Arkadian had just stepped through the front door when his mobile phone rang inside his jacket pocket.
‘Do not answer that,’ his wife hollered from the kitchen.
‘Smells great,’ he called back. ‘What is it, Tocana?’
‘I made it specially for my poor invalid husband to build up his strength, so if you want to eat any of it I suggest you switch off that phone and start acting ill.’
He took the phone from his pocket and peered at the caller display. ‘It’s work.’
‘It’s always work.’
‘Arkadian,’ he said, trapping the phone under his chin and shrugging stiffly out of his jacket to try to speed things up as much as he could.
‘I have Gabriel Mann on the line,’ the operator said. ‘He insists on speaking to you. He says he wants to turn himself in.’
Arkadian snapped to attention, grabbing the phone and letting his jacket slide to the floor.
‘OK, run a trace on the call and have a squad car on standby in case we manage to pin him down.’
‘Already done, sir. Shall I put him through now?’
‘Yes.’ The line clicked and his ear flooded with the background sounds of a busy environment. Somewhere public, a bar probably. ‘This is Arkadian,’ he said. ‘How can I help?’
‘Sorry to ruin your evening.’
Arkadian glanced up at the empty kitchen doorway and heard angry stirring coming from beyond. ‘Don’t mention it. Where are you?’
‘Somewhere much safer than jail. Listen, I need to ask you something. Have you been to visit Liv or my mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘And while you were there, did you talk to Liv?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she say anything about leaving?’
Arkadian frowned. ‘No. She’s not going anywhere. They’re keeping her in for observation.’
He heard a weary sigh on the end of the line. ‘She’s gone,’ Gabriel said. ‘She left shortly after your visit.’
‘She can’t have done. I’d have heard about it.’
‘Why? She wasn’t under arrest, and you’re on leave.’
Arkadian flashed back through his visit. He remembered how small and vulnerable she’d looked in the bed as he got up to go. Then he realized something. ‘I returned her bag to her,’ he said. ‘Forensics had finished with it, so I used it as an excuse to go and see how she was. It had her passport in it.’
‘How quickly can you get hold of passenger lists from the airport?’
‘I’d need a warrant.’
‘Oh, come on, we need information, not a robust chain of evidence. Can’t you pull some favours?’
‘If she wants to leave the country, that’s up to—’
‘She left the country because she’s in danger. I broke out of jail for the same reason. I was set up. There was someone waiting for me in a cell. I can give you a description, but I bet he’s not there now and I doubt he’ll show up on the roll call. The guard took me right to him. It was an inside job. The Citadel’s woken up. It’s making a move to silence us, which means Liv’s in danger and so’s my mother, just like before.’
Arkadian felt a twinge in his arm as he remembered the last time Gabriel had issued such a warning. He had been right then, and Arkadian had the bullet wound to prove it.
‘It’s up to you,’ Gabriel said. ‘Do what you think’s best. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.’
The sound of the bar cut off and Arkadian listened to dead air for a few seconds. From the kitchen he heard the sizzle of something juicy hitting a hot pan, then the phone clicked and he was automatically patched through to the tech guys. ‘Any luck?’
‘Not a chance. He was using an Internet phone. Very hard to trace, impossible to pin down quickly.’
‘He’s going to call back in ten minutes, might that help?’
‘Not really. He could use a different phone, a different server, a different IP. Even if he used exactly the same setup, you’d have to keep him talking for a couple of hours to give us even a fighting chance. Internet calls can be routed anywhere in the world.’
‘OK. Do it anyway.’ He hung up and stared down at his jacket lying crumpled and abandoned on the floor, a symbol of the nice evening he’d had planned. He thought of Liv and the way she had watched the priest during their meeting. He’d sensed her fear – and now he knew why.
He opened the contacts on his phone and scrolled down looking for the name Yun Haldin. Yun was an ex-partner of his from way back who had quit the force to start his own firm. He now employed a large number of former cops and had contracts to run perimeter security at both local airports.
‘You finished, or you going to go hungry?’ his wife called from the kitchen, where the sweet-and-sour aroma of garlicky stew floated out.
Arkadian’s stomach growled loudly in answer to his wife’s question.
He found Yun’s number and pressed the call button.