The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

Rory’s stare slid towards Alex again. They all did. Alex turned away with a gulp of air, his face turned towards the ceiling, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Hate me, then.

‘But that is precisely my point. If this wasn’t to do with her choices,’ Miles said, his voice tremoring with suppressed fear. ‘If she didn’t choose to leave but was taken . . .’ He let the intimation hang in the air. There would be nothing to follow; how would they ever find her out there?

Holly swallowed. ‘Well, then if she was taken, there will be a ransom demand,’ she said calmly, with a poise she didn’t feel. ‘And if so, we will know soon enough.’ She looked around them all. ‘So we should all keep our phones charged and to hand and try to stay where there’s signal. You especially, Miles, as her brother.’

He nodded, looking grateful that someone was listening to him at last. He suddenly looked younger than his twenty-eight years. ‘If it is that . . . if they did take her . . . she’ll know what to do. We had kidnap training when we were kids. Well, teenagers really.’

‘Kidnap training?’ Holly echoed.

‘Yes. Our father arranged for the SAS to teach us what to do in the event of a kidnapping.’

‘Fuck,’ Dev whispered, looking appalled.

Alex looked like he was going to be sick. If he had thought he was used to his employers’ extreme wealth, it was a different ball game to see how it played out in family life. Holly wondered if he was beginning to see now why his lies had been so devastating for Tara, why his betrayal had been so much greater for someone who struggled to trust.

‘So she’ll have a good idea of knowing what to do to get away,’ Miles said, his eyes brightening at the prospect as though this alone meant everything was going to be okay. This course, taken twenty years ago, was going to save the day.

‘I’m not sure we would want her to get away, in the middle of the jungle,’ Jed said quietly, his gaze on the floor. ‘Not without . . . equipment.’

He said ‘equipment’ but Holly suspected he meant ‘weapons’. Or survival kit. ‘Tell us about the trouble you’ve been having with the ranchers,’ she said. ‘What exactly has been going on?’

‘They don’t like that they can’t expand their farms,’ he shrugged. ‘They say the land belongs to Costa Ricans, not rich foreigners. They refuse to recognize the authority of the land purchase.’

‘Refuse, in what way?’

‘They grow their acreage secretly – felling a few trees over here, more over there. They start fires and say they were natural. They ignore fines. Intimidate and harass the rangers. And their families.’

Holly frowned at the stress in his voice on the last word. ‘. . . Yours?’

Jed’s gaze met hers. He nodded.

‘But your son . . .’ She remembered what Tara had said about it not being safe to move Paco, Tara’s desperation to act when she’d returned from seeing him, Jed’s own agitation to return to them and not be helicoptered out of the region to San José; he’d been trying to protect his family. They were especially vulnerable, left alone.

She kneeled down in front of him. ‘Jed, I know you’ve been trying to protect Tara by keeping from her how bad things have been, but I saw how those men hemmed in your car at the clinic and I know we didn’t get that flat from a sharp stone. Trust me, I work in A&E, I know intimidation tactics. But you need to be honest with us now – when you were attacked, do you think they might have been looking for Tara?’

Jed swallowed and she could see the sense of failure in him. ‘. . . Perhaps. Things have got a lot worse since she arrived.’

She felt her heart rate quicken, her mouth become dry. ‘Could they have followed her, do you think, after you were taken back down the mountain?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember much.’ He fiddled again with the wrapped leaves, clutching them tightly like a talisman.

‘But they could have stayed there, watching her . . .? Maybe they deliberately hurt you to separate you both, knowing she’d be easy pickings on her own?’

Jed stared back at her with a haunted look.

‘But she wasn’t on her own,’ Alex interjected. ‘I showed up at the base station and found them both there. We got Jed back down to safety, and she and I continued up to Alto Uren together, to get the medicine for Jed’s son.’

‘So then they followed both of you,’ Miles said.

‘No. We took the microlight for the first leg. There’s no way they could have kept up with us on foot. They couldn’t have known where we were unless, as I said, they’d been listening in on the radio channels.’ His glance only skittered in Rory’s direction.

‘But you were worried enough about the possibility of that, that you deliberately kept quiet,’ Holly argued.

‘Only partly,’ Rory said with sharp sarcasm.

Alex didn’t reply for several moments. He looked like he was trying to keep calm; there was a haunted look behind his eyes. ‘. . . I didn’t have any sense that we were being followed.’

‘But were you looking?’ Holly pressed. ‘Or were you just enjoying being with her again? Maybe you weren’t concentrating in the way you ordinarily would?’

Alex’s eyes narrowed. ‘There wasn’t much that was enjoyable about any of it! Tara wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me. She barely even spoke to me for the first day.’

Rory straightened up, hearing the subtle distinction. ‘But on the second?’

Alex hesitated. ‘. . . There was an incident that changed things.’

‘What kind of incident?’ Miles stepped in, looking fierce.

‘I had a boat I’d hidden away along a particular stretch of the river. It’s a fast-flowing stretch but we were driving each other mad. I decided we could make up time if we covered some miles on the water. But the boat came unstuck as I was getting the oars and she . . . was swept away.’

There was a disbelieving silence. ‘Excuse me?’ Miles asked, his voice hoarse.

‘She was