“Where did you go?”
“Back to the flat.”
“Where did you park?”
“Zac has this lockup around the corner. That’s where he leaves his bike.”
“A lockup?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is the bike now?”
Holly shrugs. “Still there, I guess.”
Joe looks at the phone on the bedside table. First he’ll leave a message for Ruiz.
“Come on,” he tells Holly.
“Have we finished?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we going?”
“To get a notebook.”
21
The Shelby Arms had been one of Ruiz’s favorite watering holes when he was running the Serious Crime Squad in West London. Back then it had been a dive with decent beer and passable grub. Now it’s a gastro-pub with a dozen different boutique beers on tap and cooling cabinets full of imported lagers. The menu has also been tarted up: a ham-and-cheese toasted sandwich is called a croque-monsieur. Potato and leek soup is vichyssoise.
Elizabeth and Daniela are sitting opposite each other, sipping soda waters. Ruiz has ordered a Guinness and Luca the same, sipping it somewhat curiously but trying hard to win respect.
Ruiz studies him, scratching an eyebrow, giving nothing away. The journalist is carrying scars, mental, not physical, but he’s a tough son-of-a-bitch. Daniela is interesting. She has a chill, scientific detachment. Dynamite between the sheets, he suspects. The cool ones often are. Why does he bring everything back to sex? Hard-ons of the mind.
Through a picture window, he sees a line of schoolchildren wearing hats and holding hands. Two women teachers at either end, cajoling them to stay in line and “walk don’t run.” Advice for life.
Now Luca begins talking, starting in Iraq with the bank robberies and missing reconstruction funds. He mentions an attack on the Finance Ministry, people dying. Friends. Cash smuggled across borders. Mersey Fidelity. The name Yahya Maluk seems to electrify Elizabeth.
“I’ve met him,” she says. “I’ve been to his house. He lives in Mayfair.”
Everyone is looking at her. “North visited Yahya Maluk the day before he disappeared. I asked Maluk about the meeting, but he denied it ever happened.”
“How do you know they met?” asks Luca.
“I saw the photographs.”
Luca reaches into the pocket of his shirt and unfolds the photocopies that he made last night at the newspaper office. “Is that the man?”
Elizabeth nods. “He’s on the board of Mersey Fidelity.”
Luca puts another picture in front of Elizabeth.
“What about this man?”
Three men in uniform are standing behind Saddam Hussein. She places her fingers around the face of the man on the far right, framing his portrait.
“That’s the other one.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” asks Luca, glancing at Daniela.
“I’m sure,” says Elizabeth.
“What is it? Who is this guy?” asks Ruiz.
Daniela answers, giving details of Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit, the former Baath Party moneyman who helped Saddam Hussein steal billions from his own people.
“He should be in Abu Ghraib, but he escaped four years ago.”
“What’s he doing in London?”
“That’s a very good question.”
Ruiz silently places the details in context. A wanted war criminal, a terrorist-that could explain why the Americans are so interested.
Luca continues. “We’ve established a link between money stolen in Iraq and Yahya Maluk. Through him we have a connection with Mersey Fidelity and Richard North. That’s why I wanted to talk to Bridget Lindop.”
Sitting opposite, Elizabeth doesn’t leap to her husband’s defense by denying his involvement and arguing his innocence. Instead she remains quiet, gazing out the window at a sunlit afternoon that should be darker, stormier, less radiant. North was sleeping with the nanny. How prosaic of him, how cliched. Men can be so bloody predictable.
“She’s a devout Catholic,” says Elizabeth, almost thinking out loud.
“Who?” asks Ruiz.
“Bridget Lindop-she goes to Mass every day.”
Our Lady of Grace and St. Edward Church is a listed building with red-brick walls darkened by soot, exhaust fumes and the sins of the forgiven. An old woman is dusting the pews. Her skirt is tucked up in her apron revealing pale calves that are bulging with veins like a fleshy Rorschach test.
She’s Polish. Ruiz speaks to her in German, asking after the priest. He’s in the presbytery. She fetches him, complaining about the interruption. Some people will find their own grave too crowded.
“Where did you learn to speak German?” asks Luca.
“Where did you learn to speak Arabic?”
“My mother.”
“We both have one of those.”
Daniela has gone to meet Keith Gooding and get the latest news on the search for Richard North. Police divers entered the river at first light, using sonar equipment in the zero visibility.
A row of candles is burning beneath a statue, the wax almost glowing from within, creating flickering shadows on the skirts of the Virgin Mary.
Ruiz leans back in a pew, feeling his muscles let go. High above his head there are dust motes drifting in a shaft of sunlight and a strand of web clings to a beam, moving back and forth as though the entire building is inhaling and exhaling.
“Do you know any prayers?” asks Elizabeth, struggling to kneel.
“I’ve forgotten the only prayer I ever learned as a kid,” says Ruiz. “That one about dying in your sleep.”
“You’re scared of dying.”
“Better than being scared of living.”
Elizabeth lowers her eyes and clasps her hands. “What makes a man who has a woman who loves him risk it all?”
“Are you asking me or Him?”
“You.”
Ruiz rubs his forehead. “Sometimes when a man feels bad about himself, he doesn’t want to be with a woman who looks at him with nothing but love. Instead he wants to lie on top of a woman who knows how nasty and shallow and faithless he can be… a woman who doesn’t put him on a pedestal or expect him to be a knight in shining armor… a woman who’s happy with the worst he can be.”
The priest appears. Young. Frizzy-haired. Dressed in a multi-colored shirt with silver crosses on the collar, he looks like a Woodstock wannabe, forty years too late for the party.
“I’m Father Michael,” he says, bowing slightly from the waist as though his spine is hinged on a spring. He
