Oliver York. “We need to check in with Yank.”
“Have at it.”
“It’s your MI5 contact.”
“It’s your art thief on the lam and your grandfather whose house was broken into. If we walked into a bunch of arms traffickers, I’d make the call. I’ll rent the car.” He dipped a hand into her jacket pocket and withdrew her phone, then folded her fingers around it and winked. “Tell Yank I said hi.”
“All right. It does make sense that I make the call. I’ll check with my brother at the same time to see if he knows anything about the break-in.”
Colin took the lead as they switched their route and started toward the car rental kiosks. Emma unlocked her phone and hit Yank’s cell phone number. It was early in Boston but Yank picked up on the first ring. “I just had a call from MI5. They know you’re in London and called Oliver York this morning, asked if you have an idea where to find him. Imagine that.”
“We don’t know where he is. Do they know the identity of the dead man?”
“Not yet. Where’s your grandfather?”
“I haven’t been in touch with him since we left Dublin. We stopped to see him on the way to the airport. He was having tea on the terrace.”
“Has Oliver been in touch with him?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Will he now that he’s on the run? Those two have an unusual friendship.”
“Anything is possible,” Emma said.
“Keep me posted. I’ll see what we can do on our end.”
Yank disconnected without further comment. A short conversation. Emma pictured him at his Back Bay apartment with his wife, Lucy, a clinical psychologist who’d opened up a knitting shop on Newbury Street after balking at moving from their home and her work in northern Virginia. As unorthodox and risky as his brainchild, HIT, was, Yank was a straight arrow. Late forties, chiseled good looks, crisp suits and dedicated to the FBI. He’d known what he was getting into when he’d gone after her—an ex-nun and a Sharpe—to join the FBI and then to become a part of his unique team.
She dialed an art-crimes detective she knew at Scotland Yard, and he put her in touch with the detective chief investigator leading the inquiry into the death at Oliver York’s farm. He listened attentively and instructed her and Colin to come straight to the farm when they arrived in the village.
The calls to her grandfather and her older brother, Lucas, who ran Sharpe Fine Art Recovery, were easier. Neither answered. She left voice mails and caught up with Colin. He had the paperwork finished for their rental car. They’d be on the road to the Cotswolds in no time.
“How’d it go?” he asked her. “Did Yank ask if we had a good time on our honeymoon?”
“He did not. I wish we’d run into arms traffickers. They’re more straightforward than Oliver York.”
“But nowhere near as charming.”
* * *
A few minutes later, they were on the road, heading west to the rolling hills and classic honey-stone villages of the picturesque Cotswolds. Colin was doing the driving. Emma was preoccupied, thinking about Oliver’s call. “You know this has something to do with the break-in at Granddad’s.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I left him a voice mail. I left Lucas a voice mail, too. I’ll try Granddad again.”
She was almost surprised when he answered. “Emma,” he said. “You’re in London?”
“Just landed. What are you up to?”
“Contemplating finding a hardware store to fix my broken window.”
That didn’t sound suspicious, and there was nothing suspicious about his tone. “Has Oliver York been in touch by any chance?”
“No.” A pause. “Why?”
“Something’s happened. I’m not sure what I can tell you at this point. Let me know or let the gardai know if Oliver gets in touch. And keep your doors locked.”
“Don’t talk to strangers and drink my milk. Got it.”
“Granddad...”
“It’s okay. I can tell whatever’s going on is bad.”
“I just want you to stay safe.”
“Always,” he said.
Colin glanced at her after she’d hung up. “First day back on the job,” he said.
She stared out the window at the busy motorway. “It’s going to be a long one.”
Near Stow-on-the-Wold, the Cotswolds, England
Henrietta walked home after the police finished with her. They’d blocked off entrances onto the York property, including the lane that ran past the dovecote potting shed and was part of a waymarked trail. Walkers out for the day, unaware of the events that morning, would have to take a detour, at least until the scene was cleared. Henrietta had witnessed deaths and seen corpses in her previous life but never one involving a childhood playmate as a witness—a man as enigmatic, frustrating, larcenous, tortured and sexy as Oliver York.
He was maddening, and he was the reason she had quit MI5.
That was the short answer, at least.
She continued along a dry wall, constructed God knew when, of the region’s ubiquitous yellow limestone. Oolitic Jurassic limestone, it was called. She’d thought she’d needed to know that as a garden designer, but no one had yet to ask. She wasn’t concerned about running into a mad killer. The police hadn’t been, either. She’d take care, of course, but whatever had happened behind her at the York farm, it hadn’t been random.
She crossed a bridge over the same shallow stream that ran behind the York dovecote. The paved lane would eventually take her into the village, but she needn’t go that far—never mind the temptation to. It’d been a day. She’d love nothing better than to spend the rest of it at the pub.
Instead she turned onto a narrow lane, lined with more honey-stone walls, and came to what was still known as the Balfour farm. Her great-grandparents had purchased it in 1909 as a country home and working sheep farm. They’d proceeded to have three children—Freddy, Posey and Anthony—and had left the entire property to Freddy, the eldest Balfour and only surviving son, Anthony having died young. Freddy had promptly turned over most of the acreage to tenant farmers. He’d spent holidays—not every holiday—at the house and let friends and colleagues use it for getaways, but he’d never had a great affinity for the Cotswolds or country life. Surprisingly, he’d moved to the farm after he lost his wife to a stroke. Widowed, his only son busy with his own life in London, Freddy had enjoyed several good years before he developed lung cancer and died in his Cotswolds sitting room at age seventy-seven. Henrietta had been only five, but she remembered him, her chain-smoking grandfather with the kind eyes. She hadn’t known then, of course, that Freddy Balfour was an MI5 legend and British hero. That had come later.
Posey Balfour had fallen in love with the Cotswolds as a young girl and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The family had carved out a lot for her, and she’d built her own home, where she’d stayed, content, for the next seventy years. Henrietta’s father had sold the rest of the original farm after Freddy’s death. As far as she knew her dad had never considered keeping it.
She came to her great-aunt’s house.
My house now.
She was relieved to see only her Mini and not Oliver’s Rolls-Royce in the drive.
A