Cuthbert's Way (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #17)(63)

Ryan nodded, and turned to his wife.

“Anna—before, it made sense to maintain a status quo. It looked the least suspicious, and there was safety in numbers. But now that Operation Bertie is no longer covert, this person knows they’re being hunted and that I won’t stop until I find them. That leaves them with two choices, as far as I can see.”

“Run and hide, or stay and fight,” Charles muttered.

Ryan nodded.

“If they come for me, they’ll come for my whole family. If they want something from me, they’ll try to use my family as leverage, and I can’t allow it.”

He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the soft skin of Anna’s hand.

“I think it’s time you and Emma went down to Devon,” he said, and turned to his parents. “All of you. Just for a while, until this is resolved.”

It killed him to say it, to send away those he loved most, but it was the best and only way to protect them.

“But—you said it wouldn’t matter where we were, if this person really wanted to find us,” Anna said.

“I still believe that,” he said, frankly. “But there’s no need to make things easy for them.”

“I could travel down to Devon with the girls, then come back to help you,” his father offered.

Ryan shook his head.

“I appreciate the thought, Dad, but I’m relying on you to stay and look out for everyone down south,” he said. “I want you to call in your old security team and turn Summersley into a fortress.”

He referred to the family home, set in hundreds of acres of land in the Devonshire hills.

“There’s nobody else I’d trust with my family’s life,” he added.

Charles looked him in the eye. “You can trust me.”

“For how long?” Anna asked, keeping her emotions in check as best she could. “How long will we be apart?”

Ryan looked down at their joined hands, thought of the sleeping baby upstairs, and tried to stay strong.

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. “I’ll try to finish this as quickly as I can, Anna, so we can all be together again.”

“What about you?” Eve asked, and her voice trembled. “Who’ll be looking after you?”

“I’m a big boy,” he said, with the ghost of a smile. “I’ll look after myself.”

Eve was hardly satisfied with that.

“We could arrange some security for Ryan, too,” she said to her husband, who nodded his agreement.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Ryan told them. “For now, I want to know all of you will be somewhere safe, far away from anything remotely to do with any of this. Will you do that for me?”

This last question he aimed at Anna, whose brown eyes shone with unshed tears.

“Yes,” she whispered. “For the sake of our family, and to give you the space you need to work without worrying about any of us, yes, I’ll go to Devon.”

“Thank you,” he said, and held her as she snuggled closer and laid her head against his chest. “It’s for the best.”

She knew that he was saying it to convince himself, as much as her.

“I know,” she reassured him. “But knowing doesn’t make the doing any easier.”

Across the room, Eve and Charles exchanged a glance.

“We’ll leave you two in peace,” his mother said. “We’ll get on the road first thing tomorrow.”

Eve brushed a maternal hand over Ryan’s head as she passed, then leaned down to kiss his brow, blinking away the tears that threatened to fall.

“Goodnight,” she whispered, and left them both to say their long goodbye.

*

It took him a couple of days to crack the anagram, which was lowering for him to admit.

But it was easily explained.

He would hardly be a worthy recipient of Cuthbert’s Code if he was able to understand its mysteries straight away, and nor would Father Jacob have been a worthy guardian if his message had been obvious to all who read it.

Only the most loyal followers could see it, and understand it.

Once he’d understood the message, he knew immediately where to look for the next clue, and it had taken all of his restraint not to go there immediately and claim what was rightfully his.

But he could not.

That would be foolish, for the place was under constant surveillance and its unique placement made it almost impossible to access without being discovered.

He needed a proxy.

Somebody with the intelligence, the means, the power and the incentive to do his bidding.

He knew just the man.

Reaching for the prosthetic mask he kept in a glass case, laid out on a satin pillow, he lifted it to his face and looked at himself in the mirror, smiling like the madman he was.

He was Cuthbert’s holy heir.

He was the vessel for his power.

He reached for one of a stack of unused burner mobiles and placed a call to one of his most useful contacts. When the arrangements had been made, he fell to his knees and prayed.





CHAPTER 32


Thursday, 10th December

The only person who slept through the night was Emma, who awakened fresh as a daisy and blissfully ignorant of any sad undercurrents in the household. Through her child’s eyes, she saw her father’s face appear above her cot, looked into his loving blue gaze and kicked her arms and legs in excitement, ready to be held in his strong arms. She breathed in his smell, as she laid her small head in the crook of his neck and heard the rumble of his voice as he sang a shaky rendition of ‘Water of Tyne’ on their way downstairs. Then she smiled for her mother, who followed after them with eyes that were bloodshot, for reasons she couldn’t understand.