The Hogarth Conspiracy (48 page)

“Hidden before and hidden again.” Oliver shook his head. “All those deaths for nothing.”

“If it saves Liza Frith, it will have at least done some good,” Victor replied, walking to the door and pausing. “I'm sorry I put you under so much pressure. How are you?”

“As you see.” He smiled faintly.

“Thank you again for what you've done.”

Oliver nodded, genuinely moved. “In the end, it was the right thing to do. The
only
thing.”

Sixty-Two

I
T TOOK
V
ICTOR ALMOST AN HOUR TO REACH THE APPOINTED MEETING
place, a place where he had hoped never to return. He pulled up at the knot of trees where he had parked before. Where a huge fire had once burned, a smaller fire now smoldered, throwing haphazard light on the figures surrounding it. From the copse behind, Victor heard the familiar sounds of dogs barking and squabbling but not the hysterical savagery of a fight. He was grateful for that.

As Victor approached the people with the case in his hand, he heard an owl hooting in the distance. He stopped, caught by a memory. When he was first in jail, he had struggled, fighting panic through days that were intense and blank with inaction. But the nights were the worst. That long stretch of thinking, of brooding, of remembering the trial, the witnesses, the lies that had so unjustly brought him to a prison cell. And then, one night, he had heard an owl hooting. Had almost imagined it passing close over his head, so close that he could hear the soft rhythm of its wings beating, its journey taking him out of confinement to the far, wide woods of Worcestershire.

“Ballam?”

Victor blinked, bringing himself back to the present moment.

“You got the painting?”

“Yes.” He moved toward the group, and the man with the infected eyes detached himself and came up to him, He put out his hand.

“Give it to me.”

“Give me the girl first.”

“You don't trust me?”

Amused, Victor smiled. “Don't be offended, but no.”

Annoyed, the man gestured to his companions. One of them disappeared into the shadows, then came back into the firelight holding Liza Frith's arm. She was silent, her head bowed, her dress stained. But she was alive.

“Tell him to bring her over here,” Victor said, watching as she approached.

The case began to feel heavy in his grip, the handle burning his skin as he curled his fingers around the leather. But it wasn't the painting inside—that weighed nothing—it was the weight of all that the Hogarth meant. The deaths, past and present. And in his hand Victor felt the crushing weight, the burden, of blood.

He wanted suddenly to throw it onto the fire, to watch the face of the Prince of Wales—the image that had been the source of so much misery—consumed in the flames.

But instead he held out his left hand toward Liza Frith and with his right hand extended the case toward the triad man, who snatched it, pushing Liza toward Victor and opening the case.

“Good,” was all he said. Victor put his arm around a silent, shaking, and grateful Liza and turned to leave. They'd gone only a yard or two before the Chinese man called out, “Hey! Just a minute.”

Victor froze. He felt Liza stiffen in his arms.

“What?”

“You did well.”

“You wanted the painting,” Victor said more smoothly than he felt, “and you got it. We had a deal.”

Rubbing his inflamed eye, the man passed the painting over to one of his colleagues and came toward Victor. In the background the dogs were still barking, the copse a dark hump behind. Every instinct told Victor to run, but he knew he couldn't escape with Liza in tow, so he waited and watched as the man drew up to them.

“Is there a problem?”

“There's a dogfight soon. You want to watch?”

“No.”

“You sure?” he asked again. “There's going to be a sideshow, something you might be interested in, Mr. Ballam.”

Uneasy, Victor glanced at Liza. “I want to get her home.”

“Put her in the car and then get the fuck back here!” Victor realized that he wasn't going to be allowed to go anywhere.

He walked Liza to his car and helped her in. He put his coat around her and briefly touched her cheek. Her eyes fixed on his, her lips parting for an instant. But she said nothing.

“I won't be long,” he promised, sensing he was being watched. “Stay here. When I get back, we'll go home.”

Straightening up, Victor followed the man back toward the fire. But they didn't stop there; they continued walking toward a large tent, both of them ducking under the tarpaulin as they entered. Wary, Victor looked around him, hearing the dogs barking frantically. Remembering Lim Chang and terrified of what might be about to happen to him, Victor felt the sweat slither down his back and moved farther into the tent only when he was pushed.

“Go on!”

The fog of cigarette smoke was so intense that for a moment he couldn't make out the figures clearly, but eventually he could see a group of men surrounding what seemed to be a ring. The dogs were still barking, and the men's faces turned toward Victor were all Chinese except for one: the face of the man being dragged toward the ring. He was English, heavyset, flushed, sweaty, and terrified. Stripped to the waist and barefoot, he was thrown over the steel enclosure of the ring, four Chinese men entering after him. Then, with speed and terrifying efficiency, they spread-eagled him, tying his wrists to two metal posts sunk into the ground and his ankles to two others. The man was struggling, screaming, wetting himself; then, as his tormentors stepped back, he began sobbing.

Horror-struck, Victor stared at the man standing next to him. “Who is he?”

“You don't know?”

“No.” Victor could hardly speak. “What are you going to do to him?”

“What we do to anyone who crosses us or betrays us. Watch very carefully, Mr. Ballam; this is a warning. When our business here is finished, you stay silent. He didn't. He tried to cheat us.”

“Jesus, who is he?”

“You really don't know?”

“No!” Victor said. “How could I know?”

“This is your killer, Mr. Ballam. This is the man who killed Marian Miller and Annette Dvorski.”

He turned to the triad man and looked into the sore eyes and then into the blank darkness.

“This is Bernie Freeland's pilot, Duncan Fairfax.” The triad man glanced over to the sobbing victim, his own face expressionless. “After they landed at Heathrow, he overheard a couple of passengers talking about something they had heard on the flight. Something about a priceless painting. And he wanted it. Needed it to pay off his gambling debts to us. He'd been playing recklessly, asking us for credit. Fat prick thought we'd never call in the debt. Jesus, I bet he couldn't believe his luck; here was a way to pay off his debts in one go! He just had to find the picture before anyone else did.” He paused, watching the squirming man without pity. “It was easy for him to call by later at Marian Miller's room. After all, they were staying in the same airport hotel. She might even have thought he was the john at first. Fairfax found out what she knew and then killed her, making it look like a sex crime.”

“Why the thirty rubles in her mouth?”

“That was a nice touch, supposed to point to the Russians.”

“And the dog fur?”

“What?”

Victor frowned. “Fairfax must have done that.”

Still staring at the bound victim, the Chinese man continued. “After he'd killed Marian Miller, Fairfax went after Bernie Freeland.”

Duncan Fairfax's eyes were bulging with terror. As the dogs barked at the back of the tent, the pilot stared blindly up at the faces that surrounded him.

He was blubbering incoherently, mad with panic.

“He went to New York, to Freeland's apartment, looking for him and the painting. Fairfax didn't like Freeland, so stealing off him to pay his debts didn't worry him.”

“He killed him?”

“Fairfax denies it. He was keen to confess to everything else to save himself, but not that, and he'd have told us, believe me. Bernie Freeland's death might have just been an accident, after all.”

“So why did he kill Annette Dvorski?” Victor asked, then flinched as he heard the dogs coming closer, saw the crowd parting to let the animals and their owners through. It was obvious that the dogs hadn't been fed for some days; their hackles were raised, the whites of their eyes were showing, and their mouths were working frantically against their muzzles.

“Jesus, don't do this—”

He was immediately cut off, his previous question answered.

“Fairfax found Annette Dvorski in the apartment and then tortured her to find out where the painting was, but she didn't know. He killed her anyway and then left. You were supposed to take the blame for that.”

Victor stared at the man, incredulous. “You were there?”

“Not me; one of my people,” he replied. “You had a close call, Mr. Ballam. But poor Fairfax. When we caught up with him and he didn't have the painting, he got all hysterical, pleading for time to get our money back. I knew then that you probably had the Hogarth in that suitcase, so we switched it at the airport. Fairfax was still working with us then, so he organized it. It's easy for a pilot to get luggage swapped.”

Confused, Victor's stared at him. “But if you got the painting … ?”

“Why kill him? Because it wasn't Duncan Fairfax that got hold of it; we did in the end. And we knew that if we let him go, he wouldn't keep quiet. He can't. We'd always be looking over our shoulders.” He pointed to the pilot; there was foam coming from the sides of his mouth as he struggled frantically. “He's fucking mad. He's mad because of the killings, the bloodbath. He didn't have the stomach for it. The murder of Marian Miller, then the torture of Annette Dvorski turned his brain. It was only a matter of time before the police caught up with him and then us. I had to stop that.”

In one sudden movement, the man dropped his hand. The dogs' muzzles were taken off, and the animals hurtled into the ring. They fell onto the bound man, one dog ripping at Fairfax's throat, another at his chest, a third at his face. Blood was spurting from torn arteries, spouting upward onto the jeering crowd; the pilot's agonized screams were piercing as the dogs, wriggling in the sand, exposed his guts and tore the flesh off his face.

Heaving, Victor turned away. At the back of the crowd he could just make out the face of someone he knew—Malcolm Jenner—watching the mauling of the man who had killed his niece.

“
No one
talks about us, Mr. Ballam,” the Chinese man said quietly. “And if you ever feel tempted, remember Duncan Fairfax.”

Behind them the tent had gone silent. The dogs, sated, were quiet, muzzled again. A moment later Victor could see the bloodied remains of Duncan Fairfax being dragged out and thrown into a makeshift hole. As men started to fill it in, he could see a faint flutter of movement as Duncan Fairfax was buried alive.

Sixty-Three

L
IZA
F
RITH WATCHED AS
V
ICTOR GOT BACK INTO THE CAR AND STARTED
the engine. His hands were shaking, and there was sweat on his brow. He stared straight ahead, silent, not trusting his voice.

“Thank you,” Liza said, breaking the silence. “Thanks for coming to get me, Mr. Ballam. Not many would have done that, you know … for a whore.”

“You're human.”

She stared ahead. “Most can't get past the whore bit.” She rubbed her face with the tips of her fingers, then pulled her torn jacket around her.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No. They just left me in some lousy flat, but I was okay. Honestly. Scared but okay.”

“Are you hungry?”

Surprised, she looked at him. “You want to feed me? You've just saved my life and you want to
feed
me?” Her voice was full of wonderment. “Why?”