Beggar Bride (40 page)

‘This is Quincey,’ says Giles. ‘And he has told me that wherever Callister goes he takes his phone with him. That’s how he must be contacting the priest so we must find his number and get to him, get to Jacob before anything can go wrong…’

‘How the shit do we do that? His van’s gone, isn’t it?’

‘His van has gone, but there might be something in the hut. After all, he’s no real need to cover his tracks, we are the only ones who suspect he’s got Jacob… everyone else believes he’s gone on one of his retreats.’

‘And we don’t know for definite,’ says Ange hopefully. Which way is she hoping? She doesn’t know herself. Surprised by her own thoughts, she wishes Fabian was with them now.

‘I think we do. I’m sure we do,’ says Honesty, her eyes darting from side to side in nervous terror. She is obviously petrified of what her idol might do to her when he finds out she has betrayed him. The young boy must feel something similar, for when he speaks of Callister he uses a tone of reverential fear and his eyes are hard and glittering. Only Giles seems free of contamination by this remorseless weight, more of an outsider looking in with professional detachment.

Dogs lie panting in the heat, occasionally getting up to drink from a puddle giving off evil vapours.

Inside the meeting hut, with its fiercely hot corrugated roof, bloated black flies gather on the home-made tables, feasting on scraps. Ange’s throat is dry and tight, but it’s her thoughts, not the heat, that are shrivelling her up. What if they don’t find him in time? What if Fabian pays the money and Callister kills little Jacob out of some kind of inhuman revenge, by using some cruel satanic rite?

Now Ange has visited this hellish place she knows that anything is possible.

‘Even Callister must pay his bills,’ says Giles, the only one of the three able to have a conscious thought and carry it through to any sort of reasonable conclusion. ‘Somewhere in this place there’s going to be a receipt, a letter, a bill, a communication with that phone number on it. D’you know where he’d keep something like that, Honesty? After all, you are the one who provides all his money.’

Sick and weak, eager to appease, Honesty scans her brain for an answer. ‘He writes his letters in here, there’s more flat surfaces in here, in his van there’s no proper space.’ She’s still thinking. ‘As far as I know he throws his rubbish in the bin under the stove, along with the peelings and waste.’

With a little scraping of hope now, Ange no longer notices the stench as all three of them tear through the three overflowing bins, damp, soggy stuff, putrid in the heat, crawling with flies which form a kind of furry skin moving over the top. ‘If we don’t find anything here we’ll have to go searching outside…’

‘But it seems such a slim chance…’ cries Honesty, retching.

‘We’ve nothing else to go on,’ says Giles. ‘If we don’t find this, what else can we do? Wait for Fabian to respond to Callister’s next request? And the one after that? Remember, Callister sees himself as the Great Master, believes he can bow everyone down by the mesmeric force of his personality. He’s not going to give up that easily. I don’t mean to sound so pessimistic but…’

‘
Is that what you want?’

They didn’t notice the young boy creeping in after them.

In his hand is a perfectly pristine, crisp new telephone bill. The number is on the top.

‘It’s a bloody miracle.’

Giles gives a triumphant smack of a fist into the palm of his other hand.

‘Oh, thank God, thank God,’ cries Ange. ‘Oh, I’ll never be able to thank you…’

‘We’re not there yet by any means,’ Giles reminds her. ‘We’re only just at the start.’

This poor boy must be eaten up with jealousy. There he is, one minute cohabiting happily with the fascinating Demelza, and the next she is whisked away by the dominating guru. Left on his own in that foetid van, alone with the torment and anguish, he is hardly old enough to cope with these overwhelming feelings, and no wonder…

‘You must miss her very much,’ says Ange, pitying him.

‘Oh, I do. She’s never gone away before.’

Her ears are ringing so loudly now that Ange can hardly hear him. ‘At least she left you the phone number.’

‘Yes, she did. She worries about me,’ he says softly with some pride in his voice. ‘Demelza is my mother.’

Why must Billy interfere? Why must he be so impetuous? If only he were more like Fabian. ‘Let Giles do it, Billy, please,’ says Ange, hysterically watching the time. A lump of pain has frozen in her chest. ‘You don’t know Callister. You don’t know how to handle him. They do.’

They are using Ange’s mobile phone, nobody must use the main line in case the kidnappers try to get through. When they passed through the house on their way upstairs to the nursery, the atmosphere was urgent, tense. Fabian and his secretaries were still in his study trying to make final arrangements. He came out when he heard Ange call. She could see he was distraught. ‘Nearly there,’ he told her, sighing as if he’d run a great race. ‘Please don’t worry. Soon this whole nightmare will be over. Did you manage to get anywhere?’

‘We’re trying. We’re trying.’

‘I know. I know.’

Upstairs in the nursery Petal and Archie have picked up the atmosphere and stand beside the phone staring up dumbly at Giles.

When Giles dials the precious number Ange feels that the whole of her life has been leading up to this moment, and whatever happens afterwards her future will never be the same. Will she ever laugh again? She feels dead, observing these strangers from some other universe, unable to make contact properly through the fug. She might be under water, so wavy are the outlines of the people and the room and all the furniture in it. Billy is so agitated and engrossed he is unaware that he’s clenching his teeth. Tina seems quite paralysed, in a state of trance. Ange can sense Honesty’s profound sorrow and despair, as she watches the phone like a hawk with a vole, knowing, hoping against hope that
his
voice will answer on the other end.

Perhaps, after all this, Callister and Demelza don’t even have the phone with them. Have they got Jacob with them? Can her child hear the phone ringing now? Ange feels a mournful nostalgia for life as it was before they ever heard of Fabian Ormerod, for the simple times when all they needed was something to eat and a roof…

‘This is Giles Ormerod, Callister, and I’ve got Honesty and Lady Angela here with me now.’

There’s a pause. Angela trembles and waits. His eyes are slightly narrowed, and she is amazed that Giles can speak with such calm assurance, and then she notices his fists are clenched.

Oh, thank God, Callister must have answered, he must be willing to listen because Giles is going on saying, ‘I have a few facts here which I think are important for you to have.’

Don’t let him put his phone down, God.
Please keep Callister on the line…

‘For a start, the child you have is not Archie Ormerod, but Jacob, his older brother…’

There must be some protest because Giles presses his lips together and listens.

‘Listen to me!’ Giles sounds so firm,
so sure of himself.
‘There’s quite a lot you don’t know, Callister, I’m afraid, the main point being that if Fabian realised you were holding a total stranger, not his son at all, he wouldn’t consider offering you one penny. Now please, for your own sake, just give me a few moments before things go too far and everyone loses, you’re not that much of a fool…’

Ange listens tensely as the whole story of the great deception, as they told it to Giles, as she told it to Fabian earlier, is related over the telephone. Every now and again there’s a pause, and she listens, listens hard to try and catch what Callister is saying, but she can’t, she just watches Giles’ face. Although she sees the strain there, his expression gives nothing away and he speaks with a great solemnity.

He answers with the lie. ‘No, Fabian knows nothing of this. Not yet…’

He answers again. ‘Yes, we are prepared to tell him if we don’t hear from Demelza in thirty minutes from now that she has the child safely…’

And again. ‘Yes, it’s quite hopeless. A perfect description of yourself, yes, to the police, with a description of Demelza as well, the number of the van, this telephone number, everything, Callister.’

‘No, there’s absolutely no point, they don’t care about that, they’ve nothing to lose.’

Giles listens. Giles nods, his eyes moving avidly over the room in fervent concentration. Ange can see with agonising vividness Jacob’s little face gazing up at her, his troubled look, in her head she can hear him chattering, laughing merrily, trying not to betray his fear. ‘I can guarantee that as long as the child, Jacob, is returned safe and sound, that not a word of this will pass anyone’s lips. Is Demelza with you now?’

Giles demands. ‘Yes, some guarantee that the child has not been harmed…’

And a frantic, powerless fury begins to beat inside her. Ange can’t stay, she can’t stay here and listen to this for one moment longer.

When it’s all over it is Billy who comes to find her. She is ashamed of her thoughts. She wants to be with Fabian, she wants to feel his arms around her, so much stronger than Billy’s.

They stand where they are and confront each other, two small figures passing such priceless information between them. ‘Giles spoke to Demelza…’

‘… And?’ Her voice is scarcely audible.

‘In thirty minutes from now, that’s four o’clock, she has promised to phone from a public place where we can go and fetch Jacob.’

Ange stares, searching his face carefully behind the obvious sincerity. She still can’t believe it, and feels an intense and violent hatred. ‘Why would an animal like Callister change his mind?’

‘Because he’d be mad to carry on now he knows he has been identified.’

‘But he is mad.
Like Charles Manson. He is as mad as a sodding hatter.’ The shock and relief, the hope she has now is too much to take.

Billy looks disgusted and shakes his head. ‘Who says madmen aren’t clever, too? Giving up Jacob straight away is his only chance to go free… leave the country perhaps, form a commune somewhere else, taking his wickedness with him.’

‘But why didn’t Callister insist on getting the ransom first and then giving Jacob back?’

‘Because Giles wouldn’t trust Callister, once he’d been given the money. Giles made it quite clear to Callister there was not one penny on offer. He made him understand that he would tell Fabian the whole truth rather than allow Callister to go free with over a million pounds tucked under his belt. Callister couldn’t really win, when you think about it. It was a matter of giving the child back safe, or facing a life sentence in prison.’

‘How does Callister know we won’t go to the police, once we have Jacob?’

‘Because Giles gave him his word.’

‘What do you think will happen? Tell me honestly, Billy?’

Billy’s arms go round her with great tenderness. His hands begin to stroke and smooth her tangled black hair. ‘I think, I really, truly think that Jacob is going to be all right, Ange.’

It is all so complicated. Everything, everything is so suddenly confusing, not at all as it should be. Ange hides her head in her hands and weeps.

A
S ANGE APPROACHES THE
social services offices, in the same old three-storeyed house from which they have operated since she first knew them, she gradually slows her steps, watching herself dawdling over the pavement, counting the slabs, avoiding the cracks, and she could be seeing it all through five-year-old eyes again. The same old empty feeling grips her, there’s a wide gutter that runs alongside this road, and those little twigs scurrying down could be the very same she compared her own life with, she used to see them disappear under the road again, and wonder where they were going. Once she wished she was one of them, so she could take her chance and rush off blindly into the vast unknown.

There had to be something better than this.

She mounts the stairs, no need for the smiling receptionist to give Angela Harper instructions, she knows the offices and passages and steps in this old house like the back of her hand. She stops outside Sandra Biddle’s office, the name on the door needs retouching… but she supposes the county councils don’t have the sort of money to bother with such inconsequentials now.

Angela knocks.

‘Come in.’ Sandra Biddle, large, dumpy as ever, looks up and smiles, automatically revealing her prominent teeth. ‘I didn’t know we had an appointment this morning, Angela dear.’

‘We didn’t.’

Something in her tone makes the social worker look up. ‘Sit down, dear. Don’t tell me something has gone…’

The time for game playing is over.
‘It was you who wrote me all those letters,’
says Ange, breathing hard, ‘and signed them Aunty Val. Nobody else could have known all my secrets, not even if they managed to hire a whole firm of private detectives. I want to know when Tina first told you, Sandra, and how did you persuade her to go along with it all?
But most of all I need to know why.’

This might be hard, but Ange will never call life cruel again, not after living through the nightmare of Jacob’s disappearance. Callister was assured enough to be hanging round the west country, Truro, Helston, Newquay, St Austell. On that harrowing Sunday while they waited at Hurleston with their hearts in their mouths, he and Demelza, with Jacob, had even had the audacity to visit St Michael’s Mount and picnic there, so confident was he of a successful conclusion to his despicable plan.

Giles drove the Range Rover to St Ives. They had to park at the top and walk down the narrow cobbled streets to the harbour pushing through the crowds to reach the Tate Gallery. The gallery was a white and shining structure which looked like a grounded ship which had used its angles and steps to nudge and grind itself into the very cliff face. Demelza had agreed to wait in the open cafe on top, and Ange will never find words to explain her relief at seeing Jacob, sitting there on her knee, happily licking an ice-cream.

Thank God there was no sign of Callister.

She left it to Giles to confront Demelza, to discover why such a mild, sweet-natured person would go along with such a diabolical plot. All these protestations of possession and enchantment, this craving for a mighty dominance, left Ange cold, she couldn’t take any more of it. Honesty, back at Hurleston, would be sobbing her heart out even now, believing herself to be on the brink of her own destruction.