By morning Harding had convinced himself he might have been mistaken. Maybe the woman he had seen was not Hayley after all, but someone who merely happened to look like her, someone hurrying through the rain to catch a late train home. Why should she be watching him when they were due to meet soon anyway? And why should she run from him? It made no sense. But what about the phone calls? Who had made them? Who-and why?
He said nothing to Tozer about what had happened. His doubts and suspicions were too vague to put into words and nothing seemed likely to dent the other man’s confidence that their rendezvous with Hayley would bring a resolution of their problems. Harding had more problems than Tozer knew about, of course. A resolution of them all was way out of reach. But Hayley had said she wanted to meet them. And he badly wanted to see her again-to talk to her, to make her understand. The circumstances would not be ideal. They would be about as far as possible from ideal. But they were the only ones on offer.
Nymphenburg. The baroque, white-faced palace flung back the clear winter light at them as they walked towards it. A tunnel led beneath the central block to a formal garden, beyond which the park, patched with old snow and fresh frost, stretched its wooded acres into the distance. The sky was cloudless, every shadow sharply etched.
Halfway along the path leading through the garden to the canal basin, Tozer checked his watch and announced they were early for their appointment with Hayley They diverted to the nearest bench and sat down. Tozer lit a cigarette and gazed back at the palace.
“Know anything about the Bavarian royal family, Tim?” he asked, to Harding’s surprise.
“As much as you, I expect.”
Tozer chuckled. “You underestimate me. Carol and I toured the castles down near the Austrian border the year after we were married. Y’know: the fairytale ones built by Mad King Ludwig. Neuschwanstein and the rest. As King of Bavaria, Ludwig must have whiled away quite a lot of his time here in his day, mustn’t he?”
“So?”
“So, we remember him as mad. Which is how a lot of people remember Hayley. I wondered… if she chose to meet us here… to make some kind of point about that.”
“Are you serious?”
“Not sure. But I’m definitely serious about making this meeting work. For all of us. I’m going to follow Lawton’s lead. Tell Hayley about her sister. What happened to her the day she died. I mean when she really died, not when Hanckel pulled the plug on her four years later. Hayley’s never heard my account of the accident, has she? It’s time she did.”
“Neither have I, come to that.”
“It really was an accident, Tim. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot these past few days. I mean, could Kerry’s gear have been sabotaged? Not by me, obviously. I know I didn’t do it. But by someone else?”
“Well? Could it?”
“Only if you’re willing to rope in some pretty unlikely suspects. I took all our gear over on the helicopter the day before the dive. Kerry was staying with Carol in Hugh Town. Ray Trathen travelled with me. I sent him off to a b. and b. and stayed overnight with the Metherells. We loaded the gear into John’s car and left it there till morning. Then we drove down to the quay first thing and put it aboard the Jonquil. The Martyns were waiting for us. I left John with them and went to fetch the girls. We bumped into Ray Trathen on the way back to the quay Then we set off. It was a perfect morning. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a breath of wind. Like today. Only about twenty degrees warmer.”
“The unlikely suspects, then, are Metherell and the Martyns.”
“John could have crept out to his car during the night and tampered with one of the hoses. But he’d have had no way of knowing which of them Kerry would end up using. Unless I was the target, of course. Or unless he didn’t care which of us he was endangering. It’s a crazy idea anyway. He set the trip up as a favour to me, but he was keen to go out to the site of the wreck because of his book about the Association. He had no reason to want either of us dead. And if he’s innocent, so are the Martyns. They couldn’t have done anything without him noticing. Besides, they’re just Scillonian boatmen who ply for hire. The last thing they’d have wanted was a fatality during a dive from their boat.”
“Alf Martyn said penetrating the wreck on single air supply was foolhardy.”
“He’s right. But maybe Kerry didn’t realize just how foolhardy. Maybe I didn’t ram the message home to her.”
“It might help if you told Hayley how much you regret that.”
“I plan to, Tim, believe me.” Tozer dropped his cigarette butt onto the ground and crushed it with his boot, then glanced at his watch. “It’s nearly ten. Let’s go.”
They left the garden and headed out slowly along the path beside the ornamental canal, bare-limbed trees to their right, turbid, half-frozen water to their left. The palace had only just opened to visitors and few had made it as far as the park. A woman with a yapping dog was walking along the path on the opposite bank of the canal. But on their side there was no sign of anyone.
“She is going to turn up, isn’t she, Tim?” Tozer asked anxiously.
“She told us to be here, Barney. And here we are.”
“But where’s she?”
“Give her-” He broke off. His phone was ringing.
As Harding came to a halt, Tozer went on for a few paces, then turned to look at him. “Expecting a call?” He arched his eyebrows meaningfully.
“It can’t be Hayley”
“Can’t it?”
Harding grabbed the phone from his pocket and answered. “Hello?”
“Darren here, Mr. H. Calling back as promised.”
Harding swore under his breath. He had completely forgotten Spargo’s squalid little money-making manoeuvre. He had not so much as mentioned it to Barney. “I can’t talk now,” he said quietly.
“Why not? You’ve had a couple of days to sort things out with Megabucks.”
“I’ll phone you back later.”
“Oh no. I’m not being strung along like that.”
Tozer spread his hands enquiringly. Harding gave him a stalling wave and turned away to avoid his gaze while he dealt with Spargo. “This isn’t a good time. I-”
There was a loud crack, like ice fracturing under pressure, but so close to Harding’s ear that he ducked down defensively. “Caught you at the shooting range, have I?” he heard Spargo ask. Then he looked back at Tozer. And the phone slipped from his fingers.
Tozer was on his knees, clutching at his throat, his eyes wide, staring helplessly at Harding. He tried to speak, but no words came from his mouth, only a trickle of blood. Then there was another loud crack. Tozer’s head jerked forward. Bloody fragments of brain and bone burst from the back of his skull. He toppled over, hitting the ground like a falling sack, his last breath forced from him in a dying grunt.
For a second, Harding did not react. Then there was a third crack. He dodged instinctively and saw something that had to be a bullet ping off a pebble a foot or so in front of him. There was nowhere to run to or hide. The only shelter was in the trees, where the shots were coming from. The thought formed in his mind, clear and hard and brittle as an icicle, that he was about to die. A fourth crack snapped the thought clean off. He flung himself to the ground, twisting his head and squinting despairingly towards the trees. Hayley could not be doing this. It was not possible. She had not been able to go through with killing Carol. Surely she-
But yes. It was her. A dark shape detached itself from the cover of one of the tree trunks in his lopsided field of vision. She had stopped shooting and was running hard now, deeper into the woods. This time, she did not look back. A black, fleeing figure, moving fast, threading between the trees, like a deer fleeing the hunter. But in this case the deer was the hunter. And she had made a kill.