I have to get there before him, fretted Bromley. I know Prosser. If he gets caught, he’ll take us all down with him. He may even try to pin the murders on one of us!
“I’m off to get the passports,” said Prosser, getting to his feet.
Now’s my chance, thought Bromley desperately. He waited until Prosser had driven off. Sandra said she was going for a dip in the pool and the others said they would join her. “Coming, Tom?” she asked.
“Not me. I think I’ll have a bit of a siesta.”
Sandra Prosser turned on her road to the pool and watched Bromley walk into the house. Suddenly suspicious, she told the others to go ahead and then waited in the garden behind a stand of palm trees.
Soon she saw Bromley get into the old car he had bought and drive off. She took out the mobile phone her husband had bought her when they had arrived in Rio and spoke to him urgently.
Prosser, who had just collected the new passports, swore under his breath and headed for the airport.
There was a flight for London via Sao Paulo due to leave at seven o’clock that evening. He sat and waited.
Thomas Bromley also waited but in a bar facing Copacabana beach. It was surrounded by a low hedge. Bands played outside and then stretched their hands over the hedge for payment. Little children often sneaked in around the tables, begging for money before being chased off by the waiter. He kept taking out his air ticket and looking at it to make sure it was really there.
The sun beat down. Tall Brazilian girls wearing the minimum of beachwear strolled past on very high heels. He had noticed that some of them even did their shopping in the town wearing only thongs and tiny scraps of material over their firm breasts.
He rose at last and found a taxi to take him to the airport. He had left his car in a back street.
Prosser was wearing a baseball cap pulled down over his face and dark glasses. He had changed his clothes and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts and trainers. Bromley did not recognise him. The flight was called. With a beating heart, he boarded the plane and, with a great sigh of relief, took his seat in first class. He had paid for his seat with cash but at the airport had used his genuine passport. That way, he would be picked up by the police at Heathrow.
As the flight raced along the runway for takeoff, Prosser in the seat behind Bromley lifted his shirt and ripped off a syringe of morphine he had taped to his body. He had been grateful that new security X-ray machines had not been installed at Rio. The syringe was plastic and so had not been detected. There was no one sitting next to him. He waited patiently during the long journey. As they approached Heathrow for the landing and the airline crew retired to put on their seat belts, Prosser leaned forward. Between a gap in the seats, he could see Bromley’s arm on the armrest. He plunged the syringe into it. Bromley let out a strangled cry that was drowned by the roar of the engines as the plane landed.
As he left the plane, Prosser glanced down at Bromley. To all intents and purposes, it looked as if he were asleep. It would take several days for them to find out that Bromley had not died of natural causes. It never crossed his mind that Bromley would have used his real passport.
Angela Brodie found that returning to her old life was difficult. Although she had carefully avoided basing any one of her characters on the people in Lochdubh, the villagers were convinced that this one and that one was really old so-and-so. The villagers were deadly polite to her, a particularly highland way of sending someone to Coventry.
Her husband was unsympathetic. “You should never have done it, Angela,” he said, but as her eyes filled with tears, he said, “Oh, look, let’s go to the hotel for dinner tonight and the hell with the lot of them.”
Angela felt a wave of great affection for her husband as they sat down for dinner. Not once had he shouted at her. He had been puzzled at first as to why she would do such a thing as use a thinly disguised village of Lochdubh as a basis for her novel, but then had accepted the fact that his surprising wife was a brilliant woman.
“Oh, look!” exclaimed Angela. “There’s Priscilla. I wonder if Hamish knows.”
The tall blonde figure of Priscilla had just entered the dining room. She saw them and came to join them. “And how’s the famous author?” she asked.
“Being sent to Coventry by the locals,” said Angela.
“They’ll get over it,” said Priscilla. “There might be a quick way to do it.”
“How?”
“Give six free writing classes on the theme of How to Write About What You Know. They’ll come along because it’s free. Throw in some tea and cakes as well.”
“It wasn’t a success when that horrible television scriptwriter gave classes,” pointed out Dr. Brodie.
“But he was awful and it turned out he was a plagiarist who couldn’t write.”
Angela brightened. “It might work.”
“What did Hamish think about being portrayed as the local Lothario?” asked Priscilla.
“He was annoyed, poor man. But you know Hamish. He never bears a grudge.”
“Well…” Priscilla was about to point out that Hamish was a highlander, a race capable of bearing grudges until the end of time, but decided to say instead, “If there’s anything I can do to help set up your classes, let me know.”
She smiled down at the obviously devoted couple and wondered how she could ever have believed Hamish guilty of having an affair with Angela. She said good evening to them and then drove to the police station.
Hamish’s face lit up in a glad smile when he opened the door to her, a smile to be quickly replaced with a look of caution. He did not want to be hurt again.
“Come ben,” he said. “What brings you north?”
“A holiday owing.”
“Didn’t the Australian job work out?”
“It was a contract computer job which ran its course. I’ll start again in London when my agency finds me something. Now, let’s sit down and you can tell me all your news.”
Hamish began at the beginning, telling her the latest disturbing news that Bromley had been found dead on a plane at Heathrow. As he had used a genuine passport, police had figured that he meant to turn himself in—but someone had followed him onto the plane. “The UK has a extradition treaty with Brazil so we hope the Brazilian police are rounding up the rest of them.”
But Sandra had received a call from her husband at the London airport. “Get out of there,” Prosser had said. “Bromley’s taking a plane to London and he’s going to betray all of us.”
Meaning you, Sandra had thought, numb with shock. The fact that her husband was a serial killer finally hit her. Why should she run like a fugitive? She had access to her husband’s money squirreled away in the Cayman Islands. She had done nothing wrong. She could hear the others talking on the terrace, wondering where Prosser and Bromley had got to. Why should she care what happened to Castle, Sanders, and their wives?
She had no intention of being dragged off to some smelly Brazilian cell. Her husband would have used one of the new fake passports. She would have to pray the old fake passport still worked.
Sandra opened the safe in the villa and pulled out wads of banknotes along with several bankbooks. She stripped naked and Sellotaped the money to her body before dressing again. She did not want to risk packing or calling for a taxi. It was going to be a long hot walk into town.
Chapter Eleven
—Francis Bacon
“I don’t think Prosser will go back to Brazil,” said Hamish. “I don’t think he cares what happens to anyone other than himself. Keeping those ledgers was an act of supreme vanity. So what’s the next move of a man with supreme vanity?”
“Disappear to some country where they don’t have extradition,” suggested Priscilla. She was wearing a blue cotton shirtwaister, as blue as her eyes. The shining bell of her hair fell evenly on either side of her calm face. Hamish felt a treacherous tug of attraction but mentally shrugged it off.
