Home Before Dark (46 page)

'We can work something out . . . whatever it is, I’ll do
anything.’
Ward laughed. 'You still don’t get it, Ed, do you?’
'Just let her go. You can explain when I get there, but killing
another innocent person won’t help you.’
'Help me? Land sakes alive, Ed, they’re gonna say you killed her. That’s the whole idea. And, you know what? They’ll
be right. I’m going to hang up now.’
'Wait, there’s one thing you should know—’ But he’d already
cut me off.
I looked out of the window and saw that we were coming
into the bridge’s toll plaza. The driver went through the EZ
Pass and I told him to take a right onto Pallisades Parkway – I’d changed my mind back.
He squinted at me in the rearview and I held up a couple
of hundred-dollar bills, then pushed them under the plastic
grille. 'How fast can you get there?’
'I could lose my licence,’ he said.
I showed him two more.
It was hot and stuffy in the wheel-well of the station-wagon.
Jelly lay curled up like a question mark, unable to move, the
floor of the trunk above her weighted down by the displaced
8pare wheel. Every breath she took she had to suppress a
panicky, claustrophobic fear something could prevent her
from taking the next one. What if she sneezed and her nasal
passages became blocked? What if her nose started bleeding,
spontaneously, which it sometimes did? As a teenager she
used to worry that her nostrils were too big. Now she wished
they were the size of Ohio.
She lay in the seamless dark, feeling faint and dizzy, afraid
of losing her balance even though she had nowhere to fall.
Some instinct told her she must at all costs stay awake. She
tried to remember poems, lyrics, jokes; anything to keep her
mind active. She had to fight a deep longing to close her eyes.
She switched to music. In her head, she played the Chopin
Nocturne she’d been practising for the recital, and drifted
off into a daydream that was about people having a conversation,
talking and arguing in musical phrases. Her attention
began to wander. Perhaps this was all a dream. In his car,
something happened . . . she had an idea that Guy had put
a needle in her arm. But she could have dreamt that too.
She had no clue where they were, except it felt like a long
way from Manhattan. A needle! It was too quiet for the city.
She remembered a sign that said, Atrium of Tenafly … what
the fuck was that? A deserted parking lot. Guy helping her
out of the Golf and making her lie down in the back end of
an old station-wagon. Was that the plan? Maybe he’d given
her a roofie shot, the forget-me pill… She must have blacked
out. Did he do it yet?
Jelly couldn’t remember, couldn’t think straight.
She made another attempt to move her arms and legs.
Nothing happened. It wasn’t just because they were tightly
bound, or because the shape of the wheel-well forced her to
lie a certain way, her muscles weren’t responding. The smell
of gas and oil made her want to throw up. Then, out of
nowhere, the image of a curved blade flashed before her eyes
and she felt Lazlo’s warm blood splash her foot. She gagged,
sucking air in through her nose. What had happened to Guy?
She’d heard the wagon door slam shut, a while ago now, or
was it only a minute – she’d lost all sense of time. She didn’t
have a sound picture of him coming back.
Jelly listened, straining to hear. Her ears were covered by
the tape he’d wrapped round and around her head. It was
like listening to the roar of the ocean inside a shell. Beyond
the constant surf, she imagined she could hear the sound of
lapping water.
The station-wagon was at a slant. Maybe that was why she
felt like she was falling all the time. It must be parked on a
slope.

I went slowly up, one step at a time, not even trying to keep quiet. If they were here, then Ward was bound to have heard
the taxi in the driveway, seen the headlights. I just kept my
eye on the door to the maid’s room on the landing above
me, wishing now I had a gun or some kind of weapon.
I still didn’t know if I’d made the right decision. Arriving
at La Rochelle a couple of minutes earlier, I hadn’t noticed
any vehicle parked outside. The house was all lit up, which
gave me some encouragement, but there was no sign of
anyone. I’d walked straight through the kitchen, down the
back hallway and stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened.
The door to Jesusita’s room was locked. Picking up a fire
extinguisher that stood on the landing, I smashed the doorhandle,
then used the heavy canister to batter the door open.
I took in at a glance the unmade bed, the empty wooden
chair, the length of rope tangled up in its legs. They’d been
here and gone. Light was coming from the bathroom. A pool
of water glistened on the threshold under the half-open bathroom
door. I shouldered it all the way back.
Nothing looked out of the ordinary. The tiled floor was
wet, as if somebody had taken a shower recently. A pile of
used towels and a sodden bathmat lay under the wash-basin.
The plug had been left in the bathtub and an inch or so of
soapy water. I felt the temperature, cold.
I turned off the light, came back into the room and threw
the fire-extinguisher down on Jesusita’s bed. I stood for a
moment, trying to think. Why had Ward sent me the live
video feed, then taken Jelly and locked the door to an empty
room? Why go to all the trouble? Unless he needed to delay
me for some reason. He must surely want me to find them?
I wouldn’t have been invited out to La Rochelle unless his
plan depended on my being here.
Then I saw how this was supposed to work. The empty
chair, the rope, the twisted sheets, I realised now – if Kira
Armour was right in her analysis of Ward’s motives, his crazy
insistence that I killed his parents – would become part of
the evidence against me, the trail I left behind as I prepared
to kill again. My fingerprints were sure to be everywhere.
It was all a set-up. I remembered the drowsy frightened
look I’d seen in Jelly’s eyes, and felt a rush of anger at the
thought of anyone wanting to hurt her, and because of me.
I was the one Ward really wanted to destroy. I closed my eyes
and saw his mother sprawled on the floor of the cargo
container, soaked to the skin, a trickle of blood at the corner
of her mouth. If it hadn’t been for that single ill-fated night
I spent with June Seaton, none of this would have happened.
The past had come back to haunt me, and in retributive
ways that seemed out of all proportion to anything I did
wrong. The irony was that my determination to avenge
Sophie’s murder had blinded me to the possibility that I had
set the desperate sequence of events in motion. That it was
my fault she died.
If true, if only even partly true, it was pretty hard to bear.
But I had to let that go now. There was no time to waste
on regretting what couldn’t be changed. I thought about
Jelly and the obsessive love I felt for her that had put her
life in danger and, unless I could find her before Ward
carried out his sick threats, was about to become the cause
of her death.

'They’re gonna say you killed her . . . And, you know what?
They’ll be right’
He didn’t really need my help to execute his plan, make
her my victim. I was afraid Ward would decide not to wait,
just go ahead without me, and I would be unable to prevent
the horror from repeating itself.

It took only a minute to search the other rooms and establish
that they were no longer in the house. Relieved to find Alice
Fielding unharmed – the old lady was in bed, propped up
against the pillows, sound asleep I looked in the garage and
saw that her Subaru and the vintage Buick station-wagon
were both missing. They might have driven off in either one
of them, but something told me that Ward and the girl hadn’t
left the grounds.
There weren’t many places he could have taken her. I grabbed
a flashlight from the table in the front porch and ran down
through the garden, across the terraces towards the pool area.
Without a key to the enclosure, I could only shine the beam
through the chain-link fence into the changing pavilion and
pool house. Nothing stirred among the fugitive shadows. The
pool itself, empty and overgrown with weeds, had been fenced
off to prevent accidents. A memory surfaced of one blazing
August weekend years ago when I first taught Sophie how to
dive and swim lengths underwater. The area was deserted.
I switched off the light and stood for a moment in darkness,
listening. I could hear the distant hum of city traffic, but
closer by the only sound and movement came from the
Hudson, which I could see glinting between the trees in changing
patterns of black and silver. A foreboding, some sense of
the inevitable, drew me to the river.
I started jogging along the shore road, swinging the beam
of the flashlight up and down the riverbank, calling Jelena’s
name – afraid now that I’d got there too late. It was the kind
of trick Ward would enjoy playing, offering false hope, letting
me believe she was still alive, when the worst had already
happened. It would give him a sense of ultimate control. I
thought about phoning the police. He’d warned me not to,
but I couldn’t see now it making much difference.
Drawing level with the boathouse, I stopped to get my
breath. I called out to Jelly again, if only to let Ward know I
hadn’t given up looking for them, and waited. The darkness
gave nothing back. Then I heard a noise from the trees and
bushes growing at the river’s edge that sounded like the cry
of a bird, a night heron, perhaps. I heard it again. Only this
time the cry registered as human.
Very faint but quite distinct – a cry for help.
It was a man’s voice, coming from somewhere nearby. I
turned the light on the derelict boathouse, which loomed
above me narrow and gaunt against the starless sky, and
brought the beam down to the open door, letting it play
into the inky interior, then back along the walkway that
crossed the marshy ground between the boathouse and the
track.
Halfway over I spotted a figure crawling towards dry land.
Campbell Armour didn’t look up or react when the light
fell on him. He didn’t stop either. His glasses had gone, his
face and hair and sweatshirt were caked with blood, but he
kept inching forward elbow over elbow, dragging his short
crippled legs behind him. I knelt down and put a hand on
his shoulder.
'Campbell,’ I said close to his ear. 'This is Ed Lister.’
He flinched at the sound of my voice, then turned his head
and I saw his eyes were full of blood. 'He’s got the girl, Campbell.
Do you know where they went?’
I thought you were … him.’ There was a long silence. He
barely had enough strength to speak. 'I need you to call my
wife, tell her . . .’ He faded.
'I’m going to get help, then you can talk to her yourself.
Where are they?’
He didn’t answer and I was afraid I wouldn’t get anything
more out of him. 'Campbell, he’s planning to kill her … we
don’t have much time.’
'I heard the wagon go past . . . other side of the bay.’
I knew where he meant. The shore road winds around a
pocket wilderness area of wedands and tidal shallows to a stony
point that juts out far enough to catch the main currents of
the river. The track ends in a private launch ramp, where we
used to put the Fieldings’ sail-boat in the water every summer.
It wasn’t hard to imagine why Ward might have taken her there.
I pulled out my mobile, punched 911 for emergency
services and after I’d spoken to the dispatcher, handed the
phone to Campbell.
'Stay where you are. They’ll find you.’
'I’m not going anyplace,’ Campbell said. I caught the flicker
of a smile. 'This wasn’t in the plan, dude.’
'You brought him in, Campbell . . . you’ll make it,’ I said,
though I couldn’t tell how badly hurt he was. 'The million
dollars will be in your account tomorrow.’
'In case I don’t. . .’ He asked me then, agonisingly slowly,
to do him a favour – it was a business matter, which I promised to take care of for him. I gave his shoulder a squeeze, got
up to leave.
'Ed, wait. He’s got a knife . . . it’ll look like you used it on
her.’
'I know,’ I said and started to run.
After a short distance, I turned off the track and plunged
into the reed-beds, parting the dense bulrushes that rose like
a solid wall before me. When I sank down into the muddy
Water they reached well over my head.
As the crow flies the boat ramp lay only a couple of hundred
yards across the marsh. The way round by road is a lot longer.

75

Ward stood on the slipway close to the water’s edge watching
the river take on the changing mood and temper of the night
sky. The cloud cover had broken over the cliffs of the Palisades
and a handful of stars were showing on the smooth gliding
surface of the deep-water channel out in midstream.
The light-speckled river flowed through him and he saw
it twist and turn into the single continuous plane of a Mobius
strip. On his tongue it had a silky texture and tasted bitter,
metallic, thick – somewhere between dandelion milk and
blood – the taste of perpetual sorrow.
He was thinking about the girl in the trunk of the wagon
and decided that he couldn’t wait any longer. It didn’t really
matter whether Ed Lister was there to witness the end or
not. Either way this was going to destroy him. He would have
liked to share the moment, but now he just wanted to get it
over with.
Wait a minute . . . 'get it over with’? Do I detect a certain
reluctance? Don’t tell me you got feelings for the chocolata,Ward.
Ward??? Oh hecko, you do, don’t you? My advice is stick with
the programme, bud, wait until he gets here. Listen . . .
There were crackling sounds coming from the marsh.
No, he felt nothing for Jelly. She’d been pleasant enough
to him, she was cute enough, in another life they might even
have become friends, but so what? He felt calm about what
he had to do.
He returned to the Buick, opened the tail-gate door and
pulled the spare wheel out onto the concrete ramp. He gave
it a shove that sent it trundling down towards the river. He
watched the tyre jink as it hit the water and topple over on
its side with a splash; then lost sight of it as the longshore
current bore it swiftly away.
He shouldered his rucksack.
Where’s the rush? Ed shouldn’t be long now. Why not wait? Ward lifted the flooring of the cargo bay. In the dark he
could just make out Jelly’s form curled up in the wheel-well.
He took his key-light from a pocket (the wagon’s interior
lights were disabled) and shone the sapphire beam in her
face. She blinked and he smiled down at her.
'Don’t be afraid, Jelena. I won’t let anyone hurt you.’ You want to give Lister the treatment, the full wax, don’t you?
It’ll stay with him longer if he’s a witness, if he takes part. Maybe
forever. Cm’on, man . . .
He tried not to let her see the blade in his other hand, but
she had to know what was coming. She started to squirm
and shake her head, making a moaning, gagging noise as she
attempted to wriggle up out of the well. He saw the frantic
pleading in her eyes, showing too much white now as they
rolled around in her skull. He grabbed an arm and pulled
her upper body out onto the tail-gate so that her head was
hanging off the edge, her throat exposed.
'Make it easy on yourself, sugar. Lay still for me.’
She wouldn’t though, and she wouldn’t stop the moaning
either, which got on his nerves. Ward placed a hand over
Jelly’s eyes so he didn’t have to deal with her looking at him,
beseeching him. He could feel her wet eyelashes tickling his
palm as he raised the gleaming mezzaluna above his head,
,gripping one of its horn-like steel handles in his fist.
He was about to do it, swing the curved blade – in his
mind it had already begun its downward flashing trajectory — when he met resistance. He wasn’t getting the usual 'this Js it’ feeling, no ecstatic sense of revelation, no deep conviction
of his own higher authority. Yes, well . . . didn’t I try to warn