Chapter Five #2
science department. He was looking forward to it, hoping for a part-time position to earn him some money so he could contribute
something to the household. It would be nice to meet some like-minded people, too. He was hopeful that he and Giulia Orlando’s
partner, Paul, might hang out together, but he would need more friends of his own up here. He had no intention of being dependent
on Anya for everything.
He drained the last of his coffee, and felt the caffeine doing its good work. Ready to start, he reached for his headphones
but heard the doorbell chime. He considered ignoring it, but they’d ordered a bunch of stuff for the cottage, and it was raining,
and the cottage’s small porch didn’t provide much shelter.
A woman stood outside staring up at the roof. She had the look of a busybody, and Sid’s heart sank, because he was itching to be at his desk, getting on, but there was no avoiding her now.
“Hi,” he said. “Can I help?”
“You are?” A brusque question, but she sounded friendly enough.
“I’m Sid Hill. I just moved in here with my girlfriend.”
She shook his hand firmly. “I’m Maggie from next door. Nice to meet you. We have a leak in our front bedroom, and I think
it’s a problem from your side.”
Sid stepped out and joined her in looking up at the roofline, where the cottages were adjoining. Everything looked fine to
him. “There’s nothing leaking on our side, but we’ve only been here a couple of days. I could ask my landlord.”
“Would you mind? Diana Cornish never answers my messages. I’m getting stonewalled by her secretary. Just like last spring
when I called to ask about a girl who lived here. My tenants and I were anxious because she left very abruptly.”
“Oh, dear,” Sid said blandly, to discourage her from chatting, but Maggie was on a roll, barely drawing breath before she
carried on talking.
“She disappeared in the middle of the night and left quite a lot of her stuff here. My tenants said it didn’t seem like her
to do something like that. Their impression was that she was a courteous person and they considered themselves friends of
hers, though of course they questioned this afterward, when she didn’t respond to any of their messages. Anyway, I phoned
Diana about it and the secretary wouldn’t put me through, so I called in at the Institute and she was extremely abrupt with
me. She said Diana had told her to tell me that it was nothing to worry about, the girl changed her mind and left her job
at the university.”
Sid blinked at her. This was a lot of information.
“I mean, it happens,” he said. He was thinking of the time he messaged a guy on his course who he’d been partnered with to do a presentation, and the guy had messaged back that he’d left Oxford and returned home.
Nobody had noticed. “University populations are always in flux, especially when there are a lot of international students.”
She looked at him sharply. “It was very fishy,” she said. “Though she was foreign.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I should get back to work.”
“Of course. It was nice to meet you. I’m Maggie.”
“Maggie,” Sid repeated. Had she forgotten she’d told him already? Perhaps she was losing her marbles. She looked quite old,
which made him worry that she was lonely. “Nice to meet you, too.”
He opened the cottage door. She stayed where she was, looking up at the roof even though the rain had begun to fall harder.
As he went inside, he suddenly felt as if her gaze was burning into his back, but when he turned to shut the door behind him,
she was walking away.
He was going to have to watch out for her and make sure she didn’t get in the habit of interrupting him during work hours.
The last thing he wanted was a needy neighbor.
Diana
Diana Cornish and Charlotte Craven disembarked separately when the train arrived at Euston. Charlotte got into a waiting town
car, and Diana slipped into the crowd of commuters thronging the entrance to the tube station. If they ran into each other
later, in public, they would greet one other as if they were merely professional acquaintances, nothing more.
Diana took the Victoria Line to Victoria Station, then changed to the District Line and got off at West Brompton.
She wasn’t feeling the lack of sleep yet.
Her adrenaline was pumping, her mind buzzing.
Charlotte had inspired her. She should have trusted that everything was being done for the right reasons.
Now that she was reassured, she was one hundred percent committed to making sure things went well between Anya and the benefactor.
But there was something she needed to do before she met with Anya later.
Deep inside, in a secret place, she was carrying a hunger for a man she should have left a long time ago, once he’d outlived
his usefulness to the Larks. But she couldn’t give him up. It was a weakness, she knew it, and a violation of one of the Larks’
unbreakable rules, but her life was already full of risk, and she felt she could handle this one. She undertook so much selfless
work for the cause, and she wanted just this one thing for herself.
She had seduced Henry Macdonald two years earlier. To be more precise, she’d seduced married Judge Henry Macdonald, father of two, and she’d done it to help to get a law enacted, a law designed to protect women, a law
that Judge Macdonald had a lot of sway over.
He wasn’t the first powerful man Diana had become intimate with in order to influence him, and she wasn’t the first of the
Larks to do it. There was a long tradition of exerting control this way in the Fellowship, and in the Order of St. Katherine,
too. But unlike the Kats, the Larks never married them.
Judge Macdonald opened the door of his flat and kissed Diana with so much feeling that her self-control evaporated.
I’m in love with him, she thought. That was the terrible truth of it, the thing she could barely admit to herself. He was
her Achilles’ heel, and she knew it, but she fell into his arms anyway.
Diana left Henry’s flat alone, one hour later, slipping out of his building at Chelsea Harbor and taking a cab to her hotel.
She felt the same way she usually did after seeing him: physical satiety and guilt.
At the hotel she went to her room and lay on the bed. She had some time to rest before leaving to meet Anya. She checked the
news on her phone, scrolling until she saw a headline that caught her attention.
“She Deserves a Name, and She Deserves Justice.”
POLICE APPEAL FOR HELP IDENTIFYING BODY OF WOMAN
Police are appealing for help in identifying a young woman whose body was recovered from the bank of the Thames at Shingles
Riverbank in Putney two weeks ago, when police were called to reports of a person discovered by a dog walker.
No personal property was found. Fingerprint tests were conducted but were negative. The recovered body was sent to the coroner’s
office and details were uploaded onto the UK Missing Persons database.
The death is being treated as suspicious. The body is very badly decomposed.
Detective Inspector Jason Dench said, “We’re working hard on identifying the body and pursuing several lines of investigation
regarding the tragic circumstances in which this young woman may have ended up dying. We’re now asking for help from the public
to identify her.”
A spokeswoman for the WeAreAlive Trust, a charity dedicated to eradicating modern slavery, said, “Given this young woman’s
Asian descent and the difficulty in identifying her, we believe it’s likely that this young woman was a victim of people trafficking.
We urge anyone with information to support the police in identifying her so that she doesn’t become an anonymous crime statistic.
She may have suffered extreme abuse and exploitation, but she also has a family somewhere. She deserves a name, and she deserves
justice.”
There was a photograph of where the body was found. Diana had a sickening feeling as she looked at it. It had been her job to make sure the body disappeared forever, and she’d failed.
Clio
Clio drove through the village and made a turn down an unmarked lane bordered by rolling fields. She couldn’t have known that
Sherston Hall was down there; there was no sign, just two worn stone columns on either side of the lane’s entrance, but that’s
what the GPS told her, so she kept going. The sun lurked behind a row of trees atop a ridge in the landscape and threw striae
of smoldering golden light between their trunks.
When Sherston Hall came into view she caught her breath. It was impossibly large and fine. It surely had to be Grade I listed,
with its gorgeous neoclassical facade hugged by two beautifully proportioned, symmetrical wings, fronted by a huge terrace
with an ornate balustrade. Access to the terrace was up a wide stone staircase.
She parked out front, in a sea of pea gravel. There was doubtless another out-of-sight parking area somewhere, where vehicles
wouldn’t spoil the view of or from the house, but she quite enjoyed the comedy of her small, city-dinged Renault against such
a grand backdrop. As she began the climb up the wide stone steps to the entrance a man appeared through a small door that
was set within the house’s grand double doors.
He was tidily dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt, and a lightweight sport coat. Nice brogues, polished and worn. An affable
smile.
“Can I help you?” he asked in a smooth tone of voice that struck just the right note of friendliness and authority to let
her know that she was being handled. He was staff, then. She hadn’t been sure. She flashed her badge and told him why she
was there.