‘So I thought, well, if I took Fred, I stood a chance of getting all my family together again,’ Charlie continued.
‘You thought that removing our son from his home in the middle of the night was a way of getting your family together?’ Joyce stared at him in disbelief.
‘Well, yes, you s-see—’
‘You really are mad,’ she said again.
Charlie shrugged. ‘I had to do something.’
‘Well, you’ve done something all right.’
Joyce was incandescent with rage. She was also frightened.
‘First you staged your own death, then you abducted your son, and now you seem to have abducted your wife and daughter.’
‘No, it’s not like that—’
‘Isn’t it? In that case I’m going to ask you again, am I free to go? Free to take our children away from their crazy, deluded father, to the place that used to be our home? Where I will tell the police about everything you have done. And about everything that you have told me today. They can look into your claims. They can sort it out. All I want is for my children to be safe at home again. I’m free to do that, to take my children home, am I, Charlie? You wouldn’t try to stop me.’
Charlie shrugged.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m going to get the kids. Then I’m leaving with them.’
She reached for the door handle, pulled it, pushed the door open, and began to climb out.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you.’ Charlie made a move to grab her arm.
‘Don’t you touch me,’ Joyce snapped, shrugging him off.
But Charlie was quicker than her. He jumped out of his side of the car and ran around it so that he was blocking Joyce’s way before she even had time to stand up straight.
‘I can’t let you go,’ Charlie repeated.
‘Can’t you?’ Joyce remarked levelly, slamming the car door shut behind her. ‘Then you have abducted us. You are keeping me and my children here against our will. You must be out of your mind, Charlie.’
‘Joyce, you simply don’t understand,’ said Charlie. ‘I have to do this. Like I had to leave.’
He ran the fingers of one hand through his cropped hair and stared at her, his unfamiliar eyes beseeching her.
‘Listen, Joyce, I never wanted to hurt you, honestly,’ he pleaded. ‘Just listen. When I decided to stage my own death, I did it to protect you. There was no other way. You see, I found out something, something far worse and far more dangerous than anything I already knew about your father.’
He paused again. But he still did not attempt to move out of Joyce’s way.
‘Stop being so bloody melodramatic, Charlie, and get to the point.’
‘Your father has got greedy. Or should I say, even greedier. He’s been doing a bit of moonlighting, siphoning off some of the arms whenever we do an international deal. Only a few at a time. And then he’s been selling them to an organized crime syndicate here in the UK. That’s what he is, Joyce, not only an international supplier of ingredients for chemical warfare but an underworld arms dealer.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Charlie!’ she said. ‘Dad would never get involved with criminals. Why on earth would he? He’s a wealthy man. And what other reason could there be, apart from money?’
‘Joyce, you don’t know your father. You really don’t. Trust me on that. There isn’t enough money in the world for Henry Tanner. Nor power. He lusts after power. I found out what he was doing by accident. I’d challenged him big time on the chemical warfare issue, and Henry doesn’t like being challenged. I was planning to go to the police without telling him. I think he would have known he couldn’t talk me out of it, not when he was involving the company and all of us in serious criminal activity. But he was a step ahead of me. As usual. I’d been cross-checking all the company records. I’d been using my laptop so my footprints wouldn’t show on the office system, because on that you can see straight away who has signed in and out and what they’ve been working on. But I think Henry had someone hack into my laptop. He knew what I was planning, and he knew he had to stop me.
‘I discovered that he was trying to take out a contract on me, like you said. He wanted me killed, and he knew the people to do it—’
‘Charlie, if there is any truth in what you say, how come it’s my father who got shot?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘He was playing with fire and I guess he got burned. He was dealing with dangerous people. Gangsters. People who kill for a daily rate, for God’s sake. Maybe he couldn’t give them what they wanted. Maybe they thought he’d reneged on a deal. I don’t know.’
‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I can’t believe—’
‘Joyce, sweetheart, I know this is hard for you, but I honestly believe that if he’d had the contacts he has now back when you and I first met, I wouldn’t have lived to cause Henry any bother. I’ve always known he didn’t like me, he never rated me, never wanted me in his business or in his life. He thought I was weak. And he was right. He never wanted me to be part of his family. It was all a pretence. He only took me on because he feared that otherwise he would lose you. He could see how close we were. And then, after William died, he needed someone, some puppet he could mould. My weakness became attractive to him then. He thought he could turn me into whatever he wished. And for years I let him.
‘You must have known that I was the last man on earth he would have wanted you to marry, me with my left-wing ideals. Mind you, nobody would have been right for you, Joycey, not in Henry’s eyes. But did you never wonder why he changed his mind about me? What led him not only to welcome me as his son-in-law, but to take me into his precious business?’
Joyce said nothing. Of course she had wondered that, many many times. Her head was buzzing.
‘Only I turned on him in the end, and then he decided it was time to be rid of me.’
‘What on earth are you saying? You’re not making any sense, Charlie.’
‘Aren’t I? Don’t you remember all those accidents I had last year? Like the brakes failing on the car, slates falling off a roof right by me, oil on the deck of the boat causing me to slip. Did you think it was all just bad luck?’
Joyce supposed she had, at the time. And carelessness.
‘Well, I’d come to think those incidents may not have been accidental. I reckoned I was living on borrowed time.’
‘So you staged your own death, gave me — and your children — months of grief and despair, and left us, if you are to be believed, which is highly fucking debatable, in the clutches of a man you say is so dangerous. Not only an arms dealer but a criminal. Is that what you are saying? You put your own safety ahead of that of your wife and children. And that is probably the least of your sins.’
Charlie shook his head.
‘No, you and the kids never were and never would be in any danger from Henry,’ he said. ‘You and Mark and Molly and Fred are his blood. That’s the most important thing in the world to Henry: family. His bloodline. More important to him than making money. That is how he justifies all that he does. He’s like a fucking Mafia godfather! I reckon that’s how the deluded old fool sees himself too.’
Charlie’s voice was harsh as he went on: ‘I am not Henry’s blood. He never gave a shit about me. I was always going to be dispensable in the end. When I was his pet poodle, as you put it so accurately, my darling, he put up with me. Once I started to nip at his heels, he turned against me as I suppose I always knew he would. Which is why I had to act.’
‘Act?’ snapped Joyce. ‘Is that what you call leaving your wife and children in such a cowardly way?’
‘I left you the letter. I thought you’d understand. I thought you would act on it. At least take it seriously. That’s why I put in the letter about us wanting to find our Shangri-La, and how it was still possible.’