Echoes of Lies (25 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Echoes of Lies
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“You're right, I could use the money. I could still use the money. But there are limits to what decent people do to get what they want. They don't use their own children for blackmail. And they don't lie to take women who wouldn't look at them twice away from better men.”
“I'm not lying,” gritted Daniel, pain in his voice. David's fist against his ravaged chest pinned him to the wall.
Brodie was on her feet again. “Get away from him. I mean it, David - back off. Or so help me I'll deck you!” She hunted the room for a weapon but nothing offered itself. No brass candlestick: the room was lit by wall-sconces and a standard lamp. Central heating meant no fire-irons. There wasn't even the regulation bag of golf-clubs in a corner.
“Not till he admits he made it up.” It was no accident - David knew exactly what he was doing. He ground his knuckles into Daniel's flesh until the younger man whined and his eyes closed.
“Put him down,” said Lance Ibbotsen in his teeth. “Now.” He still sounded as though he was talking to the dog.
“Not until -”
He never finished the sentence. Ibbotsen hit him behind the ear with a piece of scrimshaw like a belaying-pin.
Scrimshaw only looks delicate: actually it's made from the bit that walruses fight with. David measured his length on the floor, rolled over once and lay still.
Ibbotsen returned the souvenir of his seafaring days to its home in the bookcase. He said heavily, “He never bloody listens.” For the moment that seemed to be all he could cope with. He hadn't felled
his son because of the allegation made against him. He'd done it because an order had been disobeyed.
Brodie sucked in a deep breath and went to Daniel, kneeling beside him. “Are you all right?”
His face was ashen. He plucked at his shirt-front with trembling fingers. “I think I'm bleeding.”
Brodie ushered him towards the nearest bathroom. “We'll sort you out. Then we'll come back and sort him out.”
 
 
The damage under Daniel's shirt wasn't serious. There was a little blood, and some seepage where blisters were protecting new skin, but all Brodie had to do was tidy up the dressings. She hadn't looked this closely since the lesions were a lot worse. She made approving noises as she smoothed and patted him back into shape. “You'll be as good as new.”
“I wish,” he said fervently.
Satisfied that she'd done all that was necessary, she rocked back on her heels and looked at him. Oddly enough, she felt quite calm. “What you were saying. About David. It's not just a theory, is it? You're sure?”
“Sure enough,” he said honestly. “There are too many things you can't explain any other way.”
“Like what?”
She wasn't arguing. She needed to know. He answered as best he could.
“There were two people in the car: the woman who got out and a driver we never saw. The woman was Melanie Fields. Sophie didn't want to go with her. If she recognised her, it wasn't a good enough reason to do what she must have been told a thousand times never to do - to go off with someone she didn't know really well. But when she got close enough to the car to see who was driving, all that changed. The driver
was
someone she knew really well.”
“It didn't have to be David. It could have been - I don't know - the chauffeur?”
He regarded her with compassion. “Well, maybe.”
Brodie gritted her teeth. “Go on.”
“Sophie's five years old. She's not a baby. A five-year-old child may be useless as a witness, but she's pretty good at absorbing atmosphere. She knows the difference between people who care about her and those who look at her and see pound signs. I don't think she could have been kidnapped without realising it. She thought she was on holiday because from her point of view she was. She was happy enough to stay with Melanie Fields because David said it was all right. I expect he was phoning, maybe even visiting, whenever he could.”
Then there was the box of hair. Brodie had thought it pointed to Sophie's mother, but it could equally well indicate her father. She nodded to herself. She didn't have to like it, but she knew the truth when it was put before her.
“And the timings were too - convenient,” Daniel continued quietly. “The day you went to France. I thought, what will Ibbotsen say if the kidnappers phone before she gets back? But they didn't. But they
did
phone almost as soon as you returned and the decision had been taken to pay the ransom.
“And they asked for a woman to bring it. Why do that? Why not Lance, or David? Lance was the one with the money, David the father of the child. Why involve an outsider at all - and why stipulate a woman? It was as if they knew more about what was going on in this house, the alliances being forged, the confidences being established, than they had any right to - unless they had someone on the inside.”
Brodie shook her head. “If David was involved, he'd have opted to handle the hand-over himself. It would have been both simpler and safer. If Melanie had insisted on doing the exchange with him, no one would have been surprised. It would be the obvious thing. David was the one with most lose, therefore the one most likely to do as he was told and least likely to get creative. If she'd said he was to come himself, no one would have argued.”
But Daniel had worked that out too. “David needed to break his trail. As much as possible he wanted to stay in the back seat - avoid
meeting the kidnappers, avoid talking to them if he could, certainly avoid negotiating with them. That's why the woman always asked for Lance. Not just because he held the purse-strings but because David didn't want his fingerprints on the deal. If the arrangements were handled by his father, or by you, no one was going to think he'd given in too easily and wonder why. For ten years being sidelined by his father was a source of deep frustration to him. This time it was his alibi. It kept him safe from suspicion.”
“Except yours.”
Daniel didn't reply. He hadn't an answer that would make her feel any better.
She sensed evasion. “What made you suspect him? I can see how, once your suspicions were aroused, you had to check them out. You learned about his financial difficulties, and you got together some photographs of his friends from which I was able to make a tentative identification. But what made you suspect David Ibbotsen in the first place?”
Daniel's eyes dropped and he shrugged his clothes about him as if the bathroom was cold, which it wasn't. “He lied.”
“About what?”
“What happened - here, outside. He told you he wasn't involved. But he was. From the start.”
In the silence Brodie considered this. “He knew what they were doing to you?”
Daniel nodded.
“Maybe most people would have lied about that,” she ventured. “He wanted me to think well of him. It's a long way from there to guessing that he kidnapped his own daughter. How could you know he was capable of that kind of - ruthlessness - when I didn't?”
“Brodie - it was David who shot me. Not Lance. He said that because he thought one of them was going to prison and he didn't want to deprive Sophie of her father. I suppose he thought I wouldn't remember. But I do.”
Brodie stared at him in horror. She was no longer wondering if it was true, only how it fitted together. “You're saying that he stood by and watched you tortured for information he
knew
you didn't have!”
Daniel gave an awkward shrug. “I suppose by then he was in so deep the only way out was confession. He thought his father would have turned on him. He would, too.”
“So David watched you suffer for two days, and then he shot you?”
“Someone had to,” Daniel said, almost apologetically. “David had the best reason to get it over and done with.”
As Brodie's understanding grew, so did her sense of outrage. And not all of it was directed at David Ibbotsen. “You knew this. And you didn't tell me?”
“I was only sure today. When you recognised the photograph.”
“I don't mean about the fake kidnap. I mean, that a man I liked and was going on holiday with - that I was taking my daughter on holiday with! - is a monster. A killer, except for the merest fluke of a frosty night. You
knew
he shot you and left you to die, and you didn't tell me.”
His face twisted with regret. “Would you have believed me? You thought I resented him because you and he were getting close. If I'd told you then, without any kind of proof, the best you'd have thought of me was that I wanted it to be true. You'd have asked David, he'd have denied it and you'd have believed him. I needed evidence, quickly, before he drew you any deeper into the conspiracy.”
“Drew - me - ?” she echoed faintly.
Daniel knew he was hurting her. So much of this he'd hoped he wouldn't have to say. He'd expected that David would come clean when he realised the game was up, or else that Brodie would guess or perhaps wouldn't want to know. But maybe, difficult as it was, it was better to have everything said. Open wounds look worse but heal better. Also, he hoped very much never to have to revisit this territory again.
“He was still covering himself. You're an intelligent woman, he knew if he ever gave you a reason to wonder about him you'd find the truth. He needed you on his side. He played'on your sympathy until it started turning to something more. If he could make you fond of him, he could make you trust him. It didn't have to last
forever, and of course it wouldn't have done. Melanie Fields didn't risk prison for the small change he'd have left after his debts were paid: she did it for him, and after what they'd done together he couldn't afford to offend her. They had to end up together, so at some point you had to be dumped. Any allegations you made about him after that would just sound like the spite of a rejected lover.”
Minutes passed as Brodie reviewed the events of the past week in the light of Daniel's explanation. Twice she vented a sharp, hawk-like little pant; once she almost smiled. Finally, her tone still incredulous though her eyes believed, she said, “But - the risk! Maybe he thought he could fool everyone else, but Sophie knew. And Sophie's five years old. Sooner or later she was
bound
to spill the beans!”
Daniel shook his head. “Not really. Five-year-olds can keep secrets like their lives depend on it - if they couldn't there wouldn't be any abused children. If David told her never to speak of it, that he'd be in terrible danger if she did, she'd lock the whole thing so tight inside her it would take a psychiatrist to get it out.
“And she was never going to talk to a psychiatrist, was she? Or the police, or even her teachers. None of them knew she was supposed to have been kidnapped. And if she forgot her promise and talked about her holiday, so what? So she stayed in a country cottage when they thought she was on a Caribbean cruise. If they even noticed they'd think nothing of it.
“The only one who mattered was Lance. If she talked about it to Lance, he just might put it together. So David covered even that eventuality. He told you, so no doubt he also told his father, that Sophie was confused, that she hadn't realised she'd been kidnapped and he didn't want her to know. With that in mind, Lance would discourage her from talking about it - for fear of what he might give away, not guessing there were secrets he might hear.
“And suppose the very worst happened. Suppose she told Lance that she stayed with Daddy's old girlfriend and Daddy phoned her every day. She's five years old, she was drugged, it's already on record that she's confused about what happened: Lance would assume she was remembering something from way back and never suspect she was telling the literal truth. David's been his whipping-boy
so long it's become a kind of shield. Lance wouldn't entertain the idea that his son might have taken him on and won.”
Everything Daniel said was true. Everything accorded with what Brodie knew about the two men at the centre of it: what she knew from personal experience and what she'd been told. She groaned, and when Daniel looked anxiously at her explained huskily, “Marie. She
told
me, near as damn it. She said, ‘At least Lance was an honest monster.' If I hadn't been
- feeling
things for him - I'd have heard the rest of it, the bit she didn't say. That David was a dishonest one.”
“You couldn't have been expected to.” Daniel was still trying to ease her way. “You needed to know what I knew; and I couldn't tell you. Not without proof.”
Brodie took a deep breath and stood up. “Are you all right?” Daniel nodded. “Then we have to go back in there. We have to tell Lance.”
 
 
But Lance already knew. He hadn't got to be a rich man without learning to read faces. What had been said, and how his son reacted to it, had told him all he needed to know. They returned to the sitting room to find him standing at the French window, his back ram-rod straight, tears streaming down his face. David was nowhere to be seen.

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