‘We have to get home,’ Blake mutters. He leads me through the throng of people. The bar is crowded and the foyer seems suddenly very noisy. We get outside. I take a gulp of cool evening air and shiver. My shoulder curls up around my ears and my ribcage tightens to avoid breathing in the cold air.
‘You’re cold,’ Blake says.
‘I left my wrap in the box,’ I reply in a daze. As if it matters.
He takes off his jacket and wraps it around my shoulders.
I snuggle into the living warmth of his body heat and put off for another second hearing what he has to say to me.
‘Sorab’s missing. Looks like he’s been taken.’
I nod. As if he had said to me, ‘Let’s have a drink before dinner.’ Fighting a sense of disbelief, I clutch his jacket lapels close together and glance away from him. There’s a beggar sitting on the theater steps. He has a mangy dog. It looks mournfully at me. Poor thing. Living on the streets, eating scraps. Someone’s taken my baby. I turn back to Blake.
‘How?’ My voice is surprisingly flat. Almost uninterested. I am conscious that my reaction is strange, to say the least. Perhaps I am in shock.
‘That’s what I intend to find out. Brian thinks it’s Ben.’
‘Ben?’ I repeat. My hands drop to my sides.
Blake nods. ‘He’s gone AWOL.’
‘He’s one of the new guys, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
I force the words out of my throat. ‘One of the men you hired because I asked you to,’ I whisper. My teeth have started chattering.
He pulls his jacket tightly around me and holds me close to his body. I register the heat instantly. He radiates it like a hot water bottle.
‘Stop it. It’s not your fault,’ he says into my hair. ‘Come. Tom’s here. We have to go.’
I turn in the direction he is looking in and see Tom stop the car. Tom doesn’t smile. He looks pale. Blake opens the door and I enter and sit down huddled inside his jacket. I can’t feel anything, but a numbing cold. I clasp my fingers together in my lap to stop them from shaking. Nothing feels real.
I try to remember Ben. Dark hair, generally unsmiling with caramel eyes, suspicious caramel eyes. But that means nothing. They are all like that.
‘Is it possible that Ben might have taken Sorab for a ride in his car…and just not told anyone?’ Even as I say it I know it could never have transpired like that.
Blake shakes his head slowly and squeezes my icy hands.
His thigh is close but not touching mine. I shift so it is touching me and that thin stretch of contact comforts me. I stare silently out of the window, not seeing a thing, and listen to him making phone calls.
‘Get the word out. I want to know who has my son.’
I place my palm on the cold glass pane. I’m so numb. Some of the one-sided conversation slips through the cold fog I am in: Something about seizing Ben’s phone records. Somebody has been to his place. Looking for clues. The phones are already tapped. A police inspector has been discreetly and unofficially contacted. Feelers are already out in the street. The disjointed thought in my numb brain: how fast these men move. As if they were expecting such a scenario. An ambulance, its siren turned off, but its lights flashing, passes us on its way to another tragedy.
I think of Sorab’s little face and a shudder goes through me. Where is he? He is not familiar with Ben. He will be so frightened. He will have to go to sleep without his favorite toy. He has never been to bed without clutching Sleepy Teddy. I think of him blinking up at me from my lap. The image is oddly painful.
And then a clear thought, so comforting: They will not hurt him. They just want money. Blake will give them whatever they ask. I know Blake has ties with the underworld and the mafia. Obviously, we will get our son back. Some part of me knows, of course, that I am probably deceiving myself, but at that moment that baseless belief comforts me tremendously. I lie back and close my eyes and don’t allow myself to think further than that. I just listen to the blood pounding steadily in my ears and concentrate on the feel of Blake’s thigh pressed into mine.
When I get home the nightmare becomes real. The dining room looks like a war office with listening equipment and gadgets I cannot recognize, and Geraldine looks at me with huge, frightened eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Lana. I was only in the toilet for a minute,’ she says in a trembling voice.
Fourteen
Blake Law Barrington
Brian walks into the room and lowers himself into a chair and sits forward. He is sporting bronze stubble and looks uneasy. My senses flash a warning and adrenalin starts frothing into my veins. His eyes, always deliberately expressionless anyway, are flat and dead. I’ve known him a long time.
‘You’re not going to like this,’ he says.
A man like him is not prone to exaggeration. In fact, he is like a black hole sucking in all kinds of information and observations and never giving anything back. At his words a strange coldness invades my body. It is already so tense that it feels as if every nerve is screaming, but I force myself not to react.
‘We picked up the pings that came off the unidentified mobile phones that Ben was in contact with. We ran through every number on them for the last six months. One of the numbers was registered to a woman called Angel Levene. She works in the mental asylum Victoria is committed in. But here’s the real kicker. The one time it was used to call Ben’s number, the tower that served it was located close to the mental asylum.’
A chill goes through my body. I gape. ‘Victoria?’
Brian doesn’t say anything. A corner of his eye twitches. I never noticed that nervous tic in his cheek. I drop my eyes to the papers on my table and see a blur of white. You’re not going to like this. It has scared the shit out of me. I’m f**king terrified.
Fruitcake Victoria’s got my son? The implications are beyond anything I could have imagined.
For a long time after Brian leaves I do nothing. Simply stare out of the window. Shocked by how blissfully unaware I had been of the impending storm. Once, I would never have been caught so unprepared. I have changed. I’ve become soft. Then I get up and go to look for her. She is in the south facing reception room. She spends most of her time there now. The rest of the house seems so full of cold-eyed men. I can hear strains of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma as I get closer. It makes my hair stand on end.
Nobody shall sleep! Nobody shall sleep! Even you. O Princess.
I stand at the door and watch her, how still she is. When I move into the room, she catches the movement and starts rising to meet me, but she is seemingly so dazed she has to test the sole of her shoe on the floor before she puts her weigh on that foot.