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Aiden shot back.
Silence. Seconds ticked by.
“Don’t move!” He turned to face her for an instant, looking straight at her, his eyes a brilliant blue in the fading light. She had never felt so close to him, so intimately bound. He leaned forward and kissed her softly on the lips. Then, before she could respond, he turned away and moved a step off the curb and into the street. He ran forward, to the opposite corner, hesitated a moment before stepping out into the open, then turned once more and fired into the darkness, his black figure silhouetted for an instant against the paler stone.
Elena followed as he started to run along the pavement toward the place where he had directed the shot. By the time she caught up with him, he was standing over the body of a man sprawled face-up on the stones, blood covering his chest and soaking his shirt. A revolver lay a few inches from his outstretched hand.
“Ah, Ferdie,” Aiden said softly. “I wish you hadn’t done this. I really didn’t want to hurt you!”
It was Ferdie, from the club room. There was still light in his eyes, but it was fading. He tried to speak, sighed, and then he was still. The light faded, and his eyes were empty.
Elena felt a consuming sense of loss paralyzing her.
Aiden turned from Ferdie. He was looking at Elena, searching her eyes.
She could not think of anything to say.
Aiden stood motionless. Then he put his gun away somewhere inside his jacket and reached for her hand. “We need to go. We’ve got to get out of here before his friends come.” He bent down, picked up Ferdie’s gun, and slipped it into his pocket. “We’ve got to find a boat leaving tonight for anywhere, and get on it. We’ve got to get that list back to England.”
“Yes,” she said, almost as if she were speaking in her sleep. The street with the dying sunlight draining everything, as if the darkness absorbed it; the dead man lying at her feet, someone who had been uniquely alive. They were so intensely real that the rest of the world was a dream. And yet they were also separate from everything else, and she ached to get back to the familiar, any reality other than this. “Yes,” she said again, following willingly as he took her arm.
They began to walk swiftly toward the dock, then turned the corner without looking back.
CHAPTER
19
Lucas and Josephine were at breakfast early, when the September sun was just over the horizon in the east and there was a hint of chill in the air.
“I’ve been thinking,” Josephine began. “If Stoney knew anything—and we are almost certain he did—then he will have left clues of some sort.”
“He did know something,” Lucas said with absolute certainty. Thinking back on Stoney’s visit, he remembered things he had barely noticed at the time: his choice of words, a sense of anxiety deeper than he was admitting to, an absence of his usual wry humor. Lucas recognized it now as controlled fear, perhaps sadness, even an understanding that they might not meet again. Why had he not recognized it at the time? Was he so long out of the game that he had become blind to shades and tones that he used to understand as second nature? Or was it that he thought Stoney was growing lonely, living in the past where he had had many old friends? Please God, Lucas had not condescended to him. Looking back on it, he could not be certain.
“Then he will have left a sign, such as he could,” Josephine said. “Something perhaps only you would pick up, or see the meaning of. Lucas”—she put down her cup, as if it were of no more interest to her—“we must go and look further, before the police or anybody else comes and moves things. He may have left clues as to who the murderer was.”
“You’re right,” he cut her off, rising to his feet. “We’re going straightaway.” He debated whether to tell her about meeting Peter Howard.
“What is it?” she asked. She could not read his thoughts, but she could read his face, and she knew when a new idea or memory had assailed him.
“Yesterday evening, when I took Toby for a walk, I met up with Peter.”
“Has he anything to do with Stoney?” Her face suddenly grew more serious. There was a new anxiety in her eyes. She put facts together and made a story as easily as he did.
“Yes,” he said. “I told him about it. He believes Stoney was murdered. But he thinks that there is someone even higher in MI6 who knew about the figures Stoney discovered, and what they mean.”
“The money,” she cut in. “Where from, and more importantly, where to? Do you know…or do you have a guess? I can see it in your face. Why does it trouble you so much?”
“Because Stoney died for it.” The initial reason was that simple, whatever complications followed. “Not only that, Peter has an idea where it’s going, and so do I. After what Margot told me, I’m almost sure, but we must have proof.”
“Margot?” Her face was troubled. “Then has this got something to do with Roger Cordell?”
“I am as certain as we can be of anything that it has nothing at all to do with him.”
“Lucas.”
“Believe me, Jo, this is far too serious to tell anyone comfortable lies, you least of all,” he said quietly. “Margot told me she heard whispers at the wedding party in Berlin. A group calling itself the Fatherland Front is trying to annex Austria to Germany, as a cultural and political ally of the Germans.”
“You mean consume it, conquer it without a fight?” The sudden disgust in her face was so fierce it startled him.
