Nightside 07 - Hell to Pay

spoil or take away.”
    I couldn’t have stopped him talking if I’d tried. He’d held this bottled up inside him for years, and he would have told it to anyone who found him here. Because he had a terrible need to tell it to someone…
    “That’s why I started body-building as a teenager,” said William Griffin, still not looking at me. “So I could have some control over some part of my life, even if it was only the shape of my body. By then I knew I wasn’t up to running the family business. I knew that long before my father did. I liked to think…I might have managed some smaller triumph if I’d been left to myself. If I’d been left to choose my own way, follow my own interests. But the Griffin couldn’t bear to have a son who was anything less than great.
    “These days, I’m just a glorified gopher, there to deal with all the things my father can’t trust to anyone who isn’t family. We both pretend I’m someone important, but everyone knows…I carry out the policy he sets, but God help me if I should ever dare to make even the smallest decision on my own. I move papers from one place to another, talk to people with my father’s voice, and every day I die a little more. Do you have any idea what that’s like, for an immortal? To die by inches, forever and ever…
    “For a while I filled my time by indulging my senses and my pleasures…I must have belonged to every private club in the Nightside, at one time or another. Tried everything they had to offer…and everyone. But while that distracted, it never satisfied.”
    He turned suddenly to look at me, and his eyes were dark and angry and dangerous. “You can’t tell anyone about this, Taylor. About me, being here. With my friends. People wouldn’t understand. They’d think me weak, and try to take advantage. And my father…really wouldn’t understand. I don’t think he ever needed anything in his life. In fact, it’s hard to think of the mighty and powerful Jeremiah Griffin ever having had anything as normal and vulnerable as a childhood. This is the only thing I have that he isn’t a part of. The only place I can be free of him.”
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “Your father doesn’t need to know about this. He hired me to investigate Melissa, not you. I’m only interested in what you can tell me about your daughter and her disappearance.”
    “I wanted to be a father to her,” said William, his eyes lost and far away again. “A good father, not like Jeremiah. I wanted her to have the childhood I never had. But he took her away, and after that I was only allowed to see her when Jeremiah said so. I think Melissa sees him as her real father. Her daddy. I spent years trying to reach out to her…but even when I timed my visits so Jeremiah wasn’t there, somehow Melissa was never there either. She’d always just gone out…Hobbes is my father’s man, body and soul. He runs the Hall, and no-one gets past him. In the end…I just stopped trying.”
    He looked at me, and there was something beaten, and broken, in his face. “I don’t hate my father, you know. Don’t ever think that. He only ever wanted what he thought was best for me. And for so long…all I wanted was for my father to be proud of me.”
    “All sons do,” I said.
    “What about your father? Was he proud of you?”
    “At the end,” I said. “I think so, yes. When it was too late for either of us to do anything about it. You know about my mother…”
    William smiled for the first time. “Everyone in the Nightside knows about your mother. We all lost someone in the Lilith War.”
    “Do you believe Melissa was kidnapped?” I said bluntly.
    He shook his head immediately. He didn’t even have to think about it. “How could she have been, from inside Griffin Hall, with all our security? But she couldn’t have run away, either. There was no way she could have got out of the Hall without someone noticing. And where could she have run to, where could she go, where they wouldn’t know who she was? Someone would have been bound to turn her in, either for the reward or to our enemies, as a way of getting back at Father.”
    “Unless someone else in the family was involved,” I said carefully. “Either to help her escape or to override the security so she could be taken…”
    William was shaking his head again. “She has no friends in the family, except perhaps Paul. And nobody would risk interfering with the security that protects us.”
    “Who would