Broken Dolls (A Jefferson Winter Thriller) (17 page)

A childhood memory surfaced from her subconscious, something she hadn’t thought about in years, decades even, a long-forgotten memory. She was about five or six, young enough to still believe her father was a superhero. They were at the villa, walking along a beach together, and for once she had her dad all to herself. It was just the two of them. No mum, no annoying brothers. The sand was warm between her toes and the setting sun behind their heads stretched long shadows out in front of them. Her hand was tiny in his rough, callused one. They were talking and laughing, making up stories, and she had never felt so loved, so safe.

Rachel grabbed on to the memory. She wasn’t in that bright cellar any more, she was in a place where the air smelled of salt and exotic food and heat, a safe time and place where the only monsters she had to worry about were the imaginary ones living under her bed.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Eve. ‘You’ve gone really quiet.’

The sunlight faded and Rachel was back in the basement. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just thinking, that’s all.’

‘About what?’

‘About the sunshine,’ said Rachel.

‘And that makes you sad.’

‘No, it actually makes me happy.’

‘I don’t get it.’

Before Rachel could stop herself, she was sharing the memory with Eve.

‘You’re lucky,’ said Eve. ‘I don’t remember my father.’

‘What happened to him, Eve?’

‘He died.’

From the flat, abrupt way Eve answered, Rachel sensed it was time to back off. She’d pushed hard enough for one day and didn’t want to alienate her.

‘I should go,’ said Eve.

‘Will you come back and talk to me again? It gets so lonely.’

‘I’ll try. But I need to be careful. I’ll need to wait until Adam goes out again.’

‘Bye, Eve. Thanks for talking to me.’ Rachel paused. ‘And thanks for dinner. I appreciate it.’

‘I’ll come back soon. Promise and cross my heart.’

The lights went out and Rachel made her way over to the mattress, dodging to the left to avoid the chair. She was halfway across the room when the dog flap clattered. She turned and saw the shadowy silhouette of the tray disappear through the hole in the door. Rachel reached the mattress and wrapped the blankets tightly around herself.

Alone in the dark again.

Rachel had learned a number of interesting things from talking to Eve, and one important thing.

The most interesting thing was that Eve was lonely. She craved approval and wanted friendship, and that’s why she’d initiated the conversation. Rachel was more than happy to be Eve’s friend. She would be her Best Friend Forever if it helped her get out of here.

And the important thing: there were occasions when Adam went out and left Eve alone to guard her.

Rachel needed to get Eve on her side. If she could somehow persuade the girl to view her as a person rather than a prisoner, she had a much better chance of manipulating her into helping her escape. Rachel let that thought hang there, then told herself she was being ridiculous. What the hell did she think was going to happen here? That if she made nice, Eve would help her escape?

But it could work. It was a long shot, and she might be letting her fantasies run away her, but what was the alternative? Should she just give up? Resign herself to a fate that ended with a psycho slicing into her brain? There was no decision to be made here, not really. Donald Cole had not raised his daughter to be a quitter.

32

Templeton stopped at a door halfway along a subterranean corridor, gave a sharp, staccato
rat-a-tat-tat
knock, then pushed it open. The room on the other side was small and crammed with computer gear. Servers hummed and clicked, cooling fans spun and whirred. An air-con unit kept the temperature at a comfortable level, not too hot, not too cold.

Two wizards worked the terminals, one male, one female. They turned from their screens in unison, like they were being operated off the same wires, and checked us out. Neither adhered to the computer geek stereotype. They weren’t wearing ripped jeans or stained four-day-old T-shirts or thick bottle-bottom glasses, and they didn’t have Jabba the Hutt physiques. Both were slim and in their early thirties and well turned out. They looked like lawyers or accountants.

The girl wizard was Indian, pretty with wide almond eyes and a way of looking at you like she knew something you didn’t. She was wearing an engagement ring but no wedding band. The boy wizard had ginger hair and a permanent blush. No rings, but his Tag Heuer appeared genuine.

‘Meet Alex Irvine and Sumati Chatterjee,’ said Templeton.

‘Hi,’ they said in unison.

Given their names and appearance, I expected them to have accents. They didn’t. They sounded like they’d been shipped in straight from Oxford or Cambridge, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

‘So, which one of you is the best?’ I asked.

‘I am.’ They weren’t quite in sync this time. Sumati won by a nose. They turned to look at each other, then launched into a full-blown argument. I leant back against the door to watch and Templeton sidled up next to me. She was standing close enough for me to catch small scent clouds of her perfume.

‘You did that on purpose,’ she whispered.

‘Of course I did. They might not look like computer geeks, but looks can be deceptive. You don’t have to peel away too many layers before their true nature comes to light. So, who has the biggest collection of
Star Wars
memorabilia?’

‘That’ll be Sumati. Except it’s not
Star Wars
she’s into, she’s a Trekkie.’

‘Does she speak Klingon?’

Templeton shrugged. ‘How the hell should I know?’

‘
BIjatlh ’e’ yImev!
’ I shouted.

Sumati stopped in mid-rant and stared at me like I was an alien. Templeton was staring too. ‘I’ve got a real good memory,’ I whispered to her. ‘It’s great for quizzes, and exams, and for surprising complete strangers.’

‘Actually,’ said Sumati. ‘
BIjatlh ’e’ yImev
is fine if you’re telling one person to shut up.’

‘But if you’re talking to more than one person it would be more correct to say
sujatlh ’e’ yImev
. Yeah, yeah, I know. I just wanted to make sure I’d got your attention.’ I turned to Alex. ‘It looks like you lost this one. I’m going to go with Sumati.’

‘Because she speaks Klingon?’

‘No, because she’s a woman who can obviously more than hold her own in a male-dominated profession, which means she’s got to be at least ten times smarter than you are.’

‘So what can I do for you, Mr Winter?’ asked Sumati.

‘I guess this is the point where I ask how you know my name so you can prove how smart you are.’

She grinned. ‘The internet.’

‘That figures. You know which case I’m working?’

‘Of course. The Cutting Jack case.’

‘Our principal unsub is stalking his victims on the internet. I need you to take a look at their computers, see what you can find.’

‘We’ve already done that. We didn’t find anything.’

‘That’s because you didn’t look hard enough. Go back and have another look, and this time work from the assumption that he might be smarter than you guys rather than some dumb schmuck who can barely navigate his way around Internet Explorer. Start with Rachel Morris’s computers since she’s the latest victim. You won’t have had a chance to look at them yet, so you’ll be able to approach them with fresh eyes. Look hard enough and you will find something. I guarantee it.’

‘And I guess you want this done by yesterday.’

‘Of course.’

‘Leave it with me.’

Templeton opened the door.

‘Your Klingon,’ said Sumati. ‘I’m impressed, but you need to work on your pronunciation.’

‘
Qapla’.
’ This time I really hammered those guttural syllables.

‘Better,’ she said.

Templeton pulled the door shut and we headed back along the corridor to the elevator.

‘I take it that meant “screw you”,’ she said. ‘At any rate, that’s what it sounded like. It certainly didn’t sound like you were wishing her a long life filled with health, wealth and happiness.’

‘The literal translation is “success”, but it’s used to say goodbye. There’s no translation for “screw you”. Say that to a Klingon and you’d be inviting a battle to the death.’

Templeton laughed. ‘Nobody likes a smartass, you know. Particularly one who’s a closet nerd.’

‘I am not a closet nerd.’

‘Yeah, right, so says the man who speaks fluent Klingon and can no doubt reel off the title of every episode of
Star Trek
.’

‘I can’t name every title.’

We stopped walking and Templeton stared me straight in the eye.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I can name every title. But only for the original series. And, for the record, that doesn’t make me a closet nerd. It just makes me someone who likes to know things.’

Templeton flashed a smug grin. ‘Yeah, so says you.’

33

I sat at the Cosmopolitan’s piano and rattled off some quick C-major scales. One from the bottom register, one from the middle, one from the top. The keys were heavy and sluggish and nowhere near as responsive as my Steinway, but at least the piano was in tune. The fact it had a decent enough tone was a bonus.

The barmaid had looked relieved when I suggested she turn off the music and let me play. She’d jumped at the suggestion. Hadn’t even asked about my level of skill. Not that she cared either way. Anything had to be better than that insipid computerised Christmas music. Ten minutes of that crap and I was ready to jam pointed sticks in my ears. How she managed to last a whole shift was beyond me.

I went straight into the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto 21. By the third phrase, London and the bar had phased away. The heaviness in my heart and chest eased. All that mattered was the music. All that existed was the music.

Eyes closed, my fingers instinctively found the next note, the next phrase. They didn’t let me down. This wasn’t one of Mozart’s flashy show-off pieces, but that didn’t mean it was easy to play. The music has a forward momentum that makes you want to play faster, but if you do that you kill the mood. The trick is to keep it slow and easy. I reached the final phrase, the final note, paused a moment with my eyes still closed and waited for silence.

‘That was beautiful.’

Templeton was standing beside the piano stool. She had a strange expression on her face that was difficult to read. She was five minutes late, which was an acceptable level of lateness given the circumstances. Early wouldn’t have been cool, and any later would have been rude. I was already halfway through my first whisky and contemplating a second.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You play really well. Where did you learn?’

‘My mother was a music teacher. She taught me to play. I studied music at college, as well.’

‘I thought your degree was in criminal psychology.’

‘It was. I did the music degree in my spare time.’

‘Most people tend to party in their spare time.’

I laughed, remembering a boy who’d thought every night was party night. ‘I was fortunate,’ I said. ‘I found the academic stuff easy, which left plenty of time for all the extra-curricular stuff.’

Templeton’s eyes narrowed and she fixed me with her cop stare. ‘Just how clever are you?’

‘That’s not what you’re really asking, is it? You want to know what my IQ is.’

‘Okay, what’s your IQ?’

‘It’s well above average, but a damn sight lower than da Vinci’s.’

‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s just a meaningless number. It’s what you do with your life that matters. Our actions define us. On paper my father was a genius, and he chose to use that gift to destroy.’

‘And you choose to use your genius to try to undo his wrongs. To balance things out again.’

I shrugged, but didn’t deny it.

Templeton gave me a sly look. ‘It annoys you that da Vinci had a higher IQ than you, doesn’t it?’

‘The question is irrelevant. The IQ test wasn’t invented until 1904, so any figure attributed to da Vinci is just some so-called expert’s best guess.’

‘See, it does annoy you.’

The mat my drink was on was at an angle, so I straightened it up, moving it until the edges lined up just right. Ice rattled against glass. ‘It doesn’t annoy me.’

‘You say it’s just a meaningless number, but I’m betting you could tell me who invented it, where it was invented. I bet you could tell me the whole story. So here’s my question: if it is so meaningless why won’t you tell me what your IQ is?’

‘Because I don’t want you to define me by a number.’

Templeton reached for my glass and took a sip. She grimaced and put the glass back down. The mat shifted and I straightened it again.

‘Interesting choice of words, Winter. You could have said that you didn’t want to be defined by a number. Instead you said that you didn’t want
me
to define you by a number.’

‘A slip of the tongue.’

Templeton gave me a look. ‘So you say.’

‘Remind me again why you’re pulling a cop’s salary. You would make a great lawyer.’

‘There’s not enough money in the world, Winter.’

I laughed. ‘Yeah, you’ve got a point there.’

‘When you said earlier that your mother
was
a music teacher, you didn’t mean that she was retired, did you?’

My laughter died away and I shook my head. ‘No she isn’t. She passed away a few years back.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It was probably for the best. She never really came to terms with what my father was.’

‘Have you?’

‘I’m working on it.’ I linked my fingers together and stretched them out. ‘Okay, enough with the heavy stuff. I’m warmed up now. Any requests?’

Templeton thought for a second, then said, ‘Do you know “A Whiter Shade of Pale”? That’s always been one of my favourites.’

‘So, what are those lyrics all about?’

Templeton smiled one of those great smiles. ‘You’re the genius, you tell me.’

‘Well, the fandango is a dance that originated in Spain. And a cartwheel is an acrobatic movement.’