Du Bois lit one of the cigarettes and then took a mouthful of tea.
‘Don’t mind if I do?’
Beth shrugged. ‘I’ll overlook the abuse of my civil rights this time.’
‘She’s not your sister.’
Whatever Beth had thought he was going to say next, that hadn’t been it. It took a moment to penetrate.
‘I grew up with her,’ she told him. ‘This is a weird approach if you want something from me.’
‘She looks nothing like you or any member of your family. Your mother was unable to have children due to complications during your birth. I can provide you with medical records if that’s what you want. There’s no birth certificate in her name: in fact, according to the government there’s very little proof of Natalie Luckwicke’s existence at all. I imagine the only reason she slipped through the cracks for so long is because she grew up in Bradford. However, she is of an age and looks like the parents of a baby girl who went missing from Helmsley in North Yorkshire a little over twenty years ago.’
Beth stared at him. She didn’t want to believe him, but too much of what he said fitted. Too much of it made sense. If nothing else, it pointed to the reason why Talia was the focus of so much unspoken resentment for her.
‘Why?’ she asked, uncertainty in her voice.
Du Bois didn’t answer.
Maybe this is good, Beth thought. If it’s true then it doesn’t matter so much that Talia hated her. She could give up this stupid search for her. Make it not her problem.
‘Bullshit,’ she said without much feeling.
‘I can prove it if you want, or the next time you see your father just ask him. Now, if you tell me what I want to know, we won’t press charges, and remember you are now an accessory after the fact. We just want to find her. It’s not your problem any more, and by the looks of it you won’t live too much longer if you keep looking. I’ll give you some money and you can be back on your way home.’
It sounded so attractive. Let it go. Maybe not the part about going home, but she had to look in her father’s eyes. She wanted the truth, deserved the truth, and then she wanted to know why they loved a child they had stolen better than their own. Fuck them, fuck them all. She didn’t owe any of them anything.
‘Is she alive?’ du Bois asked.
‘As far as I know, no.’ He started to say something. ‘Listen. I came here looking for her. Then I discovered she was in the house that got blown up. I was going to leave it at that, but then I decided to find out what happened to her, how she ended up like that. The more I looked into it, the more it looked like people didn’t want me to know stuff. It felt like a…’
‘Conspiracy?’
She nodded. ‘But I don’t think it was. I think she was involved in some really dodgy stuff, and when she died the people she was involved with just wanted to make sure nobody found out about their part in it. Just arseholes covering their tracks is all.’
‘Like who?’
‘Somebody called William Arbogast.’
‘The man you tortured?’
It took someone coming out and saying it. She had no illusions about what she had done but somehow du Bois driving it home like that made it worse. His blue eyes seemed relentless. She looked away but nodded.
‘Anyone else?’ he asked.
‘That was as far as I got. The rest are below him on the ladder and…’
‘You’re not a grass,’ du Bois finished with a sigh.
‘No more than I have been.’
‘So who picked you up?’
‘I don’t know.’ Du Bois opened his mouth to protest. ‘Now wait. I don’t know if it’s to do with Talia or me rattling the wrong cage, but I got a sheet chucked over my head in the middle of the road, a bit of a kicking and chucked in the boot of a car.’
He dragged deep on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.
‘Younger sisters are a pain in the arse, aren’t they?’ he said.
She looked away from him again and nodded. Then cursed herself as the tears came and the shaking started. Du Bois just watched her. He was impressed that she hadn’t gone into shock. He let her get it out of her system.
Finally she looked up at him.
‘What happened to her? Terrorists? A meth lab? The same people as hit the nightclub?’ Beth remembered seeing him there now.
‘The truth is, I honestly don’t know.’
She looked miserable as she took a sip of the lukewarm sweet tea.
‘I’m going to see about getting you released, okay?’
Beth nodded numbly.
Du Bois walked out of the interview room. She was lying. She knew who had taken her to Tipner. Following orders, he should have made her talk. He was more than capable and had done it in the past, but she didn’t deserve it. She wasn’t part of his world. She’d had a glimpse, and he was still wondering what the S-tech-augmented hybrid had been doing in a greyhound stadium in Tipner, but she wasn’t playing in the same leagues. She was just doing the best she could for her father. She hadn’t done anything wrong as far as he could see. He could respect that. She got to walk. He would get what he wanted another way.
DC Mossa had told him that Arbogast moved in circles that had little to do with traditional criminals so he had got away with pretty much operating on his own. Somewhere, however, there was a connection between Arbogast and S-tech but du Bois just couldn’t see it at the moment.
Beth had been lucky. If he hadn’t been parked at the pointless roadblock on the bridge. If he hadn’t seen the lights at the greyhound stadium and checked on his phone and discovered it was supposed to have been deserted. If he hadn’t had the authority to task the armed police on the roadblock to follow him and to task helicopter support, then Beth would have been dead. The girl was tough, du Bois had to give her that. She had held her own longer than most. But he had put two nano-bullets in the chest of the hybrid and another two in its head to make sure it was dead.
As Beth sat there sipping another tea, wiping away tears and snot with the arm of her shredded jumper, her feeling of unease grew. She looked around the room for some explanation but found nothing. The longer she sat there the more frightened she became, and the sense that she was not alone grew stronger.
She stood up. She was the sort of person who, when she heard a noise in a house that she couldn’t explain, went looking for its cause. She moved as fast as she could, limping around the room.
The corner. The shadows in one of the corners of the room. They were just the result of the dim light in the interview room, she told herself. Nothing unusual there. But now the shadows in the corner seemed much darker than they had any right to be. Beth told herself that it was just her tired, pained and drugged mind playing tricks on her. That it was the result of the stress and the shock of the horrors that she had seen and experienced tonight. But the mounting certainty that there was someone there just wouldn’t go away.
She forced herself to take a step towards the corner. The shadows seemed to coalesce, solidify, move of their own accord in the way that shadows just don’t. Another step. She could see the dark shape of a figure now. She looked around for a weapon, her brain desperately trying to understand what was going on. Adrenaline flowed. Fight won over flight in the locked room. But the chair was bolted to the floor.
The figure lunged out of the darkness. The bag lady. Except she was something ancient, primal, ferocious. She smelled of the earth. Sharp teeth, too many sharp teeth, ragged nails outstretched. The hag-like creature bit her own tongue and spat the blood all over Beth’s face.
Beth could feel the blood move. Push itself into her face, through her skin. She opened her mouth to scream and hit the floor. She thought she heard someone whisper, ‘It’ll be okay.’