James Twining - The Gilded Seal

‘You tell me.’ Mitchell shrugged. ‘I’m normally pulling hookers out of dumpsters and junkies out of the East River. What was your angle?’

‘Hammon got into a fight with someone who’s involved in my case. I wanted to find out why.’

‘The guy’s an attorney. What more of a reason do you need?’ Mitchell laughed.

Jennifer smiled as she moved round to the other side of the desk, slowly warming to Mitchell’s black humour.

‘You got any paper?’ she asked suddenly.

‘What?’ Mitchell frowned.

‘Paper?’

Mitchell continued to stare at her blankly.

‘For the fax,’ she explained, pointing at the light blinking on the fax machine. ‘Looks like something’s caught in the memory.’

With a nod of understanding, Mitchell opened the printer tray, removed a few sheets of paper, and placed them into the fax. Moments later, the machine began to whir and hum, sucking a fresh sheet inside and then spitting it out on to the floor.

Mitchell picked the sheet up, studied it for a few seconds, then handed it to Jennifer. ‘Go figure.’

Three items were listed on the page: First an alphanumeric code – VIS1095. Then a sum of money – $100,000,000. And beneath them, a letter in a circle.

The letter M.

Las Candelarias, Seville

19th April – 9.33 p.m.

Eva seemed reluctant to leave the workshop. Tom understood why.

Unable to sleep the night of his own father’s funeral a few years before, he had wandered through Geneva’s wintry streets, vainly looking for answers to questions that he couldn’t yet quite bring himself to ask. As dawn broke, he had found himself standing outside the front door to his father’s old apartment, drawn there as if by some ancient magic. Sitting on the foot of his father’s bed, seeing his cufflinks glittering on the marble-topped chest and his ties peeking out from behind the wardrobe door like snowdrops nosing their way above ground in early spring, it was almost as if he had still been alive.

Now he sensed that Eva was doing the same, absorbing the memories of her father that swirled stubbornly around this room like paint fumes. The half-empty wine glass with a ghostly lip-print on its rim. The pocket-knife, its bone handle smoothed by use. The discarded sunglasses, one arm bent back on itself where he had sat on them. Part of Tom wanted to hold her, to tell her that it would all be all right. But he knew it wouldn’t, not for a long time, and that this was something she was going to have to come to terms with on her own.

‘We should go,’ Tom muttered eventually as he carefully wrapped the painting in a cloth and placed it inside his bag.

‘Where to?’ she said mournfully. ‘The police are in and out of his apartment. I can’t bear it there any more.’

For a moment Tom thought of suggesting that they go to his hotel, but quickly changed his mind. Chances were she would take it the wrong way, and in any case the cops were probably there by now. The best thing would be to get out of Seville as quickly as possible, but there was one more place he needed to go first. According to Gillez, Rafael had been seen going to confession at the Basilica de la Macarena the night he was killed. Assuming that he hadn’t been gripped by a sudden bout of evangelical fervour, Tom wanted to see for himself what had drawn him there. But she interrupted him before he could suggest it, her voice breathless and hurried.

‘There’s something you should know. Something Rafael told me about your father. About how he died. I should have told you before only I was so angry with you that I never –’

The words stuck in Eva’s throat as the glass roof above them suddenly imploded. Tom pulled her to the floor and threw his coat over their heads, the shards embedding themselves into the thick material and crashing around their feet. The next instant he was up, dragging her towards the exit, but heavy footsteps announced someone pounding up the staircase towards them. He turned back, hoping to get to the window, but two other men abseiled into the room, guns drawn, blocking their path. They were trapped.

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