Policy at the US Embassy in London, as he saw it, forced him to live on campus. He’d been given a three-bedroom apartment in the embassy complex, fully furnished by its previous occupant and partially refurnished by his wife, Christine. The chintz-to-leather ratio now tilted the wrong way, but Hugo hadn’t said anything — challenge enough to get Christine to London in the first place. He hoped, vainly he suspected, that an emotional investment in delicate chairs and blown-glass vases would persuade her to use the place as more than a staging point for shopping expeditions. But with her family money and friends in Dallas, where she was now, his hopes weren’t high.
Inside the compound, Hugo waved his passkey and waited as the grill slid up to allow them into the underground parking lot. Harper, as best Hugo could tell, was in a daze, registering events and sights with some delay. He’d asked a question about Hyde Park several minutes after they’d turned away from Park Lane, which bordered the green space. Now, the actor shook his head and looked over as Hugo pulled into his parking spot. “Is this the US Embassy?” he asked.
“Yep,” Hugo said.
“We should go to my hotel,” Harper protested mildly. “My stuff is all there. I have a room booked for the whole shoot.”
“Not anymore.” Hugo opened his door and climbed out. He bent down and looked at the blank face of the actor. “You’re staying with me now. Your stuff is already here.” He closed the door and waited for Harper to unbuckle himself and get out of the car. “Elevator’s this way, follow me.”
Harper trailed a few steps behind, clutching his paper bag to his chest. He looked at Hugo as the lift bumped them slowly up to the fourth floor. “Is Ginny here? She already got bail, right?”
“Yes,” Hugo said. “She already got bail.”
“She’s here already?”
“No.” Mercifully the lift stopped and the doors opened into the marbled foyer of Hugo’s apartment. In front of them the enormous living room, bright even on dull days thanks to the ceiling-high, bulletproof windows that overlooked Grosvenor Gardens.
“Nice place,” Harper said, his voice distant.
“Thanks. Kitchen and my bedroom off to the left. Your room is off the living room, first door on the right. Shares a bathroom with the third bedroom, which I use as a study.”
“Right. Thanks.” Harper walked to the windows and looked out, then turned and put his paper bag on the coffee table that Christine had bought from an antiques shop in Camden. He walked to a pure-white armchair and turned to Hugo. “Where’s Ginny?”
Hugo had done this before. Many times. Too many times. For a while it had gotten easier, but not any more, not now. It had been years since he’d looked someone in the eye and told them the worst news a person could hear. He poured a shot of brandy into a tumbler and walked over to Harper, putting the drink in his hand and steering him into the chair.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” Hugo began, his voice softening for the first time since they’d met. “I’m very sorry, but Ginny is dead.”
“What?” Harper’s eyes widened. “No, she’s not. She can’t be.”
“I’m sorry, she is.”
“But she was just … in jail, she was in protective custody, right? Like I was.”
“Yes, she was but—”
“So nothing could happen to her, that’s why …” His voice trailed off. “That’s not right. It can’t be.”
“It didn’t happen in jail,” Hugo said gently. “It happened after she was released.”
“Happened? What happened? Didn’t she come here?”
“No. That was the plan, but …” Hugo spread his hands. “Someone screwed up. They just let her go without telling us.”
Harper looked up at Hugo, his eyes wet, his face still showing confusion and disbelief. “What … what happened?”
Hugo sat in the chair opposite him. “We’re not sure exactly, not yet. But she was found in a graveyard.” Hugo took a deep breath. “She was hanging from a tree.”
Harper’s hand flew to his mouth, the brandy glass falling with a thunk onto the rug. “Oh no, no.” He started to shake his head, eyes fixed on Hugo. “She did it … herself?”
“We don’t know yet, but it’s possible.”
Harper rose to his feet and Hugo saw that his knees were shaking. The actor walked slowly to the large windows where streaks of rain blurred the view, and Hugo watched as Harper put his forehead against the glass. A moment later his shoulders started to shake, and he sank to his knees. He banged a weak fist against the window and then wrapped his arms around himself, mumbling his wife’s name over and over. Hugo watched, helpless, as Harper rolled onto his side and curled himself into a ball on Christine’s polished hardwood floor, his body wracked with the desperate sobs of a small child.
CHAPTER FOUR
The doctor had come and gone, and Hugo sat watching cricket highlights as a sedated Harper slept in the spare room. Occasionally Hugo flicked through the channels for a good movie, but there was something about the game of cricket that entertained him. The slow pace was hypnotic, like a ballet at half-speed, and he enjoyed the challenge of figuring out the rules without looking them up.
During the game’s lunch break, Hugo channel surfed again, pausing on the national news when he heard a familiar name. A once-infamous murderer called Sean Bywater had been found dead in a halfway house in Liverpool. A burgeoning serial killer, Bywater had been caught after three murders, but his “signature”—carving his initials on the victim’s back and his surgically clean use of a chisel to kill — had made it to the FBI training grounds at Quantico, Virginia, decades later. Hugo had himself tried to get access to Bywater to interview him, but the man had rebuffed every approach. Hugo hadn’t been surprised because after the killer’s sentence, he’d lapsed into silence, which he broke only a few times, mostly while stabbing other inmates.
At the time of his trial, Bywater had been the poster boy for the reinstatement of the death penalty: his crimes had been committed in 1965, just weeks after abolition. According to today’s news account, and a little ironically, Hugo thought, just two weeks after being released he’d hanged himself in the halfway house, ill-health and forty years of institutionalization too much for even a serial killer to deal with. He’d left behind no money, no friends, no family, and not even a note; just the word SORRY chiseled into the wall of his tiny room. A nice touch, considering his former MO, Hugo thought. The newsreader concluded the story by noting that another infamous killer, the former model June Michelle Stanton, was due to be released in three days into the care of her twin sister and her daughter, who’d been just two years old at the time her mother was sentenced to forty years for killing a policeman during a botched robbery. He switched back to the cricket match before the news story ended — not the kind of thing Harper needed to be seeing, should he wake up and wander in.
An hour later, at two o’clock, Harper was still in his room when the phone rang. Hugo answered to hear the ambassador’s voice.
“All safe and secure, Hugo?”
“Sleeping like a baby.”
“Good. I would have called before, but you know how it is.”
“No, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“Good enough.” The ambassador chuckled. “What’s he like?”
“He’s like one of those wedding cake decorations, but with bright, blue eyes. About the same height, actually.”
“Be nice Hugo. How did he take the news?”
“The way you’d expect a married man to react when you tell him his wife was found hanging from a tree.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Yes.” Hugo cleared his throat. “So, without meaning to sound callous and just out of curiosity, how long do I have to babysit this poor guy?”