And then she spots Stretch, who trots over to see her, and she is unable to hold back the tears any longer.
‘Weenie toes,’ she says, scooping him up.
‘And he’s got a bestie,’ Bex says, looking across at Jake. The crowds part and Kate sees another dachshund, tiny in Jake’s big arms. It must be the one from the house in Brittany. She hobbles over and takes it from him.
‘Hey, he’s mine,’ Jake says, pretending to hang on to him. ‘He’s called Banger,’ he adds, as she holds the two dogs up to her face. ‘DI Hart’s choice.’
She kisses both dogs. And then she kisses Jake too. Nothing lingering – it’s early days – but a cheer still goes up around them.
‘Like the dress,’ Jake whispers.
‘Thanks,’ she says.
It’s the orange one he retrieved from the canal – and still reeks of diesel.
They’ve talked a lot in the past week, starting with her rescue, how he managed to resuscitate her – ‘just like jump-starting an engine,’ he’d quipped. And then they talked more seriously. She’s even let him try to explain what happened at the shopping centre. She can’t forgive him. Not yet. He was by her hospital bedside all the time in France and then he took her to her mum’s, where she stayed for a few days. It was healing to stand back from everything, try to get some perspective on all that’s happened. She still can’t believe what Rob was planning to do to her – to her brain.
‘You alright?’ Bex says, finding her on her own in the kitchen a few minutes later.
She’s lucky to have Bex as her best friend. ‘Fine,’ she says, looking out of the window into the garden, where Jake is talking to a couple of friends she remembers from the canal. Single men in their forties, both fleeing broken marriages, trying to start again. Stretch and Banger are chasing each other around the flowerbeds.
‘He’s alright, is Jake,’ Bex says, clocking the direction of her gaze. ‘Pulled his finger out when it really mattered. Managing to suss what Rob was about. Going looking for you like that. Not such a lazy git after all.’
It’s good to hear Bex say nice things about him. For so long she disapproved of Jake.
‘I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him,’ Kate says quietly. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to make sense of everything that’s happened, to process the nightmare of the Brittany house, her suicidal leap off the cliff. ‘I was unconscious when I hit the water. Passed out with pain. And fear.’ She gives a rueful smile. ‘The cliffs were a little higher than I realised.’
Bex turns to Kate and hugs her, long and hard. ‘Bit of a hero, isn’t he, our Jake?’ she says. ‘You know he saved DI Hart’s son too?’
‘So I hear.’
Jake mentioned something but only in passing. It was DI Hart who filled her in with the details, during one of the interviews he conducted at the hospital in France.
‘And he’s really sorry,’ Bex says. ‘You know, about what happened.’
‘I know he is,’ she says.
‘He’s still daft about you,’ Bex adds.
Kate smiles and catches Jake’s eye in the garden.
114
Silas
Silas approaches the village, shuddering at the memory of what he and Strover saw in France: the dimly lit warehouse, like a hospital ward. The French police discovered eleven other super recognisers, all in a catatonic state. By the time he and Strover reached Brittany, they had been taken to hospital, where they remain. Doctors are confident that they’ll eventually regain full mobility, thanks to the notes that Silas found on Dr Varma’s desk about the cure given to the frozen addicts in California in the 1980s. A nurse’s life was saved too. Her heart had stopped, but the paramedics managed to resuscitate her. Another body was found – a man who had died of a seizure.
‘What about the other super recognisers?’ Strover asks as they pull up outside Bex’s house. Silas will leave Kate’s homecoming party to Strover, get an early night before tomorrow’s counselling session. ‘Were they all taken by Rob too?’
‘Their abductions went much more smoothly,’ Silas says. ‘He kidnapped each of them in the Tesla registered to Gilmour. In England, Rob tried to avoid ANPR, but if any cameras did pick him up, the car was registered to Gilmour. Kate was the prize though, the brain he coveted the most, the fusiform gyrus that lit up like no other, and he was prepared to wait for her to recover. Centaur would have to wait too. Only when she was well again could he begin to roll out the system, using the super recognisers’ exceptional P3 brainwaves to recognise faces from hundreds of thousands of images. And all this time, if he ever was discovered, he could claim he was being framed by Gilmour Martin, the double from his past who had apparently promised to destroy him.’
‘So there was never a Gilmour Martin in Thailand either?’ Strover asks quietly.
Silas shakes his head. Rob’s properties in Cornwall, London and Brittany have been painstakingly searched by forensics in the past week. Silas would like to have questioned Rob, but the evidence against him is still overwhelming.
‘Thailand was Rob too,’ he says. ‘An old phone was found hidden in his Shoreditch apartment. There’s a video on there of Rob talking to himself on a beach on Ko Samui. The date it was recorded fits – nine years ago, just before his twenty-first birthday. Forensics showed it to me tonight. It was a long drunken dialogue with himself but set up to look as if another person was addressing him.’
‘And we’re sure he wasn’t talking to Gilmour?’ she asks.
Strover won’t let it go. Getting it wrong about Gilmour will make her a better detective in the long run.
‘Rob was looking straight at the camera, telling himself that if he was to really succeed in business, he must be prepared to do bad things, questioning whether he had it in him. “You’ll need to do this, you might even need to do that.” And they were pretty bad things, including taking another’s life.’ Shortly afterwards, he was arrested, after being seen waving a gun around at someone else’s party.’
‘It wasn’t his twenty-first party then?’ Strover asks.
Two people come out of Bex’s front door. It sounds like a good evening, full of laughter. Silas will catch up with Kate properly when things have settled down.
‘We think he was travelling alone,’ he says. ‘Two days later, Rob found a drug dealer on the beach and shot him dead. At least, that’s what the Thai police now think happened, based on the video. Cheap life, no big deal. And that’s when Gilmour Martin, the name Rob had given to police two days earlier, came of age.’
115
Kate
‘The boss sends his apologies,’ DI Strover says to Kate as they stand in the corner of Bex’s sitting room. The party’s been going a while, but Strover has only just arrived.
‘He’s a busy man,’ Kate says. She wants to see DI Hart, thank him for his help, but now’s not the time.
‘How you feeling?’ Strover asks, glancing at Bex’s computer in the bookcase beside Kate.