Khan smiled, this time with no humor. "I didn't know the meaning of patient. Or what it would be like to lead a double life. I suppose I had juvenile fantasies of being a spy." He shook his head, and in the shadows the planes of his face looked hollow.
"Sweating. Lying. Sneaking. I'd always put on a bit of a facade, as it impressed the punters, but this went much deeper. I began to bring that other man home, and Soph was getting fed up. I was getting fed up. But we-my friend and I-had finally come up with a concrete scheme for nailing them, a trail of documents that led all the way through the chain. But my position is getting more precarious every day, and you can see why I couldn't appear to be cooperating with the police.
"I want out." Khan sliced his hand through the air, a figurative cut. "I've had a teaching offer from the University of London, but first I have to finish what I started."
"I can see you wouldn't want to lose out on the money, after all you've done," said Cullen.
Khan gave him an unfriendly glance. "Money would be welcome, especially now that Sophie isn't working. But so far I've not seen a penny, nor do I have any guarantee that I will. It's just that I'd like all my effort to count for something.
"It's a bloody racket," he went on, shaking his head in disgust. "Buy something from a barrow boy at a market, mark it up twenty, fifty, a hundred times, and call it a priceless antique. It's bollocks."
"You're not saying it's all worthless?" said Cullen, sounding as if he'd been told there was no Father Christmas.
"No, of course not. But you have to know what you're doing, and you should never trust an auction house-at least not ours. Kristin liked to sneer a bit at her mum's little antiques shop, but from what Kristin said, her mum is an honest trader and makes an honest living at it."
"And the Goldshtein brooch?"
"Oh, that's real enough. The hallmark and the work are unmistakable," Khan answered with a shrug. "Although I never thought to see an authentic Goldshtein that had not been cataloged. But these things do happen, even if not as often as the salesrooms and the telly auction shows would like you to think. But my guess, with a piece like that, would be that someone had it tucked away. I doubt it's been floating about unidentified on the market for years."
"And you had no previous connection with the seller, Harry Pevensey?" Kincaid asked.
"No. Although I didn't buy the story about the car boot sale-Pevensey just didn't seem the type to go digging about in car park stalls-but you can't exactly call a client a liar if you want to keep the business."
"And Kristin? Do you know what her connection was with Pevensey?"
"She didn't say, and I didn't ask, although I thought it was an unlikely liaison. Kristin was a bit of a social climber, and Pevensey was obviously not going anywhere but down, no matter what sort of profit he might have made on the brooch." Khan frowned. "You'll have talked to him, now that you have the warrant? What did he say?"
"We didn't have the chance to ask," Kincaid answered levelly. "Someone ran Harry Pevensey down last night, just like Kristin. He's dead."
"Dead?" Khan stared at them blankly, then his face hardened and he stood. "You bastards. You came here, to my home, accepting my hospitality, and all the while you meant to trick me into making some kind of admission? You think I killed that poor sod?" There was nothing icy about his rage now, and Kincaid saw him glance at the open kitchen window and make an obvious effort to lower his voice. "Have you put me in the frame for Kristin, too?"
"Mr. Khan." Kincaid stood, but more slowly. "You must realize, from what you yourself have told us, that you had a great deal to lose if Kristin Cahill reported your undercover activities to the directors of your firm. And if she had some connection with Harry Pevensey, he might have been able to compromise you as well." He lifted his jacket from the back of the lawn chair, feeling suddenly weary. He would find no enjoyment in bursting the bubble of this man's family life, and if Khan were genuine, he admired what he had set out to accomplish.
"But Kristin Cahill and Harry Pevensey died very nasty deaths," he went on, "and if what you've told us is true, you should certainly know that the job sometimes requires doing things one doesn't personally like.
"We'll need to talk to your wife, and your journalist colleague, and we'll need to check over your house and your car."
Khan met his eyes for a long moment, then nodded. "You can do whatever you like. But if I were you, I'd spend my time looking for the person who really killed Kristin Cahill. She was young and a bit shallow-like most of us at that age-and she didn't deserve what happened to her."
***
If Gavin had stopped to wonder why he hadn't rung first, he would have had to admit that he was afraid she would turn him away. He had walked from the empty flat in Tedworth Square, up Sydney Street and Onslow Street, then through Knightsbridge and across the park by the Broad Walk. He was sweating and his feet ached, but he hadn't been able to bear the thought of the tube or a bus in this heat. And choosing a destination, rather than letting his body do it for him, was, again, more of an admission than he was willing to make.
He had walked a beat as a constable, and the rhythm of his stride seemed somehow to connect him with that phantom Gavin who had walked the bombed-out streets after the war and seen potential in the destruction. When had he lost that gift?
When he reached Notting Hill Gate, he wavered, and at the last moment delayed again, taking the fork into Pembridge Road and turning down Portobello. He loved walking down the twisty hill as evening came on. The shops were closed, the street quiet, and the colors of the buildings always seemed most intense when the light was fading. It made him think of villages he had seen in France during the war, as if a small piece of a foreign country had been set down in the midst of staid London like the wrong piece in a puzzle.
But when he reached Westbourne Grove he turned left, without more debate, and from the open windows of the flats above the shops came the sound of voices in languages he didn't recognize, and the odors of strange foods cooking.
The assault of the unfamiliar on his senses seemed to galvanize him, and a wave of giddy recklessness carried him into Kensington Park Road and round the corner into Arundel Gardens. Finding the address, he rang Erika Rosenthal's bell with an only slightly trembling heart.
But Erika answered the door as naturally as if she had been expecting him. "Inspector. Please come in."
He shivered slightly as he followed her into the flat-the air had cooled suddenly as the darkness came on. But she saw it and said, "Here. Please sit down. I think there might be some sherry, if you'd like."
Taking the chair she had indicated, he looked round the lamp-lit room, exhaling in relief as a dread he only now acknowledged eased away. This room, this flat, felt as if it were Erika's alone, and he sensed no hovering shade of David Rosenthal.
An open book and an empty teacup sat on a table beside the other chair, and beside it, a basket of sewing. A worn rug that had once been of good quality covered most of the bare floorboards, glass-fronted cases on either side of the fireplace held books, and the mantel top held a collection of colorful and eccentrically carved wooden animals. He knew instinctively that they were Erika's.
"From Bavaria," she said, having come back into the room and seen his gaze. "My mother brought them to me when I was a child. One of the few things I managed to save when I went back to Berlin after the war, as they weren't considered of any value by the Nazis or the looters."
"And that?" he asked, nodding at the small grand piano that took up most of the remainder of the sitting room.
Erika handed him a small crystal glass, and as he took it he felt ham-fisted, clumsy. But the sherry was dry and gold and, when he sipped it, tasted like distilled sunlight.
"The piano?" She sat in the chair beside the open book, crossing her ankles beneath the bell made by the skirt of her pale blue shirtwaist dress. "I worked the neighborhood watch during the war. When a house was bombed, we tried to find relatives to take any undamaged posses
sions. Sometimes the owners had been killed, or sometimes families had left London and we had no way to contact them. The piano was the only thing left standing in a house on Ladbroke Road. No one wanted it, and so some of the men made a sort of pallet with wheels and rolled it here for me.
"We became very ingenious at making things to do what we needed-cobbling together, I think you would call it, although I can't imagine why."
"Something to do with shoes," said Gavin. "Do you play?" he added, not distracted from the piano.
She smiled. "My mother made me take lessons as a child. But I was always better at listening than playing." She took a small sip of her sherry, not, he thought, out of abstention, but because she wanted to savor it. Erika was a person who savored things…a book, a sip of wine, an abandoned piano, the faded colors in a rug. How had she lived in compromise with David Rosenthal, whom Gavin had come to believe had occupied only the blind tunnel of obsession?
"I can't imagine your husband here," he said, astounded by his rudeness even as he spoke his thoughts aloud.
"Oh, but he wasn't here very much," Erika answered, with no hint of offense. "He was working or he was at the Reading Room, and often he did other things that he did not choose to share with me."
"You didn't mind?"
"It would have made no difference whether I minded or not." She set her glass on the table, the crystal making the faintest chink against the wood, and met his eyes directly. "Inspector Hoxley, what have you come to tell me?"
"It's Gavin," he said, knowing he had introduced himself to her when they first met, and feeling a fool.
"Gavin. Yes, I know." She regarded him with the same gravity that had so fascinated him during that first interview.
The words came out in a rush. "I've been warned off the case. Told I'd lose my job if I didn't leave it alone." He lifted his glass, saw to his surprise that he had finished the sherry, and to his further astonishment, added, "And my wife left me."
"Because of this? Because of David?" For the first time that night he heard distress in her voice.
"No. Or if so, it was just the last little piece."
She nodded slowly. "I know about last little pieces. They are the ones that cause the edifice to topple."
He had stopped noticing her accent until she said a word like edifice, and then it made him want to smile. "Yes."
Erika rose and took his glass. "I will find us something else to drink. Tea, if all else fails. I became very English, during the war."
Finding he couldn't sit, Gavin followed her into the kitchen. Had she meant her husband, when she said she knew about last little pieces? Had her marriage failed before her husband's death?
She stood with her back to him, reaching up into the cupboard for cups and saucers. Gavin felt a return of the light-headedness that had brought him to her door, although surely it couldn't be the sherry.
Erika paused with the cups in midair, as if she sensed his nearness. Then she very carefully lowered the china to the worktop and rested her hands on its edge. She stood so still that she might have been waiting for a clock to tick or the world to turn on its axis.
He cupped his hands round her shoulders and felt the heat from her skin through the thin cotton of her dress. A quiver ran through her body, but she neither turned nor pulled away. "Erika," he whispered, "I shouldn't-your husband-this is wrong-"
In answer, she placed her hands on his and slipped them down until they covered her breasts, and he gasped with a desire so intense it left him shaking.
She said, "My husband never touched me after the night we left Berlin." Then she turned in his arms and tilted her head until she could meet his eyes. "And this-this is whatever we make it, my love."
CHAPTER 16
Even though the Allies were fighting a war against Nazi Germany, whose anti-Semitism was a central plank of its public policy, anti-Semitism did not suddenly disappear from Britain during the war, but persisted and even increased.
– Pamela Shatzkes, Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry, 1938-1945
Shadow had fallen in the courtyard at St. Barts by the time Gemma reached the main gates. She ducked inside and pulled her mobile from her bag, checking for messages now that she was out of the bright afternoon sun and could actually see the display. Nothing yet from Kincaid, and nothing from her sister. Closing the phone, she glanced up and caught sight of her father emerging from the temporary corridor that led round to the back of the complex.
She had seen him before he saw her, and in that instant took in his slumped shoulders and bleak expression. "Dad," she called out, and hurried towards him. "Is Mum all right?" Glancing at her watch, she added, "I haven't missed visiting-" The words died on her lips. At the sound of her voice, he had looked up, his face hardening, his chin coming up with the familiar bulldog pugnaciousness.
"You've missed seeing her, if that worries you at all," he said as he came up to her. "She's sleeping. It was a bad day, but then you'll know that, won't you? With all the time you've been taking from work to spend with your mum."
"Dad-I was-I am-but-"
"You have something better to do with your time? Is that what you're telling me?"
"No, Dad, of course not. But someone was killed last night-"
"And that's more important than your mother dying?"
Gemma stared at him, feeling as if she'd been punched. "What are you talking about? Mum's not dying. They've said it's treatable-"
"That's doctor talk for when they don't want to tell you the truth. She's bad. I've never seen her like this."
To Gemma's horror, she saw that he was close to tears. "Dad, she's going to be all right." She reached out, touched his arm, but he shook her off.
"Don't you dare talk down to me," he spat at her. "You've no right, missy, and this is one time when you don't know best."
All his criticism, all his disapproval, suddenly seemed more than she could bear. A red wave of fury exploded behind her eyes. "And don't you talk to me like that," she shouted back at him. "What have I ever done to deserve being treated like that?"
Vaguely, she was aware of other people moving past them, of whispered comments, but she was past caring. "I've made something of myself, something that should make you proud. I'm responsible. I've got a good career. A beautiful child. A good relationship. Why can't you for once give me a lit-"
"So that's the way it is, is it?" Having got a rise out of her, he had gone cold. "If your life is so perfect, why don't you marry him and give your mum some peace of mind while you can?"
***
"I still don't like him," said Cullen when he and Kincaid were at last back in the car. "He's very convincing, but he was just as convincing as an arrogant shit at Harrowby's. So how can you be sure which one is the act?"
They had called in a search team for the Khans' house, and a tow for their dark blue Volvo SUV, which turned out to be registered to Sophie Khan. "Ka never drives it, unless we go out together in the evenings or on weekends," she had told them.
When asked to confirm her husband's whereabouts on the two nights in question, she had said that of course he was home in bed, and what sort of idiot did they take her for if they thought she wouldn't have noticed him leaving to go run someone down?
She'd had one child on her hip and the other wrapped round her leg, and had looked fierce enough to rip their entrails out if they threatened her family.
Khan had gone quiet and distant, and Kincaid couldn't read behind the mask. Having told them quite civilly, once he'd calmed down, that they were wasting his time and theirs, Khan had added that any documents he had copied from Harrowby's he had passed on to his journalist colleague, and that he would not give his friend permission to release them.
"And if you think I'm a hard case," he'd added with a faint smile, "you haven't met Jon. You'll not get a scrap of paper from him with anything less than a subpoena."
"Should we tackle the journalist?" Cullen asked now with what sounded like relish.
Kincaid considered, then said, "Not until we've had another word with the slippery Giles Oliver."
***
Gemma watched her father walk away, her anger ebbing as quickly as it had come. She wondered if she would ever learn not to bite, not to try for the last word, because it was inevitably a losing battle. All she had done was prove that he still had the capacity to hurt her, and to make her doubt herself.
But what he had said-was he right about her mum? She turned and started down the long tunnel of the makeshift corridor, her heart pounding as if she'd just run a sprint. When she reached her mother's ward, she stood at the desk, swallowing against the dryness in her mouth as she waited for the charge nurse to be free.
It was the same Pakistani man she had spoken to the first night her mum had come in, and he smiled in recognition as he handed off a chart to another nurse and turned to her.
"You can go in," he said. "She's resting, but-"
"Is she worse?" Gemma asked. "My dad said she was"-she couldn't bring herself to say the word-"that she was having a bad day."
"Oh, I wouldn't go that far." The nurse shook his head. "She's just tired from the chemo, and the antinausea medication makes her a bit sleepy. She's doing just fine. You go in and see for yourself." He waved her off, turning to someone else, and she had no choice but to follow his command, even though her heart was still skipping erratically.
The curtains were drawn round her mum's bed. Gemma took a breath, then parted them and slipped quietly into the chair by the bedside. Her mum was sleeping, just as the nurse had said, and her breathing was easy and regular.
Relief flooded through Gemma and she closed her eyes against the sudden welling of tears.
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