“I have to do it,” he says. He turns and looks at me. “You can do anything, Karla. Help me get her out.”
They are together, aren’t they? He loves her. And he’ll risk it all for her, his life, reputation, that perfect six-year record, all to get her out. To let her live.
He loves her. Like a blow: he loves her.
I want to walk away. I want to go through the cemetery gates and out into the street where the Mondeo’s waiting, head back to the garage block … I can’t leave him here. What will he do? Go back in there? Try to protect her? And all the while Brice—
I can’t let that happen.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll pull something together.” The part of my brain that does this stuff is working, pacing out a process, ignoring how I feel. It’s as if I’ve been in a crash, and I’ve just walked away from it: I know something inside me’s broken, and it’s bad, but I’m still anesthetized by shock, on my feet and moving. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to think too much. If I can just keep going I’ll be fine.
“Can you do it, Karla?”
The truth is I don’t know.
A day ago we could have leaned on Hamilton. He put her in the Program, he has contacts; maybe he can get her out. And he’s still out there somewhere: we’re looking. People on the run sometimes return to childhood homes, places where they once felt safe; or they seek the anonymity of big cities. He was a director of Hopeland; he could still have a spare key to a corporate flat. Finn’s getting details of all possible locations. Craigie’s got search teams out at targeted addresses. I even called Ellis with the name—And who the fuck is he? Or is that something else you won’t explain? Jesus fucking Christ. So far there’s nothing.
But what if we don’t find him?
Catherine Gallagher’s an anomaly. An inmate with no record on the system. A tip-off to the authorities would do it—that would get her out. It’s keeping her safe beyond that; that’s the issue. We don’t know who the client is, but they have reach, and resources: within an hour they’ll know she’s out of the Program, and they’ll be taking steps.
“Go back in there. Try to keep her safe. Don’t leave the clinic; listen for a call. I’ll be in touch as soon as there’s a plan. Through Whitman, probably. He will need a meeting. There’s visiting facilities; he can use them. We’ll get her out as soon as we can. Afterward”—that hurts; ignore it—“you’ll both have to disappear, for good.” It comes out harder than I expected. “We can fix it, it’s what we do.” A new life, far away from this, together. Just deal with it. “You’ll want to be with her as soon as possible but it takes time—”
He says, “It’s not like that.”
You don’t have to pretend. The oldest failing, that: falling for a target. It’s pride that makes him deny it. I wish he wouldn’t. I want to say, Please don’t lie to me. I’ll get her out, but please don’t lie. I cannot. My throat has closed.
I swallow. Deal with it. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” he says, “it does.”
Very gently his hand closes over mine. He’s head down, not looking at me. Then he whispers, “It’s all right. I know you don’t want me.”
His fingers uncurl. Release. He draws his hand away. Still he’s not looking at me. “I’m sorry,” he says.
At first, nothing. Nothing at all. Something has exploded in my head, so loud it’s stunned me. I’m reeling from the shock of the concussion. For seconds, minutes, I don’t know how long, I sit there, and still I don’t know what to say.
He says, “You saw what I was like, after Terry Cunliffe. I knew you’d never—”
I want to say, I knew Terry Cunliffe, and You tried to save his life, and That is why—
And in a minute, perhaps I will, but right now I can’t. So I just take his hand in both of mine, and hold it, and wait, and wait.
Fifteen minutes later I leave Johanssen on his bench, a film-wrapped sandwich from my satchel beside him. I look back once, before the trees close him off from view. He hasn’t moved.
Will he be safe in there? He says he will. The lie is in plain sight, but I can’t call him on it: he has to go back and protect her, save her, the way he failed to save Terry Cunliffe eight years ago. Because he believes it’s the only thing to do. That’s how he makes it right.
A breeze picks up, sweeps across the cemetery. The undergrowth shivers around me. And in my head, a woman in a dark coat crosses the hallway of her building. It’s impossible to make out her expression.
I cannot trust her, but somehow I must save her.
Whitman’s standing on one of the paths. His men are somewhere close, too, out of sight, guarding the nearest exits. As I approach, he puts his mobile to his ear. “Okay,” he says into it, “move in and pick him up.” He kills the connection. “Well?” His face is pale and tense.
“Take him back.”
He says, “Program administration’s getting jumpy. This paperwork won’t hold much longer.”
“One more time.”
“Call Washington, Laura. I mean it,” he says, “or we’re screwed.”
I’ve left the Mondeo just outside the main gate. As soon as I’ve got the door closed, I phone Craigie, but there’s no news. I tell him to keep looking, end the call before he can ask me what happened with Johanssen, then start the engine, and pull away. Already I’m on antisurveillance drills. Two miles from here I’ll dump the car and walk. A bus, the Tube, a change of clothes, another car …
Johanssen’s already on his way back to the Program. The torturer Brice smiles from his mug shot. And then there’s Catherine. Once again: it all loops back to her.
The man called Daniel: what did he go through? But somehow Catherine walked away from it. Persuaded first Hamilton and now Johanssen to risk their lives to try to make her safe. What’s she capable of?
You kill once, and it changes you. Forget the nightmares, forget how troubled she may be. She knows now that the barriers can be breached. And she can do it again.
My phone rings. The display tells me it’s Ellis. He says, “We need to meet.”
Ten minutes later I find out why from Craigie. Hamilton is dead.
It takes me hours to get to Harringay. Dumping one car, picking up another, then a taxi, a bus, the Tube, each journey doubling back on the last. Still, it’s only three when I arrive: trading hours, but the tire fitters are gone, the big main doors shut. A handwritten sign says CLOSED—ELECTRICAL FAULT. A lie, and one that’s cost me. The owner’s at his desk, surrounded by paperwork. I go through to the back room, switch on the heater and the TV, select a tatty armchair, and surf the channels—a bad movie, a quiz show, an old drama on repeat. I stand up, stretch my legs, try a different chair, move the electric heater, and move it again. I go to the front office and fetch myself a tan-colored cup of evil-tasting coffee, which I drink under the plastic gaze of glamour models. I’m tired almost to the point of despair, but I can’t settle, and I can’t leave.
It’s almost three thirty before the door opens, and Ellis walks in.
“How?” I ask him, and he says, “Don’t you know? I thought you knew fucking everything, Karla. I thought your boyfriend would have been on this hours ago.”
“Police aren’t releasing details yet.”
“Oh, really?” He looks pleased. So he’s pulled some strings, had it hushed up, so he could have the news all to himself? You bastard, Ellis.
“So, William Hamilton,” he says, “where does he fit in? Don’t tell me: you don’t know. Or is it a secret?”
I don’t need this. “Just give me what you’ve got.”
He raps it out: “William Arthur Hamilton. Former director of collaborative ventures, whatever the fuck that means, at Hopeland. Retired. Lived in a village in East Sussex. Been away for a few weeks, don’t know where yet. Lights on in his house last night. He was found this morning in a wood near his home. Dead, no obvious signs of violence. Postmortem’s tonight.”
Did he just give up, go home, and wait for them
to come? Or walk out into the dark with a pocket full of pills, beating them to the punch? I’d like to tell myself he didn’t suffer, but I saw him at the house in Wentworth, just yesterday: suddenly old and convulsed by grief. He cared for Catherine, didn’t he? He tried to protect her, and I stepped out of those laurels and told him that he’d failed.
Ellis is watching me.
I get to my feet, reach for my bag. We’re done. “So why the meeting? You could have told me this over the phone.”
Ellis stands between me and the doorway. He’s going nowhere. “I figured we could use a little chat.”
“About?”
“All the things you’re still not telling me.”
I don’t have time for this.
“Eighth December, Catherine Gallagher walks out of her flat, and vanishes. Looks like she killed herself. A year passes. Then suddenly, four in the morning, you’re on the phone. You want to see the Missing Persons file, you want me to talk to her colleagues, you corner the shrink who claimed he treated her, you get her notes lifted … You go to meet Graves alone; Graves turns up dead, and you tell me the suicide story was a fake. You want to talk to this guy Hamilton. Now he’s dead, too. And all this for a girl you said you never even knew. Why? Why, Karla?” He’s fixing on me. “There’s a big hole right through the middle of this. Fill it, Karla. Tell me the truth. Put me on your side.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I say nothing. His stare holds mine. I don’t move. He reads me, swears, and walks away.
After he’s gone I force myself to wait five minutes before I leave the workshop. In the front office the owner is still bent over his paperwork, stabbing at the keys of his calculator with a sort of fury. He doesn’t look up as I pass, and I don’t say good night.
The client floats at the edge of my vision. Like you, but stronger; more powerful. Catherine must pay, but not just Catherine—Graves and Hamilton, too. They died because they tried to help her, but I’ve got Hamilton on my conscience now—I drove him into the open, to despair, and to his death. No point in whining, I didn’t know that it would come to this. It’s hardly an excuse.
And I get to make up for it by saving Catherine Gallagher. Who murdered a man called Daniel and then fled. The irony of it all twists in my face—and twists again: I’m doing it for Simon Johanssen’s sake—how many has he killed?
My mind is jumping.
Daniel, no surname, thirties, dark hair. Injured before Catherine ever appeared on the scene. Tortured afterward. For information? Who is he? Get Ellis to trawl Missing Persons, dig up the possibles? Too late now.
And Johanssen’s heading back into the Program, driven by forces he doesn’t understand, to save her. She has nightmares …
I need to move her, and I’m out of options. I’m down to the one person who can get her out.
I’m down to Lucas Powell.
A deal on information, in return for Catherine’s safety.
He wants a prize. He’ll try to take you down.
The network for himself. Me as his stooge. Or replaced completely. And then what?
The price I pay. For Graves, Hamilton. For Johanssen. All of this.
I look up. Twenty meters away, a woman in a raincoat turns her head—I can’t see her face, but something in the movement reminds me of that girl: Anna, the one outside the restaurant, the one in Mark Devlin’s photograph—
It comes at me from left field, like a blow.
Devlin in the foreground, his arm round Anna’s shoulders, both so young. Monumental stonework in the background, and a complication of twisted wrought-iron work, fantastical Gothic shapes. Behind that, dark trees: somewhere rural. The house is very ordinary. The house he doesn’t visit anymore.
On top of each gatepost is a dragon.
“Ellis?”
A hesitation, before the aggression kicks in: he’s wondering if I’ve changed my mind. “Well?”
“Mark Devlin’s alibi for the night of eighth December.”
Ellis says, “You are fucking joking—”
“Please don’t hang up. You saw him outside his office, you asked him for an alibi, he couldn’t remember. You told him it wasn’t urgent. He called you back.”
A silence on the line. Ellis weighing this one up. “What is this? You screwing with me, Karla? You trying to jerk my chain—?”
“I need it, Ellis. His alibi.”
A silence. Please, please, tell me—
He says stonily, “He was at his place with some girl called Anna. I got her details, too, and checked them out. His alibi holds. And he’s all wrong for it.”
Six p.m. before I’m back at the apartment. Three messages on Charlotte Alton’s phone: someone calling about a fund-raiser, an invitation to a dinner party, and Mark Devlin: What am I doing tonight?
Straight to the office. Log on. Fingers on keyboard—a house in Wales, a family property … I drill my way down through all the data, Devlin Devlin Devlin—
There it is. An address up in the Brecon Beacons. I pull out the postcode, fire it into a map, and up it comes, a small pink square surrounded by trees, close to a reservoir. A satellite photo gives another view: two buildings in a clearing, the main house, and another, smaller, set at right angles to it, a garage, workshop, stable block? You can’t make out the gates.
The nearest house is half a mile away.
In the month they were together, did Devlin take Catherine there? And when the time came, did she remember? A house in a forest, remote, usually empty—
Not hard to find out Devlin was safe in London, on the eighth of December.
And after Daniel was dead, and she’d moved on—
Devlin’s voice: I never saw it coming.
But he saw something when he went to that house.
Bloodstains? Sweet Jesus, the body? She was capable of things other people aren’t.
Yet Mark Devlin didn’t go to the police. He cleaned up after her. Another one on her list, along with Hamilton and Johanssen: another man stepping in to save her. I hope I get to meet her one day; I’d like to know her secret. Though Devlin’s different. He doesn’t care for her like they do. Her hold over him is something else entirely.
I set the map to print and go to change. I’m halfway out the door when I realize:
If the client knows Mark Devlin covered up for Catherine, they’ll come for him, too.
DAY 22: WEDNESDAY
JOHANSSEN
Inside the induction block, behind the same armored-glass screen, in the same room without natural light, the same clerk who processed his first entry just over two weeks ago fiddles with an application form and snatches glances at him.
Can the man see it in him, the change? He thought he’d dealt with that.
All the way back in the car with Whitman and the other two he felt it: as if a bank of switches in his head had flipped, the lights had changed, the colors were all different. All he could think of was Karla.
But he can’t be going back in there like that, and so he’s put it in a box—something solid, lead lined—closed the lid and sealed it and then buried it deep, and now he must forget it: the cemetery, her hands tightening around his, her breathing—
Later. When it’s over. Not before.
The usual routine. The strip search. Dressing. Back out into the corridor again. Whitman waiting, the dough-faced clerk still beside him, clutching his paperwork, shifting uneasily, on the edge of saying something—what? But when the escort steps forward nothing happens.
Outside. The tarmac, the view of the wall. The sentry booth. The gate sliding open—he steps through it. It clangs shut behind him.
Somewhere deep inside, that box is buried. Still a faint Geiger-counter tick of emotion tells him that it’s there.
He gets back to the compound just before 6:00 p.m. There’s a man at the clinic door, another in the waiting room, both Quillan’s. Protection; just too late.
And where’s Brice now?
He goes
past them without a word.
In the bunk-room kitchen Drill’s eating alone. When Johanssen pauses in the doorway he looks up. His expression is blank, impassive. He’s waiting for the next development, for things to get interesting again. Johanssen goes on up.
Riley’s at the top of the second flight of stairs, with his back to the closed door of Cate’s room, smoking a cigarette. His face is raw with sleeplessness.
“Where’ve you been?” he asks, but quietly, as if the door isn’t closed, as if noise might disturb her.
“Out.”
Riley grunts. “Out,” he repeats softly, bitterly, to himself. “Oh yeah, doing a deal with your Americans—”
“She asleep?” Johanssen asks.
“Still sedated.”
“I need to talk to her.”
“That’s going to help her, is it? That’s going to put Vinnie back together?” Riley looks at Johanssen, hard. “You know what I think? You should have done what Brice told you to, the first time, given that thief a kicking. Or if you couldn’t even do that, you should have had the guts to take your punishment. So you’d have lost a finger or two. Better than this, eh? Her strapped to a chair while Brice breaks every bone in that poor little bastard’s body.” He takes another drag. The cigarette’s shaking in his fingers. “He came for you—you know that, don’t you? He was going to wait for you to get back. Only she was down there and Vinnie—”
Riley stops, breathing hard. Emotion’s working over his face.
For a minute they wait on the stairs, in silence.
Johanssen asks, “You been here all day?”
“Yep.”
“Anything from Quillan?”
“Just his muscle downstairs. Too fucking late,” Riley says. “He should have known. He lets you stay, lets you wind Brice up, and then he sticks a tail on you so Brice can’t get to you. What did he think, that Brice was just going to forget about it?”
“Quillan’s not touched him?”
“That’s right, well done. And he’ll come back for you. Not today, not tomorrow, ’cos Brice is smart like that, he knows when to stop, when to back off, leave you sweating, wondering what’s around the next corner. He’ll wait till he’s good and ready. But he’ll come back. So.” He looks up at Johanssen. “You know what happens now.”
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