Hard Light (20 page)

“Listen—you can think whatever the fuck you want, but she's dead with a spike in her arm.”

His face twisted; I thought he might cry. Instead he said, “Come upstairs.”

The house was silent save for the drumming of rain. Water trickled down the steps and pooled on the second-floor landing. When we reached his room, Adrian immediately locked the door behind us. It was dark, except for the glow of the propane heater and the blue lozenge of a computer tablet on the bed.

I remained by the door, and reached in my pocket for the paring knife I'd nicked from Bruno's flat. Adrian lit the hurricane lamp, perched on the edge of his mattress, and gazed up at me, stricken. “I hope you're lying.”

“Why the hell would I lie? You didn't know?” He nodded, eyes brimming. “What about Morven and Mallo? Would they have heard something?”

“I don't know, I don't know.” Adrian's voice cracked. “Probably not—they would have rung me.”

“What about Krishna?”

“Krishna?” His eyes widened. “Christ, no. They never met. I'd be surprised if she even knew who Poppy is.”

He pulled out his mobile. I stepped over and knocked it from his hand. “Don't call them. Don't call anyone. Her place was ransacked. Not ransacked—someone knew exactly what they were looking for. They went through her drawers and looked at things.”

“What things?”

“Artifacts. Prehistoric stuff.”

Adrian drew a sharp breath. “How do you know?”

“She showed them to me. She asked me in, we had coffee. She talked about the cancer. Dying. I gave her Morven's present, and she showed me other stuff she had. She said she was leaving everything to the British Museum; she'd been in touch with a curator and she was donating her collection.”

Adrian covered his face with his hands. “Oh, fuck.”

I settled on the opposite corner of the bed and watched him cry. “I'm sorry,” I said. Adrian's shoulders heaved, but he said nothing. “I—she seemed like she needed to talk to someone. Like I said, I loved her music.”

With a groan Adrian lashed out, striking my hand so the paring knife clattered to the floor. “Fuck her music! You know nothing about her,
nothing
!”

He clutched a pillow to his face. I recovered the knife and stared at the hurricane lantern, listening to rain beat against the window. At last Adrian turned to me, his face raw and pale.

“What was it? Morven's gift? Did you see?”

I made a circle of my thumb and forefinger. “It was a bone disc, carved on both sides.”

He shut his eyes, as though hearing news he'd long feared. “A thaumatrope.”

“Right.” I looked at him in surprise. “You know what that is.”

“Yes. Do you?”

I slipped my hand beneath my collar and touched one of the amulets, cool against my skin. Slowly I withdrew it, holding it up so that it candled in the lantern's glow. Adrian's expression turned to astonishment, then fury.

“You stole it!”

“No! I saw where she put it—this and two others, they weren't in the cabinet with the rest. She stuck them in a grocery bag on a shelf in the kitchen, like she was planning to take them with her somewhere. When I saw the place had been ransacked, I grabbed them and split.”

I twisted the disc between my fingers, then slid it back beneath my sweater.

Without a word Adrian jumped to his feet and began to race around the room, grabbing things. A backpack and a dark green anorak, hiking boots, another cable-knit sweater. He ducked behind the wooden screen, returning moments later with an armful of socks and underwear that he stuffed into the backpack, then he hurried to a bookshelf and pulled out an oversized black volume that looked like a journal, thick with newspaper clippings and loose pages. He jammed that into the backpack then glanced up at me.

He said, “You have to leave.”

“Is this about Quinn? Did something happen? If you—”

“I don't give a fuck about Quinn. I'm leaving, and if you're smart you'll do the same.”

He hurried to his bed and knelt, then rolled back the rug and pulled up the loose floorboard. His arm disappeared into the hole, reemerging first with the gray canvas bag I'd discovered earlier, then a smaller bag from which he removed a set of keys. He stuffed everything into the backpack, replaced the floorboard and rug, and stepped over to turn off the space heater.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He ignored me, whipped out his mobile, swiped, and waited for the call to go through. He listened, his face grim, tried again, then a third time. He tapped out a text, stared at the screen, and cursed.

“They're not answering.”

“Who?”

“Mallo and Morven. And Poppy. None of them are picking up.” He glanced at my bag. “That's getting to be heavy—can you get rid of anything?” I shook my head. “What about the camera?”

“I'm not getting rid of my camera.”

“Dragging around that antique,” he sneered. “Why don't you just hang it around your neck for a millstone?”

He bent over the hurricane lantern and blew out the flame, held up his mobile so that cold blue light showed the way to the door.

I followed him downstairs and outside into the freezing rain. This time he walked around to the front of the house, picking his way carefully along an uneven concrete path, to where a crumbling brick wall with a broad wooden door hid the house's entrance from the street. A padlocked chain was looped through the door's wrought-iron fixtures; Adrian took out his set of keys and opened the padlock, holding the chain so I could slide out onto the sidewalk. He followed, taking care to pull the door tightly shut behind us.

“I'll text Mariah that I've left the lock off,” he said, pulling out his mobile as he started down the street. He glanced at me, and I recognized the same bleak gaze that had met me in the mirror at Bruno's flat when I realized Quinn was gone. “Did you call 999? Emergency services? When you saw she was dead,” he added impatiently.

“No.”

His expression flickered into fury, then despair. “No. Of course not.”

“Where are you going?”

“Mallo's.”

He began to walk quickly down the street. I stood and watched his tall, lean figure disappear into the city's fractal light and shadow.

“Wait!” I yelled.

I caught up with him at the corner. “I'll go with you,” I said.

Adrian scowled but otherwise ignored me. A black cab approached, and he swore under his breath when he saw its OFF DUTY light.

“I found her.” I grabbed his arm. “Any CCTV footage, it'll show whoever it was killed her.”

Adrian made a face. “Are you telling me Poppy Teasel had a CCTV in her flat?”

“No,” I admitted. “I still didn't kill her.”

“Who said you did? You protest too much.” He yanked his arm free. “Maybe it's a good idea. You tell Mallo, and I'll go back home.”

“That's not what I meant. I want to know if he's seen Quinn.”

Adrian stared at me in disgust. “Of course. You and O'Boyle—you deserve each other. Suit yourself. Morven's the one I'd worry about. Not Mallo. Here's a cab.”

There wasn't much traffic, but the roads were slick. The driver spoke softly into a Bluetooth device as we crept along, a soothing litany of Arabic. Adrian sat with his backpack between his legs and gazed at the icy streets. I made a point of looking for a photo-processing shop sandwiched between joints that sold SIM cards and cheap mobiles. I never saw one.

“Who do you think killed her?” I asked at last.

Adrian rubbed his eyes. “I don't know. It doesn't make any sense.”

“Murders never make sense, unless you're the one with the gun. Or needle. How did you meet Quinn?”

“One of the DJs I know did a gig in Reykjavík. Quinn got him some rare LPs. Year or so later my mate and I were in Reykjavík for the Airwaves Festival and he introduced us.” Adrian glanced at me. “I thought he couldn't leave Iceland for legal reasons. Has that changed?”

“I doubt it. He takes his chances.” I took a breath. “Your father—he's Leith Carlisle? The director?”

“Jesus Christ.” Adrian sank deeper into his seat and stared at the roof of the cab. “Poppy and now my father—how do you even know about these people? Everyone else has forgotten them.”

“I saw his movie. It was fucked up, in a good way.”

Adrian gave a barking laugh. “Leith couldn't tell a story to save his life. Not a story you'd want to hear when you were a kid
.
Not if you wanted to fall asleep afterward. When I finally read Conrad, the penny dropped—every one of Leith's bedtime stories was
Heart of Darkness.
He's been gone since 1980. Took off for Tangiers to hang out with Paul Bowles.
Finis
.”

“Do you remember when he made it?
Thanatrope
?”

Adrian's mouth tightened. “I remember everything.”

“I watched it again the other night, online. I dunno what it is, but it gets you. It got me, anyway. It's like a subliminal message or something. A recovered memory. Ever since then, I keep thinking I'm seeing stuff from
Thanatrope.
”

“That says more about you than the movie, doesn't it?” Adrian cracked his window, letting in a stream of cold air. “Don't romanticize him. Leith was a decent cinematographer who hung out with a lot of groovy people and got ideas above his station. He dropped acid with Brian Jones and Dennis Hopper, and it went to his head—it destroyed his head. He fancied himself the paterfamilias of this marvelous movable feast, only the feast never went anywhere. Him and his wife and his girlfriends and his kids and all the arsehole hippies who wanted to work with him. Three of us were born the same year. All Leith's kids. All different mothers.”

“Jesus.”

“Tamsin, Poppy, Morven,” he said. “Morven was so caught up with Mallo and Leith, she had no time for anyone else. And Tamsin—Tamsin was just evil. Poppy was the one who took care of us—she loved all the kids. I mean, she was still a kid herself. All those girls, none of them was more than eighteen. They'd breastfeed us in turn, the three of them. It was like a bad Thomas Hardy novel. I never knew who my real mother was until I was sixteen.”

“You're kidding.”

“I should clarify,” said Adrian. “I thought Poppy was my mother. I
wanted
her to be my mother. I didn't understand about the drugs—everyone was always stoned, but I just thought that was what grownups were like.

“She would sing me asleep at night, that song about the Golden City—that's where we were all going to live someday. The dream of a golden city. Sometimes she was a little scary, but not as scary as Morven. Or my father, who was sectionable. Eventually everything imploded. Poppy got involved with that guy from Lavender Rage. Morven and Mallo stayed around a little longer but eventually they split, too.”

“So you were left with Tamsin. Process of elimination: She's your mom?”

Adrian winced. “Tamsin is not strong on what you might call maternal instinct. And she's batshit crazy, just like Leith. No, she's worse than that,” he said, musing. “Leith truly was mad. Bipolar, schizophrenic … maybe it was just all the drugs. I don't know what was wrong, but he was obviously extremely disturbed.

“Whereas Tamsin was quite brilliant, but cold-blooded. Wicked. She used to have a dog, a pure-blooded greyhound bitch that got pregnant by some farmer's collie. Tamsin was enraged. She shot the collie, and when the puppies were born she wrung their necks, one by one. Last of all she killed the mother. Bullet in the head, just like the collie. She buried them on the moor. The soil's so acid that it eats away the bones. I looked for them a few years later, and all I found were the metal links from her dog's collar.”

“That's gruesome.” I stared out at the black rain. “Why would anyone stay with her?”

“Don't ask me. I was a kid, what did I know? I guess because they could all live rent-free, squatting in Cornwall. She made the best of a very bad situation, I'll credit her that—her parents never trusted Leith, and they cut her off once it became clear she'd turned Kethelwite Manor into a commune for a bunch of drug addicts. But the ink had dried on the deed. Tamsin owned it free and clear, that and the abandoned farm.

“After their baby died in the fire, that was the end of it. Her and Leith moved back to his flat in Islington. Me and the other kids stayed with Morven and Mallo and their friends, traveling around in a caravan from one commune or festival to the next.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“It wasn't romantic,” he snapped. “It was fucking sordid. People fucking a few feet away when we were trying to sleep in the caravan, people trying to mess with us. I learned how to bite.” He bared his teeth. “They'd give us booze and drugs, cough syrup to knock us out. After a while I wouldn't eat or drink anything unless I knew where it came from.
Who
it came from. Poppy would catch up with us when Jonno was off on tour. That was the only time I felt safe.

“Then Leith had his first big crackup and was in hospital for six months. After he got out, Tamsin had the bright idea of moving everyone back to the farm. They were going to raise sheep like the McCartneys. So we all trundled back to Kethelwite, only instead of living in the manor we were squatting in a derelict farmhouse. My place in Highgate is a considerable improvement. The kids at the village school tormented us, so we stopped going to school. There were six of us by then. Morven taught us to read. Most of us, anyway.”

“When did you find out Poppy wasn't your mother?”

“When she seduced me.”

Adrian turned to me with a steady gaze, daring me to look away. “I was sixteen. We were at the farm, just the two of us. Everyone else had gone to Glastonbury, even the littlies. I got really sick—we kids were always sick. It was a few years after the mad cow outbreak and I was scared I had that. Turned out to be the flu. Poppy stayed to take care of me. I loved to read, and she'd bring me books. Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin. Just what a mum should give her young teenage son.”