Hard Light (21 page)

He laughed. “Lawrence Durrell was a big one. I lived in those books. One night we smoked a joint together and Poppy put the moves on me. I was right freaked, but then she said, ‘You know I'm not your real mum, don't you?' I guess at some level I must have always suspected, because I didn't waste time feeling bad about what happened next. That came later—the feeling bad part, I mean.”

I ran through the numbers. “So you were sixteen and she was, what—thirty?”

“Thirty-three.”

“Holy shit.” I whistled softly.

“It gets worse. She got pregnant—not that first time, we were involved for a few months. Sneaking about, because even at Kethelwite Farm this would not have been on. This was 1989—the seventies were long over. Poppy didn't tell me she was pregnant. She just disappeared. I completely flipped out. I never saw her again.”

“Never?” I looked at him skeptically. “But Mallo and Morven … you still know all the same people.”

“I know. I—I just couldn't. When I was a kid, it was just too much. It's still too much.”

I thought of the cancer-ravaged woman in a bad wig, making coffee in her kitchen, and tried to square that with a wasted thirty-something groupie seducing her teenage stepson. “What happened to the baby?”

“I only found out years later that there
was
a baby. Some horrible friends of Poppy's took it right after it was born, raised it in a caravan in Wales. I tracked them down and contacted them, but they didn't want to hear from me. I don't think they believed me—they wanted to imagine the baby's father was Mick Jagger or something. I think that's what Poppy led them to believe.”

“Does the baby know you're the father?”

“No.”

“Then—”

He held up his hand. “Stop.”

We didn't speak again till we reached Crouch End.

 

25

Adrian had the driver stop a few blocks away from the Dunfrieses' building. The streets and sidewalks remained nearly deserted, the curbs clogged with trash and clumps of slush. I looked around uneasily for Ellen Connors, but saw only a handful of drivers standing in the rain outside the minicab office.

The Dunfrieses' security gate was ajar. So was the building entrance. Adrian and I exchanged a look, shivering from nerves as much as the cold, then hurried into the foyer as the door hissed shut behind us. Adrian bent to shake rain from his anorak. I yanked back my hood and looked around.

Overhead, the tiny red light of a smoke alarm blinked intermittently. A WAY OUT sign above the main door gave off a faint blue glow. Otherwise, the entry hall was dark.

“There's no power,” I said.

Adrian straightened and looked up sharply. “Shit. What's going on?”

We approached the elevator. Adrian rattled the metal grille as though it were the door to a prison cell. I looked up into the empty shaft to where the unseen elevator car waited, then down into the yawning pit beneath us. A brisk draft poured from the shaft, smelling strongly of disinfectant. I stepped away with a shudder as Adrian swiped at his phone. He stared at the blue screen, his expression grim.

“They're still not answering,” he said. “We'll have to take the stairs.”

He made no move to leave. I waited, glancing longingly at the door behind us, until Adrian headed for the stairwell. As he pulled the door open, he looked over his shoulder at me.

“You don't have to come, you know. I wouldn't.”

I recalled my last sight of Quinn, his lanky, leather-clad frame growing smaller and smaller as he hurried down the corridor in Canary Wharf; of Poppy, seemingly asleep on her sofa with a thread of blood stitched across her arm. I nodded for Adrian to keep going and followed him.

Adrian took the steps two at a time. I went more slowly, wary of falling. It was even darker and colder than in the foyer. On each landing, the glow of a WAY OUT sign bathed the stairwell in blue. I felt as though I climbed an ancient tomb passage or grave shaft. With every step I fought the urge run back downstairs. Best case scenario was that Mallo would be so enraged by the news of Poppy's death that he'd kill both of us outright. I didn't want to think about what a worst case scenario would look like.

But neither could I picture myself holed up in some squalid London hotel room or bedsit, measuring hours and days and months by the bottle as I obsessed over what had happened to Quinn. I'd had enough of that back in New York. I hurried to catch up with Adrian.

On the top floor I stepped gingerly out into the corridor, one hand on the wall. The air smelled fetid and dank—the filtration system had shut down when the power failed. The folding gate to the elevator was half open. A few yards away, Adrian stood in front of the door to the Dunfrieses' flat, spectral in the mobile's ghastly blue light. As he reached for the doorknob, I ran to knock his hand away.

“No,” I whispered.

I held up my own gloved hand, and Adrian nodded as I grasped the knob. It turned with ease. We looked at each other, and even in the dim light I could see Adrian's pupils dilate in fear.

We stepped inside, neither of us speaking. The flat was dark, save for the carnival splash of light from the high windows overlooking the shops and streetlamps in Crouch End, and two votive candles flickering on a coffee table beside two nearly empty wineglasses. On the kitchen counter sat a third, half full glass of red wine.

“Morven?” Adrian called softly. “Mallo? Anyone in?”

There was no answer.

I followed Adrian into the living room. Everything looked much as it had several nights ago, minus partygoers and the accompanying mess of glasses and plates and scattered clothing. Adrian crossed to the window and gazed out. I stepped soundlessly to the side tables where the Cycladic statuette remained, undisturbed, along with the bit of gold foil.

But the tiny bronze figurine of a mouse blowing a horn was gone. Adrian turned from the window, and I motioned for him to join me.

“Something's missing,” I whispered, pointing at the small table. “There, a little statue of a mouse—”

He looked at the table, alarmed, then held up his mobile to light the way to Mallo's office.

The office door was ajar. Adrian stopped, and I could smell the acrid chemical tang of his fear and hear his ragged breathing.

Mallo was in the swivel chair, his back to us and his head dangling so that he stared at us upside down. His eyes bulged and his tongue lolled from a gaping mouth. What I could see of his face was plum-colored, the swollen lips almost black. A rainbow swirl of ribbons circled his neck like a farthingale, and a leather belt was wound so tightly around his throat that it had cut into his flesh.

I looked at Adrian. His face had gone dead white. I grabbed his arm, but he only stared at me as though hypnotized until I dragged him back into the hall.

“What the fuck?” he gasped. “What the fuck was that?”

“Lock the front door,” I whispered as we hurried to the kitchen. “Cover your hand so there's no prints.”

Swiftly I checked the kitchen for any sign of intrusion. As with the living room—as with the entire flat so far—nothing seemed out of place except for Mallo's corpse and the missing figurine. I picked up the half-full glass of red wine and sniffed. I removed my glove, dabbed a finger in the liquid, and drew it to my tongue. As far as I could tell, it was red wine. I replaced my glove and held the glass to the light from the windows, looking for the telltale impression of lipstick on the rim. There was none.

I found an open bottle on the floor beside the candlelit table with the two other wineglasses. Napa Cabernet. I sniffed at the bottle, removed my glove again, and dabbed a finger in each glass. I tasted nothing unusual.

But that didn't prove anything. Date rape drugs are notorious for being impossible to detect if they're dropped into a drink.

Mallo Dunfries would have been a hard man to take by surprise, and a harder man to kill, especially in his own home—unless someone had slipped him a Mickey Finn. I tilted the first glass, and saw the faint crescent left by a woman's lipstick on the rim. The other glass held a blurred imprint where someone had drunk from it.

I stared at the scene in front of me—candlelight and wine, very romantic—and glanced back into the kitchen at the half-full glass of wine on the counter. Behind me, Adrian called out softly.

“Look at this.”

Silently we tiptoed toward the bedroom and stepped inside. “Shit,” I said.

The bed was covered with broken glass and the torn remains of the photo of a young Morven. I looked under the bed and peered into closets, then went into the bathroom.

I was worried that whomever had killed Mallo might have gotten to the medicine cabinet before I did. But when I pressed the wall, the hidden panel opened, revealing glass shelves filled with pill bottles and packets of prescription drugs. Downers, mostly—Ambien, Alprazolam, Atenolol. Krishna was wrong: Mallo didn't seem to sleep nights. I hit pay dirt with a bottle of Vyvanse, a stimulant used to treat binge eaters.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Adrian stood in the doorway, staring at me in disbelief. I scooped the bottles into my bag and closed the cabinet. “This is where I walked in. Let's get out of here.”

“Are you crazy? The police will see that's been stolen!”

“Yeah, and they'll think whoever killed Mallo was here for drugs.”

I strode back to Mallo's darkened office and edged past his slumped corpse, its bloated face like a rotting pumpkin. I yanked open the top drawer and immediately saw what I wanted, nestled beside the cigar cutter—Dagney's passport.

I grabbed it, then searched his desk, pushing aside drifts of paper. Finally I got on my knees and peered under the desk. There was Mallo's mobile phone, a spiderweb of cracks across its face. I shoved it into my bag and ran with Adrian into the outer corridor.

 

26

We raced down the stairwell to the second-floor landing, where Adrian halted so suddenly that I ran into him. He grabbed me and pointed at the ceiling.

“Look,” he said.

Above us, a fluorescent light fixture flickered on, humming ominously. We stared at each other, and I turned and cautiously opened the door to the second floor so we could peer in. A sickly green glow indicated the power had returned here, too, and presumably to the entire building. I looked at Adrian.

“Isn't it weird for the power to go out during a snowstorm? Aren't the cables buried?”

Before he could reply, a low grinding noise made us both jump: The elevator had begun its slow descent from Morven's studio on the top floor.

“Let's go,” Adrian said, and headed back down the steps.

But as though its cables had looped around my ankles, I found myself irresistibly drawn into the second-floor corridor, and toward the elevator. Its folding gate was shut. The same seven-inch gap yawned between the car and the tiled floor.

“What the hell are you doing?” Adrian called from the stairwell.

“Just hang on.”

I stepped toward the gate, grabbed its metal struts, and gazed up into the shaft.

Above me, in the shadows, the elevator glided downward along its cables, as slowly and inexorably as in a dream. Its brass fittings gleamed where the light touched them. There was a large blotch on the underside of the car, like an oil stain. I tightened my hold on the folding gate, braced both feet against the floor, and leaned forward to look down.

Two stories below, dim light illuminated the bottom of the shaft. The floor had a glossy liquid sheen beneath a sprawled figure, its arms and legs tangled like those of a floppy discarded doll. There was no head, only a wad of multicolored hair. I thought of the open gate to the elevator upstairs. Three glasses of wine, one seemingly untouched.

Adrian hissed at me from the stairwell. “For Christ's sake, Cass!”

Silently I ran back. We raced downstairs, slowing only when we reached the door that led outside. Adrian pulled the hood of his anorak over his face. I did the same with mine. We strode through the courtyard, out the security gate, and onto the rainy street.

“Keep going,” he ordered. “Keep your head down. What did you see?”

“Morven,” I gasped. “At the bottom of the shaft. The elevator door was open upstairs.”

Adrian shuddered. “That fucking lift—like ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.'”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Come on, let's catch this bus.”

We sprinted toward the stop and clambered onto the crowded bus. The time on the schedule display read 23:42. We found seats near the back and sat, me clutching my camera bag, Adrian hugging his backpack.

“We're fucked, you know,” he said in a low voice. “CCTV, Mallo's got security cameras all over that place.”

“Maybe there'll be some kind of delay because of the power. But is that normal, to lose electricity during a storm?”

“No. Yes. How the fuck would I know?” He dug out his e-cigarette and twisted it between his fingers. “It should be connected to the mains, but maybe there's a panel in the flat. Maybe it was an accident.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Really? Mallo strangled himself by mistake?”

“Autoeroticism, people do that all the time.”

“Christ, don't be an idiot. Someone doped them, someone they know. One of those wineglasses wasn't touched. Whoever it was, they just happened to drop by after the power went out, poured the nice Cab they'd brought, and gave Mallo and Morven a roofie. Mallo managed to stagger to his office while Morven zoned out on the couch. He got the belt and party ribbons, and Morven got escorted to the elevator shaft. The guest left; we arrived just in time for the power to come back on.”

“You think it was set up on purpose? So we'd find them?”

“Probably not. Probably just our bad luck. Whoever it was, Mallo and Morven knew him. And he took that little statue—the one of the mouse blowing a horn.”