“Thank you for your time, Maxwell,” Kidd said. At least they had a path for Mason. He didn’t even make it inside the club, so it was one less thing for them to look for on the CCTV. “Which way did he go?”

  Maxwell pointed down the street, off towards a road. He could have gone anywhere. Kidd looked around and saw the CCTV cameras above the door. He hoped that they would be good enough to catch the end of the road, or at least give them some idea as to where Mason had gone.

  “Janice is inside,” Maxwell said. “She’s working behind the bar today, but… she’ll be able to confirm everything I said. We have an incident book. It went in there. Everything always does.”

  Kidd didn’t necessarily believe that, but he took him at his word and he and Zoe made their way inside.

  The people dotted around the bar weren’t paying them much attention as they walked in, engrossed in their own intense conversations. The music wasn’t too loud, just a little bit of light jazz in the background, so people were keeping their voices low, trying to keep whatever it was they were saying private.

  “So we know he was here,” Sanchez said. “That’s all confirmed.”

  “The question is, where did he go next?” Kidd asked. “The credit card charges stop here, so wherever he went after that is where he’s got to now.”

  They made their way over to the bar. A woman with short purple hair was sitting behind it, doing something on her phone. She hadn’t looked up when they walked in; she was barely looking up now they’d made it to the bar, finishing whatever she was doing on her phone before fixing the two detectives with a smile.

  “What can I get for you?” she asked, her accent northern, cheerful.

  It wasn’t what Kidd had been expecting, the friendliness of her tone taking him by surprise.

  “If you’ve not had a chance to look at the menu yet,” she went on, “we’ve got a lovely selection of cocktails or mocktails, whatever tickles your fancy. Or beers and wines.”

  “We’re actually not looking for a drink,” Kidd said. “I’m Detective Inspector Benjamin Kidd. This is Detective Sergeant Sanchez. We’re looking for Janice Tate.”

  “That’s me,” she said, her tone serious and the customer service smile slipping from her face. “What can I help you with?”

  Kidd told her why they were there, and shared the information that they’d received from Maxwell. She took it in, nodding occasionally, looking past them to see Maxwell standing outside. Kidd hoped that he wasn’t getting him into too much trouble.

  “As we understand it, he never made it into the bar,” Kidd said. “But we were hoping that we would be able to check your CCTV from Friday night. It might give us some indication of where he went next.”

  “Why here?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you want to check our CCTV?”

  “This was the last place that appeared on his credit card statement,” Kidd said. “We are trying to trace his movements. This is as far as we’ve got.”

  Janice nodded, looking out at the tables of people, and then back at the detectives. “I can… I can leave the bar for a few minutes, sure,” she said.

  She took them through to a back room, one with an old computer in it and bottles of spirits lining the walls. It was part stock room, part office, and it was swelteringly hot.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she said as she stepped inside, wiggling the mouse to wake up the computer and show them the screen split into multiple camera angles.

  “That one,” Kidd said, pointing at the one outside, the one that showed them the rest of the street and out to the road. It was as he’d hoped it would be, something clear, something that would give them some direction.

  They gave Janice the time that the transaction had gone through, and within a few clicks, they were on the right camera, full screen, watching as she scrubbed through the footage and got them to where they needed to be. Kidd held his breath as he watched Mason and his group come onto the screen. He watched as Selena and several others all got patted down and were let into the club.

  Then the chaos broke out. Kidd watched as Mason tried to launch himself into the club past Maxwell. He was then hurled onto the street. He stumbled, smacking into the pavement, rolling around in agony. Maxwell hesitated, watching, waiting until Mason got up, then he shouted something at him.

  Mason stumbled away, and Maxwell went back to his job, checking people over, letting them into the club. Most people seemed to be fine. There was another person who was turned away, so it’s not like he had been discriminating against Mason specifically. It must have really been their policy.

  He kept his eyes on Mason, watching as he made his way down the street. The cobbles were really playing havoc with his feet. He could barely stay upright, stumbling, almost tumbling, as he made his way away from the club.

  A car pulled up at the end of the street, black, towering, a four-by-four. Kidd couldn’t quite see what kind of car, just an SUV, shining in the dark. He watched Mason look up and then ignore it.

  “Fucking hell,” Zoe breathed, watching as two people hurried from the car and grabbed hold of him, dragging him towards the vehicle. Mason tried to pull away, but they were stronger than him, or he was too drunk to properly resist them.

  One of them grabbed hold of him, cracking him in the face with their own forehead. It was enough to knock him out. They bundled him into the back of the car and drove away.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pippa Cooke was not happy to have had her day disturbed at the Kingston location of Cooke Hotels. While she had agreed to have a meeting with DCs Janya Ravel and Ashley Hale, it was clear from the second they walked into her office that they were not welcome.

  She was frazzled, and the state of her office pointed to the level of chaos that Pippa seemed to be living in at that present moment. The way she’d ushered them into the office, away from the prying eyes of the rest of the staff, told Janya that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t too thrilled about the attention her family was getting. But who would be?

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m not trying to be a bitch, it’s just that everything is a lot right now and I feel like I keep putting out fires. By the time I’ve put one out, three more have popped up and…” She let out a breath, closing her eyes and doing some kind of weird breathing thing to get herself back to some kind of centre. She opened her eyes and fixed the two detectives with a thin-lipped smile. “Sorry. Welcome to my life. Please take a seat.”

  There were two seats opposite Pippa’s desk, one of only three surfaces that weren’t covered in pieces of paper. The other surface was Pippa’s desk chair. No wonder she was stressed, how anyone could make head or tail of anything in an office like this was beyond Janya.

  “Thank you for agreeing to speak with us,” Janya started. “I know you’re incredibly busy⁠—”

  “Well, yes,” Pippa interrupted. “Besides this, I’ve got media enquiries to follow up with, I’ve got staff to calm down because…” Another pause, another deep breath.

  Pippa seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown. Janya could practically see the weight of the company resting on her shoulders. Whether it had been put there by her father or by herself was another story entirely.

  “We just need to speak to you about your brother,” Janya said. “We’re trying to get a sense of him, anywhere he might have got to, and what your relationship with him might have been like.”

  Pippa swallowed, the mention of Mason seeming to put a pause on the imminent breakdown. “My brother,” she said, voice quiet but not unkind. There was a warmth there. “It’s been days. Like, we aren’t the kind of siblings that talk every day or anything like that, but if we needed each other for anything, we would drop everything and be there, you know? This has been difficult.”

  “I can understand that,” Janya said.

  “We didn’t always see eye to eye, but you just never think of him… vanishing,” she said. “He was always going to be there, a perpetual pain in my arse, but still. It’s difficult. And my parents aren’t exactly helping matters. It’s difficult.” She looked between the two detectives. “I imagine you’ve both figured out pretty sharpish that my family isn’t exactly what you’d call functional.”

  Janya smiled at that. “All families have their difficulties.”

  “Yeah, they do, but not everyone has their family difficulties written about in newspapers,” she said. “In some ways, it makes it worse, makes you feel like you are completely alone in things like this, even when you might not be. I’m sure everyone who has siblings gets driven absolutely spare by them sometimes. I’m no different in that respect.”

  “I suppose not,” Janya said. “Can you tell us about Mason? A little bit more about your relationship with him, perhaps?”

  Pippa seemed to have calmed down, and Janya had managed to get the focus to be firmly on Mason, which felt like a decent amount of progress given the state she’d been in when they got there.

  “I don’t really want to speak ill of him,” Pippa said, lowering her voice a little like there might be someone listening on the other side of the door. “We didn’t always see eye to eye, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. I mean… he’s my brother.”

  “Of course,” Janya said. “But we’re just trying to get a picture of him and the people in his life. Hopefully, it will help us figure out where he’s got to and the quickest way we can get him to come back.”

  “You think he’s alright?” she asked. “I think that’s what scares me the most, is that someone could be doing this to hurt Mason, or to hurt my dad or my mum by using Mason. I don’t know. It’s all… It’s a lot.”

  “Let’s start with you and Mason, and we’ll see where we get to,” Janya said. “Like I said, we’re just trying to paint a picture here.”

  “Of course, of course,” Pippa said. “It’s a bit complicated. There are two Masons, in a way. There’s the one who’s my brother, who is there for me and a pretty decent person and then there is the one who is my colleague, the one who is about to inherit this company even though he couldn’t give a flying fuck about it.”

  Janya could practically feel the temperature in the room go up a few clicks as she spoke about the company. Remembering their briefing about the conversation that Kidd and Sanchez had with Mrs Cooke, she had expected the conversation to lead to this. Now, they were going to get Pippa’s side of the story.

  “Let’s go for the Mason you worked with,” Janya said. “I think you’ve made it very clear that you care about your brother, that the two of you had a pretty decent relationship.”

  Pippa considered this, almost like she wasn’t quite sure if it was an accurate assessment. “I think it was strained,” she said. “When you’re a Cooke, you can’t really separate one from the other because, eventually, the two things are going to intersect. And where ours intersected was enough to drive a wedge between us.”

  “How so?”

  Pippa sighed, looking at her office like she was seeing it for the first time, like she was only just taking in the mess and the chaos that surrounded her.

  “Mason is the oldest. He was always going to be the one to inherit this company,” Pippa said slowly, like she was choosing her words very carefully, trying not to incriminate herself, make her seem like the kind of person who would kidnap her brother for her own gains. She had to know that was a working theory.

  Janya knew how intelligent she was. She would have put two and two together and come out at four.

  “And,” Pippa went on, “as someone who has spent an awful lot of time building this company with my father, putting new processes in place, helping with expansion across the country, starting to consider international arms of the chain, I feel somewhat shafted by the idea that I am going to be sidelined.”

  “How did you come to find that out?”

  “Dad told me outright,” she said flatly. “It was only a couple of years ago, he took me and Mason to one side and said one day all of this will be ours, everything the light touches, all of that Lion King-esque bullshit. Mason wasn’t interested. Mason doesn’t want to work. He loves his life. He loves to… to be free.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I think you need to work for your freedom sometimes,” she replied. “And the freedom tastes all the better when you’ve spent some time breaking your back to get there. Mason never got that. Mason just wants to live the high life with little to no responsibilities, and he made sure that Dad knew that. And I thought that would be it. I’ve spent all of these years proving myself over and over again. Dad would reward me by giving me the top job.” She shook her head. “But no. That was not to be the plan.”

  “So your dad told you that you weren’t going to get the job?” Ash asked.

  “I was going to be a glorified assistant,” Pippa said sharply. “Dad wasn’t pushing me out of the company, not at all. He just made it incredibly clear that no matter how much work I do, no matter how hard I push myself, so long as Mason is in the picture, I will be in the background. He will be the head and the face of the company.”

  “So, what are Mason’s feelings about the company?”

  “He doesn’t care,” Pippa said. “No matter what happens, no matter how many incentives Dad tries to give to him, it just doesn’t matter. That’s why he does what he does, it’s why he goes out drinking and partying. Dad can’t stop him. He can try all he likes, but nothing he does seems to convince Mason to buck up and crack on.” Pippa took a steadying breath, placing her hands on the desk in front of her like it was the only thing tethering her there. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here. He’s determined to piss this legacy away and I feel like I’m fighting to keep it all alive, fighting to keep myself in the frame. But he has no interest in any of that. Make of that what you will.”

  Janya considered it for a moment. There was every possibility that Pippa could be the one pulling the strings, the one who got Mason out of the way so that she could step up, take over. But something about the way she was telling the story told Janya that maybe that wasn’t quite the case. She cared for the company, maybe not for her father and the way he was conducting himself, but she certainly cared about the legacy he had built. Maybe that was the route to take next.

  “Can you tell us more about your father?” Janya said.

  Pippa smirked. “I hate him,” she said. “You need any more than that?”

  Janya couldn’t help but chuckle. It was blunt and had definitely caught her off guard. “We may need a little bit more, yes,” she said.

  “Alright then,” Pippa said. “Let’s talk about him.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kidd made sure to get a copy of the CCTV from Neapolitan, getting it sent across to the team back in Kingston. It was the best that they could do, but it had given them a heading. Mason Cooke had been kidnapped. He had been taken away by two people in a black vehicle that, from a distance, Kidd couldn’t quite make out, but if they could get onto Westminster Council or one of the local businesses nearby and get some CCTV, they may be on to something.

  They did the rounds at the various businesses in the surrounding area, checking in with people and their CCTV providers. Some didn’t have any at all, which Kidd thought was reckless, and several had them outsourced to different companies, which they were given contact details for. It was going to create a lot of busy work, but at least they would be moving things forward.

  The next thing to do would be to break the news to Weaver and then to the family. It would likely be enough to send the media absolutely spare. If they were already worried about the millionaire’s son going missing, imagine what kind of field day they’d have when they found out he’d been kidnapped.

  “At least we know,” Sanchez said. “I know it’s not the ideal outcome, but now we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “I know,” Kidd said. “But we don’t know who, and until some kind of ransom note appears, it’s all up in the air. We don’t know what they want. It could be anything.”

  “You think Joshua Cooke is a man with secrets to exploit?”

  “It would be wrong of me to make such a judgment,” Kidd replied.

  “That’s a yes, then,” Sanchez replied with a laugh. “So we need to look more into him, perhaps?”

  “I’d say so,” Kidd said. “There may be things that he’s not telling us, enemies that maybe haven’t quite come to light yet.”

  “You think he’s got enemies?”

  “You met the guy, Zo, I’d say I’m his enemy at this point,” he said. “Let’s get back to the station, see if they’ve managed to get anything out of Pippa. Weaver is going to lose his bloody mind at this.”

  “Hey, it’s progress at least,” she said. “He was asking you to get things moving. I’d say the wheels are fully in motion now.”

  “Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it?” Kidd deadpanned.

  His phone started buzzing in his pocket. He took it out to see POWELL in big white letters across the front. He answered it.

  “Powell, tell me something good,” Kidd said. But he didn’t. What he told him was far from good.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “All you really have to do is look online at those company review websites to see what it’s like to be employed by my dad,” Pippa said.

  Janya was surprised she was being so candid, but maybe she was at the end of her rope, maybe she’d been asked to clear up one too many of her brother’s messes, and this was her opportunity to trash him. Janya only hoped that the media didn’t get near her. Joe Warrington would have an absolute field day if he managed to talk to her.

 

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