Old Enemies (19 page)

The parameters for success in a kidnap are relatively easy to define. It’s one that ends profitably and peacefully. Both conditions are important, because money alone is not enough for a kidnapper. Most kidnaps are carried out by professionals, and those episodes that end in the death of the hostage are by definition failures, because they break the rules and so do damage to the game, making it more difficult to play next time around. And it is a game. Each side has something that the other wants, and if they play the game successfully, both will win.

The problem is that a family that has a loved one snatched away and placed under threat rarely sees it like this. It’s not easy to play it as a game when you are terrorized and abused, and your loved ones threatened with death. It places the family under extraordinary pressure, which is the point of the exercise. It gives the kidnappers greater negotiating muscle, helps keep up the price.

That’s why the Breslins needed Will Hiley. They needed him to think for them, to talk for them, to untangle the twisted strands, to explain the rules of the game and to lift them above the extraordinary hurt they were drowning in.

The next time de Vries made contact, it was by chance that every member of the negotiating group except for Archer was present, and they huddled in front of the computer. Yet this time there was no anonymous Skype screen; the video link had been activated. Strange shapes began shifting from side to side as the laptop and its webcam were moved, as if it were being held in someone’s hands, but then it found its place and the first recognizable features came into view. They were Rauri’s. The light was dismal and the quality of the video stream desperately grainy but his face was unmistakable. Even if he hadn’t been so filthy and bruised Terri would have screamed, but as she did so his head came up and his despondent features grew suddenly alert, listening, wondering.

‘Mummy? Mummy?’ he called out, his voice rising, trembling. ‘Is that you?’

Even as she tried to hurl questions at him and shout out her love, the screen went blank. Yet the sound continued and in a quality that for their ears was all too graphic. They could hear Ruari crying, as though being beaten into silence, and footsteps climbing a creaking stair, then the banging of a closing door. They had been given what they wanted, the proof of life.

They stood transfixed, staring at the blank screen for several seconds until a voice broke through their trance. It was de Vries. ‘OK, six months. You publish nothing for six months.’ He sounded almost bored. ‘That’s as far as we go. Then you get the boy back.’

But if de Vries was expecting gratitude for any concession he was quickly disappointed as Terri began screaming abuse at him. It took many moments before J.J. was able to cajole her into relative silence. She retreated to a corner, sobbing quietly, mouthing the words ‘six months’ and shaking her head in disbelief. Hiley took up the reins.

‘Six months? Jan, you must know that won’t work. The diaries will leak, you know they will. We can’t keep Ruari’s disappearance quiet for that length of time. The Swiss authorities are looking everywhere for him.’

‘They think he’s dead.’

‘You know what they’re like. Very neat, the Swiss, don’t like having bodies littering the place. And long before your six months are up the snows will have melted and they’ll know that he’s around somewhere. They’re not fools.’

‘They can seek, but they won’t find.’

‘Look, you’ve got to let us start publishing long before that. Not everything, perhaps, but some parts of the diaries, some chapters. We do it in stages, you tell us what. You’ve got to give me something here.’

‘I’ll give you his fucking finger, that’s what I’ll do. You can publish photographs of that if you want. But you may have to forgive me, I don’t have any training in surgery. I’ll apologize now for what will undoubtedly be a messy job. Particularly if the little shit struggles.’

In her corner, Terri was writhing.

‘You want to keep a kid for six months?’ Hiley said in an incredulous tone. ‘You must be crazy. The longer you wait, the greater the risk you take. There’s got to be a better way than that.’

‘A finger and a thumb. You’ll get them both unless you tell me it’s six months.’

‘You know I can’t do that, Jan, I’ll have to consult the family. But please think about what I’ve said. I want to get this resolved so that everyone walks away from this, but you know you’re in a difficult situation.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A South African, hanging out in Italy. You can’t do that forever, not in Italy. Someone’s bound to notice.’

The silence that fell on them was so profound it seemed as though the connection had been lost. In the Breslin home the air seemed to have been sucked from the room, no one breathed. Then the South African’s voice returned. ‘Fuck you,’ it said in a tone that, whatever it implied, did not any longer seem bored. Then the link was cut.

Hiley gasped in exhaustion and he pushed his chair back from the screen. No one spoke. The negotiator shrugged his shoulders to release the tension, and found his shirt stuck firmly to his back. As he turned he discovered J.J.’s face creased in fury.

‘What the hell was the point in that? You went out of your way to provoke him. We don’t even know if he’s in Italy, for pity’s sake!’

‘We soon will,’ Hiley replied calmly. ‘Our guys in the sound lab will analyse it, every breath, every inflection. We’ll learn a lot from Jan’s reaction.’

‘I gave you no permission to—’

‘Take them by surprise. Test them. That’s how we learn.’

But Breslin would not be assuaged. He stood with his arms stiff and his fists clenched in confrontation. ‘It’s a bloody huge risk.’

‘And one worth taking, in my opinion.’

‘It’s my opinion I pay you to take.’

‘No, sir. You pay me for my judgement. And it’s my gut reaction that we just caught him out, that he’s in Italy after all. And if we knew that it would be a great help to us.’

‘I think he’s right, J.J.,’ his father joined in. He didn’t often do that, join in, so that when he did, they listened.

J.J. responded by marching to a side table and pouring himself a large cognac. The decanter clinked against the glass; his hand was trembling. He stared into the goblet, swirled his thoughts around, sulked, then swallowed. He didn’t offer anyone else a drink. His selfishness goaded Terri from her corner.

‘For God’s sake, do what they say, J.J. Give them what they want!’

‘You know I can’t.’

‘I know nothing of the sort. All I see is you bloody men, all of you, playing your wretched games while the life of my son is at stake!’ She couldn’t stay silent, but neither could she look them in the eye. She knew she was being unfair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted. ‘It’s just . . . I’m so exhausted. Not sleeping.’

‘None of us are,’ her husband replied, in a manner that implied it was she who was being self-centred.

‘I’m keeping you awake.’

‘We’re keeping each other awake.’

‘My fault.’

‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ he insisted bleakly.

‘Best if you sleep in the spare room for a few nights, perhaps. Let us both get some rest.’

It was a conversation that should have been conducted in private, but they had discovered there was no such thing as a private life when your son had been taken hostage. J.J. hesitated, listening to the crack that was forcing its way between them and growing substantially wider. ‘OK,’ he said quietly.

Harry’s leg was agony. His knee was swollen and locked stiff, as was much of the rest of him, and there was a cut and vivid purple bruising on the side of his temple, yet somehow they’d missed any vital part. Nothing had been broken. His attackers had been disturbed, scared off before they could complete their job. Harry stayed hidden at home, licking his wounds.

He had plenty of distraction, there was never any shortage of that in the run-up to Christmas. His parliamentary work had piled up, and with less than a week to go before the recess the system had slipped into its usual pre-holiday panic and produced an even thicker forest of paperwork for him to chop his way through. The previous evening he’d signed more than a thousand Christmas cards with their embossed green House of Commons logo, a huge pile of synthetic goodwill that had been sent over to him by his secretary. Many of the names on the envelopes, too many for comfort, he hadn’t even recognized, it was so wretchedly impersonal – Happy Christmas, whoever you are! Remember to vote for me next time! But was there to be a next time? He wasn’t even sure of that. Sometimes he just wanted to walk away from it all. Downing Street was still pushing for a decision on the Foreign Secretary’s job, but he’d asked them to wait another week. Couldn’t make up his mind about anything. He was beginning to sense frustration in Mary’s voice, but so what? It was nothing compared to what Ruari and Terri were doing to him. As he sat in his den, with winter rain beating intermittently against the window, he wished he had more cards to sign. Sometimes the wretchedly impersonal was a relief.

On the third day he stretched and was delighted to discover that he could now almost straighten his leg, although every move felt as though it was part of a clumsy student’s anatomical experiment. He wriggled his toes, relieved that everything still worked, and decided he’d been sitting by his hearth long enough. He might need a stick to get around but he didn’t need to hide away any longer. It was time, he decided, to nail the bastard who’d beaten him up.

Harry limped his way up Dean Street in Soho, his head lowered into a sharp northerly wind that was blowing sheets of abandoned newspaper along the gutters and wrapping them around lampposts. Christmas was celebrated in a different fashion on these streets; a poster in the window of one of the many sex shops instructed him to have a Horny Christmas, while the varied items of underwear on show were covered in suggestive strands of tinsel. A bored woman with too much mascara stared at him from behind the glass-fronted door. He hobbled on. He was headed for the Toucan, a pub that lay just off Soho Square. It was small, unpretentious, with a black-painted facade and the feel of a comfortable but over-worn jumper found at the back of a closet. On a summer’s evening the drinkers from the advertising and media companies that thronged together in this part of London would spill out onto the pavement in their bright shirt sleeves and at times even block the road, but when Harry arrived on a winter’s afternoon of frozen ankles and monochrome skies there was as yet almost no one. He clambered down the stairs to the small cellar bar. Everything was cod-Irish, except for the barman, who was from Naples. The bar itself offered two pumps of lager and six of Guinness, which stood like cranes on the dock waiting to unload cargo. A dusty accordion hung overhead alongside an old brass clock that had stopped many years ago. Somehow, down here, time didn’t much matter. A couple in overcoats stood at one end of the bar sharing a plate of Rossmore oysters, and in an alcove, his wallet on the table in front of him, an unlit hand-rolled cigarette in his hand, sat Sean Breslin. He looked up as Harry shuffled awkwardly down the stairs, his gaze running from the cane to the leg and all the way up to the lacerated cheek before he met Harry’s eyes.

‘Mr Jones, this is a surprise. Had an accident?’

‘No accident, Sean.’

Breslin didn’t invite him to sit, but Harry did so nonetheless. He waved at the barman and ordered a pint of the black liquid. Neither of them spoke as they waited for the drink to be poured.

‘No, not an accident,’ Harry said again, sipping through the head of the beer when at last it arrived and savouring the bite of burnt barley.

‘Keeping bad company, then.’

‘That’s for sure.’

Breslin picked up his own beer, slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. ‘Why are you here, Mr Jones?’

‘To tell you that if ever you set any of your friends on me again, I’ll break every bone in your own legs and enough of those in other parts to ensure you’ll never be able to take a crap in comfort again.’ There was no animosity evident in Harry’s voice, this was professional, like two farmers discussing the weather.

Breslin raised his eyes. ‘Ah, been busy jumping to conclusions, have we, Mr Jones?’ His accent seemed less polished, more rolling than on their previous encounters, as if this place took him back to earlier days of sea cliffs and mist-filled breezes.

‘Take it as a compliment. It seems you’re a man of your word, Sean. No sooner have you threatened me than I get chosen for a little Irish punishment. They always liked going for kneecaps in your time, didn’t they, the Boys? Not so much with baseball bats but with bullets. Seem to remember they even used the occasional electric drill.’

Breslin drank, wiping the cream from his top lip with the back of his hand. ‘This is fine stuff, wouldn’t you say, Mr Jones? Best beer in central London. But I’m surprised to see you drinking it, with your prejudice about all things Irish.’

‘Not prejudice.’

‘Almighty God, but you go getting yourself beaten up, add two and two together and already you’re making it a full Irish dozen.’

‘Just three, that’s all. You know, we were really close, face to face, the sort of thing that happens when you’re having the bejesus beaten out of you. And one of them had been drinking this stuff less than half an hour before. I took it as a small clue.’

‘So, it’s innocent until proven Irish, still. Not much changes with you people.’

‘Let’s just put it down to experience, shall we? And I came here to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.’ He stared at Breslin, who held his gaze, not blinking or faltering. ‘We don’t need all this, not with a kidnap to deal with.’

‘Know a thing or two about kidnap, do you?’

‘As, I think, do you.’

‘I’ve heard it happens.’

‘Happened a lot back home, didn’t it?’

‘So it’s said.’

‘Then let’s say we’ve both got a bit of previous.’

As they stared into each other’s eyes, Breslin realized that Harry understood, about him and about his past. Sloppy had filled in some of the detail. Breslin had started out as a bookkeeper in Dundalk, in those days a dump of a town that squatted only minutes away from the hated border with the North. It was a place of squalor; the lane where Breslin was raised had neither running water nor inside toilets. It was also a place of deep-rooted nationalism, where the bars openly displayed their hardline sympathies and where the outhouses and the fields beyond hid a history filled with gruesome secrets. Breslin had started off in the building industry, becoming one of the big players, making his fortune bulldozing the sordid concrete boxes of the slum estates and rebuilding his home town on a tide of European money – a good chunk of which had ended up in the pockets of the IRA. Find a clever bookkeeper and every lorryload of bricks or cement or lumber or steel joists would have a percentage added on, insurance companies would be scammed for building-site accidents that never happened, dirty money would be laundered and its grubby roots buried beneath new roads and concrete foundations. No one had ever been able to nail Breslin for it, but you didn’t survive in those days without playing the game, and if you played it well, you prospered. Sean Breslin had not only prospered but branched out, given his son the education that in his day his parents could never afford, then set him up in a local newspaper business. Two very different generations and, according to Sloppy, the divide was still apparent. The father remained as hard-nosed as he was hard-line, while the son seemed to have put much of his Irish past behind him. Sean didn’t care for that, not a bit.