‘Wait a minute — are you saying you used me as bait?’ exploded Gareth. ‘You fucking used me as bait just to get inside Gattenby House?’
She frowned. ‘So? What of it?’
‘What if you hadn’t managed to get us both back out?’
The frown deepened. ‘I did, didn’t I? So what’s your problem?’
Words failed him. He struggled to comprehend all that was happening. He turned to Erica. ‘OK, level with me, what is the truth? Who are you? Were you in on it with Muller or what?’
She looked at him briefly, her eyes tired and faintly sorrowful. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Sorry? Is that it?’
‘Time to cut the crap, Gareth and face facts,’ burst Caroline. ‘People have put their arses on the line for you. Both of you. There has to be a bloody good reason to do that, don’t you think? Work it out for yourself. Maybe you’d better leave it at that and we’ll explain later. We’re not in the clear just yet, so right now can I just concentrate on getting out of here otherwise it will all be a moot point.’
‘But…’ he began.
She reached into her jacket pocket and tossed something over her shoulder at him. He caught it before it hit him in the face. ‘Here, have some gum and get your mouth working around something else. I need to concentrate.’
43
She drove the Bentley deeper into the woods, the track narrowing the further in they went, even the suspension on the luxury car failing to dampen the effects of the ruts and potholes. Trees loomed out of the dark like spectral sentinels, their colour washed out in the harsh beam of the halogen headlights. They’d been driving at speed for a good forty-five minutes, but Caroline had been careful not to draw attention to the car should any on-duty patrol car lie lurking unseen and waiting to catch early morning drink-drivers. Her detour into the woodland had been unexpected and sudden.
‘Where does this lead?’ Gareth asked, but he didn’t get a reply.
Eventually she brought the car to a halt, the way ahead so narrow and choked with bushes that the car would not have got much further. ‘Everyone out,’ she said, ‘and down here,’ she aimed a flashlight ahead of them and they began to file down the overgrown track, Caroline in the lead, Lambert-Chide struggling to keep up behind her, Erica urging him on. Gareth brought up the rear. ‘It leads to a disused quarry,’ she explained, and as if to add weight to her words the track passed down a narrow alley formed of high, rough-hewn rock on either side. It eventually opened out onto a clearing, littered with the odd-tree, dense patches of shadowy scrub and long-abandoned blocks of stone. A sheer cliff rose about thirty feet ahead of them and formed a rough semi-circle topped with a dark ruff of trees. Above these the sky appeared a bleak shade of dark grey.
Caroline moved swiftly over to a large green mound, deep in shadow, and hauled away a thin covering of branches to reveal a green canvas tarpaulin. She yanked it away. To Gareth’s astonishment the headlights of a 4X4 came into view. She went to the car’s door and swung it open, urging them inside.
‘Everyone except you,’ she said to Lambert-Chide. ‘You stay here. I don’t need you as insurance now.’
‘We can’t just leave him here,’ Gareth protested.
‘Well I’m not about to take him with us,’ she returned.
‘Look at him; he’s an old man, for Christ’s sake. We’re in the middle of nowhere and it’s dark. He’s over ninety!’
She shook her head. ‘Will you get it into your thick skull that this man, no matter how old he is, would have cut you both up into tiny little pieces and all for the sake of a few measly billion. He’s not your average pensioner, Gareth. He’s a cold-hearted brute, a murderer. He stays here, which is not what I’d really like to do to him; I could do far worse. Unless you’d prefer we drop him off at the Ritz on the way?’
‘Don’t trust her, Gareth,’ Lambert-Chide said, a little breathlessly after their trek through the woods. ‘She works for Doradus. Go with her and you’ll both end up dead. I can offer you something else, Gareth, something much more profitable.’
It was at this point that Erica stepped up to the old man, the gun still in her hand. ‘Ignore him, Gareth. His words are poison. All you offer, David, is misery and death. You don’t care about anything except for the pursuit of something you will never have.’ Her eyes narrowed, her jaw steeled. ‘I have thought about this moment for decades, every day since I escaped your research facility. Thinking about you standing in front of me, helpless, and me with a gun. You treated me like a lab rat, David; nothing more than an animal to experiment upon. An animal to be used, to be hunted down, to be experimented upon or exterminated. I could so easily kill you for what you did to me. For what you would have done to Gareth. But I’m better than that. And long after you’re dead and gone I shall still be here, to spit on your memory. You’ll never have what we have, David. For all your money and your influence it can only end in dust for you.’
‘You may have fooled my father, but you never fooled me, Evelyn.’
‘She’s a fraud — she admitted as much,’ said Gareth. ‘She and Muller were in on it together.’
Lambert-Chide shook his head. ‘No, she’s the real thing, Gareth. I knew all along it was a desperate ploy, to play for time, to set doubts running. To try anything possible to protect you. As soon as I saw her I knew who she was — the same bitch who tried to snare my father.’
Her anger was clear to see, but she fought to hold it in check. ‘I loved your father, David, I truly did. Do you know how rare it is to love someone so deeply, so completely, to trust them with your very life? I guess you never have and never will. You only love yourself. As you’ll also never know what it’s like to spend many, many lonely years on the run, in hiding, taking on different names, identities, unable to commit to relationships because you know they have to end sooner rather than later, so afraid of committing to anything or anyone for fear that the truth will eventually come out about what a freak of nature you are; or to watch those you love grow old and die whilst you stay forever young. How often I’ve thought about taking my own life, to end the misery and the horror. But cowardice and my beliefs prevent me from doing so. This is not a gift — it is a curse of the highest order. You cannot know what it is you want, what it is you wish for, how it crushes the soul to be wandering like a damned spirit forever and ever. But with your father it was different; I did commit, and I would have told him who I was, eventually, and I would have been glad to have shared his love, if only for a short time. Just a short time in this ceaseless, empty life of mine. But you took it away from me. You don’t deserve to live, David, because it is people like you that are the cancer in this world, not I.’ She turned away from him, heading for the car. ‘Leave him here, Gareth,’ she said dully.
‘It can’t be true…’ said Gareth. ‘It just can’t.’
David Lambert-Chide grabbed him by the arm. ‘Don’t listen to them, Gareth. Yes, it is all true. And I can make you a very rich man. You’re special…’
But the flashing of lights through the gaps in the trees at the edge of the clearing disturbed them. It was followed by the harsh sounds of feet blundering through the undergrowth.
‘This looks like trouble,’ said Caroline. ‘How on earth did they manage to find us? I was damn certain we weren’t being followed.’
Lambert-Chide laughed sardonically. ‘All my cars have tracking devices on them as a precaution. You never know when one will go walkabout.’
‘Inside, Gareth, now,’ she said. ‘No time for gawping at the pretty little lights.’
‘You really are pushing it!’ he returned.