Private London

Chapter 95

Professor Annabelle Weston lived in an expensive mews-style two-bedroomed house not far from Marylebone High Street – and she hadn’t paid for it with her earnings from Chancellors.

She’d inherited a fortune when her father, an oil and steel billionaire, had died. So she certainly didn’t want for money. Which was what baffled me most about the whole thing. Until Jack Morgan told me what Harlan Shapiro had been working on before he was taken.

I leaned on the doorbell again. No response.

I hadn’t expected any.

I stood with Del Rio at the professor’s door and looked at Hannah Shapiro who was sitting with Sam Riddel in the back of my car. She was gazing at me through the window with an expression on her face that I couldn’t read.

Somewhere in there was the girl I knew. Somewhere was the woman she had become.

I thought of the consequences of these sequences of events. I thought of my lovely god-daughter Chloe. I remembered the tubes attached to her. I remembered the bandaging around her head. I remembered the beeping noises the monitors made as they checked her vital signs. I remembered her closed eyelids, the eyes flicking behind them as though she were trying to find her way home from the darkness.

I remembered the promise to her dad that I had made as he lay dying in my arms in a dust-blown wreck of a town in Iraq.

Then I picked up the police-issue battering ram and smashed Professor Annabelle Weston’s front door in.