Old Enemies (9 page)

‘On the day it happened I got a strange call from Ruari – or at least from his phone. Just noise, really, and muffled voices. I thought he’d pressed the speed dial by mistake and I erased it but . . . Now I think it was made from the helicopter. And today I got another message.’ She walked stiffly towards a side table on which stood a laptop. ‘On this. A voice message. Over the Internet. On Skype.’

‘You didn’t record it, I suppose.’

She shook her head. ‘But I remember almost every word. “We have your son, bitch!” it began. Then it said if we called in the police or anyone like that, we’d never see him again.’ The memory was beginning to twist inside her. ‘It said we should do nothing except wait for their next message.’ The tears were flowing now.

‘Did it give you any clues? Who they were, or where they were?’

She tried to bite back her anguish. ‘The voice was white South African, that would be my guess, but apart from that – nothing. Except at the end of the call . . .’ She was struggling. ‘At the end there was just one long scream of pain!’ Now Terri was sobbing her heart out, her manicured fingers ripping at the buttons on her sleeve, her shoulders heaving, her head hanging in despair. Harry wanted to put his arms around her, to comfort her, but he couldn’t. She seemed as though she would break in two, fall in pieces to the ground, but she was battling with her fear and eventually she let forth one final lung-bursting sob before scrabbling for a handkerchief and wiping her eyes, which once more fell on him.

‘Forgive me, but . . .’ He was hesitant, reaching for the appropriate words. ‘Why are you telling me this? What about your husband?’

‘J.J.’s away, out of contact, I don’t know precisely where. There’s some important deal he’s trying to tie up, it’s all ridiculously hush-hush. He’s even taken his head of corporate security with him. I didn’t know who else to call and . . . Meeting up with you again the other day seemed like a sign. Call Harry Jones! Why not? Everyone else does.’ She tried to make light of it, came to sit on the far end of the sofa, her lips struggling to shape themselves into a brave smile. ‘I didn’t know who else to call, Harry.’

He wanted to leave, but couldn’t. She wasn’t the only one at war with their emotions. ‘That cry,’ he said, ‘are you sure it was him?’

‘Yes. A mother knows.’ Her voice snagged on something sharp inside. She began trembling.

‘
Don’t, Harry
,’ he told himself. ‘
Don’t you dare touch her
. . .
’

She wrapped her arms around herself as though she might burst apart.

‘And what do you want me to do?’ he heard himself saying.

The message that had capsized Terri’s world and left her drowning had its origins earlier that morning. Ruari had woken from a sleep disturbed by many ghosts to find a guard watching him, impassively and without a word, and it wasn’t long before he found the silence even more oppressive than the pain from his broken nose. He tried to engage the Romanian in conversation but wasn’t even sure the dumb-ass understood him properly. He tried his French in case the guard found that easier than English, but that had fallen on equally barren soil. So when de Vries made an appearance Ruari tried a different tactic, asking if he might have something to read – ‘you know, a comic, book, newspaper, anything. It’ll keep me quiet,’ he promised. But de Vries ignored him, too.

Then the South African returned to the bleak bedroom cell accompanied by another guard, named Nelu, the youngest of the guards, a skinny, gangling youth who wore a crumpled Disney T-shirt and torn jeans and carried a laptop under his arm. For a moment Ruari’s spirits rose. Perhaps they had relented, he thought. It was the last time he would make that mistake.

‘Pity about you throwing that phone of yours away,’ de Vries began, rubbing his stubble-red chin with a knuckle. ‘Could have saved us a lot of trouble. You, too. No need for that busted nose of yours. How is it, by the way?’

‘Still hurts,’ Ruari muttered cautiously, although in truth the pain had subsided to a dull throbbing ache.

‘I’m sure it does. Nasty things, noses. Anyway, we need your parents’ contact details – you know, their private phone numbers and email addresses. And since you’ve thrown your phone away, you’ll have to give them to me.’

‘I’ve forgotten,’ Ruari replied. ‘I just sort of punch buttons, you know?’

‘No, no, I don’t think so,’ de Vries said in his clipped voice, ‘not good enough, Little Shit.’ They all seemed to have taken up the habit of calling him that, never Ruari. He had a name, an identity, but they refused to acknowledge it. His captors knew it would slowly wear him down. ‘Kids like you are sponges, you soak up everything. So don’t pretend you can’t remember. Give.’

‘You can ask.’

‘And I shall receive.’

Ruari glared back and ran his tongue across his injured lip. His defiance seemed not to affect the man, whose tone remained casual.

‘Come on, Little Shit, don’t make it any more difficult than it needs to be. Don’t you want your folks to know you’re OK?’

Ruari, who was on his mattress, stretched himself out full length as though he was going to sleep.

‘That’s a pity, one hell of a pity,’ de Vries announced in the manner of a disappointed schoolmaster. He was standing over the bed. ‘Change your mind?’

Ruari closed his eyes, trying to blot out the sense of fear this man always instilled in him, and turned away, stretching the arm by which he was manacled to the bed. Suddenly de Vries had grabbed his shoulder and was kneeling on his other arm, pinning it down. For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes, the South African smiled. Then his fingers found Ruari’s broken nose and gave it a violent twist.

It felt to Ruari as though he had been hit by a hammer. He screamed. De Vries twisted his nose a second time and all Ruari’s defences were swept away. He began spilling numbers and addresses like a ripped sack of corn. He gave them what they wanted, everything, then he lay back on his mattress sobbing. He could taste the sweetness of blood in his mouth, his body was on fire, he was having trouble focusing through the bombardment of lights that were exploding inside his skull. He was only vaguely aware that Nelu was standing nearby, fiddling with the laptop, and de Vries was talking again, calling someone a bitch, talking about the police, a husband, and messages that would follow. He made sense of nothing until the moment that de Vries crushed his nose once more, and he started screaming all over again.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Harry repeated.

‘Wave a magic wand. Make this go away. Give me back my child,’ Terri whispered, her voice straining with every word.

‘You have time, kidnappers don’t tend to go away. You should wait until your husband comes home.’

‘I can’t wait,’ she bit back. ‘I can’t just sit here and do nothing but snivel. I’m his mother, for pity’s sake.’

‘I don’t think this is something I should get involved in.’

‘You must.’

‘Must?’

‘You have no choice, Harry,’ she insisted firmly. ‘You owe me.’

‘
I
? Owe
you
?’ he spluttered.

‘Oh, I know it was a long time ago, but you weren’t the only one to get hurt.’

‘You covered it up remarkably well.’

‘You weren’t around to see.’

He listened to her in a state of astonishment. For years he’d harboured an image of her as a cynical and hardhearted woman, for no better reason than it was easier for him to pile the blame on her that way, but now she was telling him how much she had cared, felt things. She picked up a silver-framed photo of herself holding the hand of a young boy in school uniform, green blazer, cap, long socks pulled up high, with grass stains on his knee.

‘Ruari?’ he asked.

‘His first day at school. I told him he had to be brave. I think that goes for me, too. I need you to be honest, Harry, tell me everything you can. Don’t try and protect me, I need to know.’ There was an urgency in her voice.

‘What can I tell you?’

‘A great deal, I suspect.’

He took it as a criticism. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. ‘OK. That voice,’ he began.

‘The South African?’

‘The first thing I ask myself is why a white South African is involved with an English kid in Switzerland.’ He rose, went to the window where she had been standing, where he imagined her standing looking out at a young boy on a scooter racing across the grass, making sure he was safe. ‘You ever upset any South Africans?’

‘Me? No. I’ve never even been there. Nor J.J., so far as I know.’

The lawn was empty now, nothing but a couple of lazy crows searching for worms. He turned. ‘It’s always possible they might be acting for someone else.’

‘You mean, like a hired hand. A mercenary.’ They were statements, not questions. She was impressively up to pace. Despite her pain she was thinking, already working things through.

‘Possibly. We’ll need to wait and see what their demands are.’

‘How long?’

‘Not long, I suspect.’

‘But sometimes these things can drag on for weeks – months.’ Her voice rose in alarm.

‘You sure you want this?’

‘You must tell me.’

He saw the fear in her eyes; lines of suffering were etching a path around her mouth. She was ageing a year with every hour. ‘I may be entirely off target here, you understand, but why did they make him scream? It wasn’t necessary, not in their first contact with you. It makes me think they’re in a hurry.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

He thought it was as dangerous as hell, yet he shrugged. ‘It means they’ll be in touch soon. That must be good, I suppose. It’s the waiting that’s the worst.’

‘Where is he, Harry?’ she sobbed, beginning to weaken once more.

‘You say you got a phone call from him?’

She nodded as she wiped her nose with a handkerchief.

‘Give me his number, and the time he called, as best you can. Your number, too, and the phone company you use.’ She cast aside the handkerchief and began scribbling on a piece of paper. ‘Then make me some coffee,’ he added. Keep her busy, give her something to do.

She hesitated. ‘Black, one sugar?’

Christ, she remembered. He shuddered, wondering what else she could recall. Soon he could hear the clatter of crockery and the gushing of a tap from the nearby kitchen. His eyes wandered around the room, snagging on the life she had made for herself, items so insignificant yet which seemed to be shouting at him. He didn’t care to ask himself why.

The contacts file on his phone was a wizard’s grotto filled with colleagues and friends who had passed through his life, and he scrolled through to the details of one of the signals officers who had served with him during the black years in Northern Ireland and who was now making a different kind of killing as the security director of one of the leading international telephone companies. He dialled.

‘Glen? It’s Harry Jones.’

‘Harry, how the devil—’

‘No time, old chum. I need a favour.’

‘Somehow I know I’m going to regret this.’

‘One of your phones made a call last Friday morning from somewhere in Switzerland. I need to know as precisely as possible where that call came from.’

‘Ouch. If it’s not your phone and you don’t have a court order, I can’t help you. That sort of thing’s smothered in all sorts of pissy protocols and data-protection nonsense, not to mention the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and various provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights. Get my balls nailed to our ever-plunging share price if I was found handing out that sort of stuff.’

There was a short silence, followed by a long sigh.

‘And I think, Harry, you were just about to say that the only reason I’ve still got balls is because you helped me when I needed it.’

‘I was thinking no such thing,’ Harry lied. ‘Although now you come to mention it, I do remember your wife had even more lurid suspicions than the CO about what you were up to that weekend you went missing in Belfast.’

‘You fight dirty, you know.’

‘Yes, we did, didn’t we?’

‘Screw you, Harry.’ But there was no venom in it.

‘You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t—’

‘I know, a matter of life and death.’

‘A young kid’s life. I’m with his mother now.’

‘Damn, you
do
fight dirty,’ the voice muttered in resignation.

‘Thanks, Glen. I’ll text you the details.’

As he ended the call, Terri appeared with two mugs of coffee. She bent down to place one in front of him and he could smell her, a different perfume than he remembered, more subtle, but back then she’d been only – what? Twenty-three? And he a few years older. Could they ever have been so impossibly young? As she leaned forward her breast tightened against the silk of her blouse. He closed his eyes, trying to forget.

‘Not quite like old times, is it, Harry?’ she said, sensing his discomfort.

Their eyes met, wavered in uncertainty, like rivers on the point of bursting their banks, but before it could take hold the moment was snatched away as from below came the sounds of new arrivals. Wet feet stomping, the front door slamming, footsteps taking the stairs two at a time, then a voice bursting with excitement. ‘Terri? Darling? You up there?’ More steps. ‘It’s wonderful news, totally bloody mind-blowing! They’ve signed. We’re saved!’