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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Echoes of Lies
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Her voice hardened. “Most of all, it wasn't fair to David. ‘One of these women could be the kidnapper' - and they're all women he's known? Talk about loaded dice! How did you get these photographs, anyway?”
“From picture libraries in London. They supply shots of the rich and famous, to newspapers mostly.”
“You asked them for photographs of David Ibbotsen with different women? What kind of a maniac did they take you for?”
“The kind who was paying cash,” shrugged Daniel. “They really weren't interested in my motives. He's a public figure, they had photographs of him at various functions, they sold me copies of them. There was nothing underhand about it.”
“You think not?” Brodie heard her voice soaring and capped it. “How far back do these things go?”
“Five years.”
“Five years? You asked them for every photograph they had of David Ibbotsen with a woman taken in the last five years, and they didn't ask why? My God, it's true. There's somebody who'll do anything for enough money!”
When she heard what she'd said, the colour started rising from somewhere around her knees. Because it was true, there was. She'd
given him into the hands of his torturer for money. The times he could have thrown that in her face and hadn't! Mortification struck her dumb.
Daniel took advantage of the silence. “I know how this must look to you,” he said hurriedly. “You think I fancy my chances with you and for that reason, and others, I want to hurt David Ibbotsen. You're wrong, but I can see how you'd think it.
“And I know you can't make a firm identification of a woman you met once, in difficult circumstances, from a photograph. But you thought it was her - Melanie Fields. You can't want to leave it there any more than I do. To think that you may have identified the kidnapper of a five-year-old girl and never know for sure. Maybe if you met her in person?”
Brodie didn't answer. But when she'd thought about it her eyes said Maybe.
Daniel followed up the advantage. “Then, can we ask David to introduce you?”
“What?!!”
“I know - you think I'm mad and so will he. I don't care. He reckons to owe me something for what happened: well, this is it. I'm mad, I'm sick, I'm obsessed - but I want you and Melanie Fields to meet. That's all I want, if I get it he'll never hear from me again. Is it too big a price to ask? For peace of mind? For drawing a line under an unpleasant piece of family history?”
Brodie shook her head. “No,” she said softly, “it's a bargain. If it's what you want, Daniel, I'll ask him. But I'm damned if I know what I'll say to the woman.”
“You won't have to say anything. You won't actually have to meet. If David looks at you strangely and then sets it up, and Miss Fields turns up, obviously I'm wrong about this. I'll make my apologies and leave, and you can all laugh at me when I've gone. But if I'm right the meeting won't take place.”
The thing was, he didn't sound mad. He looked tired and ill, and perhaps he was obsessed, but he'd gone to a lot of trouble and he'd come up with a photograph that said something to her. Brodie knew that if she threw him out she wouldn't forget what he'd said. And
whatever his motivation, however misguided, she didn't think it was malice. He wasn't a malicious man.
“All right,” she said in a low voice, “let's talk about this. What are you saying? That a woman that David loved and left got her own back by kidnapping his daughter?”
He blinked behind the thick glasses, then he nodded. “It's possible.” His eyes on her face were intense.
Another question formed in the maelstrom of her mind and bubbled to the surface.
“Why
do you think this? You said, something
I
said … ?”
“A few things,” he said, “including something you said. There was the video tape. Remember the moment Sophie saw someone she recognised in the car?”
“But she didn't recognise the woman who had her by the hand.”
“No. But there were two of them, and she
did
recognise the driver.”
“What else?”
“The box of hair. You said that wasn't the act of a ransom kidnapper. You thought of the mother: it wasn't her, but it
was
someone who knew the child too well to want to hurt her.”
“All right,” Brodie allowed softly. “What else?”
“The exchange. It was designed to protect the kidnappers, but they also took care not to hurt or even frighten Sophie. As if she wasn't just a meal-ticket to them. Has anyone talked to her about what happened?”
“David did. She couldn't tell him much that we didn't already know. She talked about a man and a woman, and a cottage in the country.”
“Was she able to describe the woman?”
Brodie shrugged. “She's only five. Everything that goes for adult eye-witnesses goes tenfold for small children. They forget things we can't imagine them forgetting; they confuse the real with the imaginary; they focus on irrelevant aspects of things. Ask a five-year-old to describe someone and she'll say she wore pink shoes. It's not wrong, it's just no help. She may have spent longer with her than I did, but you can't count on Sophie ID-ing her kidnapper either. Is there anything else?”
“Not really.” Still Daniel's eyes didn't leave her face.
“It's pretty thin,” said Brodie.
“It would be,” he nodded. “Without the photograph.”
“I told you about that. You asked the question that would give you the answer you wanted. Don't read too much into it.”
“But if Melanie Fields refused to meet you … ?”
“It still won't prove anything. If they're an ex-item, meeting with David and me is about the last thing she'll be willing to do! If my ex-husband asked me to meet up with him and his new wife I'd fetch him one with the poker!”
Thinking about it, a new demon came. Her eyes flew wide. “Daniel, we know what Lance Ibbotsen does to people he thinks have harmed him. If we throw this woman's name into the ring, can we be sure he won't do to her what he did to you?”
A shudder ran the length of Daniel's frame. “I won't let that happen. I'll tell Inspector Deacon everything before anyone else gets hurt.”
Brodie pushed his theory round her head like Paddy pushing sprouts round her plate. It could be just so much kite-flying, and she could take refuge in that. He had nothing approaching proof. But proof was a legal hurdle; what mattered at this point was probability. Was there a realistic chance that, looking for a way to drive a wedge between her and David, he'd somehow stumbled on the truth? Identified Sophie's abductor in a way that explained the odder aspects of the case?
She made herself consider it in detail. If Melanie Fields felt about the Ibbotsens the way Marie Soubriet did, she might indeed have wanted to hurt both David and his father. But she knew Sophie; she was willing to use her but drew the line at hurting her. The little girl might well have been confused as to whether she'd been kidnapped or not.
Daniel's theory fitted the known facts too well for it to be safely dismissed as the figment of a troubled mind. He might still be mistaken but neither of them was in a position to judge. If they wanted to be sure she was going to have to meet this woman, and that meant involving David.
“All right,” she said unsteadily. “It matters to you to know if an old flame of David's kidnapped Sophie Ibbotsen. I dare say he'd want to know as well. I'm not sure how I feel. I think, that as it stands right now everyone's safe and the worst is over. If we tell the Ibbotsens we suspect Melanie Fields took Sophie, that may not still be the situation tomorrow. You say you won't let her get hurt, but realistically the most you can promise is to tell the police
if
she gets hurt.
“Suppose you're wrong. If I'm ready to consider the possiblity that you're right, you have to think about what happens if you're wrong. I've got fond of David, but I'm not blind to his failings. The biggest of them is never standing up to his father. He stood by while Lance had you hurt, and even when he tried to kill you. He turned away, he threw up, but he didn't try to stop it. He couldn't stand up to Lance then and he won't now. If you're wrong you'll have set a mad dog on an innocent woman. Daniel, that won't make you feel any better.
“I hope you are wrong, because I don't know how it'll all end if you're right. You think it's going to come between David and me: well, maybe it will. But how much satisfaction is that going to give you? You're not a vindictive man, I can't see you getting any pleasure from making people unhappy.
“But it's still your call. It's a can of worms, but if you want to open it I won't stop you. Shall I call David? Or should I get Marta down here so we can pay him a visit?”
Daniel was white. A couple of times he seemed about to say something but then didn't. He reached for his parka and his photographs. “It's like the internet. Some things you have to do in person.”
The gates were shut. A dim bulb illuminated the intercom. Brodie pressed the button and waited.
After a minute a gravelly voice demanded, “What time of night do you call this?”
Brodie gave her name. “Is David there?”
“He's busy. With Sophie. Call him tomorrow.”
Brodie felt her temper rising. She'd done too much for these people, been through too much, to be moved on like a brush-salesman.
Before she could vent the anger, though, Daniel leaned towards the microphone. “Let us in. We have information on the whereabouts of your money.”
After the briefest pause, the gates swung wide.
As she drove Brodie cast Daniel a sidelong glance. “You don't know that.”
“Neither does he. But he opened the gate.”
“Has anybody ever told you you have a ruthless streak?”
Daniel considered, then shook his head. “No.” He seemed neither pleased nor displeased so much as surprised.
Brodie drove round the back. The lights were on in the sitting room and the back door framed the rangy figure of Lance Ibbotsen. Already on edge, Brodie was prepared to be irritated by anything. “You own a shipping line, you shouldn't open your own door. They have staff, don't they?”
“I don't suppose they want to involve them in what's been happening,” said Daniel quietly.
“That's pretty decent,” said Brodie, mollified slightly. “They don't want to see them in the dock too.”
“Decency has nothing to do with it. They don't want them selling the story to
The News of the World.”
They weren't up the steps before Ibbotsen began quizzing them. “You know who did this? Kidnapped Sophie?”
“Stole your money?” said Daniel, expressionless.
“You know?”
“Possibly.”
“
Well
?”
“I need David to see a photograph.”
The old man turned on his heel, ready to haul his son downstairs by the collar if need be, but David was in the hall. He smiled at Brodie. When she bit her lip instead of returning it, the smile died.
“What's happened?”
“They know who has the money!”
David's jaw dropped. “How?”
“Don't look at me,” said Brodie indignantly, “I only do this professionally. Daniel does it because mysteries worry him. Give him an internet uplink and a return ticket to London and he'll tell you what happened to Lord Lucan, who was on the grassy knoll and how to start a room temperature fusion reaction!”
Daniel bit his lip.
David frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Ibbotsen turned the searchlight of his gaze on Daniel. “You know, don't you? You know what she's talking about, and you know who has my money.”
“Possibly,” Daniel said again. They moved into the sitting room. Daniel passed the photograph to David. “Do you know her?”
David's eyes flicked between the picture and Daniel's face. “She did this? Kidnapped Sophie?”
“I'm not sure. Do you know her?”
“I - we've met.” His eyes went out sideways to Brodie and then dropped. “Well yes, actually I do. We went out for a time. But that's months ago. Her name's Melanie.” His brow gathered. “Are you seriously telling me she's involved in this?”
“I'm really not sure. Do you know where she is now?”
“I think she went abroad.”
“Where?”
“I
don't know! We - parted, I didn't watch to see what she did next. I heard she'd gone abroad.”
“So she could have come back.”
“I suppose so.”
“Is there anyone we could check with? Parents, a brother or sister?”
“She has a brother. I wouldn't know how to find him.” Tiring of the cross-examination, he looked across at Brodie. “This can't be right. We parted amicably enough, and she isn't a vicious person.”
“You mean she wasn't,” said Daniel. “Months ago.”
David looked down at him. “People don't change that much.”
“No,” agreed Daniel. “So you don't think we could contact her.”
“I don't know how. Anyway, you'd be wasting your time. I told you, she wouldn't do something like that.”
“Because you parted amicably. You stayed friends.”
“If you like.”
Daniel nodded slowly. He chewed on the inside of his cheek. He glanced at Brodie, and she saw neither disappointment nor relief so much as the burden of an unwelcome understanding. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking now but he looked away, his shoulders slumped.
Ibbotsen was watching too, his gaze switching rapier-like between them, impatience drawing the sinews of his body like bowstrings. “That's it? That's the great revelation? You thought it might have been my son's ex-girlfriend, only there's no proof and you don't even know if she's in the country or not? I'm missing
The Ten O'Clock News
for this?”
But Brodie knew him better. “Daniel, there's something you're not saying. I don't know what it is, but I do know it's time to put your cards on the table and never mind who gets hurt.” From the way he looked at her then she knew it was going to be her.
Daniel swallowed and nodded. “All right. If no one else has anything they want to say.” He waited a moment longer, carefully looking at no one in particular, but no one spoke.
He sighed, and looked for somewhere to sit. He chose the window-seat: he didn't want to sit next to Brodie or any of them, and he wanted something at his back. “All right. I don't know how much of this could be proven in court. Maybe all of it, maybe none; and maybe it doesn't matter. You can hardly go to court with it.”
“Tell me who has my money,” said Ibbotsen tightly, “and I won't need any court to get it back.”
Still Daniel prevaricated. He might have been bluffing, stamping around at random in the hope of driving a rabbit out of the hole, but Brodie really didn't think so. His whole manner suggested that what troubled him was not the lack of an answer but the nature of the one he'd found. “I will,” he said quietly. “If I have to.”
Finally his gaze came to rest on David Ibbotsen. “Do I have to? Are you going to make me say it?”
David's expression was like boards, impervious and unyielding. His eyes smoked. “What do you mean?”
Daniel nodded, a Rubicon crossed. “Sophie was never in any danger from her kidnappers because she was never kidnapped. She was taken out of school by her father and his girlfriend. They said they were taking her on holiday, but within a few minutes David had switched to his own car in order to be home when the news came through.” He glanced at Ibbotsen. “You were impressed at how quickly he thought up a lie for the school. But he'd had days, even weeks to plan what he was going to say.
“All he had to worry about was getting you to pay up quickly, and in fact that was the one thing he couldn't do. As it happened he knew his daughter was safe in the country with Melanie Fields and the young man who was probably her brother, but it would have been just the same if she really had been kidnapped. You weren't prepared to pay the ransom. Whatever your reasons, you were prepared to leave Sophie with her abductors rather than pay a sum of money you could lose through stock market fluctuations and never miss.
“I think that hit David harder than anything you'd ever done to him. He didn't embark on this lightly. He was in real financial difficulties - he'd made some bad investments, the sky was about to fall on him, he needed to get his hands on a serious sum of money ASAP. Still, you don't steal from your own father without agonising over it. He agonised, he looked for an alternative, but he couldn't find one so he decided to do it.
“And you had a quick think about paying the ransom and decided
not to. David knew he was behaving appallingly. He was shocked to the core when you behaved worse.”
Daniel's pale eyes left Ibbotsen and found his son. There was compassion in the quiet of his face. “You were trying to strike out without him, weren't you? To create a power-base independent of the Ibbotsen Line. But it turned out he was right - it's not as easy as it looks, just because he could do it didn't mean you could. You hadn't his skill or experience and you quickly found there are more ways of losing money than making it. You were close to losing everything.
“You could have asked your father for the money. He'd have bailed you out, to protect his own interests and Sophie's; but you'd never have heard the end of it. He hadn't much respect for you before - if he had to salvage you from the consequences of your financial ineptitude he'd have made you cry blood.
“And maybe you reckoned you had a right to it. That it wasn't just your inheritance, it was something you'd earned. That's something you'll have to hammer out between you. He might, in time, forgive you for taking his money. I'm not sure he'll forgive you the rest.”
There was a longer silence then. Daniel was waiting for questions but no one asked any. No one spoke at all. Nor did they look at one another. To all intents and purposes, time stood still in the shabby, comfortable room.
Brodie was the first to find a voice, and a hollow, shaky thing it was. “You said we'd know, if we couldn't set up a meeting with Melanie Fields. I thought you meant, if she did a runner. But you didn't. You meant, if David prevented it.”
“Brodie!” The point which had loomed for days had finally come, where even-handedness would no longer serve, where she had to believe in one of them at the expense of the other. David thought she'd chosen to believe Daniel. Shock and anger warred in his voice. “It's nonsense! A fantasy. None of it happened. You
know
what happened: you were there for most of it!”
She nodded slowly. “Yes. But nothing I saw or heard contradicts what Daniel just said. It makes sense, in the whole and in detail; and mostly when something makes that much sense it's the truth.”
She looked at him with sorrow. “You say he's got it wrong? That it's a fantasy? Convince me. Please, David. Give me one reason not to believe him. One thing that happened that isn't consistent with what he says. One thing you did or didn't do that shows you didn't hold your own daughter to ransom. Just
one.
Please?”
Desperation was thumping through David Ibbotsen with the racing beat of his heart. He'd only get one shot at this and Brodie was the key to it. If he could persuade her, she would persuade his father. “Listen to me,” he said urgently, leaning forward. “I know how it looks. I can see how he might come up with this - insanity - and how you might wonder about it. But I'm telling you, it didn't happen. You have to believe me. Brodie, I think I love you. You have to believe that I wouldn't lie to you, not about this.
“Damn it, you have to believe
me
before you'd believe Daniel! Look at him - he could give jumpy lessons to a grasshopper. His mental stability is on the point of meltdown. I know whose fault that is, and I'm sorry, but this is too important to humour him. You have to see what he's doing. He hates me, and he wants you to hate me too. He's put two and two together and come up with about fifteen.”
She shook her head. “Daniel wouldn't do that. He's a mathematician. You may be right about his mental state, though I don't know how anyone in this house has the nerve to comment, but it isn't actually relevant. The known facts support his version of events. What are you telling me - it's a coinicidence?”
David came to his feet. For almost the first time she was aware how powerful a man he was: as tall as his father and twice as far round. And not all the bulk hung on the broad bones was business lunches - a lot of it was muscle. Two strides took him to the window. Hands fisted tight at his sides, he loomed over Daniel like an avalanche.
“Tell her you got it wrong,” he ground. “Tell her.”
Daniel shook his head. “You tell her I got it right. You owe her that much. You certainly owe her better than a Caribbean cruise.”
Like a catapult when the elastic snaps, one of the big fists flew. It wasn't a punch: he backhanded Daniel across the mouth, knocking him off the window-seat onto his knees on the carpet. “Tell her!”
But he wouldn't, and Brodie knew he wouldn't. She rose swiftly from the sofa and tried to get between them. David pushed her aside, forcefully enough that she ended up back where she started.
The big hand fisted in Daniel's clothes hauled him to his feet. David's broad, handsome face was twisted with rage. “I'm sick to the back teeth with your spiteful interference. Who the hell do you think you are, to accuse me of kidnapping my own child? You think I'd put Sophie through that for money? You think I'd put my father through it?

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