‘You mean they got smart. Let me guess. You turned your phone on just before you got here, right?’
‘How did you know…?’ she breathed, Tom’s question pulling her back from the edge. She had briefly switched it on. Just long enough to see if Aurelio had left her a message. Something, anything, that might explain what she had overheard. But all there had been was a series of increasingly frantic messages from her boss to turn herself in.
‘It only takes a few seconds to triangulate a phone signal. You led them straight here.’
She took a deep breath, a small and increasingly insistent voice at the back of her head fighting her instinct to just jump down.
‘Who are you?’
‘Someone who knows what it’s like to be on the run,’ he shot back. ‘Someone who knows what it takes, keep running fast enough to stay alive.’
Sighing heavily, she reached down, her hand clutching on to his.
THIRTY-FOUR
Verbier, Switzerland 19th March-7.31 a.m.
It had snowed last week-recently enough for the village’s blandly functional concrete heart to still be benefiting from its decorative touch, long enough ago for the briefly pristine white streets to have been turned into a dirty river of slush and mud-stained embankments.
Faulks had never seen the point of skiing, never understood the attraction of clamping his feet into boots that in another age would have likely been in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and then hurling himself off a mountain on two narrow planks just to only to get to the bottom so that he could have to queue and pay for the privilege of repeating the whole infernal experience again. And again.
Glancing up from his phone as they drove past, he almost felt sorry for them, a few early starters clomping noisily down the street trying not to break their necks on the ice, skis balancing precariously on their shoulder, their edges sawing down to the bone. It seemed a heavy price to pay to ensure you could hold your own at the school gates with the other parents or be able to join in with the dinner party circuit chit chat.
Still, if there was one thing he’d learnt over the years it was that there was no limit to people’s ingenuity when it came to devising irrational ways to spend their money. And the richer they were, the more irrational and ingenious they seemed to become. It was a status symbol. A badge of honour. In fact, compared to some things he’d witnessed over the years, skiing was almost sane.
Chalet Septieme Ciel was perched in an isolated spot high above the village, facing westward and with a breathtaking view over the valley below. Converted from an old school, its name meant Seventh Heaven; strangely inappropriate, given that most of its occupants, Faulks was fairly sure, were fated for a far warmer destination when their time came. Maybe that was why they chose here, Faulks mused. The prospect of an eternity roasting in the fires of Hell was perhaps all the incentive they needed to pay the extortionate fees this place charged. Anything to spend their final days somewhere cold.
Faulks’s silver 1963 Bentley S3 Continental pulled up and Logan got out to open his door for him. A former paratrooper from the outskirts of Glasgow, he’d done two tours in Afghanistan before realising that he could make more in a year as a private bodyguard than ten being shot at for Queen and country. Wearing a suit and his regimental tie, he had straw-coloured hair and a wide, round face, his nose crooked and part of one earlobe missing. His jaw was permanently clenched, as if he was chewing stones.
A female voice answered the intercom.
‘I’m here to see Avner Klein,’ Faulks announced in French.
The door buzzed open and he stepped inside, a dark-haired nurse in a white uniform rushing forward to greet him, a stern expression on her face.
‘Visiting hours aren’t until nine,’ she informed him icily.
‘I know, but I’ve just flown in from Los Angeles,’ he explained apologetically. ‘And I have to be back in Geneva mid morning. I knew that if I didn’t at least try to see him now…’
‘I understand,’ she relented, her face softening as she placed a comforting hand on his sleeve. ‘In this case… well, time is short. I’m sure he’ll see you. He’s not been sleeping well recently. Follow me.’
She led him downstairs and down a long, dark corridor, Faulks marking every third step with the sharp clip of his umbrella against the wooden floor. Reaching the last door she knocked gently. From the other side came a faint call that seemed barely human to Faulks, but which the nurse clearly took as permission to enter, nodding at him to go in.
‘Mrs Carroll is having breakfast on the terrace,’ she called as she retreated back along the corridor before he could stop her. ‘I’ll let her know you’re here.’
The curtains had been partly drawn, throwing a narrow ribbon of light across the otherwise dark room. This had unravelled along the floor and then spooled up and across the bed, revealing the pale hands of the person lying in it, his face wreathed in darkness.
‘Avner?’ Faulks said, his eyes straining to adjust to the sepulchral half light.
‘Earl, is that you?’ a thin voice rasped from the bed.
‘How are you doing, sport?’ Faulks stepped across to the bed with what he hoped was an encouraging smile.
Klein looked barely alive, his cheeks hollowed out, eyes sunk into the back of his head, hair missing, skin wrinkled and sagging. Wires from several machines disappeared under the white bedclothes that shrouded his body, their monitors flashing up a hieroglyphic stream of numbers and graphs and pulsing dots. There was a drip too, Faulks noticed, the line seeming to vanish somewhere in the direction of Klein’s groin, the livid purple patches along his wizened forearm suggesting that they couldn’t find a vein there any more.
‘I’m dying,’ Klein replied, the very effort of blinking seeming to make him wince in pain.
‘Rubbish,’ Faulks assured him breezily. ‘You’ll be back on your feet in time for the Triple Crown. I’ve got a killer tip on the Derby this year. A guaranteed winner!’
Klein nodded weakly, although his empty smile told Faulks that they both knew he was lying.
‘Thank you for visiting,’ Klein wheezed. ‘I know you’re busy.’
He nodded at the drink next to the bed and Faulks reached across and held it for him, trying not to wrinkle his nose in disgust as Klein’s cracked lips sucked at it greedily, a drop escaping from the corner of his mouth and trickling down his chin like a tear.
‘Never too busy for an old friend.’ A pause. ‘And there is something I wanted to show you.’
‘Oh?’
Rather than curiosity, there was a resigned sadness in Klein’s voice, as if Faulks had somehow confirmed a rumour that he’d been hoping wasn’t true.
‘I knew you wouldn’t want to pass up a chance like this,’ Faulks enthused, opening his wallet and extracting a small Polaroid. ‘Look-’
Klein lifted himself forward and then almost immediately collapsed back on to his pillow, convulsing under the grip of a sudden hacking cough.
‘Verity Bruce wants it,’ Faulks continued through the noise, glancing lovingly at the picture. ‘I’ve brought all the paperwork ready for you to sign. All you need to do is authorise the payment and-’
Faulks broke off as Deena Carroll, Klein’s second wife, stormed into the room behind him, gold bangles and earrings clanging like a Passing Bell.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said, roasted coffee bean eyes blazing out of a leathered face crowned by a swooping wave of dyed platinum blonde hair.
‘Visiting an old friend,’ Faulks shrugged. ‘I mean, old friends,’ he added with a small bow of his head.
‘You’re no friend,’ she hissed contemptuously, snatching the photograph from him and waving it in his face. ‘Friends don’t try and hawk their grimy trinkets to a dying man.’ She flicked the photograph to the floor. ‘You make me sick, Earl.’
‘Those grimy trinkets have made the Klein-Carroll collection one of the greatest in the world,’ he reminded her tersely as he knelt down stiffly to retrieve the photograph. ‘And now that you’ve donated it to the Met, a permanent
