Double Blind (24 page)

“Was it a car bomb?”

“That’s the rumor certainly, although it’s speculation at this point. I’ll let you know when I find out more.”

“Thank you.” I said, wondering why he’d called me.

“It seems as though you were right about there being a threat to Scott’s life, Kate. Whether it turns out to be a bomb or a gas leak, he was right in the vicinity and it sounds as though he was very lucky. Did you turn anything up in your research at my office that would have predicted this?”

“Only that Scott was due to be in Portsmouth today.”

“Hmm. So your aura thingy doesn’t tell you anything about where, when, or how?”

“Sadly not.”

“That’s tough,” he said. “Knowing something bad is going to occur, but not being able to stop it happening.”

“Tell me about it,” I muttered.

“Well, I’ll keep you updated on what I find out.”

The line went dead. Colin was a strange bird, but I was glad he’d called me. I settled back in my seat. Scott was safe, but Anita wasn’t, and there was nothing from the kidnapper.

I called Clarke again. “Do you have any updates?” I asked.

“Initial analysis by the first responders at the scene suggests a small incendiary device, pretty rudimentary. It only did the damage it did because it was in the confined space of the garage.” Clarke paused. “I just want to let you know. You were right about there being a specific threat to Scott. I did my best with what I had, but it was just sheer damn luck that it wasn’t worse. I wish I’d been able to do more.”

I didn’t blame him for not taking my warning more seriously. He’d done what he could, but he could hardly risk his career on the word of someone who saw death in rippling air. His superiors wouldn’t take kindly to his acting on such imperfect information. I sensed, though, that a bridge had been built across the chasm that had divided us and that he would listen to me more carefully from now on.

“You tried,” I said. “I’m sorry about the people who’ve been hurt down there, but I’m happy Scott wasn’t harmed. It sounds as though it was a close shave.”

“Closer than it should have been. Warning or no warning, no one should have had access to that garage.”

“No,” I agreed.

“I heard what happened at the warehouse,” Clarke said. “Parry just brought me up to date. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but it will next time.”

“That’s what everyone tells me,” I said, just before he rang off.

I sank back in my seat, staring out at the passing scenery. The ticket inspector had been right. It was sleeting, the freezing, watery mix hazing the windows. When we stopped at West Drayton, the platform was glazed with ice. I glanced at my watch. Once we reached Paddington, we’d get the tube back to my flat. It was an hour’s journey at most, but it felt infinite, because going home served no purpose. We were in limbo, waiting for instructions from the kidnapper.

Listening to the rhythmic clicking of the wheels, I felt something tugging at my brain, trying to tell me something. Finally, I realized what it was.

“I have to see Scott.”

Josh glanced over at me. “Why?”

“To make sure his aura has gone. If the bomb was what was supposed to have killed him, then his aura will have disappeared and he’ll be safe.”

This was what happened, in my previous experience. Once the threat to life had been avoided or nullified in some way, the victim’s aura vanished.

“Can’t you assume that it’s gone?” asked Josh. “Besides, you can’t be in two places at one time, and we need to wait to hear from the kidnapper.”

Darth Vader’s signature tune suddenly filled the carriage, coming from Josh’s phone. I knew that ringtone. It was Alan Bradley. Josh pushed the phone along the table towards me. “You answer it,” he said. I picked it up.

“Where’s Josh,” Alan asked, without bothering to say hello.

“Driving,” I lied. “So nice to hear your voice, Alan.”

He grunted. “I might have known he’d be gallivanting around with you. Tell him I need him in the office straightaway to be briefed for a client meeting this evening. No excuses. Oh and Kate, two more days and you’re at your desk at nine. Not a moment later.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, but Alan had rung off at ‘yes.’

“Remind me why I’m so excited about coming back to work?” I asked Josh. “Alan is such a prick.”

“You know he loves you, really. He just doesn’t show it.”

“Hmm. Anyway, you need to get back to the office for Alan’s ‘vitally important client briefing,’ ” I said, twisting in my seat to look at him. “Not too bad. You’ll pass inspection. It’s lucky that stubble is in.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” he said. “What if you get another message from the kidnapper while I’m gone?”

I didn’t want him to go to work either, but Alan was going to be mad if he didn’t turn up.

“I’ll call Detective Parry. It’ll be fine, I promise.”

After thirty minutes home alone in my flat, I was feeling Josh’s absence, wishing that he’d been able to come home with me. I couldn’t sit still. My feet kept moving, but my brain seemed to be paralyzed by fear for Anita. I couldn’t think straight. I was sure there was something I could or should be doing to find her, but I never got past two coherent thoughts in a row before everything fell apart and I found myself staring at the toaster, wondering why I’d come to the kitchen at all.

I was making my second cup of tea when the phone rang. It was Detective Parry. “Do you have a minute?” he asked.

“Of course.” I stirred some milk into my tea and took the cup to the kitchen table.

“We found very little at the warehouse,” he said. “Apart from one piece of paper with the word “kitchen” scrawled on it. Someone here seems to think it was written with mascara, which could indicate that Dr. Banerjee was being held there and that she wrote it. Does it mean anything to you?”

I thought about it. “Was there a kitchen at the warehouse?” I said. I didn’t remember seeing one.

“No, so it must refer to somewhere else.”

I looked around my kitchen. Could Anita have left something here that she wanted me to find? But why would she hide something here without telling me?

“Your people checked the kitchen at her apartment?” I asked. “The intruder must have been looking for whatever it was that she hid.”

“Yeah, they looked. There was nothing obvious, but we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

I thought for a moment, but I couldn’t work it out. “I’m sorry. I have no idea. And there’s been no word from the kidnapper. I’m really worried.” My voice caught in my throat, so I coughed a couple of times to get it back under control. “What if he doesn’t contact me again?”

The silence at the end of the line was so long that I thought we’d been disconnected. “Detective Parry?”

“He will,” Parry said. I didn’t think he sounded very convincing.

As soon as he rang off, I sat down to think things over. Why wasn’t the kidnapper contacting me? After a few minutes of driving myself crazy imagining the worst possible scenarios, I took the flash drive out of my bag and plugged it into my laptop to re-read the patient files. Maybe something would jump out at me.

I scrolled through Isaac Kaminski’s record and then the one for Mark Jacobs, but as I tried to access the third file, my laptop froze. When I tapped on the keyboard, the screen flashed bright for a moment before going dark. I hammered the keys. No response. How could my computer misbehave just when I needed it most? I was ready to throw it across the room, but common sense prevailed.

I hurried to the bedroom, knowing that Josh had left his personal laptop there. I took it back to the kitchen counter, turned it on and plugged in the flash drive. As I clicked on it to open the patient record for Danny Boyd, a notification flashed in the top left hand corner, warning me that there was only ten percent power left. Dashing to the living room, I found the charger and hurried back to plug it in.

While I watched the screen to check that the charger was properly connected, I noticed that Josh had three unread emails. And they were all from the same sender. ‘Hdunst.’ That was Helena Dunst, Josh’s old girlfriend. My stomach clenched. I knew that Josh had planned to email her in response to the postcard she’d sent, but he hadn’t said anything more about it, so I’d assumed that she either hadn’t responded, or that there hadn’t been anything to say.

Clicking on the email application, I saw half a dozen emails addressed to Helena, and more then a dozen back from her. I took my hands off the keyboard and stood up. At the window, I looked out over the slate rooftops, black and ice-slicked under grey clouds that towered like battlements in the air. I thought again of the pure blue skies on the postcard from Munich.

Why was Josh corresponding with Helena? I supposed that when he acknowledged her card, it was reasonable that she might write back with more news, and he’d feel compelled to respond to that too. But a dozen emails back and forth over the course of a few days? The last one had been sent yesterday.

Blood roared in my ears. I felt cold. I desperately wanted to open the emails and read them, to find out what Josh and Helena were saying to each other, but I couldn’t do that. Going back to the computer, I quit the email application quickly, before temptation got the better of me.

For the next few minutes, I tried to focus on the patient records, but the words seemed indecipherable. I stared at the screen, not really seeing anything, my hands clamped together in my lap. I was falling to pieces. Should a short correspondence between two old friends trigger such an extreme reaction? Maybe not, but I was insecure when it came to Josh. Even now, after we’d been dating for a year, I wondered what it was he saw in me. There was a long list of things I loved about him. He was kind and smart, thoughtful and generous. He loved his parents. At work, he’d help anyone who needed it. Alan Bradley obviously valued his design talent and business skills. I wondered what he’d say about me if anyone asked.

After a couple of minutes, the screensaver activated and showed a picture of Josh and me together in Tuscany, drinking Vernaccia in the Piazza della Cisterna in San Gimignano. I remembered every minute of that day, our drive down from my dad’s house near Florence, Josh’s excitement at his first view of the town’s medieval towers in the distance. We’d climbed up the fortress ruins to look out over the narrow, cobbled streets to the church of Sant’Agostino. Beyond the walls of the city, the rolling hills were dotted with farmhouses and fields of sunflowers. It had been a perfect day, full of love and sunshine.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from the blocked number. “Bring the notes. Time and place to follow.”

I held the phone so tightly that it hurt my fingers as a brief wave of exhilaration at hearing from the kidnapper quickly gave way to anger. What was he playing at? It had been nearly twelve hours since I’d last heard from him and he was still making me wait. I wondered how Anita was holding up.

I stared at the message as though reading it ten times would make it say something revealing, give me a hint as to who was holding Anita, or where. Then I remembered that I needed to ring Parry to let him know, not that I had much to tell him. I made the call anyway.

“I’ve heard from the kidnapper,” I said. “He said to bring the notes and he’ll let me know the time and place later.”

“And you have the notes, right?” Parry asked.

“Yes, on a flash drive.” I tapped on Josh’s laptop keyboard to bring the screen back to life, and double-checked that the three patient records were definitely on the drive.

“Call me the minute you get a location,” Parry said. “I’ll get a team briefed and ready to go.”

“That will be great, thanks.”

I closed down Josh’s laptop. My concerns about Helena and the emails would have to wait. As I put the flash drive in my bag, I thought again about the kidnapper’s demands. In the first written message and now again in the text, he hadn’t referred to patient records or files. He’d said “notes.”

It hit my brain like a flying sledgehammer. He must mean the notes in Anita’s desk drawer. The ones she told me she’d kept on all the cases so that she could review them as part of her continuing education. It fit. He’d taken Anita specifically because of her notes. How did he know about them though? Surely Anita wouldn’t have told him.

I didn’t have much time to work it out. I needed to get to the hospital to retrieve the notes before I got the next text message.

I jumped to my feet. As I was putting on my jacket, I realized I had a few taxi rides ahead of me and I was low on cash. A kitchen drawer full of scissors, tape, and old Chinese takeaway menus also held a couple of twenty-pound notes that I put there for emergencies. If solar flares ever took out the power grid, at least I could buy a few bottles of wine and tins of tuna to sustain me for a while. The twenties were tucked under a Stanley retracting knife that I used for opening boxes. On a whim, I put that in my bag too. Then I locked up and ran down the stairs to flag down a taxi. When I told the driver to get to London General as fast as he could, he took us up side streets that I’d never seen before and got us to the hospital in record time. I kept an eye open for Dr. Schwartz as I took the stairs up to the fourth floor. A nurse I didn’t know was on duty at the desk.

“I wonder if I could check something in Dr. Banerjee’s office?” I asked her.

She looked uncertain. “Visitors aren’t allowed in without, you know, someone to accompany them.”

“I understand. Do you know if Pauline is on duty?”

“Yes. I’ll let her know you’re here.”

I paced back and forth, and rushed towards Pauline when she approached the desk a few minutes later.

“I need something from Anita’s office,” I said. “I know it’s an unusual request, but can you help me? It’s to do with the kidnapping.”

“Of course. We’re all worried about Anita, so do what you have to do. Whatever it takes to get Anita back safely. Do you need any help?”

“I don’t want to cause any more problems for you,” I said. “I can manage alone, and, if Dr. Schwartz makes an appearance, you can pretend you had no idea what I’m up to.”