The plan would work. He’d make sure it did. And next week he’d collect the two hundred thousand dollars that was just waiting for him in the safe deposit box.

Hardwick put his ear against the outside door of the suite and listened. He heard a faint buzzing sound, then the steward’s voice. “Flowers for you, Lady Exner.”

Hardwick opened the door a crack. As the steward’s back disappeared into the opposite suite, he hurried down the corridor to the stairs and back to the anonymity of the public rooms.

Chapter 23

OXFORD

AT HEADQUARTERS IN Oxford, Superintendent Livingston had been very glad to hear from Regan Reilly so soon. After he said good-bye to her, he hung up the phone, swirled his chair around so that it faced the window and leaned back, his favorite position when he was thinking. He approved of Regan’s suggestion to obtain copies of the coverage of the death of Athena Popolous from her hometown newspapers. The Popolous family lawyer had made arrangements to have the body returned to Greece. Apparently the parents were in seclusion. Even though it had been more than ten years since they had seen their daughter, they had still always clung to the hope that one day she would return.

His review of the old file as well as his conversations with the lawyer made it obvious to him that the Popolous family was both affluent and influential. Undoubtedly the discovery of the missing girl’s body would be major news in Athens and would receive extensive media coverage. Pushing back the irritation that acquiring the newspapers hadn’t occurred to him first, Livingston again reached for the phone. When he left his office fifteen minutes later, it was with the assurance that copies of papers reporting the Popolous case could be translated and faxed to him and to Regan Reilly on the Queen Guinevere.

His first stop was a five-minute drive away, to the bedside of Penelope Atwater in Royal Oxford Hospital. He braced himself for the rather nasty sight of Penelope, as he had seen her last night, her face ashen, her lips cracked and dry, intravenous tubes attached to her roly-poly arms, a hospital shirt perilously close to revealing the unthinkable, all of this enveloped in a stinky haze that left no doubt as to the abominable condition of her innards.

After depositing his Renault in the carpark, Livingston gulped in a precious few breaths of fresh air, then resolutely pushed through the revolving door into the nearly empty lobby. The janitor mopping the tile floor was using a dark green cleaning solution that never failed to make Nigel’s eyes itch and little bumps appear on his already razor-burned neck. He hurried to the clerk in charge of visitors’ passes, who was wearing a red-and-white-striped uniform and a badge which proclaimed that to date she had volunteered ten thousand hours to Royal Oxford Hospital.