Scarlet Wakefield 01 - Kiss Me Kill Me (17 page)

BAD COP/BAD COP

I told Lizzie to start from the beginning. I realize now that may have been a mistake. I’m just surprised she didn’t start by recounting her birth. Blimey, this girl likes the sound of her own voice.

“I’m really in debt,” Lizzie says, winding a tissue through her fingers. “I keep thinking that if I have the latest bag or whatever, they’ll let me be friends with them. And it does sort of work. I mean, they ask me to parties sometimes, and if I’m in the same club they’ll let me sit with them if I buy lots of drinks. But Dad’s actually quite strict about my credit card, he monitors it online and he shouts at me if I go over a grand, which is nothing, actually, I can’t believe he’s that fussy when he’s a multimillionaire, you know?”

Lizzie’s incapable of holding more than one thought in her head at any one time: from her indignant tone, I can tell that she’s so resentful at her father’s injustice that she’s temporarily forgotten to be frightened of me and Taylor. She starts shredding the tissue she’s holding, ripping it up angrily. Bits of white floaty paper drift off in the breeze and fall to the grass below the bench.

“Anyway, I’m really skint after buying this bag.” She looks dolefully at the ghastly chartreuse thing with its dripping straps and buckles and shiny dangling bits. “I wanted to go out this weekend, but I can’t, because I haven’t got a penny, and then she offered me all this money if I’d just leave a note for you, Scarlett.” Lizzie looks up at me, her eyes still swollen, but with a genuinely imploring expression that makes me think she’s telling the truth here. “She swore it wasn’t anything bad, just that she didn’t want you to know it came from her.”

“Why not?” Taylor asks.

“I don’t know, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. I mean, it was two hundred and fifty pounds! Just for leaving you a note! And then the first one you had a pen leak on, so I had to go and get another one from her, which was really hard to organize because I had to be back by curfew and she made this huge fuss about coming out on the tube to meet me. Wait.  .  .  .”

The penny dropped. Lizzie stares at both of us in shock.

“You didn’t have an ink leak, did you?” Lizzie says, her voice rising. “It was all a setup. You did that deliberately so I’d have to get another note and you could watch me put it in the desk and I still don’t know how you saw me! Unless Meena saw me, but when I came out of the room she was halfway down the corridor. Did you have a video or something in there?”

Taylor and I just look back at her, stone-faced, not giving anything away.

She sighs. It’d be a sob if she had any tears left. As it is, she just looks down at the shredded tissue on the grass, and sighs again.

“No one ever tells me anything,” Lizzie complains. “That note was sealed up, so I couldn’t see what it was, and now you won’t tell me how you knew it was me! It’s so unfair.”

“Life sucks, Lizzie,” Taylor says nastily. “Deal with it.”

I expect now I should be good cop to Taylor’s bad, but I haven’t got the energy to pretend to be nice. This last half hour has been really draining. I decide that we’ll go for bad cop/bad cop instead. It’ll be quicker.

I fix Lizzie with a hard stare, and say:

“What’s her name, Lizzie? The girl who paid you to slip me that note?”

Lizzie starts shredding another tissue.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell,” she whines. “And she was going to let me go clubbing with them on Saturday and not make me pay for everything, like they usually do  .  .  .”

Taylor walks over to the bench, kneels down in front of Lizzie, and grabs her shoulders. Blimey. Taylor must look enormous from that angle, her jaw jutting forward, her arms swelling under her T-shirt. Her hands are really strong, too, and calloused from all the rope climbing. Lizzie visibly wilts in her grasp.

“You’re out of time,” Taylor says. “Give us the name. Now.”

Double-blimey. Taylor is fantastic at being bad cop. I just hope she never turns on me.

Lizzie droops as if she has no backbone at all, as if she’s just made of jelly. Her head hanging, she stares down at the grass, and whispers a name, so softly that I don’t catch it.

“What did she say?” I demand.

My heart’s pounding. We’re getting closer to finding out at least part of this mystery, the real truth of what happened that night, the answer to why Dan died.

Taylor lets go of Lizzie, who flops onto the bench.

“Nadia,” Taylor tells me. “She said Nadia.”

OPERATION OBNOXIOUS AMERICAN

It was really hard to wait till the weekend to stake out Nadia’s block of flats. But there was no way we could get into town long enough to do anything during the week. What with the Wakefield Hall seven p.m. dinner curfew, we’d barely get to Knightsbridge before we’d have to turn around and come home again. On the weekends, we’re free from noon on Saturday onward, as long as we’re home by seven for dinner, of course. That’s like an alternative religion for my grandmother—dinner at seven. And Sundays we can get away all day till dinner, as long as we present a plausible schedule of what we’re doing to our housemistress, and have at least one other girl to go out with.

(Bad luck on loners, that rule, I always think. I mean, what a way to make you feel even worse if you don’t have a friend or two to go out with on the weekends.)

We told our housemistresses (or, in my case, Aunt Gwen) that we wanted to go and explore London parks. Not a complete lie. Aunt Gwen, honestly, wouldn’t have cared less if I’d said I wanted to go and explore London crack dens; but Taylor’s housemistress, Mademoiselle Fournier, apparently clapped her hands and said what a charming idea that was. Bless Mademoiselle Fournier. I’ve had an incredibly soft spot for her ever since the whole incident in the corridor with the disembodied head and her persuading Miss Newman that she might be insane.

So here we are, sitting with our backs against trees, curled up in the roots, looking for all the world like two teenagers hanging out in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do with our lives.

“He’ll never talk to me again,” I say, picking a blade of grass and twisting it between my fingers, tighter and tighter, till it darkens and gets soggy with moisture. I drop it to the ground, where it joins a pile of other blades of grass, equally tortured and discarded.

“Come on, Scarlett. It’s only been a few days,” Taylor says.

“But he thinks I’m a bully now. I’m sure he’s avoiding me.”

“Hey, you can’t know that!”

“I just think I’d have seen him around before now.”

“He might have had a couple of days off!”

I sigh. “No, he’s avoiding me, I’m sure of it. I really think he liked me a bit.”

“Sure he did. You could tell he liked you when he came into the maze.”

“Oh yeah?” I perk up despite my gloom. “How?”

“The way he looked at you,” Taylor says. “It was totally obvious.”

“But now he thinks I’m a mean girl—”

“When this is all over, you can go and tell him everything,” Taylor says firmly. “It’ll make an amazing story. And then he’ll, like, cover your face with burning kisses.”

“He’ll what?”

She grins.

“It’s in this P. G. Wodehouse book I’m reading to learn how to be more English. The hero just covered his girlfriend’s face with burning kisses.” She points to the book lying on the grass beside her. “Hey, nothing’s happened with the stakeout while you’ve been boring me to death going on about that Jase guy, has it?”

I shake my head, my gaze fixed on Nadia’s building, across the wide road that’s Knightsbridge.

“No one in or out. I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”

“Maybe Nadia’s away for the weekend,” Taylor comments.

It’s the first time either of us have mentioned that possibility, though it’s been on our minds ever since we got here. It’s so frustrating. I scraped up from the depths of my memory the information that Nadia’s parents were art dealers, and finding their gallery’s phone number was easy enough. A call to the super-posh receptionist ascertained the information that they were “away on an acquisitions trip” till the end of next week. And the magic of the Internet also informed us that Nadia’s brother, Olivier, is at Durham University, which is far enough away from London that we could cross our fingers and assume he wouldn’t be back for weekends much.

Which leaves Nadia. And the thought that she might have left for the weekend before we got here yesterday afternoon, and that we’ll be sitting here all day Sunday, with the flat empty, just to watch her roll home sometime this evening, is so annoying that we’ve been deliberately avoiding expressing it to each other.

Taylor takes out her mobile and dials a number.

“I’m calling the flat again,” she says, “just in case.” She pauses, listening to the rings. “Ugh,” she says crossly. “Answerphone again.”

The trouble is, the fact that Nadia isn’t picking up the phone doesn’t mean she isn’t there. All her friends would ring her on her mobile. So she probably wouldn’t bother to get the house phone, assuming it would just be messages for her parents.

A few magazines lie scattered around us, which we’ve been thumbing through, but only with half an eye in my case, as I’m the one who knows what Nadia looks like, and I have to keep staring in the direction of that impressive glass entrance. Knightsbridge is wide enough to have four lanes of traffic, and I know Nadia won’t bother to glance all the way across it over the low wall into the park, let alone have any interest in a pair of averagely dressed girls who can’t remotely compete with her in any glamour or fashion stakes.

A black cab pulls up outside the building. There’s someone in it, but they don’t get out. It just sits there, idling its engine. After a minute or so, the doorman comes out and walks over to the big glass sliding entrance doors to see if the person in the cab needs anything, but the driver waves him away and he goes back inside. And then, a minute or so later—

“Oh my God!” I squeal.

“Keep it down,” Taylor hisses. “Is it her?”

I’ve grabbed a magazine and am holding it up to obscure most of my face. It’s Nadia, dressed in jeans and a tight sweater with a slit neck that shows her thin tanned shoulders. Her wrists are heavy with gold bangles. She exits the building and walks slowly toward the cab, waving at its occupant, throwing her head back to show off how shiny her hair is, extracting the maximum theatricality from this simple crossing of the pavement.

“Yeah, it’s Nadia. And I think that’s Plum in the cab,” I inform Taylor, squinting to see through the tinted windows of the taxi.

“I can’t believe she’s the same age as us,” Taylor says, gawking at Nadia’s glamour.

“Aunt Gwen says Middle Eastern girls age faster,” I say.

“Your aunt Gwen’s an evil old hag,” Taylor says. “I should know, I have her for geography.”

“Nadia is really gorgeous,” I say as Nadia bends to scoot her skinny frame into the cab.

Taylor sniffs. “It’s all makeup. She probably looks like the back of a train in the mornings.”

I crack up. “Taylor, it’s a bus, not a train. You look like the back of a bus if you’re ugly.”

“Stupid English expressions,” Taylor says sulkily. “There are millions of them, and they’re all stupid.”

The cab’s pulled away.

“They’ll be off to a really late lunch on the King’s Road.” I’m guessing, but I’ve probably got it more or less right. God knows I’ve heard them all banging on about what they did at the weekend thousands of times when I was still at St.

Tabby’s. “And then shopping in Sloane Street. We’ve got hours.”

“Hopefully you won’t need hours,” Taylor says, standing up. “Ouch, my foot’s gone to sleep.” She shakes her trainer about. “Okay, let’s get Operation Obnoxious American under way.”

I jump up, too.

“Ready to be obnoxious?” I ask.

“Jesus, after all this waiting? You kidding? I am totally ready!” Taylor says, with an ominous gleam in her eye.

And then she looks at me long and hard.

“You ready?” she asks me.

I nod. I don’t trust my voice just at this moment.

Taylor’s task, though showy, has no danger involved. I’m the one who has the scary mission to complete.

Which I am trying very hard not to panic about.

“Owww! Owww! My foot! What the hell did I trip on? Owww!”

Taylor is eerily believable. If I didn’t know this was all a setup, I’d absolutely think, like everyone else stopping to stare at her, that she’d just tripped on the carpet outside Nadia’s block of flats, fallen, and done something nasty to her foot.

She’s writhing around and grabbing it. No one’s going up to her, at least not yet: she’s making such a racket that the more repressed Brits are embarrassed by the noise. It’s not that they don’t want to help, it’s that they’re afraid that approaching her will inevitably draw them into the Scene she’s making, and one thing English people are really scared of is Being Involved in a Public Scene. It’s very shameful in our culture.

But there’s a very good reason why Taylor is shouting the place down.  .  .  .

“Owww! It really hurts! Can I get some help here, please?” she yells in the direction of the glass doors.

The doorman has got to have seen Taylor lying there. He’s probably hoping she’ll eventually get up and walk away without involving him and his building in anything.

Taylor writhes on the carpet. “I think my ankle’s twisted!” she yells. “I am so suing this building—that carpet’s a total health risk! Who the hell puts carpet on a sidewalk, anyway?”

“Are you all right?” a young man says, stopping in front of her. He’s wheeling a bike and wearing exercise gear.

“No, I’m not! I caught my foot on that carpet and now I think I’ve twisted my ankle!” she replies loudly.

“Oh crumbs,” he says, “what a bore.”

To my great amusement, Taylor actually stops wailing and writhing for a split second out of sheer surprise at this superb example of British understatement. She goggles at him as if he were in a freak show before recovering herself and saying pointedly: “Yeah, it hurts like hell!”

“Well, let me have a quick look,” he says, propping the bike up against the building and coming to kneel beside her. “I’m a medical student, actually. Not quite as good as a proper doctor. But I think I should be able to look at an ankle.”

Nooooooooo! I yell inside my head. If he gets his hands on her ankle, he’ll see that she’s completely fine, help her up, our entire plan will be ruined—

Taylor is panicking as well, as the same thought hits her.

“Uh, I’m not sure you should do that,” Taylor says feebly, “because, of, um, medical insurance  .  .  . liability  .  .  .”

But just as the young man is reaching out to her allegedly twisted ankle, a third voice breaks in.

“You can’t leave that bicycle against this building, young man!” it says reprovingly. “I’m going to have to ask you to move it at once.”

Taylor and the medical student both turn to look. It’s the doorman. Not the one who was on duty that fateful Saturday night of the party, a much older one, with a forbidding scowl. The medical student looks nervous. Taylor, however, rises magnificently to the occasion.

“I’m sorry, buddy, what did you say?” she asks angrily. “This nice guy is trying to help me after I fell over and probably broke something on your stupid carpet, and you don’t even bother to come out and check if I’m okay? Oh no, all you care about is a damn bike! If I’ve hurt myself, my mom will sue your asses from here to L.A. and back, believe me, and the fact that you didn’t even bother to come out and see if I was okay will look really bad in court!”

“Um, steady on,” the young man says uncomfortably to Taylor. “I don’t actually mind moving my bike.”

“You can both help me in right now so I can sit down inside instead of lying on some dumb carpet on the sidewalk, and this doctor guy can see if my ankle’s okay!” Taylor continues, barely registering his interruption. “Otherwise you”—she points at the doorman—“will be on the business end of a big fat lawsuit! My mom just loves to sue people!”

Blimey, I think, who is Taylor channeling? This isn’t her at all, and she’s doing it so well! The doorman starts to say something, but then he catches Taylor’s eye and thinks better of it, I can tell.

“Let’s get you into the lobby, then, miss,” he says, coming over to where she’s lying. “And perhaps after that the young gentleman wouldn’t mind taking his bicycle round to the service entrance.”

The medical student says something, and they both start helping Taylor up, but I barely catch this, as I am now in motion, sneaking along the pavement, close to the wall, moving fast and confidently, hitting the center of the gray doormat, which triggers the opening of the glass doors. Just as they start to open, which might catch the doorman’s attention, Taylor, who’s been keeping an eye on my progress, lets out a big “Owwww!” of pain and sags heavily against the doorman, so that his entire attention goes into not dropping her.

I’m in. My trainers make no noise at all on the marble floor as I sprint across it. This is one of the most dangerous bits of all, because I don’t know where I’m going. I dart my head frantically from side to side, looking for what I know has to be around here somewhere.  .  .  . Keep going, Scarlett, keep looking.  .  .  . It’s not behind the doorman’s big desk, but it must be nearby, surely, because he’d need to get to it on a regular basis. I’m past the desk and scouring the wall with my eyes—a door! Yes! I dash toward it and pull it open. A second later and I’m inside—and not a second too soon, because I can already hear voices in the lobby. Taylor’s is raised as loud as possible to warn me of their presence.

I look around. I’m in a corridor—concrete floor, steel-gray walls, bright fluorescent lights running overhead—a stark contrast to the discreetly lit dark wood and marble of the lobby I’ve just come through. This is most definitely the servants’ area of the building. Good. I move down the corridor, listening intently in case there’s anyone around, but the only noise I hear is my own breathing  .  .  . and my sharply indrawn gasp of excitement as I round a corner and come face to face with what I’m looking for.