Once in the sitting room, Henry turned to face his daughter.
‘Joyce darling, you must try to keep calm,’ he began. ‘We’re all on the same side here, and you know you can trust me to do everything in my power to get our boy safely back—’
‘Shut the fuck up, Dad,’ yelled Joyce.
Her father physically recoiled. Joyce did not think she had ever used the f-word in his presence, let alone directed it at him.
‘Just shut the fuck up,’ she repeated, quietly this time. ‘And listen for once.’
Her father sat down, with a bit of a bump, on the nearest of the room’s two sofas. It was as if Joyce had pushed him, causing him to lose his balance. Which, in a way, she had done. Verbally, at any rate.
‘Right now, I have no idea whether or not I can trust you, Dad,’ she began. ‘My husband sent me a very clear message telling me not to trust you.’
‘I don’t know what you—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Dad,’ interrupted Joyce. ‘If you didn’t know about the letter Charlie left me before you were escorted to the police station, you damned well do now. I am well aware of the reason DI Vogel wanted to speak to you and Stephen at the station. He wanted to question you about Charlie’s letter, didn’t he? He made it pretty clear to me that he believes the content of that letter makes you a suspect.’
Henry narrowed his eyes. ‘Well, I don’t know about that, darling. But, yes, Mr Vogel did tell me about the letter.’
‘Did he show it to you?’
‘No,’ replied Henry Tanner truthfully. ‘But he read me bits of it.’
‘Did he read you the bit where Charlie warned me off letting the children, particularly Fred, have anything to do with you?’
‘Yes, he did,’ said Henry. ‘But I have no idea what Charlie might have meant by—’
‘What about the bit where he told me to take the children and run? What about that?’
‘Take the children and run?’ Henry said, aghast. ‘I have no idea why Charlie should have told you to run, Joyce. Honestly, darling—’
‘Don’t you “honestly” me,’ interrupted Joyce, raising her voice again. ‘I doubt you’ve been honest with me in your entire life. “Get Fred away from your father. He won’t be interested in Molly” — that’s what Charlie said. You must know what he meant by that, Dad.’
‘I really don’t know, I promise you,’ said Henry, fixing wide-open blue eyes on his daughter’s face.
Joyce stood silent. Waiting.
‘You’re not suggesting... s-suggesting that... that you think Charlie was implying I might, uh, interfere with Fred,’ he finished lamely.
Joyce could not hold back a twisted smile.
‘Interfere with Fred?’ she repeated, making it a question. ‘What a quaint old-fashioned way of putting things. If you are asking me do I think Charlie was suggesting you’re some sort of filthy paedophile, the truth is I don’t bloody know. I don’t bloody know what to think any more about anything.’
‘I can’t believe you can even say such a thing, Joyce,’ Henry spluttered.
‘Oh, that’s the tip of the iceberg, Dad, I can assure you.’ She carried on staring him down, arms folded across her chest, defiant. ‘So, am I supposed to believe that you knew nothing of this letter from Charlie until DI Vogel mentioned it, is that what you are saying?’
‘Not exactly,’ admitted her father. ‘Stephen told me on Wednesday when you called him over. He said you’d been upset by the letter, and explained how it should have been delivered after Charlie’s death but had been delayed because of a filing mix-up. Stephen was concerned for you, and he thought that I, as your father, should know what had happened to distress you. But he didn’t tell me what was in the letter, obviously, because he didn’t know. Stephen would never have betrayed Charlie’s confidence by reading the letter, and he told me that you had refused to share the letter with him. Which is understandable, given what I now know of the contents, or at least the part that Vogel chose to tell me. But I didn’t know any of it until today, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘That’s what I’m asking, all right,’ said Joyce. ‘Because if you’re lying, the implications are pretty damned obvious. Aren’t they?’
‘Are they?’ Her father’s face was expressionless now.
‘Oh yes, Dad. Because if you already knew what was in that letter, if you knew that Charlie had urged me to take my children away from you and to disappear, to never come back, if you knew that, and if you believed that I might do it, then you might well have decided to take action to stop me doing so.’
Henry’s face was a picture of hurt bewilderment.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
‘I think you do. Come on, tell me: did you take Fred? Have you abducted my son, removed him from this house in the night so that you can keep him under your control, the way you’ve always controlled everybody in this family? Have you taken Fred to stop me taking him away from you? This house is burglar-alarmed. Whoever took Fred must have had a remote control or known the code to disarm the alarm. The alarm was set that night, I’m sure of it, but it didn’t go off. And Fred didn’t make a sound either, so he must have cooperated with whoever came for him in the middle of the night. I think that person was you, Dad. You have the code for the alarm, and Fred would do anything you told him to. Like all the bloody rest of us.
‘I think you’re the one who abducted my son.’
Thirteen
Vogel was on auto pilot after leaving the Lockleaze super’s office. He made himself pick up a cup of coffee from a vending machine. He made himself breathe deeply. Neither helped.
Vogel liked Hemmings and knew his senior officer was merely the messenger boy in this instance. He also knew that Hemmings would have been left with no choice but to comply with his instructions from London.
None of this prevented him from wanting to race back to Kenneth Steele House and slap the man.
Vogel didn’t like being angry. He considered any police officer who allowed emotion to engulf him to be immediately a lesser officer. In any case, it wouldn’t alter the fact he was no longer free to continue with this investigation in whatever way he felt best. And neither was Hemmings. Most unusually for Vogel he was beginning to wonder why he bothered. Even to question whether he wished to continue to be a police officer.
He checked his watch. It was coming up to 6 p.m.
Normally when there was a major investigation on the go, particularly when it involved a child whose life might be in danger, Vogel would stay on duty until he was close to collapse from exhaustion. That was the kind of man he was. Sometimes he even stayed in his office overnight, sleeping on a roll of foam he kept in a cupboard specially for that purpose.
This was not going to be one of those nights, Vogel decided. No. He wasn’t heading back to Kenneth Steele House to vent his anger on Reg Hemmings. He was going home to see his wife and daughter. He had phoned Mary earlier and warned her to expect him when she saw him. Not that she needed warning; she knew him too well. He only hoped the shock of his early arrival wouldn’t prove too much for her.
Thinking of his family cheered him as he set off for Temple Meads railway station, from where there were frequent trains to the suburb of Sea Mills. After all, it had stopped raining. And he was going to be home early.
By the time his train trundled into the little station the rain had begun again. Vogel hunched his shoulders against it as he hurried along the street. He really had no idea why he had yet to grasp that a raincoat, and a heavy-duty one at that, was necessary attire almost every day in his new location. In London, hopping on and off buses and in and out of squad cars, in the middle of a city which itself provided considerable protection from the elements, Vogel had rarely bothered with a coat even in the middle of winter.