Chapter Twelve #2
“One of them had a gold repoussé binding with encrusted gems. It was stunning.”
“Oh, wow. This is the drink of water I needed. Tell me more.”
I smiled and then I made a mistake. My brain had a runaway moment. Maybe because it was bliss to escape into the fantasy that
life was okay, that St. Andrews was everything it had promised, and that Mum and I could chat about our shared passion. I
started to describe another binding to her when she snapped, “Say that again.”
“It was a clasped gold binding with filigree work, showing the Adoration of the Magi.”
She said nothing.
“Mum?” I said. “Hello?”
The silence stretched further and stifled that little bit of pleasure I’d let myself feel, and with a horrible sinking feeling,
I knew that I’d said too much.
“Darling, I need you to listen to me very, very carefully. Are you alone?” Mum asked.
“Sort of.” I’d wandered around the back of the castle. There were vans parked, back doors open, caterers and chefs unloading yet more stuff. A team of landscapers was tidying up the garden nearby.
“Go somewhere no one can hear you. Go now. I’m going to call you back, because I don’t want to talk on this line.”
“Okay, but when you do, use this number.” I got out my burner phone and read the number out to her, then hung up and walked
across the garden, to a quiet spot at the edge of the woodland where I was hidden from people and out of hearing. I waited,
nerves building, for her to call, and caught it on the first ring.
“I’m alone,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“I need you to be completely honest with me. Do you promise? Don’t hold anything back because you think it will hurt me or
make me cross.”
Oh, God, I thought. What did she know? Had she found out about Dad’s involvement in the clinical trial? I braced myself to
fight with her over it.
“I promise,” I said.
“Okay, listen carefully. I’m going to ask you some questions. Remember, be honest. Lives depend on it.”
“Mum—” I started.
“No!” she interrupted, so forcefully it made her cough. “We haven’t got time for feelings, and I need to give this phone back
soon. First question: Were those accurate descriptions of the bookbindings?”
“Yes.”
“Both of them?”
I hesitated. I had a bad feeling.
“Anya,” she coaxed.
“Yes, they were,” I said.
“I know those books and I know where they’re from.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Anya, I heard St. Leo’s clock chiming when we spoke the other day. You were in Cambridge, and those bindings are from books in your father’s collection.”
“You can’t possibly know that. You only saw his collection once.”
“I might not have told you the truth about that.”
“The collection burned!”
“Did it?” she asked. “Now I’m wondering.”
My legs felt as if they might give way. I sank down and crouched against a wall.
You can’t keep secrets from me, Anya. I always know.
She broke the silence. “The clinical trial. There’s a reason I’m suddenly accepted and fully funded to join it, isn’t there?
What have you done?”
“Nothing,” I said. Please, God, don’t let her refuse this.
“Let me give you some context. After my diagnosis, when I heard the prognosis for this disease, I contacted your father for
the first time in over a quarter of a century. I sent him an email asking if he would help me access the best possible treatment,
whatever that might be. I told him if he didn’t want to do it for me, he should do it for you, because you only had one parent.
He replied promptly. Do you want to know what he said?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“He said no.”
I shut my eyes tight. The world spun around me.
“I know him better than most people. Whatever he’s up to now, he showed me who he is then. And not for the first time. So,
if I’m accepted onto a clinical trial, fully funded, including travel to a posh clinic in the US, I’m pretty sure someone
has struck a deal, and I’m pretty sure that person can only be you. What did he promise you, Anya? His collection? Has it
survived? You must tell me.”
I needed to think. I wanted to give her an answer that would guarantee she had the best possible chance at living, but I had
no idea what that might be. Truth or lies?
“Yes,” I said eventually. “We struck a deal.”
She swore under her breath. “Darling, listen to me. I’m never going to tell you anything more important than this. None of this is what you think. It’s bigger than either of us, or him, and much, much more dangerous. Anya, are you hearing me?”
Clio
Clio quickly discovered two things from police databases: that Zofia Danek had been registered as a missing person in St.
Andrews for just under six weeks, and that she’d been found at the end of that period.
She phoned the officer in charge of the case. “Zofia Danek disappeared after a hike on a bitterly cold day in Aberdeenshire,”
he told her. “She left her car behind, and we found her passport and what we assume were most of her personal belongings in
her cottage. It took a while, but we traced her to London. She’d managed to apply for a new passport from the embassy there
and had already made her way back to Poland. We worked with the Polish police to find her and eventually spoke to her. She’d
changed her name, and she requested that we keep her exact location a secret. She didn’t want her old employers to know where
she was.”
“Her employer being the Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews?”
“Right. She said she felt threatened by them, but she wouldn’t go into detail. We didn’t pursue it because there didn’t seem
to be any lawbreaking. She’d had a rough time of it because she’d had personal problems, too. She told us she’d been stalked
by a colleague’s husband, so obviously, once we’d established that she was safe, we respected her wishes to remain hidden.
We told the Institute we’d located her in Poland and that the case was closed but didn’t give out any more information.”
“Do you think she’d speak to me? I’m hoping she can help with an investigation.”
“She might. There’s no harm in trying. I’ll send details of our contact in Poland.”
Clio hung up. This case was exerting a strong pull on her. She could feel it in her gut. It wasn’t just because of the connection
to Lillian, though that was stirring up feelings; it was also a sixth sense that this went deep. She knew she couldn’t let
it lie.
It was hard to make sense of Izzy suddenly being pulled off the Diana Cornish murder. She thought about calling Izzy to ask
if she’d learned anything more, but it was probably too soon. She called her boss instead. Tim might know something, but she’d
have to be careful what she said. She wasn’t supposed to be working on this.
She called him, told him she’d had an emergency dentist appointment but was on her way in. “By the way, do you know Tony Axford?”
she asked.
“Why?”
“Just heard something about him, that’s all.”
“Anything I need to know?”
“No.”
“Then get off the phone and get into the office. We’ve got work to do.”
In the office, she exchanged emails with the Polish police when she could. At lunchtime, she made another excuse about her
teeth and raced home from work. She let herself into her flat in a hurry, threw down her keys and bag, opened her laptop,
and clicked on a Zoom link.
Zofia Danek appeared on screen. She had long, gray-blond hair that almost covered one side of her face. She’d blurred her
background.
“Hello,” she said.
Clio introduced herself. “Thanks so much for talking to me. I really appreciate it.”
“How can I help?” She sounded wary.
“I’m working on an investigation that may involve your former employers in St. Andrews. I know some of the details about why you left, but I’m hoping you can tell me a little more.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why did you leave the way you did?”
“The Institute recruited me to start in September 2022. They offered me many things at the time, a really good package, but
when I arrived, nothing felt right. They wanted to control the work I did. There is a piece of embroidery in the British Museum,
a fragment. They were obsessed with it. They wanted me to spend all my time working on it, but it had already been studied.
There was nothing to learn. The first year in the job I tried to please them, I did everything I could think of to shed light
on this scrap, but it got ridiculous. It was so small and in such bad condition there was nothing more to know about it. And
there were other things I wanted to research. When I told them I’d done everything I could, they said okay, so now we have
to find the missing part.” She made an expression of absurdity. “I mean, this was a crazy treasure hunt they were trying to
send me on because this missing piece of the embroidery disappeared after it was stolen, everybody knew that. It’s famous.
And I’m not a treasure hunter or a detective. I’m just an expert on textiles. Well, I was.”
“Have you changed jobs?”
“I had to. You know, there aren’t many of us working in these small corners of academia. Put it this way, if you gather us
all for a symposium you don’t need to book a very big room. We’re rare. Our interests are esoteric, they’re not mainstream.
If I stayed in the textiles field, the Institute would find me very easily. So, I changed jobs.”
“Can you tell me more about what happened at the Institute?” Clio was making notes as Zofia spoke, her pen racing over the
page.