How could I? I worked for Alaric now, and what’s more, he was helping me to find Gemma.
“Are you saying you won’t do this one little thing for me? Your mother and I have been remarkably patient with all your silliness about getting a job, but this nonsense has gone on for quite long enough. The country club’s been holding your seat on the social committee, but they won’t do so forever. It’s time to come to your senses. Look at Piers—he’s moved on already.”
My father’s words made me see red. Silliness? He thought me wanting to earn my own money and live my own life was silliness?
“I’d rather fend for myself than spend every day pretending I care about table decorations. And I happen to like Alaric. He’s been kind to me.”
“He’s been brainwashing you for his next scam, more like. Does he know how much this family is worth?”
“It’s not something that’s ever come up in conversation.”
“I bet he knows. Believe me—he’s bad news. And I can’t entrust half of our fortune to somebody who exhibits such bad judgement. If you refuse to see what’s already obvious to the rest of us, then I’ll have no choice but to cut you off. You won’t get another penny from me or your mother.”
That…that asshole!
True, my father hadn’t given me any money recently, but the safety net had always been there. A stable for Chaucer and a roof over my head if things got really bad. I’d never been truly alone before. Could I handle it? A tear rolled down my cheek, and another, and another, until I was crying in the middle of bloody Kensington.
“Cheer up, love.” A street sweeper paused to fish a packet of tissues out of his pocket and offered it to me. “Might never ’appen.”
Do you know? He was right. The worst might not happen, and if I gave up the little bit of freedom I’d found and crawled back to my parents, I’d always wonder “what if?” Better to be poor and happy than forever miserable.
“Thank you,” I mouthed at the sweeper and wiped my face as he continued on his way. Then I made myself straighten, even though my father couldn’t see me. “Daddy, I don’t need your money. Give the whole lot to Priscilla. She can spend it on a third holiday home and a thousand manicures, or better still, you could send Mother on a shopping spree or ten to distract her from the fact that you’re fucking yet another mistress. You’re such a hypocrite. Your friends are all slugs in fancy clothes, corrupt to the core, and as for Piers… He screwed me over, your daughter, and still you take his side. I wish I’d been swapped at birth.”
“How dare—”
I hung up before my father could finish the sentence, then stared at the phone in horror. What the hell had I just done? Anger had made my innermost thoughts tumble out, one insult after another, and I couldn’t take them back even if I wanted to.
I was on my own now, with just a possible super-thief for company.
Was I scared? Terrified. But also strangely exhilarated.
CHAPTER 39 - ALARIC
GUN OR NO gun? In the US, that wouldn’t even be a question, but in London, where handguns were banned, the risks of being caught carrying could outweigh the benefits. Not that Alaric planned to get caught, of course… In the end, he liberated a Beretta from Judd’s collection and secured it behind his back in a covert holster. He always had his sport coats cut to hide a weapon, but he’d have to be careful not to get too close to Beth. Until this afternoon, she seemed to have taken his bending of the law in her stride, but since she got back from lunch, she’d been acting differently. Cooler. More distant. Off in the same way that Emmy had been on the phone yesterday. Unless it was Alaric’s imagination? He’d avoided entanglements with women for the past eight years, so maybe his intuition had degraded?
Four p.m., and they were about to head to Ryland’s apartment. They’d studied photos and maps of the area, and Naz had come up with a floor plan of Bellsfield House North, showing the layout of apartment 504 on the fifth floor. The seventeen-storey block dated back to the fifties, the northern-most of two identical towers set on a housing estate a ten-minute walk from Hounslow West Tube Station. When the place was first completed, it had been touted as the future for modern families, but in the intervening decades, urban decay had settled in, along with a local gang and a motley crew of drug dealers. The local newspaper mentioned the Bellsfield Estate most weeks, but rarely in a positive light.
Alaric didn’t want Beth with them, not remotely, but given that the latest news story had detailed the theft of a catalytic converter, stolen in under ten minutes while the vehicle’s owner ran into the local Co-op to buy a sandwich, it seemed a good idea to leave somebody in the SUV if they wanted to drive it away again afterwards.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
Beth and Ravi both nodded from the other side of the table. Ravi was supposed to be on his way to the US to snoop around a media mogul’s Hamptons home for one of Judd’s projects, but that had been put on hold. They’d all agreed that finding a missing woman took priority.
“How long will you be inside?” Beth asked.
As little time as possible. “If Willis is home, long enough to assess whether he’s a likely suspect. If he’s not there, we’ll take a view on whether to wait, or talk to the neighbours, or leave and regroup.”
“And you’ll definitely keep me updated?”
She sounded nervous, and Alaric wished Judd was around, or even Naz, and Naz’s driving was appalling. Should he call Emmy? Her driving wasn’t much better, but nobody would steal the damn wheels off the car if she was sitting in it. He almost reached for his phone, but then he recalled the way Emmy had distanced herself. No, Sirius could handle this.
“All the way, Beth. Just keep your phone ready.”
Alaric had been born with not just a silver spoon in his mouth but a whole set of cutlery. At first, it had seemed normal, being driven in a limousine to the international school near whatever embassy his father happened to be posted to at the time, but an insatiable curiosity combined with teenage rebellion had led him to sneak away from the sanctity of wealth with increasing regularity. He’d seen how the other half lived, and when he walked out of his own life with little more than the cash in his wallet and the clothes on his back, he’d experienced it for himself. Six weeks in a Brazilian favela, a trip to Palestine, passage across the South China Sea on a fishing trawler, a month picking grapes in a Spanish vineyard while drinking too much Rioja, the stint as a deckhand in the Similan Islands…
He’d travelled the world, but he’d never seen any place as grim as Bellsfield House North. Kevin’s apartment block was luxurious in comparison. Many of the apartments on the Bellsfield Estate were now in private hands, but the outside of the building and the communal areas made North Korea look vibrant. The two towers, no more than six or seven metres apart on their short sides, cast giant shadows over the rest of the estate and plunged gloomy corners into full-on darkness.
“Was that a mouse?” Ravi asked.
“More like a rat.”
They’d dressed down for the occasion in jeans, lightweight rubber-soled boots, and plain dark-coloured T-shirts, but Alaric still felt out of place. A hazmat suit would have been more appropriate. The elevator yawned open like the gate to hell, so he opted for the stairs instead, jogging up the ten half-flights of bare concrete steps that led to Ryland’s floor. The stairwell was in a permanent state of twilight, most of the lightbulbs blown, the echoing space shaded by the monolithic south tower. Alaric caught a glimpse of a pale silhouette in the window opposite and paused. A teenager in a white hoodie stared back with mild disinterest, almost within touching distance. From his stance, he appeared to be urinating.