‘Did he know you’d dragged Gabriel into it as well?’

William sighs. Then he takes a long sip of his drink.

‘Would you like a glass?’

Karen shakes her head. The small movement makes her skull throb.

‘If you want me to tell you the whole story, I demand that you have a drink with me.’

He gets up and walks over to a barrel sitting on a wooden stand. Puts a white rag over the wooden bung, wiggles it gently and pulls it out. Then he picks up something that looks like a skinny soup ladle with a long handle and dips it into the barrel through the hole. Scoops up a few centilitres and pours them into a tumbler along with a few drops of water from a small glass pitcher sitting on the table.

‘Savour it. Do you know how old this whiskey is?’ he says.

She takes the tumbler from him without responding.

‘Try it,’ he says. ‘Try it and tell me what you think of the 1947 Huss & Groth.’

Chapter 72

72

The sound from the handbag makes Helena Tryste jump and spill her whiskey. One glass, he’d told her, just one to calm her nerves, no more. With shaking hands and an iron grip on the bottle, she pours herself a third glass.

She checks her watch again. Fifteen minutes until they have to go if they want to make it, ten minutes until she has to go down to the basement to tell him everything’s ready. Just one more thing to see to before it’s time. She takes a deep swig and opens the handbag sitting in front of her on the kitchen table.

Something inside her is hoping there’s a password, that she won’t have to do this, that it can’t be done. But the moment she picks up the phone, the screen lights up: 4 missed calls, 2 voicemails. There’s a red six at the corner of the text message app. Everything inside her is screaming at her not to do it. Don’t look, it pleads, it’ll only make it harder. With her lips pressed tightly together, she taps the speech bubble and scans the list of unread text messages and their first words.

And one that has been opened:

She closes the app and puts the phone down, rubs her trembling hand against her jeans as though to wipe off the revulsion, repeats the words under her breath, the message William told her she has to write now, before she forgets.