They are sitting on Viktor’s terrace, laptop open and gin and tonic poured. London spreads out before them in a vast panorama of greens and blue and greys. The buses like red blood cells. It all looks so genteel from up here, but they both well know the secrets that lie beneath the roofs of London. The money, the murder, the evil that people do. It was simply their stock in trade. Where you saw a cosy family chimney, they saw a corpse being burned. Such is the way of things after nearly sixty years in the business.
It is cold, but the cold helps them both think. Andrew Everton is behind bars, awaiting trial. Jack Mason and Heather Garbutt are in the ground. Henrik is back in Staffordshire, but has started sending Viktor cat videos from the internet. That feels a lot like a ceasefire to Elizabeth. She is pleased. Now that she has found Viktor again, she would rather not lose him.
But Viktor and she were agreed it was a job half done. Viktor had made Andrew Everton confess; Viktor made everyone confess sooner or later. But it didn’t feel right. To either of them. They had discussed it at length. Had they uncovered the full story? Had they got the wrong man?
‘How is Stephen?’ asks Viktor.
‘Another time,’ says Elizabeth.
Henrik has kept up the search, but everywhere he looked, the money had simply disappeared. They had cleared up ‘Carron Whitehead’ and ‘Michael Gullis’. They had never got close to ‘Robert Brown Msc’. Perhaps there was some genius who could crack that one in time, but Elizabeth and Viktor have both stopped trying.
Henrik has uncovered one lead though. It was another early payment, this time for a hundred thousand pounds.
Viktor and Elizabeth scan the file in front of them. Henrik has tracked the payment as far as the British Virgin Islands, where it was further broken down into four separate payments. One of the payments found its way to the Cayman Islands, but that path has gone cold. One headed to Panama, and one to Liechtenstein, and into the endless corridors of banking secrecy. But the fourth payment was the interesting one. To the International Bank of Dubai. It seems out of place.
‘Why pay money to Dubai?’ says Elizabeth. ‘Surely there are plenty of places much safer, much darker.’
‘Access perhaps?’ says Viktor. ‘Was this a little bit of spending money for someone?’
Elizabeth thinks she might take some time investigating the Dubai connection. She knows people there. Ten million pounds has gone missing somewhere, but sometimes a hundred thousand is all you need to catch someone. And Elizabeth would love to catch whoever killed Bethany Waites.
But perhaps she is a fool? Perhaps she is missing something obvious – it certainly feels that way. In her bones she knows it’s not quite right. Are her powers waning? She is getting old. She uses a foot spa these days. She’s even going to get Joyce one for Christmas. Is it time to quit all this nonsense? All this running around after shadows?
Viktor shivers in the cold. Elizabeth adjusts his blanket.
‘Thank you,’ says Viktor. ‘Your country is so cold.’
‘So is yours,’ says Elizabeth, and Viktor concedes the point.
Time to quit all this nonsense? Elizabeth laughs to herself. What is there in life other than nonsense?
‘Perhaps,’ says Elizabeth, ‘a little winter sunshine would do us some good?’
‘Perhaps,’ agrees Viktor. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘I hear Dubai is very temperate this time of year.’
‘I hear that too,’ says Viktor. ‘And they say the shopping is very good. There are even art galleries.’
‘Well, we could have a poke around the art galleries, couldn’t we?’
‘Spot of shopping,’ says Viktor. ‘Soak up the sun?’
‘Wouldn’t do any harm, would it?’ says Elizabeth. She may be old, but she knows she will find something there. The missing piece.
‘You know,’ says Viktor, ‘I remember being at the bottom of that hole, having all that earth shovelled over me. I remember looking up at everybody, and wondering if this might be the life for me. Coopers Chase. The tea, and the cake, and the birds and the dogs, and the friends. If it might be where I belong. You will understand that.’
‘Only too well,’ says Elizabeth.
‘I was lonely,’ says Viktor. ‘You fixed that for me. You and your friends. My friends. They are quite something, aren’t they?’
‘They are quite something,’ agrees Elizabeth.
‘Did I tell you I’m going to get a snooker table?’
‘Ron spoke of little else in the car up here,’ says Elizabeth. ‘I had to feign sleep.’
‘It’s the people, in the end, isn’t it?’ says Viktor. ‘It’s always the people. You can move halfway around the world to find your perfect life, move to Australia if you like, but it always comes down to the people you meet.’
