Lost - Michael Robotham [134]
“But if you let her go, what happened?”
Her misery is complete. “Howard Wavell!”
I don’t understand.
“Howard happened,” she says again. “Mickey made it home but she ran into Howard.”
God, no! Surely not! It was a Wednesday night. Rachel wasn’t home. She was on News at Ten making another appeal. I remember watching her on TV at the station. They used footage of the press conference earlier in the day.
“I tell you we didn’t mean to hurt her. We let her go. Then you found her bloodstained towel and arrested Howard. I wanted to die.”
An image presents itself. I picture a small, terrified child with a fear of being outside, crossing a city alone. She almost made it. Only steps away—not even eighty-five of them. Howard found her on the front steps.
My legs go weak and I struggle to stand. It’s as though my insides have become liquid and want to flood out, throbbing and glistening on the floor. My God, what have I done? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Ali, Rachel, Mickey—I let them all down.
“You don’t know how many times I have wanted to change things,” says Kirsten. “I would have brought Mickey home myself. I would have walked her right to her door. Believe me!”
“You were friends with Rachel. How could you do that to her?”
For a fleeting moment her sadness turns to anger, but takes too much energy to sustain. She whispers, “I never meant to hurt them … not Mickey or Rachel.”
“Why then?”
“We were stealing from the ultimate thief—taking money from Aleksei Kuznet, a monster. He murdered his own brother, for God’s sake.”
“You wanted to take on the biggest bully in the playground.”
“We live in a new feudal age, Inspector. We fight wars over oil and we hand out reconstruction contracts in return for political donations. We have more parking wardens than we do police officers—”
“Oh for pity’s sake, spare me the speeches!”
“We didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Rachel was always going to be hurt.”
She looks at me with wet eyes. I can almost taste the salt in them.
“I didn’t mean … we let Mickey go. I would never have …” She lowers the gun between her knees and her head follows, rocking back and forth. “I’m sorry … I’m so sorry …”
Her self-pity irritates me. I keep pressing for the rest of the story. Kirsten doesn’t look at me as she describes the cesspit in the basement and the underground river. Ray Murphy inflated a boat below ground and drew a map for Gerry to follow. He only had to travel a few hundred feet before bringing Mickey up through a storm-water drain.
“Ray knew a place to keep her. I never went there. My job was to send the ransom letter.”
“Where did you send it?”
“Directly to Aleksei.”
“What about the bikini?”
“Gerry held on to it.”
“What was she wearing when he let her go?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Did she have her beach towel?”
“Gerry said it was like her security blanket. She wouldn’t let it go.”
I’m struggling now. Of all the scenarios to contemplate I had left Howard out, convinced of his innocence. I had weighed up the evidence and the odds and decided he had been wrongly accused and convicted. Campbell said I was blind to the obvious. I thought he couldn’t see anything except his own prejudices.
“Why in God’s name did you try for a second ransom? How could you put Rachel through it again? You convinced her Mickey was still alive.”
Her face creases as she sucks back the pain. “I didn’t want to. You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“When you arrested Howard for Mickey’s murder Gerry went off his head. He kept saying we helped kill her. He said he couldn’t go back inside—not for killing a child. He knew what they did to child murderers in prison. Right away I knew we had a problem. We either had to silence Gerry or help him disappear.”
“So you got him out of the country.”
“We gave him double what he deserved—four hundred grand. He was supposed to stay away but he poured his money down slot machines or shot it up his arm.”
“He bought a bar in Thailand.”
“Whatever.”
“And then he came back.”
“The first I knew about the second ransom was when Rachel received the postcard.