“He knew I was in the country.”
“He follows news from the art world?”
“No,” said Gabriel. “He follows news about me.”
“Surely he must have given you at least some idea of what it was about.”
“He said he didn’t want to discuss it on the phone.”
“What could it be?”
“Something art related, I suppose.”
“Something Professor Blake was working on at the time of her murder?”
“An interesting theory,” said Gabriel.
“Could there be a link?”
“Between Charlotte Blake’s hypothetical research project and her subsequent murder by an axe-wielding maniac?”
“The Chopper uses a hatchet, you dolt.”
“A most inefficient murder weapon, if you ask me. Effective, yes. But quite messy.”
“You’ve never used one?”
“A hatchet? I’m quite certain that I have never once utilized a hatchet for any purpose whatsoever, least of all killing someone. That’s what guns are for.”
“I think I’d rather be shot than hacked to death.”
“Trust me,” said Gabriel. “A bullet is no picnic, either.”
* * *
He drank coffee at a dingy café in Slough until Chiara’s flight was safely airborne, then slid behind the wheel of the rental car and headed west on the M4. It was approaching noon when he reached Exeter. He skirted the fringes of Dartmoor on the A30 and during the drive down to Truro was pelted by downpours of torrential rain. The storm had passed by the time he reached Falmouth, and at half past two, when he arrived in the tiny Cornish hamlet of Port Navas, an orange sun blazed through a slit in the clouds.
The winding road down to the tidal creek was scarcely wide enough for a single car and lined by hedgerows. Gabriel had driven it countless times, usually at speeds that annoyed the neighbors. He had known them intimately—their names, their occupations, their vices and their virtues—and they had known him not at all. He was the foreign gentleman who inhabited the old foreman’s cottage near the oyster farm. He had reconfigured it to suit his needs. Living quarters on the ground floor, a studio upstairs. No one in Port Navas, with the exception of an eleven-year-old boy, had the slightest idea of what went on there.
The boy was now a man of thirty-five and held the rank of detective sergeant in the Devon and Cornwall Police. He was standing at the stern of a wooden ketch tied up at the quay, his arm raised in a silent salute. The ketch, which had been painstakingly restored, had once belonged to Gabriel. He had bequeathed it to Timothy Peel the day he left Port Navas for the last time.
He climbed out of the car and walked down to the quay. “Permission to come aboard,” he said.
Peel looked at Gabriel’s suede loafers with disapproval. “Not in those shoes, you don’t.”
“I was the one who stripped and stained that deck, as I recall.”
“And I’ve taken very good care of it in your absence.”
Gabriel slipped off his shoes and stepped aboard. Peel handed him a crimson takeaway cup from Costa. “Tea with milk, just the way you like it, Mr. Allon.”
“You mustn’t call me that, Timothy.”
“I thought you were out in the open now.”
“I am. But I insist you refer to me by my given name.”
“Sorry, but you’ll always be Mr. Allon to me.”
“In that case, I shall call you Detective Sergeant Peel.”
He smiled. “Can you imagine?”
“I can, actually. You were always a natural snoop.”
“Only where you were concerned. And Mr. Isherwood, of course.”
“He speaks of you fondly.”
“He called me a little toad, if I remember correctly.”
“You should hear the things he says about me.”
They sat down in the cockpit. The boat had been Gabriel’s salvation during the lost years, the years after Vienna and before Chiara. When he had no painting to restore, he would sail out the Helford River to the sea. Sometimes he would head west to the Atlantic, sometimes south to the coast of Normandy; and each time he returned to Port Navas, Timothy Peel would signal him from his bedroom window with a flash of his torch. Gabriel, his hand upon the wheel, his mind ablaze with images of blood and fire, would flash his running lights twice in reply.
He looked at the foreman’s cottage. “My old place seems to have been given a makeover.”
“A young couple who work in the City of London,” explained Peel. “After the pandemic hit, a lot of well-to-do Londoners suddenly discovered the joys of life in Cornwall.”
