Tim Glister - Red Corona

Half an hour later, Knox was back in Deptford.

Abey Bennett loved London. But sometimes she also hated it. Like when the mark she’d been trailing realised he was being followed and gave her the slip.

If her surveillance of Knox had been approved she’d have had a whole team working with her, blanketing Soho so he couldn’t have gone anywhere without her knowing. But, as with so many times in her life, Bennett was working alone.

It was a skill she’d learned young. Too young.

Bennett’s mother was a member of the Kiowa tribe, who had once roamed all over Kansas and the surrounding states before their land was taken from them, and her father was a white man with a drinking problem who’d walked out on his family.

Bennett and her two brothers had been born in quick succession in the late thirties, as Kansas was being ravaged by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Three years later her father disappeared without a trace. The only things he’d ever given her were her surname and her large, piercing blue eyes. Her mother had given her children their thick hair, golden skin, and three traditional tribal first names. She’d wanted to give each of them something to live up to, and honour their mixed heritage, but she’d just ended up alienating them even further from both the white and Kiowa communities. Bennett’s brothers were named Enapy and Hori, which meant brave and strong. But they were dull, absent-minded children. Abey was an old Sioux word for ‘leaf’. It was supposed to encourage Bennett to be nurturing, and it did, but it also inspired her eventually to blow away from Lakin.

When Bennett was six, her mother developed acute emphysema. All the dust storms had finally caught up with her. She couldn’t work, and she didn’t have enough money for medicine. Bennett’s brothers were too lost in their empty heads to even notice. She was already growing up fast, and after her mother’s diagnosis she had to do it even faster.

The white doctors had no interest in treating ‘a sick squaw and her half-caste kids,’ and the Kiowa elders still considered Bennett’s mother’s union with a white man too much of a betrayal to offer any help. Bennett had forced them both to change their minds.

It was this same strength of will that Bennett had used to get herself through school and then, after years of trying, into the CIA. She was the first Native American to work for the agency since the Navajo code talkers in the war. Her posting to London should have felt like a triumph. And sometimes it did, but a lot of the time it also felt like the latest fight in an unending series of battles to prove her worth.

Bennett had thought Knox might be the key to getting her bosses to take her seriously after shadowing him from Cambridge straight to Holloway prison. Now she was sure.

She’d almost taken the direct approach, sliding up next to him in Bar Italia. But she’d held back, waited to see where he was headed – because anyone who drank two double espressos that late was definitely heading somewhere. It had been a mistake. She’d tried to be inconspicuous, even wearing the trilby a man had left on the seat next to her on the tube a few weeks ago so Knox wouldn’t recognise her. But it had just made her more obvious.

She’d let herself get cocky and thought she could play the game as well as one of MI5’s best on his home turf. She’d underestimated Knox and been left looking like an idiot. Bennett hadn’t just lost him in Seven Dials, she’d let him toy with her, and prove just how far out of her depth she was.

She wished she had someone to turn to, even just to be put through the wringer for her failure and told what she needed to do to make up for it. But there was no one to debrief her, no one she could vent to or run scenarios with. All she could do was wait for her anger to fade, shove the trilby in a nearby bin, and go home.

Knox approached the old tenement building off Deptford High Street. He wanted to take a more thorough look at Bianchi and Moretti’s flat and see what Manning’s investigators might have missed. Unfortunately for him, the policeman standing watch outside didn’t want him to.

Knox tried to step past him, flashing the kind of half-smile that communicated something along the lines of ‘You’ve seen me before and I probably live here,’ but it didn’t work.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the officer asked, moving to block Knox’s way.

He was a large, stocky man. His heavy brow, lit from behind by the light from the tenement’s entrance, made it almost impossible to see his eyes.

‘I’m investigating the murder,’ Knox said.

That didn’t work either.

‘Ain’t nothing like that here.’ The officer shifted his weight, squaring up to Knox. ‘Jog on.’

Knox decided it would be easier to play the fool than call up the chief of the Met, who he happened to know personally, and get him to put the fear of God into this jobsworth on his behalf. So he turned on his heel, tripped over his feet for added effect, and headed back to the high street. Then he darted round to the building’s back door, waited for the headlights of a passing car to fade, then gave it a hard, sharp shove, catching it mid-swing before it hit the wall.

There was no guard standing watch outside the flat itself, which, if Knox had really thought about it, made it even stranger that a policeman was guarding the entrance to the building more than forty-eight hours after Bianchi and Moretti’s bodies had been removed. But that tiny piece of the puzzle was too small for him to notice.

After making sure the curtains were pulled closed, Knox turned on all the lights and started to make his way through the flat, room by room. It looked like it had never been lived in. Everything apart from the most basic furniture had been removed. Knox wondered what had happened to the men’s possessions. They must have had more clothes than the ones they’d been found in, more bits and pieces of everyday life that would have helped him build a picture of who they were, what they were doing, and why they died. He’d hoped for a treasure trove of clues, but he found nothing.

He left the small office until last. It was as bare as the rest of the flat. The desk was clear, the boxes gone, the bookcase still empty. He was about to give up, until he realised that one side of the large set of shelves wasn’t quite flush with the wall. It was only off by less than half an inch, a small enough gap for most people to miss, but it caught his attention.

He squinted behind it, but couldn’t see anything in the narrow, dark void. So he grabbed both sides and started to walk it away from the wall. He heard a low thud as something fell to the floor, finally free from its hiding place. Knox reached behind the case and pulled out what he’d dislodged. It was another bundle of pages covered in equations. But these ones weren’t made up of nonsense symbols. They were letters and numbers, maths he could recognise. And, in the middle of the bundle, were two brand new Swiss passports.

The sun was on its way back up into the sky when Valera woke up. For the briefest second her mind allowed her some peace before it reminded her where she was and what had happened. Her stomach cried out again for food, but she had no more to give it. All she could do was get up, stretch out her tired body, and wait for different kinds of pain to smother her hunger.

She shouldered her pack, picked up Ledjo’s in her arms, and started walking again. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but even though the sun was already getting higher the air was still cool. She might only have been unconscious for a few hours. She stopped at pools and small creeks for water, but with nothing to eat she quickly became light-headed.