Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery

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For André,
with love, and for the next thirty years

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth?

—SHERLOCK HOLMES, IN
THE SIGN OF THE FOUR
BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

Multiple exposure:
the superimposition of two or more individual exposures to create a single photograph. The technique can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects that were not originally there to a scene. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes.

PROLOGUE

I’ve been in too many war zones not to recognize blood when I see it, but I did not expect to find it smeared on the whitewashed walls and puddled on the black-and-white harlequin tile floor when I opened my front door.

It’s just past midnight as my taxi driver pulls up to the curb on the quiet, dark cul-de-sac where we live in north London. I’m back after two grueling weeks of work in Iraq, a photo shoot on the new postwar architecture of Baghdad, pastels and sleek modern structures blooming incongruously alongside exquisite medieval buildings and the rubble of destruction.

I open the arched wooden door to the half-timbered Tudor cottage Nick and I rent in Hampstead and call out that I’m home. Outside, the cab pulls away now that the driver, an elderly gentleman with an old-fashioned sense of chivalry, believes I’m safely inside. When Nick doesn’t answer, I figure he’s already upstairs, either in his study—he’s been working so hard lately—or in bed reading. A bottle of Veuve Cliquot will be chilling in the silver bucket he bought at a flea market after the seller swore it was used at the Château de Condé
for the wedding of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. There will be red roses, for passion, on my pillow.

You don’t have to tell me. I know I’m lucky.

Then I see blood, illuminated by a swath of golden light from the lantern at the front door. Frantically, I begin turning on lights throughout the silent house. The blood is dark and rust colored, but I can tell it’s recent, not more than four or five hours old. The last time Nick and I spoke was in Istanbul as I boarded my connecting flight. Just before I hung up he told me he loved me, as he always does, and I started to say, “Love you more,” because that’s our routine. But my phone, down to a sliver of a battery, died before I got the words out. I never got to tell him that one last time, and it still haunts me.

I set down my equipment bag and suitcase and unstrap my tripod, which I wield like a saber as I follow the path of blood spatter. Signs of a struggle and someone being dragged. A partial handprint on the wall of our sitting room, like a child’s art project. I call Nick’s name, hoping he’s still here, and pray he hasn’t bled out. The house has a tomblike stillness about it and somehow I know his attacker or attackers are gone.

And so is Nick. In the sitting room, a bottle of Scotch is overturned, the clear liquid leaving a dark wet stain on the Bukhara carpet I brought back from an assignment in Afghanistan. His glass has rolled under the settee, and his book, John Julius Norwich’s
Byzantium: The Early Centuries,
lies splayed open on the floor.

Upstairs, the blue-and-white Amish wedding ring quilt on our bed is gone. The blankets are askew, so it was probably dragged off in haste and I know that is how he left the house, bundled in the quilt under which we’d made love so many times.

Otherwise, our bedroom looks as it always does, and his clothes are still hanging in the armoire or folded in his dresser—suits arranged by season, shoes and work boots lined up in two rows, ties draped over the antique rack I found in a shop on Portobello Road. Sweaters, underwear, socks organized neatly in the drawers.

The computer is switched off in his study. His desk is immaculate, as usual. Nick doesn’t leave work around, not in his business.

I stand there for what seems like ages, wondering whom to call: 999, which will bring officers from the Hampstead police station? Scotland Yard?

But I know what I’m supposed to do and reach for my phone.

I call Nick’s people and they come. The regional security officer from the American embassy and a bland man with a forgettable face who says his name is John Brown.

That’s it. That’s all I, Sophie Medina, can tell you with absolute certainty about the night my husband, Nicholas Canning, was abducted from our home. Everything else, the rest of that night—sirens wailing, bright lights strobing the quiet darkness, doors slamming, voices raised in alarm—is a blur.

1

LONDON

AUGUST, THREE MONTHS LATER

Timing is everything. Sometimes setting is everything, too.

Lord Allingham, or Baz, as he was known to me, waited until we were standing in Innocents’ Corner in Westminster Abbey before he told me he had it on good authority Nick might still be alive. I knew his sources went all the way to the top since Baz is a senior minister at the Foreign Office, responsible for all foreign and commonwealth business conducted by the House of Lords. He also has contacts at MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, since he served on the Joint Intelligence Committee, although that’s something he’ll never, ever talk about.

Baz wasn’t smiling, so I knew his news about Nick would be one more wrenching development in what had become a sensational and well-publicized manhunt:
American Oil Executive Vanishes in Bloody Abduction
. It had taken a royal wedding to knock the story, complete with lurid speculation that involved aliens and a distant planet, off the front pages of the British tabloids.

Tomorrow would make exactly three months since Nick disappeared. There had been no note, no ransom demand, no one contacting me or Crowne Energy, Nick’s British employer, to claim responsibility or announce that he had become a pawn in a political agenda half a world away. If Nick’s cover had been blown—he was an operations officer with the CIA’s clandestine service—it never surfaced that he had been outed. To my surprise, not even the tabloids hinted that Nick might be a spy.

A week after the abduction, a group of German hikers found a dark green Citroën with more of Nick’s blood staining the backseat and inside the trunk, along with his wallet. They hadn’t even taken his ID or credit cards. The car had been abandoned next to a grove of pines off a small slip road on the Col de Tende, the mountain pass between France and Italy. I flew to Nice and joined the multinational search: five intense days combing pine forests and climbing scree-covered slopes while bearded vultures circled overhead, until the odds of finding him were almost nil.

By the time the search was called off, everyone—my family, Nick’s sister in California, our friends, his colleagues—had begun gently urging me to stop hoping and make peace with the fact that we might never find his body. To come to terms with the likelihood that he was probably dead, especially after the body of Colin Crowne, his boss, had been discovered a few days later in Vienna, floating in the Danube River not far from OPEC headquarters.

Which made Baz’s news all the more incredible.

I gripped my damp umbrella with both hands and said, “Where is he? Is he all right? When can I see him?”

Baz clamped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close, brushing a strand of hair off my face like a protective older brother. The rain was falling, fine and sharp as needles, on this unseasonably cool early August day as we entered the Abbey, bypassing the queue of visitors—one of the perks of nobility. Steel gray clouds hung so low in the sky that London had the closed-in feeling of being inside a bell jar. The scent of damp wool mingled with Baz’s cologne—Santal by Floris, very sensual—as he hugged me close.

Kings and queens are crowned and buried in the Abbey. Poets, statesmen, philosophers, and a few of the less-than-great who bought their tombs in the days when a burial spot was for sale are immortalized here. I stared at the effigies of the two infant daughters of King James I; above them, a casket contained the bones of the boy king Edward V and his brother, supposedly murdered in the Tower by their uncle Richard III in the 1400s. It would be just like Baz to deliberately choose this tragic corner of Henry VII’s chapel, screened behind the altar where Edward the Confessor’s coronation chair and the mythical Stone of Scone sat, as an appropriate stage because of the irony of the setting and his news.

“I don’t know a good way to tell you this, Sophie, so I’ll just give you the unvarnished version.” Baz began walking, pulling me along with him. He and I are the same height, five ten, but he’s fair-haired and solidly built, the latter serving him well since he still plays weekend rugby to keep in shape. I have the lean, willowy figure of my American mother and the dark hair and olive skin of my Spanish father, a man I know mostly from old photos in European football magazines. Age-wise, Baz is ten years my senior, which makes him forty-eight.

“Come,” he said. “Let’s carry on, shall we?”

I nodded, suddenly glad for the strength of Baz’s arm around my shoulder, though I knew what he was going to do: deliver bad news sideways while we were walking and in motion. That way he didn’t have to look me in the eye. Nick used to do that. Eventually I realized it was a defensive tactic so he wouldn’t have to deal with the possibility of watching me dissolve into floods of tears. Men come so unglued when a woman starts to cry.

Except I don’t fall apart easily and Baz knew that. I’d been tough and strong throughout this entire nightmare.

“What is it?” I asked him. “Just tell me.”

Around us, tourists and visitors had begun filing out of the chapel. Evensong would begin shortly in the Quire and visiting hours would be over. Whatever he had to say, it wasn’t going to take long.

Baz squeezed my shoulder. “Nick’s been spotted in Russia.”

I could feel the blood leave my face.

“Oh, God, Baz. If he’s there, the mafia got him, the Shaika,” I said. “Right before he was taken Nick told me their threats had been escalating. It wasn’t enough just to pay protection money anymore. He and Colin were worried the Shaika planned to intimidate their workers and eventually force them out so they could step in and take over their operations. The Shaika got him, didn’t they?”

Baz shook his head. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”