Isobel gets to her feet.
She goes to Christopher first. She puts her hand on his arm—just her hand, resting there, a pressure—and she looks at him for a moment. Christopher looks back at her. Something passes between them that I can't quite read.
“You did well,” she says. “We’ll be able to shut this down now.”
Then she crosses to Alistair and puts her hand against his cheek. She holds it there for just a moment, then drops her hand.
“Make sure Brodie confirms before you move,” she says. She turns toward the door and stops in front of me, looking at me directly, steadily, the way she looked at me in her office when she asked me to keep her secret. To keep a secret from my husband.
CHAPTER 41
Just An Old Woman
ISOBEL
The access card is in her coat pocket.
She has checked it twice this morning. Not from doubt—she never doubts Brodie—but from the habit of a woman who has spent forty years ensuring that the small things are correct so that the large things may proceed successfully.
Isobel took her heart medication at seven as she always did, with her French Press Americano. The pills are small and unremarkable, and she has managed to take them every morning for eight months without drawing attention to the fact.
The street is quiet. Mayfair at this hour has the stillness of money—no urgency, no noise, the pavements clean, the buildings keeping their counsel. She walks at her own pace, the cane finding the pavement in its easy and familiar rhythm. There’s no need to hurry as she’s precisely on time. She knows exactly when the viewing is. The boys do not.
The staff entrance is a narrow black door at the side of the building. She holds Brodie's card to the access panel. It clicks as the light turns green, and she enters.
The service corridor is bright with fluorescent light and has the particular cool of a building that regulates its temperature for the sake of its contents. It’s the smell of climate control, wooden frames, and old canvas.
When thinking of her failing heart she can’t help but think of Elena who also had a cardiac condition, and weaponized hers. Elena whose people infiltrated her son’s house during a solar panel installation to put an incendiary device in a wall knowing there was an infant on the other side of it. Isobel has spent considerable time trying to understand the instinct to destroy and has concluded that she simply does not possess it. Her instinct has always been to protect. To build. To keep the people she loves alive and intact and safe from those who would prefer them otherwise.
It occurs to her, not for the first time, that there is no contradiction in what she is about to do.
Protection, at its outermost limit, sometimes requires the removal of the threat.
She follows the corridor to the end and opens the door.
The gallery is small. It feels cloistered and serious.
Dark green walls, the color of an old man’s private library. The lighting recessed and warm, each painting attended to individually, as though the room has been designed around the specific requirements of each work rather than the comfort of a visitor. The floor is wide-plank walnut, ancient and expensive,the kind of floor that absorbs sound. A single exotic orchid reaches toward the wall from a plinth near the entrance. There is nothing that is not necessary, and everything that is.
This kind of gallery that does not advertise itself. It’s the kind of place that serious collectors know and nobody else does.
At the far end, his back to her, stands a dark figure of a man. She would call him Hargrove, but now she knows his name is Matthew Parkinson.
She begins to cross the room.
Her cane finds the floor, tapping and stepping, and the sound of it moves ahead of her through the silence, announcing her arrival. She watches him hear it, and his shoulders shift and he turns.
Annoyance at first. The instinctive displeasure of a man who has paid for an entire day of absolute privacy and found it violated. He looks at her the way powerful men look at elderly women: with the impatience of someone who cannot conceive that she might be relevant.
Then he places her. Something behind his eyes shifts. A reassessment. He looks at her now with the full attention of a man who has been studying a family for months and is unexpectedly in the presence of its primary architect.
His men are just outside. Two men at the front, one at the side. He is as protected as a man can be in a room this size. One yell and she’d have a gun pointed at her temple.
She watches him register, very briefly, that he did not bring his own revolver today. The thought crosses his face and is gone.He’s still wondering if he should call for help, but his ego refuses. She is, after all, just an old woman.
“Mrs Ravenscroft,” he says.
“Mr Parkinson.”
