The New Testament Church of God in the Wood Green area of North London hosted the funerals of both Andrew Tavish and Edwina Wells, Andrew’s in the late morning and Edwina’s just an hour or so after. They were work friends, not a lot more, but their brutal murders in the woods of Dorrington had brought them closer together in death than either of them ever imagined they’d be.
Steel watched from the middle of the church as Edwina’s sister gave a passionate and humorous, tear-splashed speech about her older sister and best friend. Steel’s gut ached with bitter pain, not the sting from the bite wounds but the angry pang of knowing that these deaths were to be forever shrouded in lies. The morning papers had all told the same story, the one reported by the Met and the local authorities in Tewkesbury.
The two investigators were killed by drug runners, possibly Turkish. It was an arrest gone bad, a tragedy in the line of duty that had taken place in the woods a mile south of the closest home. There was no mention of Dorrington.
There was no reference to Gordon Thompson or of Harris or Dorman. All three of them had been airbrushed away in the cold morning Tewkesbury air. Steel pounded the desktops of Darling and the others, but this was to be the official story. It was from higher up than Major Darling could reach. With his mind, as well as Steel’s, still bent on seeing Heaton swing for this whole sad wrinkle of sanity, Darling wanted Heaton and whoever it was Heaton was trotting and plotting with to think that they had indeed dotted all of their i’s and crossed all of their t’s.
Steel needed to believe in someone, and she did in fact trust in Darling, so in the end she went along with the cocked-up story. She sat there now in the bosom of an aching extended family as they wailed and moaned, sneezed and sniffled over the tragic loss of sweet, sweet Edwina Wells. Steel didn’t have a tear to shed; her mind was too busy with dark thoughts of revenge and retribution.
* * *
SHE TOOK THE Piccadilly line, reasonably quiet on a Sunday afternoon, from Wood Green down to Russell Square, which was walking distance to her parents’ flat in Bloomsbury. Several of the passengers were reading the morning papers with cover stories on Georgia and what was universally now seen as her inevitable rise to the prime minister’s office. Lassiter had all but made official his inability or desire to return to office when he healed from the bombing, which had occurred two weeks earlier. The world was ready to move on, Steel thought. The Downing Street bombing was just another media story now—an unsolved riddle, a nagging ache that the public inherently knew would be solved eventually—but the anger and the fear had somewhat subsided, and what had been just a few days earlier on a high flame on a front burner was now replaced with the taunting question of what normal would be like, what face tomorrow would flash. According to all of the papers staring across at her, it was the face of Georgia Turnbull.
She wanted to call Georgia so badly. She wanted so deeply to soothe Georgia’s nerves and, even more, wanted to tenderly kiss away her doubts.
Then, as Russell Square became the next stop, another thought flashed across the young inspector’s mind, a thought that had been there before, one that she hadn’t wanted to pick up and place, a puzzle piece that she wasn’t ready to find a hole to snap into. What if Georgia was involved? Someone was, someone very high up. To have made the connections, managed the coercions that were enlisted in dressing over and stitching up the murders of Wells and Tavish, someone had to have powerful strings available for Heaton to pull. Who stood the most to garner from all this? Who could have had the inside track it would have taken to place a bomb to set off a conspiracy from this high up? Who had profited the most from Roland Lassiter’s fall? The answer was clear: the woman on the cover of the Sunday magazine, the heir apparent.
Steel slowly picked the puzzle piece up in her mind. She tried not to remember how sweet and cool Georgia’s breath felt wrapped inside of a soft quick kiss as she twirled the notion around in her mind. When the Tube came to a stop at Russell Square, she sat there numb as passengers hobbled off and new ones shuffled in. The only two things that didn’t move were the photo of Georgia Turnbull and Steel herself.
She stayed frozen into place as the train left the station, replacing it with a sea of blackness and rail clatter. The final piece fit perfectly on all sides. All the little puzzle-type knobs and bobbles slipped into the adjoining space with ease. It was a flawless landing, a perfect placement. How could she not have seen this before? She’d been blinded by infatuation. That was the only excuse. All of her powers, all of her talent, all of her instincts had been easily felled by a simple schoolgirl’s crush.
Heaton had had inside help at Number 10 and, like everything else Sir David had in his life, it was the best there was to have. His partner in all of this would be the new prime minister. You couldn’t do any better than that. Numb and slapped senseless with an obvious truth, breathlessly taken with a sharp reality, Steel didn’t move as much as a muscle until the Tube finally pulled into Holborn, where she disembarked and headed home in her very own self-contained fog.