“I told Vincent I’d meet him. I said I would need to be careful not to attract media attention, though. A luxury cruise would be ideal—a place where people from around the globe are expected to cross paths. It wouldn’t be strange for me to be seen striking up a conversation with the Dutch ‘antiquities dealer’ aboard theBlack Orchid. I said we’d come to a financial arrangement on the ship. I told him that before the voyage ended, I would have the funds transferred.”
“You’re going to give him money? Is that what you meant bysort out A.G.?”
She sidesteps the question. “Things never quite go to plan, do they? It turns out Dr. Marsh followed Vincent onto theOrchid.”
Poppy thinks of Dr. Marsh’s comments in Kusadasi.
Given the revelatory and sensitive nature of my recent discoveries, my publisher and agent and I have just signed a mutual nondisclosure agreement ...
“And Vincent has now led him toyou?”
“Yes,” she says quietly.
“So Dr. Marsh knows—he knows that you’re Aline-Claire?” Her heart races, her breath shallow.
“He does. I realized during his talk that he suspected something—especially when he spoke of Aline-Claire’s accident with the glass door shattering, and there I sat with my scars hidden beneath my sleeves, my cane, my limp—all from that glass. He was trying to rattle us, flush us both out. And he succeeded. I sent him a text after his talk. Avi and I met with him before dawn the following day, in Avi’s room.”
“When you didn’t show for our breakfast before the Chania tour?”
She nods.
“I couldn’t allow Gideon to derail my plans, Poppy, so I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Told him everything I knew—apart from the pregnancy, apart from you—and offered him an exclusive interview. We did it right there and then. He recorded it for his book. And we signed an NDA, an embargo, valid until the end of the cruise.”
Poppy shakes her head, struggling to take it all in.
“How did you become a combat photographer, then? Or is that part also some kind of lie?”
“After I left you in the Tardis, I fled to South Africa on one of my fraudulent passports. It was a country isolated from the rest of the world in many ways—Apartheid, international sanctions, no television, banned media, limited information flowing in from the rest of the globe. It made it an easier place for me to hide, and to reinvent. I legally changed my name there. The rest ... that’s real. I became a renowned photographer. I started in Africa. And I built a false origin story that was hard to either prove or disprove. I became Lillith.”
“The photo from Mozambique? The one with the man supposedly carrying you injured and bleeding, away from the site of the IED blast?”
“Someone else. Not a reporter, but a young Portuguese national living in Mozambique and working for a nonprofit. An unfortunate accident when the vehicle she was traveling in hit the device. She died. I came across the print in some old news files, and kept it.”
“What about those still missing?” Poppy demands. “Those presumed murdered by Vincent, but never proven? Or those whose bodies were found but never tied to him?”
“I asked Vincent about them.”
“Your discussion with him ... up on the deck?”
“Part of our negotiation,” Lillith says, “over finances. I told him I could set him up for life, but before I’d do that, I needed to know about those still missing. I asked what happened.”
“He told you.”
“Yes.”
“You believe him?”
“I do. I know him well. Vincent is vain—heneedsto be admired, praised, validated. It’s part of his pathology. He’s proud of his cunning, his superiority. Most of all, he craves respect. It ties back to his upbringing, his childhood as the bastard son of a wealthy Indian tailor who rejected him, and the tailor’s Vietnamese mistress who sold her body to survive. Your father is a needy narcissist, Poppy. You heard Dr. Marsh. So yes, I believe him. I passed this information to Gideon Marsh. It will appear in his book. Those families—what’s left of them—will get their truths. As I am giving you yours.”
Her eye mists with emotion. “It’s the least I can do as your mother.”
Give Poppy her due.
End it for Poppy.
Finish with A.G.
RIP.
