Captured (John Kite Book 9) by Stuart Doughty

Author:Stuart Doughty [Doughty, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

I imagined Vernier snooping in a similar French office, discovering the word on a computer or file. That was why he got hold of the book. Maybe he was killed because he’d discovered the codeword.

A codeword for what?

Candida had kept the significance of Circe from me. And it must have significance. Otherwise why was it typed against my name? It also meant Candida knew more than she was telling me.

I looked down at Vernier’s book which I held in my hand. I had brought it to the meeting, yet never had time to show it to her. If I had, what would her reaction have been?

I glanced at the screen again, a second before Lucas’s machine went to a screensaver Below my name I saw, Candida: Theatre, followed by the name of the production she was seeing.

Lucas would return any moment. I didn’t want to be compromised by staring at his screen and, without a password, there was nothing more I could do. I left the office and went back towards the stairs and elevators. Lucas was hurrying back from the further end of the corridor. As we passed, he looked surprised to see me still in the building, but I nodded goodbye to him and he said nothing.

I nipped into the stairwell, ran down all nine flights to the ground, handed my visitor badge back and left the building.

I didn’t walk to where my car was parked. I walked the other way, towards the West End and theatreland. I had to continue the conversation with Candida, had to make her tell me what was going on. I would wait in the theatre bar until the interval, then ask her what connected the code in their files to the book I found in Vernier’s apartment.

I reached the theatre in forty minutes, then had half an hour to wait before the interval. As I had marched my way across London I had become angrier and angrier. Though I was no longer sure who I was angry with. Candida was intelligent and clever, not incompetent. Yet she seemed unable to question the prince. Had her firm entered some secret agreement with the prince? The firm would take his case but not reveal the whole truth to the likes of me? Had the prince grossly misled Candida and she was unable to extricate her firm from the mess? What was Jeffrey Sen’s role in the prince’s case? Whoever he was, Candida was unable to refuse his summons.

In most London theatres interval drinks can be ordered before the show starts. They are then prepared during the first half and left on a shelf with a receipt for the customer to pick up at the interval. I watched theatre staff getting the drinks ready, and when the sound of applause for the end of the first act filtered through, I checked along the row of sixty or seventy glasses and bottles. Sure enough, I found one receipt marked ‘Tree’. A glass of red wine and a beer.

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