Ben took Leigh’s hand again as they slipped away from the crowd and followed the slow-moving police car up the street. They glanced back and saw that the men had regrouped and were gaining on them again. On the corner of Broad Street and Cornmarket the crowds were thick with Christmas shoppers. Ben spied a taxi-rank and quickened his step. Ushering Leigh into the back seat of a cab, he caught a last glimpse of their pursuers’ angry faces. He slammed the taxi door and the car melted into the traffic.
Chapter Sixteen
Vienna
Markus Kinski strode up to his Chief’s office and barged in without knocking. He took the little plastic bag out of his pocket and slammed it down on the desk in front of him. In it were the handful of jangling, tarnished shell cases from the lakeside.
Hans Schiller looked down at the bag, nudged it with his finger and frowned up at Kinski. ‘What is this meant to be, Markus?’
The Chief looked harried. His hairline seemed to have receded another inch since yesterday. His face was grey and sallow, and his eyes were sunken deep into a bed of wrinkles. Kinski knew he was counting the minutes to his retirement.
‘I want the Oliver Llewellyn case reopened,’ Kinski said. He was the only detective on Schiller’s team who didn’t address him as sir, and the only one who could get away with it.
Schiller rested his elbows on the desktop and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘I thought we’d laid that one to rest, Detective,’ he said wearily. ‘Haven’t you anything better to do?’
‘There’s more to it,’ Kinski said, not taking his eyes off the Chief.
‘What’ve you got?’
Kinski pointed at the bag. ‘Nine-mil empties.’
‘I can see what they are,’ Schiller said. ‘What’d you do, scoop them off the range floor?’
‘I found them just now at the lake. The lake where Llewellyn died.’
Schiller took off his glasses and polished them with a tissue. He leaned forwards across the desk and looked hard at Kinski. ‘What are you trying to say? You’ve got nothing here. Llewellyn drowned. It was an accident.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘So what’s with the brass?’
‘I don’t know yet. I just know that I need to know more.’
‘But we already know what happened. You were there when they took the witness’s statement.’
‘The witness is a phoney.’
Schiller leaned back in his chair and breathed out loudly through his nose. He folded his arms across his stomach. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I just do.’
‘That’s a bold statement, Markus.’
‘I know.’
‘You can prove it?’
‘I will,’ Kinski said.
Schiller sighed and slumped another few inches in his chair, like a man with an extra burden added to his shoulders. ‘I want to help you, Markus,’ he said. ‘You know I’ve always stood by you. Not everyone’s as tolerant as I am.’
‘I know that, Chief, and I appreciate it.’
‘But you’d better keep your mouth shut until you can come up with something concrete here,’ Schiller said. ‘Remember who Madeleine Laurent is. I had a whole shit-storm of trouble from the Consulate at the time, and I’m not going to start poking around there again.’ He spluttered and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Why don’t you just let it drop? Llewellyn was just some rich playboy who got drunk and stupid. Leave it. Do yourself a favour. You’ve got better things to worry about.’
Kinski placed his fists on the desk, knuckles down. ‘If I find proof, solid proof, will you agree to reopen the Llewellyn case?’
‘We’d have to be talking about some pretty solid fucking proof.’
‘But if I did—’
Schiller gasped and flapped his arms in exasperation. ‘Yes, Markus. OK. If-and it’s one hell of a big if-you come up with something seriously convincing, then I might just consider reopening the case.’ His eyes were hard. ‘That’s as good as it gets.’
‘That’s good enough for me,’ Kinski said. Then the office door was flapping in his wake.
The detour to the office had made him even later for picking his daughter Clara up from school. The traffic was a nightmare and the roads through the city looked like a car park. Kinski sat for fifteen minutes in a nose-to-tail jam, drumming on the steering wheel and fighting his rising impatience.
In a nearby department-store window, the same channel played on rows of TV screens. Kinski gazed at them distractedly. It was one of those talking-heads shows, some interview with a politician. Kinski knew who he was. His face was plastered everywhere lately. Some rich man’s son who thought it was cool to be a Socialist. What was his name? Philippe something. Philippe Aragon. The great new fucking hope for Europe.
Kinski looked at the clock on the dash and sighed. If he didn’t get there soon, Clara would get on the bus and he’d have to double back and try to catch her at the bus stop. She’d be hanging around on the street corner in the dark wondering where Helga was. Shit.
What the hell, he thought. He slapped the blue flashing light to the roof and hit the siren. The traffic parted magically and he sped on through.
As he skidded around the corner and gunned the big Mercedes along the street he saw the school bus still pulled up outside the high wall of St Mary’s College. Crowds of little girls in their sombre grey uniforms and dark blue coats were gathered noisily around the bus, chatting, laughing. Expensively dressed mothers were arriving in their Jaguars and BMWs to collect their daughters.
Kinski screeched to a halt and killed the siren. A group of mothers turned to stare at him as he climbed out of the car and jogged over towards the bus. He looked, but couldn’t see Clara among the crowd of girls. He recognized some of her friends. ‘Anyone seen Clara?’ he asked them. ‘Clara Kinski?’
They all looked blank or shook their heads. Kinski stepped up inside the bus, but she wasn’t there either.
He stopped. A group of girls were coming out of the school gate and walking off down the road. They had their backs to him, swinging their schoolbags, laughing, skipping. He looked. He saw a violin case. Fair-coloured pigtails hanging out from under the regulation blue bonnet. He ran after them. Called her name. Some of the girls turned to look at the big, panting, red-faced man as he approached. The one with the violin case kept on walking, talking to her friend. She hadn’t noticed him. He scattered them and laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘Clara, where the hell are you—’
She turned and blinked up at him, scared. She backed away.
‘I’m sorry,’ he panted. ‘I thought you were Clara Kinski. Have you seen her?’
They all shook their heads nervously, big eyes looking up at him. Then they turned and kept walking, throwing glances over their shoulders as he turned away. One of them tapped her head to say ‘he’s crazy’ and they all giggled.
He ran through the school gate and down the tree-lined driveway. It was beginning to snow again, heavy flakes in his eyelashes. He wiped them and saw a teacher he recognized coming the other way. ‘Frau Schmidt, have you seen Clara?’ he asked.
The teacher looked surprised. ‘Is she not on the bus, Herr Kinski? I saw her go through the gate with her friends.’
He shook his head. ‘I checked.’
‘Don’t worry, Herr Kinski. Perhaps she’s gone home with a friend?’
‘She’d never do that,’ he said, biting his lip.
A small girl came out of the ivied archway that was the main entrance to the school. She was carrying a little clarinet case. She had dark plaits and big brown eyes that widened in recognition when she saw Kinski.
‘Martina, have you seen Clara?’ asked Frau Schmidt.
‘She’s gone,’ said Martina in her small voice.
‘Gone?’ Kinski asked.
The girl melted shyly under his look.
‘Speak up, Martina,’ the teacher said kindly, kneeling down and stroking her hair. ‘Don’t be afraid. Where did Clara go?’
‘In a car. With a man.’
The teacher’s expression hardened. ‘What man?’
‘I don’t know. Just a man.’
‘When did you see this?’
Martina pointed up towards the gate, where the bus was pulling away. ‘I was with her. Then I remembered my clarinet. I came back for it. Just then, a car came. A man got out. He smiled at Clara. He said he was a friend of Herr Kinski.’ Martina’s timid eyes flickered up at him.
Kinski’s heart was thudding and his palms were prickling. ‘What did he look like?’ he asked the child.
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘He was big. He was wearing a suit.’
‘What kind of car was it? What colour?’
‘Black,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what kind.’
‘Which way did they go?’
She pointed down the street. The bus was pulling away. He looked beyond it at the empty road, houses in the distance.
She could be anywhere. She was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
Oxfordshire
They switched taxis twice and rode around the countryside in buses until Ben satisfied himself that they weren’t being followed. Just as the sun was beginning to set, they boarded a red double-decker in the village of Eynsham heading back towards the city. The top deck was empty and they sat at the back so they could watch the road behind them.
‘What are we going to do now?’ she asked.
‘I think we both know that Oliver’s death wasn’t an accident, Leigh.’ Ben put his hand on hers and squeezed it lightly, looking into her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I almost wish it had been.’
She nodded sadly. ‘What was he doing there? What could have happened? He was just researching a book.’
He rubbed his temples, thinking hard. ‘Did the coroner establish time of death, more or less?’
‘He died at ten thirty-four p.m. Why?’
‘That’s too precise,’ Ben said. ‘Nobody can pinpoint the moment that accurately.’
‘Dad’s old wind-up watch,’ she replied. ‘Oliver always wore it to remember him by. It stopped…’ It was tough to say it. ‘It stopped when he went in the water.’ She sniffed. A tear welled up in her eye and she wiped it away.
‘Are you OK talking about this?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’
‘Here’s how I see it,’ he said. ‘Oliver witnessed something. Why, and where, we don’t know. We only know what he witnessed, and it looks like some kind of ritual execution. But he must have been seen somehow. They came after him, but it took them a while to catch up with him. Just over an hour’s gap from when he witnessed the crime to when he died.’
Leigh nodded and said nothing. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
‘I think he filmed the clip on a mobile,’ Ben went on. ‘Say he still had it with him when they caught him. Say the clip was still on it. They’d have thought they’d retrieved all the evidence.’
‘But then they saw my TV interview,’ Leigh said grimly.
He nodded. ‘Months had gone by. They’d covered all their tracks. Case closed. Then suddenly there’s a whole new threat. You announced you had all the research notes Oliver had been sending you, including material posted the day he died that you hadn’t looked at yet. What if he’d sent you a copy of the evidence? That’s when they knew they had to come after you as well.’
Leigh began to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know this is hard for you. Do you want to stop?’
‘What I want is to find out what happened to him,’ she said through the tears. ‘But what can we do? Where do we even start? We can’t even go to the police.’
Ben shook his head. ‘We are not going to do anything. It’s too dangerous for you. I’m going to take you somewhere safe, and then I’m going to go to Europe to start retracing Oliver’s footsteps. That’s the only way we’re going to figure this out.’
‘Where am I going to go?’
‘My place.’
‘Your place?’
‘It’s in Ireland. Very secluded, out on the west coast. You’ll be safe there. I’ll rent a car. We’ll drive up to Scotland. Ferry from Stranraer to Northern Ireland, and then across the border to Galway That way, we avoid passport controls. Nobody will know where you are.’
Her tears had stopped now, a growing look of defiance on her face. ‘And meanwhile you hop on a flight and go off on your own?’
‘Something like that.’
She shook her head. ‘There’s no way, Ben, absolutely no way that I’m going to sit this out on some deserted beach in Ireland while you go off to the continent following Oliver’s trail on your own. This is my brother we’re talking about.’
‘What if I said you could come with me? You saw what happened today. People recognize your face. I can’t move around with you. I’d be better working on my own, and you’d be a lot safer.’
‘You’d be amazed what a scarf and a pair of shades can do. I’d keep my head down and not mention my name.’
‘And anyway, you can’t travel on your passport. It’s too traceable, and if there’s someone connected to the police involved in all of this, they’ll catch up with us the minute you step into Europe.’
‘What could the police have to do with this thing, Ben?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ he said.
Leigh thought for a while, gazing out of the window at the naked trees flashing by. The bus rocked and swayed on the bumpy road. She nodded to herself, as though a sudden idea had come to her. ‘There is one way we could get out of the country and into France without being noticed.’
Chapter Eighteen
Southampton
Two hours later
Orion’s belt was bright in the east and the moonlight rippled on the water of the marina near Southampton. Either side of the long jetty, rows of white yachts drifted gently on their moorings.
Chris Anderson stood on the deck of the Isolde, his sixty-foot yacht, sipping on a hot mug of coffee and listening to the lapping water. A car door slammed in the distance, and a minute later he recognized the unmistakable figure of Leigh approaching down the jetty.
He grinned. He’d been surprised to hear from her earlier that day, and was looking forward to seeing her again. It had been a while.
Chris’s jaw tightened as Leigh came closer. She wasn’t alone. There was a guy with her. Did he know him? He didn’t think so. A good-looking bastard, too, thick blond hair, athletic-looking in jeans and a leather jacket. A couple of inches taller than him, just under six foot. Probably about five years younger than him, too. Chris sucked in his belly. He regretted now that he hadn’t played squash for a few weeks and had put on a few pounds. Who was the guy? Leigh hadn’t mentioned anything about a guest.
‘I’m still not too happy about this,’ Ben was saying as they neared the moored yacht. He could see Chris’s figure under the marina lights, a heavily built man wearing a thick white woollen fleece and a baseball cap, staring at him with a frown. ‘And I don’t think your ex-husband is thrilled either.’
‘Relax,’ Leigh said. ‘He’ll be fine.’ She skipped lightly over onto the deck and greeted Chris with a broad smile as he put his arm out to steady her. ‘Thanks for doing this at such short notice, Chris,’ she said. ‘I really appreciate it.’
She introduced them. Chris nodded curtly at Ben. ‘You never told me you were bringing a guest along,’ he said coldly.
Leigh put her hand on Chris’s shoulder and gave him a little kiss on the cheek. ‘Be nice’, she warned him softly. She looked up to see the familiar face of Chris’s old skipper who was checking the rigging, and smiled. ‘Hey there, Mick.’
‘Long time no see,’ Mick called down. ‘Good to have you on board. Like old times.’
‘Hope I haven’t put you out too much,’ she said.
Mick jumped down on deck, wiping his hands. He was a small, hard, wiry man with dark eyes and a grey beard. ‘Nah, not a bit. A hop across the Channe
l’s just a stretch of the legs for the Isolde, even in December.’
‘You’re a star, Mick. This is my friend Ben. He’s coming too.’
‘Good to meet you, Ben.’
‘You too,’ Ben said. He looked admiringly at the yacht. ‘How long’s the crossing?’
Mick shrugged. ‘Hamble to Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue? Nine hours, give or take.’
‘Travelling a bit light, aren’t you?’ Chris observed. ‘No luggage?’
‘Just my credit card.’ Leigh grinned. ‘I’ll do some shopping when we get into Saint-Vaast.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Chris replied. ‘What happened to your knee?’
Leigh reached down to the rip in her jeans. ‘Oh, that. I tripped.’
‘You’re cut.’
‘It’s just a little graze. It’s nothing.’
Chris turned to Ben. ‘Welcome aboard the Isolde,’ he said with the merest touch of warmth. ‘I’ll show you to your cabins.’ Chris put the emphasis on the plural s. He led them down below through the companionway
The interior of the yacht was surprisingly spacious and plush. ‘The woodwork is cherry,’ Chris said proudly, throwing a glance at Ben and stroking the varnished panels as he went by. ‘Handmade. She’s got it all. Oyster 61, classic model. Push-button everything. Done her share of ocean crossing, too, as Leigh will tell you. We’ve been everywhere in her. Madeira, St Lucia, Grenada. Remember that little pad we used to rent on Mustique, Leigh?’
‘Wasn’t that the place you got bitten on the arse by the monkey, and ended up in hospital?’ Leigh said flatly as she followed them down inside.
Chris cleared his throat and Ben suppressed a smile.
‘It’ll be strange for you, sleeping in the guest quarters instead of the master cabin,’ Chris said to Leigh.
‘I’ll survive,’ she said.
Chris showed Ben into the smallest of the Isolde’s three cabins. ‘You can put your things over there.’ In the light of the cabin he ran his eye up and down Ben’s scuffed old brown leather jacket and tatty-looking green canvas haversack. It looked heavy. Ben wedged it up on top of a storage unit above the bunk. His jacket sleeve rode up as he raised his arms, and Chris noticed the expensive diver’s watch on his wrist.