The Mercedes dug into the tarmac and powered forward, heading for Hyde Park Corner. D’Cruz grunted underneath Boxer, who tried to keep his eyes focused on the scooter’s tail light up front. Then the tail light went out.
‘Where the fuck is it?’ said the driver.
The traffic slowed to a crawl up to Apsley House. They had no chance.
‘We’ve lost him,’ said Boxer. ‘Take us back through the park.’
Hyde Park, dimly lit, stretched out beyond Rotten Row to the deeper darkness of the Serpentine. The freezing night air buffeted through the car. Boxer checked behind, pulled D’Cruz up from the footwell, put him in the corner away from the smashed window, swept the glass off with his arm. He ran his hands along the back seat, found the bullet hole. D’Cruz would have taken it full in the chest.
‘What now?’ said the driver.
‘Get back onto Kensington Gore,’ said Boxer. ‘Slow down. We’re all right here in the back.’
The gold of the Albert Memorial flashed past in the gloom. The high-rise lights of the Royal Garden Hotel welcomed them from the darkness of the park. D’Cruz brushed himself down, shivered in the cold. After a few more minutes they pulled up outside a new development on Aubrey Walk. The Mercedes parked in the street. D’Cruz told the driver to take a walk.
‘Maybe there’s something you want to tell me before we go any further,’ said Boxer.
D’Cruz was still in a state of shock. His hands trembled, his breathing came quick.
‘Thanks for that,’ he said. ‘That was above and beyond the call of duty.’
‘Martin Fox can organise a bodyguard for you.’
‘Yes, I’ll speak to him about that.’
‘Who wants you dead, Mr D’Cruz?’
‘I think you can call me Frank now,’ he said, and hit the inside of the car door with the side of his fist, trying to pull himself together.
‘Frank?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It looks as if you’ve upset more than one person.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘If the people who’ve kidnapped your daughter want to get paid, or want you to take them seriously, they wouldn’t kill you, the paymaster general, on your first day.’
‘I don’t want you to talk to Isabel about this,’ he said fiercely. ‘It will frighten her half to bloody death.’
‘It hasn’t done a bad job on you; or me, for that matter,’ said Boxer. ‘I’d have expected this in Karachi, but not here.’
‘I’m going to have to think this through,’ he said.
‘I’ll be your sounding board,’ said Boxer. ‘I’d like to know what I’m getting myself into.’
D’Cruz stared into the middle distance, flicking off bits of glass stuck to his wool coat.
‘Is this an Indian mafia problem?’ asked Boxer.
‘What do you know about that?’ said D’Cruz sharply.
‘Nothing. It’s just a question. Martin Fox told me you were a Bollywood actor. There are connections.’
‘Keep to the work you know,’ he said, looking hard into Boxer’s face.
‘I’m trying to,’ said Boxer. ‘But I found myself in the personal security business instead.’
‘Sorry,’ said D’Cruz. ‘I’m still shaken. Sorry for that. Yes. Let’s go and meet Isabel.’
‘You still haven’t told me anything, Frank.’
‘Only because I don’t know,’ he said.
D’Cruz opened the car door. The driver ran over to help. He waved him away, went to the intercom, pressed the bell, spoke. The barred gate opened. They walked through a parking area into a fake Georgian square which, at its centre, had a landscaped garden, whose plants were bagged against the frost. There were very few lights on in the other houses. It didn’t look as if D’Cruz was the only one using this upmarket estate as a haven for foreign investment.
A woman opened the front door, threw her arms around D’Cruz, pressed her face into his neck. She was crying and saying ‘Chico’, over and over for about a minute, a tissue balled in one of her fists. Boxer stood back, let them have their privacy. D’Cruz extricated himself and walked her into the warmth and light of the hallway. They stood, silhouetted, and talked, their mouths inches apart. She nodded as he explained, their heads turned in Boxer’s direction. Isabel Marks went out to shake his hand, apologised for her state, brought him in.
It was always a tense moment to be introduced to the mother of a kidnapped child. If she didn’t like the look of you, no matter what the husband might say, you’d lose the job. Boxer elicited extreme feelings. He either inspired total confidence or profound dislike. He’d noticed that the wives of very rich men generally fell into the second category. They did not like it that he was self-contained, unimpressed by wealth, not overawed by status or celebrity, and didn’t have a molecule of subservience in his nature. He’d been fired on doorsteps in Miami, São Paulo, Nassau, Manila and Johannesburg.
Boxer had, initially, been concerned by the kind of residential development where she was living. But as soon as their eyes met, hands connected, Boxer knew that Isabel Marks was not the sort of person he usually came across in the hallway of a ten million pound home. There was no artifice, no attempt at disguising her terrible suffering. The barriers were gone and he fell straight through to the person inside. He had the strange feeling that a child might have, on looking into its mother’s eyes: total trust, absolute belief, complete certainty. The meeting had a seismic effect on him because these were convictions that had been absent from his own life. He was surprised to feel a distant yearning, made even more poignant because it was for something he’d never experienced himself.
She withdrew her hand, went back under the arm of her ex-husband, who steered her down the hall, but she couldn’t restrain a perplexed look over her shoulder at the light green eyes following her every move. They went to the kitchen at the back of the house, which gave out onto a patio garden and some huge lime trees beyond. Isabel excused herself to wash her face and repair her make-up.
‘Where’s Jo?’ asked D’Cruz, when she came back.
‘She had to leave,’ said Isabel.
‘Had to?’
‘We were getting on each other’s nerves,’ said Isabel. ‘I’m probably too raw to be with at the moment.’
‘Bollocks,’ said D’Cruz, surprising Boxer with his idiomatic English. ‘She’s self-obsessed, that’s all. No sympathy. No empathy. She’s probably seeing it all from the point of view of Alyshia’s aunt.’
‘Don’t wind yourself up, Chico,’ said Isabel. ‘Pour some drinks.’
She set out tumblers and ice, while D’Cruz poured the whisky. Boxer was drinking her in. She was probably a few years older than him. The dark hair, still worn girlishly long. The brown eyes under straight black eyebrows, permanently on the brink of concern. Those eyebrows unbuckled something in him. High cheekbones with the slightest declivity beneath. He imagined men wanting to . . . he imagined himself kissing her on that spot. Then the full mouth with pronounced Cupid’s bow. Her sallow skin, a strange hybrid of Mediterranean olive and London pallor that would go instantly golden in the sun. Her figure was almost old-fashioned, compact, as if it was used to work, but with a waist cinched by a belt that emphasised her high bosom and round hips. She was wearing a coffee-coloured cashmere wool dress, with a wide chocolate belt and suede high heels with the same cocoa content.
They sat with a bottle of the Macallan and a bucket of ice in the middle of the table, and Isabel insisted on first name terms. She had been working over the conversation she’d had with the kidnapper and had some notes in front of her.
‘He seemed relaxed about time,’ she said. ‘When he told me I could call him Jordan, he said, “why be formal when we’ll be talking to each other over the next few weeks, months . . . possibly years”.’
‘A tactic. He wants you to think he’s got all the time in the world,’ said Boxer. ‘We’ll see what sort of a hurry they’re in as time goes on
.’
‘I stupidly asked if he was a friend but I could tell, even with the voice distortion, that he wasn’t. He waffled on about “working on the relationship side of things”, which annoyed me. I wanted to talk to Alyshia, not listen to his crap.’
‘Don’t be annoyed. He’s showing you that he’s rational, reasonable, even sensitive,’ said Boxer. ‘It’s good to try to make that attitude last as long as possible.’
‘I just wanted him to shut up and let me talk to my baby, but he said that wasn’t going to be possible because she’d been kidna—’
Isabel broke down. D’Cruz got up and put his arm around her. They were very tender with each other, despite D’Cruz’s mention of ‘the limits’ earlier. This gap in their lives was their only creation and they were each other’s sole comfort. It always moved Boxer to see how parents were forever pregnant with the presence of their offspring, wherever they were in the world. And when they were taken or just gone, how that exquisite fullness turned to black. He couldn’t help but think of Amy; his wayward, crazy child – gone, but at least not disappeared. Had his own mother been like Isabel Marks when she’d been told he’d run away from school? Three weeks he’d been gone, aged fourteen, when they’d picked him up in Valencia, and all she’d done was given him a rocket when he got home.
‘Do you have children?’ asked Isabel, jolting Boxer out of his thoughts.
‘A daughter. She’s seventeen.’
‘Do you have a photo?’
He handed over his flipped open wallet.
‘She doesn’t look seventeen.’
‘That’s because she’s fourteen there and sweet and innocent,’ said Boxer. ‘Now she doesn’t allow photographs. She’s in the process of derailing her life and I suspect she doesn’t want anybody to see it in pictures.’
‘They’re a constant worry,’ said Isabel, handing back the wallet.
‘What else did Jordan say after he told you he’d kidnapped Alyshia?’
‘He told me not to go to the police or press, but it was delivered with such a terrible threat . . . I mean, so graphic I’m not sure I can bring myself to repeat it.’
‘Try,’ said Boxer. ‘We need to know the psychology of the man we’re dealing with.’
‘He said we might be extremely lucky to see her some months later but she would be in an advanced stage of decomposition and forever troubling the mind of the person who’d “chanced upon her remains”. I can’t imagine the sort of person that would be prepared to stick that kind of image in a mother’s mind. It’s inhuman.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Boxer, worried by what he was hearing. ‘What about the demands?’
‘I managed to ask him what he wanted and assumed, because Chico is such a well-known businessman, that it would be money. It’s crazy, isn’t it?’ she said, momentarily diverted. ‘I was so glad when Alyshia came back from Mumbai. I’d been terrified that this sort of thing would happen to her out there, but not . . . not here. Not in England. Not in London.’
‘It can happen anywhere in the world, Isabel,’ he said, and realised that he’d enjoyed using her name.
‘Jordan said it wasn’t about money. That this won’t be sorted out with “a good old bit of Asian haggling”. He wouldn’t “be so crass as to put a price on my child’s head”. He said Chico would dismiss this and I should persuade him otherwise. For some reason, that jolted me back to reality. It had all been surreal up until then. It made me think that Jordan knew Chico, so I asked him. He crapped on about Chico being in the media so much that everybody thinks they know him, but that I would know him better than anybody. And that again made me think he knew him personally. He also said he would only talk to me. If we tried to put anybody else on the line, he would hang up. Three strikes and you’re out, were his words. After that, somehow, I had the presence of mind to ask for proof that he was holding Alyshia. And he gave me the nickname . . . the nickname I haven’t heard her use for ages. It used to make us laugh and laugh. The nickname for her grandmother . . . my mother.’
Isabel broke down again, dropped her head onto her ex-husband’s shoulder.
A phone rang somewhere in the house. Isabel went rigid, sprang out of the chair and ran upstairs. Boxer followed, stood in the doorway of the bedroom. She looked at the screen, shook her hand at him and answered it. Boxer went back downstairs to the rare sight of a billionaire slumped and deflated by something beyond his enormous powers of control. D’Cruz dragged the whisky bottle across the table, poured a finger into his glass.
‘If you’re happy for me to continue,’ said Boxer. ‘I’ll have to go back and pick up some equipment.’
‘She likes you. There’s no problem there,’ said D’Cruz. ‘You’re hired.’
‘While I’m away, you should think about where you want me to conduct this operation. From here? A rented flat? A hotel room? Isabel and I are going to have to be in close contact. A kidnapper’s call can come at any time and I have to be on hand to help her with negotiations,’ said Boxer. ‘You should also make up a shortlist of trusted friends who you would be happy to negotiate on your behalf. The first thing we’re going to do is try to take Isabel out of the firing line. The other thing to think about is this kidnapper knowing you and is that relevant to what happened earlier this evening? Is there someone who bears you some intense personal animosity, who would have the resources to conduct a professional kidnapping? Because with the flesh on the bones that Isabel’s just given us, that is what I believe we have here: a highly professional, well thought-out, psychologically directed kidnapping. I’ll be bringing some recording equipment back with me, but nothing that won’t fit in a small suitcase. If Isabel would rather stay here, that’s fine by me. I’ll need a room to set up the computer and the recording equipment and a place for me to sleep, that’s all.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Isabel, from the door. ‘That was Jo, by the way. Apologising. She sends her love, Chico.’
‘Bloody, fucking woman,’ said D’Cruz.
‘I’ve told her there’s no need for her to come back. I’ll be quite all right with Charles.’
Boxer had the use of the Mercedes. He sat up front with the driver, a thick-set Londoner with the customary shaved head, who’d used the last hour to install a sheet of plastic in the shattered window in the back. As they glided through the streets of Notting Hill, Westbourne Green, Maida Vale and Kilburn, the driver told him he’d only worked for Mr D’Cruz three times and nothing had ever happened before.
‘You spoken to your boss yet?’
‘Not on a Sunday evening.’
‘Is he the nervous type?’
‘Nah, he’ll just tell me to take a car with bulletproof windows. We have them. I just didn’t think that’s what we were getting into.’
‘Nor did Mr D’Cruz,’ said Boxer. ‘You’d better make sure your boss doesn’t talk to the police about this until you get clearance from me. There’s a delicate situation in progress.’
‘I don’t think my boss has very close relations with the police . . . if you know what I mean.’
‘But don’t try dealing with that bullet in the back seat yet. We’ll organise some forensics to take a look at it.’
The car pulled up outside a large white stucco house in Belsize Park Gardens. Boxer took his small suitcase up to the top floor flat. He emptied out the clothes he’d been wearing in Lisbon, opened the case’s false bottom and removed twenty-five thousand euros in cash – his poker winnings. He put the blocks of money in a wall safe behind a painting of a sixteenth century Italian businessman, which had a heavy rococo gilt frame. He took out two thousand pounds in cash, shut the safe and replaced the painting.
In the kitchen he went into a saucepan cupboard, removed the pans and a section of the base. He lifted a floorboard underneath and took out a Belgian-made FN57 semi-automatic pistol with a spare twenty-round clip. He liked this gun because, although it was light, at just over one and a half pounds fully loaded, the rounds could penetrate
Kevlar vests. He put the gun, spare clip and one thousand five hundred of the cash in the false bottom of his overnight bag. He packed clean clothes. From the spare room he took a small, hard-shelled, silver suitcase, which contained the recording equipment, a laptop computer, memory sticks, note-pads, pre-prepared sign cards for use in telephone calls with the kidnappers, felt tips and Blu-tack. He took a pen torch and some metal tools from a cupboard and put everything by the front door and only then did he make his call to Martin Fox.
‘I’ve been hired,’ he said. ‘Somebody on a Vespa took a pop at D’Cruz en route between the Ritz and his ex-wife’s house in Kensington.’
‘Jesus,’ said Fox. ‘Still, I can’t say D’Cruz had the look of a virgin about him.’
‘You’d better arrange for forensics to extract the round from the back seat and get the ballistics on it,’ said Boxer. ‘I’ve told the driver not to touch.’
‘I’ll talk to D’Cruz’s insurers and I’ve got a DCS Makepeace coming to my office tomorrow to sit in my operations room. I’m sure he’ll be interested in that.’
‘I wouldn’t think it’s connected to the kidnap. Why kill the guy you want to pressurise?’ said Boxer. ‘You might get D’Cruz a bodyguard, too. The driver’s calm, said he’ll sort out a limo with bulletproof glass. Has D’Cruz spoken to you yet?’
‘No. Was he shaken?’
‘And stirred,’ said Boxer.
The arrivals hall at Gatwick was busy. Mercy was standing well back from the mêlée of people crowding the barriers in front of the double doors from the customs area. She had a clear view down the channel where the arriving passengers would come. Amy’s flight had landed.
There was a strong smell of fried food, which was contributing to the sickness in her stomach, although most of that was coming from her mental state. She couldn’t help but feel that she’d failed as a parent. She thought her incapacity must have stemmed from the absence of her own mother, who’d died in childbirth when Mercy was only seven, and the insanely strict regime that her Ghanaian police officer father had imposed on her and her four siblings. Maybe she was just repelled by parenthood because, as the eldest, a lot of mothering had fallen in her lap. She’d never intended to have a child so early herself. Amy hadn’t been planned, arriving, as she had, soon after she and Boxer had split up. She’d found herself with little to offer Amy, reluctant to impose her father’s type of discipline, but with no alternative up her sleeve. Then again, she was dealing with somebody harbouring the suspect genes of Charles Boxer, and that was never going to be easy – a runaway boy with a ‘missing’ dad, a war veteran, a lone professional, a man who, as far as she’d known, had never loved passionately, and had now become someone, since leaving his job at GRM, worryingly detached.