He listened to the twitter of birds and the distant traffic rumble as he made some coffee. No milk, no sugar, nothing to eat. He left the radio off. He wasn’t interested in whatever might be happening in the world. He sat for a while at the small table in his kitchen, the coffee cup hot between his hands, emptying his mind, trying not to think about things. Most of all, trying not to think about the two bottles of ten-year-old Laphroaig in his suitcase – and how easy it would be to walk over there and open one of them. Too easy. He knew he’d get there in a moment of weakness, when the demons came. But this wasn’t it.
At three minutes to eight he stood up, walked back to the living room and found the fabric Tesco shopping bag he’d left on one of the armchairs the night before. He picked up the heavy bag, carried it across the room and dumped the contents out across his desk. Books spilled everywhere.
There were over twenty theology textbooks in the heap, and he’d set himself the task of reading them all in the next few days. Acres of Hebrew and Latin to pore over. Thousands of pages of abstruse philosophy. Aristotle. Spinoza. Wittgenstein. Stacks of essays and interpretations of Bible scripture. It was a mountain of work, and he relished the prospect. It would keep his mind occupied and get him in training for when term began in October. Nineteen years was a long time to catch up on.
He worked for six straight hours, stretched and stood up and then headed for the tiny bathroom. After a quick shower he pulled on a pair of jeans and a white cotton shirt, and ate a stale tuna sandwich that he’d bought at a filling station on the M40 the day before. Sometime after two he left the flat and did the half-hour walk into the heart of the city in twenty minutes. He headed straight towards the Bodleian, the University’s grandest and oldest library, just off the city centre.
The sun was beating down strongly. As he walked, he took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.
That was the moment, strolling through the old city under the clear blue sky, when it hit him.
He stopped. It was the strangest thing.
Suddenly, and for just one wonderful instant, it all seemed possible. That he could live the simple life he’d dreamed about, far away from the violence and ugliness he’d been immersed in for what seemed like an eternity. That he could be happy again one day, that the pain would come to an end.
It was just a taste of that happiness, a simple taste of normality and freedom and the promise of some kind of life again. He knew there would be more bad days ahead – days when he didn’t even want to go on living. But here, now, for the first time in months, he could feel the sun on his face and he was thankful to be alive. Maybe the worst of the grief was over. Maybe he was coming through. Maybe he was going to be OK.
He was still smiling sadly to himself as he walked through the stone archways of the Bodleian. The main reading rooms smelled of old leather and burnished wood. He approached the desk and showed his card to the librarian.
Twenty years before, the women behind the desk had been notorious battleaxes with intimidating stares that had frightened most of the students. He’d been idly wondering whether he was going to find them still here, greyer, fatter, and even more formidable.
The librarian flashed a smile at him. She was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with sandy curls tied up loosely in a ponytail, little wisps hanging down and framing her face. It was a pretty face, open and natural. She glanced twice at his name on the card, and smiled again. He requested the book he was after, and she told him in a low voice that it would have to be fetched up from the bowels of the library.
He thanked her, and spent the next half-hour flipping through periodicals in a booth in the reading-room across from the main desk. Every so often, he was aware that the librarian was glancing over at him. Then another member of staff brought him the book he’d come to read, and he didn’t see her again.
It was late afternoon by the time he left the library. The heat and sweat of the bustling city centre was a strong contrast to the cool silence of the Bodleian reading rooms. He filled his lungs with the smell of the old city.
‘Well, I’m back,’ he said quietly to himself.
Chapter Eight
‘Is this line secure? I have to talk to you.’
‘It’s secure. Why haven’t you reported sooner, Kaplan?’
‘We’ve had a problem here.’
A pause. ‘The girl?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘You killed her, didn’t you? You had strict orders to take her alive.’
‘She’s alive.’
‘Then what?’
‘She’s alive but she’s no use to us.’
‘You’re trying to tell me you screwed up.’
‘We had her, OK? She was right in our hands. But she was hard to catch. She was on a motorcycle. We chased her for about three miles, from the villa up into the hills. Those roads are twisty, and there’s a lot of forest. We tried to head her off, but she panicked. She went off the road, where we couldn’t follow. I left Ross and Parker in the vehicle and took Hudson with me. We went in after her on foot.’
‘And she got away.’
‘No. We got her. She didn’t get far before she came off the bike.’
‘What’s the damage?’
‘No serious external damage. A few cuts and grazes. But she suffered a head trauma, and that’s the problem. She was unconscious a long time, nearly thirty hours. Came round yesterday. But she has some kind of traumatic amnesia. She can’t answer our questioning, because her memory has blanked out.’
‘You’re sure you got the right person?’
‘One hundred per cent sure.’
‘How bad is she?’
‘We can’t really say. The amnesia might be short term.’
‘You’d better hope so. Have you any idea how serious this is?’
‘It’s under control.’
‘Doesn’t sound much like that from this end, Kaplan. If she doesn’t regain her memory soon, you’ll have to get her back here where there are proper facilities.’
‘There’s another small problem.’
‘You mean this gets worse?’
‘All her things have disappeared from the villa. We went there to collect everything. It’s not there any more. Luggage, papers. All gone. She wasn’t meant to be leaving until morning. It means we have to replan. It can’t look like an accident any more.’
‘Nice work, Kaplan.’
‘One more thing. There was someone at the party, some boyfriend, we think. He’d been hanging around. We didn’t think anything of it. But then at the party he spilled her drink just after Hudson spiked it. Looked deliberate.’
