Fred ran to her side, and pressed his small body into hers.
‘Please, Mum, listen to him,’ he said. ‘He can explain everything, really he can.’
Joyce glanced down at him, then looked enquiringly at her husband.
‘I had to tell Fred what’s been going on,’ he said.
So far as Joyce was concerned, that only made things worse. It went against her instinct to protect her son.
‘Does that include why you wrote me that letter and why you took our son from his bed and brought him out here, why you abducted him?’ she enquired coolly.
Charlie lowered his head. ‘Well, not absolutely everything, obviously.’
‘I can’t believe what you’ve done, what you are doing.’
‘Please, Mum,’ said Fred again.
‘It’s all right, Fred,’ said Joyce, though it most certainly wasn’t. Absolutely nothing was all right.
She turned to her husband again. ‘And what about today’s pantomime? What was that all about? Molly and I spent more than an hour freezing to death, waiting and hoping for Fred to turn up while you lurked in the back of our car — then you kidnapped us too.’
‘I had to do it that way,’ said Charlie. ‘I am in danger. We all could be in danger. I was terrified of anyone seeing me, recognizing me. You could have been followed. Your phones could have been tracked. I couldn’t meet you anywhere public, not even in the middle of the moors. You don’t understand. We’re safe here. Hidden away. For the time being, anyway. That’s why I had to get rid of your SIM cards. And you can’t even get a signal here, so we can’t be tracked directly to this place. I drove over the moors almost to Barnstaple this morning so that Fred could text you. Risked being spotted, of course, but on the roads there was less of a risk of using the phone than there was using it near to where we were hiding out.’
Joyce could only stare at him. Charlie’s eyes were unnaturally bright. Was he on drugs? For years she’d worried about his reliance on prescription medication. Had it pushed him over the edge? Had his state of mind been so adversely affected by his excesses?
‘You are mad, aren’t you,’ she said.
It wasn’t a question.
‘I’m not mad,’ said Charlie quietly. ‘But I may have been before I staged my own death.’
Then, whilst Joyce was still trying to work out what he meant by that, he spoke again.
‘Won’t you please come into the tent,’ he said. ‘It’s dry and warm in there. We can talk properly.’
‘I don’t remember us ever talking properly, Charlie,’ said Joyce. ‘Maybe that’s the problem.’
‘Please,’ said Charlie.
‘All right, I will listen to your story. But unless you have something amazing to say to make me change my mind, I shall be driving our children home. Without you. And meanwhile, Fred, Molly, I’m sorry, but whatever your father thinks, I do need to speak to him alone.’
Charlie looked as if he were about to protest. She silenced him with an impatient flick of the wrist. ‘I mean it, Charlie. Alone or not at all.’
She looked around the ruined barn, trying to work out a way of organizing some privacy.
‘OK,’ she said, addressing her children. ‘You two go into the tent and try to keep warm. Charlie, we can sit in the Range Rover. Now, nobody argue. Please. That’s my condition for listening to you, Charlie. Else I shall take off now and go straight to the police.’
She paused, wondering if that would even be possible, or if Charlie would attempt to stop her. She decided to challenge Charlie while the thought was in her mind.
‘Assuming you don’t intend trying to prevent me or our children leaving,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t do that, would you Charlie?’
Charlie looked at his feet. Clad in the kind of cheap army boots you can buy on the net. Boots no real soldier would ever consider going for a yomp in.
At least he seemed to realize he would not be able to persuade Joyce to listen to his story as long as their children were in earshot. He remained silent.
Fred looked at Molly.
‘Come on, you,’ said Molly. ‘Let’s do what Mum says. You know she means it.’
Joyce did mean it too. Her children had picked up on that straight away, and so it seemed had her husband. Even if he had avoided her question about whether or not she and the children would be free to leave.
Charlie said nothing but stepped towards the Range Rover and climbed in behind the wheel. Joyce watched Molly and Fred disappear into the tent and zip up the flap, then she climbed into the passenger seat beside her husband.
Twenty
Henry Tanner was beginning to come round from the dose of morphine the nurse had administered a few hours earlier. He was still in extreme discomfort, but he could cope with that. And he knew that he always healed well. Age had yet to change that.
It was the awful stress of what was happening to his family that was so hard for him to cope with.
Felicity had told him about Joyce and Molly. Indeed, she had been sitting at his bedside when she’d called Vogel. But Henry had been semi-conscious at the time, and had barely taken it in. He had a vague recollection that she’d asked if he knew where they might have gone. Henry had no idea whatsoever, and for once in his life he didn’t know what to do or say.
The suspicion that had been lurking in the back of his mind ever since Fred had gone missing no longer seemed fanciful. Ever since he could remember, he’d lived with the possibility that he might one day be a target. His dealings with Mr Smith and others of that ilk had made it a real possibility.
But the threat had never materialized, until now. Or had it? Henry thought back to the death of his only son, mown down by a hit-and-run driver. Apparently an accident, though Henry had always had his doubts about that, doubts he had kept from his family and most particularly from Joyce. Mr Smith had assured him that an extensive investigation at the highest level had concluded William’s death had been a tragic accident. And Henry had chosen to accept that. And to ensure that his entire family did likewise.
This time, Henry didn’t know what to think. His instincts told him that the crisis engulfing his family was unrelated to the work he had undertaken for Mr Smith. No, it was down to Charlie. Charlie’s bloody nervous breakdown, or whatever it was that had led him to go so spectacularly off the rails. Charlie’s meddling in matters that were way out of his league. Charlie had brought Armageddon upon the family. And Henry wasn’t sure that even Mr Smith could save them now.
He was so desperate, he’d been prepared to tell DCI Clarke the whole story. But something was still holding him back. It went against every fibre of Henry’s being to reveal the rot which had taken hold of all that he held dear. He had thought that, with the help of Mr Smith, he would be able to put everything right, he would be able to get Fred back, to restore normality. He and he alone. Like always. But this was not proving to be so. Instead, one catastrophic event seemed to be following another.
For the first time ever Henry Tanner wished he were someone else. He wished his life’s work had been something else. The morphine had worn off to the point that his brain was once more fully functional, but he was torn between wishing he could think with even more clarity, and wishing he could slump into semi-consciousness again.
He cursed Charlie. And he cursed his father and his father’s partner for luring him into a world which, one way or another, was now threatening to destroy him.
Being Henry, he did not consider that the real reason they had landed in this terrible and dangerous mess was because he, like his father before him, had inveigled other members of his family to join him in the precarious world he had inhabited for so long.
A world that he feared was about to crash irrevocably.