“No, why would she be?”
“Do you know that for sure?”
“No, but—”
“Did you do as Ned asked, did you find out who she was, did you give him her name?”
“Yes.”
“Carolyn was killed in a hit-and-run three days after the press interview, three days after she called out to Ned, asking where Justine was.”
“Christ.” He rubs his chin, runs his hand through his hair. I see the doubt in his eyes, the questions he’s asking himself.
He gets to his feet and walks out of the shed. I don’t know where he’s gone, or why he’s gone, I don’t know if I should go after him. But before I can do anything, he comes back with his phone and stands in the doorway, looking down at the screen, searching for something.
“Thank God.” He closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “She’s okay, she’s fine. I found her Instagram, she posted yesterday.”
I hear the shake in his voice and I’m ashamed of what I did. But it’s too late to take it back.
“I’m so sorry about Carolyn,” he says quietly. “I could do with some water—would you like some?”
“Yes, please.”
“Do you want to come into the house? I have a fully functioning kitchen.”
“No, I’ll stay here, thanks.”
“Okay.”
He leaves, and I wipe sweaty palms on my jeans. It’s getting hotter in the shed but I don’t want to leave the semidarkness. I don’t want him to be able to see my face in case he sees how hard it is for me to be near him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He comes back with two bottles of water and throws one to me from the doorway.
“Thanks.” I unscrew the top, take a drink.
I wait for him to sit down but he stays standing.
“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.”