The "doctor" portion of John's personality (as opposed to the obnoxious and possessive ex portion) happily kicked in after a moment, and he dispatched Mary (as the most locally unrecognizable of us) to the village chemist's with an illegible-to-me prescription for flucloxacillin. By the time she returned, he had cleaned and stitched Lakhari up, drawn a line around the infected area with sharpie and said, "Red beyond this line means you need to get to hospital for IV meds, I don't care if you're a superagent," and the man was sitting on his own sofa drinking a nutritional smoothie made by his anxious wife.
Mary came back with the tablets in a small paper bag, and Ajay took his first dosage of antibiotics, wincing slightly at the bitterness.
"I can't believe it's you, Rose," he smiled, a surprisingly sweet expression on such a dangerous man, "What are you doing here?"
Mary shrugged, and said, angling her head towards me, "Bit of a small world. One of those coincidences that this one claims don't exist."
"I stopped claiming that years ago," I mused, "Though in this case…"
John and Mary eyeballed me, and then returned their attention to Ajay.
"Can we now hear the actual narrative, Mr. Lakhari?" I asked the man.
Ajay looked at Nora and Cecil edgily, but answered levelly enough.
"Most of what they said was true. I was doing my workout before bed, the others had already gone up. He came at me with a knife just when I was finishing the bench press. We saw later that he'd bought a gun, but he must have wanted to keep the noise down."
Lifting a hand to his bandaged ribs, he winced and said, "He got me almost right away. I've been out of the game too long, it's too easy for people to beat my arse anymore, eh, Rose?"
Mary smiled.
"But I was already moving so it wasn't deadly, and I was able to fight him off. We struggled for a few minutes and then I was able to get to the gun and take him out."
"That was your gun?" John asked.
"The shotgun? Yes. Totally legal, too."
"Not sawn-off it's not," I disagreed, "But it'd be a minor penalty and defense of yourself from a deadly attack is a perfectly good protection from prosecution."
"That's what we were going to do at first, Mr. Holmes! Just call the police and have done!" Nora exclaimed, "But then when Cecil and I heard the shot and came down, we saw the tattoo he had, and Sachi… or that is to say, Ajay…"
He interrupted her.
"Nora and Cecil never had any real idea of my past."
"Though we both rather suspected something," Cecil interjected wryly.
"It was the greatest mistake of my life not to tell them," Ajay said quietly. Nora reached out and intertwined her fingers in his.
"We know now," she murmured.
Ajay cleared his throat.
"Anyway. We saw the tattoo, and I knew that this wasn't just purely a random attack. It was someone who was trying to look like me. And I knew what that meant."
"Yeah," Mary agreed.
"What?" asked John.
Ajay and Mary shared a knowing look, and finally she shrugged.
"It's easier for you to get yours out. Go on and show Mr. Holmes, Ajay. We can trust him."
Ajay rolled up the sleeve of his olive-green shirt to reveal the same tattoo that we'd seen on the body… simple, stylized, four circles close-packed into an equilateral triangle. I leaned in for a closer look.
"You can't really see it, you have to go by touch," Mary said, but I, in fact could see it… a small raised scar, and when I ran my fingertips over it I could feel a bump beneath the skin, small and narrow, no longer than a grain of wild rice.
"An RFID chip?" I asked.
"Mmm," Mary replied, "The AGRA treasure."
We all looked at her. Mary sighed, and began, "You already know about the portable drives. That's where the team kept all our information. But we kept all our money in a bank in Grand Cayman. Completely anonymous, completely untraceable. The only way any of us could access any of it was by having a quorum… at least three out of the four RFID chips physically present in one place at one time."
"You lot really didn't leave much down to trust, did you?" John asked.
"We didn't need to, that was the whole point," Ajay replied sarcastically, "It's easy to trust people when you've made it almost impossible for them to betray you. It's much harder when you have to give them the opportunity."
"The thing is, though," said Mary, "Whoever did this obviously didn't know the entire story. The whole point of an anonymous bank account is that it's anonymous. It's not like we had to rock up there with the RFID chips plus two forms of ID apiece. That… the dead man, he just needed three chips. And it didn't have to be implanted. Alex's wasn't, the idea gave him the screaming willies, so he wore his in a gold capsule around his neck."
"He gave it to me before he died," Ajay sighed.
"How much money is it?" I inquired.
"Well, that's the thing… nothing. Rose and I closed it out about ten years ago, divvied it between us when we split up. There wasn't any point in keeping it in that format any longer, it was really inflexible."
"All right, then, how much money was it?"
Mary looked up at the ceiling, calculating.
"With the currency exchange back then, I'd say… about twenty million pounds? Give or take."
"Sounds about right," Ajay agreed.
John choked on his own saliva.
"You have ten million pounds?" he asked Mary disbelievingly.
"I have about three million pounds."
John stared at her, until Mary rolled her eyes and said, "Look, he spent six years being violently tortured during which I basically moved to England got a job and married you. I figured he'd earned the lion's share."
"Twenty million is a very fair motivation for murder. But why the wedding ring? You're still wearing yours, Ajay. So why did you try to pry it off of the dead man?"
"Wedding ring?" asked Ajay.
"Ah… that would be. Well that would be my wedding ring," Cecil Barker stammered, "You'd gone into the panic room and the police were on their way when we realized he didn't have one. I didn't pry it off, I pried it on. He had broader fingers than I do."
From his position behind Ajay, he put a hand on the other man's shoulder. With the hand Nora wasn't holding, Ajay reached up to clasp it.
"The law would allow me to marry either of them, Mr. Holmes. But not both. And so… while it's informal, it's true."
Mary raised her eyebrows, looked at the trio, and grinned.
"A happy ending!" she exclaimed.
"I don't suppose there's any possibility of my getting it back? Sentimental value, and all?" Barker inquired.
