The First Apostle

“Who?”

“Me.”

14

I

Though he was used to the traffic in Rome, Mandino was still surprised at the sheer number of cars on London’s streets. And at the treacle-slow pace at which the traffic moved, from red light to road works to another red light.

The distance between the apartment in Ilford and Angela Lewis’s apartment in Ealing was only about fifteen miles, about a quarter-hour drive on an open road. But it had taken them more than an hour so far. Rogan was inching his way down the Clerkenwell Road, silently cursing the traffic, and the navigation system for bringing them this way.

“We’re coming up to Gray’s Inn Road,” Mandino said, consulting a large-format London A-Z he’d bought at a newsagent’s fifteen minutes earlier, when they had been stationary for even longer than usual. “When we reach the junction, ignore what that piece of electronic junk tells you and turn right, if you’re allowed to.”

“Right?”

“Yes. That’ll take us up to King’s Cross, and if we turn left there we’ll be able to get on the Euston Road, and that will take us straight to the motorway. That’s a longer way around, but it has just got to be faster than staying in this.” Mandino gestured at the nearly motionless traffic all around them.

A mere ten minutes later, Rogan was pushing the Ford sedan up to fifty on the A40.

“If there are no more holdups,” Mandino said, calculating distances on the map, “we should reach the Lewis woman’s building in under twenty minutes.”

In her north Ealing apartment, Angela replaced the telephone and stood in the living room for a few seconds, irresolute. Chris’s phone call had scared her, and for a moment she wondered if she should ignore what he’d asked her to do, bolt the doors and simply stay inside the apartment.

Chris was right—she was still angry with him, because in her opinion the breakup of their marriage had been his fault, due entirely to the fact that he’d always been in love with his best friend’s wife. He’d never talked about his feelings for Jackie—but then again, Chris had never been very good at talking about any of his feelings. But you only had to watch his reaction when Jackie appeared—his whole face would light up. The sad reality was that in her and Chris’s marriage there had always been three people.

And Mark was dead! This shocking news, coming so soon after Jackie’s fatal accident in Italy, was almost unbelievable. In just a few days, two people she’d known for years were dead.

Angela felt the tears coming, then shook her head angrily. She wasn’t going to turn into a weeping wreck, and she knew what she had to do. Chris had many faults that she could—and indeed had—expound in great detail during their brief marriage, but he’d never been given to flights of fancy. If he said her life was in danger, she was perfectly prepared to believe him.

She walked briskly into the bedroom, pulled put her favorite bag from under the bed—it was a Gucci knockoff she’d picked up in a Paris street market years earlier—and quickly stuffed clothes and makeup inside. She took a smaller bag and grabbed a selection of her favorite shoes, checked her cell phone was in her handbag, unplugged the charger from its usual socket by the bed and tucked that in the overnight bag as well, then chose a coat from her wardrobe.

Angela made a final check that she’d got everything, then picked up her bags, locked her door and took the two flights of stairs down to street level.

She’d only walked about a hundred yards down Castlebar Road when she spotted a vacant black cab in the northbound traffic. She waved her hand and whistled. The cabbie made a sharp U-turn and stopped the vehicle neatly beside her.

“Where to, love?” he asked.

“Shepherd’s Bush. Just around the corner from the Bush Theatre, please.”

As the cab gathered speed down Castlebar Road toward the Uxbridge Road, a Ford sedan made the turn into Argyle Road from Western Avenue, and stopped outside Angela Lewis’s apartment building.

II

Bronson put down the phone, ran upstairs, pulled an overnight bag from his wardrobe, grabbed clean clothes from his wardrobe and chest of drawers and stuffed them into it. He made sure he left one particular item on the bedside table, then went back downstairs.

His computer bag was in the living room, and he picked that up, checked that the memory stick was still in his jacket pocket, seized Jeremy Goldman’s translation of the inscription from the kitchen table and shoved that into his pocket as well.

Finally, he opened a locked drawer in his desk in the living room and removed all the cash, plus the Browning pistol he’d acquired in Italy. He slipped the weapon into his computer bag, just in case.

And all the time he was doing this he was checking outside the windows of his house, watching for either Mark’s killers or the police to turn up. The Met now knew he was a serving officer with the Kent force, and it would take only a few phone calls to find his address. Whether or not his agreement to drive over to the apartment in Ilford had actually served to allay their suspicions he had no idea, but he wasn’t prepared to take any chances.

Less than four minutes after he’d called Angela, he pulled his front door closed behind him and ran across the pavement to his Mini. He put his bags in the trunk and drove away, heading north toward London.

About two hundred yards from his house, he heard sirens approaching from ahead of him, and took the next available left turn. He drove down the road, made another left at the end, and then left again, so that his car was pointing back toward the main road. As he watched, two police cars sped through the junction in front of him. He guessed that he’d got out of the house by the skin of his teeth.

An hour later, Bronson parked the car in a street just off Shepherd’s Bush Road and walked the short distance to the cafe. Angela was sitting alone at a table in the back, well away from the windows.

As Bronson threaded his way through the tables toward his ex-wife, he felt a rush of relief that she was safe, mingled with apprehension as to how she might be feeling.

And, as always when he looked at her, he was struck anew by her appearance.

Angela wasn’t a beauty in the classical sense, but her blond hair, hazel eyes and lips with more than a hint of Michelle Pfeiffer about them gave her a look that was undeniably striking.

As she pushed her hair back from her face and stood up to greet him, she drew appreciative glances from the handful of men in the cafe’.

“What the hell is going on?” Angela demanded. “Is Mark really dead?”

“Yes.” Bronson felt a stab of grief, and swallowed it down quickly. He had to stay in control—for both their sakes.

He ordered coffee, and another pot of tea for Angela. He knew he should eat something, but the thought of food made him nauseous.

“I rang Mark’s apartment,” he said, “and a man answered the phone. He didn’t identify himself, but he sounded like a police officer.”

“What does a policeman sound like?” Angela asked. “Still, I suppose you would know.”

Bronson shrugged. “It’s the way we’re told to use ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ when we’re talking to members of the public. Almost nobody else does that these days, not even waiters. Anyway, when I gave him my name, he told me that Mark was dead, and they were treating the death as suspicious. Then another man—definitely a copper, and probably a D.I.—asked if I could drive over to Ilford and help explain some things.”

He put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe he’s dead—I was with him earlier today. I should never have left him alone.”

Angela cautiously reached for his hand across the table. “So why didn’t you just drive over to Ilford, as the policeman asked?”

“Because everything changed when they found out my name. The second man—the D.I.—told me they knew I was a friend of Mark, because they’d found my Filofax in the apartment, and that there were notes about the trip to Italy in it.”

“But why did you leave your organizer with Mark?”

“I didn’t, that’s the point. The last time I saw my Filofax was in the guest bedroom of Mark’s house in Italy.