‘It’ll be about the Bosch chain—’

‘The chain!’ Mark almost shrieked. ‘Are you both mad? This man is violent—’

Slowly Honor rose to her feet, guiding Mark to the front door. His arm felt resistant under her touch, his hostility obvious as she spoke to him.

‘Look, I’m OK. I’m just bruised. If I’d broken any bones I’d be in agony, and I’m not; I’m just shaken.’ She smiled. ‘I have to talk to Nicholas alone—’

‘And you think you’ll get a straight story out of him?’ Mark asked. ‘Remember what I found out—’

‘I need him to explain,’ she said, interrupting. ‘I can’t just take your word on this. I have to know what he did, and why. And if he did it.’

‘You saw the proof—’

‘I saw papers, clippings, old photographs,’ she replied. ‘I want to hear it from his own mouth. Good or bad, I want Nicholas to tell me.’

Exasperated, Mark opened the door to leave, then turned.

‘You’re a fool. You should back off from this now, before you really get hurt. Your brother stayed out of your life for years – why don’t you return the compliment and stay out of his?’

‘Because I’m his sister, and he’s all I’ve got,’ Honor replied crisply. ‘I trust him. Nicholas will look after me.’

‘Want to bet?’ Mark replied, slamming the door behind him.

When Honor returned to the sitting room, Nicholas had made coffee for both of them, pushing a cup towards her as she sat down. He could see a bruise beginning on her cheek and her left eye was swollen.

‘I could kill Elliott for hurting you … Maybe we should go to the police.’

Her tone was sarcastic when she answered. ‘That’s a good idea, Nicholas. The police have already questioned you about one murder – they can’t fail to be interested in what happened to me today. Especially as you know my attacker personally.’ Her tone hardened. ‘Don’t be stupid. The police can’t get involved … What does this Elliott man want?’

‘The chain—’

‘It’s all about that bloody chain!’ she snapped, touching her ribs gingerly.

‘But you don’t believe in the chain or the conspiracy, do you? You think I faked it all,’ Nicholas said, his tone cold. ‘Apparently other people believe that too—’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘What you meant was clear enough. You even suggested that I was losing my mind. Paranoid—’

‘You were talking about people being murdered! About the Church and them coming after you—’

‘And now you’ve been attacked,’ he said simply. ‘Or was that was all part of my master plan? Maybe I wanted to throw suspicion off myself and hired someone to go after you—’

‘I didn’t say you were lying!’

‘You didn’t have to say it, you thought it,’ Nicholas retorted hotly. ‘My sister, the one person that I thought believed in me. Your suspicion hurt me more than you can imagine—’

‘And what about you?’ Honor countered, glaring at him. ‘You come in and out of my life and I’m not supposed to ask any questions. Yes, you’re my brother, but there are big gaps in your life that I don’t know about—’

‘I don’t know everything about your life either!’

‘But I don’t have anything to hide.’

‘And I do?’ he queried, turning to leave.

Angrily she slammed the door closed, forcing him to stay.

‘No! You are not walking out of here now. Not this time, Nicholas. I’m not risking my good name or my safety for half a story. I want to know what’s going on.’

‘I’ve told you the truth!’ he shouted. ‘You know about the chain and the deception. I’m not telling you the whole story about Bosch for a reason. What you don’t know you can’t give away. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

‘Are you talking about Bosch? Or yourself?’

Anger drained the colour from his face. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘What were you doing in Europe when you were in your teens and early twenties? All those times you went away and never explained …’ Her tone softened. ‘Tell me, Nicholas. Before you entered the Church, what were you doing?’

He said nothing, his face blank.

And it frightened her.

‘I just want to help you. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I’m not prying into your past—’

‘I suppose the little prick you had here earlier is doing that for you,’ Nicholas replied, his voice hard. ‘I imagine you set him a task, digging around, scraping up all the dirt he could find. Of course, you two being lawyers, you’d want to know everything.’

She was astounded by his anger. ‘Nicholas, I’m not judging you—’

‘You’ve never stopped judging me since we were children! You and Henry. You think I didn’t hear you two talking? “Poor Nicholas, he feels so guilty about our parents’ death, but it wasn’t really his fault—”’

‘It wasn’t your fault!’

‘No, but it certainly felt like it!’

She shook her head. ‘You’re changing the subject. I was asking about what you’d been doing in Europe—’

‘And I’m not telling you!’ he roared. ‘What d’you really want to hear, Honor? That I fucked a lot of women? You know that. That I was irresponsible, bummed my way round? You know that too. I was a kid, dammit. Kids do stupid things.’

His rage unnerved her. Was he angry because she was prying into his life, or because she had uncovered what he had done? Honor knew that she should back off, but couldn’t. Instead, like the lawyer she was, she went in for the kill.

‘Who’s Nico Lassimo?’

The name punched into the air between them. It left the room winded as Honor watched her brother and waited for him to speak. Explain, she willed him. Tell me that Nico Lassimo wasn’t you. Deny that you were in Munich and Milan. Protest your innocence. Tell me that you were never involved in faking. Tell me it wasn’t you that attacked that woman, or stole from Raoul Devereux. Tell me it was another man.

But Nicholas didn’t explain. Instead he looked at his sister with sadness and a kind of resignation. ‘My God,’ he said finally, ‘when did you stop knowing who I was?’

This is the last time I will come here, Nicholas thinks, deep in sleep, walking between the dream yew trees. This is the last time that I will see this. As ever, he hears the crunching of glass, his priest’s shoes treading the broken beer bottles into a mosaic underfoot.

The old nest is still here, he thinks, as always, as ever the same. The cupboard too, and across the narrow wedge of worn grass the priests whisper, two men under the arch of the entrance, next to the message board that displays the church Bring and Buy sale …

But this time the man walking up the gravel path is not a congregant. Not a worshipper … Nicholas turns over in bed, restless, sweating in his winding sheet … This stranger comes armed with a lens more vicious than a sword and points it at the church, grabbing at images of the pitted stone and the yielding spire. And the name Patrick Gerin scowls over the desolate garden like a fall of dead leaves …

Tear it down, Nicholas thinks. Tear it down.

He knows they will. That someone – not a congregant, not a worshipper – will come in the night and light a match. They will fire up the outhouse with its cupboard, burning the old nest and the roof rafters where once a boy sat and crooned to a bird.

As ever, as always, Nicholas turns in his memory … And now he is walking towards the flames that someone – not a worshipper, not a congregant – lit to destroy what he saw. And what he was too late to prevent. He walks in without pausing, feels the heat. So hot, as ever, as always, the fire purifying both his dying limbs and his living mind.

And beyond this, above the memory, the dead boy, and the spiralling flames, a man cries in his sleep and wakes no one.

Seventy-One

Trafalgar Square, London

In the evening the lights illuminate the smug white patch of the square, with its morose lions and the novelty displays – the enormous ship in a bottle or the giant mutant hen, its feathers the colour of cheap toffee wrappers. Perched like ludicrous sentries on their plinths, their presence is only ever temporary, their impact negated under the daunting, old soldier gaze of the National Gallery.