‘Are they conscious?’ she manages to ask. Her voice is barely a whisper.

  ‘Fully.’

  She closes her own eyes, trying to imagine what these people are suffering. She assumes they are all super recognisers, like her. She had a repeat nightmare in her last months in the police unit. Told to identify a decapitated head, she had to watch a stream of thousands of contorted, disfigured faces until she could bear it no more and woke up in a cold sweat. For a second she wonders if Rob’s lying here too, whether they’ll be incarcerated together, side by side, but she doesn’t recognise any of the faces.

  ‘Sometimes we let them see a movie,’ Putin says, glancing at his watch. ‘It’s a little in-joke of ours – we call it the Ludovico hour.’

  105

  Silas

  Silas moves fast after ending the call with Jake. Ward isn’t happy about forensics coming into his own office to check for fingerprints, but he agrees when Silas tells him on the phone about Jake’s encounter at the Carrefour petrol station with Kate’s double – and possibly Rob’s too.

  What worries Silas is that Ward must know Rob well, certainly better than he knows Kate, whom he only met once, when the super-recogniser unit was set up. They would have been talking about Centaur for months. Did he meet Rob enough times to realise that it wasn’t him walking into his office?

  ‘The boss isn’t stupid,’ he says to Strover as they grab a coffee in a Pret opposite Moorfields Eye Hospital. ‘Even if he did go to university.’

  ‘You think it’s Gilmour?’ Strover asks.

  ‘Let’s see.’

  All Silas knows is that Rob’s fears about Gilmour one day taking over his life don’t seem so incredible any more.

  It doesn’t take long for the results to come back on Kate’s passport, which was still on his boss’s desk. Her fingerprints are on file – it was part of the vetting procedure when she was recruited to the super-recogniser unit – and they have been duly found all over the passport. But so have more recent fingerprints, which forensics have checked against IABS, a new Home Office database that contains the prints of all foreign nationals entering the UK. And they belong to a woman from Finland who went missing six months ago, shortly after arriving in the UK.

  ‘Her name’s Catrine,’ Silas says, passing his phone across the table to Strover. Jake was right.

  ‘Uncanny,’ Strover says, studying the picture. Unsettling too. Silas thought he knew Kate well, but the likeness is striking. Enough to convince Ward.

  It’s another ten minutes before the initial results on Rob’s passport come through. Only one person’s fingerprints are found on it, apart from Ward’s, but it’s not clear whose they are. Rob’s prints aren’t on file and IDENT1, the police database of prints for everyone taken into custody, has failed to find a match.

  They are now waiting for the Royal Thai Police to call back. Strover’s new best friend, Manu Jabthian at the Bang Kaen Detective Training School, unearthed another old file overnight on Gilmour Martin that includes his prints.

  Strover’s phone rings.

  ‘It’s Manu,’ she says, glancing at the international number.

  ‘Answer it,’ Silas says, trying to remain calm.

  He watches her as she listens and then hangs up.

  ‘The prints on Rob’s passport match Gilmour Martin’s from Thailand.’

  106

  Jake

  Jake scrabbles down through the dunes and onto the beach. The tide is in, but there’s a thin strip of sand that runs halfway around the bay to a tiny inlet, where a couple of small boats are moored. Beyond it the dunes give way to rocks and then sheer cliffs. There must be a drop of at least fifty feet from the house where he saw Kate, and there’s no beach directly beneath it. No obvious way up.

  He still can’t be sure it was Kate, but her hand movements were familiar. In the early days, when they’d drunk too much on the narrowboat, she would stand on the bow and wave energetically at passing boats, putting her whole body into it, determined to get at least a smile in return, even from the grumpiest passers-by. It was a private joke of theirs.

  He has no idea how he can reach the house. It’s also much further away than he thought. There was no way in through the main gate, which he observed from a distance, and the perimeter fence is too high and monitored by CCTV. Approaching from the sea is his only hope.

  He loves Kate more than ever, will never take her for granted again. ‘We could go somewhere if you like,’ the woman in the Swindon shopping centre said. He flushes at the memory of it. One stupid moment. Her mouth tasted bitter, like yarrow.

  He looks across the bay, then bends down to pluck some moist samphire shoots pushing through the sand. He’s starving, but there’s no time to forage properly. It’s up to him now. DI Hart said there was nothing more they can do, at least for the moment. If a couple who look like Rob and Kate have walked into a police station in the UK, Jake has only one option left. He glances at the boats again and starts to run towards them, wishing he were fitter, praying that he’s not already too late.

  107

  Kate

  Kate watches as the woman in the nurse’s outfit comes towards her and Putin, studiously avoiding eye contact. Does Putin control her too? As if on cue, he pulls out the remote. But for who? He stares at the woman’s firm figure, making no effort to be subtle, before checking his phone again. The woman immediately looks up at Kate, giving the faintest nod in the direction of the main door.

  Did Kate imagine it? Her stomach starts to churn. What does the woman mean? Kate heard the door lock behind them when they arrived; it clicked with a sickening finality.

  The woman turns to smile at Putin, who appears surprised, flattered. It must be the first time she’s paid him any attention. The woman smiles again, coquettishly this time, and starts to walk towards him, hips swaying shamelessly as she passes close by Kate, one hand holding the clipboard across her chest, the other down by her side. Kate feels the plastic card before she sees it, brushing her hand. A card like the one Putin used to let them in.

  Kate grasps it and watches as the woman continues to flirt with Putin, leaning in to whisper something to him. Men can be so weak. He momentarily turns away, as if he doesn’t want Kate to hear their exchange. And then the woman looks over his shoulder at her and mouths one word.

  Jump.

  108

  Jake

  Jake’s heart sinks as he reaches the end of the deserted beach. Both boats moored in the inlet are old and unloved. Earlier he’d seen some buoys marking lobster pots, strung along the coast like beads on a giant necklace, and he’d thought the boats might be in decent condition. He’d also expected to find a tender pulled up on the sand somewhere, hidden at the back of the beach, but he can’t see one. He’ll have to wade out.

  Five minutes later, he hauls himself onto the nearest of the two dilapidated boats, checking again that there’s no one around. He’s hidden his phone and wallet behind some rocks on the beach. The water was cold and his wet trousers are heavy as he gets his bearings on board. He’s always loved boats and has long dreamt of owning one like this, maybe a Plymouth Pilot with an enclosed cuddy and dual helm positions. He’d keep it down in Cornwall.

  He scans the cliffs again, where he thought he saw Kate. It’s at least a mile away, but if he can get the engine going, he can cut straight across the bay and search for a way up. He lifts the inspection hatch and peers down at a rusty, single-cylinder, ten-horsepower diesel engine. The last time he had to hotwire anything was when he lost both sets of ignition keys for the narrowboat’s ancient engine. All he needs is a piece of cable. The owner of the boat seems reassuringly untidy, like him, and Jake soon finds a rusty length in the depths of the engine bay, semi-submerged in the bilge’s oily seawater. After turning on the fuel, Jake touches one end of the cable to the starter motor, the other to the positive terminal of the twelve-volt battery, bypassing the ignition switch. A few sparks – enough contact to crank the engine. Bingo. Removing the cable, now hot, he grabs the tiller and sets a course for the cliffs.

  Kate used to hate how much time he spent with his head in the engine. Maybe now she’ll think it was worth it.

  109

  Kate

  Kate grips the card in her hand and slides off the flip-flops, trying to control her breathing. She can’t stay here a second longer. The ventilator masks, the IV tubes, the screens – she’s never going to subject herself to all that again. She’d rather die than get trapped here, in this grey torture zone between life and death. Her body might be weak, boot-marked and sore, but her mind is strong.

  Jump.

  The lock clicks and the door is open before she hears the first shout behind her from Putin. The woman will do her best to stop him; Kate prays that her selflessness won’t be the death of her. Kate doesn’t care about the pain that’s about to rip through her own body. The urge to escape is overwhelming, visceral.

  Fresh air, blue sky. The sea stretching out before her. Kate runs as she’s never run before, ignoring the pain in her swollen ribs, forcing her legs to go faster, focusing on the sea. The sea that extends all the way to Cornwall, to where she and Jake used to camp in the drizzle, water dripping through the flysheet, their Morris Minor failing to start, just enough money for a pint in the pub across the soggy cornfield, Jake stopping to pick her stitchwort and bluebells, her cursing him, loving him.

  Her chest is heaving with the effort now, and she feels nauseous, faint, but she’s got nothing to lose. It was Jake out there on the cliffs, she’s sure of it. His profile is hard to mistake. It’s why she recognised him in the CCTV footage. He looked surprised when the woman kissed him, she’ll give him that. Shocked, even, by what he was doing. It had to happen, though. She and Jake were going nowhere, not communicating, too poor and too tired and too stuck in a rut, clinging to the wreckage of their waterborne life together, taking each other down to the cold lonely depths of a world where they’d forgotten how to love. Then along came Rob. And now Jake’s come looking for her.

  She keeps running, forcing her bruised body forward until there’s nothing solid beneath her feet any more. She doesn’t stop. The sea is waiting for her far below, waiting to engulf her in its salty embrace, and she is a child again, jumping from the harbour wall. For a split second she thinks about arcing her body into a swallow dive, but she’s never jumped from this height before. She’s going to die. The cliffs are too tall. Better a quick death now than a slow, wide-eyed one back there. She tries to force her hands down to her sides, keep her feet pointed as she plummets. A pencil jump, like the one that impressed the Cornish boys in Mousehole. But then the shock hits, hot fiery pain like she’s never felt before, twisting and folding her screaming body until it’s snuffed out by the smack of watery darkness.

  110

  Jake

  Jake hears the scream before he sees the body tumbling through the air. He knows at once it’s Kate and all he can do is watch from the boat, praying that she will survive the fall. Or did she leap? She always loved to jump and these cliffs are sheer and there is water below, but she must have been desperate to risk it. A second later she hits the surface, leaning too far back but feet first.

  He’s still five hundred yards away. The engine’s cooling system isn’t working and he’s worried it’s about to overheat, but he tries to squeeze more power from it even so. A man appears on the clifftop, peers over the edge and disappears. Did he see him? Jake is now two hundred yards from where Kate hit the water. He can see her body, floating in the sea, listless, head down.

  ‘Kate!’ he shouts about the noise of the motor. Thick black smoke has started to billow out of the engine bay. ‘Kate!’

  Her body is not moving. A gown of some sort is floating on the surface beside her. He’s still a hundred yards away.

  ‘I’m here,’ he calls out, breathless. He reaches forward to turn off the fuel, one hand still on the tiller. The engine cuts as he pulls up alongside her. She’s still not moving. The sea is deep and dark, even though they’re close to the shore. Cursing the choppy water, he braces himself against the gunwale and reaches over the side. He grasps repeatedly at Kate as he leans out – grasps and misses, tries again – and then finally he manages to grip a hank of her hair, a shoulder. Big heart thumping, he leans out even further, dangerously far, gets both hands under her torso and turns her. He lifts up her head, trying to keep it above the waves. Her eyes are shut and her limbs are limp. Floppy. Tears are streaming down his face now. He can’t bear the sight of her like this. With one last effort, he scoops her up, heaves her out of the water and lays her in the bottom of the boat. She’s not breathing.

  He checks in vain for a pulse at her wrist. Leaning forward, he breathes into her mouth. Her lips are cold. Deathly. He throws back his head in a howl, a wounded roar at the sea. Who did this to her? His Kate? The love of his life. He looks down at her broken body again. It’s OK. He can do this. No one else can save her. He starts to compress her chest, desperately trying to remember the first-aid course he attended in the village hall, something about the rhythm of ‘Staying Alive’. Kate loves the Bee Gees, used to dance around the boat to it when he was trying to write. She dived off the bow once when he’d had enough and had started to chase her. He glances up at the clifftop. Something awful must have happened up there to make her jump. After thirty compressions, he breathes into her mouth again: one, two, three.

  Kate starts to cough, throwing up chestfuls of seawater.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Jake says, shaking with relief as his heart soars. The tears return. He rolls Kate onto her side and thumps her back as she’s sick again.

  ‘Ow,’ she moans. And then they’re both crying and he’s cradling her in his arms as he scans the wide empty sea.

  Five minutes later, Jake has got the engine going again and he’s heading back across the bay, getting them as far away as possible from the house. No one has appeared again on the cliffs, but he’s not taking any chances. Kate is sitting in the bottom of the boat, out of the wind, wearing his jacket. And he is standing at the stern, steering a steady course for the shore as a coastguard rescue helicopter hoves into view.

  111

  Silas

  Silas and Strover watch from a doorway across the street as the black cab slows outside Rob’s apartment in Nile Street. Silas has arranged for backup and Armed Response officers are in position at either end of the street, ready to assist in the arrest if he needs help, but he’s still nervous. NABIS has just confirmed that the bullet that killed Dr Varma matches those fired in Cornwall and Thailand. And the man who pulled the trigger is still on the loose.

  Silas has a weird feeling when he sees the couple step out of the cab. He knows it’s not Kate, but he still does a double-take. And he now knows who the man is. The fingerprint match from Thailand with Gilmour Martin was the final piece of the puzzle. In consultation with the Met’s SIO, Silas requested Air Traffic Control to monitor the man’s earlier helicopter flight from Swindon to London, and two unmarked cars from the Met’s Specialist Crime and Operations Branch tracked the taxi journey from Battersea Heliport to Nile Street, considered the safest place to make an arrest.

  ‘Here we go,’ he says. They cross the street, approaching the couple as they’re about to enter the apartment. The adrenaline rush is almost overwhelming. He never thought he’d be back on the streets of London again, making arrests with armed support. Conor would be impressed, maybe Mel would be too. That’s the problem. They never get to see these moments, can’t share in the professional satisfaction that makes him get out of bed every morning.

  Strover moves towards the woman, flashing her ID as she takes her to one side, while Silas confronts the man, who visibly tenses.

  ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of ordering the murder of Dr Ajay Varma,’ Silas says. ‘For the abduction of twelve super recognisers, the murder in Cornwall of a barman at the Bluebell pub in Wiltshire, the false registration of a car with the DVLA, and entering the UK on a false passport. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you can later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  ‘Very good,’ the man says, glancing up and down the street, where armed officers have now broken cover and taken up closer positions. He looks so young, barely older than Conor. ‘But aren’t you supposed to give a name?’ he asks. ‘My name?’

  Silas takes a deep breath, watching as Strover hands the woman over to another female police officer. To his right, he clocks an Armed Response officer shifting his feet, gun trained on the man in front of him, elbows high. This is it. What Silas lives for. Strover is back at his side again. She’s done well. He stares at the man, tries to imagine what it must have been like for Kate when she looked into these hollow blue eyes, blinking now in the bright London sunshine. Whose soul did she really see?

  ‘Your name?’ Silas repeats.

  Strover looks across at him, waiting for him to confirm that it’s Gilmour Martin.

  He pauses, savouring the moment, the evening light of east London.

  ‘Your name’s Rob,’ he says. Strover flinches beside him. ‘Robert Colwan.’

  The man looks at Silas, blood draining from his face, and checks up and down the street. Has Silas got it wrong? This is Rob before him, no question. It always was Rob, wasn’t it? But the man doesn’t speak. He just stares at Silas as he slips a hand inside his jacket pocket. A moment later, shots ring out as the man slumps to the ground, armed officers running towards them from either end of the street, the air full of urgent cries.