She ate lunch in a café that the book highlighted, wondering if the whole thing was insane. She watched the other patrons carefully, waiting for one of them to pull up a chair and introduce himself, offer an explanation. None did. There was one more site marked in the book and it was the furthest away: she almost decided not to bother. But she’d come this far, so she got on the tram and rode out down the long, tree-lined avenue to the quiet suburb of Tervuren.
The Royal Museum of Central Africa stood in an imposing, lead-domed building that looked like a mausoleum. It was a place out of time, an anomaly in the fabric of history. Built as a monument to King Leopold’s vanity, it had opened the year his vicious reign in the Congo finally became too much even for his countrymen to stomach. In the 1960s the winds of change had blown in just enough to shake loose the ‘Congo’ from its name, but not enough to disturb the dust on the old collections. Lions and elephants stood rigorously stiff in glass cases, poised as their killers had posed them. The only reference Ellie found to the savagery of the Belgian occupation was in a brief display in a gallery at the far end of the building, an apologetic footnote tucked at the bottom of the page. She thought of Conrad again, and wondered how many of those profits had poured into accounts at Monsalvat.
The horror, she murmured to herself.
‘We meet again.’
She spun around. A short, tubby man with tousled hair and an apologetic expression was watching her from across a cabinet of ivory tusks. Perhaps she’d half expected him, but she was still shocked. It occurred to her that he’d bided his time, waiting until she reached the furthest, emptiest place in this distant, empty building. There were no guards here. The whole long corridor leading away from the room was deserted.
‘I’ll scream,’ she warned him.
‘Please don’t.’ He stepped away, holding up his hands, as if she were pointing a gun at him. It unnerved her.
‘Why did you send me that newspaper article?’
He looked out of the window, at the green lawns and grey sky. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
There was nothing special about the building at No. 46 Lombard Street, unless you looked at the roof. On four floors it housed an insurance company, a firm of headhunters who preferred the term ‘executive search’, a commodities trader and a small consultancy. But on the roof, unseen and unnoticed, there grew a forest of antennae, dishes, aerials and masts. They twitched in the wind, feeling out the least ghost of information.
If you could have followed your way through the tangle of holding companies and blind trusts that owned the building, you would eventually arrive — by way of Liechtenstein, Monaco, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands — almost back where you started. And if you could have followed your way through the tangle of electrical cables coiled up in the basement, they too would have led to the same place: out of the building, a hundred metres underground along Lombard Street, and up into a dark room on the fifth floor of an old building behind King William Street, filled with the hum of electronics. In that room, if you could have peered through one of the many screens that lit it, you would have seen two men staring at a map overlaid with red lines like a child’s scribble.
‘It’s too easy,’ said Destrier. ‘In the old days we’d have needed six men to keep tabs on her — backup vehicles, disguises, the lot. Now her phone tells us every step she takes and it’s not even illegal.’
Blanchard examined the map. ‘She’s been busy.’
‘All the tourist sites.’ Destrier made a gesture on the touch-screen and the map zoomed out. Now the red lines looked a tangled ball of string, with a single thread trailing off the end. ‘Right now, she’s at the Congo Museum.’
‘Show me the time profile.’
Destrier pushed a button. The lines changed again, swelling or contracting so that the thickness showed the length of time spent in any given place. Stringy veins where she’d been travelling, broad pools where she’d lingered in the museums. It made the overlay look like a giant blood splatter.
‘She’s spending a long time at the Musée d’Afrique.’
‘Maybe she likes dead animals.’
Blanchard stared at the screen. ‘Do you have watchers?’
‘Two guys followed her for a couple of hours this morning at the art gallery. Saw a thousand pictures of fat women and nothing else, then buggered off. Not very cultured, my guys. Koenig’s in town; Saint-Lazare said he was a higher priority.’
‘Of course. How about phone calls?’
‘Not many.’
‘Any to Oxford?’
‘One a night. Talks for about ten or fifteen minutes.’
‘Were you listening?’
Destrier gave him a sly look. ‘She hasn’t told him about her night at the opera, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
Blanchard didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Keep monitoring her.’
Outside the museum the grounds descended in a series of severely geometric terraces towards an ornamental lake. The pale gravel crunched like bonemeal underfoot, powdering Ellie’s shoes white. At least there were more people here, families with dogs and children roaming about on a Saturday afternoon. Ellie said nothing, waiting. But her companion seemed in no mood to speak either. He slouched along with his hands in his coat pocket, darting little glances over his shoulder.
‘Who are you?’ Ellie said at last.
His face brightened. He looked glad for the opening, and it occurred to Ellie that perhaps he was as nervous as she was.
‘You can call me Harry.’
‘Are you a spy?’
He thought about that. ‘Not in any political sense. I belong to a group that prizes secrecy.’
‘Like the Freemasons?’
‘Not really.’
He paused, examining his reflection in the pond. ‘I’m sorry about all the cloak-and-dagger. I tried to get you at the art gallery, but they were watching.’
Ellie could feel herself skating on a thin layer of credulity, talking and nodding as if this were a perfectly normal conversation. ‘Who’s they?’
‘Your employers.’
‘Of course. The medieval heart of darkness, spying on me all the time.’ She rounded on him. ‘Why did you give me that newspaper article?’
‘Because I thought you should know the truth.’ He held her gaze. ‘John Herrin was your father. John Herrin was Aneurin Stanton.’
‘My dad died in a car crash,’ she said numbly.
‘That’s what your mother told you.’
They turned left, along a long rectangular lake. Everything here was straight lines: the horizontal banks of the lake and the path running parallel; the perpendicular bars of a row of poplars.
‘What’s your version?’
‘Pretty much what it said in the paper. He was hit by a train in an Underground tunnel. Died instantly.’
Ellie felt dizzy. ‘Can we sit down?’
‘It’s better if we keep moving.’ Harry glanced over his shoulder. ‘He died trying to break into the Monsalvat Bank.’
‘Is that what you are? Bank robbers?’
‘Monsalvat have something in their vaults that belongs to us — something they stole a long time ago. Nye Stanton died trying to get it back. Now you’re their star young banker.’ He pouted, feigning surprise. ‘Coincidence, no?’
‘So — what? You rigged the competition to get me in there? You thought I’d unlock the vault to let you go in and get what you want?’
‘We didn’t have anything to do with it.’