“He’s not far away,” said Neil.
“Is he alive?”
Neil screwed up his face in horror at the suggestion that Ethan might not be. “Of course he is. I told you, I’d never hurt the kids.”
Susan stopped struggling. A shudder passed through her. Tears swelled in her eyes. Her lips twitched, unable to express the pain and joy she felt. Harlan knew there was no time for the luxury of emotion. There was no time for anything except getting to Ethan. Right this moment, Yates would be wondering what was going on. He might be starting to panic. Maybe he’d even be thinking about disposing of the evidence. Harlan gestured at Kane. The boy blinked as if emerging from a trance, before quickly moving to take hold of his mother’s wrist and draw her away from Harlan.
Harlan hauled Neil to his feet. “You’re gonna take me to Ethan right now.” His voice was as deadly sharp as the blade at Neil’s throat. He pushed him towards the door.
Neil twisted to look at Susan, heedless of the way his Adam’s apple dragged over the knife. “I did it for us,” he said again, with a tremor of pitifully desperate love in his voice. “Because I wanted us to have a life together.”
Susan looked at Neil with a hate in her eyes even more toxic than his love.
Crushed by what he saw, Neil’s body sagged and his head drooped. As Harlan thrust him into the street, Susan broke away from Kane and ran after them. “I’m coming with you.”
“No way,” said Harlan. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I don’t give a fuck! I’m coming!”
Kane grabbed Susan’s wrist again. “Please, Mum, I don’t want you to go.”
“Let go, Kane.” She tried to shake him off, but he clung on like a limpet.
Turning quickly away from them, Harlan put his hand on Neil’s head and none too gently guided him to the driver’s seat. “Don’t you fucking go without me,” shrieked Susan, as he rushed around to the other side of the car. He just had time to reach across Neil and press the central-locking button, before Susan yanked at the passenger door. She hammered on the window. “Open this bastard door!”
Harlan thrust the ignition key into Neil’s hand. “Go! Go!”
With trembling fingers, Neil fumbled the key into the ignition. As they accelerated away, Harlan hissed in his ear, “Remember what I said, if you fuck with me…” He trailed off, letting the threat hang between them.
“I won’t.” Neil’s voice matched his ghastly grey face, as he watched Susan recede in the rearview mirror.
Chapter 22
“Where are we going?” asked Harlan.
“Spital Street.”
Harlan had been called out to Spital Street numerous times during his years on the force. It traversed the lowermost edge of a rundown estate of maisonettes and flats perched on a hillside just north-east of the city centre. “What address?”
“I know where it is, but I dunno the exact address. It’s a second floor flat.”
“Who lives there?”
“No one. It’s empty. That’s why Martin took Ethan there.”
“Is he the only other person involved in this?”
A slight hesitation, then, “No. His girlfriend’s in on it too. Her name’s Paula. I dunno her surname. She lives in the flat below the one where we’re keeping Ethan.”
Harlan took out his phone and dialled Jim. “Have you got a name for me then?” his ex-partner asked, on answering the phone.
“I’ve got a lot more than that. Nash didn’t abduct Ethan. Neil Price did.”
Jim released an exhausted breath. “Make up your mind, Harlan. First you tell me this nameless roofer did it, now you-”
“Shut up and listen, Jim,” Harlan interrupted. “They both did it. The roofer — his name’s Martin Yates — him and Price are in it together, along with Yate’s girlfriend.”
An instant’s stunned silence followed, then Jim said, “How do you know this?”
“Price told me himself. I’m in the car with him now, on my way to where they’re holding Ethan.”
“You mean the boy’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“Where?” There was no relief in Jim’s voice. Within seconds, icy professionalism had overcome his initial surprise. Like Harlan, he knew they hadn’t won the game yet, and the clock was running down fast.
“Spital Street. It’s an empty second floor flat.”
“But we searched all the unoccupied flats around there,” said Jim. “How did we miss him?”
The answer was obvious to Harlan: Ethan had been kept elsewhere — and that elsewhere was almost certainly Yates’s girlfriend’s place — until after the police were done searching. But there was no time for explanations. “We’re in Eve’s Toyota. I’ll make sure we park directly outside the flat. You need to get some units over there fast. Yates might be onto me.”
“I’m already on it. How far away are you?”
“Not far. Five or ten minutes.”
“You’ll be there before us then. Don’t go trying to be a hero, Harlan. Wait in your car and let us do our job.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get Ethan back safe.” Harlan hung up. A woozy feeling hit him, causing the road to momentarily double before his watering eyes. Shaking the dizziness from his head, he felt his bandage again. As he drew his hand away, rivulets of blood coursed between his fingers. Grappling with Susan, it seemed, had opened his wound fully. He wondered whether he’d have the strength to ‘do whatever it takes’.
“So what was the plan?” Harlan asked, more to try and fend off the tugging fingers of unconsciousness than because he needed to know right that moment.
Neil shrugged as if he wasn’t sure, but then said in a strangled sort of voice, “Paula was gonna phone the police and say she’d heard suspicious sounds in the flat above hers. When they came and found Ethan, she’d claim the reward and we’d split it three ways.”
“And who came up with this plan?”
Again, Neil shrugged. “Me and Martin went out drinking a few months back. I don’t usually drink, but Gary Dawson,” his upper lip curled with hate around the name, “was threatening to send his thugs to my parents’ house. I was going out of my head with worry. Martin’s in even deeper with Dawson than me. We were talking about ways of making some quick cash, and I jokingly said we should try to find that missing boy, Jamie Sutton, and claim the reward. And Martin said it would be easier to just snatch a kid ourselves for the reward. So we started talking about how we might do it. We weren’t being serious at first — at least, I wasn’t…” Neil trailed off as if he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of his words. “Oh God, it sounds so insane now.”
“No it doesn’t.” There was a simple, ruthless logic to everything Neil had said. Harlan wasn’t about to let him use madness to exonerate himself from responsibility. A couple of things didn’t make sense to him, though. “But why risk abducting Ethan from his bed? Why not just snatch him off the street?”
“That was our original plan. We wanted to make it look like the same bloke who took Jamie Sutton took Ethan.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Ethan, that’s why. Outside school, he never leaves Susan’s side. He’s been like that since his dad died. I remember even when me and Susan first got together, he used to ask her all the time, why did Dad leave us? She tried to explain, but he just couldn’t get it into his head what death means. I guess he’s afraid she’ll leave him too.” The familiar guilt twisted inside Harlan, as Neil continued, “We kept waiting for a chance to grab him off the street, but there was no chance. Martin got impatient. Dawson’s thugs were hounding him. We talked about taking Ethan from the house. Martin was all for it, but I didn’t like the idea. The problem wasn’t Susan — after she takes her
