The Lost
- Автор: Бекетт Саймон
- Серия: Jonah Colley #1
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Orion/Trapeze
- ISBN: 978-1-398-70690-3
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Lost». Краткое содержание книги:
Ten years ago, the disappearance of firearms police officer Jonah Colley’s young son almost destroyed him.
A GRUESOME DISCOVERY
A plea for help from an old friend leads Jonah to Slaughter Quay, and the discovery of four bodies. Brutally attacked and left for dead, he is the only survivor.
A SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH
Under suspicion himself, he uncovers a network of secrets and lies about the people he thought he knew — forcing him to question what really happened all those years ago...
That didn’t stop Fletcher from quibbling. ‘Doesn’t say much for your powers of observation. I thought he was supposed to be a friend of yours?’
‘I’m not the one who confirmed his DNA,’ Jonah shot back.
Call that one a draw.
If there was one aspect of Jonah’s story the DI was most suspicious of, it was his claim not to know who had come onto the boat and saved his life. Fletcher had returned to that time and again, worrying at it to try and prise open a chink in Jonah’s story.
‘So you didn’t get a good look at him?’
‘I had a plastic bag on my head. I was busy trying not to suffocate.’
‘And he didn’t say anything? Nothing to indicate who he was or why he was there?’
‘No, but Gavin had upset some dangerous people. They must have caught up with him.’
Fletcher studied him as though searching for a lie. ‘Then why didn’t he take the ransom money? Why leave a hundred grand behind?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t realise it was there.’
‘So it was just a happy coincidence this individual showed up when he did? Saved your neck and then left, just like that?’
‘It must have been. All I can tell you is I didn’t invite him,’ Jonah said.
Technically, that was true. Jonah didn’t know the intruder’s identity, not for certain. Yet he could remember the way the boat had tipped when it was boarded, the heavy thump from the deck. There had been an impression of size and bulk as the figure had prowled around the cabin, and it would have taken frightening strength to overpower Gavin so quickly. Jonah could recall the feeling he’d had as he lay helpless on the floor, the certainty that his life hung in the balance. And he could remember the soft tapping as the blurred figure stood over him. While he’d been fighting for breath at his feet, the intruder had been calmly sending a text. Jonah could only think of one reason for that.
To ask instructions.
He couldn’t say for sure how Eliana Salim’s bodyguard had found him, or why he’d chosen that moment to intervene. But it would have been simple enough to install a location tracking app on the phone she’d given him. That had disappeared along with Gavin, but Jonah guessed it wouldn’t have been too difficult to set up the phone’s microphone to eavesdrop remotely. Salim could have heard everything Gavin said and told her bodyguard when to step in. Just as she’d told him to leave Jonah’s phone behind, so he could call for help for the twins. He didn’t know if Gavin was already dead when the bodyguard carried him from the boat, but after meeting Salim he didn’t think so. She’d want her sister’s killer taken alive.
Especially when she discovered who it was.
It still bothered him that he’d withheld any mention of Eliana Salim or her bodyguard. But each time he’d been tempted to tell Fletcher about them, he’d come up against the same objections. He’d no proof, either that Salim was alive or that any of what she’d told him was true. He didn’t even know what name she was using. And even if he was believed, Jonah couldn’t see what use the information would be.
Balanced against that was the knowledge that he owed his life and those of the twins to her intervention. Betraying her trust would be a shoddy repayment, especially if it put her in danger from whatever faceless people she’d been scared of. Jonah didn’t know how or why, but instinctively he knew that telling anyone about Salim would be a bad mistake. So would crossing her.
Just ask Gavin.
Standing outside the warehouse fence, Jonah shivered. The plastic sheets covering the scaffolding billowed and snapped, as though the building underneath were breathing. Below it a section of the façade had been sandblasted, clearing away centuries of grime to reveal pale stone underneath. A literal airbrushing of the past. But it didn’t matter how the developers rebranded this place, Jonah thought, turning away. It would always be Slaughter Quay to him.
As he retraced his steps to where the barges were moored, a now-familiar heaviness weighed on him. There were unanswered questions over more than Gavin’s fate. The third warehouse victim remained unidentified, and was likely to stay that way. Gavin had said the man had been a rough sleeper, a random victim killed for no other reason than to muddy the waters over Nadine Salim’s and Daniel Kimani’s murders. A still-young man, probably Eastern European, though even that was uncertain. No one had come forward to claim him, and Gavin’s callous dismissal had proved all too accurate. Somebody no one would miss.
It was a sad epitaph.
But it was another, unlikely victim who weighed heaviest on Jonah’s conscience. Owen Stokes’s body still hadn’t been found, and Jonah didn’t think it ever would be. Gavin had said it was weighted down at the bottom of the river, and there was no reason to doubt that he’d been telling the truth. About that, or the way Stokes had died. No matter that Gavin had orchestrated it, or that Jonah believed he’d been fighting for his own life and that of Nadine Salim, the cold fact remained.
He’d killed an innocent man.
He’d been told there wouldn’t be any charges. There was no actual evidence that Owen Stokes was dead, and even if there was, the intent and the crime had been Gavin’s, not his. Even Fletcher didn’t hold him to account over Stokes’s death. But that didn’t change what had happened, or how Jonah felt. Duped or not, he’d blood on his hands.
That was something else he’d have to learn to live with.
He was back at the tethered barges. They bobbed sluggishly on the oily water, a flock of squat ugly ducklings with the dirty swan of the larger barge riding behind. Jonah went to sit on a low wall nearby, where he could see its faded name: The Oracle.
Picking a piece of crumbling mortar from the wall, he flicked it into the water. The thought of Gavin’s betrayal was still raw. That a man he’d trusted, once called his best friend, could have known what had happened to Theo and yet said nothing, remained unfathomable.
The case was being reassessed in the light of the new information, but Jonah didn’t hold out much hope. Even if it was reopened, too much time had passed. The CCTV footage from the park that morning, which might have confirmed that the woman with the pram was Ana Donauri, had been wiped years before. Without that, or any other proof, all they had to go on was hearsay. Gavin’s word, and how ironic was that?
The Theo-shaped hole that had opened that morning at the park was still as dark and empty as ever. It sat at Jonah’s centre, a void that would never be filled. He would tell himself that at least now he was closer to the truth. But then Gavin’s words would come back to him and take the pain to a whole new level.
Of course they fucking killed him.
He’d known that there was no chance his son could still be alive, not after all this time. But hearing Gavin so casually confirm it left a wound too deep to heal. And festering in it was still the awful canker of not knowing. Not knowing if Theo had suffered before he’d died, of what had been done to him. Of how scared his tiny scrap of a boy must have been.
Yet regardless of whether or not the case was reopened, for the first time Jonah felt in his heart there was at least the possibility of answers. The people who had actually abducted Theo might be dead themselves, but there were still the ones above them. The faceless power brokers, whose decisions had sealed fates and ended lives. Including his son’s. Jonah didn’t know how he could find them, but if Eliana Salim had given him Ana Donauri’s name, then she must know others. Finding Salim again wouldn’t be easy, but it was a place to start.