Chapter 41
Just An Old Woman
ISOBEL
The access card is in her coat pocket.
She has checked it twice this morning. Not from doubt—she never doubts Brodie—but from the habit of a woman who has spent forty years ensuring that the small things are correct so that the large things may proceed successfully.
Isobel took her heart medication at seven as she always did, with her French Press Americano. The pills are small and unremarkable, and she has managed to take them every morning for eight months without drawing attention to the fact.
The street is quiet. Mayfair at this hour has the stillness of money—no urgency, no noise, the pavements clean, the buildings keeping their counsel.
She walks at her own pace, the cane finding the pavement in its easy and familiar rhythm.
There’s no need to hurry as she’s precisely on time.
She knows exactly when the viewing is. The boys do not.
The staff entrance is a narrow black door at the side of the building. She holds Brodie's card to the access panel. It clicks as the light turns green, and she enters.
The service corridor is bright with fluorescent light and has the particular cool of a building that regulates its temperature for the sake of its contents. It’s the smell of climate control, wooden frames, and old canvas.
When thinking of her failing heart she can’t help but think of Elena who also had a cardiac condition, and weaponized hers.
Elena whose people infiltrated her son’s house during a solar panel installation to put an incendiary device in a wall knowing there was an infant on the other side of it.
Isobel has spent considerable time trying to understand the instinct to destroy and has concluded that she simply does not possess it.
Her instinct has always been to protect.
To build. To keep the people she loves alive and intact and safe from those who would prefer them otherwise.
It occurs to her, not for the first time, that there is no contradiction in what she is about to do.
Protection, at its outermost limit, sometimes requires the removal of the threat.
She follows the corridor to the end and opens the door.
The gallery is small. It feels cloistered and serious.
Dark green walls, the color of an old man’s private library.
The lighting recessed and warm, each painting attended to individually, as though the room has been designed around the specific requirements of each work rather than the comfort of a visitor.
The floor is wide-plank walnut, ancient and expensive, the kind of floor that absorbs sound.
A single exotic orchid reaches toward the wall from a plinth near the entrance.
There is nothing that is not necessary, and everything that is.
This kind of gallery that does not advertise itself. It’s the kind of place that serious collectors know and nobody else does.
At the far end, his back to her, stands a dark figure of a man. She would call him Hargrove, but now she knows his name is Matthew Parkinson.
She begins to cross the room.
Her cane finds the floor, tapping and stepping, and the sound of it moves ahead of her through the silence, announcing her arrival. She watches him hear it, and his shoulders shift and he turns.
Annoyance at first. The instinctive displeasure of a man who has paid for an entire day of absolute privacy and found it violated. He looks at her the way powerful men look at elderly women: with the impatience of someone who cannot conceive that she might be relevant.
Then he places her. Something behind his eyes shifts. A reassessment. He looks at her now with the full attention of a man who has been studying a family for months and is unexpectedly in the presence of its primary architect.
His men are just outside. Two men at the front, one at the side. He is as protected as a man can be in a room this size. One yell and she’d have a gun pointed at her temple.
She watches him register, very briefly, that he did not bring his own revolver today. The thought crosses his face and is gone. He’s still wondering if he should call for help, but his ego refuses. She is, after all, just an old woman.
“Mrs Ravenscroft,” he says.
“Mr Parkinson.”
He blinks, perhaps surprised she knows his real name. “Give me one reason,” he says pleasantly, “why I shouldn't have you killed right now.”
“Because I have something you want,” she says. “In my pocket.”
He waits.
“And because I need your guarantee, your personal guarantee, that you will never come near my family again.”
Something almost like amusement, but also impatience. “You know that isn't how this works.”
“Yes,” she says. “I know.”
She knows, as she had told Ivy, that the only way to end this is with a dead body. She presses her thumb against the underside of the raven's wing to release the aerosol.
Novichok is not slow.
Parkinson’s eye twitches. Once. The slightly unfocused expression of a man who has noticed something is wrong but has not yet identified what. His hand moves toward his jacket, towards his phone, and stops. He blinks at his hand. His pupils have gone to pinpoints. “What—?”
He wants to yell but he can no longer talk.
His throat is working without his direction.
His other hand comes up, confused, purposeless.
He takes one step and his leg fails him.
It’s not a fall, not exactly, but something more incremental, the body shutting down in sequence.
He collapses to his knees on the polished walnut floor.
He looks up at her, finally understanding. Comprehending that there is nothing, not his men outside, not his money, not eighteen months of meticulous planning, that can change what is happening to him. He takes his last shuddering breath.
Isobel also begins to feel the nerve agent then. Pressure in her chest, a heaviness behind the sternum, the faint blurring at the edges of her vision. It was expected, so she’s not alarmed.
She bends on aching knees and presses two fingers to the pulse point at his throat. Nothing. Parkinson is gone and the Ravenscrofts are safe once again. When she straightens out she finds a chair. There is always a chair in galleries, for the contemplation of art, and she sits.
The heaviness in her chest deepens.
She thinks of Gregory first. Gregory with his mustard waistcoats and his patience and loud classical music blasting through the halls at the manor.
The way he has loved her, steadily, for forty years, through everything she has not been able to tell him.
She has asked Brumilde to look after him, and every Raven knows that Brumilde is reliable in all the ways that matter.
She thinks of Christopher, the ruffian, the rogue, who will be all right. She knows he will be all right. He just needs someone to believe in him.
She thinks of Ariana. Her daughter, returned to her. Those months—too few, and yet she would not trade a single morning of them.
And dear baby Alexander, who will not remember her, and who will grow up safe because of her. That is enough. That is more than enough.
She thinks of her firstborn, her precious Alistair.
The boy he was. So serious, so scarred after Ariana was taken, so determined to manage everything himself.
The man he became. The way he looked at Ivy, as though Ivy was not someone he deserved, but she knew better.
She knew they were perfect for one another, and their wedding day had put everything right in her heart, even though it was failing.
Isobel has been the keeper of this family for four decades. She did not always do it cleanly, or kindly, or in ways she would care to account for in full. But she did it.
The light in the gallery is very warm and very still, and she is so tired. She’s relieved to finally set it all down. It’s an ocean-deep sadness, but also intense relief. Alistair and Ivy will carry it now. She has made sure of that.
She closes her eyes and rests.