A Ghost at the Door (35 page)

The tears were gone, her cheeks brushed dry by the breeze. ‘I told you that I knew we’d never find him, not alive. But I do need to know the truth. You haven’t told
me.’

‘Somebody tried to make it look like suicide but I think you were right. He didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.’

‘Why?’

‘Same reason as the others. He knew too much.’

‘They were all murdered?’

‘It wasn’t just Delicious. Al-Masri certainly. Susannah Ranelagh probably. Who knows about Christine Leclerc? Her death was certainly violent enough. Your father. And right now
I’m even beginning to wonder about my own.’

‘It was a heart attack,’ Jemma prompted.

‘I’m wondering about that,’ he replied.

‘All members of the croquet club,’ Jemma said.

‘And then there were two,’ Abby added.

‘Not for much longer. Not at this rate,’ Harry suggested.

‘The bishop and that strange woman. Who on earth is she?’ Jemma asked.

‘I haven’t even a glimmer of an idea.’

They sat lost in the maze of sorrows and surmise. Overhead a pair of buzzards circled languidly on a light sea wind and in a distant meadow a roe deer grazed the lush grass.

‘We should call the police,’ Jemma said eventually.

Harry reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone. ‘Well I’ll be . . .’ he breathed as the screen came to life.

‘Harry?’

‘Our bloody bishop. He’s just resurfaced, sent me a message. Wants to see me.’

‘And we don’t believe in coincidence, do we?’ Jemma said.

‘He’s got to be involved. In one way, or the other,’ Abby suggested. ‘Be careful, Harry.’

‘Or be a bloody fool,’ he muttered.

‘Sorry, Abby, Harry here doesn’t do careful,’ Jemma added ruefully.

He reached for Abby’s hand. ‘Abby, I want to ask you a very great favour. I don’t know how I dare but . . .’

‘You don’t want to call the police, do you?’

‘No, not just yet. I’m out on bail on suspicion of one murder and if I’m found at the scene of another, Chief Inspector Edwards will take a distinct personal pleasure in
burying me so deep it’ll take an Act of Parliament to get me released. Returning to the scene of the crime, he’ll say. And, unreconstructed idiot that I am, I’ve even left my
prints on the gas taps for him. Our bishop friend wants to see me. Let me at least find out what he’s up to before we do anything.’

‘You think it’s him?’

‘The odds are getting shorter.’

‘But if it’s him . . .’ Abby didn’t want to finish the thought.

‘I’m on my guard. I’ll draw him out. Take the risk. I owe it to you and your father.’

‘Your own father, too, remember.’

‘Old Bishop Randy wants to see me tonight. Shall we head back to London?’

Abby didn’t respond immediately. From somewhere nearby a newly fledged seabird was calling, a lonely, plaintive cry that mingled with the sound of the waves falling on the distant shingle.
The mackerel sea melted into a sky of finest blue silk woven through with clouds of English lace. Somewhere out there, in the infinity that lay beyond the horizon, were the fading echoes of her
father. She wanted to capture them while she still might. ‘I think this was where he sat, right here. Where he was happy,’ she whispered. ‘Let me have a few minutes here with him,
will you?’

Jemma kissed her, then walked hand in hand with Harry to the car waiting for them on the road below.

It didn’t matter a mouldy fig that they hadn’t called the police. With the app on his mobile phone in front of him Edwards had been spying on their every move, every
twist and turn of the wheel through West Dorset, where they slowed, where they stayed. He knew Harry: the bugger was mental, didn’t know when to stop, couldn’t help himself. Edwards was
certain that whatever he was up to would be connected with the case; Harry Jones didn’t take holidays. Yet there was a puzzle. For more than an hour Harry had stopped at the side of some
rural road by the sea and none of the maps that the chief inspector had to hand or could summon up from the Internet suggested there was anything at that spot. But something had to be there,
something that had drawn his man to a very specific spot on the map and kept him there for some while.

Edwards waited until the Volvo had reached the motorway and was on its way back to London, then he called a colleague in the local Dorset constabulary, a fellow officer he’d met on a
homicide investigators’ course at the National Crime Faculty in Bramshill. Not an official request but one that was off the radar, not logged, no paperwork. ‘Just my old copper’s
nose twitching, Derek,’ he explained. ‘Can you kick a couple of your layabouts and get them to give their eyes some exercise?’

‘What are you looking for, exactly, Hughie?’

‘No idea. But this is a murder investigation.’

‘Casting a few flies?’

‘Something tells me this is good fishing weather, Derek.’

Hughie Edwards liked fishing. It taught him patience, not a natural side of his makeup, and he needed to be patient just a little longer. Harry was still the only suspect, the only one he was
after. He’d soon have the bastard in his net.

Shades of confusion, and enough of them on the trip back to London to raise a sweat and a muttered curse inside the Volvo. Abby hadn’t returned with them, saying she
wanted to spend a little more time along the soaring coastline her father had loved – not near the cottage, of course, although for one so free with tears she displayed an emotional core of
oak. She’d known her father was gone, she’d said, so it was time to celebrate what he had rather than to mourn what she had lost. Yet there were fresh tears when she kissed them
goodbye.

Harry insisted on driving even though his shoulder ached, an inevitable after-effect of knocking down locked doors and half-strangling local farmers. The muscles were out of condition. Yet no
sooner had they passed the Fleet service area than the brake-lights of the Friday-night traffic in front of them lit up like a Californian rock concert. They sat and tried to be patient, seeking
distraction. Jemma was wearing shorts that exposed almost all of her thighs, which stretched out provocatively. Harry had been studying them.

‘You’re staring,’ she said.

‘Any chance?’

‘Not with that lorry driver hanging out of his window to get a better look.’

‘Then I’ll cut the swine up first chance I get.’

But the opportunity never came. The delay dragged on, their whimsical humour evaporated and Harry kept glancing at the car clock, checking it against his father’s wristwatch, which lied
and said he had a few minutes more. Was it fate? He was on his way to what he sensed would be one of the most profound confrontations of his life, yet he was stuck in the most impenetrable traffic
jam. Fuck coincidence.

The patrol car was sent out from the station at Dorchester. The two young police officers, one a newly qualified constable and the other a female probationer, went first to the
Gathering Storm. Yes, Mr Jones had been there, even signed his name in the register, although Mrs Butt admitted to being surprised when she’d been told that was his real name. She was a
professional sceptic when it came to any man who booked in with two women and kept the floorboards creaking half the night. And, as if that hadn’t been enough to arouse her suspicions,
there’d been some sort of trouble in the toilets with a couple of the locals. Nasty sort, that Mr Jones.

With the directions supplied by Chief Inspector Edwards the two constables then found the lay-by just beyond the blasted tree, where the lush summer grass bore the signs of having been crushed
by a parked car. The overgrown track up the hillside also showed the marks of where someone had recently passed back and forth. The officers followed the trail that led to the thick woodland on the
skyline above.

Their progress on the motorway was so poor they turned off at Farnborough. ‘I’ll jump on a train,’ Harry had said. ‘Might just make it in time.’
He’d left Jemma in the Volvo to continue the struggle into London.

And he made it in time, with minutes to spare and sweat on his brow from the stewing pot of the Underground. Wickham’s message had said they should meet at St Stephen’s in Walbrook.
Harry scrambled up the stairs of Bank station and into an evening already grown dark. During the day these pavements were packed with workers from every corner of the financial world but now most
of them had disappeared off to their homes or into the wine bars and pubs. It was a reasonable bet that Harry and the bishop wouldn’t be disturbed, not in a church.

Amid the medieval clutter of streets and alleyways that still left its mark on the City of London, St Stephen’s was like blossom on a bare branch. The Walbrook, on which it stood, was one
of the old streams that had flowed through and now under the streets of London. Hemmed in and squeezed on all sides, the church had been burned, ransacked and bombed, its exterior still bearing the
scars of endless repairs, yet from its ruins grew a rose of extraordinary beauty. Christopher Wren had rebuilt it after the Great Fire, conjuring up a domed structure that he used as a template for
his later construction of the cathedral of St Paul’s a few hundred yards to the west. Three hundred years later another genius, the sculptor Henry Moore, had been summoned to add yet another
transcending touch. He had taken a slab of raw travertine marble from the quarry where Michelangelo had taken his own material and from it had created a great circular altar, which now sat beneath
Wren’s soaring dome and had become the reborn heart of this old church. It was there, at the altar and in a pool of light that reflected off the white marble, that Harry found the bishop.
Wickham was kneeling, his old back bent, his forehead resting against the smooth cream-grey marble, deep in prayer.

Edwards was still tracking the icon on his tracker screen with the remorselessness of a cat pursuing its dinner when his colleague from West Dorset called.

‘Hughie, you might have given me a little more warning,’ he complained.

‘What the hell d’you mean?’

‘I’ve got a probationer who wants to quit and a constable who’s still wiping the sick from his sleeve.’

‘What did they find?’