‘I wouldn’t have put Hannah down for that,’ said Suzy.
‘She wasn’t wearing it,’ I replied. ‘Look at the collar.’
She looked at a faint red smudge. ‘Lipstick.’
‘Right.’
I knew exactly who wore Chanel No. 5, the colour of lipstick that could leave such a mark and who also insisted on calling me ‘Mister Carter’. I remembered the hand that she had stroked Hannah Shapiro’s cheek with. It hadn’t been a maternal gesture as I had imagined.
It had been the caress of a lover.
Chapter 93
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER and we were back in front of Adrian Tuttle’s computer screen.
Adrian ran the kidnappers’ phone message to me through an audio sequencer and displayed a section in a waveform graphic.
Below the first graphic he ran a second piece of recorded audio and displayed it. This was the time Hannah had called me without benefit of voice distortion. The exact same phrase. Adrian aligned the two and they matched perfectly.
If I was enough of a contortionist I would have kicked myself. I had been puzzling over what had changed between Saturday night and Sunday morning and realised what it was. Harlan Shapiro was making the trip over. They hadn’t thought he would, given his past form. When he did, the goalposts were moved. The only person I had told that he was coming, outside of our own people, had been Professor Annabelle Weston.
I drummed my fingers on the table. Thinking. She had said she was going away on a conference. That was a lie. She was obviously moving Harlan Shapiro somewhere. And where was Laura Skelton?
I punched Del Rio’s number into the phone and told him to put Hannah on. Her voice was querulous, subdued.
‘I know what’s been happening, Hannah,’ I said. ‘And I know you had your reasons.’
‘You don’t know the half of it!’
‘I know I don’t. What happened to you was awful.’
‘Awful?’ She laughed, but it was a far from happy sound. ‘You really don’t know anything, do you?’
‘I know about you and Professor Weston, Hannah. I know she took advantage of you.’
She laughed again. It was a brittle sound.
‘She didn’t take advantage of me. I love her, Mister Carter.’
‘She was your tutor.’
‘She was my tutor and my counsellor and my lover and my friend! And I don’t expect you to ever understand.’
‘We need to know where she is. We need to get your father home safe.’
‘That’s exactly what we don’t need. That was what the million pounds was for. I was never going home.’
‘So what changed?’
Hannah hesitated. Not quite so strident now. ‘We figured it wasn’t enough. We figured five million was more like it.’
I doubted that she had done any of the figuring at all. She was just a pawn in somebody else’s game. I felt sympathy for her, for that much at least.
‘So where are they now, Hannah?’ I asked pointedly. ‘And why aren’t you with them?’
‘Plans change.’
I pictured her on the other end of the line, cradling the phone on her shoulder, rubbing her abraded wrist. Remembering how things had changed suddenly for her.