“Well maybe I’ll leave a note, or wait till he gets back. Thanks very much for your help.”
“You’re welcome,” she said and disappeared back into the house. He got the feeling she’d be watching him from the window, nothing better to do with the long hours of the day, so he drove off up the street before parking again and walking back to Holden’s house.
The runner was probably a Russian if they thought he was European, tying in with what Pearson had told him about Berg’s connections. Only a Russian would be audacious enough, too, to move into Holden’s house and carry on with his daily routine, not even hiding himself away. So he was almost certainly Russian, and if he was, that would be JJ’s best lead so far as to what Berg was doing and where he was making alliances.
Once inside the house JJ moved around carefully, making no contact, doing enough only to check the rooms. There was a lot of ethnic decoration, African masks and figures, Asian prints. There was little to suggest anyone was living there, Holden probably absent for days, the Russian having left no readily visible trace, no sign even in the kitchen that anything had been eaten there.
He went upstairs, noting that the Russian was staying in what appeared to be a guest room. There was a duffle bag in the closet, most of his clothes still folded neatly inside it, a couple of shirts hanging up, a suit. A smaller bag in the same style was tucked under the bed, but JJ decided to check it after he’d dealt with the guy, not wanting to move anything the Russian would recognize as having been moved.
He’d kill him first, then look in the bag. There wouldn’t be much point in interrogating him, not because he wouldn’t speak but because he wouldn’t have much worth telling, other than that he was there to kill Holden. And besides, restraining someone was always messier and harder than killing him. He’d kill him, sticking to what he knew best, removing one more of the opposition, spooking them just a little more for what it was worth.
There were two bathrooms. Again, in one there was a small shaving bag with his various toiletries still piled up inside it, a towel folded neatly over the one that was already on the rail. It all gave the impression of someone with a military background, overly methodical, no instinct, the kind of guy who wouldn’t sense the way most people could that there was someone else in the house.
JJ checked the other upstairs rooms, settling finally in the largest bedroom, the one he imagined to be Holden’s, facing the street, a large double bed, the same mix of ethnic carvings and prints as elsewhere. Keeping away from the window in case the returning runner saw him there, he did a quick sweep of the room, finding nothing interesting, only a walk-in closet that looked bare enough in places to suggest he’d taken a lot of clothes with him.
Then JJ lifted the bedspread, checking if there was enough space under the bed for him to lie beneath it. At first it looked like there was nothing under there, but then his eye was caught by something, a flat package only just visible beneath it, something wrapped in cloth, perhaps nine inches by six.
His heart picked up a beat at the sight of it, a surge of memory, a jolt of anticipation as he pulled it out into the open, almost as if it were the same package. This was smaller than the one the girl had taken though, and solid, he realized as he unfolded the cloth that was wound a couple of times around it.
It was an icon, some saint or other in the Russian style, bathed in gold. As far as he knew they weren’t particularly valuable but it was still a big market, and that probably answered the question of what Bostridge had been doing in Moscow, buying up stolen icons, a business Holden still appeared to be involved in.
That made the hit even more confusing though, the fact that JJ had been sent in by London to take out some black market art buyer. As he’d thought once before, Bostridge had to have had more business in Moscow than buying icons, because the Mafia might have killed someone who was only there on business but no one else would have done.
He folded the piece back into its cloth wrapping, thinking of the girl again as he did it. How transfixed he’d been by her that night and yet chances were she was already crumbling away from the beauty she’d had then, or dead, her capital used up, lives running faster out there than most places.