I was desperate to inflict pain on the person who’d dared to take my child.
It was going to be hard to rein it in.
There really wasn’t a PG way to kill a man.
How long would it take for Fox to get here? I tried toremember where he’d said Sally’s house was. And Jenny. How far away was she?
“Can we go now, Mama?”
I needed to think. And fast.
“Give Bibi my phone,” I said. “We need to talk, and she loves watchingOctonauts.”
Bibi had no idea anything was wrong. I wasn’t going to change that. My priority was getting her out of here safely—and preferably with no idea she had ever been in danger.
“Octonauts!Yayyyyyy!” Bibi spun round to look at Drake.
He took a few steps forward and handed my phone to me. He watched me as I tapped a few buttons and theOctonautstheme tune blared out. I turned up the volume and handed the phone to Bibi, then led Drake a few feet away from the table. Away from my daughter.
“What do you want from us?” I kept my voice level.
Drake folded his arms. “Last year, I was given a keyring with a set of keys on it to unlock a safety deposit box. Inside it was my final payment, my goodbye bonus. The amount I needed to retire.”
“What the hell has this got to do with us?”
“I thought the keyring could’ve had a locator inside it. I took it off the keys and planned to hide it in someone else’s vehicle to throw them off knowing my actual movements.” Drake shook his head. “But I made a mistake. The keys were the decoy. The keyring itself was the key.”
I was still no closer to understanding how any of this was our problem.
“When I realized I needed the keyring, I went to get it from my car. But it wasn’t there. My employers said it was my fault I’d lost it, and I could only have the duplicate if I did another job for them.”
Was I meant to feel sympathy for him on hearing that he’d been screwed over by his gangster bosses?
“Back in Italy, I drove you and Bibi to the hospital. Bibi found the keyring and took it.”
“Don’t accuse my daughter of being a thief! She—”
“It would’ve looked like nothing. It’s just a small metal ball. It might’ve still had the chain attached to it.”
A keyring without its chain. A broken pendant. Bibi’s penguin had been wearing it round its neck.
“Last month, I finally tracked down security footage from the hospital. I saw Bibi playing with something small and silver.”
“You came to England for the keyring? And you took Bibi just to ask her where she’d put it?”
“I know who you are, Haze. I know what you are.” He stared at me silently.
I stared back. This couldn’t be happening.
“I wanted Bibi to give it to me without involving you,” he said. “I didn’t want you to keep the keyring for yourselves.”
“You really think we’d run off with some piece of kit we don’t even know how to use? To try and cash it in at some unknown location?”
“I would never underestimate you. I’ve seen your victims.”
And there it was.
He knew us; he knew our work. He was law enforcement, but he was dirty. A child kidnapper and a mercenary. And he was judging us. A couple of serial killers who only ended bad men. There was black, white, and gray—and that was us right now.
