Page 78 of The Professor
“What’s through here? A bedroom?” I grinned at him and pushed open a door. Sure enough, a king-sized bed with a silver-gray headboard and soft white sheets filled the room.
“I like the way your mind works. But I’m gonna take a shower. I’ve still got some of your brother’s blood on me.”
I pulled a face. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Not your fault.”
He disappeared, and water came on. Another door, to the right, caught my attention, and I opened it and peered inside. Unlike the rest of the apartment, this room was dark, the curtains closed and the wooden furniture thick and heavy.
I flicked on a light and stepped in. Bridget’s words came back to me about a wall of Post-it notes and string linking them like a giant web. She might have been joking but she was right. The largest wall was a maze of interconnected information aboutpeople. And the desk was piled with books and files. A computer had several hard drives and a bowl of memory sticks at its side. A few lights flashed as though it was always working—always searching for the criminals who deserved to die.
A rosy apple sat on the desk. I picked it up and bit into it, the tart juice spreading on my tongue. At the center of the wall were a bunch of names tacked into place. Some had pictures with them, some had question marks beneath them. String moved outward to other names, mainly women, and some had black crosses over their photographs.
Did that mean they were dead? If so, there were a lot of them.
I moved along the wall. There were place names, last seen dates, birth dates, pseudonyms, and then countries, drawn out geographically and with more people and names dotted over them.
It was a huge piece of information, spanning continents, two hundred people at least, maybe more if some of the long lists of names were included.
A shudder went through me when I spotted an image of Brian Dix. Unlike the man next to him, he didn’t yet have a black cross on his photograph. But he was dead, I knew that for sure.
And at the center of the wall, above a picture of a thin man with a scrawny moustache and the name Ranson, were several blank images, string linking them to Ranson and countries—Romania, Kosovo, Armenia, Albania.
Albania.
My mouth dried. What did this mean? Ranson, it was his book Mitch had had back at the house. He’d said Ranson bought women from abroad for his whore warehouse. Were these blank images the unscrupulous people he ordered them from?
A well of nausea built up, because if so, my mother was Albania. This grand criminal web had her factored into it—Andrew just hadn’t known her name.
I locked my knees, it was as if my bones had gone, they felt weak. I looked closer and saw that there were other countries linked to Ranson: Bulgaria, Turkey, and Syria. These each had a photograph, one woman, two men, and black crosses over them.
“They’re dead.” I pressed my hand over my mouth. I understood what I was seeing. Galahad had killed these three human traffickers. Or someone had. They’d been taken out.
There was a noise behind me and I turned. My heart was thudding. I dropped the apple, and it rolled across the floor.
Andrew had a towel wrapped around his lean hips, and his hair was damp from the shower. He stared at me through narrowed eyes.
“You…” I pulled in a shaky breath.
He tipped his head.
“You had my mother on your kill list.”
He didn’t speak.
I wanted to scream.
“I can see how you’ve been following these gangs, Andrew, picking the ringleaders off. You would have got to her soon, killed her, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you think?” He stepped up to me.
The scent of shower gel swirled around me, a heady smell that fractured my thoughts further.
“I…I don’t know what to think. She…she was my mother.”
“If you play with fire, you get burned.”
Tears formed and spilled down my cheeks. “I loved her.”
