GEORGINA ARRIVED BACK at ten past six. I had been watching out for her through the hall window.
She came into the hall carrying a couple of designer-branded carrier bags.
“Only two?” I said.
She laughed. “Yvonne and I spent most of the time chatting or having lunch. The place was so full, mostly with Chinese. Even the menu was in Chinese. The waiter told us that Bicester Village is the number-two destination for Chinese tourists, only behind Buckingham Palace. And I can believe it.”
“James and Amanda are coming,” I said.
“Coming where?” Georgina asked, seemingly confused.
“Here. This evening. Soon. To welcome you back from Yorkshire.”
“Oh. That’s great.” But she didn’t seem totally excited or pleased. “But I haven’t got any food for them.”
“I’m sure that won’t matter.”
“What time are they coming?”
“Seven.”
At least, I hoped they were both coming. Neither of them had texted back to confirm. But that might have been because my text to them had given them strict instructions not to contact me or their mother—just to make sure they were at the house by seven o’clock.
“So I’ve got less than an hour,” Georgina said. “I’ll have to see what I can rustle up.” She was not happy, and she was also getting quite agitated. “Why didn’t you call me? I could have stopped to buy something on the way home.”
She started to go towards the kitchen.
“I thought it would be a nice surprise,” I said. “And there might be more of them than just James and Amanda.”
She stopped and turned around. “More of them?”
“I said they could each bring a friend.”
In fact, I had told both James and Amanda in my text that they should bring someone with them, to provide them with some support.
“Why don’t we just order a takeaway?” I said. “Then we can ask them all what they’d like when they get here.”
Georgina relaxed a little. “Sure. But I’m still going up to have a shower and to change into something smarter.”
“There’s no need,” I said. “You look fine as you are.”
She gave me a stare, which implied that I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about. She went upstairs.
James arrived at ten to seven and, as expected, brought Gary Shipman with him—or rather Gary Shipman brought James, as they arrived in Gary’s car.
I opened the door to them before they could ring the bell, James in shorts and tee shirt, while Gary sported jeans and a leather jacket.
“What’s all this about, Dad?” James asked immediately. “Are you and Mum getting divorced?”
“You’ll find out everything soon enough,” I said. “Go into the sitting room with Gary.”
He looked worried but did as I told him. I went back to staring out the window.
At five to seven, Amanda’s battered blue Ford Fiesta turned in through the gates, and I could see that she had brought Darren with her.
I went out to meet them.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Amanda asked, clearly quite distressed.
“Come on in,” I said in reply, standing aside to let them through the front door. “Hello, Darren.”
He grunted something at me in reply, which I didn’t comprehend, and I wondered if he was high.
I ushered them into the sitting room to join James and Gary, and into this rather glum-faced gathering walked Georgina, all smiles and happiness, with fresh makeup and wearing one of her smartest dresses.
“How lovely,” she said, walking over to give each of her children a kiss.
“Lovely?” James said in obvious surprise. “What’s lovely about it?”
“Having you here, of course,” Georgina replied.
“Hasn’t Dad told you the real reason why we’re all here?”
“No.” She suddenly sounded concerned. “Why are you all here?”
There was a long pause as my wife looked in turn at the four young faces staring back at her.
“Because Dad wants a divorce,” Amanda said finally.
At that point, the front doorbell rang.
I went out into the hall to answer it while the others remained in the sitting room in a stunned silence.
When I went back in, with Patrick Hogg, KC, all five of the others were staring at me. I closed the sitting-room door, as if to close us all in privately together, both literally and symbolically.
“This is Patrick,” I said. “He’s a lawyer.”
“So it is true,” Georgina said almost in a whimper.
Patrick went and leaned against the wall at one side of the room, between the windows, taking his mobile phone out of his pocket. Meanwhile, I stood on the sheepskin rug in front of the fire place, facing all of them.
“As a matter of fact,” I said slowly, “it’s not true that I want a divorce. But I did give James and Amanda that impression strongly in the text I sent to them late last night.”
I looked down at Georgina who was now slumped on the sofa, with tears running down her cheeks, which were making an awful mess of her newly applied mascara.
“I’m so sorry, my darling,” I said to her with a smile. “I didn’t want to distress you like this, but I couldn’t think of anything else I could have said to the children that would have guaranteed that they would both be here this evening and also that they would bring Gary Shipman and Darren Williamson with them.”
She looked up at me, trying to smile back.
“Hold on a minute,” James said. “So if you don’t want a divorce, why are we all here? What’s the real reason?”
Now it was my turn to look in turn at the four young faces in front of me.
“Because I know that one of you is Squeaky Voice.”
They all stared at me again.
“What?” Georgina asked.
“For the past three weeks, someone has been calling me, and in a squeaky voice he or she has been demanding that I make Victrix horses lose races. And it’s one of these four youngsters here. And I want to know which one.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” James said.
“Being ridiculous, am I? So speaks someone who blatantly lied to me, his own father, about whether he came into this house last Saturday afternoon.”
I stared at him, but he said nothing.
“I know you did, so why didn’t you say so when I specifically asked you? You came here to collect something from your room, even though you told me that it was Gary who had to collect something from his house. You also left a dirty glass in the kitchen sink. Had a drink of water, did you? But forgot to put the glass back in the cupboard?”
I paused but still James said nothing. Neither did Gary. So I went on.
“And what was it in your room that was so important that you came all the way from Bristol to fetch it, and at such short notice?”
James just sat there, looking up at me.
“No answer?” I said, looking down at him. “Okay, I’ll tell you. You came to collect some black notebooks, four of them, from the bottom drawer of your desk.”
“You shouldn’t be going through my things,” James mumbled.
“I went through your desk because you asked me to. I was looking for your passport, remember. It had slipped down the back, from the top drawer to behind the bottom one. Hence I found the notebooks, and the printed BUGS flyers, one of which I sent to you, along with your passport. It must have given you a huge fright, because you knew where the flyers had been. Under the notebooks. Which meant I must have seen those too.”
“So what was so important about these notebooks?” Georgina asked.
James didn’t answer, so I answered for him.
“The books contained lists of names, amounts, and calculations for the Bristol University Gamblers Society, something that James and Gary, here, have been running together for the past two years.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
“I suspect you wrote everything down in the notebooks by hand so that it couldn’t be found on your computers. And I imagine you kept them here in case your flat in Bristol was broken into or raided by the police. Because operating a gambling club without a proper licence is illegal.
“But you hadn’t reckoned on me finding them. So you decided to come and fetch them before I realised what they were. And I probably would never have realised except that James lied to me about coming here, and I was determined to find out why. So I searched his room again, and the notebooks were gone. I had briefly flicked through them all when I’d been looking for James’s passport, so I sat down and worked hard at remembering what I had seen.”
“But what has this got to do with someone phoning you about horses losing?” Georgina asked.
“The Bristol University Gambling Society has not been having a good time in recent months, especially as they guaranteed a return on stake money to all the students who joined—hundreds and hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, each of whom handed over their cash in good faith.”
I looked at both James and Gary, but they went on sitting, stony-faced, saying nothing.
“Matched betting was it?” I asked. “Using James’s mathematical skill to work out the stakes. For risk-free returns.”
Still no response.
“And all was going fine as long as you kept getting the bookmakers free bets. But when they dried up, it was more difficult, especially after some of the Bristol betting shops stopped taking your bets altogether. So you tried to force me into stopping the Victrix horses, so you could lay them big on the exchanges without having to also bet on them to win with a bookmaker.”
“But how could they force you?” Georgina asked.
“By kidnapping Amanda and then threatening to kill her if I didn’t obey their instructions.”
Even Georgina was now silent, with her mouth hanging open in shock.
“Now you are being ridiculous,” James said, finally finding his voice. “How could Gary or I have possibly kidnapped Amanda when we were both at the same party as you and Mum. And we were there all the time.”
“Because no one did actually kidnap Amanda, did they?”
I looked straight at Amanda who was sitting next to her mother on the sofa in front of me. She went bright pink.
“Amanda simply walked out of the garden when no one was looking and then drove herself away. Gary’s car, was it? You drove to Pangbourne, parked the car somewhere in a back street from where Gary could collect it later, and then you waited for a while before banging on someone’s front door with a cock-and-bull story that you couldn’t remember anything.”
“But she’d been drugged,” said Georgina. “How could she drive?”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “The ketamine. Are you aware that you can inhale it as a white powder? Or even take it by mouth as a liquid?”
“But there was an injection puncture on her neck.”
“Indeed, there was,” I said. “But that wasn’t how the ketamine got into her system. That puncture mark had been made earlier, probably by our medical student here.” I pointed at Gary. “It was conveniently covered up at the party by a white scarf tied tightly around her neck. The same scarf that was dramatically left behind on the ground, to further make it look like she had been taken away by force.”
James stood up. “This is all fucking nonsense. I’m going.”
“Sit down!” I said sharply. “I’m not finished.”
“You might not be, but I am. Come on, Gary—let’s go.”
“If you step out of this room, James, I will have no option but to call the police and hand them all the evidence I have.”
“You don’t have any evidence,” Gary said, also standing up. “It’s all just a fanciful story you’ve made up, and I’ve heard enough of it.”
“Do you know someone called Mike Mercer?” I asked.
“Never heard of him,” Gary said, but his body language shouted otherwise.
“Well, he knows of you, all right. He told me all about you when I went to see him in Bath yesterday afternoon. He left Bristol University last summer, and he claims that your gambling society is a huge con trick. And he’s been saying so on social media for months. He says that you tried threatening him, to make him stop. But he wouldn’t stop, would he? Instead, he went to the local papers. That’s how I found him.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Gary said. “And what he says is not evidence.”
“Are you willing to take that risk? Now sit down, both of you.”
Slowly and reluctantly, James and Gary returned to their seats.
I turned towards Amanda.
“And it seems, young lady, that you are making a habit of being abducted by mysterious men. But it never actually happened, did it?”
She said nothing. She just looked at me.
“First at the party,” I said, “and then again last week. That’s what you claimed. Darren called me at nine o’clock on Thursday evening to say you had gone missing again. He said you’d left the flat at seven to get him some beers from the local shop, but you hadn’t come back. He even said he’d been out to look for you. So I called the police again to report you missing. But you weren’t really missing, were you, Amanda?”
She said nothing.
“Because you spent the evening sitting in a corner of the saloon bar of the Railway Tavern, in Didcot, waiting for a telephone call to tell you when you could walk home. The landlord remembers you very well because you only bought one soft drink the whole evening and didn’t talk to anyone. He told me that he’d felt sorry for you and thought you might have been there to get away from an abusive partner, so he didn’t ask you to leave.
“And then, just before closing time, he answered an incoming call for you on his landline. That was because you had left your own mobile phone behind at the flat, so that it couldn’t be used to trace where you were, just as you had done on the night of the party. The pub landlord said you called yourself Elizabeth, but he recognised you all right from this picture.”
I held up my mobile phone with Amanda’s smiling face showing on the screen—a photo I’d taken the previous Christmas Day.
“You even told me that the van smelled of dogs, just to try and confuse the issue. I bet you and Darren had a good laugh about that.”
“I knew nothing about it,” Darren said.
I didn’t believe him.
Amanda was now openly crying and hanging her head in shame, as well she might, considering the terror and distress she had caused her mother and me.
“I’m sorry,” she said between sobs.
“So who rang you at the Railway Tavern?” I asked. “Was it Darren?”
She shook her head without looking up. “It was Gary. The whole thing was his idea.”
“Shut up!” Gary shouted at her. “You stupid little bitch!”
He leapt up from his seat and tried to hit her, but I took a step forward to stop him, grabbing his raised wrist before he could bring his hand down on her.
“Don’t you dare touch my daughter, you little shit.”
He wrenched himself free from my grasp and then reached into his jacket pocket. When he pulled his hand out again, there was a flash of reflected light—the hand now held a knife.
“Don’t be stupid, Gary,” I said, shocked at this sudden escalation. “Put the knife away.”
But from his angry demeanour, it was quite clear that he had no intention of putting the knife away.
Anger plus a knife.
Together they made for a very dangerous combination.