violently several times to avoid angry pedestrians who shook their fists at him as he went past. Ava laughed and Trave forgot the seriousness of their situation for a moment as they accelerated past the Chelsea Barracks and across Sloane Square.
But Ava’s mood changed abruptly when Trave turned off the King’s Road and the tall, red-brick, Dutch-style houses of Cadogan Square came into view, surrounding the well-tended communal garden. The square looked very different from when she had last seen it two evenings before. Now it was three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was shining, and the birds were singing in the plane trees. A woman was walking her dog across the newly mown lawn, and at the far end two men in whites were playing tennis. But the peacefulness of the setting had no effect on Ava. Her experience with Seaforth was seared into her memory, and she felt a surge of anxiety as she recalled her narrow escape from his apartment.
The houses in the square had mostly been built at the same time midway through the reign of Queen Victoria, and many of them were indistinguishable from one another, so Trave was worried that Ava might not recognize the one where Seaforth lived. But she knew it straight away, and Trave parked the car out in front. The closer the better, he thought, if Seaforth came back and they needed to make a quick getaway.
He turned off the engine and turned to look at his companion. ‘Maybe you should stay down here,’ he said, looking down at her shaking hands.
‘No, we agreed to do this together. You can’t go back on it now I’ve got you here,’ she said angrily.
‘I’m not trying to. I was thinking of you, not me.’
‘Well, don’t,’ she said, refusing to be placated. ‘We should go now, before he gets back.’
They went up the steps and Trave examined the bank of bells on the wall beside the glass-fronted door. Ava had already told him that Seaforth lived in the penthouse flat, so it was no surprise to find Seaforth’s neatly typed name next to the top bell. Trave pressed it and he and Ava waited for several minutes before breathing a simultaneous sigh of release when nothing happened. After moving his finger down the column, Trave pushed the bottom bell and almost immediately an old man wearing slippers and a cardigan appeared at the other end of the hallway, shuffled slowly across the carpet, and peered out at them apprehensively through the glass.
Trave held up his warrant card, trying to look commanding, and the old man reluctantly opened the door.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked nervously.
‘I’m afraid not. We’re here on police business,’ said Trave, repeating the meaningless but useful phrase he’d used on Seaforth earlier, and walked purposefully inside.
The old man started to protest, but Trave ignored him and headed straight for the lift, followed by Ava.
‘Do you think he’ll call the police?’ asked Ava as the lift ascended noisily towards the top floor.
‘He will in a minute,’ said Trave enigmatically.
Stepping out on the landing outside Seaforth’s flat, Ava understood what Trave meant when he took out his gun.
‘Go back in the lift,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how many bullets this’ll take, and they could rebound off the door. I don’t want you to get hit.’
‘Aren’t you going to at least try opening it some other way?’ asked Ava, looking dismayed. She remembered Seaforth’s dextrous picking of the lock on Bertram’s desk and thought that he would certainly have come up with a more sophisticated approach to breaking and entering than what Trave had in mind.
‘I’m not a locksmith,’ said Trave. ‘And we don’t have any time. Now please …’
Ava did as she was told, and a moment later there was a deafening explosion, succeeded immediately by two more. When she opened her eyes, Trave had already gone through the shattered door and was inside Seaforth’s flat. Nervously, she followed him in and came to a standstill in the middle of the living room, bathed in the sunlight that was pouring in through the wraparound windows and was glowing on the steel-and-glass surfaces of the modern furniture. She felt disoriented, as if the room were just an extension of the cityscape outside and she were floating among the towers and treetops. She felt there was no relation between this ethereal eyrie and the apartment she’d visited two evenings before.
‘God, I wish I knew what I was looking for,’ said Trave, rousing Ava from her reverie. He was systematically pulling open every cabinet and drawer in sight and rifling through any documents he found. He didn’t bother to put anything back, just threw the discarded documents on the ground and moved on to the next cache.
‘Haven’t you any idea?’ she asked.
‘Not really. I’m guessing something written down, something about whatever it is he’s planning. Something connecting him with his masters back in Berlin. If it’s here, of course,’ he added, speaking from the bedroom, where he’d gone to continue the search. ‘Because that’s the worst part — not knowing whether there is anything …’ Trave’s voice trailed away, and Ava went over to the bedroom doorway and found him holding the photograph of the smiling young man in uniform that she’d noticed when she was in the room before.
‘It’s his brother, isn’t it,’ she said, although she thought she already knew the answer.
‘Yes,’ said Trave. ‘He was called Alistair, and I think he’s the reason we’re all in this mess.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Seaforth’s mother told me that Charles found out after the war that his brother was executed for cowardice by the British Army in 1916 and that the discovery enraged him — with the kind of rage that doesn’t go away but grows inside a person year after year like a cancer, until he can think of nothing else. Or at least that’s what I think happened,’ said Trave, shaking his head.
But it wasn’t what Ava wanted to hear. ‘You make him sound like a victim,’ she said. ‘And he’s not. He’s evil, like the monster in that picture over there,’ she said, beckoning Trave over to join her in the doorway so that she could show him the Francis Bacon painting hanging above the mantelpiece in the living room. ‘Look — it’s his Dorian Gray picture, the man behind the mask.’
Trave was silent, gazing up at the picture. Ava watched him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but when he spoke, it wasn’t at all what she expected to hear.
‘We need to get it down,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Just a hunch, that’s all.’ He put Alistair’s photograph on the desk, moved a hard-backed chair over in front of the fireplace, and then climbed on it. Carefully he lifted the picture and found it came easily away from the wall. Ava helped him set it on the carpet, and when she looked back up, she gave a gasp of astonishment. A compact stainless-steel safe was revealed behind where the screaming head had been. There was a small combination dial in the centre of the recessed door.
‘How did you know it was there?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t. It was the logical place for a safe, that’s all. Although I suppose it explains why none of the desk drawers or the cabinets is locked,’ Trave added with a sigh, looking round the room. ‘God knows how we’re going to open it.’
‘Can’t you use the gun?’
‘It won’t work.’
‘Why? It did on the door.’
‘Safes like this are bulletproof. There’s no way we’re getting inside it unless we know the combination.’
‘And that could be anything,’ said Ava, acknowledging defeat. She felt bitterly frustrated. To have come this far only to be thwarted by a locked steel door was a hard pill to swallow. ‘Come on. We need to get out of here,’ she said, turning away and moving towards the door. ‘Those gunshots of yours made a hell of a noise. Someone’s going to have called the police. They’ll be here soon.’
But Trave didn’t respond. Instead she saw he’d gone over to the desk while her back was turned and had picked up the photograph of Seaforth’s brother again. He was staring at it intently, as if it contained some kind of secret. And then he suddenly put it down, climbed back on the chair in front of the fireplace, and began twisting the dial on the safe this way and that. He stopped, waiting for a click, but nothing happened. And then he tried again, but still without success.
‘What numbers are you putting in?’ asked Ava. She’d crossed the room to stand behind him.
‘The date Alistair was shot — the eleventh of February, 1916. His mother told me it; she said it was the day before his birthday. It was a long shot, but I thought it was worth trying,’ said Trave, opening his hands in a gesture of resignation.
He started to get down from the chair, but Ava put out her hand to stop him. The movement caught him by
