‘Yes.’
‘So you’re making a choice.’
‘No. I want them both. Where are they?’
‘No choice is a choice, remember?’ He smiles. ‘Did you ask your wife about her affair? I bet she denied it and you believed her. Look at her text messages. I’ve seen them. She sent one to her boss saying that you suspected something and she couldn’t see him any more. Do you still want to save her?’
A blood-dark shadow shakes my heart and I want to lean across the space between us, one arm drawn back like a bow, and smash my fist into his face.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Look at her text messages.’
‘I don’t care.’
His voice erupts in a hoarse laugh. ‘Yes, you do.’
He glances at Ruiz and back to me. ‘I’m going to tell you what I did to your wife. I gave her a choice too. I put her in a box and told her that your daughter was in a box next to her. She could breathe through a hose and stay alive but only by taking her daughter’s air.’
His hands are bolted to the table, yet I can feel his fingers reaching into my head, wedging between the two halves of the cerebellum, levering them apart.
‘What do you think she’ll do, Joe? Will she steal Charlie’s air to stay alive a little longer?’
Ruiz launches himself across the room and hurls his fist into Gideon’s face with a force that would knock him down if his wrists weren’t bolted in place. I hear breaking bones.
Gripping Gideon beneath his lower ribs, he drives his knee into his kidneys, sending bolts of pain shooting through his body. Perspiration. Empty lungs. Fear. Faeces. Ruiz is screaming at him now, pounding his face with his fists, demanding to know the address. For a violent, bloody minute he takes out all his frustrations. He’s no longer a serving member of the police force. Rules don’t apply. This is what Veronica Cray meant.
Waves of pain break and crash on Gideon’s body. His face is already beginning to bruise and swell from the beating, yet he’s not complaining or crying out.
‘Gideon,’ I whisper. His eyes meet mine. ‘I’ll let him do it. I promise you. If you don’t tell me where they are, I’m going to let him kill you.’
A bloody froth forms on his lips and his tongue rolls across his teeth, painting them red. An unearthly smile forms on his face as the muscles contract and relax.
‘Do it.’
‘What?’
‘Torture me.’
I look at Ruiz, who is rubbing his fists. His knuckles are torn.
Gideon goads me. ‘Torture me. Ask me the right questions. Show me how good you are.’
He sees me hesitate and bows his head in the posture of the confessional. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t tell me you’re a sentimentalist. Surely you’re justified in torturing me.’
‘Yes.’
‘I have the information you need. I know exactly where your wife and daughter are. It’s not like you’re uncertain or half-sure. Even if you were fifty per cent certain, you’d be justified. I tortured people for far less. I tortured them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
He stares at his hands like a man considering his future and discounting it.
‘Torture me. Make me tell you.’
I feel as though someone somewhere has opened a sluice gate and my hostility and anger are draining away. I hate this man more than words can describe. I want to hurt him. I want him dead. But it’s not going to make any difference. He won’t tell me where they are.
Gideon doesn’t want forgiveness or justice or understanding. He has bathed in the blood of a terrible conflict, done the bidding of governments and secret departments and shadowy organisations operating beyond the law. He has broken minds, obtained secrets, destroyed lives and saved countless more. It changed him. How could it not? Yet throughout it all, he clung to the one pure, innocent, untainted thing in his life, his daughter, until she was taken away from him.
I can hate Gideon, but I cannot hate him more than he hates himself.
70
‘There’s another anomaly,’ says Oliver Rabb, adjusting his crooked bowtie and dabbing at his forehead with a matching handkerchief.
When I don’t answer he keeps talking. ‘Tyler turned on his mobile and turned it off again at 7.35 a.m. It was on for just over twenty-one seconds.’
The information rises and falls over me.
Oliver is looking at me expectantly. ‘You wanted me to check for anomalies. You seemed to think they were important. I think I know what he was doing. He was taking a photograph.’
Finally there is awareness. It’s not a grand vision or a blinding insight. Things have become clearer, clearer than yesterday.
Gideon took photographs of Julianne and Charlie. He used a mobile phone camera, which had to be turned on for the pictures to be taken. The anomalies can been explained. They support a theory.
Oliver follows me upstairs, through the incident room. I don’t notice if detectives are back at their desks. I don’t notice if my left hand is pill rolling or my left arm is swinging normally. These things are unimportant.
I go straight to the map on the wall. A second white pin is stuck alongside the first. Oliver is trying to explain his reasoning.
‘Yesterday’s anomaly happened at 3.07 p.m. The mobile was turned on for fourteen seconds but he didn’t make a call. Later, he transmitted a photograph from the same phone to your wife’s mobile. Afterwards, he left the handset on a bus.’
He pulls the image up on screen showing Charlie with her head encased in tape and a hosepipe in her mouth. I can almost hear the rasp of her breath through the narrow opening.
‘The second anomaly was this morning, just before he sent another photograph- the picture of your wife. It explains things.’
Gideon knew police could trace a mobile every time he turned it on. He didn’t make mistakes. In each case he turned on the mobile phone for a reason. Two signals. Two photographs.
‘Can you trace the signals?’ I ask.
‘I was struggling when there was only one, but now it might be feasible.’
I sit alongside him, unable to comprehend most of what he’s doing. Waves of numbers cross the screen as he quizzes the software, overrides error messages and circumvents problems. Oliver seems to be writing the software as he goes along.
‘Both signals were picked up by a ten metre GSM tower in The Mall, less than half a mile from the Clifton Suspension Bridge,’ he says. ‘The DOA points to a location west of the tower.’
‘How far?’
‘I’m going multiply the TOA- Time of Arrival- with the signal propagation speed.’
He types and talks, using some sort of equation to do the calculation. The answer doesn’t please him.
‘Anywhere between two hundred and twelve hundred metres.’
Oliver takes a black marker pen and draws a large teardrop shape on the map. The narrow end is at the tower and the widest part covers dozens of streets, a section of the Avon River and half of Leigh Woods.
‘A second GSM tower picked up the signature and sent a message back but the first tower had already established contact.’ Again he points to the map. ‘The second tower is here. It’s the same one that carried the last mobile call to Mrs Wheeler before she jumped.’
Oliver goes back to his laptop. ‘The DOA is different. North to north-east. There’s an overlapping connectivity.’
The science is beginning to lose me. Rising from his chair again, Oliver goes back to the map and draws a second teardrop shape, this one overlapping the first. The common area covers perhaps a thousand square yards and a dozen streets. How long would it take to doorknock every house?
‘We need a satellite map,’ I say.
Oliver is ahead of me. The image on his laptop blurs and then slowly comes into focus. We appear to be falling from space. Topographical details take shape- hills, rivers, streets, the suspension bridge.
I walk to the door and yell, ‘Where’s the DI?’
A dozen heads turn. Safari Roy answers. ‘She’s with the Chief Constable.’