The scrutiny relented, though, when a respected investigative reporter fromThe Guardianrevealed that a large ransom had indeed been paid and that the kidnappers, as was often the case, had not lived up to their end of the bargain. The Metropolitan Police, according to the story, now feared that Alice Winter had been murdered by her captors, a fear shared by her husband. On the evening the story appeared onThe Guardian’s website, he conducted an impromptu news conference on the doorstep of his home in Hans Place. Several reporters present made note of his ashen, haggard appearance. He looked, they said, like a man who believed he would never see his wife again.
Missing fromThe Guardian’s otherwise authoritative account were several crucial details, including the enormous size of the ransompayment, the manner in which the money had been paid, and the identity of the man who had negotiated the terms of the deal. He was not, as some had speculated, connected to London’s lucrative K&R trade, but he was an expert nonetheless and had the scars to prove it. The newest were the four deep lacerations above his left ankle, a parting gift from a malevolent, deer-red German pinscher named Oscar.
It was by no means the gravest injury he had ever suffered, even as a result of an encounter with an angry canine, but it was surely among the most humiliating. He spared Irene and Raphael the shameful details—they were under the impression he had merely turned an ankle during his brief visit to Ibiza—but he told Chiara the unvarnished truth. She reacted, as he anticipated she would, by reminding him of her unambiguous warning about serving as the bagman. His ill-considered response—that he was not, technically speaking, the bagman because there had been no actual bag—did little to mollify her anger. He was lucky, she said, that the kidnappers hadn’t left him on the side of that Lower Austrian road with a bullet in his head. For reasons he failed to disclose, he did not dispute the point.
He allowed himself, during the first seventy-two hours after his return to Cornwall, to entertain the hope that Alice Winter would likewise turn up along some remote stretch of European roadway. His hopes faded, though, as the days slid by with no sign of her. He was confident he had taken every measure possible to bring her out of captivity alive, including the extraordinary step of placing himself in the hands of her abductors. The mistake, he told Chiara one evening as she prepared their dinner, had been Edward Knight’s.
“He never should have authorized the transfer of the money without a final demonstration of proof of life. It was a violation of the most basic rules of the kidnap-and-ransom game.”
“What would you have done if you were in Edward’s shoes?”
“I would have hired someone like me and let him do his job.”
“And if I was the one who had been kidnapped?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t be standing on the doorstep of my Knightsbridge mansion making tearful appeals.”
The second of the two proof-of-life photos, the one the kidnappers had left in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, somehow found its way onto the front page ofThe Daily Mirror. Gabriel feared that the next photograph to appear in the British papers would be his—and that the Metropolitan Police would soon be knocking on his door. He was, after all, the only person other than Alice to have laid eyes on the kidnappers. For some reason they had allowed him to live. It was, he thought, their only mistake.
There was one more false sighting—a beach in Biarritz, a fortyish woman from Leeds who had had too much to drink—but after that the trail appeared to go well and truly cold. By the second week of July even the tabloid press was beginning to lose interest in the story. Gabriel, his lower leg sufficiently healed, resumed work on the Bellotto. On a windblown Wednesday afternoon he was retouching the prow of a traghetto crossing the Grand Canal when he heard a car coming up the long drive. It was a Volvo ES90, a model frequently used by plainclothes officers of the Metropolitan Police. He was relieved, therefore, when the driver’s-side door opened and Edward Knight stepped into view.
This time they set off eastward along the clifftops toward Penzance. Their pace was unhurried, contemplative, in part because Gabriel was favoring his left ankle.
“And where,” inquired Edward Knight, “did this unfortunate incident take place?”
“In the woods outside a Lower Austrian town called Falkenstein.”
“And when the police arrived?”
“There were no police.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Practice.”
Knight smiled briefly in spite of himself. “Can you ever forgive me, Allon?”
“Whatever for?”
“Getting you involved in this mess. You were a damn fool to place yourself in the hands of the kidnappers.” Knight lowered his voice. “And damn brave as well. Imagine my surprise when the phone rang and that awful voice told me that they were going to kill you if I didn’t send the money.”
“You shouldn’t have listened to them.”
“And what if they weren’t bluffing? What if they had killed the great Gabriel Allon? I couldn’t have lived with that on my conscience,” said Knight. “I rang Peter Hoffmann and ordered him to initiate the wire transfer.”
“At what time?”
“Shortly after sixa.m.Zurich time. The kidnappers called me a few minutes later to say that CyproBank had received the money and that you and Alice would be released unharmed. Obviously that turned out not to be the case.” They slowed to a stop and stood shoulder to shoulder atop the cliffs near Porthchapel Beach. “Would you mind, Allon, if I asked you a difficult question?”
“You want to know why the kidnappers released me and not Alice.”
Knight nodded.
“Once you wired the money, they had no incentive to release her.”
“They promised they would.”
“They’re kidnappers, Edward. They say a lot of things that aren’ttrue. Which means there’s a distinct possibility that you will soon receive yet another demand for money.”
