The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  Tuesday, 8:21 p.m., BST

  How can anyone who has learned what Kat has in the past few hours stand so tearless and alone under an ocean blue sky with barely anything interrupting her thoughts except the details of the landscape around her?

  She draws clean air deep into her lungs, listening to the whispers of reeds knocked together by the breeze and the lapping of the river tide.

  From where Kat is standing, through a screen of trees rising out of flat marshland, she sees patches of the concert hall, its square white chimneys stark against the sky.

  Around her, she hopes, lie the secrets of Suzy’s death.

  She’s on a narrow public walkway running an inch above marsh water. Farther ahead it drops to become a mud-soaked footpath that curves around the river’s edge toward a church far in the distance. Along the way, seagulls dip and bank. The tide is low, the small boats grounded on mud.

  Would Suzy have been a solitary figure as she walked across open marshland to the river, or had others been on the lawn? Did she know then that she was in danger?

  Wanting to feel Suzy’s presence in the last place her sister was alive, Kat squats, runs her hands softly through the reeds.

  There is nothing to show that a woman has been murdered here. River marshes stretch away on both sides of the path, which is earth-cracked dry in some places and sloppy with mud in others. With water to the left and right, there’s nowhere to go but the path.

  She wonders if Suzy ever saw her attackers, which way she was facing when she was shot.

  Kat is pretty certain that Suzy was killed by a hollow-point bullet. Nothing else would have blown so much of her sister’s head off. There’s a type of hollow-point known as the Black Talon, in which the copper jacket peels back into six claws to inflict maximum damage.

  The image causes sweat to break out on Kat’s neck, despite the breeze and chill from the weakening sun. She wipes her sleeve across her forehead and hears movement, different from the rustling of the reeds, and takes a moment to work out where it’s coming from. First she thinks it’s behind her, then what sounded like the sway of leaves becomes a dull hum, and in the dimming light, she recognizes aircraft lights in the sky, wings tipping after takeoff.

  Friday night, when Suzy was killed, it was raining. Why would she go for an intermission walk in the rain? Was she dating someone? Was she killed by her date? Why was she even there? Suzy never went to concerts.

  On the path at the edge of the grassland leading to the concert hall, at the edge of her vision, she imagines for a split second a tall figure with a rifle. Then she remembers that Liz is holding back, giving Kat space, and what she sees as a weapon is only Liz’s walking stick. Luxton is returning the rental car and getting another one. Cranley has gone back to London.

  Kat beckons Liz Luxton onto the walkway.

  “Nothing’s here,” she says.

  Liz points across the marshes to the river. “The p-police have put up a fake murder site over there,” she says. “But this is where she was shot.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Cranley’s got to an officer who was here. He says he wouldn’t lie.”

  “The police would go that far?”

  “They do what the politicians tell them.”

  “But Stephen Cranley is in charge?”

  “Exactly. He went along with it in order to stay in charge.”

  Liz’s face glows in sunset colors. Kat might have half an hour of decent light at most.

  “Where exactly was the body?” she asks, surprising herself by using professional terminology. Not my sister but the body.

  “There.” Liz points to a straggle of marsh reeds, thin trees, and mossy growth.

  The impact of a bullet does not knock you back, as many people think. Her nervous system instantaneously wrecked, Suzy would have collapsed on the spot, at most fallen from the walkway into shallow water.

  “Faceup or facedown?” says Kat.

  “Faceup.”

  Feet firm on the walkway, Kat looks across the soft light green of the wet marshland bathed in the long rays of the sun. Between her and the concert hall is an expanse of low green yellow reeds, a hedgerow, a line of pine trees, but no cover for a close and accurate shot. Was the killer behind Suzy, following her, or in front of her, waiting?

  Kat takes the pocketknife from her bag and steps off the walkway onto the soft, muddy bottom. Water, two inches deep, tepid from the day, seeps into her shoes. She wades forward, opening the knife. Her mind is on the burn mark on Suzy’s shoulder. The killer was behind her, not waiting. He fired as she turned. The first round would have touched Suzy’s shoulder, causing her to freeze just long enough to make the head shot.

  Pushing aside the reeds, her pants wet above the ankles, Kat splashes toward a dead tree, its thick, gnarled trunk rising out of the water, the only object in range that could have stopped a slug. If it didn’t, the slug could be anywhere in miles of thick reeds and mud, and she’ll never find it. With the back of her wrist, she wipes sweat out of her eyes and runs her hand over the wood, caked with moss in some places, smooth as skin in others. She spends fifteen minutes examining the wood, knife blade open, probing for an embedded round.

  Her eyes sting with grit fallen from the trunk. Her fingertips and knuckles are grazed. It could be there, and she’d still miss it. It would take a forensic team a day to cover what she’s trying in fifteen minutes of fading light.

  Liz sits cross-legged on the walkway, her walking stick across her knees and her hands resting loosely. The reeds, the water, the air are perfectly still. Only the color is changing as a bronze moon changes shift with the vanishing sun.

  Gently, trying to stir the water as little as possible, Kat wades back and climbs onto the walkway. “I want you to go right back over there,” she says to Liz. “Then walk toward me, as quietly and softly as you can.”

  Her back to the concert hall and Liz, she waits. There would still have been twilight, there would be a moon, and even in the rain, Suzy would’ve been able to see the walkway without a flashlight. No one would be around except her and the killer.

  When she feels the vibration from Liz’s footsteps, Kat shouts, “Stop.”

  Liz is maybe forty yards away, around a slight curve. Kat keeps her eyes level and without emotion as she walks toward her.

  Hard green plastic runs down the center of the walkway, held in place by wire netting wrapped around the edges of the planks. On her hands and knees, Kat searches the surface around where Liz is standing. Then she lowers herself into the still, brackish water, closes her eyes, and eases her hands into the silt, washing it gently through her fingers, inch by inch.

  It takes time and many false hopes, but at last she touches the piece of metal she’s been looking for. With Liz holding a flashlight, Kat wipes it clean and rests it in the palm of her hand—the spent cartridge thrown out of the automatic weapon that killed her sister.

  Kat’s fingers curl around the cartridge. “Know somewhere we can get this analyzed?”

  “Stephen can get it done.”

  Kat slips the cartridge into her pocket, and they start walking back toward the concert hall, but slowly because Kat doesn’t want to reach the open ground just yet.

  Low tide has stripped the river to a stream, leaving the marsh reeds in two colors, mud black at the bottom and moonlit yellow at the top. Two grounded boats tilt against the jetty wall, one with faded maroon sails tied to its mast like a Chinese junk. The other, bigger, with blue paint peeling, has a streak of smoke unwinding from a thin black chimney. No rain. No wind, either, out there. So bright is the moon now that Kat can still see the faraway church and gulls circling above the emptiness.

  River smells cling to Kat like wet rust—this is the second time today she’s found herself stinking of brackish water. She wants to shower. She wants to sleep.

  Above the marshes, couched in the moon’s glow, she watches an aircraft, lights flashing in and out of heavy blue gray clouds as it comes
in to land on an airfield nearby.

  “Where do these planes come from?” says Kat.

  “Byford,” says Liz. “It used to be an American airbase with the biggest runway in Europe. RingSet bought it, together with the port.”

  Kat gazes across the open lawn toward the concert hall, which is empty and unlit on a weekday night with no performance and made gloomy by scudding dark clouds overhead.

  “No one looked at the audience list for Friday night?”

  “Officially, yes. In reality, no.” Liz looks at Kat, unblinking. “That’s what we’re hoping you would do.”

  A lone heron flies low over the yellow reeds. Two rabbits dart across the lawn. Wind blows strands of hair into Liz’s face. She runs a hand across the base of her neck and checks her watch again. “Now it’s almost dark,” she adds.

  Kat nods. After all, this is what she does for a living. “I’ll go alone,” she says at last. “You stay here. Wait for Mike.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Tuesday, 10:17 p.m., BST

  The sloping roof of the concert hall stands straight ahead, with four square, ice white ventilation shafts standing symmetrically on the peak. In front are trees, a gravel driveway, a solitary sculpture, and dangerous openness.

  Kat chooses not to cross the grass but rather to skirt around it through a bank of evergreens, across the empty parking lot, to the front of the complex, where she has a clear view of the box office door. In front of the door is a patio. Farther on is a wooden bridge across water, and there’s another bridge between Kat and the concert hall.

  It reminds her of one of the big restaurants on the banks of the Potomac, except more quaint and lacking the smell of money.

  She runs silently across the parking lot asphalt, then across grass; then she’s jolted by the loudness of her sneakers on gravel. She reaches a low wall before the steps, ten yards away from the box office door, which is wooden and windowless.

  Once over the bridge, she stops, catches her breath against the wall of the concert hall, looks up, and thinks she sees a figure on the grassland ahead. For a second she stalls, until her eyes adjust, and she sees it’s a sculpture.

  On the side of the concert hall facing the marshes, small basement windows run the length of the building. The first three look into a kitchen. Through the fourth, Kat sees an upright piano and a camp bed. And the fifth is just what Kat needs; it’s been left ajar. She squats, eases a finger underneath, and unclips the latch. It’s a squeeze to get through, and she lands clumsily, knocking over a cello covered in a blue velvet cloth.

  The door is unlocked, the corridor dark. She goes along to the end, where there’s half a flight of stairs up to the ground floor, and at the top, sealed off from the outside by windowless wooden doors, is the box office.

  She boots up the office PC, her flash card slotted in to silence any alarms. She sits cross-legged on the floor, the soothing whir of the computer bringing down her adrenaline level. She’s staring at a poster displaying the summer schedules. Last Friday’s concert, which Suzy saw, was the Youth Chamber Choir and Symphony Orchestra of St. Petersburg, conducted by the director of the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire playing a selection of Tchaikovsky, including Symphony No. 5 and Romeo and Juliet, and Beethoven, including the Ninth Symphony. It started at 7:30 p.m., with a half hour intermission at 9 p.m., which is when Suzy was shot.

  Suzy, she asks silently. Why drive three hours, through the mother of all checkpoints, to come here?

  The computer screen settles, then dissolves again as Kat’s software succeeds in punching in the correct password.

  Kat types T-H-O-M-A-S into the booking search engine. It delivers three Thomases. Kat narrows it with C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E, and up it comes, just like at the North lecture, a whole data file on Charlotte. Suzy was sitting three rows back from the front and one seat in from the center aisle. The booking was made only for Charlotte Thomas, paid for by her credit card.

  Charlotte is described as an employee of Eurojuste, the legal agency of the European Union.

  Beginning with the back row, Kat skims down the list of those in the audience. She makes her way across and down until her gaze freezes on a particular name. She hits a key to go beyond and get the data file, makes sure her mind isn’t playing tricks on her.

  It flashes up ALERT; then comes CLASSIFIED. Kat punches the F5 key to reactivate her flash card. The screen goes black. A blood red warning uncurls: ATTEMPTED ILLEGAL ENTRY. The central processing unit clicks and whines down into silence.

  Kat’s eyes are on the darkening gray of the computer screen, at first ashamed, then motivated by the creeping dismay at what will now happen.

  An alert is going out to every security agency signed up to protect the CPS. So powerful is the cordon surrounding the concert bookings that it’s overridden all of Kat’s software.

  Kat flips out the flash card and runs back down the corridor, through the cello room, out the window, across the grassland, down a slope, and onto a path, eyes scanning the marshlands for Liz, but seeing only confusing night shapes.

  On Friday night it had been raining, with none of the hazardous clarity Kat has to deal with now. The moon lights up the landscape as far as the broken horizon. Wherever Kat can see, she can also be seen.

  Kat slows to a fast walk, checks behind her. She’s in the marshes, but on a different walkway. There are no sirens, no lights blaze from the concert hall. She stops, hand on mouth. To her right, down from the walkway, are flattened reeds, cordoned off by a trail of yellow tape. One end is tied around the trunk of a dead tree; the other nailed into a post. The tape, taut and windless still, carries the warning POLICE CRIME SCENE—KEEP OUT.

  This is the bogus murder scene, where no spent cartridges will ever be found.

  Whoever came up with the idea that a bogus site be created knew Suzy’s killer. Which means that Cranley might know as well. And to Kat, everything has become clear. When she asked Max Grachev about the audience list, he didn’t answer. No wonder.

  The name given to her by the concert hall database seconds before the system crashed was Max Grachev, sitting four rows back and on the other side of the aisle from Suzy.

  The next sound Kat hears is real: a click of metal on metal.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Tuesday, 10:36 p.m., BST

  Kat’s facing the marshes and the river, looking into the blankness of a blue gray, moonlit night. There’s a sound from somewhere behind her, where the path comes out of the marsh reeds to the open ground in front of the concert hall, marked by a sculpture on the lawn, and then the terrace, where the audience has drinks during the intermission of a concert. Beyond that is a parking lot, the village, the lives of ordinary people. Ahead lies wilderness.

  Kat wipes her eyes with her sleeve, breathes in smells of pines and river water. Then she doesn’t move. This is where people run to if they’re being chased from the concert hall. Had Suzy seen Grachev and run, not to safety among the audience, but to the emptiness of the marshes?

  The walkway vibrates with the pressure of slow footsteps. Not one person. At least two.

  Tension tightens around her face, her neck; then it ripples down her back as if in preparation for a hollow-point bullet smashing into the back of her skull.

  The footsteps behind her stop. Kat gulps a breath, puts her hands on her hips, turns, and faces Yulya Gracheva. Her hair is down. She’s wearing a white leather jacket and jeans with leather boots. She’s holding a 9mm Serdyukov SPS pistol, common in the Russian military. Her left hand’s in her jeans pocket, and her face is soft, sympathetic, as it was when Kat first met her. Yulya keeps moving forward and stops about ten feet away.

  “You’ve got to stop running,” Yulya says gently.

  Kat can’t detect anyone else with her. Behind Yulya, she sees marsh reeds and the concert hall. There’s nothing at the edge of her vision, either, just water glistening on the river’s muddy flanks and boats leaning aground in the low tide. There’s no sign of Liz or Mike Luxton.r />
  Kat tilts her head. “You seen my friends around anywhere?”

  Yulya doesn’t answer. She shifts her position, right leg taut, left leg relaxed, looking more than ever like she did in the Kazakh file picture. She folds her arms, cupping her fingers loosely around the butt of the pistol.

  “You want me to put my hands up or something?”

  Yulya’s expression doesn’t change. It’s friendly but firm. A keen intelligence radiates from her face. “I don’t want you to waste your valuable life hunting down Suzy’s killer.”

  Kat takes a step back. Yulya doesn’t react. “I appreciate your concern, but aren’t I facing her?”

  “No.”

  “The real killer doesn’t always pull the trigger.”

  “I like you, Kat,” says Yulya. “I liked you the moment I laid eyes on you at Max’s place.”

  Kat takes another step back. Yulya still doesn’t react.

  “Was it Max?” asks Kat.

  Spits of rain fall on them. Yulya glances up—the moon and clouds play together like a spider, making cobwebs.

  “Max isn’t cold-blooded,” she says. “That’s why Mother moved him out of the business. To build up a company like RingSet in Russia, you need a ruthless streak. Max doesn’t have one. Nor does my little sister, Lara. But I do. I was born with it. It’s part of my spirit. My mother noticed it early on and encouraged me. She kept saying that without people like me, the human race would not have achieved as much as it has.”

  Yulya’s accent doesn’t sound as pure East Coast American as before. It has a European lilt to it. Kat keeps her eyes on her folded arms.

  “So what do you want?”

  “You’re here because you want to know who killed your sister. I am here because I need the file you stole on Friday night. I propose an exchange. Then you can go home.”

  “Who killed Suzy?”

  “He’s a professional. In exchange for the file, I will give you his name. You can spend the rest of your life hunting him down. When you find him and kill him, you might feel better.”