Chapter 4 - The Black Book of Vance
The cold took my breath away in an agonizing gasp. The current beneath the boathouse was vicious, clawing at my soaked tuxedo, pulling me toward the iron teeth of the submerged sluice gate.
I scrambled through the churning water, my shins smashing against submerged wooden beams, until my hands found the slick, freezing steel of the trunk.
The water was already up to the lock. The industrial padlock securing the hasp was thick, case-hardened steel.
*11:56 PM.*
"Marcus, I need the bolt cutters!" I screamed, holding my mouth above the swirling eddy.
"The cutters won't bite this grade of hardened alloy!" Marcus yelled from the catwalk above, struggling with the rusted control panel of the winch. "The gears are stripped! Vivien jammed a steel crowbar into the cogwheel—the sluice is dropping three inches every ten seconds! The whole room will be an airless tank in four minutes!"
Inside the box, the cries had turned into frantic, suffocating coughs as water began to seep through the seams. *"Mama! Open the door!"*
"Hold on, sweetheart!" I yelled, tears mixing with the freezing river water on my face. "Hold on! Uncle Lorenzo is here!"
I remembered my mother’s dying gasp in the Grosvenor corridor: *Take my father’s key! The gun room!*
No—not the gun room. My father had kept an emergency breaching tool in the estate maintenance locker by the dock slip! I lunged toward the wooden wall, tearing away the rotted emergency glass box with my bare hand, ignoring the shards slicing deep into my palm.
My fingers curled around the heavy, iron-headed fire axe.
I spun back to the trunk. The water was now lapping at my chest.
With a roar that tore the lining of my throat, I brought the heavy pick-head of the axe down directly onto the hasp. Sparks flew in the gloom. The metal shrieked, but held.
"Again!" Marcus screamed, dropping from the catwalk into the water beside me, grabbing the chains to take the tension off the lock.
"Die, you bastard!" I screamed, swinging the axe with every ounce of muscle, every drop of hatred, every shred of protective fury left in my body.
*CLANG!*
The hardened staple snapped.
Marcus tore the lid open.
Inside, curled into a ball atop a rising pool of river water, was little Lily. Her lips were blue, her eyes wide with unimaginable terror. I thrust my hands into the box, scooped her shivering, soaked body against my chest, and held her high above the black torrent.
"I have her! Marcus, go!"
Marcus shoved me up onto the wooden catwalk just as the final gear of the winch sheared off with an explosive sound like a gunshot. The iron sluice gate crashed down entirely, sealing the lower dock in a violent vortex of drowning water.
I collapsed onto the dry floorboards outside the boathouse, rolling onto my back, clutching the trembling three-year-old tightly under my coat. She buried her freezing face into my neck, sobbing so violently her tiny body shook.
"You're safe," I whispered, my voice breaking, kissing her wet hair. "You're safe, Lily. It's over."
Behind us, headlights pierced the storm.
Three unmarked police vehicles screeched to a halt on the lawn. Clara, the maid, fell out of the front passenger seat before the car had even stopped, screaming her daughter’s name.
"Lily! Oh God, Lily!" Clara threw herself into the mud beside me, tearing the child into her arms, weeping hysterically, pressing kisses all over the girl's cold cheeks. "Lord Blackwood... you saved her... you saved my baby..."
"She's safe, Clara," I managed to say, sitting up, my hands bleeding, my body shivering from the hypothermic chill. "Vivien will never touch you or your daughter again."
DCI Hammond stepped out of the second car, a foil thermal blanket in her hands. She draped it over my shoulders, her face grim.
"We have Vance in custody at Paddington Green," Hammond said, watching the ambulance crew take Clara and Lily. "And we searched Vivien’s private townhouse in Belgravia."
"What did you find?" I asked, wiping water and blood from my forehead.
Hammond held up an evidence bag containing a weathered, leather-bound journal with the initials *A.S.* stamped on the cover. Arthur Sterling.
"It wasn't just your mother, Lord Blackwood," Hammond said, her voice dropping into a somber whisper. "According to Vance’s confession and the records in this book, your father didn't die of a sudden myocardial infarction four years ago. Vivien was his hospice nurse during his post-operative recovery."
A cold, bottomless void opened in the pit of my stomach.
"She murdered my father," I stated, the words falling like lead weights.
"She poisoned him with low-dose digitalis over eight months," Hammond confirmed. "Then she engineered her encounter with you at the Royal Ascot charity derby six months later. But there's a problem, Lorenzo."
"What problem?" I demanded, rising to my feet, the adrenaline surging back through my veins. "We have the paralytic, we have Vance's confession, we have the child's kidnapping!"
Hammond’s phone buzzed violently in her pocket. She glanced at the screen, and her expression turned to sheer, horrified disbelief.
"The prison transport vehicle," Hammond stammered, looking up at me. "The armored van carrying Vivien from the Grosvenor to the holding facility... it was ambushed on the Westway five minutes ago."
"What?!"
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"A heavy sanitation truck rammed the transport into the median. Armed men with high-caliber rifles terminated the drivers and blew the rear doors off." Hammond swallowed hard. "Vivien is gone."
***