Stiletto (50 page)

*

He sat on a bench by the river Thames and pondered. Lionel John Dover, formerly of Northampton, now abruptly of no fixed abode and completely unconcerned by that fact.

Nine hours ago, he had been a family man with a well-paying job as a senior manager at a successful company. True, for the past two years, he had been completely insane, but that had not bothered him as much as he would have expected, nor had it interfered with his life.

And then he met that woman.

She knew,
he thought.
She knew everything.
She knew about the things he’d done, and she’d done something to him, held him pinioned against his will.

So of course he’d had to act, even though it was broad daylight and they were in a crowd.

What was she? Who was she? How could she know about it? About me?

Panicked, he’d hurried away from the racecourse and gone straight to a cash machine. He had taken out as much money as he could, three hundred pounds. That, along with the money in his wallet, gave him four hundred and thirty-seven pounds. Normally he would not have been carrying more than a hundred pounds on him, but he’d been betting and socializing.

He hadn’t dared to go to his car. Instead, his mind whirling, he had gone to the train station and bought a ticket to London. Once he got to the city, he visited the nearest Marks and Spencer and bought a complete change of clothes, paying with cash. Nondescript. Designed to blend in. He stuffed the morning suit into the first rubbish bin he could find and walked away.

He’d also walked away from his life, his family. His wife, Catherine. His children, Harry, Jenny, May, and Rupert. His dogs. His job. Everything. And yet, he found that he didn’t care. They were the trappings of another man’s life, a man who was not impossible and not insane.

Before it all started, he hadn’t been a bad man. A stupendously boring one, perhaps, but not bad. He was not given to flights of fancy or possessed of much imagination. He humdrummed his way through life being respectable and upright. Certainly not the kind of man who would kill people.

The first time it happened, he’d been collecting for the Red Cross, of all things. Community service. Knocking on the door of a house on a quiet street in Daventry, he’d felt a burning in his spine, a heat that built unbearably and set him gasping for breath until a pulse surged out of him. It sent him to his knees, and he’d been instantly drenched with sweat. Then he had a sudden awareness of the inside of the house as crystals erupted from every surface and impaled the two people within. He’d seen the house through a thousand facets. He’d
felt
the man’s and the boy’s skin, their blood, their muscles and organs, as the blades cut through them.

His mind had fractured then, unable to reconcile the horrific unbelievability of what was happening with the sheer undeniability of its truth.

In a daze, he’d staggered away, gotten into his car, and driven back to his house. No one was home, and he’d stripped down and showered. He’d thrown his clothes in the washing machine and then passed out for hours. When he woke up, the memory of what had happened sent him shuddering. It was undeniably real. His rancid clothes were still in the machine and there were half-moon cuts in his palms from when his fingers had clenched unbearably, but beyond that, the memory of those moments was burned into his brain. He had to dash to the toilet, where he was violently ill. Then, trembling, he turned on the television.

Braced for coverage of the nightmare, he found absolutely nothing. The big story was that some Shetland pony carrying a fat child had bolted from a local riding school, run into town, and come to a halt in the market square. No mention of any murders. No mention of crystals.

Over the next few days, he’d watched the news, read the papers, and scoured the Internet, but there was never any reference to a horrific double murder, let alone a horrific double murder with unexplainable crystals. His psyche, already splintered by the impossibility of what he’d experienced, was shattered completely by the fact that no one else seemed to have noticed.

Lionel Dover had become a different person. The way in which he understood the world had changed. On the outside, he continued to go to work, to spend time with his friends and family, but inside, his thought processes could no longer be considered human.

Eventually, he’d driven by the house and seen no police tape, no bereaved family members wandering around looking shell-shocked. Several weeks later, a For Sale sign went up, and a few weeks after that, people moved in. They did not appear to be aware that their new home had been formerly occupied by a man and a boy who had been killed inexplicably.

Then it happened again. And again. Each time, the sensations were the same. Each time, he braced himself for the world to explode, for word to get out, for the media to go mad, and each time, it was as if it had never happened. No mention anywhere. He was still going home at the end of the day to his wife and children with no consequences whatsoever. He’d stopped caring about what it meant. He was a man who had a home, a job, and a family and who periodically killed people with crystals and felt no concern about any of it. He was madness in the convincing costume of a regular person.

He experimented, cautiously. He went up to London and found that the ability came when he called it — he could direct it to emerge as he wished. But there were times when it came without being summoned, and then there was no way to stop it. He’d feel the burn in his spine, a sure sign that in a few minutes the crystals would erupt, and so he would have to find a person on whom he could unleash them without anyone seeing.

And then that woman had appeared. That impossible woman. Now he sat on the bench by the river and came up with a thousand explanations for her, each one more ridiculous than the last. She was a witch. She was an angel sent to punish him. She was a government operative. She was a figment of his imagination. She was an alien. She was his conscience.

It was all so absurd, he would have thought it was a hallucination.

Except for one thing. His hands closed around his proof.

*

Much to her surprise, Myfanwy opened her eyes.

Not dead. That’s good.

She was in a four-poster bed with a bag of blood hung up next to her, trickling down into a tube in her arm. The blood looked a little more purple than it should have, but she accepted it. On the far side of the room there was a nurse doing some paperwork at an antique desk. A clock on the wall noted that it was ten o’clock; the light coming through the window indicated that it was morning.

Myfanwy quickly took stock of how she felt and was cautiously pleased. No pain. She could wiggle her toes and fingers and — she reached out with her powers and made the nurse drop her pencil — her mind as well. As an added bonus, she knew exactly who she was.

On the downside, she was not entirely certain
where
she was. The large window showed a little walled garden that could have been anywhere.
Am I in the world’s most baroque sanatorium? How long have I been out?
Before she could muster her thoughts to call out to the nurse, the woman walked out of the room.
Marvelous. Well, I suppose I can wait,
she thought. She shifted and felt a twist of pain in her back.
Yes,
she decided hastily,
I think I’ll just lie still here for a while
. Then the door opened and her executive assistant entered briskly, holding a stack of files. She was such a familiar sight in such unfamiliar surroundings that Myfanwy felt a little trembly in the lower lip for a moment.

“Good morning, Rook Thomas,” said Ingrid in a tone that acknowledged no difference from any other morning.

“Good — good morning, Ingrid. Where am I?”

“One of the rooms at Hill Hall. You were at Ascot yesterday.”

“Oh, okay.” She felt a rush of relief. “You didn’t have to come up here. The traffic this morning must have been a bother.”

“I came last night, Rook Thomas. Now, the Rookery has couriered over these reports for you to review and some papers for you to sign.”

“All right,” said Myfanwy, blinking her eyes rapidly. “Oh, what about my car?”

“It’s been delivered back to the Rookery, but I’m afraid that a member of the Reading team had to break in and hot-wire it. They didn’t have your handbag, and no one turned it in at the racecourse. New keys are being cut.”

“Well, that’s irritating.”

“The phones and credit cards have been canceled, of course, and your various ID cards are being reissued.”

“Thank you.” She reached out cautiously, braced for the pain that sparked pointedly in her back and insides, and took the first document. It turned out to be all about her.

The report advised that Rook Myfanwy Thomas had been impaled by a spike of crystal of unknown type that possessed characteristics of quartz and alabandite. The weapon had damaged a couple of major organs, which sent her into shock.

Dr. Marcel Leliefeld and Miss Odette Leliefeld had performed impromptu surgery and repaired the injuries, preempting the death that would normally have occurred from that sort of damage. Examination of the spike did not show any fracturing or chipping.

A photocopy of Dr. Marcel Leliefeld’s notes written in glorious copperplate listed the various compounds that had been applied to her during the surgery. The names meant nothing to Myfanwy, but she assumed the Checquy surgeons had reviewed it and would have declared war if something ghastly had been done. More compounds had been added to the blood that was percolating into her. Dr. Leliefeld noted that, provided she remained in bed for the rest of the day and drank plenty of fluids, she would be able to get up to attend that evening’s dinner, though she would be restricted to one glass of wine during the meal and one cognac afterward. She should be fully recovered by the next day, and there would be no scarring.

Well, I was bloody lucky there,
she thought weakly. She knew that she should probably be outraged at the thought of Grafter materials floating about inside her, but she simply couldn’t manage it. For one thing, it would be churlishly ungrateful, and for another, the fact that she was alive and would be able to get up for dinner made it impossible to mind.

There were some distant bangs, and the two women looked sharply at the window.

“Are we under attack?” asked Myfanwy calmly.

“Sir Henry has taken the guests to shoot skeet,” said Ingrid.

“Oh, well, as long as none of the guests get shot,” said Myfanwy. She turned her attention back to the paperwork.

The next report made her gasp. The first page was a photograph of the murderer.

“What? Do we have him?” she asked Ingrid.

“No,” said the EA. “But we know who he is.” Myfanwy nodded disappointedly and turned her attention to the dossier.
Lionel John Dover of Northampton. I fucking hate you.
Most of the file consisted of standard government information — records from the National Health Service, a précis of his finances, details about his family — but there were also two sketches that Pawn Clements had done of him. The first was his face at rest. It was unmistakably him.

She’s very good,
thought Myfanwy.
Of course, she would have to be. If she’s summoning up these images, the Estate would have made sure she could draw well so that she could show them to other people.

The second picture, however, was the one that made her hands sweat. According to the caption, Clements had recorded his expression at the moment that he’d unleashed the crystals in the bathroom. It was the same look that Myfanwy had seen when he’d stabbed her through the hand and in the back. The gritted teeth, the staring eyes, the expression of exertion. But in this picture, there was a look of satisfaction on his face that made her want to vomit.

“The pursuit is under way?” asked Myfanwy tightly.

“Yes, Rook Thomas,” said Ingrid, “but you know we have to be discreet. There’s the fear that if we just started slapping this picture up on television screens and in post offices, we might push him to lash out with his powers in public.”

“If we go public, so might he,” mused Myfanwy. “God, this job is ridiculous. The monsters and the monster-hunters both have to be circumspect. So, what are we doing?”

“We’ve spoken with his family — they’d actually gone to the police and filed a missing-persons report when he didn’t return home after the races. We’ve got Checquy people posted in Northampton and searching the area around Ascot. But honestly, he could have gone anywhere. His car was still in the parking lot, but so many attendees traveled by train, he could be anywhere by now.”

“Hmm. My concern is that, since he knows someone is onto him, he’ll do a Lord Lucan and vanish. Either he’ll go on the run in En-gland or he’ll bolt out of the country. I don’t want this man getting away from us, Ingrid.”

“They’re doing their best, Rook Thomas.”

“I know,” said Myfanwy tiredly.

“Do you want some good news?”

“Desperately.”

“The BBC’s fashion team liked your hat.”

Myfanwy looked up at her in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

Ingrid produced a printout and handed it to her. There, in glorious color, was Myfanwy in her hat. The caption gave no name but described the hat in loving detail. “Oh. Gosh. Does this constitute a security problem?”

“I shouldn’t think so. To be honest, Rook Thomas, no one would recognize you without the hat.”

“Thanks,” said Myfanwy sourly. “Well, that is nice. Remind me to write a thank-you note to that Greek woman who bought it for me.”

“Lisa Constanopoulos.”

“Right. Oh, and she was one of the people who prophesied the amnesia, so it’ll have to be a letter of introduction as well.”
The intricacies of etiquette in the supernatural world would make Emily Post stab herself in the heart with a fork,
she mused.
Admittedly, it would be whichever fork was completely appropriate for the occasion
.

*

“I’m afraid that the shooting season won’t start for several months yet,” said Sir Henry. “Pity, too, because we get some excellent pheasant and partridge here at the hall. Still, I thought some sporting clays might be a nice way to spend the morning. Give you a chance to try out the guns.”