The Phoenix

He nodded.

‘Once I’m divorced … things will be different,’ she promised him.

Gazing into her eyes, Mak wanted to believe her.

After dinner, they sat out on the terrace talking for a long time. Afterwards, as usual, he walked her back to her own suite of rooms. But this time, when she placed her hand on the door, he moved in behind her, pressing his body close against hers.

‘I don’t want you to go.’

Ella closed her eyes. She could feel his warm breath in her ear and the heat of his body against her bare back. She was afraid of him, but excited at the same time, his desire triggering her own. Turning around she kissed him, only once but with a passion that, to her shame, she didn’t have to fake.

‘I don’t want to go either,’ she whispered afterwards. ‘But I must. Goodnight, Makis.’

Turning the handle she slipped inside her rooms, closing the door behind her, her heart pounding as she waited to see whether he would force the issue and follow. To her combined relief and disappointment, he didn’t.

Back in his own bed, feeling elated and frustrated in equal measure, Mak stared up at the ceiling. The kiss was real. That much he knew for sure. As for everything else Persephone had told him tonight, on balance he believed her. But Miriam’s warnings still hovered in the back of his mind like an unwanted black cloud.

Better safe than sorry.

He would speak with Cameron McKinley first thing tomorrow morning about having her followed. Persephone Hamlin would be free to go to Athens. But until the hour she joined him aboard his yacht, Argo, Makis Alexiadis would be watching her every move.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Detective Inspector Jim Boyd pulled back the plastic sheeting and winced at the remains on the medical examiner’s slab.

‘Female, obviously,’ Lisa Janner, the medical examiner explained. Helpfully, as it was far from obvious to Jim Boyd that the slimy mess he was looking at was even human. ‘And as I said on the phone, Asian. Even with the facial features largely destroyed, you can tell from the hair. See?’ Lisa lifted up a thick strand of glossy black hair between two gloved fingers, for DI Boyd’s perusal. ‘Probably early fifties. Well off, judging from the manicured hands, expensive dentistry. Dead long before she was submerged.’

The body, what remained of it, had washed up on the banks of the Thames not far from Westminster Bridge in the early hours of this morning, wrapped ineffectually in three layers of black plastic bin bag that had done very little to protect it from the foul ravages of the river. Some poor student out for a dawn jog had found it and spent twenty minutes heaving his guts out before he had the strength to call 999. That’ll teach the smug bastard, turning his body into a temple while the rest of us are still in bed sleeping off our hangovers, thought Jim Boyd. Although he was damn glad he hadn’t found ‘her’ in her original state. If what he was looking at now was the cleaned-up version, he dreaded to think …

‘Cause of death almost certainly blunt force trauma to the back of the skull,’ Lisa went on, gently turning the slimy orb to one side to reveal the wound. ‘Although there are other relevant injuries that might have resulted in—’

‘Where’s the mark? The letter?’ It was the first time Boyd had spoken. The first time he’d felt confident he could open his mouth without vomiting.

‘Ah. That’s down here.’ Mercifully covering up the melted remnants of the woman’s features, Lisa Janner lifted the base of the plastic tarp. One foot had been completely, and very cleanly severed, as if with a guillotine. But the other had been marked along the entire sole with a large letter: ‘P’.

‘What is that?’ Jim Boyd looked closer. He felt more comfortable down at this end. ‘Not a tattoo?’

‘No. It’s a brand,’ the medical examiner informed him. ‘Like a cattle brand. It was made with hot metal. Burned into the flesh.’

‘After death?’ Boyd asked hopefully, wincing again.

‘Impossible to say.’

It took Jim Boyd a few moments to remember where he’d seen something similar recently. In the newspaper. The little toddler, washed up on the beach in Greece. Branded like an animal, and on the foot too. But that kid had been a migrant, stuffed onto one of those Libyan death boats, the poorest of the poor. What could a child like that have in common with a rich, middle-aged Asian bird

stuffed into bin bags in London.

‘Sir?’

Harrison, Boyd’s sergeant, stuck his eager, ruddy-cheeked face around the door.

‘We’ve got a name, sir. Probable anyway. Professor Noriko Adachi. She’s an academic, apparently. Lives in Japan.’

‘Japan?’ Boyd raised an eyebrow.

‘Yes, sir. The techs were able to trace a bar code on a library card found with the body. It’s from Osaka University. One of Professor Adachi’s students there officially reported her missing three weeks ago.’

Boyd frowned. ‘What was she doing in London?’