unanswered questions about identity that had tormented her throughout her childhood and teens. She had hoped that sharing it would bring him peace also. But her attempt to cool his smouldering self-hatred had only thrown fuel on to it. He already blamed himself for the death of their father. Now she had handed him a reason to blame himself for their mother’s too.
He had shambled away like a ghost.
He didn’t speak to her for months afterwards. All her calls went unanswered. She even left messages at his therapist’s office, until she discovered he’d stopped going and started fervent visits to church instead.
The last time she had seen him was in New York. He had called up out of the blue, sounding happy and vital, just like his old self. He told her he was going on a journey and wanted to see her before he left.
They met at Grand Central Station and spent the day hanging out and doing tourist stuff. He told her he’d realized some things that had given him a new focus. He said that when someone dies so someone else can live, then that someone has been spared for a reason. They had a higher purpose; the journey he was about to begin was his way of divining what that purpose was.
She’d assumed the journey would entail climbing a bunch of scary-assed mountains, but he told her that wasn’t the way to get closer to God. He didn’t elaborate and she didn’t ask him to. She’d just been glad he seemed to have found an exciting new direction. She didn’t for one moment think, as she waved him off at the airport, that she would never see him alive again.
Liv blinked back the tears and looked up at the Citadel, standing like a sliver of night against the spring sky. She felt now the pain her brother must have felt back then. She had never blamed herself for her father’s death or her mother’s, but she blamed herself for Samuel’s. No matter what Arkadian thought, it was her desire for self- knowledge that had led to her discovering the truth about their birth, and it was her thoughtless revelation of it to Samuel that led to his fall from the top of that bloody mountain.
The sound of the door clicking open snapped her back to the present. She rubbed at the wetness around her eyes and turned to see a bulky plainclothes cop with a round, pasty face and thinning hair the colour of brick. His eyes peered at her from the softness of his face and his hands rested on his hips, opening his jacket slightly to reveal a hint of shoulder holster, and a set of handcuffs clipped to his belt. His shirt strained to contain his belly and a badge rested on it, suspended from a cord around his neck.
She’d seen a million like him; the insecure kind, who had to let you know they were police, even though they wore no uniform. They were the sort she always cosied up to when working a story, because they liked to talk.
His brow creased. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah. Just. . having a moment. .’
He nodded uncertainly. Tried a smile. Gave up and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘Only, I got a squad car out back when you’re ready. I’m going to sneak you out and take you over to Central. We got a gym over there where you can grab a hot shower and a change of clothes.’
Liv blotted her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Sure,’ she said, shooting him a smile that was even weaker than his. ‘What’s your name. .?’
‘I’m Sulleiman,’ he said, lifting his photo ID. ‘Sulley, if you want to be friendly.’ She caught a glint of what looked like a chrome-plated.38 sticking out of his pancake holster as she looked at the picture. The flash of the camera had bleached out his face a little and he looked more serious in the picture than in real life, but it was definitely him: Sub-Inspector Sulleiman Mantus, RPF.
‘OK,’ she said, satisfied that she wasn’t about to be kidnapped again. ‘Let’s go, Sulley.’ She swept the newspaper from the table and followed him out.
The reception area was humming as they made their way through it. Two uniformed officers were standing guard by the entrance, checking everyone in and out. Beyond them, Liv saw a news crew, lights on, camera rolling, the reporter standing with her back to the building as she taped her report; or maybe it was live. Liv drifted behind the Sub-Inspector into a hushed hallway leading to the rear of the building. Another uniformed officer stood by a pair of overlapping plastic doors. He nodded as they approached.
‘After you. .’ Sulley stood aside.
The plastic buckled slightly before delivering Liv into what she momentarily mistook for the blinding sunshine.
Then a woman shouted: ‘Are you connected with the disappearance of the monk?’
Liv spun round to head back into the safety of the building but the Sub-Inspector grabbed her arm and hustled her towards an unmarked police car a little way down the alley. She dropped her head so her hair fell over her face.
‘Are you under arrest?’ the reporter yelled.
A flashgun exploded to her right and a man’s voice joined the questioning.
‘What is your connection with the missing man?’
‘Was the theft an inside job?’
The Sub-Inspector pulled open the rear door of the car, pushed Liv firmly into the back seat and slammed it behind her.
Liv glanced up just as the interior flooded with light from a camera pressed against the window. She wrenched her head away.
The car bounced on its springs as Sulley dropped into the driver’s seat.
‘Sorry about that.’ He caught her eye in the rear-view mirror as he fired up the engine. ‘It’s amazing how quickly the press catch on to these things.’
He popped the handbrake and eased away from the pack. The last thing Liv saw as she glanced out of the rear window was the dead-eyed stare of a camera lens looking right back at her.
Chapter 72
Kathryn Mann pointed to a spot on the dusty concrete floor of the warehouse and the forklift pirouetted gracefully and lowered one of the master pallets from the C-123 right on to it. She was trying to arrange things so that the next shipment due out, an agricultural supplies drop to one of their projects in Uganda, didn’t end up buried somewhere in the stack. Each master pallet had a thin aluminium skin round it and was the size of two large refrigerators. It was like a massive three-dimensional puzzle, but it beat sitting in the office watching the news with Oscar and waiting for Gabriel to call.
The truck eased its forks from beneath the pallet and peeled back out to the transport plane. Most of the fertilizer would be flying straight back out again in a few days, with a bit of luck.
A loud rapping caused Kathryn to look up. Through the narrow avenue of crates she could see Oscar standing at the window, gesturing for her to come over. His expression was grim.
Kathryn handed Becky her list. ‘Could you make sure these ones stay at the front?’
‘Look,’ Oscar said, the moment she walked into the office. He pointed the remote at the TV on the wall and edged up the volume.
‘The investigation into the death of the monk,’ the newsreader announced in a tone usually reserved for massacres and declarations of war, ‘has taken a turn for the macabre this morning.
Sources close to the investigation believe that his body has disappeared from the city morgue. .’
The picture cut to an unsteady image of a bedraggled woman being led to a car.
‘Are you connected with the disappearance of the monk?’ the reporter’s voice shouted. ‘Are you under arrest?’
The woman looked up briefly, staring directly into the lens before dropping her head and disappearing behind a curtain of dirty-looking hair.
‘That must be the girl,’ Oscar said.
But Kathryn didn’t hear him. She was transfixed by the sight of the plainclothes police officer at Liv’s side. She watched him bundle her roughly into the back seat. Saw the camera tilt up towards his face. Saw him hold up his freckled hand to push it away.
Then he got in the car and drove her away.
