told. She felt as if she had hardly left.
“I’m staying at the Fletcher Hotel in Kensington,” she told Locke.
“Do you want a ride? My car is nearby.”
“The tube will do fine. I’ve bothered you enough today.”
“ Bothered is hardly the word I would use,” he said. “Emotionally ravaged is more like it.”
“I’m sorry. I know this must have been upsetting.”
“The consequences are just beginning to sink in. It’s one thing to discuss forgeries in the abstract. It’s quite another to have them staring you in the face when you know all the participants and are imagining how everyone is going to react. I’m not going to sleep well, I can tell you that.”
“If it’s of any comfort, this should be over soon,” Ava said.
“How soon?” he asked.
“Hopefully I’ll see Edwin Hughes tomorrow, and if that goes as planned I’ll be onto Glen Hughes right after.”
“Can you call me?”
“When it’s completely finished, not before.”
“And you’ll bring the files here?”
“I promise,” Ava said. “And you won’t discuss this with anyone, not even your shadow, until then?”
“I promise.”
Ava extended her hand. Locke took it and shook it vigorously. His eyes bored into hers, looking for doubt. She stared back and then smiled. She trusted this one.
“I’ll walk you down,” Locke said.
When they reached the street, he hesitated at the door. Ava looked around and saw a sign for the underground. “There’s my transportation,” she said, and walked towards the tube station before he could speak.
She took the train to Kensington High Street. It was past eight o’clock when she got there, and when she walked up the steps, she saw that for once it wasn’t raining. She went to Marks amp; Spencer and bought a tuna sandwich — confirming first that the tuna was albacore, not skipjack or yellowfin — and a bottle of white burgundy.
An hour later she was sitting in T-shirt and panties at her computer, the half-empty bottle of wine next to her, reading about the Earl of Moncrieff. She had already googled Holmes and Reiner, and the Earl was just as formidable. She could only imagine how horrific it would be to have all three gunning for you. She hoped the Hughes brothers had as much imagination as she did.
She opened her email. Maria was elated at Ava’s reaction to the possibility of her mother’s visit. Ava blinked, surprised that her girlfriend had read so much into what she had thought was guarded support. She sat back in her chair. Maybe Mimi is right, she thought. Maybe it’s time to make a commitment.
Her father had also written to her. The first part of his message made her smile. A detente had been reached between Bruce and Jennie Lee because he had bribed his wife. He had given her a choice: maintain the hostility and he would catch the first plane back to Hong Kong as soon as they landed in Toronto, or make things work and he would spend an extra week in Richmond Hill.
His response to her question about why he needed to talk to her about Michael wasn’t so clear. Michael has some financial problems that he’s trying to work through. I’m not sure it’s going well. I’ll talk to him when I get back to Toronto tomorrow. I don’t want to say anything more than that until I know all the details.
She checked the time. It was still the middle of the night in Hong Kong. Normally she didn’t email Uncle, but she didn’t want to wait up to call him. So she wrote, Call Wong May Ling. Finalize a financial arrangement. I think I’ve finally found some information about who did this, information that we can use to get some of the Wongs’ money back. I’ll call you in the morning, my time.
Ava climbed onto the bed with the files she intended to take to Edwin Hughes in the morning. She went through each of them in detail, making sure that the spelling and grammar were accurate in the letters she had prepared. It seemed trivial, but she wanted nothing to detract from the professionalism she intended to impart. This time she was going to be prepared. This time Edwin Hughes wasn’t going to shuffle her out the door.
She turned on the television and found herself watching an old episode of Prime Suspect. She had seen all of the shows when they came out, and then had bought the DVDs. She made Mimi watch them with her, though she was too embarrassed to admit that she identified with Helen Mirren’s character. It wasn’t Jane Tennison’s persistence, smarts, indifference to chauvinism, or toughness that appealed to Ava’s sense of herself; it was the fact that no matter how many people were around, Tennison was essentially alone — and she was okay with being alone.
Ava fell asleep on top of the bed, the television still on. She woke at four, cold and needing to pee. She turned off the TV, went to the bathroom, and then crawled under the duvet.
When she opened the bedroom drapes the next morning at seven, she blinked in surprise. The sun was shining, and the people outside were wearing dresses and short sleeves. She quickly made a Starbucks VIA instant coffee, downed it, brushed her teeth and hair, put on her running gear, and headed downstairs.
The weather was glorious, the smell of flowers wafting across the High Street from Kensington Gardens. She did three full laps through the Gardens and Hyde Park, the longest run she’d had in months. As she jogged back to the hotel, her thoughts turned to Edwin Hughes. She remembered him sitting behind his desk, his brown leather wingtips resting on the Sorensen paperwork as if it was so much garbage. She remembered him calling for the girl in the red dress — Lisa was her name — to tell her the meeting with Ms. Lee was over, and would she kindly escort her from the premises.
By the time Ava got back to the hotel, she was wired. She put on the blue-and-white pinstriped Brooks Brothers shirt, her black linen slacks, and her alligator heels. She pulled her hair back as tightly as she could, fastening it in place with the ivory chignon pin. She completed the look with a light touch of red lipstick, some mascara, and her Annick Goutal perfume. She slipped on her Cartier Tank Francaise watch and her gold crucifix, stood back, and looked at herself in the mirror. Dressed for battle again, but this time with more purpose.
It was nine thirty, four thirty in the afternoon in Hong Kong. She phoned Uncle.
“I was waiting,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I was getting organized for my meeting.”
“Your email pleased me.”
“I think we have a pathway to some kind of resolution.”
“How much can you get back?”
“I don’t know yet, but they have money, these people.”
“Who are they?”
“Two brothers: their names are Edwin and Glen Hughes. One of them may have had nothing to do with this at all; I’m just not one hundred percent sure yet. I’ll know in a while.”
Ava heard his dog yapping in the background and then the voice of his housekeeper, Lourdes, telling it to be quiet. He was still at his apartment. “I have been back and forth on the phone with May Ling all day.”
“And?”
“We have an agreement,” he said.
She thought his tone sounded strange — flat, tentative. Not many things excited Uncle, but money usually did. And this could be a lot of money.
“Was she pleased with the developments?” she asked.
“More than pleased, I would say. She wanted to call you, of course, and I told her you were completely out of reach,” Uncle said. “Pleased or not, though, she still negotiated very hard.”
“What did we end up with?”
“Twenty percent.”
It was a substantial discount from their usual fee of thirty percent, but given the amount of money involved, it was still a healthy commission. “Good… Why doesn’t that seem to please you?”
“As I said, we talked all morning. She is a smart woman, May Ling. Once she knew we had a chance to recover the money, she knew we would not walk away so easily. As much as she wants to appease her husband, the businesswoman — the Wuhan woman in her — could not keep from haggling.”
“I understand,” Ava said.
