Michelle hurried after him, refusing to let him abandon her.
“Rocky, he’ll kill me. He’ll have me killed. Do you want that on your conscience?”
“Never mind my conscience. That’s my affair.”
They were at the harbour now, heading for the fishing boats unloading after an early morning’s catch.
Michelle gave up for the moment, sitting down on a bench and punching in Jeremy’s number on her phone. She watched the pair of lovers descend some stone steps to a jetty. It was a windy day and the harbour waters were rough, causing the prows of the boats to swing to and fro like pendulums while the buoys clanked and tocked.
I wish I had a lover like him, who would help and support me, she thought wistfully, jealous of the way Rocky seemed happy to risk his entire life for Flipp. How deluded she had been to imagine Cordwainer had any feelings for her. The love between Rocky and Flipp poured out of them in everything they said and did. How had they achieved that? How did it happen?
She sighed and listened to the burr of the ringing phone, waiting for Jeremy to pick up and make everything all right again.
The ringing switched to voice mail and she sighed again. He must be in a meeting, perhaps. She began to leave a message, trying to sound calm and only partially succeeding. As she spoke, she watched Rocky and Flipp board a fishing vessel and head downstairs into the hold.
“Jeremy, it’s Michelle. Please ring me as soon as you get this message—it’s very urgent. I’ve been discovered by Cordwainer’s men. I’ve got away for now but…” Her voice trailed off. She heard a sharp scream, Flipp’s, and the sound of raised male voices.
Then the screaming stopped, and there was silence.
Chapter Eleven
The smell of the police-issue gauntlet covering Flipp’s mouth was so familiar and so terrifying that she could not breathe it in without retching. Her stomach leaped and jolted while her captor’s other hand closed so tightly about her upper arm that it was numbed within a minute.
“I’ve missed you, Philippa.” The voice in her ear was too much for her, and she vomited, suddenly and copiously, so that he had to take his hand off her mouth with a shout of shocked anger. “Ugh, clean yourself up,” he snarled, pushing her towards the bucket of water that stood in a corner of the hold. She fell on her knees and buried her face in the wet cloth, letting tears merge with the icy damp.
“Rocky,” she jerked out, looking over to the corner where he lay unconscious, a bleeding wound on the side of his head, seeping out and matting his messy black hair. All the same he looked peaceful, the sleeping boy she liked to just watch during the long nights under canvas. Was he still alive? He was so pale. She tried to crawl over to him, but her path was blocked by Charles Cordwainer, who knelt over her lover’s leatherclad bulk and began tying his wrists in front of him.
“What if you’ve killed him?” She addressed the words to Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Rhodes, who was washing his vomit-stained hands in the b
ucket behind her.
Rhodes shrugged. “What if I have?” The handle of the gun he’d used to knock Rocky out protruded from his jacket pocket. Flipp, in her haze of misery and fear, tried to formulate a plan, to get the gun, to use it against Rhodes and Cordwainer, but her thoughts refused to order themselves and she found herself once again drawn to the corpselike figure of Rocky. Before she could lash out at Cordwainer, Rhodes had hold of her again, and he pushed her down on a bench and handcuffed her hands behind her back.
“Calm down, love,” he said, trying to sound soothing. “It’s all right. I know what’s best for you, Philippa. That’s all I’m trying to do here—I want to help you.”
“Then let me go. And let Rocky go. That’s the only way you can help me. Oh, killing yourself would be good too.”
Rhodes tutted, his head to one side, and put out a hand to stroke Flipp’s cheek.
“You’re still so young, aren’t you? And you don’t understand what you need. You don’t understand what’s good for you. But I do. I always did. Come home with me, love. Come back home.”
“It was never my home.” Flipp was struggling against her breath to get the words out. “It was my prison. You caught me when I was just a kid with nobody to protect me and then you…preyed on me. You’re a fucking vulture. You’ve no shame, and you should have. You should be in prison.”
“I caught your family’s killers for you. I did all of that for you. I protected you. I did it because I love you.”
Flipp turned her head away and let the sobs take their course, transported far away to that awful time, five years ago, when Rhodes had come into her life.
She had only escaped dying in the fire that had destroyed her home and killed her parents because she had stayed out too late at a gig in town. Returning at two o’clock in the morning, wondering why she hadn’t had the usual series of angry, anxious text messages from her mother, she had found a ring of fire engines surrounding the burning shell. She didn’t remember much after that, until Rhodes had come to visit her on the psychiatric ward, to ask her about her father’s involvement with a local crime gang.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she had said sullenly. “I’ve been at boarding school since I was thirteen. I’m only home for the summer holidays.”
But she had known about the late-night meetings and the cars outside with smoked-glass windows. She had known that her mother looked tired and jumped every time the phone rang. She had known enough to feel uneasy.
Eventually she talked to Rhodes. He had been wonderfully supportive, totally committed to catching and jailing her parents’ killers. He had come through for her, given her her day in court, given her closure.
But it wasn’t closure. It was the opening of a whole new Pandora’s box.
On the day the arsonists were sentenced, he had taken her out for a celebration dinner, just the two of them, at a little place in Soho.