She stalked forward. “I used a .338 sniper rifle from the top of that elm. I’ve been practicing at the range in Eastbourne for years; take my picture to them, they’ll identify me. I’ve been away for the last two years—”
The officer took an involuntary step back. “Backup,” he said into his radio. “Backup.”
“—but I’ve been planning this all this time, because that man over there?” She jabbed at finger at August’s body. “He broke my heart. He lied to me. He proposed to someone else. He belonged to me, and he proposed to Bryony Downs, and I will be damned if I see him go. If I saw him go. Past tense. We’re past tense now.”
The officer put his hands up, nodding, the way you would with a tiger in a center ring.
“And this?” Holmes jerked her hand at me. “This pathetic, sniveling boy thinks that if he gets me out of this mess, he can have me, like I’m some prize to be won. Look at it. Look at me. How much is it worth to you now?”
“DI Green,” the officer said gratefully, as the woman in the long coat approached, picking her way through the snow. “We have a confession—I haven’t cautioned her, it’s an excited utterance—”
Her sharp eyes went from Holmes to me and back again. “Which one?” she asked.
“Her.”
Did I imagine it, the DI’s disappointment? “Fine,” she said. “Cuff her. Caution her. Then ask her again. You too, boy, come along.”
Cautiously, the officer took Holmes by the arm. Despite everything, despite the way she’d all but spit blood in his face, he treated her like she was spun glass. He put the cuffs on her wrists, and the DI put a hand on her shoulder, and the three of them walked back to the car.
I made to follow them. And then I saw that I had missed the paramedics taking August’s body away. From a distance I saw them hoist the gurney up into the back of the ambulance. They would take him to the morgue. They would cut off his clothes and lay him on a slab, like an object. Like a doll. I wondered who they’d call to identify him. Who was left to come and say his name?
Beyond him, the police were putting Holmes into the car. They were taking their time with it, like they were paying her a courtesy. I knew she had worked with the Yard before, in London; she’d helped some detective whose name I’d forgotten solve the case of the Jameson diamonds. The one that I’d heard about, all the way in America. But we were far from London, now, and America too, and the police here would only know the Holmes name and not the girl who wore it.
I hadn’t realized until I registered the wet on my knees, but I had bent down to kneel in the snow. I didn’t think I could walk. Time had gone slow; the police were milling around now, putting up tape, taking out a camera and tripod from the car to photograph the scene.
It didn’t matter. I would just stay here, in a place where I didn’t have to think.
Someone put a hand on my shoulder. “Come with me, boy,” he said, and I nodded and got up and followed. He led me around the house and to the cellar door, still open, the floor below it dirty and covered in straw. “Down,” he said.
I turned to look at him. It was Holmes’s father. Alistair. “Why?” I asked him.
“They want you to wait down here,” he said. “Come along.”
He was kind about it, in practice. He gave me an arm to help me down the stairs, and once I was down there, he produced a chair—one from the dining room table, it looked like, from its high, carved back—and let me get myself settled before he pulled out the rope.
I didn’t remember what he did with it. I only remembered the after, the rope wrapped around me like a snake.
Looking at me, there, he steepled his fingers under his chin. “I’m sorry to have to do this,” he said. There was something in his face that had been snuffed out. “I’d much rather have my daughter here, with you. I think it would give you some comfort to have her beside you. Do you want me to put out a chair for her too? As a symbol?”
“No,” I said. I had the vague sense that something was wrong. I wiggled a little against the rope, but it held.
“Oh,” Alistair said, watching me. “You’re coming out of shock. That’ll make this harder.”
Behind him, the wall was hung with weapons—a pair of fencing foils, a set of knives with the edges dulled. This was their practice room. I looked back at Alistair’s face. His eye was bloodshot and bleeding from where I’d kicked him, crawling out of the cellar. I had the insane urge to apologize.
It was insane, that urge. Wasn’t it? But so was being bound up to a chair in the cellar of a house where your friend had just been murdered.
“Will you let me go?” I asked him cautiously.
“Do you have a compelling reason?” he asked. “I always made my children give me a compelling reason. Why do you think I’ve led you here? There are several pretty points to be made. Biblical. Isaac and Abraham. You could start with those.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about, you’re a right bastard?”
But Alistair had already lifted up the gas canister. That was when I started struggling in earnest.
“Help!” I yelled. “Somebody help me! I’m down here!”
“Make no mistake,” he said, “this wasn’t my first choice of action, but it’s the only logical one remaining. Lucien has no reason anymore to keep our—our financial situation a secret.”
“Your financial situation,” I said, gasping, as he doused my legs in fuel. I hardly felt it. They had already been wet from the snow. “What the hell does that mean?”
Now he was washing his own legs with the gasoline. “It means I’ve been taking payouts from the Russians. Convincing my friends at MI5 to be in certain places at certain times. Leaking the information. Letting them get picked off. Like chickens in a little house, waiting. There’s a song about it, I think.”
I was the architect of some small international conflicts, he’d told me, on the day I’d met him. “I thought you worked for the Ministry of Defense.”
“The MoD. I started there. I spent some time in Whitehall too. Home Office. MI5. I came back. Where on earth do you think my daughter learned her skill set? She certainly didn’t intuit her abilities. But it’s over. Do you know how Lucien Moriarty escaped his surveillance in Thailand?”
I didn’t say anything.
“No guesses? Pity. Do you know what my country does to traitors? Lucien Moriarty does. And when he found he couldn’t control my actions—when he couldn’t control my daughter’s actions—he stopped mincing words. I would call in the last of my favors. I would go out there myself, have a word with Milo, a drink, I would wait until he slept, and then call on those men loyal to me in his company.”
“You have spies? In Greystone?”
“Of course I do,” he said, impatiently. “Why on earth wouldn’t I? It pained me to do it, of course, to help that man. He’s a blunt instrument. Much like my daughter. I’d always thought she’d come to an untidy end, but at Lucien’s hands—
“Well. I suppose it’s no use now. Lucien is ‘on the loose,’ as ridiculous as that sounds, and no matter what promises he made me I know he’ll leak the information anyway. What loyalty does a man like that feel? None. It’ll all come to light. The only real recourse I have is to erase the evidence. I, myself, am evidence. You’re evidence as well—and Leander, of course, and my wife, though those two are beyond my reach. This is the best I can do. The insurance policy should leave a nice nest egg for my son, if he ever decides to settle down.”
From his pocket, he pulled a lighter. Not a metal-plated one, as I’d expected, something precious and small, but a plastic one, the kind you bought at the gas station.
“No,” I said. “No, no—no, absolutely not—”
“Or he could just buy himself another war,” Alistair said, squinting at the small fire in his hands. “I swear, that boy has more influence than I’d ever dreamed of—”