‘No fixed plans,’ Gabriel drawled. ‘Are you asking me on a date?’
‘Peter Hambrecht’s conducting in Oxford. An intimate chamber-music concert at Magdalen College,’ said Ella, ignoring the innuendo. ‘I’m going to see what I can pick up.’
Gabriel sighed. ‘He’s no longer in contact with her, Ella. You know that. You’ve been tuning into his devices for weeks.’
‘I think Oxford will be different.’
‘It won’t.’
‘Well, I’m going.’
‘You’re wasting your time. We should go back to other known contacts. A Japanese professor, Noriko Adachi, was found dead in London. She lost her son to the Petridis’s drug empire years ago and had been in England asking questions about Athena before she went … Ella? Are you there?’
A single, long beep answered the question.
Peter Hambrecht gave a few light twitches of his baton as he guided the musicians effortlessly through the last bars of Handel’s Messiah. It was glorious to be back in Oxford, and specifically in Magdalen chapel, a baroque masterpiece that was surely the most fitting setting possible for one of Peter’s very favorite pieces of music. The ancient stone walls, the faint, lingering smell of incense and candle wax, mingled with women’s perfume, and the joy of doing the one thing he knew he could do perfectly and effortlessly – conducting an orchestra – all helped ease the pain. The terrible pain of Athena.
‘You bring it on yourself you know, my love,’ Paolo, Peter’s bookseller boyfriend of almost a year, told him reprovingly last night, right before Peter took his chauffeured car to Oxford. ‘I don’t know this woman at all, but I do know you can’t save her.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’ Peter challenged.
‘Because no one can ever save another person from themselves,’ Paolo said simply. ‘Besides, from everything you’ve told me, salvation isn’t what this lady wants.’
He was right. Absolutely right. The other things Paolo had said had been right too. About Athena being toxic to Peter’s happiness, about her dragging him back to the past, about his need to focus on his present life, his glittering career, their relationship.
But Athena’s latest betrayal still hurt.
She’d gone. Disappeared like a thief in the night from the house in Burgundy, just as Peter had helped her to disappear from Antonio’s flat, and just as Athena had promised, sworn, that she wouldn’t do to him.
Poor Mary was convinced that she was to blame. ‘I don’t know what happened, Mr H. Truly I don’t. It was a day like any other. She seemed well. Calm. When I found her gone at six the next morning, I assumed she’d gone for an early morning walk in the grounds, but there was no trace of her.’
‘It’s quite all right, Mary,’ Peter had reassured her. ‘I’m afraid Athena is a master at this. Her life has always been rather … complicated. She’ll show up eventually.’
‘Yes, sir, I daresay, but she still needs medical attention, that’s the thing! She thinks she’s well but she isn’t. Her operation scars aren’t healed yet. Without proper nursing they could easily get infected. And she’s supposed to have physio for her walking as well, that limp she has on the left side? We’d only just started the exercises. But she’s so stubborn.’
‘That she is,’ Peter had agreed with a light laugh. But inside, his own feeling of dread was building, and it only grew greater as the days passed. Slowly it dawned on him that Athena had never had any intention of recuperating in private. The new identity he’d helped her to forge – the new face, new name, new papers he’d spent so much money and effort procuring for her – had never been so that she could live out the remainder of her days in peace and safety, as Peter had hoped.
The surgery wasn’t her ticket out of her old life of crime with Spyros. It was her ticket back into it.
She used me.
Spyros Petridis might be dead and gone, but the changes he’d wrought in Athena’s psyche were not so easily reversed. The Athena Peter had grown up with in Organi was still there, deep inside. But she’d long since been subsumed by this other Athena, this dangerous, vengeful, duplicitous Athena, who had learned to love power for its own sake and to wield it without mercy or compassion.
Lowering his baton as the dying notes of the Handel subsided into a breathless silence, Peter closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable eruption of the audience.
‘Bravo, maestro!’ They yelled and whistled from the pews. ‘Encore!’
Tears coursed down Peter Hambrecht’s cheeks. Only one member of the audience surmised that they weren’t brought on by the sublime music.
Ella waited outside the vestry that served as the conductor’s dressing room, poised to intercept any signals from Peter Hambrecht’s phone. She didn’t have to wait long.
‘Mary?’
‘I’m sorry to ring you again, Mr H.’ The nurse’s voice rang out as clearly in Ella’s head as if she were standing in the same, cold stone cloister. ‘But something came back to me. I don’t know if it’s relevant.’
‘What is it?’ asked Peter, unable to keep the hope out of his voice entirely.
‘I overheard her talking on the phone. Not the day before she left but earlier in the week. I don’t know what she said, I’m afraid. I only remembered it at all because she was speaking Greek. But she was talking to someone called “Jimmy”. I wondered if that might mean anything to you?’