James Patterson - Private London

Expensive rugs were positioned around the room. A small TV in the corner. Matching burgundy leather sofas with tartan fabric trimming, and assorted throw cushions. The kitchen beyond was neat, pristine. Polished chrome and pale white wood.

An open door to the side led upstairs, and another ground-floor door was closed. I was about to open it when Del Rio shook his head and raised his pistol once more.

He kicked the door open. A downstairs bathroom. Empty.

Upstairs, Annabelle Weston had converted one of the two bedrooms into a small office. The venetian blind covering the window and the plain wall looked all too familiar. She had filmed Hannah’s pieces to camera for us there.

Thirty minutes later and we had finished searching. Nothing. Hannah couldn’t tell us where the professor had gone, either. She didn’t know.

I’m not a psychiatrist but I could see how easily Hannah could have been manipulated. She must have had a very poor view of men.

A father whom she had considered had abandoned her and who then took advantage of her in the most abusive of ways. She had watched men rape and kill her mother. She had been robbed of her mother’s love and had grown up in a house where she had come to hate her father. Not hard for a vibrant, charismatic and beautiful woman like Annabelle Weston to channel those feelings in other directions.

Not hard for her to turn the young woman’s need for love into something more physical.

Annabelle Weston had left behind a laptop in her office. She must have been so sure that Hannah wouldn’t betray her, and that we wouldn’t be smart enough to put two and two together. Maybe she figured we were onto her before we were. She knew we’d found a witness and had gone to ground.

Del Rio and I hadn’t been able to break the security on the laptop and access her secure files, so Adrian Tuttle had had his second evening of the weekend spoiled. Fifteen minutes after I called him from the professor’s flat he turned up with his dinner date. Five minutes later he told us he couldn’t crack it either.

His dinner date, a painfully shy Australian woman in her mid-twenties, told him to stand aside. In less than sixty seconds she had cracked wide open the security systems that were in place on the professor’s computer.

A blush brightened her cheeks. I could see what Adrian Tuttle saw in her. She had a nice smile, too. Adrian himself was watching her like the cat who’s got the cream.

‘Told you she was good,’ he said.

‘And you were right.’ I smiled at her as she moved aside. ‘Adrian tells me you’ve just finished a doctorate in this kind of stuff.’

‘Yeah,’ she said blushing again.

‘How would you feel about working for the private sector? So happens we have a vacancy in our computer-forensics division.’

‘Fair dinkum?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Very fair dinkum.’

‘I’ll have a think about that, then.’

I nodded. ‘Good.’

Fifteen minutes later, after trawling through all manner of coded files, I hit the mother-lode.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I said out loud.

Half an hour later we were sitting in the conference room.

Up on the screen Professor Annabelle Weston was in her office in mid-counselling session.

Her student and patient sat in the reclining chair. Hannah Shapiro. Her head lolled back, her mouth slightly open, her eyes closed, but a sluggish movement behind them, as the eyes move when searching for a memory. And the professor’s voice: honeyed, silken, soporific. Planting seeds as carefully and deliberately as an Iraqi insurgent building a bomb.

I picked up the remote and paused the tape. I figured Hannah had seen enough.

Hannah shook her head, dragging the back of her right hand across her eyes. Tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘Why would anybody do something like that?’ she asked.

I didn’t reply. I knew exactly why Annabelle Weston had done it. She had taken an already vulnerable young woman and made her even more emotionally wrecked. So she could build her up again and make a tool out of her.

It’s what cults did, it was what oppressive regimes did. Break down a person’s personality, their individuality and mould them into becoming part of a machine.

‘So he never did any of those things?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You were in a heightened state of suggestion. She led you down a series of thoughts that weren’t your own to a conclusion that was entirely hers.’

‘It was so long ago, I was thirteen. I couldn’t remember exactly, because…’ She trailed off.

‘It’s what she was counting on. You had all those bad feelings because of what had happened to your mother, parts of what had happened on that day you recall. She let you think that the abuse had occurred but you had driven them out of your memory because you couldn’t face them.’

‘It’s called False Memory Syndrome, Hannah,’ said Sam. ‘It’s a form of brainwashing.’

‘She used me.’

The sadness in Hannah’s voice was heartbreaking – or it would have been had I not thought of Chloe.

‘You had deep-seated issues with your father, which she exploited. Abandonment issues, betrayal issues. You had a lot of anger. In your eyes he was responsible for what happened to your mother, after all, and at thirteen years old things can seem very black and white in moral terms.’

‘He was to blame! He refused to pay the ransom. It was peanuts and he did nothing!’

‘He thought he was doing the right thing, Hannah. He hired Jack Morgan,’ I reminded her.

‘Who got there too late!’

‘He saved you.’

‘Maybe I’d have been better off dead.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. Jack Morgan didn’t have the resources back then that we do now. He was on his own.’

‘Then my father should have gone to the police.’

‘Do you know what the statistics of surviving a kidnapping are, even if the ransom is paid?’

Hannah shook her head.

‘They’re not good, Hannah. Your father took the national line: you don’t deal with terrorists.’

‘They weren’t terrorists.’

‘They held a gun to yours and your mother’s heads and threatened to kill you if he didn’t pay the ransom. You got a better word for what they did?’

She looked down at the floor again. Taking it all in. Annabelle Weston had been like a second mother to her. Except that she had been betrayed all over again. She looked up, her face wet with tears once more.

‘I believed her.’

‘I know, Hannah. And she’s going to pay for it, I promise you.’

‘And you always keep your promises!’

‘I try.’

‘You promised to look after me.’

‘And it’s what I’m doing. You have the truth, Hannah. You have that, at least. What you do with it is up to you now.’

Hannah nodded, straightened herself and looked at me with something like determination in her eyes.

‘Okay,’ she said.

‘The first tape you made you were play-acting, the second time you weren’t. What happened?’

‘Annabelle…’ Hannah caught herself, the name seemingly tasting like ash in her mouth. ‘She kept me at her flat. She came back excited with the news that my father was flying over.’

I nodded. It was pretty much as I had deduced.

‘She made some calls. Soon after that some people came.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. A woman in a burka and two men with her. But they were deferential to the burka woman. They were like bodyguards.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘I don’t know. They all spoke in Arabic. At least, the women did. The men said nothing. Then they tied me up, properly this time, and left me in Annabelle’s study. She didn’t talk to me again.’