by Sam Blake
Chapter 34
EDWARD CROXLEY didn’t look back at Vittoria as he left The Hogarth Hotel. Watching him go, she picked up her glass to finish the end of her smoothie. He seemed slightly shell-shocked, she had to admit. Which was precisely how she wanted him.
Sucking up the last of the pink froth in her glass, she glanced behind her out of the huge paned window. It was a beautiful day and she had a lot to think about. She needed some headspace to work out the next move. An idea that had already been forming in her head had crystallised with Marcus’s call.
‘Everything alright for you, Ms Devine?’
Vittoria smiled up at the waiter; he was always so welcoming and attentive. ‘Thank you, Joel – everything is wonderful as always. I’ll sign for this and then I’m going to go for a walk, I think.’
With the sun on her face and autumn leaves tumbling around her feet, Vittoria was so deep in thought she hardly noticed where she was walking. Wandering into a charity second-hand bookshop, she found herself scanning the spines, finding a wonderful compendium of Hitchcock’s films. She opened the cover and, running through the index, discovered many she had never heard of: Number 13, Always Tell Your Wife, Woman to Woman, The White Shadow, A Passionate Adventure. They felt like the story of her life … The Pleasure Garden, Dangerous Virtue. It was like the book was waiting for her.
With her purchase firmly under her arm, and her head full of Edward Croxley and Stephanie Carson, she headed towards Gower Street and London University’s Senate House Library. The iconic Art Deco building always made her think of MI6 and, for some reason, the women of the Special Operations Executive who had operated behind enemy lines during the Second World War. It towered with such authority, its pale grey façade stark against the sky.
Vittoria felt like she was behind enemy lines now. Marcus had declared war and she was going to have to fight for everything she believed in to survive.
Taking a moment to pause in the sunshine, she leaned on the wall at the corner of Mallet Street and looked up at Senate House across the road, lost in thought. Then, from behind her, she heard the strangest clanking noise. Startled, she turned to see what it could be. The old wall she was leaning on bordered the edge of some gardens, the foliage lush, but the railings along the top of the wall had all been cut off, leaving a row of iron stumps behind.
Adjusting the weight of the book under her arm, she looked properly, puzzled, quickly spotting a sign that explained it. It was a sound installation – the iron railings that had once run along the wall had been removed during the Second World War and had been replaced with a sound projection. That was the noise she’d heard. She put out her hand to run it along the ghost railings and heard the clanking noise again – it sounded exactly as if she was running a stick along them. Vittoria took a step back. How strange and wonderful. It was if they were there, but not there.
Looking at the invisible railings, their ghostly presence still there to hear, a few things fell into place in Vittoria’s head.
She knew exactly what she was going to do next. It was complicated, but the railings had given her the idea. She just needed to arrange an appointment to pop back over to Mile End to see Mr Bahnschrift.
Vittoria pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and glanced at the time, checking for any missed calls. Nothing from Croxley yet. Hardly surprising; he had a lot to think about.
The day Edward Croxley had thought it was OK to swindle Lily and Jack out of their livelihood had been a very bad day indeed. Granted, he’d had other considerations – he was playing a very dangerous game with some very dangerous players – but whatever his problems were, his solution was despicable.
And one he would live to regret.
Croxley’s face had been a picture when he’d seen the amulets. She’d collected them the minute the mail-box company had texted her to say a parcel had been delivered, and on the way back she had popped into a jeweller’s to have three gold hook catches fixed onto her bracelet so she could clip the three amulets onto the chain. The fourth had been lodged in the hotel’s master safe.
His mouth had literally fallen open. He’d been so shocked that he’d hardly taken in what she’d said about Arabella Smyth, about how easy it would be to get the case reopened. His eyes had been fixed on her wrist as she held it up to show the amulets off. ‘Pretty, aren’t they? I believe they are quite sought after.’
‘Only three?’
‘No, I have a fourth too.’
‘What do you need?’
‘Apart from the keys to a shop in Bloomsbury and a certain promissory note?’
He’d raised his eyebrows. ‘Apart from? How much do you want for the amulets?’
‘Oh, they’re not for sale.’ She’d paused. ‘Rather, I have a proposition for you. It’s a little delicate. It concerns my husband …’
As she’d explained, his colour had drained.
‘And what if I won’t?’
‘Well, it’s not really a case of won’t, to be honest. When you agree I’ll give you these three little treasures. When the job’s done you get the fourth. I’m going to leave it at Power’s in the safe – it can be collected there.’
‘But what you’re asking—’
‘I’m asking you to be a witness, Edward, a witness to a set of circumstances – that is all. My husband is in trouble at the moment, Edward. He’s about to lose his job and have what’s left of his good name dragged through the mud. I’m quite sure he’s not in a good place mentally. I will ensure that everything runs like clockwork. I assure you, you can trust me.’
Croxley had started shaking his head as Vittoria continued, ‘You’ll be paid well, too. I don’t expect people to do things for free. An extra five thousand pounds on top of the thousand we agreed previously.’
Croxley’s eyes had nearly come out on stalks. Vittoria had taken a sip of her smoothie. One thing about bastardi like Edward Croxley was that their greed would always win over common sense and caution. It was a common human condition.
There was a good reason it was one of the deadly sins.
Leaning back against the wall, the sound installation behind her, Vittoria glanced at the time again, running through everything that had to be done in her head. She needed to go back to her hotel now and get a message to Mr Bahnschrift in Mile End as soon as possible, but then she’d go to the theatre this evening. The stage door of The Dominion Theatre was right opposite the entrance to The Bloomsbury Hotel, just a short walk from The Hogarth Hotel where she was staying, and they had just opened with Hitchcock’s Rear Window. She switched the heavy book to her other arm. Now she’d be able to read up on the making of the film before she went to see the stage production. She smiled to herself – serendipity was a strange and wonderful thing.
As she turned to head back, Vittoria’s phone pipped with a series of texts. She took at cursory look at the first from Marcus and then saw there was one from Croxley. Perfect timing. As per her instructions, it was vague, but she knew exactly what it meant.
Your terms agreed. Will need full
details of delivery.
She texted him back.
Lighthouse Bar 2moro at 10 and
will give you the particulars.
It was starting.
Chapter 35
AS THE FRONT DOOR closed behind Jack, Lily put down her mug of tea and waited for a moment, listening to his feet on the wooden stairs, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything and was doubling back for it. Had he remembered the shopping bags? She’d sent him to Sainsbury’s with a list, insisting that just because he wasn’t opening up the shop didn’t mean he could spend half the morning asleep on the couch and the rest of the day moping about.
And they needed milk.
She’d heard him again last night, muttering to George and moving around as quietly as he could so he didn’t wake anyone, but very much awake himself. Depression gave him insomnia – she’d felt cruel waking him up this morning but she needed him to get into a normal sleep pat
tern and perhaps being exhausted would help him get at least one decent night’s sleep. But right now she had something she wanted to do that she couldn’t risk him walking in on.
A moment later, she heard the ground-floor street door clang closed and hurried to her room to get the notes Vittoria had given her and her MacBook.
Back at the kitchen table she powered it up.
She’d already logged into Marcus’s Gmail: she’d looked at Marcus’s schedule, double-checking it with a flight-tracking website that allowed her to follow the route of individual planes by their flight number. It was incredible to see just how many aircraft were on the move across the world at any moment in time. But she was only interested in one, and she’d needed to make sure that it was in the air and hadn’t been delayed so she could log in undetected and delete the alerts that the account had been logged in to from a new device.
But he was off this week, so this time she just had to keep her fingers crossed. Lily logged in. She’d been keeping an eye on his email traffic, checking his location and travel history and looking at his appointments. If she had a bit longer she’d have been able to check what he was watching on YouTube, but one step at a time. And she needed to be fast just in case he was checking his email at the same time.
It had to be said, his mail wasn’t very exciting – he had his work emails going into his Gmail account but there didn’t seem to be anything very personal arriving separately to that. Lily had signed him up for a couple of porn websites via his TransGlobal email address, and one for sexually transmitted diseases, to spice it up a bit. The opt-in emails for their mailing lists had gone into spam, so finding them quickly, she clicked to confirm she wanted all their marketing communications and any from anyone else they thought he might be interested in. She opened another window and found a weapons manufacturer and signed him up for their mailing list too, just for good measure. She was sure his TransGlobal address could be accessed by his employers, who would be likely to check it for evidence in light of the recent revelations in the press. She’d make sure they had a few surprises.
Scrolling through, Lily had been surprised the first time she’d looked at it that Marcus’s own email was so bland, but perhaps she shouldn’t have been. No doubt he suspected that Vittoria might check up on him, so maybe he was being careful to keep his communication with his mistress to WhatsApp or text or to delete anything vaguely compromising. Lily checked the trash just to be sure. There were only a few emails there, taxi receipts mainly. All pick-ups or drop-offs to a certain address in Notting Hill. Interesting. The fact that there wasn’t much else in there suggested to Lily that Marcus checked and cleaned up his email quite regularly. Perhaps she just needed to check more often to find something she could work with. Or perhaps he had a private email account just for Stephanie Carson? That would make more sense. She needed to do some more digging, see if he’d used this address as a recovery email – perhaps there was an email linking this to another, more secret account.
Lily pushed her glasses up her nose thoughtfully and glanced back through Marcus’s inbox – there were several email newsletters from boat manufacturers, an email about sails. She knew she could look at them and then mark them as unread, but she really didn’t have time, and she could get a lot from the subject line, or where someone had left that line blank – like his friend Aidan, who rarely seemed to put a subject in his emails – Lily could see the first line. Seeing an email from him, she smiled to herself. Vittoria had told her Aidan had been a huge support to her, that his patience with his friend’s behaviour was wearing thin. The email was one line:
Mate, what the fuck have you done this time? Do you ever think of V?
At least Vittoria had someone she could turn to, someone who understood.
Lily scrolled down a bit further, but it wasn’t the emails she was interested in today. Moving her mouse, she opened Marcus’s calendar.
Vittoria had told her that he always nagged her about her gold leather-backed appointments diary, how out-of-date it was not to store everything on the cloud. So everything he was doing should be noted here and Lily had plans for his diary. She’d waited until Emma had texted her to confirm that he was meeting his bosses on Friday before she started rearranging his appointments. He needed to have other things on his mind or he might realise things had been moved.
Lily played with the end of her ponytail as she scanned Marcus Devine’s week ahead.
Tomorrow morning, Thursday, he’d made an appointment with what appeared to be – Lily frowned as she read the entry and opened another tab, checking the company name – a firm of solicitors based in some very swanky offices in Dublin city centre, according to the photos on their website. She’d thought for a minute it might be a firm of accountants – it had one of those generic partners-type names that only lawyers or accountants with little imagination could come up with.
But a lawyer’s office? What was he going to discuss? Lily smiled. She didn’t need to be a genius to work out that he needed advice on his legal position after the newspaper article. Let’s hope that was it. She flicked back to the company website. It was a big firm, big enough to have specialist litigation lawyers as well as the sort that did your will and sold your house.
Jeepers, was he thinking of selling the house? Lily had seen from the look in her eyes just how much Vittoria loved that house, that somehow she felt it had taken an active part in her recovery. For a moment Lily wondered if Vittoria felt, perhaps subconsciously, that if she left the house she’d lose all the progress she’d made physically, that being there was keeping her going. Perhaps it was. The human mind was a complex thing, that was for sure, and Vittoria was better qualified than Lily to understand it.
Lily heard a car pull up outside, doors slamming before it drove off. She glanced out of the kitchen window. She couldn’t see the road below properly without standing up, but it was a sure sign she needed to get a move on. Jack could come back any minute.
Clicking on the calendar, Lily changed the appointment with the law firm from 10.30 a.m. to 11.30. Being an hour late would mean he might miss his slot entirely – it would certainly mess up his day. From the look of the firm, Lily was sure that he wasn’t their only important client – they probably had a pretty busy schedule.
She just hoped they weren’t the type of company that sent you a text reminder of your appointment the day before, but that would be a bit crass for a company like this. It wasn’t like he was booking in to get his hair cut or have a massage.
Lily scanned the next few days. Marcus had a meeting marked for Friday morning – 11.00 a.m. TG HR Adelphi House.
Adelphi House was TransGlobal Airways Corporate Headquarters. Em had said Marcus had been suspended and had texted to say he was due in to discuss the situation on Friday. The meeting had to be about that. Lily felt her heart rate increase, her palms suddenly sweaty. Was he going to get the sack? She truly hoped so. He certainly had a lot of explaining to do, which was going to be quite a challenge under the circumstances.
There’d be no harm in making that meeting a bit later. She changed the 11.00 a.m. to 12.00 noon.
It was definitely the type of meeting you’d turn up early to, but even if he went in half an hour early, he’d still be technically half an hour late, which would smack of arrogance, unreliability and very bad manners. All qualities that would make him even more unpopular with his bosses.
It was possible he had the time etched on his mind, but if that was the case, then he’d probably think the incorrect time was just a typo. Lily was being very careful not to leave any indication that anyone had been snooping about. She closed out of Marcus’s email, a twinge of something spiralling in the pit of her stomach. Was it guilt? Or maybe worry? Lily sighed. She knew she was playing havoc with Marcus Devine’s life, but really he’d brought all this down on himself: she was only settling the balance. A balance that had a very important shop on the other side. She heard the street door bang closed downstairs. This was about Jac
k and getting his life back on track and, really, she’d do pretty much anything to ensure his happiness.
With so much happening in his life right now, messing with Marcus Devine’s head was going to be easy and, Lily was sure, quite effective. And she was only getting started.
Chapter 36
MARCUS HAD TO put the kitchen lights on when he came downstairs on Thursday morning. Dublin Bay was dark and overcast, a storm out to sea turning the water a strange green, a colour he always thought of as Beachy green. His father had given a painting to the yacht club they were both members of – it had already been gifted its twin, a view of Kingston Harbour by Beachy, and the water was the exact shade of the water today. It didn’t bode well. It was as if the sea here was mirroring the storm brewing in London.
To make it worse he felt hung over, still groggy from trying to adapt back to European time. It was always the same with the Sydney trip. He loved Singapore but it always left his body clock completely upside down. Maybe he was getting too old for this job. When he’d first got his licence, almost twenty-five years ago, the world had been a different place – air travel had just started to change, low-cost carriers coming in, Ryanair and easyJet bringing the costs way down. But TransGlobal had still been one of the world’s greatest airlines then, glamorous and exciting; the air crew had been gorgeous and there had been none of this #metoo crap. Now every second person flew, the industry was swamped with Eastern European pilots who all looked about fifteen and everyone was working longer hours and had faster turnaround times. It was all going to shit. Marcus sighed. If things were different he’d be looking at early retirement, but that wasn’t even a viable thought right now, never mind an option.
Marcus shook his head, fighting a yawn. Normally the seven days he had off after the Sydney run was spent trying to get back into European time, but right now he had too much to do. With everything happening, the last thing he had time for was to catch up with his sleep and get back into a normal routine. Christ, he needed caffeine, and plenty of it.