Page 70
It was exhausting work, channeling all that fury and desperation. And Matts had a tricky dialect—broad Yorkshire tempered by boarding school, then dampened by her time in the US. Very different from Marple’s native accent. The angrier Matts got, though, the more her native sounds came out. Flat vowels, defined t’s, dropped articles.
Marple was having a hard time calibrating between the shouts and the muttering. She sped through the footage until she located a segment that showed Matts on her knees at the front of her cell. In this section, she seemed to be talking to somebody on the other side of the food slot. Something about watches. This was as close to a normal speaking voice as Marple had heard so far. She listened closely.
“My husband. He’s a master watchmaker…” Marple stopped and rewound. “My husband. He’s a master watchmaker…”
Marple heard the door to the comms room open. She froze the video and turned around. It was Virginia.
“Sorry. I thought I heard shouting in here. Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. Just rehearsing.”
“I put everything away in the kitchen. Anything else you need?”
“Come here,” said Marple. “I need you to see something.”
Virginia closed the door behind her and walked over.
“You do hair, don’t you?” asked Marple. “Cut and color?”
“A bit,” said Virginia. “I worked in a salon in high school. I do my own tints.”
“Thought so,” said Marple. The highlights in Virginia’s hair changed frequently, sometimes daily. Orange, pink, magenta—and at the moment, green.
Marple pointed the remote and placed a marker on the crown of Agnes Matts’s head. She zoomed in. Her straight hair was parted down the middle. “How would you describe that tone?” Marple asked.
Virginia moved closer to the screen. “Natural. Medium brown, touch of auburn. Kind of dull and ordinary.”
“Good,” said Marple, turning off the video. “Dull and ordinary. When the time comes, that’s exactly how I need to look.”
Virginia nodded. “I’ve got my kit in my room. We can color your hair tomorrow morning.” She turned and headed for the door. “Good night.”
Marple gave her a wave and waited until Virginia closed the door behind her. Then she sat down at one of the keyboards. She took a sip from her mug of chamomile tea and got back to work.
Agnes Matts was not the only person Marple needed to research tonight.
In fact, she was just getting started.
CHAPTER 70
OLIVER PAUL WAS a patient man. But his patience was fraying.
He sat in a sparsely furnished room on the top floor of a small rented house in Bayou Vista, at the edge of West Bay. Through his window, he could see the lights on Galveston Island, the strip of land that separated the bay from the vast gulf beyond.
But his focus at the moment was on his laptop. And his phone.
His craftsmanship on the work coveralls was paying off. A microcamera in the top button of each of the outfits Ron and Pete were wearing gave him a clear, if sometimes jumpy, view of where his two operatives were at any time. Their modified Apple Watches fed him a simultaneous stream of data—distances, dimensions, air temperature, biometrics, along with an audio feed. It had taken Paul months to hack Apple’s proprietary software, but once he was in, he could make the watches do pretty much anything he wanted. He was wearing one himself, with its own special modifications. The software engineers in Cupertino would have been impressed—and horrified.
The cell phone on the table was on the opposite end of the technology scale. It was just a low-tech burner, and only one person had the number. Paul was expecting a call from his attorney and financial partner—one man with two names—telling him that his wife had been freed.
And he was tired of waiting.
Paul pulled his laptop closer. The feeds from Ron’s and Pete’s button cams showed them squeezing into their cramped sleeping module—two steel-framed bunk beds with a narrow door leading to a toilet, a sink, and a stall shower. For two big guys, there was barely enough room to move.
The feeds blurred, then blacked out as both men took off their coveralls and hung them in a tiny closet. That was fine with Paul. The watches on their wrists told him everything he needed to know, and gave him a foolproof way to alert them when the time came. If a text alert didn’t do the trick, a minor electrical shock would. The module’s overhead light went out as both men climbed into their bunks, groaning and complaining about the thin mattresses.
Paul watched their respiration and pulse rates drop as they both settled into N1-stage sleep. He stared out over the water, thinking about Agnes Matts, about where they might be holding her. At Bedford Hills, her movements had been fairly easy to trace. Now she might as well be on the far side of the moon. But not for long. Not if Holmes, Marple, and Poe came through.
A few minutes later, Pete’s side of the screen alerted. Paul glanced down. The readout showed Pete’s breathing rate quickening. His core temperature rose two degrees. His pulse rate suddenly shot up from 65 to 130.
