‘I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him,’ Kate says quietly. She’s not sure she’ll ever be able to make sense of everything that’s happened, to process the nightmare of the Brittany house, her suicidal leap off the cliff. ‘I was unconscious when I hit the water. Passed out with pain. And fear.’ She gives a rueful smile. ‘The cliffs were a little higher than I realised.’

Bex turns to Kate and hugs her, long and hard. ‘Bit of a hero, isn’t he, our Jake?’ she says. ‘You know he saved DI Hart’s son too?’

‘So I hear.’

Jake mentioned something but only in passing. It was DI Hart who filled her in with the details, during one of the interviews he conducted at the hospital in France.

‘And he’s really sorry,’ Bex says. ‘You know, about what happened.’

‘I know he is,’ she says.

‘He’s still daft about you,’ Bex adds.

Kate smiles and catches Jake’s eye in the garden.

114

Silas

Silas approaches the village, shuddering at the memory of what he and Strover saw in France: the dimly lit warehouse, like a hospital ward. The French police discovered eleven other super recognisers, all in a catatonic state. By the time he and Strover reached Brittany, they had been taken to hospital, where they remain. Doctors are confident that they’ll eventually regain full mobility, thanks to the notes that Silas found on Dr Varma’s desk about the cure given to the frozen addicts in California in the 1980s. A nurse’s life was saved too. Her heart had stopped, but the paramedics managed to resuscitate her. Another body was found – a man who had died of a seizure.

‘What about the other super recognisers?’ Strover asks as they pull up outside Bex’s house. Silas will leave Kate’s homecoming party to Strover, get an early night before tomorrow’s counselling session. ‘Were they all taken by Rob too?’

‘Their abductions went much more smoothly,’ Silas says. ‘He kidnapped each of them in the Tesla registered to Gilmour. In England, Rob tried to avoid ANPR, but if any cameras did pick him up, the car was registered to Gilmour. Kate was the prize though, the brain he coveted the most, the fusiform gyrus that lit up like no other, and he was prepared to wait for her to recover. Centaur would have to wait too. Only when she was well again could he begin to roll out the system, using the super recognisers’ exceptional P3 brainwaves to recognise faces from hundreds of thousands of images. And all this time, if he ever was discovered, he could claim he was being framed by Gilmour Martin, the double from his past who had apparently promised to destroy him.’

‘So there was never a Gilmour Martin in Thailand either?’ Strover asks quietly.