Long Time Lost (15 page)

Miller and Kate took an orange city bus west into the bustle of the Trevi district, where Miller jumped off and led the rest of the way on foot through narrow cobbled streets, the heat close to suffocating, Kate struggling to keep up.

He threw in extra turns, doubled-back on himself and paused in front of shop windows. But he couldn’t spot a tail. He didn’t think they’d been followed.

The back-up location was a dismal two-star hotel inside a thin wedge of a building, the reception located one floor up, above a failing
gelateria
where the flies buzzing on the tubs of ice cream vastly outnumbered the customers.

The old guy working the hotel reception was thin and scrawny, his back bowed, his collarless shirt badly stained.

Miller felt like a giant standing before him, grit crunching under his shoes, the stench of blocked drains filling his nostrils. He asked the old man if he spoke English, and the man gazed up with yellowed, rheumy eyes and replied that he did, which was a relief, since Miller’s Italian didn’t extend much beyond
ciao
and
per favore
and a series of elaborate hand gestures. So Miller gave him Christine’s name and said she was a guest in the hotel and that she was expecting them.

The old man peered at him closely, then past him at Kate. He spent some time consulting a guest ledger.

‘What is your name?’

Miller swallowed his irritation and introduced himself. The man nodded and studied Kate a second time. Her presence seemed to confuse him.

‘She’s also a friend,’ Miller explained.

‘She waits for you.’ The man pointed a crooked finger out the door. ‘There is a cafe.’

‘She left here?’

He nodded.

‘Was she alone?’

‘
Si
. But another Englishman is looking for her. He came here not so long ago. An hour, maybe. He also said he was a friend.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘Nothing.’ His lips peeled back to reveal a set of discoloured dentures. ‘I no speak good English, understand?’

‘Can you describe this man to me?’

He did, and his description was detailed. He told Miller the man was white, mid-fifties, fat, badly dressed – which was something, coming from this guy – and wearing a straw sun hat.

Which made the man Mike Renner, Miller thought. Had to be.

‘Thank you,’ he said, and turned to go, following Kate towards the door.

‘Your friend,’ the man called after them. ‘She’s very afraid, I think.’

But Miller didn’t turn back or acknowledge him. He just placed his hands on Kate’s back and hurried her down the staircase, his heart pumping hard in his chest, his mind taunting him with the dangers Christine had exposed herself to.

Outside, the street was crammed with people. Tourists, mostly, though there were some Italians in tailored business attire and a cleaner in orange overalls pushing a rubbish cart along. Miller waded into the crowds. He saw plenty of cafes. Plenty of people. But he couldn’t see Christine.

‘What does she look like?’ Kate asked.

But Miller didn’t answer. He was busy asking himself if they’d just been played. He was wondering if the old man in the hotel hadn’t been just a little bit
too
helpful. Maybe he’d sent them out on a fool’s errand. Maybe Renner had been lurking in the back office.

But no, he was being paranoid, because finally he spotted Christine sitting beneath a sun-faded parasol at a pavement cafe.

She looked pensive and fearful, her face angled down, her eyes flitting left to right. She stubbed out a cigarette in a glass ashtray, stabbing it repeatedly until the filter was crushed. She was still tamping away when Miller surged forwards and grabbed for her wrist.

‘Get up. Let’s go.’

Miller had already snatched up her handbag before she’d seen it was him. The handbag was tangled in her arm and her hand flew up with it.

‘Move,’ he said, quietly but firmly.

‘Miller? What are you doing? I haven’t paid.’

‘Here.’

He threw some money on to the table and pressed the handbag into her chest, steering her away from the cafe, smiling tersely at the other patrons.

‘What’s happening? What’s wrong?’

‘Keep walking.’

‘You’re scaring me.’

‘Everything will be OK.’

‘Who’s she?’ Which told Miller that Kate was keeping up with them. ‘What’s going on?’

Christine’s dishwater-blonde hair was a tangled mess, her skin jaundiced, and there were dark circles around her eyes. Miller had suspected for a while now that she was self-medicating. He hated to think where she was getting the drugs.

‘Be calm.’ Miller scanned the faces that surrounded them. There was nobody he recognised. No obvious threat.

‘Is it Danny? Please tell me it’s not Danny.’

‘Danny’s fine. But we have to go, OK?’

‘Go where?’

‘This way.’

He picked a path through the tourists, urging Christine ahead of him, closing in on the Trevi Fountain.

The crowds swelled. The crush got worse. A thousand cameras and smartphones were pointed their way. Miller saw tour groups and holidaymakers, backpackers and street artists. Beyond them all, he saw the great Baroque fountain and the flash of sunlight reflecting off the coins being flicked into the pool.

He jumped up on to a stone plinth at the fountain’s base and looked all around until a shrill whistle pierced the backbeat of chatter and he turned to see a policewoman in a starched white uniform motioning wildly at him to get down off the stonework.

Christine tugged on his arm. ‘Is someone following me? Miller? Is that why you’re here?’

‘You should have stayed in the hotel. That’s what we agreed.’

‘I had to get out. I had to. It was smothering me in there. I was scared.’

‘It’s OK,’ Kate told her.

But it wasn’t. Not really. Not yet.

‘This way. Hurry.’

He led them towards Piazza di Spagna, his arm on Christine’s back, Kate skipping along at her side. He stopped and looked back three times and didn’t spot anyone suspicious. Certainly nobody he recognised. He didn’t think they’d been tracked.

But he was wrong.

Mike Renner was a long way back. Adams was moving faster than he’d anticipated, but his height and size made him easy to spot, and Renner was able to hide his face whenever Adams stopped suddenly and looked around. It didn’t hurt that Renner had been in Rome a day now, long enough to concede to the pounding heat and invest in new clothes. He had on khaki shorts with canvas boat shoes, a blue polo shirt and a straw hat. He looked like a hundred other sunburnt Brits abroad. He looked about a thousand degrees cooler than Adams right now.

The big man was sweating prodigiously. His plaid shirt was pasted to his back and his hair was slicked down against his face.

For the hundredth time that day, Renner asked himself if he should have moved sooner, if there’d been more to be gained by cornering the sad-eyed blonde outside her hotel than waiting for Adams to show.

And for the first time that day, Renner was about to receive a definitive answer.

His phone buzzed in his clenched fist and he snatched it to his ear.

‘Where are you?’

‘At the train station,’ Wade replied.

‘Well, they’re here, with me. You’ve left me with three of them to track. What am I supposed to do if they split up?’

‘Relax. I have something better.’

Renner crabbed sideways to peer around an overweight American in shin-length shorts and a hockey jersey. Adams was moving on a diagonal trajectory towards the far right of the piazza.

‘Better how?’

‘They stowed their luggage. I have it now.’

‘And?’

‘I have ticket stubs from their flight, other documents, too. They’re travelling under false names. She’s Kate Ryan. He’s using the Nick Miller alias I already told you about.’

‘How does that help us?’

‘First up, if you lose them, we know they’re going to come back here. They’ll want to collect their stuff.’

Renner was silent for a moment, thinking it through. Wade was right, although he wasn’t inclined to acknowledge it.

‘I also have Adams’s iPad.’

Renner faltered as a group of Japanese tourists converged on him, following a woman who was holding a yellow umbrella above her head.

‘So?’

‘So I switched it on and there’s some weird security system guarding this thing. I’m thinking there has to be something important on here.’

‘Can you bypass it?’

‘Oh, sure, because I’ve kept my talent for hacking computers secret from you until now.’

‘Then it’s of no use to us.’

‘Maybe it can be. I just need some time.’

‘How much time?’

‘A few hours. Maybe three or four. It’s hard to say exactly.’

Four hours.

‘Fine.’ Renner shook his head. ‘Let me see what I can do. But I want updates, Wade.
Regular
updates.’

Jennifer Lloyd accompanied Sean Ellis to a wooden bench on the banks of the Bridgewater Canal. Ellis had said that he was hungry and needed something to eat. He’d asked if she’d like to join him. Lloyd wasn’t flattered, and she wasn’t fooled. She knew the food and the walk were an excuse to get them both out of the Shelter. Maybe it felt like less of a betrayal for Ellis to talk with her away from the place.

‘The real tragedy’, Ellis said, tearing open his sandwich bag and lifting a limp cheese-and-pickle-on-granary towards his mouth, ‘is that we didn’t just lose two people on the night of the fire, we lost three.’

Lloyd waited for him to chew, her sandwich bag unopened in her lap.

‘Melanie perished, of course. And Sarah. And that was awful, obviously. But I was beginning to think Anna had turned a corner. She seemed positive about the trial.’

‘Even though you didn’t believe her.’

‘It wasn’t for me to determine the truth. That was for the jury to decide.’

Which sounded like a platitude he’d comforted himself with before.

‘But the jury didn’t get to decide, did they?’

‘Anna ran, Detective Sergeant. Things got very serious very quickly. Running was what she knew.’

‘Did you talk with her before she left?’

‘No. It was several weeks since I’d seen her last.’

‘Because she was kicked out of the Shelter.’

Ellis took another mouthful of sandwich, a gob of pickle clinging to the corner of his mouth. ‘We found her a place in another shelter that seemed more suitable to her at the time.’

‘Because Connor Lane made you evict her?’

‘No.’ He swallowed. ‘Mr Lane never
made
us do anything. He still doesn’t.’

‘But you knew he’d want her gone. So who told her? Was it you?’

Ellis stared at the opposite bank of the canal, his gaze becoming unfocussed. Eventually he nodded.

‘Why not Sarah? She was the manager.’

‘Sarah asked me to do it.’

‘You sound like you resent her for that.’

‘Sarah was a remarkable woman. An inspiration to me. But I admit I was a little disappointed in her. Asking Anna to move on was the right decision to make, politically speaking.’

‘And ethically?’

‘Ethically I’m not so sure.’

‘I took another look at the file. A witness claimed that Anna was seen talking with Sarah on the afternoon of the fire. With Melanie, too. On the steps outside the Shelter. She seemed agitated.’

‘I was told the same thing.’

‘Do you know what they discussed?’

‘No. I didn’t hear about it until afterwards.’

‘And what about since then? Has Anna contacted you?’

Ellis shook his head and took an even bigger bite from his sandwich.

‘It’s not so unusual,’ he said, his mouth full. ‘The kids at the Shelter are grateful for what we do. I know they are. But they feel no obligation to explain themselves when they choose to move on. And Anna would have heard about the fire and how Melanie and Sarah were killed. She would have run into other kids from the Shelter, on the streets.’

‘You’re saying she was scared?’

‘Perhaps. But we still don’t know what caused that fire. Or who. There’s never been any proof it had anything to do with the Lane family, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I wouldn’t work at the Shelter if I believed for one moment that was possible. Who knows? Maybe it was Anna herself.’

But it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. The fire, maybe, but the fatal gunshots? It didn’t fit.

‘What about Nick?’ she asked. ‘What about his arguments with Sarah?’

Ellis grimaced, as though reluctant to spill. Before Lloyd could press him, her mobile began to vibrate. The call was from Foster.

‘Curious thing,’ Foster began, before she could speak. ‘We got a hit on the Kate Ryan passport. A notification came in from Italian border control at Rome Fiumicino airport.’

‘Rome?’

‘But here’s the strange part – the notification was sent automatically, close to an hour ago. I just called for more details. It doesn’t exist any more.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Frankly, neither do I. It could be a system error.’

‘What about passenger manifests for flights out of Hamburg to Rome? Can you get access to those?’

‘I already did. There’s no record of Kate Ryan on any flight. No flag against Nick Adams, either.’

‘I think we can assume he has a fake ID of his own. How often do false flags crop up?’

‘I asked the guy I spoke to the same thing. He said never.’

‘So the Ryan passport triggers a blip, then the blip disappears. Could it have been deleted somehow?’

‘The guy I spoke to says not.’

‘But—’

‘I’m keeping an open mind about it. Just like you asked me to.’

She hung up, leaving Lloyd to lower the phone, trying to assimilate the new information. Ellis was staring at her, waiting.

‘The arguments.’ She nodded at him. ‘Tell me about them. Did they focus on Melanie’s decision to testify?’

‘Mostly, yes. And about Sarah wanting to continue her work at the Shelter. Nick never really got comfortable with the idea of her working for Mr Lane. She didn’t, of course. Not directly. But he couldn’t get his head around that.’

Because he wasn’t stupid, Lloyd thought. Because all the foundations and board members in the world couldn’t disguise who made the real funding decisions that would be the life or death of the charity.

‘To your knowledge, was Nick ever violent towards Sarah?’

Ellis’s throat bulged, as though he’d tasted something foul in his sandwich.

‘Once. Perhaps. She came to work with a bruise on her face. Another on her wrist. She was cradling her arm. But she wouldn’t talk about it.’

‘When was this?’

‘Two, three weeks before she died?’

‘Could Nick have killed her, do you think?’

‘Honestly? I don’t know. Don’t they say that anyone is capable of killing, given the right circumstances? Or the wrong ones, I suppose.’

‘Including Nick?’

Ellis set down his sandwich.

‘If he was in a complete rage, I guess I couldn’t rule it out completely. They were in love. I believe that. But their relationship wasn’t perfect. They both worked so hard. That created some conflict. But Melanie?’ He shook his head. ‘Nick doted on her. She was everything to him. And to shoot her? To burn her body? I think it’s inconceivable.’

Ellis scrunched up the paper bag from his sandwich, then stood abruptly and kicked a toe into the ground.

‘I really have to be getting back.’

Lloyd stayed seated. She was thinking about everything he’d said, looking for weak points and for flaws. There were plenty she could identify, but none she felt the need to challenge him on quite yet. And she was thinking about the phone call from Foster. Thinking about Rome.

‘Just one more thing: if you had to guess, where do you think Anna is now?’

Ellis blew air through his lips, crushing his paper bag between his hands.

‘Truthfully? She could be anywhere.’

Which was exactly what was beginning to concern Lloyd. Because what if Fiona was right about Nick and she’d been wrong all along? What if he hadn’t run because he was a killer but because he was protecting someone? Had he spirited Anna away somewhere? Was that what he was doing with Kate Sutherland, too?