FORTY-THREE

It hadn’t been diamond bracelets that had won Samantha for León de Bruin. It hadn’t been pearl necklaces or Armani bags or teas in the Ritz. She’d had so many handsome and wealthy admirers that she’d barely even noticed him. Her favourite at that time had been an up-and-coming actor a year or two her junior, tall, arrogant and quite ludicrously beautiful. He’d had little money, though, so he’d used de Bruin’s infatuation with Samantha to his own ends, inviting him along to expensive restaurants and fashionable nightclubs so that he could pick up the tab, while either ignoring him completely or mocking him for it.

De Bruin was a proud man. He’d seethed at this treatment, but he’d been too afraid of Samantha’s displeasure to stand up for himself. Then one night, back in Lincolnshire, a pair of his biker friends had come to see him, worried about how he’d been letting things slip. He’d confessed a little to them. They’d guessed the rest. Two nights later, Samantha and her young actor friend had been heading out for the night from her Pimlico apartment when they’d been set upon by three men in black leathers and motorbike helmets. She’d watched in horror as they’d beaten him to the ground then had kicked him where he lay, breaking his hand and disfiguring that beautiful face. ‘Don’t you ever fuck with my mate again,’ one of them had told him, when they were done. ‘You neither, love.’

She’d noticed him after that.

The latest news from Warne Farm was up on de Bruin’s screen. The Scene of Crime team had found that poor family, thanks to Elias having been alerted to footprints in the mud. Who else but Anna would have noticed those? Worse still, she was planning to visit the county’s Serious and Organised Crime unit this afternoon in an effort to identify him and Andrei from their library of photographs and footage. In short, she was doing everything in her power to bring him down. He should have hated her for this, yet all he felt was longing.

Diamonds wouldn’t make Anna Warne like him. Nor money, nor shows of violence. She seemed neither avaricious nor vain, and she believed he’d killed her uncle. Worse, if they should ever meet again, she might even recognise him, and he wasn’t yet that crazy. But he found himself possessed of a terrible restlessness all the same, a compulsion to be near her that was intensified rather than lessened by the risk involved. Even thinking about being in Nettleham while she was there made his heart pump harder, filling him with that dry-mouthed anticipation junkies must feel on contemplating their first score after rehab.

And he knew he was going to do it.

Andrei was in the garage, washing the wheels of the Lamborghini Huracan with soapy hot water. It wasn’t his job. De Bruin had a man for that. Cars simply filled the hole in his heart where others kept their families or pets. During his interview, indeed, he’d asked more questions about de Bruin’s fleet than about his duties. He stood up when he saw de Bruin approaching. Suds dripped off his hand to form a soapy pool on the concrete floor. ‘Are we going out?’ he asked.

De Bruin had made no plan. He simply needed to be in Nettleham. Andrei was indifferent to human weakness, yet he still felt ashamed to admit this to him. ‘That girl from the farmhouse the other night,’ he said. ‘She’s trying to identify us from police surveillance footage.’

Andrei looked unmoved. ‘Are we on police surveillance footage?’

‘No.’

‘Then what’s the problem? She never even saw our faces.’

‘We have distinctive builds. She noticed our accents too. They might get lucky.’

‘You want her killed?’

Even after all this time, Andrei’s bluntness could take de Bruin aback. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It would only make things worse.’

‘We could have your biker friends do it.’

‘No. I don’t want her hurt. Not unless we have no choice.’

‘Then…?’

‘I don’t know.’ But he had to give him more than that. ‘She’s going to collect her uncle’s van while she’s there. I thought maybe to follow her. So that we know where she is, should we need to act.’

Andrei nodded. ‘I’ll get a tracker.’

‘You have one?’

‘Of course.’ He tossed his sponge into the bucket then wiped his forearms and hands off on his towel before heading up to his rooms to fetch it.

They took the Ford Discovery for its anonymity and tinted windows. Neither of them had visited Nettleham Police HQ before. It was hardly a place to put them at their ease. It was dusk when they set off, but night by the time they arrived, the lamps in the huge car park glowing a sulphurous yellow. They took a spot away from the CCTV cameras, but with a good view of the station’s front steps and main entrance. It began to drizzle, misting up the windscreen and blurring their view. A steady stream of officers and support staff emerged to set off home, wrapped warm against the weather.

‘Stay here,’ said de Bruin, turning up his jacket collar and getting out.

The pound ran along one side of the car park, but it was sealed off from it by an unbroken tall wire fence. A sign directed visitors to its main entrance on a residential street around its other side. He put up his hand to shield his eyes from the rain as he peered through the mesh. And there it was, backed up against a wall, a white transit van with a loose front bumper and a scratch down its side.

‘Well?’ grunted Andrei, when de Bruin returned to the Discovery.

‘Still there.’

‘So what now?’

De Bruin scratched his cheek. There were far too many police around to risk scaling the fence to fit the tracker. But he wasn’t ready to give up either. ‘We wait,’ he said.

Neither man was much for small talk, so de Bruin took out his phone. It was a very special and very expensive device. Press its power button for less than five seconds and it operated as a perfectly normal Samsung Galaxy, albeit one that needed both the correct thumbprint and a six-digit code to get past its lock screen. Get the code wrong twice in a row and it would be wiped and reset. Ditto if anyone tried to open it, or if they pressed the power button for longer than ten seconds. But press it for between five and ten seconds twice in a row and it turned into a very different device, opening a specialist application called C-Cure that disabled its camera, microphone and GPS, then used a Tor browser and end-to-end encryption to route messages, conversations and other traffic through multiple servers in distinct jurisdictions, making it virtually impossible to trace.

He used it now to check the Dark Web for new documents. There was only one: a receipt for certain items belonging to Dunstan Warne that had been returned to his niece. He was glancing idly through it when he sat up electrified and showed it to Andrei.

‘Bastard,’ muttered Andrei. ‘All this time.’

‘All this time,’ agreed de Bruin.

No question now of hanging back. His sense of self-preservation had finally kicked in. They couldn’t do anything here, not with all these cameras and police around. But Anna was due to collect her van from the pound, whose main entrance was on a different street. And he could see no reason not to go wait for her there.