“No one.”
Finn thought back to the specific wording of Jonas’s note: APARTMENT WHERE GIBSON IS STAYING. It made more sense now—not a BGS apartment, but the place where Gibson was staying, an apartment that belonged to someone else. How on earth had Jonas found that information?
“Okay, I’ll just wait until no one comes home. I’m in no hurry.”
Urgently, Gibson said, “My partner. I live here with my partner.”
Finn thought of the unused guest room, discounting the idea of a business partner, and said, “Female, male?”
“Male.”
“You don’t want me to hurt him?”
Gibson shook his head. “Please, whatever you do to me, don’t hurt—” He stopped, a protective instinct preventing him from saying the name.
“Taylor’s address.”
“32, rue Cayenne, but you won’t find him there. He’s in Lausanne. He went back this morning. I don’t know where. He said he’d book into a hotel when he got there.”
“Lausanne? You have got to be kidding me—he’s gone back for Hailey? What do you people honestly think a couple of fifteen-year-olds were gonna do with that information? And, Jesus, it’s not like he can stage a second suicide.”
“We’re just following our orders, but Taylor . . . Look, all I know is he was told to go to Lausanne and await instructions. It might be nothing to do with the girl.”
Finn suspected it was everything to do with the girl. This sounded like Ed’s idea of total war, the two kids unwittingly making themselves part of the enemy army. It was just as likely that Perry had targeted them because he’d sensed it would undermine Finn in some way.
With guilty relief, Finn was glad that Adrienne had left, but then Perry wouldn’t have targeted her. The aim of this, as well as Ed’s paranoid views on security, was to unsettle Finn into making a mistake, not antagonize him into retaliation. It was unlucky for Ed that Finn had found his soul this last week.
“You shouldn’t have killed the boy, Steve.”
“I didn’t kill him, I just . . . I would never . . .”
“Then you should have stopped Taylor killing him, or you should have refused to be a part of it. You knew it was wrong.”
Gibson had tears running down his face, or perhaps it was just water from his recent outburst.
“Please, I’m not a bad person.”
“That makes it worse.”
Finn grabbed the cuffs with one hand, pushing Gibson’s arms down against his body, grabbed his throat with the other, and pushed his head under the water. Gibson cried out, the words lost and turning into splutters and bubbles. He kicked out ineffectually, tried to raise his head, twisted his body as if trying to escape from a straitjacket. And all the time, he stared up at Finn and Finn kept staring back at him until the fight had gone out of him and the gaze had become meaningless.
He went into the bedroom and looked in the drawers of the bedside tables. One was full of sex toys, some of them exotic enough that Finn couldn’t even work out how they might be used. He took a couple of the more obvious ones and dropped them into the bath, together with the key from the cuffs.
He went into the kitchen and found a plastic bag, which he put over Gibson’s head, tearing a piece of the plastic free and placing it in one of his cuffed hands. Finn doubted the police would be encouraged to come looking for a killer, and certainly not for him, but this at least gave them an easy scenario—the sex game that had gone wrong.
He washed his hands, put his watch back on, and before leaving he did one more sweep of the apartment. He found Gibson’s phone among his clothes; there were only a couple of names in the contacts—one was probably the boyfriend, the other his parents—and he’d been scrupulous in keeping the phone clean.
He finished up in the study, searching for an address book before discovering Gibson’s one lapse, a scrap of paper with LT and a UK cell number written on it—so maybe Taylor was new to Gibson, flying in specifically for this current operation. Finn put the piece of paper in his pocket.
He noticed a picture on one of the shelves then, of Gibson and his partner, smiling broadly, somewhere up on the ski slopes by the look of it. They looked a happy couple, and looked, in the way a photograph could sometimes reveal, like good people.
But that good man had, at the very least, helped in coercing a fifteen-year-old boy into a basement, in attaching a rope to a beam, had perhaps helped hold the boy’s arms by his sides as Taylor kicked the stool away. Where had his goodness been then?
Chapter Thirty
He took a taxi back to the station and called the Portmans on the way. Debbie answered, and Finn said, “Debbie, it’s Finn. Are you all at home?”
“Yes, of course. Is something wrong?”
“No, I don’t think so, but I want you all to stay inside until I get back, and don’t open the door to anyone.”