The Secret Chord: The Virtuosic Spy - Book 2 (7 page)

Conor retraced his steps back to the inn, dreading the approaching encounter with Kate. In the kitchen, Abigail had left a covered plate on the counter along with a note giving instructions for re-heating the meal. A line scrawled at the bottom read:
Don't do something stupid. You belong here.

He put the plate in the refrigerator and went upstairs to Kate's apartment, where he found her sitting in the living room facing the window. The bottle of whiskey and two fresh glasses had migrated from the bar to her coffee table. She saw his reflection and looked back over her shoulder.

"I was beginning to think you'd already left."

"I'm sorry. I went for a walk." Conor eyed the immaculate wheat-colored carpet and wiped his forehead, realizing how dirty and sweaty he was. "I'll just clean up a bit. I won't be long."

When he returned, his anxiety was tempered by inquisitive interest. Although he passed the living room every day he'd never ventured inside. The handsome space was lit by artfully arranged lighting, and its pale yellow walls glowed in the deepening twilight. Although the carpeting provided a muffled ambiance,
 

the overall design seemed more formal than he would have expected. Everything was tasteful and complementary, but too pristine and strangely inexpressive of what he knew of Kate's personality.

"This is a gorgeous room." He paused in front of the large window framing the lake in the distance.

"Thanks. Anna designed it—my latest stepmother." Kate glanced around the room. "Actually, her interior decorator did. She wanted to help. I had to let her do something but I didn't anticipate the consequences. I feel like I'm visiting someone else's house when I sit in here."

"I know what you mean. Maybe this will take the edge off." Conor splashed some whiskey into one of the glasses, and with the bottle poised over the second looked at Kate. She nodded. "A Jameson's drinker." He poured and handed her the glass with a smile. "I don't think I would have guessed that."

"Well, there's always more to learn about someone."

"Touché."

He sat in one of the two leather club chairs anchoring either side of the couch, considering how to begin. As he'd completed the walk back to the inn Conor had begun piecing together a story—something to spin the facts into a benign tidy package and seal off further avenues of inquiry. The strategy involved a fair amount of dissembling. Looking at Kate's solemn face as she sipped her drink, he couldn't do it. His appetite for pretense had never been strong, and grew weaker the longer he remained anywhere near her. Without any backup plan he started talking, praying he'd know when to stop.

“The trick is knowing when to stop," he blurted aloud, and after a stab of panic realized he'd begun a more authentic story than the tale practiced earlier. "With the drink, I mean. That's where my brother got into trouble, after I'd left for Dublin. Our father had been dead for years, and our mother . . .”
 

An image of Brigid McBride rose in Conor's mind and pain bloomed in his chest like the kinetic flare of a match. "She was a rare one, a sort of half-pagan, half-Catholic mystic. A lot of the time she seemed to be living on the threshold of some other place. She was easy to love but not always easy to live with, and I never realized how lonely it was for Thomas until I got a taste myself. Not hard to end up spending your evenings with a bottle when you've nothing better to do. I was lucky I had the fiddle." Conor took a sip from the glass and shot Kate an apologetic glance. "Sorry. Getting off to a slow start, here. I'll come to the point, eventually."

She nodded, drawing her feet up to the couch and tucking them beneath her. He waited until she'd settled again before resuming.

"Thomas hired two farming assistants. From Northern Ireland. He started getting drunk with them on a regular basis, and they went to work on him. They connected him with someone they said had a scheme for building Irish pubs in places that didn't have them—Asia, Africa. They said this fellow wanted partners who could come up with capital. Thomas got seduced by it all, the idea of having a different kind of life in some exotic country. He was an easy mark. One night they got him completely fucking scuttered and he signed off on papers for a business loan."
 

Conor still remembered his own incredulous anger at first hearing this tale—a textbook scam, and one that had a nasty twist buried inside.

"At least, they told him it was a loan," he continued bitterly. "Turns out he'd submitted an application to the European Union for an agricultural grant with barely a word of truth in the bloody thing. The EU made the award, but pretty soon they twigged the farm didn't have nine hundred head of cattle and didn't have sheep at all. They filed a warrant with Interpol, and the Garda—that's the Irish police force— went to arrest him, but when they got to the farm Thomas had disappeared. So, they came looking for me."

"I don't understand." Kate frowned.

"I was co-owner, and I'd signed the application forms as well." Conor put his unfinished glass down, sliding it across the coffee table. "I didn't even read them. They came in the post with a typed note telling me to sign and send them on to an address in Tralee. I saw it was to do with the farm, so therefore I didn't give a shit, and I always did what my big brother wanted. A few months later the Garda took me out of my flat in handcuffs and I got convicted for conspiring to defraud the EU. That ended my days in Dublin, and my career with the National Symphony Orchestra."

"You went to prison?" Kate had shifted to the end of the sofa near Conor. Uncomfortably near.

"I went back to the farm, which seemed like prison right enough, at first." Conor sat farther back in his own chair, seeking respite from her clear-eyed attention. "My solicitor made a deal for repaying the money in installments, and the farm was the only way I could earn enough. The debt's been paid—I had help in the end—but the record stands for anyone who wants to look for it."

"Did you ever see Thomas again?"

Kate's question was a natural one, but Conor wished she hadn't asked. It took the story in a direction he couldn't allow. Before he could form an answer she made it more complicated.

"You were with him when he died."

He kept his face still, suppressing a tremor of surprise. He'd learned something about her impulsive nature and inclination to draw conclusions from fragments of data. He hadn't realized how good she was at it.

"Yes. I was with him."

"Tell me what happened."

From someone else this might have struck Conor as vulgar curiosity, but the compassion in Kate's eyes suggested a different motive. She had figured him out—seen more than he intended to show, heard more than he meant to say. Instead of being sensibly alarmed she was offering to listen to him, to be a channel for safely releasing the pressure he cradled inside himself like a combustible gas.

"I can't do that."

She nodded, unsurprised. "But, did you make peace with him before he died?"

"Jesus, Kate." A strangled hiccup—more sob than laughter—lodged in Conor's windpipe. The choking fit gave him time to harness the emotion she'd innocently ignited. "You're quite a skilled interrogator, you know." He dropped the fist from his mouth with a sigh. "Bloody ruthless."

"I'm sorry."

"No, you're all right. Sure it's the one good thing to come out of the whole business. It was okay between us. He was a decent man – simple, strong and loyal. Yeah, we were okay in the end." He stood up and moved back to the window, trying to put more space between himself and the temptation to go on testifying. "I'm sorry for all this. I ought to get out of here before causing you more trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" Kate asked.

Conor gave an evasive shrug, but the truth was he didn't know himself. That was the hell of it. "I can leave in the morning. If you want me to?" He studied her in the window's reflection. Her face was calm and utterly fearless. She smiled.

"If I said 'yes', where would you go?"

He turned to her with a soft laugh, shaking his head. "Good question."

7

A
FTER
A
DAY
OF
FIELDWORK
UNDER
THE
HOT
A
UGUST
SUN
Conor entered the kitchen through the back door, weary, sore and ready for supper. He almost always came from work too ravenous to wash and change for dinner, but with his clothes redolent of the barnyard the inn's dining room was off-limits. An alcove off the kitchen was the only acceptable place for him, and his arrival had been anticipated. A bowl of gazpacho sat waiting and Dominic was coming forward with a basket of bread.

"
Prego
," he called out in his rolling Italian accent, gesturing for Conor to take a seat. A slender man in his fifties with a neatly trimmed mustache, Abigail's husband had negotiating skills that might have earned him a good living as a diplomat, yet he seemed content using them to manage the fragile alliance between the dining room and kitchen staff—and between all of them and his wife.

"She started asking where you were an hour ago
.
'He works too hard,' she says. 'He doesn't sleep enough,' she says." Dominic clapped a hand on his shoulder, giving Conor a sympathetic smile. "She's got worries,
amico
. She's got
questions
."

"Oh, bloody hell. Thanks for the heads-up, Dom."
 

Conor had grown fond of Abigail over the past several months and was touched by the maternal interest she took in him, but her fussing sometimes strained his patience. This was the price to be paid, he supposed. With Kate's encouragement he'd remained in place, and only time would tell whether the decision was sensible or delusional. In the meantime, he'd become rooted in a community of people who cared—and worried—about him. He could hazard a guess at the source of Abigail's latest concern. A few minutes later she arrived with his dinner, and confirmed that he'd nailed it in one.

"Darla said she ran into you at Copley Hospital earlier today." She put the plate down in front of him—diver scallops on a bed of risotto with a side of hanger steak—and waited.

Darla Barstow was the inn's housekeeper, a petite high-strung woman of twenty-three who reminded Conor of some form of feathered wildlife, always twitching and chattering.

"I figured she wasn't likely to keep that to herself." He reached for the salt.

"That doesn't need salt." Abigail plucked the shaker from his hand. "So? Are you sick?"

"Of course not. Do I look sick?" Conor bent over the plate to hide his irritation.
 

"You look tired."

"Sure you're always telling me that."

"Because it's always true. You were at Copley once already at the beginning of May. I gave you directions."

"And didn't quiz me, as I recall. Keeping a diary now, are you?" Instantly, Conor regretted his ill-humored sarcasm. Abigail flinched as if she'd been slapped. She turned away and he caught her by the hand.

"Abigail, I'm sorry. Listen, they're just check-ups. I need to go once a month for a while to make sure my lungs heal properly. They take an X-ray, I spit in a cup and it's done. I'm fine, and I'm not as tired as you seem to think."
 

"I'll take your word for it." She allowed herself a grudging smile. "Baked potato?"

"Have I ever refused one?"

She brought two, and left him to finish his dinner, but returned later carrying a covered plate on a tray. "Since you're so fit and rested I'm sending you up to deal with Kate."

Conor hadn't seen Kate at all during the day, which wasn't uncommon given their divergent schedules, but in the evening she often took a minute to bring him a pint of something from the bar. Concerned, he frowned at the tray. "What's the matter? Is
she
sick?"

"In a manner of speaking. She's in her studio. I think she was there all night and the only thing she ate today was a chocolate bar—for breakfast." Abigail set the tray on the table. "Take this to her and make sure she eats. I'm holding you responsible."

Conor rubbed a hand over his mouth. "Listen, if she's in her studio I imagine she'd rather not be bothered. Artists can get pretty absorbed—"

"No, you listen, Conor. You've been here four months and you've been a godsend, but it's time to make yourself useful in a different way. Kate needs to talk about what she's going through to somebody who understands. She needs something I can't give her. You can."

"Jesus . . . " Conor squirmed under her gaze.

"I understand you're afraid," she added softly, "But this is what you need too, sweetie. Stop fighting. A second chance only counts if you recognize it when you see it."

He stopped fidgeting and grew still. "I can't start down this road, Abigail."

"Of course you can. It's the only road worth starting down. Now, go. Get out of my kitchen."

As always with Abigail, he had little choice but to obey. Filled with conflicting emotions he lifted the tray and left, threading his way through the busy dining room. On an intuitive level, he understood Kate's struggle. A few weeks earlier he'd ended his own self-imposed penance and had begun playing his violin again, practicing in a shed next to the barn. The initial effort had been excruciating. Consumed with self-doubt, he'd struggled with pacing and mechanics as well as memory. Entire sections of concerti he once could play in his sleep escaped him, or came out in the wrong order. The first session was painful and more than a bit frightening, but when finished he'd flexed hands that had not been stretched in such a way for nearly a year and felt their responding ache with a wave of contentment. It was like having a limb rejoined with his body—the point of attachment was tender and raw, but the parts knew they belonged together.

Unlike other aspects of his life the experience was one he could discuss without mystery or evasion, but he hesitated to open this line of conversation. Kate had shared few details about her own creative paralysis, and none about its cause. Given his own reticence he had no right to probe, and as a rule he avoided topics which might become too personal. As Abigail had clearly discerned, his friendly affection for Kate was threatening to spill beyond the boundaries he'd set, and the effort to contain it was taxing enough without further complications.