Fifth Victim

to the Dempsey family, I remembered suddenly, the young Amanda had reminded me on a regular basis that she considered me barely at a level with the gardeners. Still, at least she’d been consistent about it.

‘Look, Dina—’

‘Let it go, Charlie,’ she snapped, her tension making Cerdo break into an uneasy sidle. ‘For God’s sake! Do I have to fire you?’

It would do me no good, I reasoned, to point out that it was actually her mother who had that privilege. Instead, I waited until she’d got the white horse to settle, and pushed Geronimo into a longer stride to catch up.

‘We think Torquil Eisenberg is in on the kidnaps,’ I said then, conversational.

Cerdo bounced again, snatching at the bridle as he reacted to the slight contraction of her hands. It was as though Dina was sitting on a giant lie detector. Perhaps she realised that, because the abrupt way she grabbed at his mouth made him try to spring forward in response, and gave her an excuse to fuss for maybe half a minute persuading him to calm down to a walk again. Then she looked back at me.

‘How do you know?’

It took me a moment to work out what was wrong about that – not just the question, but the way she asked it.

For a start, where was the instant denial? Where was the protestation that surely nobody she knew could possibly have been responsible for any of it, and especially not chopping off a victim’s finger – albeit a largely redundant one? Where was the instinctive laughter, scorn even?

And, more than that, the emphasis was wrong. If she’d stressed the ‘you’ part, it would have seemed more dismissive, but she didn’t. If anything, the taut little sentence was weighted towards the ‘how’. So instead of expressing doubt at my deductive powers, it became somehow almost an admission of her own guilt.

If she’d been thinking coolly, logically, she would have asked a rake of questions I had no answers to. We had no proof other than an overheard phone call, a suspicion, a gut instinct.

Instead, more than anything she sounded scared. As scared as she had done the day I’d taken her to see Sean and she’d refused to run away from danger. What did she have to prove?

‘Dina—’

‘Hey, there!’

The voice came from up in the dunes to our right. I wheeled Geronimo round to put him between Dina’s horse and the shout, grateful for his quick responses.

Dina leant past me for a better view, shading her eyes with her hand. She stared at the figure who was now approaching in long sliding steps through the ankle-deep sand, and her agitation communicated itself clearly to Cerdo who began to stamp and fidget.

‘Tor?’ Dina’s own voice was incredulous. ‘But … what are you doing here?’

Torquil made a show of cupping a hand behind his ear until he was less than five metres away. Then he spread his hands wide and grinned at us both.

‘What?’ he demanded. ‘C’mon, you’re acting like you’re surprised to see me, babe.’

I assumed that question was aimed at Dina. She flushed as if he’d made an accusation.

‘I am,’ she said blankly. ‘What are you doing here, Tor?’

‘You asked me to come,’ he said, the big smile diminishing just a notch as the first trace of annoyance began to creep in. He checked both our faces, as if this was a practical joke at his expense that was being carried on just a little too far. But still he clung to the hope that, sooner or later, one of us would be unable to hold back the laughter and confess. All he saw was confusion. ‘You sent me an email … didn’t you?’

‘No, of course I didn’t!’

I checked up and down the beach quickly in both directions. There were the usual joggers and power-walkers carving a path along the harder packed sand just above the waterline, a couple of quad bikers in the distance, the sound of more in the dunes, but it wasn’t the kind of beach where you got crowds. It all looked quiet, normal.

Nevertheless, something at the back of my scalp began to prickle.

‘What did it say, this supposed email?’ I asked.

Torquil glanced at me with a knowing smile just flicking at the corner of his mouth.

‘Oh, OK, I get it,’ he said. He sighed, as if being forced to go through the details when it was obvious that we all knew them. ‘The message said to meet Dina – here, this morning,’ he said, adding with a leer, ‘That she’d come alone and so should I.’

‘Why?’

‘Whaddya mean, why?’ He gave a splutter of full laughter that died when he realised that he was the only one laughing. His face twitched. ‘She knows what it said.’

I glanced at Dina, found her white-faced. She met my eyes, mutely pleading.

I don’t! I didn’t!

I believed her. And from over the dunes I heard the sound of another engine approaching. Bigger than the higher-pitched quads that had masked it to this point, the note rising and falling as it ploughed across the soft ground.

‘Torquil,’ I said, aware that my own anxiety was making even the placid Geronimo start to skitter a little underneath me, ‘where are your guys?’

‘My what?’

I wanted to shake him. ‘Your bodyguards,’ I said, louder now. ‘Where are they?’

He didn’t like my tone. It made him stubborn about replying, which wasted valuable time. ‘I told them to stay with the car,’ he said at last, grudging, jerking his head back the way he’d come.

‘Call them in.’

‘Why?’

It was a good question, one I didn’t have the time nor the inclination to answer. Every instinct told me this set-up stank, and, in that case, I wanted witnesses. If Torquil’s bodyguards were in on whatever games he was playing, he wouldn’t have needed to ditch them before that phone call at the country club, and he wouldn’t have come alone now. They worked for his father, I recalled. Did that make a difference?

‘Charlie, what’s going on?’ If Dina was sounding worried before, it had stepped up a level.

‘We need to get out of here,’ I said, eyes on the dunes, straining to get a bearing on direction. The acoustics of the sand made it hard to judge exactly where the vehicle was going to pop out. ‘Just be ready.’

‘But, why?’ she demanded, the timbre of her voice high and cracked. ‘Charlie, talk to me! What’s happening?’

But at that moment an old Jeep Wrangler, its red body streaked with dust, came bowling over the top of the nearest dune and hurtled down the beach towards the three of us, kicking up a plume of sand and spray.

I yanked Geronimo in a tight circle, crowding Dina and Cerdo into the same urgent manoeuvre. I don’t know what made me flick my eyes towards Torquil as I did so. And I don’t know what I was expecting to see there in return. Reproach, regret, resentment – who knows? Maybe anger, like last time, or even some sense of growing alarm.

But what I wasn’t expecting was a gleeful, wanton excitement.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

‘Go! GO!’ I yelled at Dina, but Cerdo was way ahead of her. The white horse catapulted forwards with such violence that she was left scrabbling to stay with him. The two animals stretched into a full gallop, their eager rivalry compounded by the fact we were heading for home.

I kept Geronimo as close alongside as I could, holding back slightly into the line of fire as the red Jeep swerved down onto the flat sand behind us.

And in my head, the calculations swirled and formed like ice. A fit horse can gallop flat out at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour for maybe a mile before it’s blown – two miles at the most. It was a shame Cerdo wasn’t a Quarter Horse, too, because that particular breed has been clocked at closer to fifty-five over its namesake distance.

An off-road vehicle, on the other hand, can keep going until it runs out of fuel in the tank. The beach was firm, the ridged sand even enough to make fifty or sixty miles an hour feasible if the occupants didn’t mind losing a