There was such a thing as being too dependable, thought Melody, when the first thing your boss said on finding you at the office after five o'clock was 'Oh, I knew you'd still be there.'
She was, of course, finishing up paperwork that Gemma would normally have been doing herself, and she felt the tiniest twinge of resentment. Not that Gemma could help her mother being ill, but Melody felt unsettled and would like to have been out doing something other than tackling Gemma's latest request, which meant ringing up newspaper morgues trying to track down copies of every paper printed on the day David Rosenthal had died in May 1952.
She sighed as she pulled out her phone list. As much as she liked working with Gemma, maybe she should put in a request for a transfer to an MIT-a Murder Investigation Team at Scotland Yard. As much as she hated to admit it, she was beginning to envy Doug Cullen his job.
For a moment, Melody let the idea take hold, then shook her head. If this job was risky, that one would be akin to running blindfolded into oncoming traffic. It was definitely out of bounds, and if she knew what was good for her, she wouldn't kick at the traces.
'I take it you were expecting us?' Kincaid asked as Khan motioned them inside.
'I'd have been an idiot not to. And I couldn't talk at work, although my taking the afternoon off will probably fuel the gossip mill for a month.' Khan's Oxbridge accent had softened round the edges, and his tone lacked the animosity Kincaid had heard when they'd met in the salesroom. Khan's expression was still tense, however. 'Let's not stand about having a convention on the doorstep.' Shifting the baby on his hip, he called up the stairs, 'Soph!'
There was the sound of quick footsteps, and a woman came round the landing carrying another child, this one a sleepy-eyed toddler with her thumb in her mouth. 'Just now changed,' she said, and gave them a cheerful smile.
She was fair-skinned, with a pleasant face and a mass of brown hair that curled in corkscrews. 'Hullo. I'm Sophie. And this,' she said, jiggling the child on her hip, who promptly hid her face against her mother's breast, 'is Isabella, and that,' she said, nodding at the baby, 'is Adrianna, as Ka probably hasn't bothered to tell you. You must be the police.'
'Ka?' Kincaid repeated, certain he had missed a page, but not quite sure which one.
'Sorry,' said Sophie Khan. 'Silly university nickname. He hates it when I call him that in public, but then this isn't exactly public, is it?'
'Can you take the baby, Soph?' Khan asked, sounding only mildly exasperated.
'Why don't you put her in her high chair in the kitchen? Then you can go out into the garden for a bit of peace and quiet, and I'll bring you something to drink.'
They followed Khan and his wife through a sitting room that at a casual glance had more the ambience of IKEA than antiques, and then through a kitchen, where Khan stopped to ease the baby into a chair that latched on to a sturdy tile-topped table.
French doors led out to a flagged patio overlooking a long, narrow garden with neat borders and grass still the emerald of spring. A red-and-blue plastic swing set took center stage on the lawn.
'Dreadful, isn't it?' said Khan as he sank into a chair in the shade. 'I've a kit for a proper one in the storage shed. I just haven't had the time to build it. Maybe when this is all over…'
'What exactly are you talking about, Mr. Khan?' asked Kincaid, now completely at a loss.
Khan stared back at him, looking equally befuddled. 'Are you saying they didn't tell you?'
'Who didn't tell me what?'
'Jesus bloody Christ.' Khan closed his eyes and wiped a hand across a forehead already damp from the heat. 'Don't you people ever communicate with one another? SO6. Fraud. Whatever the hell they're calling themselves these days.'
'I talked to Fraud,' said Cullen, sounding defensive. 'They said they didn't have anything definitive on Harrowby's.'
'Not yet, they don't.' Khan leaned forward, hands clasped on his knees. 'Look, I'm really sorry about what happened to Kristin Cahill. She was a nice girl, and I tried my best to get her out of it.
'But do not, do not'-he chopped a hand in the air for emphasis-'come stomping in with big boots and screw up what I've been working on for the last three years. I don't know what you've stumbled into, but it has no bearing on what's going on at Harrowby's.'
'What do you mean, what's going on at Harrowby's?' asked Cullen. 'And what do you mean, you tried to get Kristin Cahill out of it?'
But it had clicked for Kincaid. 'You tried to get Kristin to quit, didn't you? Giles Oliver said she saw you copying papers.'
'So she told the little weasel. Damn.' Khan looked pained. 'And he thought he'd finger me before I fingered him. Tosser.'
The door opened and Sophie Khan came out with glasses on a tray. 'Orangina,' she said, placing the tray on a small table. 'Not elegant, but there it is. That's the last of the ice, I'm afraid. We've rather gone through it today.'
She gave Khan a questioning look, but when he merely said, 'Thanks, Soph,' and took his glass, she went back into the house, giving them a nice retreating view of jeans and her colorful batiked cotton top.
'You've known each other a long time, I take it,' Kincaid said, after a grateful sip of his own drink.
'Since university. Oxford. We were at Balliol together. I read art history, and Sophie literature, for all the good it does her now.' His fond grin transformed his lean face.
Khan was, Kincaid decided, perhaps only in his midthirties. His poise, his clothes, and the veneer of arrogance he had worn so well at the salesroom had made him seem older. He said, 'I think, Mr. Khan, that you had better start at the beginning.'
'Ah, well.' Khan's smile vanished. 'I never thought it would come to this. I specialized in Eastern art and meant to teach. But there were no suitable openings after uni, and the job at Harrowby's came up. I thought it sounded glamorous, wet behind the ears as I was.
'I came up from the floor, like Kristin and Giles Oliver, and I soon found out that it wasn't glamorous at all. But by the time I really began to see all the cracks in the porcelain, Soph and I were married and had bought a house. So I had commitments, and couldn't afford to jump ship, but the higher I climbed, the more rotten things got.'
'What sort of rot are we talking about?' Kincaid asked.
Khan waved a hand. 'You name it. Dealing in stolen or illegally exported antiquities. Falsifying import documents. Forging provenance. Collusion in the setting of the reserve. Phantom bidding. That, by the way, is Giles Oliver's little specialty, when he works the phones.'
'Is it, now?' Kincaid asked thoughtfully, reconsidering his opinion of Oliver. 'And this dirty dealing-it goes all the way up?'
'To the top. And between international branches of the firm.'
'Why doesn't Fraud step in?' asked Cullen, sounding incensed.
'Because they can't prove anything. And even if they managed to bring a charge against the firm-and believe me, a collector who has paid an obscene amount of money for an antiquity that he thinks might have been illegally exported is
'The documents that Kristin saw you copying-what were they?' asked Cullen.
'Memos from one of the directors to the heads of several departments, very clearly setting out a scheme for the smuggling of listed Italian objects.'
'Did Kristin know what they were?'
'God, no. That would have been disastrous. She just saw me copying things in the director's office when I had no reason to be there. I thought if I was hard enough on her, she'd leave.'
'It seems to me that you-'
Kincaid cut Cullen off. 'You still haven't said exactly what you were doing.' He wasn't ready to antagonize Khan,
