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“I still have questions,” I say.
He nods. “Go on.”
“After I escaped from the room, why were you so mean? I get it, I’d tried to escape. But not bringing me food, then leaving it just inside the door instead of coming all the way in, what was all that about?”
“It wasn’t me,” he says. “I wasn’t there. I had to go away for a couple of days, sort something out, and I was already late because of you locking me in the room. I left as soon as Carl let me out.”
“What was it you had to sort out?”
“Amos Kerrigan.”
“What did you do?”
“I spoke with a couple of ex-colleagues, who spoke to one of their informers about the need for him to disappear.”
It takes a moment for it to sink in that he was at the origin of a man’s death. I push it from my mind; I can’t think about it now.
“I keep going back to the kidnapping,” I say. “I know you had to make it believable, but why make us think we were being kept longer than we actually were?”
“As I said, Carl wanted to make Ned suffer for killing Lina. He wanted Ned to believe that his father didn’t care that he’d been kidnapped, that he was happy to let weeks pass before paying the supposed ransom. But he only had that two-week window when Ned was supposed to have taken you away for a break, so he decided to make it seem as if you’d been kept for longer than you actually were. It’s disorienting, being kept in the dark, time loses all meaning.” He stops, realizing maybe that he’s telling me something I already know. “I agreed, because I thought that for you mentally, if the days seemed to be going by quite fast, it wouldn’t be such an ordeal. When we looked at dates, we realized that if we brought everything to a close on the thirty-first of August, it would tie in perfectly with the postnup you’d signed. It wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t, essentially it wouldn’t have mattered if you’d been married to Ned for forty days, or two months. But the thirty-first of August seemed a good time to stop.”
“How did you know the terms of the postnup? From Paul Carr?”
“Yes. Paul thought it was pure genius and mentioned it to Carl, and Carl thought it would be great to use it on Ned, make him think we knew more about him than he thought.”
“How much does Paul know?”
“Enough. He was also working for Mr. Smith, keeping an eye on what Ned was up to.”
“Is Mr. Smith an alias for Steve Algerson, by any chance?”
“No comment. Where did it come from, the doubling thing?”
“My dad. When I was young, he asked me if I’d rather have a million pounds immediately or a pound doubled every day for a month. I chose the doubling thing without ever working it out. I regret that now; I regret that I didn’t work it out and tell him the exact answer.”
“You worked it out on the back of the bathroom door.”
“Yes. I felt I owed it to my dad to do it.”
“I didn’t know that you’d lost your parents until Paul told me. It must have been hard. He said that you ran away to London.”
“I was lucky, I met Carolyn. It could have turned out very differently, though.” I take a breath. “I need to ask you something. The shooting thing. It was horrible. Why did Carl do it? Did you know he was going to pretend to shoot me?”
“No, not to the point where he would fire the gun. He wanted to frighten Ned, show him that he was prepared to kill one of you if he had to. We never expected Ned to actively encourage Carl to kill you, we thought at any moment he would tell Carl to stop, especially once Carl had cocked the barrel. But he didn’t, so Carl fired it into Ned’s mattress.” He pauses. “I couldn’t believe he’d actually fired it, I put my hand over your mouth to—I don’t know—let you know you were still alive, that you hadn’t really been shot, that I was there. It all happened so fast.” Another pause. “We had an argument about it afterward, me and Carl. I’d had enough, I hated what we were doing. It haunts me, what we did, not to Ned, but to you.”
“I survived.”
“You were extraordinary. I expected you to be terrified, but you weren’t.”
“I was, but I was never afraid of you. And I felt safer in that room than I’d ever felt with Ned.”
“I should have done more, I wanted to but—”
He stops, the guilt visible on his face.
“There’s something else that’s been puzzling me. The photo of me on Ned’s Instagram—it was taken at the house in Haven Cliffs, the day we went for lunch with Lukas. I thought Lukas had taken it. But he hadn’t?”
He looks down at the ground. “No, I did. Carl asked me to. His plan, once he had taken Ned—before he decided to take you as well—had always been to make Ned believe nobody was particularly botheredabout him being kidnapped, not his parents, nor his wife. He already had a photo of Mrs. Hawthorpe playing tennis, and he wanted to have a photo of you. He was going to taunt Ned with the photo, make out that you were so unconcerned about him that you had accepted an invitation from Lukas to go back to the house in Haven Cliffs. After, when our plans changed and we took you too, that photo came in more useful than we’d imagined, as it gave credence to the story that you and Ned had gone away on a two-week break. All we had to do was upload it to his phone.”
