prompted few loving, comforting or supportive feelings.
He gave her no kiss. No greeting. He merely said, as if in a continuing conversation, 'Do you realise that Ordinand isn't mine to sell? Do you realise we're in hock to the Emit? No, you don't. You can't do anything. Not even something simple like looking after a kid.
Miranda crumpled behind me and sank to the floor. Alessia and I bent to help her up, and I said to Miranda's ear, 'People who are frightened are often angry and say things that hurt. He's as frightened as you are. Hang on to that.'
'What are you mumbling about?' Nerrity demanded, 'Miranda, for Christ's sake get up, you look a wreck. He stared with disfavour at the ravaged face and untidy hair of his son's mother, and with only the faintest flicker of overdue compassion said impatiently, 'Get up, get up, they say it wasn't your fault.'
She would always think it had been, though; and so would he. Few people understood how persistent, patient, ingenious and fast committed kidnappers could be. Whomever they planned to take, they took.
Rightsworth said he wanted to ask Mrs Nerrity some questions and guided her off to a distant sofa, followed by her bullish husband with his tinkling glass.
Alessia sat in an armchair as if her legs were giving way, and Tony and I retreated to a window seat to exchange quiet notes.
'He…' Tony jerked his head towards Nerrity, 'has been striding up and down here wearing holes in the effing carpet and calling his wife an effing cow. All sorts of names. Didn't know some of them myself.' He grinned wolfishly. 'Takes them like that, sometimes, of course.'
'Pour the anger on someone that won't kick back?'
'Poor little bitch.'
'Any more demands?' I asked.
'Zilch. All pianissimo. That ray of sunshine Rightsworth brought a suitcase full of bugging gear with him from the telephone blokes but he didn't know how to use half of it, I ask you. I fixed the tap on the 'phone myself. Can't bear to see effing amateurs mucking about.'
'I gather he doesn't like us,' I said.
'Rightsworth? Despises the ground we walk on,'
'Is it true John Nerrity can't raise anything on the horse?'
I'd asked very quietly, but Tony looked round to make sure neither the Nerritys nor Rightsworth could hear the answer. 'He was blurting it all out, when I got here. Seems his effing business is dicky and he's pledged bits of that horse to bail him out. Borrowed on it, you might say. All this bluster, I reckon it's because he hasn't a hope of raising the wherewithal to get his nipper back, he's in a blue funk and sending his effing underpants to the laundry.'
'What did he say about our fee?'
'Yeah.' Tony looked at me sideways. 'Took him in the gut. He says he can't afford us. Then he begs me not to go. He's not getting on too effing well with Rightsworth, who would? So there he is, knackered every which way and taking it out on the lady wife.' He glanced over at Miranda who was again in tears. 'Seems she was his secretary. That's her photo, here on this table. She was a knockout, right enough.'
I looked at the glamorous studio-lit portrait; a divinely pretty face with fine bones, wide eyes and the hint of a smile. A likeness taken just before marriage, I guessed, at the point of her maximum attraction: before life rolled on and trampled over the heady dreams.
'Did you tell him we'd help him for nothing?' I asked.
'No, I effing didn't. I don't like him, to be honest.'
We sometimes did, as a firm, work for no pay: it depended on circumstances. All the partners agreed that a family in need should get help regardless, and none of us begrudged it. We never charged enough anyway to make ourselves rich, being in existence on the whole to defeat extortion, not to practise it. A flat fee, plus expenses: no percentages. Our clients knew for sure that the size of the ransom in no way affected our own reward.
The telephone rang suddenly, making everyone in the room jump. Both Tony and Rightsworth gestured to Nerrity to answer it and he walked towards it as if it were hot. I noticed that he pulled his stomach in as the muscles tightened and saw his breath become shallow. If the room had been silent I guessed we would actually have heard his heart thump. By the time he stretched out an unsteady hand to pick up the receiver Tony had the recorder running and the amplifier set so that everyone in the room could hear the caller's words.
'Hello,' Nerrity said hoarsely.
'Is that you, John?' It was a woman's voice, high and anxious. 'Are you expecting me?'
'Oh.' Miranda jumped to her feet in confusion. 'It's Mother. I asked her…' Her voice tailed off as her husband held out the receiver with the murderous glare of a too-suddenly released tensions and she managed to take it from him without touching him skin to skin.
'Mother?' she said, waveringly, 'Yes, please do come. I thought you were coming…'
'My dear girl, you sounded so flustered when you telephoned earlier. Saying you wouldn't tell me what was wrong! I was worried. I don't like to interfere between you and John, you know that.'
'Mother, just come.'
'No, I…'
John Nerrity snatched the telephone out of his wife's grasp and practically shouted, 'Rosemary, just come. Miranda needs you. Don't argue. Get here as fast as you can. Right?' He crashed the receiver down in annoyance, and I wondered whether or not the masterfully bossy tone would indeed fetch the parent. The telephone rang again almost immediately and Nerrity snatched it up in fury, saying 'Rosemary, I told you…'
'John Nerrity, is it?' a voice said. Male, loud, aggressive, threatening. Not Rosemary. My own spine tingled. Tony hovered over the recording equipment, checking the quivering needles.
'Yes,' Nerrity said breathlessly, his lungs deflating.
'Listen once. Listen good. You'll find a tape in a box by your front gate. Do what it says.' There was a sharp click followed by the dialling tone, and then Tony, pressing buttons, was speaking to people who were evidently telephone engineers.
'Did you get the origin of the second call?' he asked. We read the answer on his face. 'OK,' he said resignedly. 'Thanks,' To Nerrity he said, 'They need fifteen seconds. Better than the old days. Trouble is, the crooks know it too.'
Nerrity was on his way to the front door and could presently be heard crunching across his gravel.
Alessia was looking very frail indeed. I went down on my knees by her chair and put my arms protectively around her.
'You could wait in another room,' I said. 'Watch television. Read a book.'
'You know I can't.'
'I'm sorry about all this.'
She gave me a rapid glance. 'You tried to get me to go home to Popsy. It's my own fault I'm here. I'm all right. I won't be a nuisance, I promise.' She swallowed. 'It's all so odd… to see it from the other side.'
'You're a great girl,' I said. 'Popsy told me so, and she's right.'
She looked a small shade less fraught and rested her head briefly on my shoulder. 'You're my foundations, you know,' she said. 'Without you the whole thing would collapse.'
'I'll be here,' I said. 'But seriously it would be best if you and Miranda went into the kitchen and found some food. Get her to eat. Eat something yourself. Carbohydrate. Biscuits, cake - something like that.'
'Fattening,' she said automatically: the jockey talking.
'Best for your bodies just now, though. Carbohydrates are a natural tranquilliser. It's why unhappy people eat and eat.'
'You do know the most extraordinary things.'
'And also,' I said, 'I don't want Miranda to hear what's on the tape.'
'Oh.' Her eyes widened as she remembered. 'Pucinelli switched off that tape… so I couldn't hear.'
'Yes. It was horrid. So will this be. The first demands are always the most frightening. The threats will be designed to pulverise. To goad Nerrity into paying anything, everything, very quickly, to save his little son. So dearest Alessia, take Miranda into the kitchen and eat cake.'
She smiled a shade apprehensively and walked over to Miranda, who was sobbing periodically in isolated gulps, like hiccups, but who agreed listlessly to making a cup of tea. The two girls went off to their haven, and Nerrity crunched back with a brown cardboard box.
Rightsworth importantly took charge of opening it, telling everyone else to stand back. Tony's eyebrows were sardonic. Rightsworth produced a pair of clear plastic gloves and methodically put them on before carefully slitting with a penknife the heavy adhesive tape fastening the lid.
Opening the box Rightsworth first peered inside, then put an arm in and brought out the contents: one cassette tape, in plastic case, as expected.
Nerrity looked at it as if it would bite and waved vaguely at an ornate stretch of gilt and padded wall unit, some of whose doors proved to be screening a bank of expensive stereo. Rightsworth found a slot for the cassette, which he handled carefully with the plastic gloves, and Nerrity pushed the relevant buttons.
The voice filled the room, harsh, thunderous, uncompromising.
'Now, you, Nerrity, you listen good.'
I took three quick strides and turned down the volume, on the grounds that threats fortissimo would sound even worse than threats should. Tony nodded appreciatively, but Rights-worth was irritated. The voice went on, more moderate in decibels, immoderate in content.
'We nicked your kid, Nerrity, and if you want your heir back in one piece you do what you're told like a good boy. Otherwise we'll take our knife out, Nerrity, and slash off something to persuade you. Not his hair, Nerrity. A finger maybe. Or his little privates. Those for sure. Understand, Nerrity? No messing about. This is for real.
'Now you got a horse, Nerrity. Worth a bits we reckon. Six million. Seven. Sell it, Nerrity. Like we said, we want five million. Otherwise your kid suffers. Nice little kid, too. You don't want him screaming, do you? He'll scream with what we'll do to him.
'You get a bloodstock agent busy. We'll wait a week. One week, seven days. Seven days from now, you get that money ready in used notes, nothing bigger than twenty. We'll tell you where to leave it. You do what we tell you, or it's the castration. We'll send you a tape of what it sounds like. Slash. Rip. Scream.
'And you keep away from the police. If we think you've called in the Force, your kid's for the plastic bag. Final. You won't get his body back, Nothing. Think about it.
'Right, Nerrity. That's the message.'
The voice stopped abruptly and there was a numb minute of silence before anyone moved. I'd heard a score of ransom demands, but always, every time, found them shocking. Nerrity, like many a parent before him, was poleaxed to his roots.
'They can't… ' he said, his mouth dry, the words gagging.
'They can,' Tony said flatly. 'but not if we manage it right.'
'What did they say to you this afternoon?' I asked. 'What's different?'
Nerrity swallowed. 'The… the knife. That part. Before, he just said 'five million for your kid'. And I said I hadn't got five million… He said, 'you've got a horse, so sell it.' That was all. And no police,
