Angel of the Dark

“Matzo balls,” he said dully.

“Sorry. Matzo balls.” She blushed. “Not much of a Jewish wife, am I?”

A few weeks earlier, on their honeymoon, David would have laughed at that line. Made some joke about Catholic girls being crap in the kitchen but virtuosos in the bedroom. Now he said nothing. He just sat there, staring. Something’s changed.

Inside, she was worried, but she made sure to betray no trace of her anxiety in her tone.

“So if I have dinner ready at eight, you’ll be home?”

“I’ll be home.”

David Ishag kissed her on the cheek and went to work.

TEN MINUTES LATER, BEHIND THE WHEEL of his Range Rover Evoque, David plugged in his MP3 player and listened again to the recording Danny McGuire had given him yesterday.

Sarah Jane’s voice. “We can’t, not yet. I’m not ready.”

A man’s voice, electronically distorted. “Come on, angel. We’ve been through this. We go through it every time. The gods have demanded their sacrifice. The time is now.”

Sarah Jane again. Angry now. “That’s all very easy for you to say, but it’s not the gods that have to do it, is it? It’s me. I’m the one who has to suffer. I’m the one who always suffers.”

“I’ll be gentle this time.”

A strangled sound, half muffled. Was it a laugh? Then Sarah’s voice again.

“He’s different from the others. I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Different? How is he different?”

“He’s younger.” There was a note of desperation in her voice, of pity even. Hearing her made David Ishag’s heart tighten. “He has so much to live for.”

The distorted voice took on a harder edge. “Your sister has a lot to live for too, doesn’t she?”

The line went crackly at this point, and the audio was lost. David had heard the recording fifty, a hundred times now, desperately searching for any meaning other than the obvious one: that his wife and some unknown lover were plotting his murder. Each time he reached this point, he willed the next line to be different. Prayed he would hear Sarah Jane’s voice saying: “No, I can’t, I won’t do it. David’s my husband and I love him. Leave me alone.” But each time, the nightmare recurred exactly as it had before.

“Yes, yes. Friday night.”

“I love you, angel.”

“I love you too.”

With David’s help, Danny McGuire and his team had finally managed to tap in to Sarah Jane’s cell phone, as well as the two pay phones in Dharavi that his men had observed her using. They still hadn’t traced the identity of the man. He was obviously a pro, distorting his voice and using sophisticated blocking software to prevent anyone from accurately tracking his number. But the Ishag mansion was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Any unidentified male coming within five hundred feet of the place was photographed and, if necessary, stopped and searched.

“You’re completely safe,” Danny McGuire told David. “If she tries anything, we’ll be there in an instant.”

But David Ishag didn’t feel safe. Not just because Interpol being there “in an instant” might not be quick enough. It could take less than “an instant” for a bullet to penetrate his skull or a kitchen knife to puncture his aorta. But because the real tragedy of all this, the thing he feared most, had already happened. He had lost Sarah Jane. Worse than that, he never really had her in the first place. Sarah Jane, his Sarah Jane, didn’t exist.

Even now, in the face of overwhelming damning evidence of her guilt—even without the audiotapes, David Ishag had seen McGuire’s pictures of the other widows, and the resemblances were too striking to ignore—he couldn’t fully make himself believe it. Sarah Jane had looked so heartbreakingly sexy in that negligee this morning. She’d sounded so vulnerable when he hadn’t been able to bring himself to laugh at her jokes, or even look at her properly when she spoke to him. Part of him, a big part, still wanted to tell Danny McGuire and Interpol and the rest of the world to go fuck themselves. To take Sarah Jane to bed, make love to her the way he used to and afterward simply ask her about the man on the tape and the lies she’d told him. Challenge her face-to-face to explain herself and give him a rational explanation.

And she would explain herself and apologize, and David would forgive her, and someone else would have committed these dreadful murders, not Sarah Jane, and they’d live happily ever after.

His car phone rang, shattering the fantasy.

“So we’re still set for an eight o’clock start tonight.” Danny McGuire sounded almost excited, as if they were talking about a kick-off at a football game and not an attempt on David’s life. “No last-minute changes. That’s good.”

“You picked all that up, then? At breakfast.”

“Clear as a bell.”