I let Saslow’s head fall onto my shoulder. Anyone we passed, who might glance into the car, would almost certainly think she was sleeping.
The girl was now the key to my survival. She would make it possible for me to move on to the next stage of my life.
I needed to get away. I needed to go to another country. I knew what my choice was. I needed to be somewhere where cooperation with the United Kingdom was rarely an option. Somewhere I already had contacts in organisations which would welcome my special abilities. I had money. Not a lot, but enough to keep myself while I rebuilt my existence.
And I had my people, many more than Saul, Al and Leo. I could not always summon them at will, nor could I always deny them when they came to me. Sometimes I could make them wait. Other times I had to allow them to take me over at once. When they come to me and I become them, sometimes it is I, Aeolus, who has summoned them. Called them up at will. But sometimes it is as if they summon me and I have answered their call. They are my people.
As for Willis, poor Willis, he was never more than the cloak within which I wrapped my real selves.
If he disappears for ever, he will be no loss.
I am Aeolus.
Twenty-Nine
Hemmings stared at Vogel.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’
‘Well I can’t be sure, sir…’
‘I think you are, Vogel, you know it in your gut, don’t you, man?’
‘I feel it, that’s for certain, sir,’ said Vogel.
‘What about DNA and fingerprints? Willis’s will be on record like every serving police officer in the UK. If he’s our killer then his DNA would have come up as a match on the national data base straight away, wouldn’t it?’
‘Apparently not and I can’t explain that, sir. Not yet. We’ll have to look into it. Meanwhile, I think we need to take every precaution. All being well, Willis and Saslow should be back within fifteen minutes or so.’
Involuntarily, he glanced at his watch again. If they are coming back, he thought. If Willis was still sticking to his reliable copper personae and hadn’t totally transformed himself into Aeolus. It didn’t bear thinking about. If anything happened to Saslow, Vogel would hold himself responsible for the rest of his life.
Hemmings was speaking. Vogel heard him from afar. He made himself listen properly. He and Hemmings could only deal with the situation as it now was.
‘So let’s get an armed response presence here, right away,’ Hemmings was saying. ‘Low profile, keep them out of sight. Then as soon as Willis and Saslow are in the building we separate them. Get Saslow out of the firing line, before the armed response boys do the arrest. Got it?’
Vogel had it.
‘I’ll call them in,’ said Hemmings.
He did so at once on his desk phone.
‘They’ll be here within twenty,’ he said. ‘We may have to play a holding game for a bit, if Willis and Saslow get here first. Keep Willis sweet. String him along a bit.’
Vogel stared at Hemmings in silence for a moment.
Sometimes, just sometimes, he thought the detective chief inspector was from another planet. Keep him sweet? String him along a bit? This could be a man who had killed three times in cold blood and those were only the killings they knew about. This could be a man who did not know who he was from one day to the next, and who, if Vogel had correctly understood Professor Freda Heath, could swing in and out of his various murderous identities almost by the minute. Vogel felt totally out of his depth and that had never happened to him before.
‘You know what sir, I’m not sure if that’s going to be possible…’ he began.
‘If he comes back here with Saslow, then surely it will be,’ said Hemmings.
Vogel did not entirely agree, but saw Hemmings’s logic.
‘It’s if he doesn’t come back with Saslow that we need to really worry,’ the DCI continued.
Vogel didn’t need telling that. He was already desperately worried.
When Saslow came round, she had no idea where she was. For just a split second, she could not even remember what had happened to her. Then she saw Willis and she remembered it all. That’s when the pain hit her, surging though her body. The second blow had been much harder than the first. She realised she’d been concussed, more than that, she had been rendered unconscious.
He was standing at a table and seemed to be sorting through the contents of a box. He had his back to her. She tried to speak. Her head hurt, a lot. Her right cheek hurt worst of all. Without thinking, she tried to raise a hand to touch it. She was still handcuffed behind her back. Her ankles were handcuffed too. She realised she was half-sitting, half-lying on a concrete floor, with her upper back against a wall. She wriggled, involuntarily struggling to move, but she was chained to the wall. Willis had looped one of the cuffs on her wrist through a thick, metal chain.
She looked around her. She was in some sort of dimly lit room without windows. This was her prison now. The air was dank and heavy. She wondered if it was underground.
She wondered if she would die there.
She was finding it difficult to breathe. It felt as if her nose and throat were blocked. She tried to speak again, but was aware only of a gurgling sound. Willis turned around then. Only, she could barely recognise him as Willis. The man she’d thought of, not really as a friend like some of those she worked with, but certainly as a close colleague, perhaps her closest colleague. Someone trustworthy upon whom she could rely. This was not Willis. This was some madman, with eyes cold as ice.
He moved towards her. Willis was tall, a good six feet, and the celling in the room was low. He couldn’t quite stand up fully. So he walked with his head slightly bowed and when he stood above her, his bent upper body loomed over her. He reached out with one hand. Saslow was absolutely terrified. Was this it? Was he going to kill her? She cowered away from him, as best she could given her handcuffed hands and feet.
‘Don’t worry, you snivelling bitch, I can hardly bare to touch you,’ he hissed at her. Then she saw he was carrying a plastic bottle of water. He placed the neck of it between her lips and tipped. She gulped down as much as she could, desperate for it. Her throat seemed to clear. Then water began to dribble down her chin. She couldn’t take any more. Mercifully, he removed the bottle before she choked. She gasped for air. Her breathing seemed a little easier, but she could barely speak. Her voice was little more than a whisper.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked.
‘That depends on your friends, your police friends,’ he said. ‘If they follow my orders, I will tell them where you are. Then they will come for you, I suppose. If they disobey me, well, you will die, eventually.’
She heard herself begin to sob.
‘What did you expect?’ he asked coolly. ‘You aren’t a total fool, are you?’
Saslow was suddenly aware that she was losing control of her bladder. She knew that fear did that. She had seen it happen, but never thought it would happen to her.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’
He shrugged.
‘There is no toilet here,’ he said.
She heard herself pleading with him.
‘Please, I need to go. I can’t hold it much longer…’
He shrugged and turned away.
She couldn’t help it. She began to urinate. The liquid poured from her, seeping through her clothes and leaking on to the floor. He turned back to face her.
‘You filthy, filthy bitch,’ he growled.
Then he stepped towards her and slapped her twice across her already battered face. She screamed with pain. He stepped back and just stared at her.