I could not move. I had a vile, acrid taste of something rotten in my mouth and I found it difficult to breathe. Not often stuck for ideas or thoughts, this time I was clean out. I don’t know for how long I stayed, my feet planted to the spot, my torch flashing aimlessly around the sides of the vault. Along with the grief and rage, the burning sense of abandonment and loss, I had one desire and that was to cover her up. I couldn’t let her be found like that, without dignity.
I reached out towards her. Stupid, of course – it would make no difference to McCallen now that she was dead, and the professional in me said that there was no way could I risk so obvious a connection to her. I had to leave. I had to go and never come back. Despite this, I took one step then another, forcing myself forward. Within a metre or so, I halted for a second time and registered that something else was very wrong.
Chill freezing my spinal fluid, I glanced back, awkwardly, over my shoulder. I don’t scare easily. I don’t believe in the concept of evil, no more than I believe in coincidence and superstition and men in colourful robes swinging incense, yet the way in which McCallen had been dispatched, the symbolism behind the death tableau did not escape me. Darkly, I wondered if Titus had played a hand in it. Was he still here?
A final couple of strides and I was close enough to stretch out and rest my hand on her hair, feel the softness between my fingers, entwine a lock and feel it shift within my grasp. Alarmed, I gave a tug and the entire head of hair came clean off. Dropping the wig on the ground, I stared more closely at what lay beneath. Short hair, muscular shoulders and narrow hips. Lifting up the dead man’s head told me all I needed to know.
I backed away and headed for daylight. At any moment the padlock would be reinstated and I’d be left here entombed. To my surprise, the door yielded easily and I sped outside, up the steps, and glancing left and right saw that by some miracle I was alone.
I remembered nothing of my journey home. One moment I was fleeing, head down, hands in pockets, the next I was packing a holdall. As a last-minute precaution, I picked out a skinny vintage tie made of leather, very Sixties, and popped it into my jacket pocket.
I now knew that, with Titus’s death and another intelligence officer missing, my home would be swarming with police and MI5 and God only knew who else. If Titus had acted with the full knowledge of his superiors, I was a dead man.
I piled out of the house, mind screaming. The wig was a nasty touch and undoubtedly contained a message. Something I’d paid so little attention to at the time darted into my brain: ‘What if he was killed to get to me?’ McCallen had meant Lars Pallenberg. Was Titus killed to get to me? If the wig trick, a blatant and sick joke, was also designed to stir my blood, it had worked. God help whoever was responsible.
Whatever theory or scenario crowded my brain, every one of them was coloured by China Hayes. It was Hayes’s man who had come for me, Hayes who had the motive to wipe out his competitors, Hayes who’d sent me to kill Simone. Yet the connection to Simone, the coincidence of her association with Titus, the fact that she’d picked me up, continued to bug me. When questioned she’d had an answer for her activities and denied having a close relationship with Titus or knowing Hayes, yet the grim thought that there was something Simone wasn’t telling me poked me hard in the gut. Again, it came back to motive. The thought of her running around town bumping off experienced intelligence officers was mad to the point of absurd. No, Simone would keep until the following evening. It was time I paid China Hayes a more personal visit.