by John Connor
‘He poisoned her?’
She nodded. ‘She told me that.’
‘Is she alive still? Did you call the police or …’
She shook her head. Then started to cry, softly.
‘Let’s go in,’ he said. ‘I need to check her …’
‘She died right then.’ She screwed her eyes up. ‘She died while I was stroking her hair. She was trying to tell me things. She started convulsing. I couldn’t stop it …’
They went back in and he did it all again, checking for signs of life, going through the motions. When he was finished he stood up and walked back to the doorway, where Sara was standing, head down, still crying.
‘She spoke to you?’ he forced himself to ask, again. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’
‘What did she say – about the poison, I mean?’ He was trying to get to grips with it, thinking that if the Belgian police arrived any minute now it would make a massive difference to everything if the man out there really had killed this woman. He looked around the floor for anything that might have been used to poison her – a syringe, perhaps – but couldn’t see anything beyond the mess. ‘Did she say anything else about the poison?’ he asked again. How did Alison Spencer know she had been poisoned? There must be a clue. Or maybe the guy told her that. Or she felt the effects. But what would he use to poison her?
He was being cold-blooded, he thought. But there wasn’t time for sympathy and consolation. Not right now. He was in a perilous situation. Or was he? In actual fact he had done nothing wrong at all. The man had slipped and fallen. ‘Sara,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me, please? What did she say – all of it?’ He put a hand on her arm. She looked up at him, her face a mask of twisted grief and shock. ‘She didn’t say anything about how he did it,’ she muttered, the words coming out indistinctly. ‘But she told me something else.’
27
John Lomax was in his kitchen, just finishing the preparations on a cod and bacon dish he’d first found in a Jamie Oliver book. Only now he hadn’t been able to find the cookbook, so he was going from memory. He was beginning to think he’d forgotten something important. It was meant to be a quick meal for himself and Rachel. She was on lunch break from a shift at New Charing Cross Hospital – only a five-minute walk from his riverside flat, so she wasn’t desperately pressed, but he didn’t want to spend the whole time in the kitchen. Her visit was the high point of today – the only bit he had been looking forward to. He wasn’t rushed at all, of course, because since he’d retired he had nothing to do. Not really. A year and a half ago he’d been looking forward to doing nothing, but now it was driving him mad. He was filling the time with going through the old Grenser files, but there was something desperate about that. And messing around with food wasn’t going to keep him sane.
The cookbook had promised, he recalled, that the meal would be ready – from start to finish – in thirty minutes, but he’d already spent fifteen minutes trying to tie little pieces of string round the cod and bacon bundles. Also, he couldn’t remember whether the parcels were meant to be wrapped in foil or not. Surely something like that, otherwise the white wine would just cook off and wouldn’t steam the fish. Or was the white wine from another recipe that he was muddling with this one? Maybe the string too. He was getting annoyed with it. He had arthritis in the joints of his little fingers – not a new thing, this had started over ten years ago – which made fiddly stuff like this a bit difficult, and anyway, it was all a waste of time, trivia. What did it matter what they ate?
The kitchen was open-plan with the rest of the downstairs space and from where he was standing, at the dividing bar, he could see the television screen in the opposite corner of the room. Rachel was lounged on the sofa in front of it, watching the midday news, drinking a coffee. She still had her white coat on, the stethoscope and hospital ID tag hanging around her neck. She looked relaxed, the coat unbuttoned – showing the open-necked blouse beneath, the bare skin at her throat. She had her long legs up on the couch, half tucked under her, but he could still see a lot of them. There was something illicit about it, in his head. Still, after all these years, and even though he was retired. Because she had been a victim in one of his cases. One of his cases – that was a laugh. As if Grenser could be ranked level with anything else he’d done. If only.
It was illicit, but what was he to do? She was a victim, yes, she was saddled with that burden, it was always there, between them. She lived with the crushing weight of it, it was the element she lived within. But life went on within it. That was the brutal, absurd truth, for her, for him, for all survivors. She still had her life to live, and was living it. And she was still a woman. For him, an extremely attractive woman. Too thin for most, he was aware, but he had always gone for women like that. He hated fat, and most women over forty got fatter in certain areas. It was a natural process. But not Rachel. She did too much worrying to put on weight. She was tall too – his own height, just under six foot. Of course, that her hair was bone-white – it had turned that way in the first year after Lauren’s disappearance – shouldn’t really be something positive. To him it made her look like some tall, leggy, Scandinavian blonde. His imaginary take on her – because white wasn’t blonde, and her hair had been dark. Her body was fit and lean because she had started an obsessive exercise regime about fifteen years ago – originally a therapy to help get her past the downers – so even that was something loaded with the shadow of the past. And you could see twenty-two years of acute anxiety etched into her face and lurking behind her eyes. It was there even when she laughed. But she was still attractive. Despite it all. Attractive both as she was and as he recalled her – because she had been stunning when younger, and the traces of that were still there. He couldn’t get away from that. No use pretending to himself that it was otherwise.
So was that what was going on between them? he wondered Something that simple? Something sexual? Why not?
He finally got the tray of cod into the oven and went over to the sofa, sitting down beside her. She didn’t notice. She was focused on a news item about healthcare funding. The big anniversary was past and she was suddenly back to normal, the memories of Lauren, the corrosive imaginings, pushed back to wherever it was she kept them bolted down, controlled. The change in her mood was schizo – as it always was – unsettling for him, though he was relieved. Yesterday she had still been under it, today she was almost normal. Maybe twenty-two years of practice did that. He listened with half an ear to the news item, his eyes on her face.
What did she think was going on with them? he wondered. When she came round in the evenings they usually just watched the TV, or sat out on his balcony, looking at the river, chatting. His apartment was directly opposite the Harrods Furniture Depository – as it had been before they converted it into yet more luxury flats – with a view up to Hammersmith Bridge – a beautiful aspect, even on an overcast, miserable day. It was enough to sit there with her, he thought, holding hands, sipping wine, staring at the sunset, or the bridge, or the boats on the river.
But he wanted more. There was something unhinged about their relationship. That was what made it interesting and infuriating. She had a vein of insanity, of course. It wasn’t the usual sort of madness, as with bipolar sufferers, or depressives, or alcoholics. But her moods and thoughts were all sudden like that. She took him by surprise.
This time of year aside, she was rarely low. More often she had an excess of energy. She wasn’t what people assumed she would be – crippled by the past, humourless, always about to drop into an emotional abyss. Mostly she wasn’t like that at all, on the surface. But there was always that edge to her. There must be something twisted about him too, he thought, for him to want to be with her. Brothers and sisters didn’t sit and hold hands – not at his age, anyway. That wasn’t what they were. Nor did friends – not as much as they did. And friends certainly didn’t sleep together, but they did that frequently now, clinging to each other like frig
htened lovers, yet never going farther.
The news item changed to something about a pirate incident, somewhere too far away to worry about. He saw her focus ease and she turned to look at him. He smiled at her and opened his mouth to tell her she looked beautiful – something else friends didn’t do – but then something the presenter said caught his attention. The name of the place. Ile des Singes Noirs. He frowned and listened.
A new and sinister activity; Somali pirates had kidnapped someone – they were saying – but not from a boat, or from Kenya, instead from a remote island. At least that was what was assumed. Sara Eaton. A twenty-year-old heiress to an immeasurable fortune. Her mother had only just died, he gathered, but he had missed her name while he was staring at Rachel. There was a picture of Sara Eaton on a boat somewhere, looking tanned and young, just like an heiress should. All her staff had been killed – at least eight people. She was missing.
‘Poor girl,’ Rachel said.
He looked at her. ‘Ile des Singes Noirs,’ he said. ‘Sara Eaton? That ring any bells?’
She shook her head. He stood up and told her he wouldn’t be a minute. ‘Just have to check something,’ he said. He could feel her eyes on him as he walked over to the stairs to the second floor.
He didn’t close the door to his study – though he didn’t want her seeing the paperwork in there – because she would have heard that from downstairs. Instead he walked quietly over to the desk and thought about the name. Ile des Singes Noirs. Wasn’t that the name of Elizabeth Wellbeck’s private island in the Indian Ocean? It had come up in the inquiry. He was sure of it. And did that mean Elizabeth Wellbeck was the mother of this kidnapped girl, the mother who had just died? He sat down, switched on the anglepoise and pulled out a pile of policy books from the shelving behind him. Maybe he had the name wrong. French wasn’t his forte. Or any language.
He started leafing through the book covering the second month of the inquiry. He had a vague feeling about it, plus he was sure he could remember where exactly on the page a reference might appear. He turned the pages quickly, looking only at that spot – the middle of the left-hand page. He found it within half a minute.
Ile des Singes Noirs. He was right. It was an island that back then, at least, they had been told belonged to Elizabeth Wellbeck. In the weeks following the incident her staff had reported that that was where she was, where she lived. She had some eccentric wildlife project going there, spent most of the year on the island. That was where she had been on 14 April 1990, the day Lauren had been taken. On that day Elizabeth Wellbeck – the founder, chief benefactor and director of the Wellbeck Foundation, the organisation that owned and ran the Wellbeck Clinic from which Lauren Gower had been snatched – on that day Elizabeth Wellbeck had been several thousand miles away. Hence the inquiry had no need to speak to her, except as a kind of formality, very low down on the list of priorities. It had been three weeks before they had finally got round to meeting her. By then she had already publicly announced a three-million-dollar reward for information about the disappearance. Not that that had helped. He supposed it was still available, technically, sitting in some forgotten bank account somewhere.
He found the interview now, in his copy of Box 221, and skimmed through the sheets. A short interview, conducted by DI Pearce, not himself, since Elizabeth Wellbeck wasn’t a suspect. Nothing of interest revealed. There was some time taken up at the end with how soon she could make available one of her PAs – a young Russian woman who might or might not have been at the clinic that day – and who, at the time of this interview, had still not been spoken to. On that date the PA – Arina Vostrikova – had still been on this paradise island Wellbeck owned – Ile des Singes Noirs. Not so tempting a place now, he thought. Now that the kidnappers had found it.
What about Sara Eaton? A quick search through the indexing material revealed that Elizabeth Wellbeck was married to Sir Freddie Eaton. How had he forgotten that? So he assumed the girl taken, or killed, today was their child. The news item had given her age as twenty. She was born, therefore, two years after the kidnap of Lauren. Maybe she’d been mentioned in the 2003 inquiry, when they’d reopened it all, but not in the original material, of course.
He started to search for a mention of her. He was standing behind the desk with one of the boxes open and was getting out the sheets of paper when he became aware that Rachel was leaning against the open study door, watching him. He stopped, closed the box, turned red with embarrassment. He felt like he’d been caught out doing something forbidden.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, but he could see from her look that she already knew. She stepped in and looked down at the paperwork scattered across the desk. She bit her lip, stared at him.
‘I’ve been reviewing the inquiry,’ he said quietly. He sat down and sighed. He thought she might start crying now, then it would get worse. The whole day would be ruined, perhaps the whole week. It would knock her back.
But she didn’t cry. Instead, she walked round to his side of the desk and put a hand on his head. She stroked his hair. He looked up at her. She was staring out of the window, a strange look on her face. Her skin was flushed red, like she’d just sprinted from somewhere, but her breathing was slow. He put a hand up and held her arm. He wanted to say sorry, but wasn’t sure what for. When their eyes met she smiled, as if with sympathy. Without warning, she bent down and kissed him on the cheek, then held her face against his, cheek to cheek. She stayed like that for a long time. He didn’t dare move. He had the feeling her eyes were closed.
‘She’s dead,’ she said eventually, very softly. ‘I know she’s dead.’
He swallowed hard, shocked. It was the first time he had heard her say anything like that. Immediately, he wanted to contradict her. But he didn’t. That wasn’t his right. And anyway, she was probably correct.
‘I wish I knew where she was, and what happened,’ she said. ‘I wish someone would tell me where she is. But I don’t think she’s alive any more. I thought you should know that.’
He waited for her to straighten up, then took a breath. He stood up and put his arms round her, pulling her close. Absurdly, he thought she was going to turn her head into him, start kissing him. Her hands were round his neck like that would happen. He couldn’t work out what was going on with her, what she was thinking, or feeling. ‘Your food is going to burn,’ she murmured. Her face was right in front of his. He didn’t move. He waited for her to come forward to him. There was a long, awkward silence while they stood like that, too close for misinterpretation, yet nothing happening. He thought the moment would pass as suddenly as it had arrived. That was what always happened. But then she pressed her mouth against his and started to kiss him.
28
Sara stood right in the corner of the wide, glass-panelled room, the phone pressed to her ear, listening anxiously to the sound of her father’s voice. Only half of what he was saying was registering. Her attention was all over the place; she was exhausted and distracted, unable to focus clearly for more than a few seconds at a time. Tom was only a few steps behind her, also listening – watching to make sure she followed his advice. He had told her – again and again – not to mention anything she had personally done with her gun. They were in the entrance lobby of the Eurostar terminal, part of a large, dirty, teeming station called the Gare du Midi, in Brussels. Out on the main concourse she had suffered a new kind of panic, surrounded by too many people, all far too close to her, intruding into her personal space. She didn’t like big public places, wasn’t used to them. But this disgust with humanity had taken her by surprise. It was more like something Liz would have experienced, one of the reasons she’d fled to the clinic.
Inside the Eurostar lounge it was a bit quieter than out in the station proper. They were about fifty feet from the entry gates they were going to go through when she had finished making this call. The train would board in about fifteen minutes. Another couple of hours after that and they’d be in London.
�
�Christ Almighty …’ her father said, his voice low, tense, almost a whisper. ‘I don’t know how you’re managing to speak about it. Christ Almighty …’ Usually when he spoke to her – no matter what it was about – he managed to convey an impression of indifference, as if she were interrupting something important, or her concerns weren’t terribly interesting. But not now. She had given him the whole terrifying sequence of events – how she had watched her best friend shot dead, seen piles of bodies in the dirt, a man shot at point-blank range (without saying who had shot him), the desperate flight across the island, the plane out, all of it – how a woman he had once known well had died in her arms, how she had discovered her mother was dead and buried, with her not even told, or invited to the funeral. She had got it all out without her voice cracking. It had taken a tremendous effort of will to keep talking, to keep telling him it all. And yet, at the end of the account there was a massive, terrifying gap. A crucial absence of information. She had left out the very last thing that Alison Spencer had told her. She had kept that from him, kept it from Tom too. Because it was information she couldn’t deal with right now, couldn’t bring herself to even consider. It was sitting inside her, worming away, burning her up, while she tried desperately not to even look at it, not to acknowledge it had even been said. Because if she went there, if she let herself think about that, she thought she might crack down the middle, crack and collapse.
At the end there had been silence from her father, his shock palpable. She had to ask him if he were still there before he could get himself to speak. ‘I’ll need to speak to you about your mother,’ he said now. ‘Properly. We’re all devastated, Sara. There are reasons for everything that’s happened. But now is not the time. Now we have to deal with all this …’
She scanned the faces in the room, most people either sitting down waiting, or standing under the monitors watching the TV news. All either businessmen or tourists, she thought. All looking pretty comfortable. Not the mad mix out in the station. Beggars and drunks. She had felt threatened out there, clung on to Tom until they got in here. She was overreacting, of course. She knew that. Spoilt little rich brat. But it hardly mattered. She felt nauseous, dizzy. It was the simple fact that she was standing here, alive, still functioning. That was what was doing it. Nothing had changed. It was preposterous, completely unreal. The complete nightmare of the last seventy-two hours. It was playing now in the back of her head – all the images and sounds – playing like a continuous reel of gut-wrenching horror, right there behind her eyes. But no one knew. No one saw it except her. Everything out here was the same as it ever was.