Long Time Lost (27 page)

‘Say something.’

Kate wouldn’t speak. Perhaps there wasn’t anything to be said. Miller knew that what he’d done was terrible, shameful, but he’d wanted to be honest with her, to have her try to understand.

‘Please say something.’

But she didn’t. Or couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry for it,’ he told her. ‘You have to believe that. But you asked me for the truth, and honestly, I’d do it all again tomorrow if I had to. You know now what Lane is capable of. You’ve seen it for yourself. I wanted my daughter safe.’

Kate took a step back and looked up to where the dirty grey clouds were drifting down over the high mountain peaks.

‘Melanie hates me for it. I thought I was saving her and now she’ll barely talk to me. But she’s safe. She’s alive. I have that for Melanie, and I have it for you, too. And all right, maybe I’m stupid to want more. Maybe I can’t ever be allowed it. But I want it, Kate. I want a future with you. With Melanie. That’s why I brought you here. That’s why I told you. I saw something in Prague. Something that made me understand that there can’t be any secrets between us if we want a real chance for whatever we have together to truly begin.’

Kate wiped at her face with the back of her wrist, smearing her eyes. She was sniffing, her breathing irregular, her chest hitching and falling.

‘I won’t do it,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’

Miller felt his heart lurch.

‘I know I’m asking a lot. I know that, Kate. But I’m going to ask it all the same.’

She smiled through her tears, as though he’d somehow misunderstood her; as if his confusion only made it worse.

‘What is it? Tell me.’

She shook her head some more, drawing in a deep breath and summoning enough composure to steady herself. Then she sighed and fixed her gaze on Miller, speaking with a fragile calm.

‘Is she close? Is Melanie here?’

Miller raised an arm and pointed up the mountainside, beyond the village.

‘See the chalet all on its own in the clearing? She lives with a man and his children. His name is Timo. A good man. A widower. Timo, Nico and Mia. They’re Melanie’s family now.’

But as Miller was talking, Kate had started shaking her head, lifting her hands, backing away. What was it she was saying to him? He couldn’t make it out. Her eyes seemed to be searching him, pleading with him.

He finished talking, and Kate stood still for a long second.

I’m sorry
.

That was what she’d been saying. And now she was repeating it, mouthing it over and over as she reached up to the side of her head and plucked free an earpiece connected to a flesh-coloured wire. Miller, numbed, felt his whole world tip on its axis, everything thrown upside down and falling around him as she unzipped her hooded top and rolled up her white T-shirt and showed him the radio transmitter that was strapped to her chest.

Half a mile away, Mike Renner lowered the two-way radio he’d been talking to Kate on and turned to Aaron Wade. Both men had headphones covering their ears. Both men had been listening to every word Nick Adams had had to say. They shared a look. It was a look of shock and concern and confusion. And on Wade’s bruised and grazed face Renner caught something else.

Fear.

His lips and mouth were still swollen, an after-effect of whatever drug Nick Adams had disabled him with, but the tightness that gripped hold of his features was unmistakable all the same.

He had good reason to be afraid. Connor Lane did not tolerate mistakes, least of all where his younger brother was concerned. But this mistake affected them both, and it had happened on Renner’s watch.

Anna Brooks had been dead all this time. Melanie Adams was still alive. Which put a whole new dimension on the situation, though the ultimate outcome would have to be the same.

Wade reached up to remove his headphones. Renner did likewise.

‘Are you going to tell him?’ Wade asked.

Renner didn’t know. He hadn’t made up his mind just yet.

‘No, and neither are you,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t change anything for us. Or for them.’

Renner looked into the dimmed rear of the van, locking eyes with the overweight soap actress who was tied up next to the weedy black kid. He glanced at the wounded father and the scared little girl and the dirty rag doll she clenched in her lap.

Then he turned his head and traded a new look with Wade. It was a look that spoke of tough choices and hard resolve. And, on Wade’s face, something else – an animal hunger.

Renner cupped an earphone to the side of his head, but all he could hear now was the whine and hiss of static. He gazed out the windscreen and lifted the binoculars off the dash, looking through the magnified lenses towards the turbulent waters out on the lake. In the foreground, he could see Adams leaning into Kate’s face, trailing the wire from the radio transmitter in his fist.

‘Get it over with,’ he said to Wade. ‘And try to keep it clean.’

He didn’t lower the binoculars. He didn’t want to see the eagerness on Wade’s face as he clambered into the rear of the van. But he couldn’t avoid hearing Becca’s muffled scream as Wade closed in on her and slapped her, and he couldn’t block out Emily’s distressed cries as Wade began shouting questions about the location of the chalet and the man called Timo and the obstacles they might face.

Miller tore along the steep mountain track in his rental SUV, gravel and loose mud clattering against the chassis.

Kate braced a hand on the dash as Miller braked sharply for a hairpin bend, wrenching the wheel around, stamping on the gas. He was driving like he was having a fight.

Which he was.

With her.

She said, ‘I didn’t have a choice. You have to understand that.’

‘Oh, I understand.’

‘They have Becca and Hanson. They have Pete and Emily. They told me they’d kill them. They said they’d start with Emily.’

‘And you believed them.’

She glared across at him. ‘They killed Christine. They killed Clive.’

‘So maybe you really didn’t have a choice.’

‘Hey.’ Kate dug her nails into his arm. ‘They killed your wife too, remember? Or was that another lie?’

He stared out through the mud-smeared windscreen at the raking incline ahead. They were spearing through an area of woodland, pines on either side of them. He was angry with Kate. Angry with Lane. But mostly he was angry with himself. He’d let Melanie down. He’d failed her. Again.

And why? Because he’d put himself first. He’d tried to let Kate into his life.

The SUV thumped over a pothole, the steering wheel bucking wildly in his hand.

‘Sarah’s dead. Lane took her from me.’

‘Then you know, don’t you? You know I had no choice.’

He did know. And he also knew that it had been his mistake. His error. Even without baring his soul to Kate, the outcome would have been much the same. Hanson knew where Melanie was living. Becca had visited the village with him before. Renner could have extracted the information from either of them. He’d be pressing them for details now.

So the truth was he wasn’t angered by what Kate had done. He was bothered most of all because he’d been played. Because they’d used his feelings for Kate to manipulate him. Because he’d allowed them to. And, to top it all, because he’d been so caught up in what he was sharing with Kate, in his need to confide, that he hadn’t taken the time to act on his instincts when he’d sensed that something was wrong.

It was also his own stupid fault that they’d been tracked in the first place. He should never have sent Kate to Arles. He should never have let any of them go into the village and approach the house. Kate had told him that Renner and Wade had caught up to them only a few hours earlier. Hanson had pulled into a deserted rest stop just beyond Bern because Emily had been feeling travel-sick. She’d needed some air. A white van had roared up behind them and Renner and Wade had leapt out. They’d been armed. They’d been rough.

And they’d been clever. Back in Arles, Pete had followed Miller’s instructions and prepared a go-bag for himself and Emily. Becca had tossed it into the back of his car before she knew that Renner was there. It had only taken Renner a second to slip a GPS transmitter and a radio bug inside the bag.

Wade must have flown in to join Renner somewhere on his route. It worried Miller to think how angry Wade would be after Prague, and he feared the revenge he might exact.

‘We should have looked for them in the village,’ Kate said.

Renner hadn’t wanted Kate to know where they’d be watching her from after she’d been shoved out of the van. He hadn’t wanted her to be able to signal to Miller in some way.

‘You said they were armed, Kate. What would you have had me do? Throw rocks?’

‘They’ll still be armed if they find us up here. Down there, they might have held back. They would have been concerned about police, about witnesses.’

‘Like they were concerned in Arles? Or at that rest stop?’

‘Still.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess we’ll be OK. Plenty of rocks to throw up here.’

Miller looked across at her, gauging her attitude. She was acting tough, but it wasn’t a hard act to see through.

‘Timo is Swiss.’

‘Terrific. I hear they have an excellent reputation for fighting.’

‘They also have compulsory national service. Timo has army training. When he completed his service, he had a legal right to buy his assault rifle. He keeps a hunting rifle, too. I’ve seen them both, in a small barn near his chalet.’

‘Well, OK then.’ She nodded. ‘Go Switzerland. Why didn’t you say so sooner?’

They burst out of the tree cover, speeding between pastures and meadows. Cows grazed around them, bells clanging from their necks, several of them lying down. There was a rickety chalet up ahead, a water trough out front. Two goats were drinking from it and they raised their heads as the SUV rumbled by.

A dark shadow rushed across the fields, the storm clouds skimming low and bringing with them the first hard spatters of rain. Miller flicked on the SUV’s headlamps and hit the wiper blades. They beat side to side, smearing mud, until a sudden squall struck so hard that the wipers were overwhelmed. Miller switched them to full speed, the mechanism whining, the deluge blurring the way ahead.

‘How far?’ Kate shouted, over the din of water on metal.

‘We’re a way off yet.’

‘Can we make it in this storm?’

‘No choice. We have to.’

But Miller cut his speed a little, straining against the misty sight from his swollen eye. The track climbed onwards, rising steeply, curving wildly. He thought of the yellow lights that had been flashing around the lake, of the warning they’d given and all the warnings he’d missed.

Miller had visited the chalet many times before, nearly always without Melanie or Timo being aware of his presence. It was situated in a grassy clearing, close to a wood and an overhanging rock outcrop cluttered with trees that looked down, on a good day, over the valley and the village, the crystal-clear lake and the majestic Alps beyond. But not today, because the clouds and the rain had closed in around them, making it feel as if Miller was sliding the SUV to a halt next to a rugged and drenched ledge in the middle of a desolate wasteland.

He cut the engine and pulled on the handbrake, parking in the middle of the road, blocking access to a handful of even higher and more isolated shacks. He killed the headlamps, leaving the keys in the ignition. The wiper blades had stopped on a slant.

Miller could feel the hard journey in his jangled nerves and aching backside and in the tenderness of his bandaged palm. He checked the time. Gone 3 p.m. Ordinarily he might have expected Renner and Wade to wait for nightfall, but with the storm raging and the sky leaden, it was possible they’d come sooner.

‘Melanie really lives here?’ Kate asked him.

‘Timo keeps cattle and goats. They have electricity. Water. They grow a few vegetables.’

‘“Remote” isn’t the word.’

Miller didn’t say anything to that. He knew how it looked and how it was. Melanie had shut herself off from the rest of the world.

‘I guess it doesn’t get much safer than this.’

‘It didn’t. Until today.’

The chalet was squat and leaning to one side, the timber boards weathered and grey. Oblongs of yellow light shone through the recessed windows against the dreary afternoon light. A rusted flatbed truck was beached at the side of the chalet.

‘What are you going to say to them?’

‘Damned if I know.’

He pushed open his door, holding on to it against the wind.

‘I’m leaving the keys here,’ he shouted back. ‘In case one of us needs to get out of here in a hurry.’

Then, fastening his coat and turning up his collar, he slammed the door closed behind him, ducked his head and ran.

The loamy scent of the meadow was strong in his nostrils and the air felt damp and abrasive as the frenzied rain pummelled his head and face.

The meadow fell away from him into a shallow compression and as he rushed down, his legs feeling heavy and drained, a sudden violent crack and a low bass rumble pierced the sky all around.

He turned to see Kate stumbling behind him, picking her way through the grass and mud, her arms out at her sides for balance. A brilliant flash of lightning seemed to freeze her for an instant.

He waved and beckoned her on, turning back to the chalet, racing for the porch, leaping up on to the spattered boards, then pausing to contemplate the rough plank door. They must have seen his approach. They must have noticed the lancing beams of the SUV, at least. But they hadn’t come outside. They hadn’t welcomed him here.

So he held off on knocking and he waited for Kate to catch up to him. She peered at him, lips parted, frowning, her expression seeming to ask what he was waiting for exactly.

He didn’t know, but he waited all the same, until finally he raised his flattened hand to beat on the timber, only for the door to open in front of him.

Melanie didn’t act surprised. She showed hardly any emotion at all. Her attention was drawn for a moment to the damage to his face, the bulging swell around his eye, and her lips parted with a small puff of air. She turned her head slowly and glanced at Kate. She didn’t say a word.

And neither did Miller.

The thunder came again. Then the lightning.

He thought of where to begin, of what he might say. It seemed like he never had the right words to say any more.

Miller sensed Kate looking between them. He could tell she was growing restless and that she’d feel the need to intervene before long.

So he went ahead and came right out with it.

‘You have to leave, Mel. All of you. I’m sorry, but we have to get you away from here.’

The rain was swirling past him and in through the door, wetting Melanie’s thick woollen socks. She had on a knitted jumper over frayed grey jeans. Her hair was long and dark, parted above one eye. She looked so much like Sarah in that moment that it stilled the air in Miller’s lungs.

Then her face hardened and she curled her lip and moved back as if to swing the door closed, but Timo appeared at her shoulder before she could. He clutched the door and gazed squarely at Miller.

Timo was tall and powerfully built with short sandy hair and a full beard. Farm work might have given him the body of a wrestler but the solitude of the mountains had gifted him an aura of calm assurance and control. Miller had watched him often from the cover of the dense pines that bordered the edge of the meadow. He’d seen how much Timo cared for Melanie and the children. He knew he had to have been wounded deeply by the slow, cruel death of his wife – just as Miller had been wounded by the brutal loss of Sarah – but he believed him to be a good and caring man. He’d always felt that Melanie was safe with him.

So it was to Timo that he appealed.

‘I wouldn’t be here unless I had to be. Please. You both know that. We don’t have a lot of time.’

Timo weighed his words in silence. He was almost as tall as Miller, nearly as broad, but he looked ten times as healthy. In the winter months, he worked as a ski instructor. During the summer, when he could find someone to watch over the animals, he liked to rock climb or hunt. There probably hadn’t been a day in his adult life where he hadn’t engaged in some kind of strenuous physical activity.

‘This is our home.’

‘I know. And I want you to be able to come back here. Which is why I’ll stay after you leave. I’m going to end the threat. I’m going to stop it here for good.’

‘What have you done?’ Melanie asked. ‘What’s happening?’

‘It’s Lane. It was always going to be Lane.’

Melanie stared at him, becoming gaunt, a desperate pleading creeping into her eyes, as though she hoped he might tell her it was all a terrible mistake.

‘Let us in. Please. I already told you, we don’t have long.’

Renner had Wade handle the driving. It was partly because he was tired from the long motorway miles he’d negotiated on his own and partly because he wanted Wade up front, away from the four figures huddled together in the back. But mostly it was because his injured shin was hot and painful, the tissue swollen, the broken skin rimed with green pus.

Renner clicked on the dome light overhead and studied the map Wade had fetched from the tourist office in Brienz. He’d had Hanson use a pencil to mark the correct location of the chalet and he was confident he hadn’t been misled. If Hanson was as good as Renner had been told, he’d know that very few people had ever lied to him and survived the experience. Still, Renner was a man who liked to erase doubt wherever possible, and he’d allowed Wade a few minutes to make the consequences of attempting to trick them abundantly clear. They would keep their guests alive long enough to correct any misdirections they’d been foolish enough to give.

Renner’s problem now was comparing the detail on the map to the terrain they were passing through. The storm was raging, the light poor, and visibility was terrible. The tyres on the van were old, the treads worn way down. They kept sliding, the engine revving wildly, hopelessly.

Renner clutched the grab handle above his seat, his mind racing with the implications of what they were speeding towards. This entire mess had started out with two bungled hits, four years apart. It was maddening to think things had gone so wrong four years ago, and that he was only finding out about it today.

Those two errors – neither of them his fault directly – had spiralled into something much more complex and demanding but potentially more conclusive, too. He had the opportunity now to end every threat to Russell in one go by taking out Kate and Melanie, and as an added bonus, he could finally rid himself of the inconvenience of Nick Adams.

Which should have been a good thing, except Renner’s confidence was shaken – in Wade, as well as in himself – and he was becoming less and less certain that they’d be able to drive up close to the chalet. Supposing he was reading the map even halfway right, hiking from anywhere near their current position would take an hour, maybe two, and then the same again back, which was something he wasn’t sure his leg could bear.

He craned his neck and gazed up at the grisly sky, then down at the shirt, trousers and loafers he had on.

He tensed his left leg, lifted it gently, and felt the savage ache and the sting. If the van made it no further, he might have to let Wade go on alone. In a twisted way, he supposed it was fitting, but it was a prospect that filled him with dread.