“Neil, you there?” said
the man. “Neil–” Harlan hung up.
Susan’s eyes widened as
the penny suddenly dropped. “That was him, wasn’t it?” she hissed. “That was the
bastard who took Ethan.”
Kane nodded
mutely.
Harlan tore away Neil’s
gag. “Where’s–” he started to say but before he could finish, Susan flew at
Neil, her fists and nails flailing, drawing livid red lines across his face. He
made no attempt to defend himself.
“It was you!” she
screamed. “It was you all along! How could you do this?”
Neil’s reedy voice
quivered in reply. “I did it for us.”
Harlan caught Susan’s
wrists as she swung at Neil again. “There’s no time for this, Susan!” His mind
reeled with pain as she strained against his hold, trying to twist her arms
free.
“Where’s my boy?
Where’s Ethan?”
“He’s not far away,”
said Neil.
“Is he alive?”
Neil screwed up his
face in horror at the suggestion that Ethan might not be. “Of course he is. I
told you, I’d never hurt the kids.”
Susan stopped
struggling. A shudder passed through her. Tears swelled in her eyes. Her lips
twitched, unable to express the pain and joy she felt. Harlan knew there was no
time for the luxury of emotion. There was no time for anything except getting
to Ethan. Right this moment, Yates would be wondering what was going on. He
might be starting to panic. Maybe he’d even be thinking about disposing of the
evidence. Harlan gestured at Kane. The boy blinked as if emerging from a trance,
before quickly moving to take hold of his mother’s wrist and draw her away from
Harlan.
Harlan hauled Neil to
his feet. “You’re gonna take me to Ethan right now.” His voice was as deadly
sharp as the blade at Neil’s throat. He pushed him towards the door.
Neil twisted to look at
Susan, heedless of the way his Adam’s apple dragged over the knife. “I did it
for us,” he said again, with a tremor of pitifully desperate love in his voice.
“Because I wanted us to have a life together.”
Susan looked at Neil with
a hate in her eyes even more toxic than his love.
Crushed by what he saw,
Neil’s body sagged and his head drooped. As Harlan thrust him into the street,
Susan broke away from Kane and ran after them. “I’m coming with you.”
“No way,” said Harlan.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“I don’t give a fuck!
I’m coming!”
Kane grabbed Susan’s
wrist again. “Please, Mum, I don’t want you to go.”
“Let go, Kane.” She
tried to shake him off, but he clung on like a limpet.
Turning quickly away
from them, Harlan put his hand on Neil’s head and none too gently guided him to
the driver’s seat. “Don’t you fucking go without me,” shrieked Susan, as he
rushed around to the other side of the car. He just had time to reach across
Neil and press the central-locking button, before Susan yanked at the passenger
door. She hammered on the window. “Open this bastard door!”
Harlan thrust the
ignition key into Neil’s hand. “Go! Go!”
With trembling fingers,
Neil fumbled the key into the ignition. As they accelerated away, Harlan hissed
in his ear, “Remember what I said, if you fuck with me…” He trailed off,
letting the threat hang between them.
“I won’t.” Neil’s voice
matched his ghastly grey face, as he watched Susan recede in the rearview
mirror.
Chapter
22
“Where are we going?”
asked Harlan.
“Spital Street.”
Harlan had been called
out to Spital Street numerous times during his years on the force. It traversed
the lowermost edge of a rundown estate of maisonettes and flats perched on a
hillside just north-east of the city centre. “What address?”
“I know where it is,
but I dunno the exact address. It’s a second floor flat.”
“Who lives there?”
“No one. It’s empty.
That’s why Martin took Ethan there.”
“Is he the only other
person involved in this?”
A slight hesitation,
then, “No. His girlfriend’s in on it too. Her name’s Paula. I dunno her
surname. She lives in the flat below the one where we’re keeping Ethan.”
Harlan took out his
phone and dialled Jim. “Have you got a name for me then?” his ex-partner asked,
on answering the phone.
“I’ve got a lot more
than that. Nash didn’t abduct Ethan. Neil Price did.”
Jim released an
exhausted breath. “Make up your mind, Harlan. First you tell me this nameless
roofer did it, now you–”
“Shut up and listen,
Jim,” Harlan interrupted. “They both did it. The roofer – his name’s Martin
Yates – him and Price are in it together, along with Yate’s girlfriend.”
An instant’s stunned
silence followed, then Jim said, “How do you know this?”
“Price told me himself.
I’m in the car with him now, on my way to where they’re holding Ethan.”
“You mean the boy’s
alive.”
“Yes.”
“Where?” There was no
relief in Jim’s voice. Within seconds, icy professionalism had overcome his
initial surprise. Like Harlan, he knew they hadn’t won the game yet, and the
clock was running down fast.
“Spital Street. It’s an
empty second floor flat.”
“But we searched all
the unoccupied flats around there,” said Jim. “How did we miss him?”
The answer was obvious
to Harlan: Ethan had been kept elsewhere – and that elsewhere was almost
certainly Yates’s girlfriend’s place – until after the police were done
searching. But there was no time for explanations. “We’re in Eve’s Toyota. I’ll
make sure we park directly outside the flat. You need to get some units over
there fast. Yates might be onto me.”
“I’m already on it. How
far away are you?”
“Not far. Five or ten
minutes.”
“You’ll be there before
us then. Don’t go trying to be a hero, Harlan. Wait in your car and let us do
our job.”
“I’ll do whatever it
takes to get Ethan back safe.” Harlan hung up. A woozy feeling hit him, causing
the road to momentarily double before his watering eyes. Shaking the dizziness
from his head, he felt his bandage again. As he drew his hand away, rivulets of
blood coursed between his fingers. Grappling with Susan, it seemed, had opened
his wound fully. He wondered whether he’d have the strength to ‘do whatever it
takes’.
“So what was the plan?”
Harlan asked, more to try and fend off the tugging fingers of unconsciousness
than because he needed to know right that moment.
Neil shrugged as if he
wasn’t sure, but then said in a strangled sort of voice, “Paula was gonna phone
the police and say she’d heard suspicious sounds in the flat above hers. When
they came and found Ethan, she’d claim the reward and we’d split it three
ways.”
“And who came up with
this plan?”
Again, Neil shrugged.
“Me and Martin went out drinking a few months back. I don’t usually drink, but
Gary Dawson,” his upper lip curled with hate around the name, “was threatening
to send his thugs to my parents’ house. I was going out of my head with worry.
Martin’s in even deeper with Dawson than me. We were talking about ways of
making some quick cash, and I jokingly said we should try to find that missing
boy, Jamie Sutton, and claim the reward. And Martin said it would be easier to
just snatch a kid ourselves for the reward. So we started talking about how we
might do it. We weren’t being serious at first – at least, I wasn’t…” Neil
trailed off as if he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of his words. “Oh
God, it sounds so insane now.”
“No it doesn’t.” There
was a simple, ruthless logic to everything Neil had said. Harlan wasn’t about
to let him use madness to exonerate himself from responsibility. A couple of
things didn’t make sense to him, though. “But why risk abducting Ethan from his
bed? Why not just snatch him off the street?”
“That was our original
plan. We wanted to make it look like the same bloke who took Jamie Sutton took
Ethan.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Ethan, that’s why. Outside
school, he never leaves Susan’s side. He’s been like that since his dad died. I
remember even when me and Susan first got together, he used to ask her all the
time, why did Dad leave us? She tried to explain, but he just couldn’t get it
into his head what death means. I guess he’s afraid she’ll leave him too.” The
familiar guilt twisted inside Harlan, as Neil continued, “We kept waiting for a
chance to grab him off the street, but there was no chance. Martin got
impatient. Dawson’s thugs were hounding him. We talked about taking Ethan from
the house. Martin was all for it, but I didn’t like the idea. The problem
wasn’t Susan – after she takes her Valium she’s out of it for the night. The
problem was Kane. If we were gonna do it that way, it would have to be on a
night Kane was sleeping over at a friend’s or something. But then Martin, the
crazy fucker, just went ahead and did it. First I heard about it was when the
coppers came to see me. I swear, I nearly had a heart-attack.” Neil heaved a
breath, shaking his head. “I thought Martin was alright, but he’s got serious
problems up here.” He tapped his temple. “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t
think I’d ever have gone through with this.”
“Bollocks,” retorted
Harlan, sickened to his core by the nauseatingly familiar sound of someone
trying to talk their way out of their guilt.
“It’s true. Martin
wasn’t even going to give me my full share of the reward, ’cos he reckons I
haven’t done enough to earn it.”
“Whose idea was it to
take Ethan?”
Neil was silent a
moment, then he admitted, “Mine.”
“Then you’ve done
plenty to deserve everything you’ve got coming to you.”
“But all I did was come
up with the idea, Martin and Paula did–” Neil broke off at a glance from Harlan
that warned him there would be dire consequences if he continued to insist on
his relative innocence.
They were nearing
Spital Street. Three and four-storey blocks of flats loomed over them, rising
up one behind another like piles of boxes. Another wave of wooziness washed
over Harlan, prompting him to ask, “That’s the other thing I don’t get, why
Ethan? Why not abduct some random kid?”
“Martin wanted to, but
I told him it had to be Ethan or I wouldn’t go through with it.”
“Why?”
“I know Ethan. I knew
he wouldn’t try to fight or escape. Plus, that way I could, y’know, stay close
to the investigation and give Martin the heads up if the coppers began sniffing
in his direction.”
Harlan narrowed his
eyes in scrutiny, wondering whether Neil was really as stupid as his words
suggested. If they’d done as Martin wanted, maybe, just maybe, their plan
would’ve worked. But this way they had little or no chance of getting away with
it. After Paula had contacted the police, it wouldn’t have taken them long to
connect her to Martin, and from Martin it was only three or four short steps to
Neil. “So you did all this for seventy-odd thousand quid.”
“We expected it would
be a lot more. Jamie Sutton’s reward was two hundred thousand.” Neil’s voice
took on a sneering tone. “But it turns out most people in this piss-hole of a
city won’t put their hands in their pockets to save anyone except themselves.
If they had done, this thing would’ve been over weeks ago.”
“Seventy thousand, two
hundred thousand, a million. What’s the difference? No amount of money’s worth
this.”
“That’s easy for you to
say. You haven’t been fucked over by people your whole life.” Neil flashed
Harlan a look sodden with resentment. “Susan told me about you. You had it all,
and you threw it away.”
Neil’s words pierced
Harlan deeper than Nash’s knife had done. Talking about himself was the last
thing he wanted to do. And Neil was the last person he owed an explanation of
his past to. But still, he felt compelled to respond. “I didn’t throw it away,
it was taken from me.”
“Bullshit. Your son
died, but you still had a career, a house, a wife who loved you. You still had
a million times more than me.”
I had nothing after Tom
died
!
Nothing
! Harlan wanted to yell, but he knew that wasn’t true. The truth was
he’d been so torn apart by pain, fear and rage that he’d wanted to nullify his
identify, make his life nothing. And he’d almost managed it. Almost.
A bitter smile spread
across Neil’s face. “I know your type. I’ve known you all my shitty life. You
were one of the popular kids, I can tell. Things have always come easy to you.
Easy come easy go. But I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve got. I found
happiness for the first time when I met Susan, and I wasn’t about to let it go.
No fucking way! When she told me she thought maybe we should stop–” He broke
off suddenly, as if he’d said more than he intended to.
Looking at Neil’s face,
its plain, mousey features quivering with emotion, his parting words to Susan
came back to Harlan.
I did it for us
.
Because I wanted us to have a
life together
. And with them came the realisation of exactly what they
meant. A strange kind of relief passed over him, as he said, “This was never
about money. Susan was going to leave you. You took Ethan to stop her, to make
her need you as much as you need her. Didn’t you?” Silence was all the answer
Harlan received, and all the answer he needed. “You never intended to follow
your plan through – at least, not the plan you and Yates cooked up. That’s why
this thing has dragged on so long. Because you knew that if Susan ever got
Ethan back, you and her would be finished. But why involve Yates and his
girlfriend? It would’ve been a lot simpler to abduct Ethan yourself, do him in
and get rid of the body?”