She lowers the shirt but doesn't answer.
“A lot of people are looking for you.”
“And you get the prize.”
“Can I call an ambulance?”
“No.”
“OK, we'll just talk for a while. You want to tell me what happened?”
Kirsten shrugs and lowers the gun, resting it between her thighs. “I saw an opportunity.”
“To play with fire.”
“To make a new life . . .” She doesn't finish the sentence. Dampening her lips, she makes a silent decision and starts again. “It was almost a joke at first; one of those ‘what if' ideas that you toss around among yourselves and laugh about. Ray was good at the technical side. He used to work in the sewers. I kept an eye on the little details. At first I thought Rachel might even play along. We could set the whole thing up and she'd finally get what she deserved from her family or her ex-husband. She was owed.”
“She wouldn't play along?”
“I didn't ask. I knew the answer.”
I look around the room. The wallpaper has a honeycomb design and within each octagon is the outline of a naked woman in a different sexual pose.
“What happened to Mickey?”
Kirsten doesn't seem to hear me. She's telling the story in her own time.
“We would have been fine, you know, if it hadn't been for Gerry Brandt. Mickey would have made it home. Ray would still be alive. Gerry should never have let her go . . . not alone. He was supposed to take her home.”
“I don't understand. What are you talking about?”
A painful smile steals across her face but doesn't part her lips. “Poor Inspector, you haven't worked it out yet, have you?”
The truth grows in me like a tumor with the cells doubling and dividing, invading the empty spaces and the gaps in my memory. Gerry Brandt said he let her go. They were his last words.
“We only had her for a few days,” says Kirsten, gnawing at a fingernail. “Then he paid the ransom.”
“What ransom?”
“The first one.”
“What do you mean, a first ransom?”
“We were never going to hurt her. Once we got the ransom, we told Gerry to take her home. He was supposed to drop her at the end of her street but he panicked and left her at an Underground station. The fucking idiot! He was always a loose cannon. Right from the first day he jeopardized everything. He was supposed to be looking after Mickey but he couldn't resist going back to Randolph Avenue to see the TV crews and police.
“We would never have included him except we needed someone to look after Mickey who she couldn't identify. Like I said, we were always going to let her go. She told Gerry she knew the way home. She said she'd change trains at Piccadilly Circus and catch the Bakerloo line.”
This information seeps into my stomach and joins forces with the tepid nausea. My mind is tallying the details. Mr. and Mrs. Bird saw Mickey at Leicester Square. It's one stop from Piccadilly Circus.
“But if you let her go, what happened?”
Her misery is complete. “Howard Wavell!”
I don't understand.
“Howard happened,” she says again. “Mickey made it home but she ran into Howard.”
God, no! Surely not! It was a Wednesday night. Rachel wasn't home. She was on News at Ten making another appeal. I remember watching her on TV at the station. They used footage of the press conference earlier in the day.
“I tell you we didn't mean to hurt her. We let her go. Then you found her bloodstained towel and arrested Howard. I wanted to die.”
An image presents itself. I picture a small, terrified child with a fear of being outside, crossing a city alone. She almost made it. Only steps away—not even eighty-five of them. Howard found her on the front steps.
My legs go weak and I struggle to stand. It's as though my insides have become liquid and want to flood out, throbbing and glistening on the floor. My God, what have I done? I couldn't have been more wrong. Ali, Rachel, Mickey—I let them all down.
“You don't know how many times I have wanted to change things,” says Kirsten. “I would have brought Mickey home myself. I would have walked her right to her door. Believe me!”
“You were friends with Rachel. How could you do that to her?”
For a fleeting moment her sadness turns to anger, but takes too much energy to sustain. She whispers, “I never meant to hurt them . . . not Mickey or Rachel.”
“Why then?”
“We were stealing from the ultimate thief—taking money from Aleksei Kuznet, a monster. He murdered his own brother, for God's sake.”
“You wanted to take on the biggest bully in the playground.”
“We live in a new feudal age, Inspector. We fight wars over oil and we hand out reconstruction contracts in return for political donations. We have more parking wardens than we do police officers—”
“Oh for pity's sake, spare me the speeches!”
“We didn't want to hurt anyone.”
“Rachel was always going to be hurt.”
She looks at me with wet eyes. I can almost taste the salt in them.
“I didn't mean . . . we let Mickey go. I would never have . . .” She lowers the gun between her knees and her head follows, rocking back and forth. “I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry . . .”
Her self-pity irritates me. I keep pressing for the rest of the story. Kirsten doesn't look at me as she describes the cesspit in the basement and the underground river. Ray Murphy inflated a boat below ground and drew a map for Gerry to follow. He only had to travel a few hundred feet before bringing Mickey up through a storm-water drain.
“Ray knew a place to keep her. I never went there. My job was to send the ransom letter.”
“Where did you send it?”
“Directly to Aleksei.”
“What about the bikini?”
“Gerry held on to it.”
“What was she wearing when he let her go?”
“I don't know exactly.”
“Did she have her beach towel?”
“Gerry said it was like her security blanket. She wouldn't let it go.”
I'm struggling now. Of all the scenarios to contemplate I had left Howard out, convinced of his innocence. I had weighed up the evidence and the odds and decided he had been wrongly accused and convicted. Campbell said I was blind to the obvious. I thought he couldn't see anything except his own prejudices.
“Why in God's name did you try for a second ransom? How could you put Rachel through it again? You convinced her Mickey was still alive.”
Her face creases as she sucks back the pain. “I didn't want to. You don't understand.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“When you arrested Howard for Mickey's murder Gerry went off his head. He kept saying we helped kill her. He said he couldn't go back inside—not for killing a child. He knew what they did to child murderers in prison. Right away I knew we had a problem. We either had to silence Gerry or help him disappear.”
“So you got him out of the country.”
“We gave him double what he deserved—four hundred grand. He was supposed to stay away but he poured his money down slot machines or shot it up his arm.”
“He bought a bar in Thailand.”
“Whatever.”
“And then he came back.”
“The first I knew about the second ransom was when Rachel received the postcard. Gerry came up with the idea all by himself. Mickey's body had never been found. He still had her swimsuit and strands of her hair. I went ballistic. His greed and stupidity threatened us all. Ray said he was going to stop Gerry before he gave us away . . .”
“You could have walked away then. Nobody would have known.”
“I wanted to kill him—I really did.”
“What changed your mind?”
“None of us thought Aleksei would say yes—not after paying one ransom—but then straight off he agreed. I almost felt sorry for him then. He must have really wanted to believe Mickey was still alive.”