What? Lady Neku told herself. You’re going to cry now?

She made herself cross the tiles to the table where her family still sat, their food as frozen as those who’d been about to eat it. She did this by the simple expedient of refusing to give herself an option.

Lady Neku’s mother grinned at the world from a gash that opened her throat from ear to jewelled ear. She’d either been the first to die, or accepted her death without complaint, because the arms of her chair still touched the table and her glass of wine stood icy but undisturbed. Blood crusted the surface of her Maltese lace shawl like beads of jet, sewn into random patterns.

Her brother Nico had gone down fighting, his scabbard abandoned beside his half-seated body, his chair pushed back and twisted sideways. Antonio sat back and Petro slumped so far forward in his seat that his head rested on the table. Even his long black hair felt frozen.

Everyone wore their best clothes, black velvet and lace, jewelled cloaks. Only one member of the Katchatka family was missing. The one staring down at the table and its barely touched wedding banquet.

So this is what death looks like, thought Lady Neku. A massive smear of shit across the surface of the world. She should have known. All this, just to remember why she’d first run away.

CHAPTER 55 — Monday Morning, 2 July

So much of what Kit thought was right was wrong, starting with who killed Ben Flyte. The police had believed the killer was Armand de Valois, until Kit tripped up their conclusions, while Kit himself had decided it was Kate O’Mally, a woman he’d always believed capable of anything.

It had been someone else entirely.

“Ben Flyte?” demanded Pat, pulling off a muddy road. His question was meant to be throwaway. A sorry, what was that? Only Kit had watched his shoulders tense.

“Mary’s boyfriend.”

“Really?” Pat said. “I’m not sure we ever met. They kept changing…”

“Kate mentioned him in Tokyo.”

“He’s probably with someone else now,” said Pat. “Things are different these days.”

Kit sighed. “You know,” he said, “what your mistake was?”

Pat Robbe-Duras climbed out of the car. After a second Kit realised he was meant to follow. The sky was dark, the stars high, and the moon half hidden by a flat scrap of cloud. A flare of a match and the restless tip of a cigarette were the only clues that Pat was walking towards an open-fronted hangar, watched by sleepy cattle from a nearby field.

“Tell me my mistake,” he said, when Kit caught up.

“Never once mentioning him,” said Kit, then asked a question that had been troubling him, really troubling him. “No face, no fingers, no jaw, no teeth—how did you bring yourself to inflict that level of damage?”

“He used to hit her,” said Pat. “Did Katie tell you that? Mary wouldn’t let either of us interfere. We were just meant to live with it. And then she went missing.”

“The suicide?”

“Before that,” said Pat, disappearing into the hangar. When he returned it was to pick up his conversation where it left off. “Mary was due to have lunch with me about a week before she took the ferry. She never turned up, but Ben did in that wretched little car of his.”

“Did he say where Mary was?”

“No,” said Pat. “Hadn’t seen her in days apparently, and didn’t know where she’d gone, wanted my help getting her back.”

“So you killed him.”

“That was later,” Pat said. “When I realised he’d brought his shit into my life.”

“What?”

“He arrived with a Chinese lacquer trunk he’d found Mary for Christmas. Asked me to store it until they made up again, lying little fuck. I gave him about ten minutes, to make sure he wasn’t coming back, and then hacked the lock. You know what I found?”

“Heroin.”

Pat nodded. “So I called him up and said I knew where Mary was, but we needed to talk before I told him.” The old man’s face was a cold mask in the moonlight. “He came bouncing back, all smiles, promising to make everything right. And then he saw the open trunk…”

Two men were leading a small plane out of the hangar, one of them walking ahead. The plane had both its engines going and was inching forward, running without lights. As Kit watched, it angled itself along a darkened runway.

“You should go,” said Pat.

“Say goodbye to Neku for me. And tell her I’ll see her soon.”

“Of course.”

Looking away, Kit said, “You never told me how you made yourself mutilate Ben Flyte. What drove you, was it anger?”

“No one got tortured,” said Pat. “We had a whisky while Ben waited for me to tell him where to find Mary. Only his glass was loaded with my painkillers. I put him in the freezer and hacked him up later, when he’d frozen. It was meant to make his body hard to identify.”

“It worked,” Kit said. “And the drugs?”

“Into the river.” Pat looked sad. “That was my big mistake,” he said. “They killed the fish.”

The waters of the English Channel were dark beneath the plane. A sheet of oxidised lead hammered flat by moonlight and wind. A bank of tiny diodes on a console were the only lights in the cabin. Kit was pretty certain that flying dark was illegal but he kept his mouth shut and watched sullen lead turn into wild grass instead.

Dawn was an hour away. Which would give Kate’s pilot time to land in France, turn around, and be back over Kent before the sun clipped the horizon. A feat quite within the Beechcraft’s capabilities, according to a tatty leaflet Kit had been reading before take off.

The Air King E90 was a turbo prop, once popular with air charter companies. It could stay airborne for six hours and was designed to seat eight, two pilots, four passengers in club chairs, and two bodyguards, chauffeurs, or junior staff in seats at the back.

In the plane they used, someone had long since ripped out the leather seats and replaced the carpet with sheet steel, unless that was the original floor. Over the steel had been taped polyethylene, now badly scuffed and somewhat torn. Whatever this plane usually carried it was unlikely to be Business Class passengers, or their assorted hangers on.

The pilot was a young Asian called Tony. At least that was how he’d introduced himself at the small airfield, where Kit had been dropped by Pat, who turned out to drive almost as quickly as Brigadier Miles.

“Calais…right?” It was the first thing Tony had said since take off.

“Apparently.”

“Okay, I’m to give you this.”

The padded envelope contained euros, two credit cards, an EU driving licence, one of the new ID cards, and a passport, all made out in a name Kit didn’t recognise. Kate O’Mally had obviously spent the last half hour before Kit left pulling in favours. It said something for her reputation that the fakes were good.

“Computers,” said Tony, glancing across. “Just drop in the photograph and hit print.”

The licence and ID looked perfect. The back pages of the passport, when Kit examined them in the light, seemed slightly ruffled.

“If anyone queries you,” Tony said, “say you got caught in the rain.” He shrugged. “And remember, the credit cards are only for show. Your boss said use cash.”

My boss? Kit laughed.

The wild grass gave way to French fields and finally to a small airstrip trapped between empty railway lines and the edge of a vast farm, one of those industrial outfits with tractors the size of small houses and pig pens the size of railway stations.

“You known Kate O’Mally long?” Kit asked.

“Never heard of her,” said Tony, adjusting the joystick to slide the Air King E90 between a narrow strip of lights. “Never heard of you either. I’m not even here.”

There were slow trains to Paris from Calais, express trains, and even a Eurostar, which stopped to take on passengers at a dedicated station nearby. A plane ticket was already waiting for Kit at Aeroport Charles de Gaulle. All the same, Paris, the ticket, and Kit’s flight to Tokyo would have to wait. There was somewhere else Kit needed to go first. He got there by truck.