18

Black spotted her sitting alone in the far corner of the busy accident and emergency department. Her right hand was braced diagonally across her chest in a sling and a thick dressing was taped to her temple. Her head was lolling towards her chest as if she were drifting in and out of sleep. He picked his way towards her, weaving between drunk students, an old man who looked like death and a young woman who smelled of poverty nursing a screaming baby.

‘Karen? What happened?’

She blinked and looked up, then smiled with relief as much as her battered face would let her.

‘Leo. Thanks. I got the nurse to call the porters’ lodge. I couldn’t –’

She seemed overwhelmed and confused. Her speech was slurred from a large dose of codeine. She struggled to stand. He took hold of her arm and helped her to her feet.

‘Let’s get you home.’

He led her between the rows of seats, along the corridor and out to where he had parked his Land Rover. She moved slowly and stiffly and seemed to be injured in several places. There were grass stains on her jeans and scratches along her cheek and neck. The message the college porter had brought to his door shortly after eleven p.m. was simply that Karen had been in an accident and needed collecting from the John Radcliffe Hospital. Black knew that like most people in Oxford she cycled everywhere, and he had assumed that she had had a crash. He waited for her to tell him what happened, but she didn’t say a word. He noticed there were bruises on both sides of her face, as if she had received multiple impacts. He struggled to picture how they could have occurred.

Only once he had safely installed her in the passenger seat and fastened her seat belt did he venture a joke.

‘So, what did the other guy look like?’

‘I don’t know. He was wearing a mask.’ Silent tears spilled down her cheeks.

Some joke.

‘He?’

She spoke falteringly through sobs: ‘A man – outside the site at Woodstock … jumped out at me … pushed me off my bike … fractured my wrist … I thought he was going to kill me, Leo, then …’

‘It’s all right.’

Karen’s breath came in short bursts between sobs.

‘Have you told the police?’

She nodded and wiped her eyes. ‘They sent a woman to take a statement … She asked if it could be domestic. I had to tell them about Joel … I don’t think it was him. This man was … he was like a … he was so quick.’

Black tried his best to remain calm. ‘Did he say anything?’

She shook her head.

‘Was he trying to rob you, or –’

‘He took my rucksack … My purse and phone were in there.’ She swallowed. ‘I thought he was going to … He must have followed me. How else would he have known I was there?’ She looked at him through red, swollen eyes. ‘I’m scared, Leo.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll sleep on your sofa.’

She nodded gratefully.

Black touched her reassuringly on the shoulder. He turned the ignition and started for home.

By the time they arrived back at college Karen was out on her feet, the opiates rendering her into a stupor. Black looped his arm around her waist and supported her full weight as he helped her up the stairs to her rooms on the second floor. She crawled into bed still dressed in her clothes and within moments fell deeply asleep. He closed the door and retreated to the small sitting room that doubled as a study into which she had crammed the few possessions she had salvaged from the ruins of her marriage. A large framed photograph on the wall above her desk showed Karen during a recent field trip to British Columbia hugging a vast cedar tree that must have been thirty feet round. He recalled her stories of the expedition: of how the First Nations people had, over the centuries, harvested planks from the outside of the trunks by tapping in wedges which, aided by the action of the wind, slowly caused pieces of timber to split away. The trees repaired their own wounds and lived on for centuries alongside their human companions. The idea of people living in harmony with their forests had moved her deeply.

She was a botanist whose work, as far as he knew, was purely altruistic. He could think of no possible reason for anyone to hurt her except for purely opportunistic reasons. Muggings were rare but not unknown. A lone woman on a bicycle in an area beyond the scope of any security cameras was an easy target. Only one detail troubled him. She had said ‘balaclava’. If her memory was correct, that meant her attacker was more than a mere opportunist. He had planned.

A small paranoid voice sounded in the back of his mind suggesting a connection with the missing scientists. He dismissed it. Karen was a plant biologist. Her work had no defence application that he could conceive of. She had been attacked and robbed in a city that for all its wealth had more than its fair share of poor and desperate vagrants, addicts and street criminals. Such things happened every day.

He sank into the chair beside her desk and found his thoughts drifting back to Finn.

He should never have agreed to go to Paris. Ever since seeing Finn’s body he had been stirred by a primitive desire for revenge. He could feel it now. If he knew where to find the man who had attacked Karen, he knew exactly what he would do to him: break his jaw and ensure he never had children. It would be over in seconds. He pictured the limp, groaning body at his feet. He tried to push the image away, to replace the anger with rational thoughts: who was to say what he would be capable of if he were hungry and destitute enough? It didn’t work. Since his trip across the Channel something inside him had shifted. The ghost of his old self was haunting the new.

What if whoever killed Finn wants to kill you, too? How many people must there be who would gladly see the two of you dead? How many sons, fathers, brothers and cousins have you killed, Leo?

The more he tried to silence the taunting voice the louder it became until he could think of only one way to silence it. Reluctantly, Black brought out his phone and found, buried at the back of his wallet, a business card. He took them into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

In the bedroom of his sixth-floor flat in a nondescript block in Lancaster Gate Freddy Towers stirred from the semi-doze which these days so often passed for sleep and reached for the phone ringing on the bedside table. He squinted at the screen and saw that it was the call he had been hoping for. He sat up excitedly and switched on the reading lamp as he answered.

‘Leo? Is that you?’

‘Yes, Freddy.’ He sounded flat and morose. ‘A friend of mine has had an accident.’

‘A friend? Who?’

‘Dr Karen Peters. She’s a botanist. She’s also a close colleague.’

‘What sort of accident?’

‘She was attacked and robbed by a masked man. It could be purely coincidental –’

‘But you think there’s a French connection …? What would be the point of hurting your friend?’

‘You tell me, Freddy.’

Towers paused to think. ‘No, I can’t see any obvious link.’

‘It seems premeditated, frankly, the sort of thing I’d do to soften up the genuine target. What I’m getting at, Freddy, is whether there is anything you’re not telling me … The past … My guess is there is.’

‘Careful over the phone, Leo. Perhaps we ought to meet? How are you placed tomorrow lunchtime? I can come up if you like. How about the Randolph?’

Black answered with silence.

Towers tried again: ‘I can make it tomorrow evening if you’re busy. I’ll call the local police now if you like, tell them to keep an eye on her for a few days. Karen Peters – is that right?’

‘I don’t want you coming here. London. I can make lunch tomorrow.’

‘Excellent. Army & Navy, then. Shall we say one?’

Black rang off.

Towers lay back on the pillow, feeling hopeful for the first time since he had received the news of Dr Bellman’s abduction. If Leo could be prised from his lair, anything was possible.