He patted her on the arm, a gesture of comfort and assurance that he had probably made to his patients a thousand times before, and she hated him for it, hated him for his lies, and his blank visage, and for even thinking he could get away with patronizing her. He sensed that he had overstepped some mark, so he turned his back on her and began putting away his equipment and dressings. Still, her obvious antagonism seemed to have goaded him, and he could not resist attempting to assert his superiority over her.
‘You should have gone to a hospital, though,’ he said. ‘I warned you at the beginning: had you submitted to proper care, I might be more optimistic about any possible outcomes. Now we’ll just have to do our best with what we have.’
The boy appeared beside him. The doctor had not even heard him enter the room, and so it seemed to the older man that he had somehow materialized out of the shadows, drawing black atoms from the ether to reconstitute himself in the gloomy room. In his hand the boy held a photograph of a girl aged sixteen, perhaps a little younger. Her hairstyle and mode of dress indicated that the picture had not been taken recently. He turned the photograph so that it faced the doctor, like a conjuror displaying the crucial card in a sleight-of-hand trick. The doctor paled visibly.
‘Remember your manners, Doctor,’ said Darina. ‘Don’t forget who disposed of the evidence of your last botched procedure. Use that tone with me again, and we’ll bury you next to that girl and her fetus.’
The doctor said nothing more, and left the room without looking back.
Now here she was, out of bed for the first time since that bitch had scarred her. She wore a loose, open- necked shirt over a pair of sweat pants, and her feet were bare. It was hardly elegant, but wearing a buttoned shirt meant that she did not have to pull anything on over her head, and the sweats were comfortable and nothing more. The boy had brought her a glass of brandy at her request. She sipped it through a straw in order to avoid stinging her damaged lips with liquor. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to mix alcohol and painkillers, but it was only a small glass, and she had been thirsting for a proper drink for days.
The boy began playing with his toy soldiers in their big wooden fort. They were knights on foot and on horseback, made from tin and carefully painted. She had bought them for him at a booth in Prague’s Old Town Square. The artisan who sold them also made imitation medieval weapons, and heavy gauntlets and helms, but it was the soldiers that had caught her eye. She bought hundreds of dollars worth of them: sixty or seventy in total. The boy was only a year old then. She had left him in the care of a nanny in Boston, the first time she had been separated from him since his birth, and had traveled to the Czech Republic to retrace his steps. All she knew was that this was the country to which he had departed in his final days, the last place in which he had drawn breath before that stage of his existence was ended, and a new one begun. He had no memory of it, and so could not recall the trauma of his dying. It would come as he grew older, but she had hoped to unearth some clue as to what had occurred there. She found nothing: those responsible had covered their tracks too well.
But she was patient, and the boy would have his revenge.
It surprised her how the old and the new could co-exist inside him. He was so like a regular child now, lost in games of war, but this was the same boy who had helped her to torture Barbara Kelly to death. At times like that his older nature took over, and he seemed almost surprised at the damage that his hands could wreak.
She checked email on her laptop, and began listening to the messages that had been left on her various phones. There was nothing of consequence on the main numbers, and it was with some surprise that she found a message waiting for her at one of the oldest of the numbers, the one that had been earmarked for a very particular cause, and on which she had almost given up by now.
The message began haltingly, the voice slightly slurred. Alcohol, and more: a little toke, possibly, to take the edge off.
‘Uh, hey, this is a message for, um, Darina Flores. You don’t know me, but a while back you came to Falls End, Maine asking about a plane . . .’
She put down the glass while she listened to the rest of the message. No name left, only a number, but unless the caller had acquired a throwaway phone for the express purpose of calling her, his identity would be easy to establish. She played the message again, concentrating on every word, registering hesitations, emphases, intonation. There had been a lot of pointless calls in the early days, a lot of frustrated men with fantasies of getting her in the sack, and a couple of drunken, anonymous calls from women expressing the opinion that she was a bitch and a slut, and worse. She had responded to none, but recalled them all. She had an extraordinary memory for voices, but she could not remember ever having heard this one on the system before.
And there were details in this message, fragments of knowledge and description, that told her this was worth pursuing, that this would not be a wasted journey. There was
A passenger: the caller mentioned a passenger.
She rose and headed for the bathroom. A small nightlight burned in the outlet by the toilet, far from the big mirror which the boy had covered with a towel, but Darina turned on the main bathroom light as she entered. She reached for the towel, and felt the boy’s hand on her arm. She looked down at him, and was touched by the expression of concern on his face.
Touched, and unnerved.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I want to see.’
He let his hand fall. She removed the towel. Even through the dressings, the appalling damage to her face was clear.
Darina Flores began to cry.
20
Walter Cole sat in his armchair, a beer in his hand and a dog at his feet. He had put on some weight, and there was more white in his hair than I remembered, but he was still recognizably the man who had been my first partner when I made detective, and whose family had consoled me when my own was taken from me. His wife, Lee, had greeted me with a kiss when she answered the door, and an embrace that reminded me there would always be a place for me in their home. Years before, I had found their daughter when, like a child in a fairytale, she got lost in the woods and was taken by an ogre. I think Lee viewed it as a debt that could never be repaid. I looked upon it as some small return for keeping a light in the darkness for a man who had once been forced to look upon the butchered bodies of his wife and daughter. Now it was just Walter and me, and a yawning dog that smelled faintly of popcorn.
I had not spoken to him of Epstein, not yet. Instead I had eaten a late supper of leftover meat loaf and a baked potato. Walter had joined me even though he had already eaten, which probably went some way toward explaining why he was now more than the man I remembered. I had helped him clean up when we were done, and we had taken our coffee into the living room.
‘So, you want to tell me about it?’ he said.
‘Not really.’
‘You’re sitting there glowering at the rug like it just tried to steal your shoes. Somebody lit your fuse.’
‘I misjudged an old acquaintance, or he misjudged me. I’m not sure which. Maybe both.’
‘He still alive to tell the tale?’
‘Yep.’
‘Then he should be grateful.’
‘
‘It wasn’t a judgment, just a statement of fact. I’ve saved your clippings, but I don’t want to know the unofficial details. That way, I can plead ignorance if someone comes knocking. I’ve reached an accommodation with what you are, even if you haven’t.’
‘What I am, not what I do?’
‘I don’t think there’s a separation where you’re concerned. Come on, Charlie, we’ve known each other too long. You’re like a son to me now. I judged you in the past, and maybe I found you wanting, but I was wrong. I’m on your side here, no questions asked.’
I sipped my coffee. Walter had also opened a beer for himself, but I had declined one. He was singlehandedly
