The Ties That Bind (35 page)

‘Sandy,
please
,’ he begged; speech came easier already to his newly lubricated mouth. ‘You don’t have to do this. I thought you were my
friend
.’

‘Don’t you
dare
talk to me about friendship,’ she growled, exposing greying gumlines. ‘You lied to me first. Pretending that you’d left the case alone. Taking me for a stupid old woman.’

‘No,’ said Luke. ‘No, I won’t have that. I
loved
spending time with you. Fucking hell, Sandy, I was doing this all
for
you. Writing the story so that you’d be free of him.’

‘Oh Luke, you stupid boy, that’s the last thing I wanted,’ she said. ‘
Why
did you have to interfere?’ He thought he saw genuine regret on her face, but what did that mean? The judgement on which he had once prided himself was fatally, horribly flawed.

Chapter 52

Luke shifted on his mattress to ease the strain on his wrists but the rope tore at his ankles instead. He pressed his cracked lips together to stop himself from crying out in anger as well as pain. How
dare
they do this to him? But now was not the time to lose his temper. Instead, he breathed as evenly as hurt and fury would allow, and when he trusted himself to speak again, he changed the nature of his plea-bargain.

‘I won’t write the book if that’s what you want. Just go to the house, smash up the computer, burn my notes. It’s all in one bundle at the back door, in my bag. If you get rid of that bag, no book exists. I haven’t saved it anywhere. I’ll call my agent to say that I’m abandoning the whole thing. You can listen. We can do it now if you bring me my phone. I’ll leave Brighton, you’ll never hear from me again. I’ll go back to Australia, first flight I can get. Just, please, Sandy, please, let me
go
.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Sandy. ‘You still know, and we’d still
know
you know.’

So those bullets were blanks too. He drew on the only ammunition he had left.

‘I’m not the kind of person who can just disappear without people worrying. People
care
about me, and it won’t take them long to find out where I am. Marcelle and Cecil at the History Centre both know I’ve been coming here to you, Sandy. If I go missing they’re
bound
to come to you. I mean, look. There must be traces of me all over this house. My fingerprints on your furniture. My blood on your floor, for fuck’s sake.’

Vaughan paced a circle around Luke’s body then crouched to examine him with the thorough detachment of a pathologist. ‘Actually the blood’s only really on the mattress, and that’s easily disposed of. Bit of paraffin on this and you’re off.’ His fleshy hands mimed an explosion. Luke pictured this burning bed and his burning body on it. Hot tears broke their levee. ‘You won’t be found here, anyway. We’ll take you for a drive.’

Sandy gasped; the glance she shot Luke told him she was shocked not because this was news to her, but because Vaughan had chosen to share it.

‘What?’ said Vaughan. ‘You started it. He might as well know. There are miles and miles of coastline in Sussex. That’s a
lot
of cliffs.’ He was enjoying this, the bastard. He might have admonished Sandy for telling Luke the what and the why, but when it came to the how, he spoke with relish.

‘You must understand that we can’t let it carry on,’ said Sandy, impatience battling with concern and winning. There was no such conflict in Vaughan’s voice, no such apology.

‘We’d have stopped you weeks ago if we could have,’ he said, but it’s taken us a while to get all the measures in place to silence you . . .
conveniently
.’ He was trying to suppress a smile, and Luke thought he knew why. Vaughan’s
proud
of his work, he realised. Not the outward job as Grand’s henchman, but this, his private work, his
real
work. This is what he’s really good at. He gets the same thrill from this that I do from chasing a story and the temptation to brag is too much for him to resist. Vaughan mastered his smirk and continued. ‘We had to make sure we had someone else to take the rap for it. Someone with a history of violence and instability, and a reason to want you out of the way.’

Laughter burst through Luke’s tears and contempt elbowed fear to one side. Vaughan was not, after all, the criminal mastermind of Sandy’s conviction. ‘No one’s ever going to believe that Joss Grand is capable of doing this to me! He can’t even hold a
conversation
without help.’

‘No, he can’t,’ agreed Vaughan. ‘But Jeremy Gilchrist can.’

The laughter stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

‘
Jem
?’ He slid his eyes to Sandy for confirmation and got it in the way she turned her face from his. ‘But he wouldn’t—’

‘Wouldn’t he?’ said Vaughan. ‘He’s got form when it comes to you. The Sussex force are aware of him. You had his number blocked, he’s already pleaded guilty to assaulting you. We’ve got it all on paper.’

Luke gasped to recall all those confidences spilled out to Sandy and the sealed envelope listing the threats Jem had made against him. He had only handed her the document recently, but she had first urged him to write it down the night he had gone to her after Jem had broken in. He had been touched, at the time, at the force of her concern for him. Now, that concern was recast as self-serving connivance. Had she known then that he had an arrangement with Grand? Would Vaughan have told her? Had he already been a dead man the night he took her clubbing? When she dressed his wounds, was she already wondering how she could get rid of him? The length of betrayal increased the depth of it, making him feel sick. It was so grotesquely, horrifically out of proportion to his own, well-intentioned deception.

‘What have you done to him?’ he asked.

‘
We
haven’t done anything.
You
emailed him yesterday and made him an offer he can’t refuse.’ Vaughan tried to tap the screen with gloved fingers. The vinyl squeaked and stuck, and he had to remove the glove to access the little envelope icon. He held the phone so close to Luke’s face that his nose was almost touching the screen. The letters seemed to swoop like starlings for a few seconds before settling into sentences.

Darling Jem, I miss you. I was wrong and I’m so, so sorry.

Serena told me where you were. You must have been through hell. Please, let me make it all better.

Come to me. I’m somewhere new now: 33 Disraeli Square, Brighton. It’s beautiful here.

Let’s try again.

All love, always, Luke.

The phone was snatched away before Luke had a chance to check the clock or re-read it, but it was committed to memory already. God, it read
exactly
like something he would have written a year ago. He could not have felt more violated if they were reading something he had actually composed. He had never told Sandy – never told anyone – about the way they used to speak to each other, so she must have gone through their old text messages. Countless times he had left his phone lying around in her house while he’d gone off to mix a drink, or even nipped out to buy cigarettes. He had not dreamed that the self-professed technophobe would even pick it up. But she must have done, studying Luke and Jem’s private language until she was fluent in it, and then sent a message to its only other native speaker. She might not have rated herself as a writer but she had captured his voice perfectly.

‘According to this reply, which I won’t read out because it’s a bit . . .’ Vaughan let a beefy hand flap down over a limp wrist, ‘…he started driving down at ten this morning. He should be here any time now.’ He pulled the glove back on with a snap and wiped the screen with the hem of his sweatshirt.

It was impossible to guess, without knowing the time, where Jem might be now. Checking his reflection in a service-station mirror? Stopping at a wine merchant to buy a bottle of something expensive? Slowing to a crawl as the Brighton traffic thickened? Circling the square looking for a parking space, brimming with false hope? Luke hoped that something had gone wrong: that Jem, distracted and excited, had lost concentration and rear-ended another car somewhere on the outskirts of town, given himself whiplash or a broken rib or something else that would put him in hospital long enough for them to do their worst with Luke without dragging Jem down too. Every wrong he had ever done him evaporated.

‘Sandy, Vaughan, this is completely out of proportion. How could you be so cruel to Jem? He doesn’t deserve this any more than I do!’

‘I haven’t got a choice.’ She was defiant, a mother tiger protecting her cub. ‘You pushed me into it.’

He trawled the banked memories of all the crime, true and fictional, he had read and watched. ‘Look, it can’t work. Both of you, listen to me. Say you go through with this ridiculous plan, say you . . .’ he had to force the cop show words out of his mouth. ‘Say you kill me and try to frame Jem for it. They’ll know that these burns on my wrists were done earlier, hours before death. Jem’ll be able to prove he was somewhere else when these injuries happened. He’ll turn up on CCTV at a petrol station, or his credit card will show up. As soon as the police start talking to him they’ll know it’s a set-up.’

He was only half-sure that this was true but was gratified to see Sandy flash a look of hesitation, or panic, at her conspirator.

‘The water will take care of that if we take you far enough away, make sure you’re in there for long enough,’ sniffed Vaughan. Luke could not tell if he was bluffing, too. ‘And anyway, the police won’t talk to Jem. We’ve as good as got a signed confession. What did it say, Sandy?’

A signed
confession
? Luke was disorientated.

‘I honestly have no choice but to end it like this,’ she replied. Those horrible familiar words made the cold water in his guts churn. ‘I hope you understand, and understand the responsibility you bear . . . this way I hope to enfold you in my loneliness, for ever . . . blah blah blah . . .’

Luke let out a long low moan, remembering the time he’d shown Sandy the letter. He’d done it to get closer to her, to give her something of himself so that she would open up to him, and so secure the friendship. The irony was bitter as bile. He had not checked that the note was safely tucked in its secret pouch for days, weeks, even. It was beyond doubt that of all the papers stuffed in his satchel, Jem’s letter would not be one of them.

‘See?’ said Vaughan. ‘It works if he’s taking you with him, doesn’t it? It’s a good job he’s got a flair for the dramatic. Considerate of him not to put a date on it, too.’

Fear and rage allowed him to leap the pain barrier: he emptied his lungs and he yelled for his life, a noise that must surely wake the whole square.

‘Be quiet,’ said Sandy. ‘Be quiet, shut
up
!’ Her hand was over his mouth. He could taste sweat on her palm; hers, not his. His voice pushed against her like a fist. He tried to bite her but she caught his jaw. She scraped around behind her for the scarf that had been used as a hood, stuffing it far deeper into his throat than she had before.

A sudden swill of saliva gave Luke a second’s warning of the vomit that rushed up his windpipe, the water he had gulped so greedily reappearing laced with stomach acid. It had nowhere to go, and he had to make the decision to swallow it or choke. Forcing it back down, Luke felt so entirely wretched that for a soft dark second he actually wanted to die. At least if he went now, like this, they might not be able to implicate Jem. It would almost be worth it to rob Vaughan and Sandy of their satisfaction.

He closed his eyes and prepared to let go. Shutting out the light was a sweet relief, and he willed the swimming red pool of the inside of his eyelids to fade and still to black. But life’s grip was stronger than Luke’s release mechanism. He was pulled back into the world by a fumbling overhead, a vague distant clunk and then, louder, the front door swinging open with a slow seabird squeak. He parted his eyelids again, the light a hot spoke in each eyeball.

‘There you go,’ said Vaughan. ‘He came to you after all. Ain’t love grand?’

‘Get him down here,’ said Sandy.

Vaughan cracked his gloved knuckle and paused with his foot on the bottom step to listen to the footsteps overhead. They were light, hesitant and uneven, the stop-start tread of someone walking a floor for the first time. Luke strained to hear Jem’s voice calling his name, but his own laboured inhalations were rushes in his ear. He tried to cry out a warning through his soaked gag, but it was all he could do to breathe.

Luke had been so sure that the figure in the cellar doorway would be Jem that it took him a moment for the projected image to reshape itself to the true, shrinking and bending until the tall lean man his imagination had presumed was replaced by a tiny stooping figure cradling an oxygen cylinder.

Joss Grand took in the tableau of Vaughan at his feet, Luke prone and bound in the truss he had made notorious, Sandy kneeling before him like Mary Magdalene.

‘What the
fuck
,’ he said, ‘is going on here?’

Chapter 53

The flare of hope that Grand had come to rescue Luke was extinguished by the confusion on the old man’s face. Grand was looking down on Sandy but without authority, the balance of power unclear for the first time in fifty years. She had just described their relationship as a see-saw and it seemed to Luke that for the first time they were poised at its fulcrum, neither of them knowing whether to push down or kick away from the ground.

‘Vaughan? I saw the car outside. What are
you
doing here? It’s not your day to come here till next week.’ He peered deeper into the cellar. ‘Fucking hell, Vaughan, what’s the boy done to earn this?’

So, he still believed that Vaughan was on his side. That would hurt when he found out: the king betrayed by his crown prince.