She’ll leave, walking quickly at his side. Unless there are things she needs to know, she won’t talk: her mind will be running ahead of her, to the patient and the things she’ll have to do next.
There’ll be a tail. He’ll have to lose it. He’ll have to make her understand that losing the tail is necessary.
He can do that.
He’ll keep close to her, but that won’t worry her. He’s just covering her back. As they approach this place she’ll be a little ahead of him.
Just inside the doorway he’ll pull up—Wait—and put a hand on her shoulder.
There will be no premonition, no sense of betrayal, no terror, no pain. It will be quick. She’ll feel nothing.
And then he’ll put her out of sight, where no one will find her.
Hours later the maintenance crew will come with their tools to fix the cap on the tank, but he’ll be long gone.
Again and again it loops through his head. And with it, a twinge of anxiety, an ache of misgiving—the flash of something in the corner of his eye, like a tail, gone when he turns. The sense of something, just beyond his range.
What is it? What’s wrong? The camera? The timing? The client? The risk that it’s a trap?
Nothing from Karla: nothing on the client. But Fielding said they came with references. A revenge hit, pure and simple.
And if you come here, and there’s someone waiting?
Then he’ll be ready.
So do it. Just do it quickly and cleanly, and leave.
Outside the fog’s thickened—visibility’s dropped to fewer than four meters now—and it plays tricks with his eyes: when he peers into it, it becomes grainy, and shapes seem to move within it. His headache intensifies, squeezing itself into a knot at the back of his skull. The wound in his back feels hot and prickly against the dressing. He’s tired again, and he’s getting slack—Brice was right, he’s losing it, making mistakes. But Brice won’t strike today, even if he could find him in this fog—Brice wants him sweating and looking over his shoulder for a while longer. Sometimes he can still feel Brice’s slick finger probing, probing … As he reaches the road, two figures materialize out of the fog in front of him: something about the light makes them seem bigger and more threatening, and for a second or two he tenses, but a few feet away they resolve into ordinary, evasive men who play by the rules, avoid eye contact. Johanssen plays by the rules, too, and looks away, and they pass.
He finds a pay phone on an empty street. When the line connects there’s a pause, then a sleepy, muffled “Huh?” He pictures Fielding groping for his Rolex, a tousled blonde untidily asleep beside him.
“Did I wake you?” Johanssen asks and Fielding mutters something he doesn’t catch.
Background noises: Fielding hauling himself out of bed. The acoustic changes as he moves from one room to another, becomes echoey. Hallway? Bathroom?
“Well, son,” Fielding says expectantly.
“Everything’s all right.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
Silence: Fielding testing for the lie. Johanssen waits.
Fielding says, “All right then,” and the pressure releases in Johanssen’s chest. The line goes dead.
Karla next. Give her the word. Another pay phone, though; a different line. The phones are monitored. He won’t put her at risk.
He steps out of the kiosk. The damp’s soaked through the layers of his clothes and into his skin. He’s cold.
To his left a patrol vehicle rumbles out of the fog with all lights blazing and an extra man on top cover. The man looks wired.
To his right, a tall figure shuffles toward him, head down, plastic bag in hand. Johanssen senses the moment when the man—he’s sure it is a man—registers him.
Any second they will both look away.
The man stops. But he doesn’t look away.
He always was a big man, six-six or six-seven, and he towers over Johanssen still, but the Program has shrunk the flesh on his frame, and his big raw hands stick out from his ragged cuffs. Three days’ growth of gray bristle on his chin and a cut above his eye. But it’s him.
Eight years become nothing: it’s night, a damp summer night, and Johanssen’s back at that big house overlooking the river at Marlow—
What can you do?
Whatever I have to.
Charlie Ross. Charlie Ross, who died three months after he entered the Program—who came out of here in bits, whose partial remains were returned to his widow for cremation—
Except Charlie Ross has just walked past him.
The fog’s getting thicker, invading the side streets, clogging the spaces between the buildings. He moves carefully, checking for Ross’s loping stride ahead of him; checking behind himself, too, for the first sign of the tail.
People loiter in doorways or stumble down the streets. They squint at him but he’s nothing to do with them, and no one interferes with him.
He turns a corner just as Charlie Ross crosses a junction ahead of him and vanishes out of sight.
Another snatch patrols slowly down the street toward him. Another knot of wary-eyed men stare at him as he passes too close. He ignores them. He strains for the retreating shape of Charlie Ross.
Ross turns a corner. Johanssen marks it, turns it. As soon as he enters the street, a figure turns right at the other end.
Johanssen breaks into a soft-footed run.
At the corner where the figure turned he pauses, one hand against the wall, and looks right. He’s not been here before.
The buildings are blurred with fog. There are sounds of shouting and banging, then someone starts to wail. A man is hanging out of a window, bellowing at the empty street. There’s a bad smell of drains.
Charlie Ross is gone.
The one man who knows who he is, the one man who can link him to that night in the farmhouse and the death of Terry Cunliffe, and he’s alive, in the Program. An administrative error? Or one of those freak coincidences, a perfect-match DNA sample, another man with Ross’s profile cremated in his place? It doesn’t matter now. Charlie Ross is alive. Charlie Ross can ID him. And he can’t count on any mercy from Ross: two minutes in the same room eight years ago doesn’t buy you any favors. Not after what happened with Terry Cunliffe.
Ross was Quillan’s enemy. If he survives now it’s only with Quillan’s permission, Quillan’s favor, a tolerance that could be withdrawn at any second. But now Ross can give Quillan the one thing Karla deprived him of eight years ago: the life of the fourth man in that farmhouse on the night Terry Cunliffe died.
DAY 20: MONDAY
KARLA
Eight o’clock on Monday evening. I’m on the roof terrace of my apartment, forty-one stories up. The fog that’s wrapped my building in wadding all day has lifted at last. The air’s raw and cold. Across the dark chasm of the dock the offices of Canary Wharf still roar with light: financial institutions, stockbrokers, law firms; business conglomerates controlling factories in the sweatshop Third World the best part of a day’s flight away. This could be Hong Kong, New York, anywhere.
Between the evergreen foliage and the hardwood benches, concealed speakers spin out a thin skein of melody: an early-music ensemble plays Bach. There’s a shawl over my jacket and a glass of red wine in my hand. I’ve only managed one mouthful. Tonight it tastes like poison.
The news broke this morning: a man found stabbed to death in a quiet Buckinghamshire village, the police appealing for witnesses.
Craigie arrived at my apartment shortly after. He looked tired, but then, he’d been up all night fixing Sean’s cover and alibi.
“Sean’s exposed now,” he said. It sounded accusing.
“I know.”
I couldn’t dodge the blame. Couldn’t shake his suspicion either: if he’d been running it, it wouldn’t have ended like this.
“It’s all reactive, isn’t it?” he said bitterly. “We don’t control it.”
“We never did.”
“If they place
Elizabeth Crow at the scene—”
“They won’t. I can put her out of the country. Have her traveling in Eastern Europe somewhere. And the online images for her will look nothing like me: if they come up with an e-fit, it won’t match.”
“And Ellis?”
“Ellis will cooperate.”
“Sure about that? What if he doesn’t?”
“Then he’s just sacrificed his career,” I said stonily.
A moment’s silence between us. Then Craigie said, “So what happens now?”
“Straight after I phoned Graves he called someone on a mobile. I think he told them the police were on the way. Maybe just a friend. But less than three hours later he’s dead. So maybe not a friend.”
“You think they may have had him killed to shut him up?”
“It’s the only call he made. Then while I was in the house, they phoned back.”
He shook his head. “If they just killed Graves, they know he’s not going to answer.”
“What if they sent someone else to kill Graves? Maybe they’re checking the job’s been done. Or maybe they did the job themselves, they’re in the garden, and they’ve just seen someone walk into that house. They’re wondering who I am. Maybe they’re not phoning him. They’re phoning me.”
“You picked up?” he asked sharply.
“I didn’t speak. Craigie, whoever they are, Graves talked to them, and then he died, and I think they know why. The mobile they used will have left a trail. Finn’s on it now.”
“What if it’s unregistered?”
“We get the list of who else they called and where they called from. We start to narrow this down. Meantime I’ll arrange a meet with Fielding. See if he knows anything about the hit on Graves. Maybe he supplied the manpower. We need to know, one way or the other.”
“So you’re going to see Fielding now—” A stinging tone.
“All right, you talk to him.”
A silence. Craigie just looked at me. I thought—though I couldn’t be sure—he gave a tiny, disbelieving shake of the head.
On the Program surveillance feeds Johanssen entered the workshop alone, then left. A final check before he does the job? I tried to track him back toward the compound, but the fog was down there, too, the outside surveillance feeds all clogged with white. You couldn’t see a thing. But ever since I’ve been expecting a call from him, a coded message, the trigger to get the bolts loosened on the tank. It hasn’t come.
The lunchtime news bulletin named Graves as the murder victim. An eminent psychiatrist, they called him. His colleagues in the practice issued a statement expressing shock and highlighting his valuable work with “distressed and vulnerable patients.” The neighbors spoke of the devoted son who’d visited his elderly mother regularly at the house, but who hadn’t been seen much since her death.
Within an hour one Sean Wilson, a carpenter who’d gone round to Graves’s London house with a price for a job, turned himself in for questioning.
Then at three o’clock: a police news conference. Thames Valley’s show, no sign of Ellis, and no mention of a link to an ongoing Metropolitan Police inquiry, but that means nothing: they may be keeping that particular powder keg dry. The detective handling the case appealed for a woman who was seen near Graves’s mother’s house around the time of his death to come forward. He stressed she was not a suspect; they just wanted to eliminate her from their inquiries. Were the police looking at any former patients in connection with Ian Graves’s death? The detective hedged: there were signs that property may have been disturbed. “We’re keeping an open mind,” he said.
Shortly after that, the phone rang, and this time it was Ellis.
“Let’s start from the beginning.” And where’s that? “She was never depressed. She never went to Graves for treatment. All those colleagues beating themselves up because they should have guessed? They were wrong. But something was happening all right. You know what tells me that? The fact she lied about her sick mother. She knew they were coming for her, didn’t she? She knew they were coming, but she thought she’d beaten them. When she walked out of her place on the eighth December? She was running. Just not fast enough. Isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know, Karla?”
“I have evidence that someone wanted Catherine Gallagher dead.”
“What evidence?”
I said nothing.
“Look. I didn’t put myself in this position. You told me to get the file. You sent me after her colleagues. You asked me to take you to Graves. I’m just playing the hand I’m dealt. Now I want this collar, and you want to get to the person behind this.” Then he said, “And you need an in on the Thames Valley inquiry because they’re looking for you.”
“I’m either a neurotic patient or a married lover. Maybe both. I want to keep my name out of the press. No one expects me to turn up.”
“What if they realize it was Elizabeth Crow?”
“The woman seen at Graves’s address looks nothing like Elizabeth Crow. Check online if you don’t believe me. And Elizabeth Crow’s abroad. Eastern Europe, I think.”
“You think you’re so fucking clever. You were seen. No one else. Just you.”
“Someone else was there. I’m sure of it. And they knew I was coming. They knew he was going to crack.”
For a second he relented. “His mobile’s missing. Maybe they bugged it. Took it from the scene after they killed him.”
“Phone records?”
“Nothing useful.”
A lie? Or maybe just Thames Valley keeping some details to themselves.
“What about forensics?”
“Processing now. Oh, I don’t expect they’ll get a sniff of you, you’re too careful. But they’ll keep looking. And while they’re looking, you’ve got to keep your head down. You need me,” he said. “And sooner or later you’ll realize that the only way you’re going to crack this is with my help. So talk to me.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I don’t share whatever I turn up. You get to see what happens next on the TV news, along with all the other good citizens.”
“You won’t turn up anything. Whoever killed Graves did it to stop him talking, but it’s worked against them. It’s drawn attention, and they don’t like attention. They’ll go to ground. If there’s no forensics and no sightings, then you’ve lost them.”
“You and me both,” he said.
“Except I don’t need to turn in a result.”
“Oh yes you do,” he said. “I haven’t a fucking clue why, but you do. You want to know what’s behind all this, and it’s eating you up, Karla. Fucking eating you up. I come up with nothing—so what? Graves isn’t even my case. Catherine Gallagher’s a suicide. But you—you don’t come up with a result and what happens then?”
And after that, just as the light was fading: Finn, with news of the number that Graves called.
Someone’s deleted the account.
Every detail about the phone that made that call—the complete call record and all the technical data that would tell us where those calls were made from, the cell sites, the aerial sectors—have vanished from the service provider’s records.
They knew we’d look. They’ve covered their tracks. That’s why Thames Valley Police aren’t searching for the person Graves phoned. As far as everyone else is concerned they don’t exist.
But records don’t just vanish. Someone pressed the button.
I’m starting to sound desperate.
And finally, a call from Stephen. I sat by the phone and listened while the machine took the message. He hoped I was well. He was wondering how I got on. He didn’t mention the police. He sounded concerned but not desperately worried, so he hasn’t put two and two together: he hasn’t linked the notes I showed him to the dead man. Maybe he’s not seen the news yet. Or maybe his normal working da
y gives him his fill of the world’s horrors. He doesn’t need to seek them out: they’ll come to him anyway.
The walkways below my building are almost deserted, the bars quiet. I sip my wine—it’s tarry and corrosive—breathe in the cold night air, and try to focus on the views but tonight they’re flat, without depth, as if they’ve been pasted onto glass.
Last night all I could see was Graves. Tonight I’ve shut him out, but someone else has taken his place: Catherine Gallagher. But not the blurred fugitive from the CCTV, nor the woman from the surveillance feed, thin, dead faced, hugging herself against the cold. No: the woman in that very first photo, with the guarded smile, the unmistakable self-control.
What did I tell myself, right from the start? I have seen this woman before and she was never a victim. And yet I bought the story, just like everyone else: that Catherine Gallagher couldn’t cope.
I told myself: she killed someone, and although she never gave a sign, it weighed on her, plunged her into depression, and so she went to Graves. She may not have meant to tell him, but she did. That’s what I thought. But none of it was true.
So who hired Graves? The people who put Catherine in the Program, to ensure there’d be a nice pat answer to her disappearance?
Or did she fix it all herself?
You want to fake a suicide: your own. But nobody believes the clothes-on-a-beach setup anymore. They want proof. Or failing that: a witness, an expert witness. That was what you gave them.
Did you have something on him, or did you simply pay him? There’s no record of payment, but you’re smart enough to hide it. You knew that sooner or later someone might come looking. You covered your tracks.
You bought his cooperation; he faked his notes on you. He gave you the background you needed. He labeled you a potential suicide.
At work you didn’t make the amateur’s mistake of overacting: you didn’t fake depression or anxiety to colleagues who might see through it. Restraint—emotional reserve—is part of your nature: you stuck with that.
On the eighth of December, at 8:15 p.m., you walked out of your flat and you never came back.
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