“Of course. It was nice to meet you. I’m Maggie.”
“Maggie,” Sid repeated. Had she forgotten she’d told him already? Perhaps she was losing her marbles. She looked quite old, which made him worry that she was lonely. “Nice to meet you, too.”
He opened the cottage door. She stayed where she was, looking up at the roof even though the rain had begun to fall harder. As he went inside, he suddenly felt as if her gaze was burning into his back, but when he turned to shut the door behind him, she was walking away.
He was going to have to watch out for her and make sure she didn’t get in the habit of interrupting him during work hours. The last thing he wanted was a needy neighbor.
Diana
Diana Cornish and Charlotte Craven disembarked separately when the train arrived at Euston. Charlotte got into a waiting town car, and Diana slipped into the crowd of commuters thronging the entrance to the tube station. If they ran into each other later, in public, they would greet one other as if they were merely professional acquaintances, nothing more.
Diana took the Victoria Line to Victoria Station, then changed to the District Line and got off at West Brompton. She wasn’t feeling the lack of sleep yet. Her adrenaline was pumping, her mind buzzing. Charlotte had inspired her. She should have trusted that everything was being done for the right reasons. Now that she wasreassured, she was one hundred percent committed to making sure things went well between Anya and the benefactor.
But there was something she needed to do before she met with Anya later.
Deep inside, in a secret place, she was carrying a hunger for a man she should have left a long time ago, once he’d outlived his usefulness to the Larks. But she couldn’t give him up. It was a weakness, she knew it, and a violation of one of the Larks’ unbreakable rules, but her life was already full of risk, and she felt she could handle this one. She undertook so much selfless work for the cause, and she wanted just this one thing for herself.
She had seduced Henry Macdonald two years earlier. To be more precise, she’d seduced marriedJudge Henry Macdonald, father of two, and she’d done it to help to get a law enacted, a law designed to protect women, a law that Judge Macdonald had a lot of sway over.
He wasn’t the first powerful man Diana had become intimate with in order to influence him, and she wasn’t the first of the Larks to do it. There was a long tradition of exerting control this way in the Fellowship, and in the Order of St. Katherine, too. But unlike the Kats, the Larks never married them.
Judge Macdonald opened the door of his flat and kissed Diana with so much feeling that her self-control evaporated.
I’m in love with him, she thought. That was the terrible truth of it, the thing she could barely admit to herself. He was her Achilles’ heel, and she knew it, but she fell into his arms anyway.
Diana left Henry’s flat alone, one hour later, slipping out of his building at Chelsea Harbor and taking a cab to her hotel. She felt the same way she usually did after seeing him: physical satiety and guilt.
At the hotel she went to her room and lay on the bed. She had some time to rest before leaving to meet Anya. She checked the news on her phone, scrolling until she saw a headline that caught her attention.
“She Deserves a Name, and She Deserves Justice.”
POLICE APPEAL FOR HELP IDENTIFYING BODY OF WOMAN
Police are appealing for help in identifying a young woman whose body was recovered from the bank of the Thames at Shingles Riverbank in Putney two weeks ago, when police were called to reports of a person discovered by a dog walker.
No personal property was found. Fingerprint tests were conducted but were negative. The recovered body was sent to the coroner’s office and details were uploaded onto the UK Missing Persons database.
The death is being treated as suspicious. The body is very badly decomposed.
Detective Inspector Jason Dench said, “We’re working hard on identifying the body and pursuing several lines of investigation regarding the tragic circumstances in which this young woman may have ended up dying. We’re now asking for help from the public to identify her.”
A spokeswoman for the WeAreAlive Trust, a charity dedicated to eradicating modern slavery, said, “Given this young woman’s Asian descent and the difficulty in identifying her, we believe it’s likely that this young woman was a victim of people trafficking. We urge anyone with information to support the police in identifying her so that she doesn’t become an anonymous crime statistic. She may have suffered extreme abuse and exploitation, but she also has a family somewhere. She deserves a name, and she deserves justice.”
There was a photograph of where the body was found. Diana had a sickening feeling as she looked at it. It had been her job to make sure the body disappeared forever, and she’d failed.
Clio
Clio drove through the village and made a turn down an unmarked lane bordered by rolling fields. She couldn’t have known that Sherston Hall was down there; there was no sign, just two worn stone columns on either side of the lane’s entrance, but that’s what the GPS told her, so she kept going. The sun lurked behind a row of trees atop a ridge in the landscape and threw striae of smoldering golden light between their trunks.
When Sherston Hall came into view she caught her breath. It was impossibly large and fine. It surely had to be Grade I listed, with its gorgeous neoclassical façade hugged by two beautifully proportioned, symmetrical wings, fronted by a huge terrace with an ornate balustrade. Access to the terrace was up a wide stone staircase.
She parked out front, in a sea of pea gravel. There was doubtless another out-of-sight parking area somewhere, where vehicles wouldn’t spoil the view of or from the house, but she quite enjoyed the comedy of her small, city-dinged Renault against such a grand backdrop. As she began the climb up the wide stone steps to the entrance a man appeared through a small door that was set within the house’s grand double doors.
He was tidily dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt, and a lightweight sport coat. Nice brogues, polished and worn. An affable smile.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a smooth tone of voice that struck just the right note of friendliness and authority to let her know that she was being handled. He was staff, then. She hadn’t been sure. She flashed her badge and told him why she was there.
“I’ll see if Lady Arden is available,” he said, poker-faced. He had Clio wait in the gracious entrance hall, where decorative plasterwork swirled playfully across walls painted a delicate pale gray. The balustrade on the elegant staircase curled with rococo twirls, the floor was marble, and between the flourishes of ornamental plaster huge paintings hung, life-size portraits of bewigged aristocratic women posed against bucolic backgrounds, wearing tight bodices and plumped-up skirts like puffs of silken cloud.
