The Prisoner(66)

There’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, something I haven’t been able to do, because I haven’t had the courage. But I dig deep inside me and type “male body found Dorset” into my search en gine. There are several articles, and I scan them quickly, my heart thudding, discarding each one until I find the one that I hoped I wouldn’t find, Wednesday, August the fourteenth, about a man’s body being found on a wooded road, not far from Haven Cliffs, the seeming victim of a gangland killing.

The room tilts, I grip the table, wait for the dizziness to pass. At the time, the all-consuming murder of Lina just days before had taken precedence over Hunter’s; it had seemed wrong to mourn a man I barely knew. But now, waves of grief rack my body, for what might have been, if Lukas hadn’t ordered him to be killed.

Lukas. I can hardly bear to think about him now that I know he was my captor. But he is still the only person who will be able to give me the answers I need. My mind goes back to the phone call from Paul, warning me away from the memorial service. It has nothing to do with me being besieged by the press; why would I be? The service isn’t about me, it’s about Justine and Lina. Even if someone recognized me, they wouldn’t ask why I was there, not when everyone knows I worked at the magazine. The warning to keep away is about someone else being there, someone the kidnappers don’t want me running into, and that person can only be Lukas. And if Lukas is coming over from Vilnius, or Los Angeles, for the memorial service, the chances are that he’ll stay in his home away from home, the house in Haven Cliffs.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN




I step off the train in Bournemouth, exit the station, and walk to the taxi stand. The driver rolls down his window.

“Where to, love?”

“Haven Cliffs, please,” I say, climbing into the car.

“Do you have an address?”

“The house is called Albatross, but I’ve stupidly forgotten which road it’s on.”

“No problem.” He fiddles with his GPS. “Got it.”

“Great, thank you.”

I sit back, look out of the window, trying to calm my nerves. I have no idea how the next hour will play out but I know what I’d like to happen. Lukas is there, he agrees to talk to me, he admits giving the order for Hunter to be killed, admits kidnapping me and Ned, admits killing Ned. He tells me that everything was payback for Lina’s death, because he once loved her, or because he was meant to look out for her, and then I leave, and go straight to the police with the recording I’ve secretly made on my phone. But I’m not so na?ve as to think things go exactly as we’d like.

“Here you are,” the driver says, some fifteen minutes later.

I look out of the window and see a pair of black double gates with a high white wall stretching on either side of it. I recognize the small black gate a few yards along from the main gates; it’s the gate I went through when I pretended to look for Ned on the beach.

I pay the driver, get out of the car, and stand for a moment, studying the upper windows of the house where I was held captive for two weeks. When the kidnappers first brought us here, I didn’t smell the tang of the sea in the air. But maybe the fear I felt as they dragged Ned and me from the car had blunted my senses. Even if I had smelled the sea, I wouldn’t have thought we were at the house where Ned and I had had lunch with Lukas. In my mind, the place we’d been brought to was old and derelict, hidden away in some woods.

I wait until the taxi has left before pressing the intercom button. While I wait for it to be answered, I look up and down the wide road, noting how each house is so far from its neighbor that I could have screamed as much as I liked, and nobody would have heard.

I press the intercom again, but nobody answers, and I feel suddenly furious, because if Lukas is going to the memorial service for Justine and Lina tomorrow, he should be here by now. It’s why I waited until today to come, why I didn’t come yesterday or the day before, in case he hadn’t arrived yet.

I press the intercom again and again, refusing to believe Lukas isn’t somewhere behind the high white wall. Unless he decided to stay in London to be nearer to the church. But London is only a couple of hours by train from Bournemouth, and surely this is where he’d come to grieve for a woman who meant so much to him that he resorted to murder and kidnapping to avenge her death?

I move away, hoping to lull Lukas into a false sense of security, in case he’s watching me on the camera perched above the gate. I walk along the length of the wall to the right and, tucked away at the end, I find another pair of double gates, not quite as stately as the main gates. There’s no camera, and no one around, so I grab hold of the top of the gates and try to pull myself up. The gates are too smooth for me to get a toehold; my shoes scramble uselessly and I drop down to the path. I move to the stone pillar on the right-hand side of the gate and this time, when I grab the top of the gates, I manage to get enough purchase on the pillar’s rough surface to haul myself up. I just have time to peer quickly over the top before my foothold slips, and I see that the gates lead to a wooded area at the side of the house. These are the gates that the kidnappers drove through the night they brought me and Ned here.

I return to the main gates, press on the buzzer, keeping my finger on it, enraged that Lukas is refusing to answer, enraged that it hasn’t worked out as I’d hoped. Defeated, because I can’t stay around forever, I raise my head, look straight into the camera, and slowly mouth a message to Lukas: See you tomorrow.