Lady of the Shades (27 page)

Five or six minutes later, Etienne Anders stops squirming and sits up, eyes still closed, lips spreading in a suitably ghostly smile. ‘Hello, Ed,’ she says, only it isn’t her
voice. It’s Andeanna’s.

I freeze. Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. A moaning approximation of her voice, perhaps, at best. But this is the real thing, the voice of the woman I met on the boat,
the woman who seduced me and had me dispose of the Turk. The voice of a ghost.

‘Who are you?’ I croak. ‘Is this a recording?’

‘Don’t be silly, Ed.’ I see now that the smile is Andeanna’s as well. A warm but worried smile, like the one she flashed the first time we kissed. ‘You know
it’s me.’

I lean forward, fingers digging into the mystic’s. ‘I want to hear you say it.’

‘I’m Andeanna Menderes,’ she sighs, ‘but I called myself Deleena Emerson the night we met at Shar’s party.’

‘You died,’ I whisper. ‘Years ago. You’re dead.’

‘Yes, Ed. I know.’

‘But you were real!’ I shout. ‘I touched you. Kissed you. We made love.’

‘No,’ she corrects me. ‘We couldn’t. I would have, if I’d been able, but there are limits.’

‘Who sets them?’ I croak, but she only smiles and shakes her head.

‘How have you been?’ she asks, as if we’d parted the day before.

‘How do you fucking think?’ I snarl, no longer seeing Etienne Anders, no longer doubting, chatting with Andeanna the same way I did when she was alive. When I
thought
she
was alive. All the doubts blown away. Adjusting with surprising ease to the resettlement of my axis of reality.

‘I’ve kept track of you as best I could,’ Andeanna says as my ghosts drift into the background, sullen, disappointed, and also confused-looking. ‘I’ve been with you
much of the time. I tried letting you know I was present, but I don’t have that power any longer. If you hadn’t come here, we could never have spoken with each other again. That’s
why I told you about Etienne. I didn’t know what was going to happen when Mikis died, but I guessed it might be like this. I didn’t want to leave without explaining.’

I feel tears building, but I blink them back. ‘Explain that you made a fool of me? That you used and discarded me? That you forced me to kill your ex-husband, promising it would make you
mine, knowing it would only drive us apart?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she mutters, dropping her head with shame. ‘There was no other way. I had to have him killed. Just like he killed me.’

I push my anger aside and concentrate on this immediate part of the puzzle. ‘The Turk killed you?’ I ask, and she nods. ‘But Greygo said –’

‘Greygo started coming here when he was nineteen,’ she interrupts. ‘I’d been with him since I died, as your ghosts are always with you, but that wasn’t enough.
He’d only known me as a child knows. He yearned to learn more about me. He did the rounds of mystics and seers, longing to talk with me and hear me tell him that I loved him. Etienne was the
only one I could speak through. She’s special, the way you are. You both have connections to the dead which most of the living lack.

‘Greygo had harboured suspicions for a long time. Mikis was careful never to let his secret slip, but sometimes he’d drink too much, moan my name in his sleep and beg forgiveness.
Greygo wondered what his father had to feel guilty about.

‘It took him a long time to build up to the question.’ The mystic’s face lifts, filled with Andeanna’s pride. ‘
Did my father kill you?
It almost destroyed
him as he asked it. I meant to tell him the truth and turn him against the monster who took my life. But there was so much fear in his eyes, fear that I’d say yes . . . ’ Her face
clouds over. ‘As much as I hated Mikis, I loved Greygo and couldn’t bear to destroy him. I made up a suicide story, mixing in enough truth to explain Mikis’s guilt. It hurt
Greygo, but not as much as the truth would have.’

‘And killing his father — don’t you think that hurt?’

‘Of course,’ she sighs, ‘but I had no choice. I had to kill Mikis. I couldn’t know peace until I did.’

‘Tell me how you did it,’ I whisper. ‘Tell me how you assumed human form and tracked me down.’

Etienne shrugs, exactly the way Andeanna used to when I asked a question she couldn’t answer. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Bullshit,’ I snarl.

‘The truth,’ she says gently. ‘This is the real world, Ed, not one of your books. There aren’t answers to every question. For years I was a bodiless entity, haunting the
mansion. I glimpsed fellow spirits from time to time, but I had no way of communicating with them. I was alone, and lonely, but at least there was Greygo. I watched him grow up. I was there when he
brought his first date home. I kept an eye on him and spoke to him, even though he couldn’t hear me.

‘One night I felt myself changing.
Forming
. I was terrified. I didn’t know what was happening. I was feeling things again, smelling, hearing, seeing. After the initial
shock, it was wonderful. But now that I was solid – visible – I had to leave before I was seen. So I grabbed some of Greygo’s clothes and fled.

‘I wandered the city, bones and flesh strengthening while I walked, and if you think that was painless, you couldn’t be more wrong. I was cold and scared, in agony. Then, when the
sun rose, I disintegrated like a vampire. Sunlight always undid me. That’s why I never met you in the day, always late in the evening when the sun’s power was fading.

‘I re-formed the next night, in the place where I’d come apart. Naked and defenceless, I hid, only coming out when the city was asleep. I returned to the mansion and raided my old
room. I sold jewellery – my own, items that Mikis had held on to, so I didn’t feel bad for stealing it – and set myself up in a small apartment, where I retired each night before
dawn, so that I could rematerialize somewhere familiar and safe the next evening.

‘Shortly after that, my thoughts turned to revenge.’ Her expression hardens. I’m amazed by how much of Andeanna there is in the mystic’s face. It’s as if
she’s taken over Etienne Anders from the inside, making the medium’s features her own, moulding them to mirror hers. ‘I wasn’t driven by hatred. Killing Mikis was just
something I had to do. Without knowing
how
I’d re-formed, I knew instinctively
why
— to make Mikis pay.’

‘How did you know?’ I ask.

‘I just did. It’s . . . ’ She grins sickly. ‘It’s a dead thing. You’d have to die and come back like I did to understand.’

‘I’m not
that
eager to find out,’ I deadpan, and for a few seconds we smile at one another the way we used to, like it’s a big joke.

‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I knew I couldn’t kill Mikis by myself. I didn’t have murder in me. I had to find somebody else.’

‘Which is where I came in,’ I growl, and she nods glumly. ‘Why me?’

‘Pure misfortune,’ she sighs.

‘Don’t lie. You tracked me down and tricked me into an affair. You used me like a puppet.’

‘No.’ She shakes her head vehemently. ‘It wasn’t like that. I know that’s how it looks, but I swear on all that’s sacred, on
Greygo
, I didn’t
set out to trap you.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I mutter.

A pained expression crosses her face. ‘I was at that boat party by chance,’ she says. ‘I crashed a lot of parties. Given who and what I was, I couldn’t mingle with those
who’d known me when I was alive. I’d fall in with groups on their way to a party, pretend to be human for a few hours, slip away like Cinderella before the break of day.

‘The only thing I had on my mind that night was fun. Like so many other nights, that proved elusive, which is why I wound up on deck, to brood about the cruel twist of fate that had placed
me there. Then I found myself next to
you
.’ Although the mystic’s eyes don’t open, the lids fix on me as if the spirit of Andeanna sees through the thin layers of flesh.
‘I knew instantly that you were a man of violence. I saw your ghosts and sensed their hatred of you. I knocked the glass overboard to start a conversation with you, and . . . you know the
rest.’

‘I thought I did. But why don’t you tell me how it really was? It was never about love. You saw me as a tool from the start, didn’t you, a way to kill Mikis?’

She sighs. ‘My interest was wholly mercenary that first night. But that changed as we spent more time together. I forgot what I was. I fell in love with you. It was crazy, and it messed up
everything, but I couldn’t help myself. When I was with you, I
was
real, alive, desperate for love. That wasn’t a sham, Ed. I couldn’t have faked those
emotions.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m not!’ she cries. ‘Listen to me.
Hear
me. I know you hate me, and you’ve every right to, but don’t turn your ears against the truth. I love you,
Ed, and if you ever loved me the way you claimed, you’d know in your heart that I’m not lying.’

The terrible thing is — I do.

‘What about Axel Nelke?’ I ask, anxious to steer talk away from love.

She stares through her closed eyelids, disappointed by my reaction, then shrugs. ‘Axel was my lover. Mikis killed him. What more do you want to know?’

‘The guard I killed. You said he was Axel Nelke.’

‘I lied. When you saw through my first disguise – Deleena Emerson – I knew I had to make my next seem as genuine as possible. I had to tell you as much of the truth as I dared.
If I’d invented a name for my fictitious bodyguard, you might have sensed the lie. I felt safe using Axel’s name. I knew I wouldn’t blurt out the wrong surname by mistake, or tell
you he had red hair then turn round later and say he was blond.’

‘But the man I killed . . . ’

‘A guard. I don’t know his name. There was one on duty most nights. They usually knocked off at ten or eleven if Mikis and Greygo weren’t home.’

‘You didn’t set me up to kill him?’

‘Of course not. I wanted Mikis’s head, nobody else’s. I don’t know why the guard returned when he did.’

Is she telling the truth? I don’t know. If I could see her eyes,

I’d have a better idea. ‘Greygo hadn’t heard of a guard going missing,’ I note.

She smiles bitterly. ‘Greygo didn’t want to know about Mikis’s business, so he was kept in the dark whenever possible. If he’d been home around that time, he would have
noticed that the guard had disappeared. Since he was absent, Mikis saw no reason to share the troubling news with him.’

‘Why did you invite me there?’ I ask, reluctant to let it drop. ‘What was with the battered face? Was that faked?’

‘Self-inflicted,’ she mumbles. ‘By then I’d fallen in love with you. On the boat, I thought I might be able to hire you to kill Mikis. But I now knew that whatever
you’d done in the past, you weren’t a killer any more. Yet you remained my best hope. I thought you could be encouraged to kill. So I used your love for me to turn you against
Mikis.’

‘Then you did manipulate me!’ I shout.

‘Yes and no,’ she sniffs.

‘You can’t have it both ways, Andeanna.’

‘But I did,’ she protests. ‘I loved you, Ed — that was real. But I had to kill Mikis. My first priority, my very reason for existing, was to make Mikis pay. So, yes, I
used you. But I didn’t fake love to win you over.

‘My plan was for you to see that Mikis had hurt me, lose your temper and target him. Afterwards I’d have told you the truth. Or if, as I suspected, I faded away when Mikis was dead,
I’d try to contact you via Etienne, as I’m doing now. Then the guard turned up, you killed him and a new plan formed. You revealed the truth about your past, you asked to eliminate
Mikis, you dreamt up the assassin angle. I didn’t want that – it was complicated, and it implicated you too deeply – but I was powerless to turn you from your path.’

‘You could have told me the truth,’ I contradict her.

A wan smile flickers across her lips. ‘That I was a ghost? A shade of the night? Would you have believed me?’

‘Probably not,’ I mutter. ‘But if you’d let me see your form unravel one night . . . ’

‘I considered that,’ she says. ‘But if I’d let you see me for what I truly was, I didn’t think you’d be able to love me any more. I was worried I’d
scare you off.’

‘It takes a lot to scare me,’ I grunt.

‘Don’t I know it,’ she grins. Then she tickles my left wrist with one of her fingers. ‘If it’s any consolation, I did what I could to protect you. I lied to suit my
purposes, but also to suit yours. I could have betrayed you to Bond, planted evidence to condemn you. But I wanted you to escape.’

‘Very thoughtful of you,’ I snap.

Silence descends. I mull over what Andeanna has told me. It’s too insane to be true. I want to reject it out of hand. But what’s the alternative? Andeanna Menderes was murdered
twenty years ago — fact. I fell in love with a woman who shares her looks — fact. I have it on good authority that the woman’s ghost has roamed the halls of her home since her
death — fact. That woman is now speaking to me through a medium — fact.

Too many facts to ignore. When there’s no sane answer, a man must accept the insane. As impossible as it is, as crazy as it sounds, the truth is undeniable. ‘I fell in love with a
ghost,’ I groan.

‘Yes.’ Andeanna smiles sadly. ‘And a ghost fell in love with you.’

Incredibly, my mood is lifting. The truth has been revealed. It’s an awful, twisted truth, but now I can begin to deal with it. It won’t be easy, but I don’t have to chase
around wildly any longer, pursuing false threads, driving myself mental in search of an answer.

‘It’s asking a lot,’ Andeanna murmurs, ‘but do you think you can forgive me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘This has thrown my world out of whack. I don’t know what I feel for you, or what I’ll feel a week from now, a month, a year. If I
said I could, I’d be lying.’

‘That’s fair,’ she nods.

‘I was always fair with you,’ I note pointedly.

‘And I wasn’t with you,’ she agrees.

‘So.’ I settle back, studying the face of the channelling mystic. ‘Where do we go from here?’

‘Our separate ways,’ she answers promptly.

I feel a strange pang of regret. Even after all she put me through, I still love her, and the thought of parting for ever fills me with dread. ‘Can’t we . . . isn’t there some
way we can . . . ?’