Steel visited Edwina Wells’s grave in Hoddesdon. There was a light rain that fit the occasion. She was buried next to her father, a former officer of Scotland Yard, and her sister who had died of leukemia at age nine in the 1960s. The family graves were on a slight hill behind a large stone church.
She missed her already. She thought about her so much more now than she did when she was alive, but that’s how it was, she figured; you only realize what you have when you’ve lost it. Edwina had been a good friend. It had been Edwina who was on duty when sixteen-year-old Steel landed at Scotland Yard with a wild tale of taxicabs being used to disrupt the Queen’s Jubilee. It was Wells who first sensed there was something to her story. Something to Steel. It was Wells who had convinced her parents to let the young Davina take the courses she took and then to serve her country.
“You’ve made me good and proud, Davina Steel.” She heard that, over and over. She missed her friend, and she burned bright now, smoldering with anger. She had been duped. She had been lied to. She had been treated with disdain, by a traitor. Georgia was somewhere laughing at her, she thought, laughing at her and reveling in the power she had stolen, laughing at the people that she was supposed to be looking over. Steel would bring her down, make her pay. She would make Edwina Wells proud.
* * *
SHE WENT TO see Darling at SO15. She realized there was a possibility that the major general was involved with the bombing as well. There were considerable resources spent in the reframing of the Dorrington murders. It would take someone high up in that world to push those kinds of buttons. It didn’t make sense to her, though—not Darling. He wasn’t a clubby political type. He was a soldier, a man of virtue. He was too rigid to chase that breed of fox. She didn’t see Turnbull or any of the others even having the audacity to confront someone like Darling with such a scheme.
She felt strongly that she knew people, could sense the superficially unseen. Events had proven that right. Her reputation spoke of it regularly. Yet she missed on Georgia, missed that one completely, hadn’t she? Could she be this wrong about Darling? She thought not.
* * *
“THE PM’S INVOLVED. From the beginning. She’s aligned with Heaton. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s true.” Darling sat wordless, a good three minutes—an eternity when you’re sitting across from someone whom you’ve just dropped the world on. Darling kept staring at her, chewing his lip underneath his bushy mustache. His spartan office walls were closing in on her. She was about to beg him for an answer when he finally spoke.
“It’s preposterous, but it makes some sense.” Again more silence; then, “I mean the whole thing makes no sense, yet oddly, this does make some sense. If it’s true, if you’re correct, then it’s a horror. A tragedy for England.” He got up, paced. “If you’re wrong though, Steel, if you’re off on this, it’s going to be the end of you, you realize that? It’ll gut you. From here on in. You’ll be done. Can you see that?”
“I’m not wrong. She’s involved. There are others as well. I was there. I saw what happened at Dorrington. I still have the bite marks.” Darling looked back to her now. She knew what he was thinking: Dorrington. A conspiracy. It all could be true. High-level connections? It would make strong sense with Heaton involved, but this was the prime minister she was implicating.
“I could set a trap for her, sir, make her reveal herself to you. Would that help?” He went back to his desk, sat across from her, played with his facial hair for another interminable amount of time, and then finally looked over the desk intently.
“What kind of a trap do you have in mind, Steel?”