“Your appointment before the inquisition? I don’t envy you.”
“You’re welcome to join me.”
“Thank you, no. I have enough problems as it is.”
“What problems do you possibly have?”
She glanced at Olivia Watson.
“It was a long time ago, Sarah.”
“Not as long as the two of us.”
“I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on you,” said Gabriel. “You were walking along P Street near Dupont Circle.”
“The dew was still on me.” Smiling, she surveyed the art world figures lining the bar. “It’s a wonderful way for our story to end, don’t you think? A late-summer evening, a corner table at the bar at Wiltons, all our old friends.”
“It’s not over yet, Sarah.”
“You promise?”
Gabriel smiled. “Cross my heart.”
His appointment before the committee of inquiry was at 9:00a.m.The setting was a safe-speech room deep within Vauxhall Cross. SIS’s chief legal officer, a man called Drake, sat by his side throughout. The questions were polite in tone, respectful, even, and Gabriel answered them to the best of his ability, which was limited. Indeed, whenever the inquisitors strayed onto dangerous ground, Drake the legal officer would mumble something that sounded like an incantation, and the inquisitors would dutifully move on. Thus they learned nothing from their star witness that they did not already know—nothing about Alice Winter and her husband Edward Knight, nothing about Alice’s Cambridge friends Sophie Maxwell and Ella Burns, nothing about the staged abduction or the half-billion-dollar ransom payment or the chalet in Switzerland or the dog that had taken a chunk out of Gabriel’s ankle in Lower Austria.
Which left the inquisitors little choice but to focus their attention on the day of the attack itself. Why, they wanted to know, had Gabriel made forcible entry into the house in Wilton Crescent? And who were the two women who entered the home with him? A glance at Drake and a mumbled magic spell made both questions disappear. He was more forthcoming, though, about what he had found on the roof of the house—and how he had managed to disable one of the drones. The lead inquisitor wanted to know why the toppled drone had detonated. Gabriel answered with what amounted to informed speculation.
“It was an assassination attempt.”
“Who was the target?” asked the inquisitor.
“I was.”
When the session finally ended, Gabriel headed to the SIS’s private bar for a quick drink with Graham Seymour and was behindthe wheel of the Range Rover in time to beat the London evening rush. The sun was setting by the time he reached Dartmoor. About a mile past the old Warren House Inn was the turnoff for Wormwood Cottage. He stopped there long enough to collect a single passenger. Parish the caretaker and Miss Coventry the cook, for all their forbearance and decency, were not sorry to see her go. She was, they assured themselves, someone else’s problem now.
58
Wickham House
Of the minor role played in the affair by Detective Inspector Timothy Peel, neither his colleagues at the Devon and Cornwall Police nor the broader British public would ever know a thing. He was a page torn from a tattered book—or a ghost note, he thought, recalling his torturous childhood piano lessons, a softly struck E-flat, scarcely heard and soon forgotten. Slow to anger or feelings of resentment, he was appalled at how quickly he had been cast aside. The long ride home to Exeter on the night they brought Alice Winter back to Britain had left him cold. He had watched the events that unfolded next—the murder of a Russian agent in Copenhagen, the attack on Downing Street—certain in the knowledge that his old friend Gabriel Allon was the thread that ran through it all. And Ingrid, of course. What a pair of hands she had. Plucked a phone from the jacket pocket of a Swiss banker as though she were picking a daisy. Too bad it was the wrong bloody phone. Still, it all seemed to have worked out in the end, though no thanks to DITimothy Peel. He was not ashamed to admit that from time to time, in moments of boredom and Cornish loneliness, it left a bitter taste.
Upon his return to duty, he rejoined the team investigating the murder of Gareth Wright, the carpenter who ended up in a shallowgrave near the old mining town of Sticker. In Peel’s absence the case had gone cold as ice. Having been away for a few days—truth be told, it seemed more like a month—he took it upon himself to conduct a thorough review of his colleagues’ work. He read the notes and transcripts from the door-to-doors, he scoured the forensics reports from the SOCOs, he ran down the owner or operator of every vehicle that had passed a plate-recognition camera on the B3287 around the time Gareth Wright was last reported alive.
It was the camera that led Peel to the doorstep of one Trevor Knox of the hamlet of Blackwater. Knox, it seemed, had dabbled in carpentry himself before embarking on a life of crime. He claimed not to know the victim, but interviews with friends and associates revealed that some years earlier Trevor Knox had worked with Gareth Wright on a couple of projects—apparently not with any proficiency or diligence. Furthermore his explanation as to why he was in Sticker on or about the night of the murder didn’t hold a drop of water. Claimed he went there to see an old girlfriend, but the girlfriend said that if Trevor Knox ever showed up at her door, the D&C Police would have another murder to investigate. She was a bit of a wreck, the old girlfriend, but Peel couldn’t help but admire her style.
He took his findings to DCI Tony Fletcher, and Fletcher, after a few choice words to the other members of the investigative team, granted Peel permission to place Trevor Knox under surveillance. He conducted much of it personally and after a fortnight was convinced that it was time to interview the subject again, this time at headquarters in Exeter with a recorder rolling.
On a cold and rainswept morning in early September he dispatched a half-dozen uniforms to rouse Knox from his Blackwater bed and bring him in. But Peel scarcely had time to caution his prime suspect when DCI Fletcher entered the room and brought the interview toan abrupt end. And so it was that Timothy Peel was thrust once more into the strange case of Edward Knight and the missing British socialite who was not really missing.
It had been two months since she last set foot in Wickham House, but all the old rules still applied, especially those regarding her bereaved husband’s office door, which was never to be opened or even knocked upon when closed. Charlotte Rose, Wickham’s chief housekeeper, had violated the rule early in her tenure and had received such a tongue lashing—first from Mr. Knight, then from his personal assistant, Mr. Higgins—that the thought of violating it a second time never crossed her mind. She got the worst of it from Higgins, or Hiccups as the late Alice Winter used to call him, not only behind his back but straight to his face. Alice had loathed Higgins, and Higgins had loathed her in return.
But Higgins, thankfully, was gone, as was his replacement, a lovely fellow called Nigel Whitcombe. Charlotte had been sorry to see Mr. Whitcombe go, though she was pleased that Mr. Knight had finally rid himself of the security men who sat in a parked car just inside the manor’s front gate. Every morning they insisted on inspecting Charlotte’s driving license as though they had never laid eyes on her before. She reckoned she would have had an easier time getting into Number 10 wearing a suicide vest.
On that morning, however, Charlotte Rose rolled unmolested through Wickham’s grand gate in her dowdy little Vauxhall and parked in her usual spot in the rear courtyard. She entered the house through the flower room and headed to the kitchen, passing the door of Mr. Knight’s office along the way. It was tightly closed, which was not unusual, as Mr. Knight was an early riser and a dogged worker.Whatwasunusual was the silence within. Mr. Knight had a booming telephone voice and typically watched the financial news at a wall-vibrating volume.
Ninety minutes later, long after Charlotte commenced her daily cleaning of the enormous manor, she made a return visit to Mr. Knight’s wing of the house and saw that the situation had not changed. A closed door, silence within. Gently, soundlessly, she tried the door’s latch and discovered it was locked. Next, after first calling Mr. Knight’s name, she gave the door the tenderest of knocks, but there was no answer. Nor did she receive any answer when she dialed the number for Mr. Knight’s mobile phone, though she could hear the device ringing inside the office, clear as a bell.
At which point, having lived through the drama of Ms. Winter’s abduction, Charlotte Rose thought it best to telephone the Devon and Cornwall Police. Two fresh-faced PCs appeared at Wickham House a few minutes later and, after obtaining permission from higher authority, forced the lock on the office door, whereupon they discovered Edward Knight seated at his desk, with two bullet holes in his chest and a third in the center of his forehead.
