Prayer by Philip Kerr

talking about it at smart dinner parties. He thought it made him seem edgy and subversive. Even though he wasn’t like that at all. In a lot of ways, Peter was very conservative. As I’m sure you know if you’ve read some of his stuff.”
    “Yes, I do know. But it’s not us he was afraid of. It was someone else, you think?”
    “He was definitely afraid of something.”
    She shivered a little and, collecting a cashmere shawl off the arm of her chair, wrapped it around her shoulders.
    “Sometimes this place gets a bit lonely and one starts to imagine things. We used to joke about it, Peter and I. The Sleepy Hollow syndrome, we called it. It’s a lot easier to joke about that sort of thing when you don’t live on your own.”
    “Are you afraid of something now, ma’am?”
    She shrugged. “Your husband dies, sometimes you forget he’s not here. You imagine he’s in the kitchen. Or in his study. Like he always was. Or, sometimes, you imagine—other stuff.”
    Cynthia Ekman shook her head. “It’s an old house. Sometimes it creaks a bit, that’s all. I’m sure that there’s no one who has it in for me, the way they might have had it in for him. Not anymore, anyway. It’s been a long time since anyone threatened me. At least five years.”
    “We didn’t know about that,” said Helen. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid that all of our attention has been on your husband’s death.”
    “I’m originally from Somalia,” said Mrs. Ekman. “I was born there and then sought political asylum in England to avoid an arranged marriage, before coming to work here in the States as a translator at the United Nations. Then I wrote a book about the treatment of women in Islamic society called
Among the Odalisques: Breaking Out of the Seraglio
.”
    “I read that,” said Helen. “You’re Cynthia Shermarke?”
    “Yes.”
    “I enjoyed that book,” said Helen. “It was a bestseller, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes, it was. Only the book earned me a lot of criticism in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Some of it quite violent, really. I had more than a few death threats. These days that’s par for the course when you write something people disagree with. After I’d written the book, I met Peter. We married and came to live out here. The panic room was originally supposed to be for my benefit. Little did we think that it would be him who’d feel he needed it.”
    “Perhaps you’d care to elaborate,” said Helen.
    Mrs. Ekman smiled and it seemed that Helen at least had won her confidence.
    “Yes,” she said. “Perhaps I should.”
    Mrs. Ekman put down her glass and got up to fetch a laptop off a desk. She brought it back to her chair and opened it up on her knees.
    While we waited for it to start up, I glanced around the room. A number of handsome cigar boxes occupied pride of place in alcoves like the tombs of unknown French generals. I knew they were cigar boxes because there was a cigar cutter on the top of each one. A crystal ashtray the size of a hubcap was on the coffee table next to a granite table lighter that looked as if it had probably been cracked off a meteorite. And there was an oxygen cylinder with a line and a breathing mask to remind me that Peter Ekman had suffered from smoking-related emphysema.
    “He kept the journal on this laptop,” explained Mrs. Ekman, as she typed some more. “It was protected by a secret password. Except that the password wasn’t so very secret. It was written down in a little notebook where he kept a record of all his passwords. Peter was very careless about that kind of thing.”
    Mrs. Ekman smiled a patient sort of smile and, for a moment, I had an insight into the kind of relationship they’d enjoyed: him, frequently drunk and disorganized, but fun with it, probably; and her, resourceful and tough, even a little steely, and often exasperated by her brilliant husband, but obviously charmed by him, too. At least she had been until she found out about the affair, I imagined.
    “I’ve