Moving to the store window, I pretended to window shop. There were quite a few little Georges and Charlottes in there, all dressed like miniature adults of the 1950s. Wilson stood scratching his ear, watching Bibby place George on a giant rocking horse. He was probably wondering how he was going to ship that thing back to Sydney.
I couldn’t hear, but it appeared that Wilson received a phone call, as he suddenly reached into his pocket for his phone and studied it.
I stumbled back as he turned and walked swiftly in my direction, passing through the door and out onto the street. He then stepped to a quiet spot, checking around him.
I needed to hear that conversation.
Pretending to snap photographs of a nearby theatre poster with my phone, I edged closer to Wilson. I’m a woman who enjoys the theatre, I said in my mind as I took the photos, as though passersby would somehow catch my silent message and be convinced.
Wilson was on the other side of a decorative partition. I could only just hear his lowered tones above the London traffic and noise. He was making lots of ums and ahs, listening to the other person.
“The husband’s here,” he then said clearly. “Cops know he flew into London. Why the fuck did he come all this way? If he wanted to run away, why didn’t he take a slow boat to New Zealand or something? Someone needs to explain that to me. What the hell is going on?”
The husband? Could he mean Gray?
“Mistake to bury the knife,” Wilson said. “Stupid fucking Australian cops took too long to find it. They don’t deserve their fucking jobs.”
My fingers almost froze on my phone as I pretended to snap yet another picture.
The knife.
This was about Gray.
“What about Constance?” he said. “She being a good girl and staying put here in London? I made sure Hurst told her she couldn’t leave.”
Blood drained from my face. He knew about me. And knew that I’d spoken with Detective Hurst. Therefore, he had to know about Rosemary. Questions whipped through my mind. Had he ordered her killed? What connection did he have to Detective Michael Hurst? Why would a detective take a directive from Wilson Carlisle?
The awful truth dawned on me. The detective was one of them.
I was just a thin partition away from Wilson. If he knew I was here, what would he do? I turned my head away, my chest tightening.
“Yeah. Get onto it pronto,” continued Wilson in a sharp tone. “I can’t do much from here. But I’ll be there for the closing ceremony. You know I will. I never miss it.”
What closing ceremony? Some charity event he was attending? I had to research that. If I got away from here alive.
Wilson sighed noisily. “Is Kara missing me? Tell her Daddy Wilson misses her. Little asshole broke my finger last time I saw her. Told me not to touch her again.” He chuckled. “She told me to disappear into the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.”
My stomach folded in on itself.
Kara. What had he done to her? He knew exactly where she was. Kara had to be with the person he was speaking to, because he just asked them to tell her something. How on earth did I find out who was on the other end of that conversation?
I didn’t gain anything useful from the rest of Carlisle’s phone call.
I waited until he headed back into the store and then made steps in the opposite direction. I was too much of a mess right now to keep tailing him. A professional might be able to hold it together, but not me. Not now. My eyes brimmed with tears.
Kara, how did you get mixed up with Wilson Carlisle?
These were dangerous, bad people. Were they traffickers?
Who did I need to contact? Someone who was an expert in rescuing people caught up in sex trafficking? But I didn’t know who I could trust. I couldn’t trust the police.
And how was I going to find Gray now? I had no way of contacting him.
As I caught a cab back to my hotel, I realised I wasn’t safe there anymore. Wilson would be sure to know where I was staying. Detective Hurst knew where I was; therefore Wilson knew.
I made a decision: I was going to travel to Greece and find an expert who rescued trafficked persons. I’d seen documentaries about such people—they’d just been volunteers on their own, hacking paths through the tangled, dangerous jungles of the traffickers. That was what I needed. Someone who worked outside of the system. Someone who couldn’t be corrupted.
THE FIFTH CHALLENGE
47. Evie
THE MONASTERY, IT WAS WARPING MY mind. A feeling of being reeled in and at the brink of being consumed. My dreams had been invaded by three-dimensional shapes that folded out into endless hexagons. Forming and reforming. Everything in perfect order. Phi. Binary code. Birds of prey. Myself, running through the dark halls. Trapped and re-trapped in geometric prisons. Everything in a balance that cared about nothing, not even the numbers upon which it was all based.