As she walks back across the street with the bag, she sees someone familiar. Cara. The woman who got off the train with her in the village. She struggles not to stare. What’s she doing here? It’s definitely her. Big eyebrows. She’s waiting for a bus on Praed Street, glancing briefly in Kate’s direction, but there’s something odd about her manner.
Kate turns away, trying not to panic, and looks back at her again. Is she a tail? Kate saw it in her old job, when colleagues were pursuing suspects in crowds. The telltale glance. Why would Cara be following her? She must have got back on the same train as her in the village. The late runner. Kate was distracted, chatting with Jake.
Half an hour later, Putin pulls up outside a converted factory on Nile Street, between Hoxton and Shoreditch. Rob told her about its history once, when he was facetiming from his bedroom. He was shy about showing her the rest of the flat, embarrassed by its size. A former printworks, it was given the Manhattan loft treatment in the late 1990s and transformed into fashionable warehouse apartments. His is the penthouse, of course.
She takes her bags and reassures Putin that she’s fine as she stands outside the main entrance. She tries the door but it doesn’t open. Putin points to the camera above the patchwork of buzzers.
‘Smile and it will recognise your face,’ he says.
She presses the number for the penthouse and waits. A moment later, the door swings open and she’s in the foyer, waving goodbye to Putin. How does the camera recognise her if she’s never been here before? She takes the lift to the third floor, presses the buzzer and pouts like a movie star in front of another camera. Childish. She does that when she’s nervous. Why was Cara watching her at Paddington? And then she’s standing in an open-plan living area that makes the home in Cornwall seem like a garden shed.
The space is huge! At least twenty yards long and almost ten yards wide, with a kitchen bar in one corner, dining table in another, all reclaimed-wood floors, industrial-brick walls and loading-bay doors. There’s a pool table, a cinema zone and a bedroom at the far end. She wonders for a moment if she’s come to Rob’s office by mistake and everyone’s out. It’s even bigger than she expected. How does one person live here?
She wanders around, taking in all the art. Vast canvasses and installations, including one that she recognises, a grotesque ‘data-mask’. It’s a 3D-printed sculpture of a face and was in the house in Cornwall for a while, but she found it too disturbing. Rob explained it to her once: the artist, Sterling Crispin, reverse-engineered facial-recognition algorithms to show how human faces are seen by machines. And then her heart misses a beat as she come across three of her own works. They are the same paintings that Rob exhibited in the hospital show, the sight of which had so lifted her spirits.
She stands in front of them and stares. Of course she immediately starts to see things that are wrong with them, but they aren’t so bad. Her goal was to paint unflinching, raw portraits, to create a sense of confrontation between artist and sitter, the latter usually wide eyed, as if they’d been caught doing something untoward. She leans in closer to a portrait of an old man who used to sell gas bottles and sacks of coal on the canal; his lined, world-weary face. She remembers layering on the oil paint with a scalpel, impasto style, mixing the lumpy colours to create coarse, textured flesh, chatting quietly with him.
The sight of these pictures makes her want to cry with happiness – and to paint again. She had a very similar reaction in the hospital. She walks on down the wall and sees another portrait, by the late Sarah Raphael, one of her heroes. It’s jewel-like and intense, an early work and full of empathy. She feels honoured to share a wall with her, but it’s a salutary reminder of her own limits as an artist.
Upstairs she finds a second bedroom, a wet room, and a spacious roof terrace complete with real grass and a scattering of wicker chairs around an outdoor bar. The views of London, bathed in early evening sunlight, are breathtaking. Can she see Rob’s office from here? They’re close to Old Street roundabout, where he works. She’s suddenly desperate to see him, to pick up where they left off before things started to go wrong in Cornwall. She’s just been imagining things, as Jake says, suffering from Capgras syndrome. Dr Varma will be here shortly. He’ll confirm the diagnosis, she feels certain of that now. The more she thinks about Capgras, the more it sounds like her.
She looks out across the London skyline again. Is Rob watching her from his desk? She waves, trying to dissipate some of her impish joy. And then she cartwheels across the grass, remembering her pictures on the wall downstairs, and peers over the wall to the street below.
The car that brought her is parked across from the entrance to the apartment block, partially obscured. She leans further over the wall and can just see Putin on the pavement, talking to someone she recognises. Her mouth dries, all joy gone. It’s Cara, the woman on the train, the same person she saw at Paddington.
59
Silas
Silas follows the track through the woods until it opens out into a grassy area, hazy in the evening light and buzzing with the low drone of summer insects. If it were mown, it would make an idyllic cricket pitch, hidden away amongst the trees. On the far side, there’s a gamekeeper’s hut that could easily double up as a rustic pavilion.
It’s here that Conor has asked to meet him, which somehow seems fitting. Conor used to play cricket when he was younger. He was good, but bat and ball were alien to Silas and he didn’t show any interest. His own dad brought him up on a strict diet of football. Given the chance again, Silas would watch every one of Conor’s cricket matches, offer to do the scoring, make the teas. Be a father.
No one else is around as he approaches the hut. There’s an open barn area, for large machinery, presumably, and a shed to one side. Conor didn’t say much on the phone, just that he wanted to meet here. He could see Silas down by the train track, had been watching him for a few minutes from the woods above.
‘Conor?’ he calls out. ‘You there?’
Silence. A red kite enters the far end of the clearing and sweeps over the grass, twisting and turning in search of carrion. Silas moves forward, pushing open the hut door. Inside, some logs, a row of pheasant feeders, neatly stacked, a collection of white plastic scarecrows piled up in the corner. The familiar smell of weed.
It takes a few seconds for Silas’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. And then he sees Conor on the floor, propped up against the far wall. The relief knocks him sideways. For the past six weeks, Silas has had to consider the possibility that Conor might be dead. And here he is, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking gently like a child.
Silas has seen him in better shape, but at least he’s alive.
60
Kate
Somewhere below her a phone starts to ring, so Kate returns downstairs from the apartment’s rooftop terrace. She can’t find the receiver at first and then she works out that the ringtone, more of a futuristic pulse, is coming from the bedroom. She pushes open the door and sees the handset by the bed. She hesitates before she answers it.
‘You’ve found the bedroom then,’ Rob says.
‘I heard the phone and thought I should answer,’ she explains, feeling like an intruder as she glances around Rob’s private world. They’ve never shared this space before – the bed, its white cotton sheets. On one wall there’s a large canvas photo of them together on Porthbean beach, smiling at the camera. She looks tired but happy. In her mind, Rob’s life in London has always felt so separate, but the connections to Cornwall, their life down there, are here, plain to see. Another surge of happiness runs through her.