LITMIR.BIZ

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head. Her right temple was throbbing so hard that she felt it would burst. It terrified her. Involuntarily she put her hand up to her hairline and felt blood seeping between her fingers. She opened her eyes and the room started to turn, spinning round and round, faster and faster. Quickly she closed them again tight shut, but it was too late. She was turning herself now, and, as she felt her stomach heaving upward, she leant over to the side and was violently sick onto Katya’s ruby-red carpet. The movement and the retching made her suddenly conscious of a new hurt low in her back. For a while she lay motionless on the floor facing her own vomit while the two pains fought each other for supremacy until finally they fused together into one solid agony. And the pain was mixed up with shame and fear. She knew what she had done: she had messed everything up. She shuddered as she thought of what Franz would say when he found her. She had to get up, to warn them before this Vanessa woman arrived. Because she didn’t know where Katya was. Not in the room certainly. The terrible, shameful retching had at least cleared her head and she found she could open her eyes now without the furniture rising up to meet her. She took in the unmade bed, the syringe that had rolled away underneath it, a photograph of Katya’s dead parents on top of the bookcase, and beyond it the door. It was closed. She felt in her pockets for the key, without success. Like a fool she must have left it in the door when she came in, and, if so, Katya would almost certainly have locked her in as she fled.

      The pain came back in waves, and for a moment she thought she would pass out again, and perhaps she might have if she hadn’t heard the sound of a car driving up and parking in the courtyard below. Now she knew she had almost no time left – a minute or two at most – before Titus opened the front door and brought his guest inside. And so, gritting her teeth, she dragged herself across the carpet to the door and then, putting her hand up to the handle, she found her worst suspicions confirmed. It was indeed locked. But she’d already thought of what to do. She reached down and took off her shoe and then, using all her strength, banged it on the door frame again and again, while she shouted out for help. After half a minute she came to the end of her strength and fell back in a swoon. But it was enough.

      Two doors down and one floor below, Jana’s brother, Franz, was sitting on his bed, polishing a pair of expensive black shoes. They were spotless, gleaming, and clearly didn’t need polishing, but he still shined them every night, enjoying the ritual, the backward and forward strokes. He was in full evening dress, apart from his tie, and, just as he had been doing all day, he was thinking resentfully about Titus’s ill-considered association with the policeman’s wife, searching his brain for a way to get Titus to break off the relationship. Franz had his door shut, so he didn’t hear Jana fall or Katya running in the corridor up above. He did, however, hear Vanessa Trave drive up into the courtyard and Titus come out to greet her. And it was probably the way he strained to hear their conversation down below that enabled him to catch the sound of his sister banging on Katya’s door, crying out for help.

      He ran upstairs, but he couldn’t release her straightaway. He had spare keys to all the rooms in the house, even Titus’s study, but they were back in his room, and so he had to return there to get the spare for Katya’s bedroom. Once inside, he helped his sister onto the bed and listened patiently while she explained what had happened. He wasn’t angry with Jana; instead he blamed himself. He ought to have gone with her to give Katya the injection. The fact that the girl hadn’t resisted last time didn’t mean she’d always be that way. And she’d obviously kicked Jana in the small of the back while Jana was down on the ground. He’d have a score to settle with little Katya when he found her, which had to be quickly. Vanessa Trave was downstairs, and she couldn’t be allowed to know what was going on. Once again Franz clenched his fists in angry frustration. Why wouldn’t Titus do what he asked? The woman was married to a police inspector for Christ’s sake, the same police inspector who’d asked all those awkward questions after Ethan died, poking his nose into other people’s business. So what if she and Trave were separated! They probably still talked to each other. Couldn’t Titus at least have taken her somewhere else? No, no, always no. Titus was a law unto himself.

      Franz looked down at his sister, trying to decide what to do. She was too badly hurt to help with the search. That much was obvious. And there was no time to lose.

      ‘Stay here, Jani, I’ll come back when I find her,’ he said, speaking in Dutch. His voice was gruff but not unkind, and Jana picked up on her brother’s use of his pet name for her.

      ‘Yes, I’m sorry, Franz,’ she said, sounding relieved. ‘She went crazy. I didn’t expect it.’

      ‘I know. Rest now. I’ll be back soon.’ He picked up his sister’s hand, held it lightly for a moment, and then let it go.

      It was the nearest Franz Claes could get to tenderness or affection. Such emotions didn’t come naturally to him. But he was fond of his elder sister. They went back a long way. And the idea of her being pushed around and kicked by bloody little Katya made him angry inside. He could feel the rage building like a knot in his stomach. But he had it under control. It was something he prided himself on – he was always in control of his emotions.

      Franz went out into the corridor and stood there for a moment, listening intently. With his left forefinger he stroked a long white scar that ran down from the hairline above his left ear to a blotch of red puckered skin just below his jaw, but otherwise he was entirely still. Titus and the Trave woman were somewhere downstairs, too far away to be audible from where he was. It was Katya he was listening for. But he could hear nothing except the sound of his sister’s painful breathing in the room behind him. He looked from one end of the corridor to the other, trying to decide which way to go. The house was old, full of unused cupboards and recesses where Katya could be hiding, and there were two staircases going down, one at each end of the corridor. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and went to the right.

      A few minutes later he began to be seriously concerned. He’d gone from room to room, systematically searching every crevice, every corner, but he could find no trace of Katya anywhere. What if he was wasting his time? What if she had got out of the house and was even now heading down towards the gate? The doors and windows were locked, but she could have slipped out the front door and past her uncle when he went out to greet Vanessa. He knew Titus wouldn’t welcome an interruption before dinner, but he felt he had no choice. There wasn’t any time to spare, and he needed help if he was going to find the damned girl before she caused any more trouble.

      As he’d anticipated, Titus and his guest were downstairs in the drawing room. It was the handsomest room in the house, with its views through high windows onto the rose garden and the valley beyond – a good place for a romantic encounter, Franz thought bitterly. As a rule of thumb, he didn’t like women, but this one he disliked more than most. She was in the way, and she was a security risk. He wished that Titus had never clapped eyes on her.

      He took a deep breath, knocked at the door, and went in. They were standing in front of the fireplace. Titus was holding Vanessa’s hand but dropped it when Franz came in.

      ‘What is it, Franz? It’s surely not time for dinner yet,’ he said, glancing over at the golden ormolu clock ticking sedately beneath the oval Venetian mirror on the mantelpiece. It was just after six o’clock.

      ‘I know. I’m sorry, Titus, Mrs Trave. Something has come up. It won’t take a moment.’

      ‘Oh, very well. I won’t be long, my dear.’ Titus Osman made it a point never to raise his voice, never to depart from the elaborate rules of courtesy that he’d set for himself, but under an apparently unruffled exterior he was seriously annoyed by Franz’s intrusion. For several weeks now he’d felt the right moment was approaching for a marriage proposal to Vanessa. The timing had to be right, and Titus was nothing if not patient, but she seemed particularly receptive this evening. The weather helped, of course. A warm late summer evening with the sun sinking gently into the pine woods beyond the lake. Perhaps he would take her out into the rose garden after dinner. Smoke a cigar; walk the carefully tended pathways hand in hand in the moonlight; tell her how he felt. But then again – perhaps not the cigar. The smoke might get in the way, particularly if they kissed. He liked the slow courtship that they had been engaged in, and he had enjoyed planning each move forward, continually adjusting his words and suggestions depending

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