“You need to see this.”
The text message from Innis had come in just after he got back, with a link to a site that contained those images he'd asked him to have a go at. He enlarged the photo when it came up. Even with the limitations of the size of the screen on the phone, the details were sharp, picking up the background in the warehouse at the back of the Paris gallery, enhanced so that there were no shadows, no blurry details in the image of the young woman that emerged.
Even with her hair tucked under the cap, the bill pulled low, it was the same—a brief glimpse at the airport in Edinburgh, a certain way of moving that came up in the next shot, the profile shot. That shadowy figure had a name.
Alyia Malik. The artist they'd met briefly at the London gallery, and Jonathan Callish's wife.
Kris stared at the images, one after the other, her brain slowly catching up with what she was seeing.
How? Why?
“Think!” James told her. “It's what you're good at.”
He laid it all out, every encounter, each incident, information Innis had hacked along with what they'd learned from Diana Jodion about the tapestry and their meeting with Vilette Moreau.
“Cate took those photographs to Callish. He knew about the tapestry.”
Kris knew it was a short step, that Alyia Malik had also known about it.
“Right after we met with him, you go to meet with Brynn Halliday.”
And it was just another small step that his wife had known about it.
“The van from the attack was at the Paris warehouse.” He wasn't going to let her off this time.
“And we know someone hacked into Cate's phone account, following all her calls, everyone she was in contact with.”
They'd also been following her phone list, along with the text message and the scanned photograph Cate had sent her.
And someone had been following them, from the beginning.
“Someone was looking for something at the Tavern,” he went on. “My guess? The photograph of the tapestry. And they're trying to stop you. They've already proved they're willing to do whatever it takes.”
He caught up with her out on the street.
He was trying to scare her. She was way past scared. She was terrified. What was Cate after? What was the story?
A lost artifact?
Diana Jodion said it was uncertain that the tapestry was worth anything, depending on its condition, even if it was found. There were tapestries in museums all over Europe, nice to lookat, but the value was in the historical importance, what it told about the Medieval period, the hand work that had created it.
The Bayeaux tapestry was important as an archive of events in a time period when there were few written historical archives. But another tapestry from the Medieval period even if it could be found?
Was there a secret in the tapestry? Something woven into the fabric?
Vilette had been certain of it. But was that nothing more than the colorful imagination of a woman who had led a very colorful life? Looking for the spotlight one last time with a story that no one could prove?
Then why were four people now dead?
“You've done more than anyone could,” James reasoned with her. “With everything that's happened, now the explosion in Paris, we need to turn everything over to the French authorities.”
The next step.
Earlier that morning she would have agreed with him. She didn't know what the next step was. That was then. Now she knew who the young woman was in that photograph, possibly the last person who had seen the tapestry before it disappeared. And that letter, hidden in a niche in that cellar, that found its way into a museum decades later. She might have walked away from all of it, if not for that letter.
“Kris.”
She heard it in the change in his voice, and the hand that closed around her arm.
