Then she looks up. Her eyes fix on the cameras and the watching press pack and they are brimming with tears. ‘My Caitlyn has a heart of gold. She is the most caring, loving, wonderful daughter that a mother could have. Her whole future is ahead of her. Half a century of life in front of her. She has the right to meet the man of her dreams and fall in love, to raise her own family, to sit her own grandchildren on her lap and to know she has made the world a better place with her presence and her legacy. Please don’t take that from her. Don’t take away all that love that she can give, all her dreams, all her future.’ She quickly blots a running tear from her cheek. ‘I would gladly give everything that I have to get my daughter back. And that is what I am prepared to do.’ She turns over the sheet of plain paper in front of her and holds it up to the cameras. ‘This is my bank statement. I am lucky. I have ten million dollars to my name. I promise that I will give you that whoever you are. Everything I have, everything I can raise. In exchange for the safe return of my daughter.’ Her eyes narrow and her face hardens. ‘But be aware of this, I am also prepared to give that money to anyone who successfully leads the police or any other investigators to your door and who can recover Caitlyn safely and bring you and anyone involved in taking my daughter to justice.’ She takes a long slow breath, seems to relax her shoulders a little. She gestures to the giant beside her. ‘This man is Josh Goran.’ She puts her trembling hand on his broad forearm. ‘He is America’s most successful private investigator and bounty hunter.’ She takes strength from talking about him. ‘He is a former major in America’s Air Force Special Operations Command unit. For the foreseeable future, he will be working solely for me and will be completely dedicated to securing my daughter’s safe return.’
Goran points a big finger straight down the eye of the nearest camera lens trained on him. ‘For those who have Caitlyn, I have a message. Please take the lady’s money now and give her up. It’s an honest offer that Kylie Lock has made. She means it.’ He looks around the room, up at the ceiling. ‘Please take up that offer. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. Real sorry if I have to come and take her from you.’
89
Megan is trying to forget being dropped from the Lock case and concentrate on the silver dog tag Jimmy Dockery has placed in the palm of her hand. It’s from around the neck of Tony Naylor, the missing bum case that Tompkins dumped on her desk just as everything else was getting more interesting.
The cheap tag had been handed in by a jogger out on Salisbury Plain and listed on a CID lost and found circular because of the inscription on the back: ‘Happy Birthday T. Luv Nat x.’ Jimmy had noticed the tag matched the one Tony wore in the train station picture taken with his sister. To round things off, Nathalie Naylor had just confirmed it as the one she’d bought for her brother.
What’s interesting Megan is not that it was found but where it was found. A lay-by in the middle of nowhere. But not any old nowhere. A nowhere on the closest main road to the burned-out barn where Jake Timberland’s body was discovered.
Jimmy is staring at her staring at the small silver block. ‘You trying to contact the dead?’
She turns the tag over. ‘I wish I could. I’d certainly ask Tony Naylor what he was doing out on that road. Not the kind of place you go for a walk. It’s bleak, desolate, unattractive.’ She hands the tag back to her DS. ‘Naylor was a drifter, no money, no home, certainly no car. How did he get so many miles from a town or village with nothing around but unploughed fields and scrub?’
‘Someone must have driven him out there or he hitched a lift.’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe he heard there was farm work?’
She looks at Tony Naylor’s photograph in the file on her desk. The thin-faced twenty-five-year-old has been unemployed most of his life. When he has bothered to earn a living, it’s never been far from a town centre and a pub. Back-breaking shifts as a crop-picker or farm labourer out in the middle of teetotal-nowhere-land are not his style.
Naylor is dead. She knows he is. She thinks it and she feels it. And she knows that very soon she’ll be picking up the phone in front of her and breaking bad news to his twin sister.
‘Jim, see if you can get operational support to divert some men from the barn and run radar over the field.’
‘You think he’s buried out there?’
Megan nods. ‘I don’t think it. I’m sure of it.’
90
There comes a point when you have to take the game to the opposition.
Change defensive into offensive.
Be proactive rather than reactive.
Gideon runs all the axioms through his mind as he stands nervously outside the office of D. Smithsen Building Contractors. It’s an ugly collection of Portakabins on a rundown industrial estate. In the yard are old and dust-ridden flat-bed lorries. Pot-holed tarmac is covered in boils of spilled gravel and cement. Incongruously, there is also a pristine, personally plated black Bentley.
Gideon takes a deep breath and breezes into the latent hostility of a sour-smelling and grubby reception area.
‘Good morning. I’m looking for Mr Smithsen. I have some work I need doing.’
The woman behind the cheap desk looks annoyed at the interruption. She puts her magazine down and gets to her feet. ‘Take a seat, I’ll see if he’s busy.’ She jerks open a sliding door, leans in and then turns back to Gideon. ‘You can come through.’ She drags the door wider and steps to one side.
David Smithsen rises from a torn leather chair to greet his visitor. ‘Mr Chase, how are you?’ He gestures to a seat.
‘I’m okay, thanks.’
Smithsen sits back behind his desk ‘You certainly look better than when I saw you last.’
‘That wasn’t a good moment.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t. Now, how can I help you?’
‘Thought it was about time to get that work done. You know, the repairs to the study, the damaged brickwork. And the roofing.’
‘Roofing?’
‘You mentioned you were going to do some for my father. He’d given you a deposit.’
Smithsen slaps his forehead with his palm and smiles. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I remember now. I thought you meant roofing over the study.’
Gideon smiles. It’s time to stop the pretence. He has no intention of hiring the builder. It was simply an excuse to confront the man. ‘When you came out to Tollard Royal, you went upstairs and snooped around, went through some of my father’s private books.’
Smithsen looks horrified. ‘I went to check out the safety of your ceiling, that’s all.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ Gideon’s voice is calm but he feels increasingly nervous. ‘Mr Smithsen, I knew exactly how and where I’d left those books and you’d moved them, tried to look for something and I think I know what.’
The builder stays silent.
‘You were looking for the same thing as the man who broke into the house, the one who left me in the fire.’
Smithsen tries hard to look offended. ‘Mr Chase, really I—’