‘Can I get dressed?’ asked the girl softly. Drexler nodded without thinking, just to let his brain work on the problem. She stepped gingerly into a pair of jeans as though the whole of her right side was sore.
He looked up at McQuarry. ‘Nicole Bailey. What the hell?’
‘This is some kind of set-up, Mike. Has to be.’
Drexler nodded. ‘It’s that all right, but Sorenson didn’t tell me about the girl…’
‘What are you talking about, Mike?’
Drexler looked up at his partner. For a second he hesitated. ‘Sorenson offered me a deal. In exchange for my father’s whereabouts I was supposed to kill someone, someone who deserved it.’
‘Who?’
‘He didn’t say. Just that it would be soon.’
McQuarry nodded and looked over at the prostrate night manager, spittle oozing from his uncontrolled bottom lip. ‘And Sorenson led us right to him. Neat.’ She paused and turned back to Drexler. ‘What did you say?’
Drexler pulled the M9 from his jacket.
‘Whose gun is that, Mike?’
‘Sorenson’s…’
‘Mike!’
‘Don’t try and stop me, Ed.’
McQuarry held up her hands and backed away from him. ‘Easy, Mike. You do what you gotta do. No one’s gonna stop you, just take it slow…’
Drexler turned to her, eyes blazing. ‘Don’t talk me down like I’m a perp, Ed. Just shut up while I do this thing. We both know this piece of shit won’t be missed.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this, Mike?’
‘Course I’m sure.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ said the girl from behind him.
‘Shut up!’
Drexler raised the gun so that it was pointing at Jacob Ashwell’s temple. He took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.
Brook turned and let the picture of Laura Grant waving to the camera fall to the floor. He stared into Grant’s eyes, a sad smile deforming his face. ‘Hello, Laura.’
‘Damen. Why couldn’t you have found out tomorrow?’
‘When you’ll be far away.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You were coming here that night you saw me in the car, weren’t you?’
She smiled. ‘A minute later and I’d have been at the door. That would have saved you some time. How long have you known?’
Brook looked her over. She was dressed head to toe in figure-hugging black jeans and a sweater. No ski mask today. ‘Before yesterday it was just a vague unease.’
‘Caused by what?’
‘Oh, the coincidence of Joshua being ill keeping you in Derby the night of the murders. That was a little too neat.’
Grant nodded. ‘I didn’t like it either, but I had to be in town for the Inghams. I’d had a couple of weeks off beforehand. We’d done so much preparation. Also, we figured if Josh was ill, you’d suspect him first.’
‘I did. How did you pull that off?’
‘A few nasty bacteria stirred into my curry when he was in the toilet. He always finishes my meals when we’re on expenses.
Is that all?’
Brook peeled off his gloves to cool his hands. ‘Yesterday, interviewing Ottoman, you asked him why he didn’t kill Jason, but you were actually looking at me, asking me.’
Grant smiled at him. ‘It was the right question. Do you have an answer?’ Brook said nothing. ‘Anything else?’
‘I suppose your uncanny ability to move the case forward rankled — that brainwave with the rope and the trapdoor for instance.’
Grant chuckled, her cold eyes boring into him. ‘Maybe you couldn’t accept that I was a better detective than you.’
Brook smiled. ‘Actually, I think I had accepted it until our walk in the Peaks.’
‘What did I say? I really tried to be careful.’
‘You were, Laura. But you can’t stifle muscle memory. You crossed that bridge to take the short cut to Alstonefield before me. Without a map, only a local would know that path.’ Brook patted for his cigarettes and reached into a pocket. Grant produced a small revolver. It didn’t seem natural in her hand.
She held his eyes but lowered the gun when Brook took out his cigarettes and lit up. Grant indicated the sofa with a dart of her eyes. Brook moved over and sat.
‘Someone raised in Ashbourne, say.’
Grant’s eyes widened and her hand seemed to stiffen around the gun. ‘That was careless.’
‘Hardly that, Laura. Or should I call you Nicole?’
She was wrong-footed for a second, then smiled faintly. ‘Now I see why you’re so highly rated. I’m impressed.’
‘Don’t be. Your partner gave me a copy of his book. It’s all in there if you know how to read between the lines.’
Grant’s smile faded. She looked towards the copy of Drexler’s book on the bureau. ‘Agent Drexler? Did he?’
Brook could see confusion in her face. Perhaps in giving him the book, Drexler had overstepped the mark. There were private things in there. Brook decided to press home this small advantage.
‘I must say none of the pictures look like you.’
‘It’s not hard to alter your appearance in California, Damen.’ She looked out of the window for a moment. ‘My life as Nicole Bailey was over. Caleb and Billy Ashwell killed her.’
‘And yet you’re the body even the FBI couldn’t find.’
Nicole smiled at that. ‘Thank God Uncle Vic found me first.’
Uncle Vic. Brook flinched at the phrase he’d first heard uttered by Sorenson’s niece, Vicky, two years earlier. Like it or not, Brook couldn’t deny the unswerving loyalty and affection the professor inspired in others. He took a deep pull on his cigarette. It tasted bitter.
Nicole looked down at the floor then hard at Brook. ‘He saved me, Damen. He saved me from those monsters and he saved countless future victims.’
Brook nodded. There it was. ‘SAVED’ — The Reaper’s mantra buried deep inside her.
‘I was half-dead and out of my mind in that cabin. Small windowless room. The smell. So hard to breathe. So claustrophobic. You can’t imagine. I … we were in hell. Every time that door was unbolted I was ready for death. A few days earlier … my sister…’ Her face crumpled for a moment but she blinked away the tears and stared back at Brook defiantly. ‘But one night there was Uncle Vic, my dad’s friend. Covered in the blood of Caleb Ashwell. The most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.’
She laughed coldly. ‘Funny, when he saw me from the door he didn’t move at first — just stood there with a strange look on his face. He hadn’t expected survivors. It threw him. I was too young to know, I couldn’t realise what he was thinking, not until later. It’s what I’m thinking now.’
Brook smiled. He was now a living witness. ‘Trust.’
‘The very word. Could he trust me with his life? He must have known he could never be sure, not for definite, I was just a kid. But he saved me anyway, risked everything he’d worked for, not knowing if one day I’d give him away. The professor was a great man. Instead of protecting himself he took me to his house and hired someone to nurse me back to health.
‘You know what? If he’d killed me I would’ve understood. I could have died happily knowing my family’s killers had been executed. But he took a leap of faith. I’ve spent the rest of my life repaying that faith, Damen.
