' What? '
Thorne watched as the gates begin to swing slowly open.
'You'd best make yourself scarce, Gary,' Langford said. 'She might recognise you. You wouldn't want that, right?'
'What the hell does she want?'
'Well, I don't think she's popped by for tea and biscuits, do you?'
In the van, they could hear the rasp of Brand's breathing and the sharp scrape of his chair against the tiles. As he walked away from the pool and moved inside the house, Brand whispered into the microphone, 'This is all going tits up.'
'You're telling me,' Boyle said.
The Golf was disappearing from view, heading up the driveway, when Langford shouted Ellie's name somewhere in the house. Thorne moved quickly towards the rear of the van.
'Where are you going?' Samarez asked.
Thorne was already opening the doors. 'This could all get very nasty very quickly,' he said.
'What about Brand?'
'I don't care.' Thorne jumped down on to the path, talking fast. 'Langford's not exactly predictable right now, and if Donna's come for Ellie, I can't see him just handing her over, can you?'
'We do not have enough,' Samarez said.
Boyle shook his head. 'We don't have anything.'
'Keep listening,' Thorne said, slamming one of the doors. 'He might get careless now that he's got something else to worry about.'
He slammed the other door before Boyle or Samarez could argue and sprinted towards the gates. He stopped momentarily when he reached them, to check that the Golf was out of sight, then slipped through just before they closed with a clang.
He waited for ten seconds, fifteen, his hands on his knees, panting. His mouth was dry and the spit he sucked up tasted coppery.
Like he was waiting to face a bull.
Then, still breathless, Thorne began jogging uphill towards the house.
FORTY-SIX
It took Thorne three or four minutes to reach the house, but it felt like a lot longer. The Golf was parked outside, and though Thorne would have loved to tell the man in the driver's seat precisely what he thought of him, there wasn't time. He settled for a hard stare and the satisfying look of panic on the private detective's face as he walked past the car.
The door to the villa was open and Thorne could hear shouting from inside. He stepped into a large, vaulted lobby. There were acres of white marble, potted palms whose leaves almost brushed the glass roof and a staircase that swept up and around to his right. He walked beneath it, his breathing and heart-rate finally beginning to slow a little, and followed a tiled corridor towards the far side of the villa, towards the screams of rage and frustration that echoed off the tastefully decorated walls.
'Well, you've wasted your fucking time…'
'Christ, what's he done?'
'What's he done?'
'Please…'
'You really are a stupid bitch, aren't you?'
Just before the corridor ended, Thorne passed a room whose door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and saw Gary Brand, sitting and flicking through a newspaper as though it were a doctor's waiting room. Brand looked up, alarmed, and opened his mouth to say something.
Thorne put a finger to his lips as a glass shattered somewhere near by.
'You've lost it, love.'
'Just tell her to go…'
Brand tried to stand up, but Thorne pushed him back into his seat. Told him quietly but firmly to shut his mouth and stay where he was. Then he stepped back into the corridor, took another few paces and peered around the corner.
'You heard what she said.'
'I'm not going anywhere.'
'Maybe I should call the police…'
Thorne was now at the entrance to a large, open-plan seating area. There was a pool table and a white piano beyond the L-shaped sofa. On the far side was what looked like a well-stocked bar, with rows of bottles in gleaming optics and vintage movie posters framed on the wall above.
The Dirty Dozen. Where Eagles Dare. The Italian Job.
The room led directly out, through an open pair of sliding doors, to the pool, and from where he was standing, Thorne had a clear view of the action.
Langford was sitting on the edge of a sunlounger, with Ellie standing behind him. A few feet away, on the other side of a glass-topped table, Donna stood, her fists clenched at her side and her eyes fixed on her daughter's right hand, which was resting on Langford's shoulder.
'I was struggling not to laugh out loud,' Langford said, 'when that copper accused me of 'taking' her.' He glanced up at Ellie. 'She couldn't wait to get over here, could you, love?'
'I dreamed about it.' Ellie squeezed her father's shoulder, but spat the words across at her mother. 'Just had to wait until I was eighteen, so nobody would bother looking too hard.'
'For ten years, you were all I thought about,' Donna said.
'Oh, I thought about you, too. Only not quite in the same way.'
'That last day I saw you, before the trial, you cried and cried and begged them not to take me away.' Donna's voice was weak and cracked. 'You wouldn't let go of my arm.'
'I was a kid,' Ellie said. 'I was stupid.'
'No…'
'I didn't know what you'd done. What you'd tried to do. I didn't know what a vicious cow you were, did I?'
'But I did it for you.'
'You tried to kill my father!'
'For us.'
'You didn't think about me, how I would feel.'
'That was all I thought about, I swear. All those years…'
'Funny,' Langford said. 'I thought you were too busy becoming a rug-muncher to give a shit.'
Even from his vantage point twenty feet away, Thorne could see the hatred etched into Donna's face.
'When did you contact her?' she asked.
Langford thought about it. 'About eighteen months after I got here, once I was settled. I got word to her, had a few friends keep an eye out, passed on some money whenever she needed it. We started making plans for you to come out here fairly early on, didn't we, love?'
Ellie nodded.
Donna was shaking her head as though trying to make sense of what she was hearing. 'I don't understand,' she said. When she looked across at Ellie, it was as if Donna herself had become the child. 'I don't understand…'
Thorne had seen and heard enough. He stepped into the open and watched as Langford spotted the movement, focused on him… then smiled.
'I thought you must be knocking about somewhere,' Langford said.
Donna and Ellie both stared at Thorne – the daughter looking straight through him, the mother ashen.
