Brian Freemantle - Two Women

Jane said: ‘You need gas.’

‘I’ve got enough to get there and back to the cabin.’

‘What about back to New York?’

‘I thought we’d probably go in their car.’

‘It would be a delay, if that’s not how they plan it. Irritating.’

‘I guess you’re right,’ agreed Jane, seeing the Shell sign ahead although on the other side of the road. She filled up and had to lean back into the car to take cash from her satchel.

As she got back into the car Jane said: ‘That bag’s full of money!’

‘I left New York in a hurry… didn’t know at first where I was going, what I might need… didn’t want to use credit cards…’

Jane moved, as if to say something, but didn’t.

Alice knew the pharmacy, attached to the small supermarket that she and John had used, in a mall on the outskirts of the small township. As Jane paid she said to Alice: ‘I need to go to the restroom right away.’

‘I’ll wait,’ said Alice, although she didn’t. She’d already isolated the pregnancy-testing kits, picking the first on the shelf at random, and as an afterthought she took up a tube of toothpaste from an adjoining display.

‘Bought something?’ queried Jane when she emerged, nodding to the plastic bag in Alice’s hand.

‘Toothpaste,’ said Alice, glad she had provided herself with the excuse.

‘You know what?’

‘What?’

Jane indicated her own package. ‘False alarm. Just spotting.’

‘Probably everything that’s happened.’

‘That’s what I think.’

They walked back out into the car park side by side. Alice almost automatically checked her watch and Jane said: ‘We’ve been gone exactly thirty-five minutes.’

‘OK,’ smiled Alice. That’s how she could think now, she reassured herself. Of everything happening – and being over – in minutes.

Jane said: ‘You want to do me a favour? Let me drive! That stick shift I had really was fun.’

‘It’s a pretty stiff box.’ Still in so much danger it was bizarre standing here in a car park discussing gearboxes!

‘Come on! It’s only just up the road.’

‘OK,’ shrugged Alice. Just get everything over, that’s all she wanted to do. Just minutes.

Jane couldn’t get the car into reverse and ground the gears as she followed Alice’s instructions and the Volkswagen shuddered unevenly backwards and then kangarooed forwards when Jane selected first gear. Jane said: ‘Sorry… sorry…’ and got into second and then third much more smoothly. She swung easily out on to the mountain road but almost at once, at the junction, made a left.

‘No!’ said Alice. ‘This isn’t the way to the cabin. This is the Stockholm road.’

‘I know. I saw the sign on the way down, which is why I’ve taken it,’ said Jane, accelerating, eyes fixedly forward. ‘We’re not going back to the cabin, not yet anyway. I think you and I have got much much more to talk about, don’t you, Alice?’

When Alice didn’t reply Jane said: ‘When you next speak to Gene Hanlan you can tell him you were tricked. And that now it’s you who’s been kidnapped.’

The FBI spotter plane was disappointing. The pilot complained thermal updrafts made it difficult to fly as low as he needed, for a satisfactory search, which was further hampered by thick forest ground cover over wide tracts of the mountain range. Neither he nor the observer had seen a single vehicle resembling a Volkswagen. After two flights Hanlan suspended the aerial search but kept the plane on standby.

It was not until just after nine thirty that Hanlan was finally able to relay the licence number and specifications of Alice’s light-grey vehicle to Patrick McKinnon, who estimated that they were still thirty minutes short of West Milford. Hanlan duplicated the vehicle details to the relevant Highway Patrol offices and all police forces in a twenty-mile-wide arc between Paterson and West Milford. He also copied everything to Highway Patrol and state police headquarters at Trenton.

When McKinnon came back on the line Hanlan was telling the Northcote firm’s lawyer Geoffrey Davis of his conversation with Jane Carver, anxious to discover if she had instructed the man to oppose legal access to the Citibank safe deposit, which she hadn’t. Hanlan said he’d call back.

‘They were ahead of us again,’ announced McKinnon. ‘They took down the Snelling mailbox marker: we overshot first time. Place has been ransacked. Not as bad as the photographs we saw of Litchfield but close.’

‘Any signs of violence… blood…?’

‘None. There should be forensics, though. We’ve driven over their car tracks but there should be something left.’

‘I’ll send up the guys we brought back from Washington,’ said Hanlan. ‘They’re due to finish what little was left at Litchfield and Brooklyn. What about the Volkswagen?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘It would be there, if they’d been grabbed. They’re still running, together.’

‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ said McKinnon. ‘What do you want us to do?’

Hanlan wished he knew. ‘Leave a couple of guys to see nothing gets touched. Make a base in the town, ready to move. I’ll put the plane up again: hope something comes from the road checks.’ He wished to Christ there was something more practical he could do than sit around hoping.

Barbara Donnelly said: ‘Why have they done it?’

‘Maybe it’s a good job they did,’ said Ginette, when Hanlan recounted his conversation with McKinnon. ‘If they’d been there, we might have found bodies.’

The forensics team had finished what little was left for them to do. Because of the initial dismissal of both as accidents, the Bureau reinvestigation of the deaths of George Northcote and Janice Snow was largely restricted to autopsies, although by dismantling the lock of Janice’s apartment – as they had in Princes Street – the scientists found unquestionable evidence of the lock having been picked. A Bureau pathologist at Brooklyn also established from the direction of the bone-splintering that it would have been impossible for Janice Snow to have broken her fingers falling from her supposed hanging. The beginning of decomposition made a positive finding difficult but from the detailed medical examination of George Northcote it appeared that the multiple lacerations to the face and head – wounds which were belatedly discovered to have blinded the man – were more likely to have been caused by a blade thinner and sharper than that of the cutting machine into which Northcote was alleged to have fallen.

‘Nothing I’d like to go into court with but they weren’t accidents,’ the forensics leader told Hanlan. ‘What are we looking for in the cabin?’

‘Anything,’ said Hanlan, exasperated. ‘Anything at all. Just make it something I can work from!’

The two Mafia consiglieri had been informed of every word exchanged between Gene Hanlan and Patrick McKinnon because the Cavalcante searchers in the Bearfort Mountains were getting perfect scanner reception on McKinnon’s cellphone. It also gave them all the details of Alice Belling’s Volkswagen, which were duplicated within thirty minutes of Hanlan providing them to the Highway Patrol headquarters at Trenton, where the Cavalcante Family had a paid informer in the communications room.

Tony Caputo said: ‘We can’t have missed them by much.’

‘We still missed them,’ said Charlie Petrie. He needed to stay here in Trenton, hear at once what was happening, but he was desperate to get back to Manhattan and convene a conference with the other New York Families. It was obvious what had to be done with the Belling woman. But how – what pressure could they use? – to get Carver’s wife to retrieve what was in the safe-deposit vault?