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He stared at her before shrugging. “Sure, the wheels are just up there.”
“Just up there” turned out to be a half-mile walk through uneven terrain in the pitch dark to a road. A motorbike was near the tree line, keys under the seat. He tossed her the spare helmet. “It’s not the Vespa but it’ll do.”
She clung to him on the way back to town. When they reached London, lines of smoky pink were beginning to burn against the sky, and early morning commuters were making their way along the still mostly empty streets. A few cabs and one bendy-bus puttered along the roads.
She tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to one corner. He slowed the bike and then stopped near the entrance to the Tube. She got off and handed him back the spare helmet.
“Sure you don’t want to hang with me?” he said.
“First stop we made for petrol I’d just sneak out of the bathroom window. Why not save time and cut to the chase?”
He pulled the phone from his jacket pocket and tossed it to her. “Bonne chance.”
“So that’s it? No more trying to convince me? Just wish me good luck?” It seemed clear to Shaw that part of her wanted to stay with him. But he wasn’t feeling conciliatory right now.
“Just another job.”
He throttled the bike.
“Thanks for saving our butts, Shaw,” she said, a bit guiltily.
“Like I said, just another job. Reg.”
He popped the gear changer with his heel, released the clutch, and pulled away, leaving her to trudge on to the Underground alone.
CHAPTER
66
REGGIE LOOKED AROUND the small footprint of her dingy flat in London. There was a lumpy four-poster bed, an old chest that had belonged to her mother, a square of frayed carpet, a table with two straight-backed chairs, a hotplate, a small under-the-counter fridge, a four-foot-high shelf crammed with books, and two dirty windows that looked out on the back of another grimy building. Her single potted plant was quite dead because a freak heat wave that had hit London while she was gone had baked her room, which sat defenseless without the benefit of central air-conditioning. The toilet and shower were down the hall. The folks in her building were early risers and if she wanted to bathe with even moderately hot water she had to get there by 6 a.m.
I’m twenty-eight and still live like I’m at university.
She’d showered in cold water since she’d arrived home late, and then changed into the only clean clothes she had left in her closet. She bagged up her dirty laundry with the intent of washing it later in the facilities downstairs. Since she’d been gone awhile, her fridge held nothing edible. She ate breakfast at a café down the street, taking her time over eggs, coffee, and a buttery croissant. She’d charged her phone and sent a text to Whit. She’d received an immediate reply. All their people had gotten out safely. One had even gone to the villa and retrieved her personal things and brought them back to England. In his message Whit wanted to know where Shaw was. He wrote, “Make sure he can’t find Harrowsfield.” She emailed him back and told him that Shaw was no longer with her and that she would make sure she wasn’t followed.
Walking down the street Reggie stretched her arms and worked the kinks out of her legs. The boat ride had been horrible, pitching and swaying nonstop. Shaw had taken the ordeal easily in stride. He’d never once become sick. He just sat at a table, reading a book and even eating, and would hand her towels and a bucket when she needed it, which was frequently.
When she would glance up at him for sympathy she didn’t receive any. Then she felt guilty for even seeking it. It was an unforgiving business and one had to tough it out. He certainly had. She, on the other hand, had come up a little short with her sea legs. At least she was safely back in England, as was her entire team. While it was true they had missed Kuchin, things could be far worse.
She rode the Tube to Knightsbridge. She was heading out to Harrowsfield later to brief the others but had something to do first. She had a sixty-millimeter-size safe deposit box housed at a company that specialized in storing people’s valuables. It had all the latest technological security devices—biometric scanners, access cards, and each box wired directly to the closest police station while closed-circuit cameras monitored the vault. This level of security cost nearly a hundred pounds a year and was worth every penny to her.
She entered the building and successfully passed through the various layers of security. Alone in the vault room, she accessed her box and slid out the contents. Making sure her back was between the camera overhead and the items she was looking at, Reggie sat down at the table and began to read through things she knew by heart.
This was her ritual. After every mission she came and did this. All other times she had been successful. This was her first miss, her first loss, her first ass-kicking. But still here she was. It was important.
The newspaper articles were old and yellowed. Over time the paper would fully disintegrate, but the information contained in the pages would never be erased from her mind. Some days she wished that it would disappear.
Robert O’Donnell, age thirty-six. The photo of the man was a faded black-and-white, but Reggie had no trouble recognizing him. He was her father, after all. He’d died on her seventh birthday. The headline from the Daily Mail had covered all the basic points and added in its typical dash of hyperbole:
London’s Most Notorious Serial Killer Since Jack the Ripper Dead!
It was not exactly what a little girl wanted to read about her dad on her birthday.
Twenty-four victims, all female and all in their teens and twenties, had died at her father’s sadistic hands. At least those were the ones that were known. People had even compared him to the American serial killer Ted Bundy, who’d been executed around that time. A charming, good-looking man who’d lured young women to their deaths. Except Bundy had not been married with children. He’d been a loner. Reggie’s father had a good job, a loving wife, and a boy and a girl. And yet somehow over the years he’d managed to slaughter at least two dozen human beings with such ferocity and depravity that veteran constables who’d discovered some of the bodies had spent time afterwards in therapy to help them through the horrors they’d witnessed.
Even now, once the truth had been established past all doubt, she still couldn’t quite bring herself to accept that the man who had helped create her was the same man in these horrible stories. She looked at another newspaper, one written on the fourth anniversary of her father’s death. It had a full-page picture of him in his last days. In the face Reggie could see a man possessed by something not human at all. But she also saw something else that terrified her even more.
My eyes. My nose. My mouth. My chin.
