“Do you think you could have done more to stop her?” Ellis asks.
“I think I did everything I could.” Then his voice loses that sorrowful tone, becomes quizzical: “Though I’m curious. You’ve asked exactly the same questions as your colleague did a year ago.”
“And that surprises you?”
“I thought as you’d taken the trouble to call on me again …”
“We’d be asking different questions? Not always.”
Graves doesn’t move, his face doesn’t change, but it’s like a vibration in the air, his reaction. Graves knows there’s something wrong about this. Something Ellis said has given us away. Graves will phone Ellis’s boss. And ask about Elizabeth Crow? That could be interesting.
“Well,” he says, “if that’s everything.”
He rises, and as he does so his hand flattens protectively across the file in front of him.
“One other thing,” Ellis says. “She paid for her treatment with you. How did she pay?”
“Cash,” Graves says, and gives us one small, dismissive smile.
And I know: That was all wrong.
The glossy black door closes quietly behind us as we walk down the front steps.
“Nice bloke,” Ellis says. “Yeah, if I was suicidal, a chat with him’d make all the difference.”
“We need to talk,” I say.
Ellis has gone back to his car. He flicks his key fob, and the hazards blink. “Too right. Get in.”
“Not here.”
“Get in,” he says.
I get in on the passenger side and close the door. The car reeks of air freshener. Immediately he holds out a data stick to me—the recordings of the other interviews?—but when I reach for it he doesn’t let go, and his face is sour.
“You owe me an explanation,” he says. “Don’t say, What explanation?—you know fucking well. Five days I’ve been on Catherine Gallagher’s case, every spare moment of every fucking day, burning the midnight oil, turning over all the stones, and what have I got? No threats. No sign of foul play. No motive—no cock-ups, no unexplained deaths under her care, no unhappy families, no one holding a grudge against her. Colleagues hardly knew her: no one much liked her, but no one hated her either. Graves is an obstructive bastard but his account’s solid—”
“Graves is wrong.”
“Oh, is he? What about?”
Mark Devlin’s Catherine flashes before me: the woman capable of all the bad things, without the boundaries to hold her back. Fielding’s, too: the woman responsible for a shocking, ugly death—for whom the Program’s not punishment enough—
And a professional like Graves should have seen all that, should have been on to her in seconds.
“Well, Karla? How’s he wrong? What am I missing, eh? Because I’ve looked, and there’s nothing in the hospital. And apart from one halfhearted fling with some headhunter, nothing outside it either. She was a lonely control freak, and she was depressed. Karla, I’ve looked at everything, and you know what? Every fucking thing so far says she’s a suicide. Open and shut. Except you. The only person talking about murder is you. What makes you so sure? Don’t tell me it’s a hunch, don’t give me any of that intuition crap. You know something and you’re not saying.
What is it?”
But I can’t tell him.
“Nothing that counts,” I say. I can hear the frustration in my voice.
Ellis hears it, too. “Right,” he says. “And I’m supposed to believe that? What is it? A witness? Someone who knows where the body’s buried? But someone. Otherwise how come you’re so certain she was murdered? That’s point number one—”
“I’m not—”
“And then we’ve got point number two. Why it matters to you. ’Cos it does matter. When did you last sit in on an interview with me? Fucking never. So until you can give me something more, you’re on your own here. Got that?”
“Ellis—”
“I’m hungry, Karla. I’m not fucking starving.” He lets go of the data stick at last. “Call me when you’re ready to talk. Now get out of my car.”
I shed my disguise in a toilet in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I want to hear those recordings—there’s still the chance that Ellis missed something, that the Catherine whom Devlin knew is still lurking in her colleagues’ testimony—but I have to make the usual circuitous journey home, and it’s almost four before I sit down at my desk, open the directory, and click on the first icon.
By the time I’ve finished five hours have passed, the offices beyond my window have emptied, and it’s night.
Ellis is right. There’s nothing.
I put my coat on and walk out, to the river.
I like the Thames at night. Its broad sweep becomes monumental after dark. I lean against the curved metal railing, hugging my coat around me. On the far bank the lights of the Hilton Pier and Columbia Wharf seem a long way away. Just then, to my right, where the river curves out of sight beyond the converted warehouses of Limehouse Reach, a light on the water catches my eye: it’s a police launch, buzzing downstream toward me. It approaches—the swell cracks against the underside of the hull as it skims past—and then it’s gone, but I stay there against the rail, waiting for the next boat and the next … A commuter boat approaches from downstream and maneuvers against the pier below me. The queue of passengers shuffles aboard, and it casts off again and heads out into midstream, while at the far curve of the river a party cruiser comes into view, its lights jeweling the water with tiny reflections. Faintly I can hear music.
What am I doing, standing here in the dark? Hunting Catherine? But I’ve already found her. Except every time she’s different, and the more I see of her, the less I know. Who is she? Not Ellis’s missing person: he thinks she’s dead. Who, then? Aylwyn Roberts’s ambitious, intensely private doctor, who couldn’t bear to admit she wasn’t coping? Ian Graves’s depressive? Mark Devlin’s clever woman without barriers, capable of evil? All of these, or none?
The first time I saw her I thought: Monster. And she is, but not the kind I thought back then: she’s like a virus, replicating itself while still evolving, every version slightly different than the last, and just when I think I’ve got her contained, defined, she re-evolves again …
And I’m no nearer to knowing what she’s done, or why, or who wants her dead, and time is running out.
So what happens now?
I stare at the river. I wait. No answer comes.
I shiver suddenly. It’s a cold night, and a breeze has sprung up. Time to go home.
I’m turning away from the rail when it comes back to me, in a snapshot: Graves on his feet, the file in front of him on the desk, and his hand flattened protectively on its cover.
A little skip in my blood: protective of what?
He’s told us all about Catherine’s depression.
What if there’s another story in the file?
Phone Craigie? No. Phone Robbie. Not just because Craigie will lecture me about risk, but also because the people I need to talk to don’t trust anyone easily, but they do trust Robbie.
“I want to lift a file,” I tell him. “Secure premises.”
“Specialist contractor?”
“And it’s urgent.”
There’s a moment’s silence, then Robbie says, “You mean Louis, don’t you?”
And he’s right, I do. But I wish I didn’t.
DAY 16: THURSDAY
POWELL
Thursday night. He’s working late again.
Spread out across the desk: the records retrieved from the Ealing flat. Pages ripped from exercise books, covered in Laidlaw’s patient black-ink script. Time on his hands meant narrative accounts in full sentences, but not all are like that—some are in note form, just the hurried essentials. But every one complete.
The things we knew about. The things we didn’t.
The Ealing flat was on the surveillance log—Laidlaw couldn’t make himself invisible. But they’d checked it out, or thought they
had. The electoral register and the bills gave the resident’s name, one Arthur Burton: a recluse, in poor health, shunning his neighbors—but they saw lights going on, heard the radio and the TV. And heard Laidlaw visiting from time to time, with bags of shopping—calling out, It’s all right, it’s me, I’ve got my key, or Get the kettle on.
When Powell did the walk-through of the flat—the first one in, covers on his shoes, touching nothing—he found the timer switches on the lamps and radio and TV, and the cupboards full of food.
Arthur Burton was a complete fiction, his name stolen from a child who’d died in the 1930s, a largely hollow ID with no obvious connection to Laidlaw’s Russian past. His landlord was a different matter. Gordon Fox: a cover name assigned to Peter Laidlaw back in ’76, after his own name had popped up on a Soviet watch list.
Someone should have spotted that.
They found the records triple wrapped in plastic, in six different locations around the flat—in the cistern and taped to the underside of the bed frame, under the floorboards and in the freezer compartment, in the oven and in the lining of a coat—each cache spanning a different period of Laidlaw’s relationship with Knox.
The things we knew about. The things we didn’t.
Transactions logged in minute, careful detail: each tip-off, dead drop, brush pass, hidden message. And then, after every cool account: Laidlaw’s bewilderment, excitement, bafflement, frustration. The growing knowledge MI5 was watching him. The growing sense, too, of an alliance with Knox. He’s given me a good one this time and They’ll have to work harder if they’re going to catch us out.
Beyond that, yet another layer: the search for Knox himself.
The patient analysis of each transaction: not just the information supplied and what it might imply, but the method, and every clue that might be gleaned from that. Dead drop in park and Shoes ordered by credit card—details not available and Brush pass in café, didn’t see. Tradecraft??? Background? Is this a double bluff?
Got sight of the man who may have dropped off package. I attempted to follow, but failed.
The collation of the list of Russian names: question marks and strikethroughs.
Two years ago: Maybe not Moscow after all????
A period of stalling: Laidlaw’s frustration mounting. Though we’re on the same side he will not trust me and This is getting nowhere. The notes are scantier.
And then, a week before Laidlaw’s own death:
Saw package man again, am almost certain.
Details of a sighting in a street market. A ferret-faced man—Mediterranean origin???—in a brown jacket, dodging between stalls. Found and lost again.
There’s never any mention of Laidlaw’s illness, the hospital appointments, the tests. Except in the last sentence, underlined:
I wish I had more time.
It’s gone ten now. He slips out of his office, locking the door behind him out of habit, and walks down to the little kitchen at the end of the corridor. While the kettle boils he reviews today’s meeting with the Section Chief. The street market’s a weekly happening, every Saturday. It’s got to be worth a look?
Laidlaw’s description of the man taunted them both from the page. There is, of course, no photograph.
The Section Chief’s nod was purse lipped. It said: Is this the best you’ve got?
“Use local police. But keep them in the dark.” The instruction wholly unnecessary: has the man forgotten how many times he’s done this? “And no direct contact with Knox, understood?”
As if he might have forgotten.
The kettle clicks off. Beyond that sound there’s another, from outside in the corridor. A door closing, the snick of a latch? A colleague working late? He goes to the kitchen doorway, peers out, but the corridor is empty, and all the doors are closed.
A shiver of something. Paranoia? Again he thinks back to the moment outside the Ealing flat: resting the crate of papers on the car roof, reaching for his keys—the flash of sunlight off a moving car—
The sense of being watched.
DAY 17: FRIDAY
JOHANSSEN
He doesn’t go far today. The weather’s turned sleeting and gusty, the wind whipping needles of ice into his face. Behind him the two-man tail follows very close, hunched into their thin jackets, with no attempt at concealment. He makes it to the shops on the west side of the main guard base and buys toothpaste and another bar of chocolate. When he comes out the two men are loitering sullenly by the door. He hands one the chocolate. “Let’s get back.” For just a second the man looks almost angry—as if Johanssen’s broken a rule—but then he looks at the chocolate and relents. The three of them walk back together, not speaking, heads down against the sleet.
He’s climbed the first flight of stairs above the clinic, and he has one hand on the door into the kitchen, when the sounds begin.
One word first, quite loud, spoken urgently. A pause, and then a phrase, rapped out. Then a small, soft whimper, barely audible.
He’s carrying his boots. He puts them down and climbs up to the second floor, carefully, so the treads don’t creak. The phrase comes again—four syllables.
He tries the handle; it gives, and the door creaks open.
“No,” she says, and it’s a plea this time.
The blackouts are in place, the room near dark. The floor’s piled with clothes and junk. On the far side of the room, the bigger bundle on the mattress moves.
She’s pushed herself upright against the wall. Her head flips right, then left—“Get to a phone,” she says, and “No, not that.” Her eyes are half open, but she’s not awake.
“Get to a phone.” The four-syllable phrase from before: he recognizes the rhythm. Then another word he can’t make out, strangled up in her throat, it might be “dragon,” he’s not sure, and then under her breath she starts to count: “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight—”
“Cate—”
“He’ll be dead in a minute,” she says. “In a minute.” She whimpers again.
“Cate—” He takes a step toward her.
The movement does it. She blinks. Then slams herself back against the wall, clutching the bedding around her, staring at him. Automatically he takes another step—she flinches, scrabbles for something in the bed, and then her hand comes up and the blade’s in it, a dull glint in the gloom.
He backs, one step. “I’ll use it,” she says, and she means it, and in a second he sees what she does: Ryan Jackson, double murderer, blocking the doorway. He takes another step back.
“You were dreaming,” he says. “It’s over now.”
Still she stares at him, fist white around the knife, chest heaving, eyes wild.
He says, “You cried out. But you’re okay. I can go now. You want me to go now.”
For a handful of seconds she doesn’t move. Then slowly she lowers the hand with the blade and looks down at the mattress as if she doesn’t know how she came here.
He goes down to the kitchen, fills a glass with water, and brings it up to her. She’s pulled a ragged blue cardigan over her T-shirt, and when he comes back in she’s wiping a hand across her face: the skin on the inside of her wrist’s a pale film, the sinews and veins starkly visible through it.
He passes the glass to her and then backs off again. She sips, shivers, puts the glass down. Huddles into her cardigan, looks sideways at the blacked-out window. Handfuls of sleet are rattling against the glass like tiny stones.
“You called out in your sleep,” he says.
“What did I say?”
“You were counting. You wanted to get to a phone. You said something about a dragon.”
She’s silent for a moment, then she says, “I’m in a room. From the window you can see a gate. The gate has dragons on it.”
“And that’s where it happened, in that room?”
She nods, then rubs her arms, as if she’s cold. “I keep going back there.” She looks at him. “What do you dream about?”
Karla. A rooft
op at night. A man at a desk. The farmhouse; Cunliffe screaming. “Just stuff.”
“The same dreams?”
“Sometimes.”
“Good or bad?”
“Both.”
Suddenly she says, with a quiet intensity, “Tell me a good dream.”
The best dream—Karla, her hair against his shoulder—segues into his head. Not that. Second best, then. He says, “It’s night. I’m on a rooftop. I’m running.”
“And that’s it?” As if she expected so much more.
Then for a moment neither of them moves.
She says, “His first name was Daniel. I wasn’t told his surname. He was your age. Maybe younger. Dark hair. It shouldn’t have been difficult. He was already”—choosing the word carefully—“incapacitated. Both of his ankles broken. The left one must have been when he tried to get away, the right one … later. And he was restrained, of course, and he’d bled quite a bit. So I thought it would be quick. But he fought. Despite everything. He fought. So it took … time.”
She looks down. She’s been twisting the hem of her cardigan in her hands: she stops now, but doesn’t let go.
“Why did you do it?”
She looks up at him again, and he can almost see it, something coiled and spitting at the back of her eyes. “Because I could.”
“Had he attacked you? Is that why?”
“Huh. He’d done nothing to me. He was a complete stranger.”
“Someone made you do it.”
She laughs—a hard, flat, bitter laugh, like a slap. “No one made me do it. Any of it. That’s the thing. No one made me do it. I could have walked away—I could have done ‘the right thing,’ whatever that was; or I could have done nothing, nothing at all. But I stayed. I stayed, for four days. And then I killed him.”
She turns her head toward the window, though there’s no view. She says, “I think you should go now.”
He goes downstairs, but not into the bunk room. Instead he sits on the first-floor landing, with his boots beside him, and listens, for half an hour, an hour, while in the room overhead she paces from one wall to the next.
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