“They’re not.”
He shrugged, as if that proved his point. “And yet you’re willing to believe this guy’s being paid by your father to act as a bodyguard, protect you against kidnappers. How do we even know those two guys were kidnappers?”
“They had guns.” Though now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember seeing guns.
“So? Maybe they were the police. That would explain the body armor. Because why would a kidnapper wear body armor? What, he thought you might be packing a gun?” It troubled her, but he had a point. They didn’t know anything about Lucas, if that was his real name, and they had only his word for it that he’d been paid to protect them, to protect her. “For all we know, he could be out there calling your dad right now and demanding a ransom. What a classic trick for a kidnapper—you convince your victims they’re in danger and that you’re protecting them.”
She thought about it, all the question marks, the apparent unwillingness of Lucas to provide answers for any of them. The sum of their knowledge was that Lucas had been following them, that he’d killed two men without hesitation, that he had false passports with their pictures. All the same, he had an air of someone who was being straight with them.
“I believe him,” she said finally. “If he was lying, he’d have tried to convince us, but he hasn’t. He just assumes we believe him because he’s telling the truth and he can’t see why we wouldn’t believe. I know this is all crazy and, trust me, I really wanna speak to my dad, but I think Lucas is telling the truth.”
Chris looked at her, not saying anything. He nodded then, seeming to accept that she was probably right, and he looked down at the gun. “Then we’re in some really deep shit.”
Ella looked at the gun too, but in her head she was silently correcting him; they weren’t in really deep shit, she was. Whatever this was, sooner or later Chris would be able to walk away from it if he wanted to, and from her.
She had an uneasy feeling, though, that sitting on that night table was a reality she’d been shielded from, a reality that her father hadn’t wanted to taint her childhood or youth. But it had surfaced now, and even if she came through this, if nothing ever happened again, she’d be forever on her guard, always scanning the crowd for another Lucas.
Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of
Kevin Wignall’s
WHO IS CONRAD HIRST?
now on sale at bookstores everywhere!
Dear Anneke,
I should have written to you like this ten years ago and I should have kept writing. The night I found out you were dead, I should have run back to the house and started writing and never stopped. But I ran the wrong way, I never put that loss into words, and all the horrors of the last decade, all the murders—yes, I’m a murderer now, many times over—all of it arose, in one way or another, from that failure.
I can imagine you remonstrating with me, telling me that it was a war zone, that similar horrors befell many of the people who were foolish or unfortunate enough to be in Yugoslavia at that time. It’s true, the shells that fell on you in the market square also fell on countless others, and I was not the only one to get caught up in the fighting, to cross over from observer to participant in the squalid chaos that reigned there.
And I have no doubt that I was scarred by the things I did and saw, but none of it, none of what happened to me excuses my failure to get help and leave that violence behind. None of it excuses my betrayal of the person you knew and everything he stood for.
Think of that person, the English boy who wanted to be a photographer—he was kind, wasn’t he, and gentle and funny? Do you remember him? Then you should hate him, because for the past nine years that same person has been a professional killer, working for a German crime boss, killing people for money be didn’t need, remorseless, empty of any kindness at all.
The most recent was only yesterday afternoon in Chur. Yes, yesterday afternoon I killed a seventy-six-year-old man called Hans Klemperer. I don’t know why they wanted him dead, and at the time I didn’t care. To me, he was no more than a set of instructions, his death no more important a detail than the destruction of his computer.