“We’re wasting time,” Rosalind said, the sharpness in her voice not quite masking something I took to be fear that vibrated along under the surface. “We know Felix has got Ella, for God’s sake! What are we waiting for?”
Lucas, galvanized by the urgency in his wife’s voice, started to move, clearly expecting us to follow.
“Hold it,” Sean said quietly. “We’re not going anywhere until we’ve got a few things settled.”
Lucas threw him a look of pure distaste. “You want to haggle over a price for my granddaughter’s life, is that it?” he jeered.
Matt pushed his way forwards. “She’s my daughter,” he said. “D’you really think we don’t care what happens to her?”
Lucas stared at him, then let his eyes skim across the rest of us. I don’t know what he expected to see there, because he made a brief gesture of impatience. “I don’t need your help anyway,” he muttered, turning his back and taking a step towards the Range Rover.
“You do need us, or you wouldn’t be here,” Sean said. “Maybe the Greg Lucas who served at Goose Green and Port Stanley might not need our help, but a salesman like John Ashworth certainly does.”
Lucas arched and froze like he’d been speared between the shoulder blades. I saw his head move slightly, making eye contact with Rosalind. Her mouth thinned and she dropped her gaze, almost an admission of defeat.
Slowly, he turned back, and the man who faced us now was not the one who’d turned away only moments ago. His shoulders weren’t so square-much less like the old soldier whose skin he’d been animating for the last twenty-odd years. Like he could finally stop pretending and it was something of a relief to him. He tried to raise a smile, but it never quite developed.
“So … my secret’s out,” he said, and even his voice didn’t seem quite the same, rusty and wry. ‘At last.”
“Where’s the real Lucas?”
“Dead, of course,” he said, matter-of-fact.
“You killed him,” Sean said, and it wasn’t a question.
Lucas — somehow I couldn’t think of him yet as anyone else-nodded. “But it was self-defense,” he added quickly.
“Of course,” Sean said blandly. “That’s why you hid the body, stole his identity and skipped the country leaving your baby daughter behind.”
Something skittered across Lucas’s face that might have been irritation, or guilt. “What does it matter now?” he asked, sounding suddenly tired. “What matters is Ella. If you’re not going to help us then, as Rosalind pointed out, we’re wasting time we don’t have.”
“We didn’t say we weren’t going to help,” Sean said. He glanced over his shoulder at Neagley She nodded, her face serious, and I waited for him to look to me, too, but I wasn’t altogether surprised when he didn’t. “Where is he likely to have taken her?”
“Felix has a place out on the 302 toward Bretton Woods,” Rosalind said, stepping forwards. “It’s isolated-no close neighbors. I’d guess that’s where they’ll be.”
‘And even if she isn’t,” Lucas said, grim, “that’s certainly where Vaughan will be. I’m sure we can find a way to persuade him to tell us where his guys have taken her.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” I said, and felt their focus on me. I shrugged. “From what I’ve seen of him, Vaughan isn’t the kind of bloke who gives in easily, however much you try to bully him.”
Lucas gave a short, mirthless laugh. “If I threaten to turn state’s evidence against him, he’ll cave, believe me,” he said, ignoring the shocked glance from his wife, like she didn’t think he had it in him.
“Is that what’s made him take her now?” Sean asked. “Why’s he waited this long to make his move?”
Lucas hesitated and it was Rosalind who took a deep breath and said, “Because he realized-as we do-that we’re not going to be able to keep hold of Ella for much longer.”
“What?” It was Matt who uttered the surprised question.
Rosalind gave him an old-fashioned look. “Surely your legal people have told you by now that your claim is much stronger than ours is-or was?” she added sadly. “Even before you started digging up the dirt on Greg.”
“And, just as surely, you must have known there was a chance the truth would surface sooner or later, regardless?” Sean said.
She shrugged. “It hadn’t so far,” she threw back with a hint of defiance. “What would change?”
“You found out about Simone’s money, and you got greedy,” Matt said, disgust in his voice.
Rosalind didn’t reply to that one, just flicked a glance at her husband that I couldn’t fully discern the meaning of.
“Whatever you may think of my motives,” Lucas said tightly, “Ella’s in danger. If you’re going to help, then let’s go. We can settle anything else later.”
“We’ll take our vehicle,” Sean said. “It’s less distinctive and Vaughan won’t recognize it.” And he spoke to me directly for the first time since the Lucases had shown up. “You’re not coming with us on this, Charlie,” he murmured, putting his hands on my upper arms. Despite the softness of his voice, it was an order, not a suggestion. And when I would have argued anyway he said, brutal, “You’re no use to me like this. We can’t afford to carry anyone.”
I swallowed, knowing he had a point and bitterly resenting that fact. “Yes, sir,” I said, jerking myself out of his grasp. He let me go, or I never would have achieved it.
“Matt,” Sean said. “I want you to take Charlie back to the apartment.”
“But-”
“I need you to stay with her, OK?” he said, cutting across the other man very deliberately. “Wait for us there. If anything goes wrong, we’ll need someone on the outside to call in the cavalry.”
Matt shut up abruptly and nodded. He looked both disappointed and relieved to be ordered out of the action, and guilty over both emotions.
Sean’s gaze swung back to me and I saw an understanding in the dark depths of his eyes.
He knows, I thought, panicked. He knows what Reynolds tried to do to me and he doesn’t want to risk him trying it again, if we should fail.
“Take the Range Rover,” Lucas said to him, curt in his generosity to the man who would, ultimately, rob him of his granddaughter. He threw the keys over, aiming high, and Matt caught them with a flinch before they would have struck him in the face.
He turned them over in his hands. “I’ve never driven left-hand-drive,” he admitted, subdued. “Or an automatic transmission.”
Lucas sighed and turned to his wife. “Rosalind, honey,” he said gently, “you better take them.”
“Greg, let me come with you,” she said, urgent. “I can help. I can be useful. We can still come out of this — ”
“I know,” Greg said, his voice soothing. He reached out a hesitant hand and stroked her pale cheek. “But it’s too late for all that now. All that matters is Ella.”
Rosalind’s face hardened and she stepped back out from under his touch in much the same way, I thought, that I must have done from Sean’s.
“Very well,” she said, almost snatching the keys out of Matt’s hands.
We stood, the three of us, and watched as Sean got behind the wheel of the Explorer. Neagley and Lucas climbed aboard, and they drove quickly away into the darkness and the softly falling snow. We none of us moved until the big Ford’s taillights had reached the end of the hotel car park and disappeared completely from view
Then Rosalind eyed the pair of us with much the same disfavor she’d shown towards me and Neagley earlier that day.
“Get in,” she said, jerking her head towards the Range Rover, still standing in the middle of the car park with its lights on and its doors open and nobody at home. If the plain resentment in her voice was anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one who was completely and utterly pissed off to be left behind.