He slept again, this time dreaming of fire, and fear, and faces from the past. When he woke, she stood at the foot of his bed. “Why did you walk out?” he asked.
Then, he realized that had been the past, and that he knew now why she’d walked away from him that night in the pub more than twenty years before. His head was suddenly clear and a frisson of fear made the hairs rise on his arms. He groped for the bed control, raising the head until he could look her straight in the eye. But then he fumbled the keypad and it tumbled away, dangling out of reach at the end of its cord.
“But I just got here,” she said, and smiled.
“How did you know I was awake?” he asked with a slight frown, conveying—he hoped—only a mild curiosity. He saw that she’d pulled the privacy curtain separating the bed and the main part of the room from the door.
“A little bird in your friend Tommy’s office.” She shook her head, made a tsk of disapproval. “Den, did you think I wouldn’t notice you’d pulled the Craig files? I thought you had more sense. Why, after all this time, would you care what happened to Angus Craig? I’d say he got his just desserts.”
“No one deserves to be murdered, not even Angus. And what about Edie, Lynn?” The photos in the case file were still sharp in his mind. A surge of rage made him clench his fists in the flimsy blanket, but he kept his voice calm. “Was she just collateral damage?”
“Angus Craig had every reason to commit suicide. And it’s unfortunate that angry, desperate people often take those closest to them.” Evelyn Trent shrugged, and he could have sworn he heard the silk of her very expensive suit rustle against itself. “We both know that, Denis.” She might have been correcting a slow child.
He looked at this woman, wondering how he could ever have thought her a friend. When he first began to suspect her hand in the seeping corruption within the force, he’d told himself she hadn’t been bad in the beginning. But now he knew that the rot had been there from the first, and that the failure to see it had been his.
“I know,” he said, “that Angus Craig, whatever else he may have done, did not murder his wife. And he did not commit suicide.”
Lynn looked amused. “Not even you could tell that from the investigation file.”
“He told me himself.”
“What?” For the first time, she looked startled. And irritated. “Don’t be daft. He couldn’t have.”
“But he did. I went to see him that night. I wanted him to admit what he’d done to Sheila. I wanted to know if she was the first. He laughed at me and told me I was a fool.
“It was you who killed Sheila, he said. When you paged him that night, he’d just left Mickey and the others in the pub. He knew it wasn’t Mickey who’d throttled her. He knew it wasn’t me. I could barely stand, much less strangle someone.”
“Denis.” She shook her head, as if exasperated, but she moved a step closer, her hand resting lightly on the foot of the bed. “You really are ill. What utter nonsense. Are you going to suggest I raped her, too?”
“She wasn’t raped. There were no signs of sexual assault. All that business of straightening her skirt, that was for my benefit. Window dressing.”
“Really?” Lynn said, frowning, cocking her head a little as she looked at him. It was a mannerism he remembered. He’d once found it fetching. “Assuming for a moment that the blow on your head didn’t knock you completely senseless,” she went on, “why on earth would I do such a thing?”
“Because she was a spy.” He licked his lips. “A spy among the spies, a cat among the pigeons. Ironic, don’t you think? And put there by Angus Craig himself—irony of ironies—because he didn’t trust us not to go native. If you were feeling too much sympathy for your antidiscrimination protesters or your animal rights activists, who would you confide in but party girl Sheila?
“But Sheila found something completely unexpected. You were playing both sides of the coin, taking payoffs from your protest group in return for information on police activities. You were always seen together, you and Sheila. Someone approached her, thinking she was in on the deal. Sheila must have tried to talk to you about it, because you were friends.
“What you didn’t know when you decided to shut her up was that she’d already told Angus.” His throat was going dry. Very deliberately, he reached for his water cup and took a sip from the straw, wondering if he could throw the water in her face. And what good it would do if he did. His hand shook.
“Assuming any of this rubbish was true,” Lynn said slowly “why didn’t he stop me?” Her voice was still controlled, but he could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest.
“And blow open his whole Special Branch operation, the operation he’d spent years putting together?” He managed a croak of laughter. “But he had an even better reason than that. Leverage over you. It served him well for more than twenty years as you rose in the ranks. Complaints against him were ignored or dismissed. But he asked too much the last time, didn’t he, Lynn? He was blown, facing assault allegations and a manslaughter charge at the least. He wanted you to make it all go away. Threatened you, in fact, if it didn’t. Angus Craig had been as useful to you as you were to him, but you’d had enough, and you couldn’t be certain he didn’t have something that could hurt you.
“He was cocky that night,” he continued. “Certain you’d come through for him and all his troubles would vanish in a puff of smoke. Which they did, just not in the way he expected.” Denis looked at her with revulsion. “Who did you get to do such a job, Lynn?”
“Stop calling me that,” she snapped, and it was instantly clear that she’d dropped all pretense. “I’m Evelyn. I was always Evelyn. As for Angus, your old friend Mickey came in very handy. He never liked Angus much, especially after Angus deemed him unfit to continue in the job.
“Mickey didn’t succeed as well with you, unfortunately for both of you. But he, at least, is no longer a problem.”
“Dead?”
“Mmm. He thought he could take out his handler. Stupid of him. But when you kept breathing, he was afraid—rightfully so—that his usefulness had come to an end, so he tried to extricate himself. It’s too bad he didn’t hit you harder.” She quirked an eyebrow. “I’m surprised, because he liked you even less than Angus.” Sighing, she shook her head. “I’m sorry you woke up, Denis, really I am. It was very inconvenient of you.”
Forcing a smile, he said, “What are you going to do, Lynn? Smother me with a pillow?”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Denis,” she said, but her voice was hard, the malice palpable. She stepped closer, leaning towards him. “You know I don’t need to do that. You do love your wife, you know. That’s always been your weakness. I don’t think you could live with yourself if anything happened to her.”
He shook his head. A mistake. The room rocked and it was a moment before he could gather himself for a denial. “That won’t work with me twice, Lynn.” But even as he said it, his dream came back to him, the fire and the terrible fear, and he wasn’t sure he could hold firm.