She heard feet on the stairs and ran towards the door, dropping the iron and lifting the chair leg to shoulder height. She pressed herself flat against the wall alongside the door and waited. The door burst open and she swung her weapon, but there was no one there.
A voice outside in the hallway said, with a weary sigh, ‘What do you think this is, James bleeding Bond? Come on, luv, I’ve been around too long. Back off.’
Feeling somewhat sheepish, Kathy stepped away from the door and George appeared, a small automatic in his hand, aimed in the general direction of her midriff. ‘Ooh
…’ he frowned at what she was holding. ‘That’s an early Eames prototype that is. Worth a bomb. Hope you haven’t done any permanent damage. Luz’ll kill you.’
‘I was thinking that might be the general idea,’ Kathy said, her heart thumping from the adrenaline.
He clucked scoldingly. ‘I told you to be patient.’
‘Where is she, George?’
‘Do you want me to cuff you to the bench?’
‘No.’
‘Well behave then. Watch telly, have some food. You look like you could use it. There’s some choice stuff in the fridge. I bought it myself.’
‘Why are you getting mixed up in this, George? You’re on parole. They’ll put you back inside forever. Let me out now and I’ll do the best I can for you.’
‘Save it.’ He stepped back and slammed the door closed behind him.
It was late afternoon before George appeared again. He knocked on the door and pushed it open cautiously. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Where to?’ she asked, suddenly reluctant to leave the security of her prison.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Queen Anne’s Gate.’
‘Okay.’ He turned on his heel and she hurried after him. When she reached the top of the spiral staircase she had the impression that the house was deserted. She noticed a large painting had been taken down from the wall of the studio. They continued on up to the entry pavilion, and George held the passenger door of the car open for her. Her backpack was on the seat. She got in and they set off along the misty autumn lanes, passing the village pub, its lights on for the evening trade.
When they reached the M25 Kathy said, ‘Come on, George. What’s happening?’
‘She’s gone. You won’t be seeing her again, none of us will. She just needed a bit of time to get clear.’ He glanced over at Kathy, her expression suspicious in the wash of passing lights.
‘What, no amazing corpseless death?’
‘No. She always knew it might come to this. After the opening of Marchdale she thought she was in the clear, but she couldn’t be sure. There was always the chance of some bloody-minded copper or reporter figuring it out.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So she had arrangements in place. She’s still got her money, of course, and by now she’s a long way away and somebody else. There’s no chance of catching up with her this time.’
‘Are you really letting me go, George?’
‘Yeah, really. I advised against it, you might like to know. Loose end, I said, but she didn’t see it that way. She wants the cops to know, and not be able to say or do a thing about it. Otherwise, she said, it would be like designing a building and not having anyone know it’s yours. She said this was her last big design.’
‘What makes you so sure they won’t do anything?’
‘We’ll see, shall we?’
‘What about Madelaine and Charlotte? How do they feel about all this?’
‘They know nothing. Nobody does, except you and me, and I’ve got a watertight alibi for the last twenty-four hours.’
Kathy was silent, thinking. They came to the M4, but then, at the next junction, turned off at the signs to Heathrow. ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the way.’
‘I’ll drop you off at the taxi rank here.’ He felt in his pocket and produced some cash that he handed to her. ‘Luz told me to look after you. Here you go.’ He pulled over to the kerb. ‘Goodbye, Kathy. As far as I’m concerned, none of this happened.’
She watched him roar away, then walked over to the taxi queue and caught a cab into town. As it pulled to a halt at Queen Anne’s Gate, she looked up at the brightly lit windows and wondered what sort of reception she would get.
The first person she bumped into in the corridor was Bren, who goggled as if seeing someone risen from the dead.
‘Kathy! We’ve been looking everywhere. What happened to you?’
‘It’s a long story, Bren. Is Brock about?’
‘In his office, yeah. You’d better get up there. Are you okay? No damage?’
‘I’m fine. Catch up later.’
But Bren came with her up the stairs all the same, as if she might disappear once again.
Dot’s desk was empty, and Kathy knocked on Brock’s door. There was a muffled ‘Come’ and she pushed it open. Brock was bending over a pile of papers. He straightened with a cry, and, in a spontaneous gesture that took her by surprise, grabbed her and pulled her to him.
‘Kathy! I thought…’ He hugged her for a moment, then stepped back, holding her at arm’s length, embarrassed now at this display. ‘I really thought…’ Then he seemed to force a frown across his face. ‘Dear God, you’ve had us in a panic. What happened to you?’
Kathy turned to Bren, standing behind her in the doorway. ‘I need to talk to Brock alone.’
He nodded and closed the door softly behind him. Kathy and Brock sat down, and she told him her story.
At the end of it he shook his head. ‘I don’t know where to begin, Kathy. It’s like some textbook exercise on how to make every mistake under the sun. They’ll be using this at Bramshill for training purposes, and no one’ll believe it could actually be true.’
Kathy lowered her head, accepting the inevitable.
‘… dashing off without talking to me first. Not saying a word!’
‘I thought that would only make things worse, involving you,’ she offered, trying to sound contrite.
‘No back-up, no explanation. Where did that leave us when things went wrong?’
He went on, twenty-four hours of sleepless anxiety resolving itself into anger and dismay. Kathy said as little as possible, answering the odd point, making necessary explanations about some of the more lurid disasters, the break-ins, the drunk driving.
‘And how you could then, knowing what you did, have agreed to get into that car with Diaz and Todd…’
‘I needed evidence,’ she said reasonably. ‘I knew I was about to be kicked off the force. I needed something concrete.’
He shook his head in despair. ‘It’s not the first time, Kathy. I sometimes think you have some kind of death wish…’
But she sensed the anger fade and something else take its place, a sort of astonished admiration, not so much for her as for Charles Verge.
‘He really did that? I had no idea. And none of them knew? No one recognised him, his mother, his daughter…? It’s incredible.’
‘You do believe it, don’t you?’
‘Yes…’ He was thinking of Gail Lewis’s story of the hermit crab dragging around the wrong shell. Yet she, like everyone else, had misinterpreted the image. ‘Yes, I do.’
When the interrogation was over, Brock poured them both a scotch and sat back, thinking.
‘Lizancos will have destroyed his tapes and files, we can be sure of that. But Luz Diaz couldn’t have lived at Briar Hill for the past few months without leaving DNA traces, no matter how well they’ve cleaned the place.’
‘I thought of that,’ Kathy agreed, ‘but even if we found Verge’s DNA in the house, it wouldn’t help, would it? We know he was there before he disappeared.’