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“How did you get this information?”
“So, it’s true?” came another voice.
Everyone ignored it because all their focus was on Dexter. “Rupert?” he repeated. “How did you get it?”
I took a breath and levelled with him. “Adele.”
I sensed Iris on my right stiffening even more than normal.
Dexter leaned across the table. “You’ve spoken to her?”
“Not directly,” I replied.
His frown deepened. “Then… how?”
“She sent a message through Vivian Gillespie.”
“Oh well then,” Bertie laughed, collapsing back in his seat making it squeal in protest. “Nothing that comes out of her mouth can be trusted.”
“Nice to see Sinclair had brainwashed you too,” I said, not succumbing to an eyeroll.
I turned back to Dexter to see his attention still acutely focused on me. “How did she get to Vivian?”
I sighed in resignation. “They met in London,” I said, knowing that even if Dexter tried, he would never find Adele in that sprawling metropolis. She may not still be there – she could have been anywhere in the world by now.
His eyes dropped to the table for a second or too. When they lifted again, they were filled with sadness. “Is she safe?”
I swallowed at the surprising show of emotion from a man I thought didn’t possess the capacity. “Yes. She’s safe.”
Dexter sighed and nodded, almost to himself. “Thanks. Thanks Rupert.”
“You stole them?” Angelica Horseman, one of the few female members of the Consortium, scowled at Iris.
Iris pursed her lips and her brow concaved, showing all the lines she’d tried to Botox away. “We gave them a life most people can only dream about,” she said, through gritted teeth. “The Winters were common, uneducated lowlifes. They wouldn’t have known what a fifty looked like if it slapped them around the face.”
“Just like you wouldn’t know a crock of shit if you fell into one?” I shot back. “Only a subhuman, heartless, gutless cretin would steal a child, let alone two children. And then raise them as their own but leave them with nothing. You have no conscience, do you?”
Iris stared at me with a face like concrete. It was true: the woman simply wasn’t capable of feeling true emotion. There was a word for that: sociopathic.
The room was deathly quiet, waiting for Iris’s response. She didn’t disappoint.
She blinked slowly. “And you were such a disappointment, Rupert.”
Angelica gasped.
“All I ever wanted was for you and Ossian to be friends, comrades, a force to be reckoned with. Sinclair and I handed Thorn Pharmaceuticals to you on a platinum platter, and you… you turned your nose up at it.” Her mouth dropped open to emphasise the point.
“Because the red tops were grown over dead bodies and toxic waste!” My voice raised with the snapped words.
“What?” Anthony’s focus dragged from Iris back to me.
“That’s right,” I shrugged, appealing to the entire room. “Did any of you know about that?”
I knew Bertie was aware, and Andrew, and perhaps one or two others, but the secret to growing Bas was tightly held for a reason. This was going to be news to the vast majority sitting before me. Most heads shook and few a people stood. The sea of faces I’d first walked into had paled by several shades.
“That’s right,” I continued. “The red tops are grown on toxic biomedical waste. Ossian and Sinclair have been shipping it to the island in the dead of night, where it is disposed of illegally, into the heart of the island we love.”
“But… If you knew about this,” Angelica said. “And you disagreed with it, why didn’t you report it?”
