The report occupied the bottom third of page seven, a single column beneath a headline that read NORFOLK CONSTABULARY REFERS VANE CASE TO WATCHDOG. He read it twice. The words were careful, the kind of institutional language that acknowledged failure without ever quite naming it. Systemic shortcomings. Procedural irregularities. The investigation had exposed what the report called a pattern of oversight stretching back decades, and the Independent Office of Police Conduct would now determine whether anyone in a position of authority had chosen not to look too closely at Vane Maritime Holdings and its relationship with the local council. Marcus West was named. Two other councillors were not. The Orsine Foundation received a single sentence near the end, a mention so brief it read almost like an afterthought.
James folded the newspaper and set it aside. The coffee was bitter and cold and he drank it anyway.
The chair opposite him scraped across the floor.
“You've gone grey at the temples, James.”
He looked up. Phineas Magus settled himself into the chair with the careful economy of a man who had been old for a very long time and had learned to conserve what strength remained. His tweed suit was immaculate, the waistcoat pressed, the red bow tie precisely knotted. The cane he laid across his lap was topped with a red gem that caught the light in a way James remembered but could never quite describe. He was five feet four inches tall, and he occupied the chair as though it had been waiting for him.
“Phineas.”
“You're not surprised to see me.”
“I stopped being surprised by you in 1987.” James set his cup down. “How did you find me?”
Magus smiled, a small expression that moved his white beard but left the rest of his face undisturbed. “I always know where you are, James. The question is whether I choose to act on it.” He signalled to the waitress, who appeared at his elbow with a speed that suggested she had been summoned rather than summoned herself. “A pot of Earl Grey, please. And a fresh cup for my friend.”
“I don't want fresh coffee.”
“You'll have it anyway. It's cold and you're being stubborn.” Magus waited until the waitress had gone before he spoke again. “I read about Cromer. The papers were quite taken with it for a week or so. A dead patriarch, a sunken wreck, a ledger full of secrets. Very dramatic.”
“It wasn't dramatic. It was wet, mostly.”
“You threw the watch into the sea.”
James said nothing.
“That was well done,” Magus said. “Sentimental, but well done.”
The tea arrived. Magus poured with the same precision he brought to everything, the stream of liquid arcing into the cup without a single drop spilled. He pushed the fresh coffee across the table and James took it because refusing would have required more energy than accepting.
“There's an assignment,” Magus said. “It requires someone with your particular experience.”
“No.”
“You haven't heard the details.”
“I don't need to.” James leaned back. The chair was too small and the noise of the café pressed in on him from all sides, a hundred conversations happening at once, none of them his. “I'm done. Whatever it is, find someone else.”
Magus stirred his tea. The spoon moved in slow, unhurried circles. “It's Moscow.”
The word landed in the space between them and sat there. James felt his hand tighten on the cup. He made himself loosen his grip, one finger at a time.
“Then definitely find someone else.”
“I'm afraid that isn't possible.” Magus set the spoon down with a small click against the saucer. He leaned forward, and when he spoke again his voice was softer, the Scottish accent thickening around the edges of the words. “There's a name you need to hear.”
“I don't need to hear any names.”
“Katarina Velichev.”
The cup stopped halfway to his lips. James looked at the coffee, at the dark surface trembling slightly because his hand was no longer quite steady, and he understood that the quiet he had found on the bus out of Cromer had been a borrowed thing all along. Three months of sleep that came easier than it used to. Three months of not looking over his shoulder. And now this, a name spoken in a Covent Garden café by a man who had been old when James was young and showed no sign of getting older.
He set the cup down.
“When?”
“Tomorrow evening. There's a flight from Heathrow at six. I've taken the liberty of arranging the paperwork.”
James looked at him. Magus looked back, his expression unreadable, the red gem on his cane catching the light from the window and holding it.
“You knew I'd say yes.”
“I knew you'd listen,” Magus said. “The yes was always yours.”
James picked up his coffee and drank. It was still hot, and it burned the roof of his mouth, and he did not flinch. Outside the café, Covent Garden carried on in the grey afternoon light, the buskers and the tourists and the pigeons moving through their routines as though nothing at all had changed. James watched them through the glass and thought about Moscow, about snow on Red Square and a woman whose face he had tried for fifteen years to forget, and about how little distance three months could put between a man and the person he used to be.
Magus poured himself more tea. The spoon went back to its slow circles. Neither of them spoke, and the noise of the café filled the silence, and James sat with the weight of a name he had not spoken aloud since the last time he left Russia and wondered if he had ever really believed he would not have to go back.
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