Tears of the Jaguar (34 page)

Deborah phoned a taxi from her hiding place on the hill and didn’t leave that spot till the driver called to say he was parked at the foot of the stairs in the village. She had him drive her to Skipton, and en route she phoned the Malkin Tower cottages and paid her bill by credit card. She would not be picking up her belongings, she said. The landlady said that was fine, that she could send them on if necessary, and Deborah thought she sounded careful but very slightly relieved, as if someone had already inquired after her.

Or was sitting there now, waiting for her to come back
.

“You didn’t leave a bottle of spring water for me outside the cottage door last night, did you?” she asked the landlady.

“No, love,” said the woman. “Were you short?”

“No,” said Deborah. “It’s fine. I’ve had a lovely stay.”

As they sat in traffic outside the railway station in Skipton, Deborah took out the spring water bottle. It still had a few
mouthfuls left. It looked clear enough, but on careful inspection she could see that the bottle had a pinprick hole just below where the cap sealed. She had been drugged, and had repeated the process by drinking from the bottle again in the churchyard. It had made her hallucinate, making real the troubling images that had been festering in her subconscious over the last two days, just as poor Professor Hargreaves had hallucinated a nineteenth-century poisoner in her wheeled chair going to execution.

Barry had said he had “just made himself a cuppa”: tea. Someone—presumably the woman who had gone missing from the tour—had spiked it to disorient him before her attack.

Whatever Deborah had been given, it had made her paranoid as well as delusional. Yet she was sure she had given information to someone very real who had come to the piggery to find out what she knew. It was almost funny how that same paranoia may just have saved her life in the churchyard. The gunman, after all, was real enough. If she hadn’t been so terrified when he first appeared, she might have let her guard down for a crucial moment...

Was it possible that the gunman was part of the hallucination? She thought not. The more she considered what had happened the previous night, the more she thought that the altered state into which the drug had pushed her had come on and passed quickly. It had been all over in perhaps twenty minutes, and that was after drinking half the bottle. This afternoon she had taken only a few sips, and her head had been clearing before the man in the suit arrived. The dog, she figured, had been real. Perhaps it was seeing that that had given her hallucinations shape, led to the image of the crone digging teeth from the ground—just as the dog had been in the barman’s story of the witches. She wrapped
the bottle in a plastic bag and put it away. At some point, she would want its contents tested.

Barry had told her that Hargreaves had been searching for anything to do with Edward Clifford, but among the items he had looked for were two unfamiliar names—George Withers and Sir Henry Mildmay. Deborah repeated his searches and turned up another bitter testimony from an unhappy seventeenth-century courtier. He referred to Mildmay, who seemed to have been a prominent official under Cromwell, as the “Knave of Diamonds.” A strange name. She wondered about coats of arms and gemstones.

And then she stumbled on something so bizarre that her breath caught.

Surely not?

It couldn’t be. She had to see Hargreaves.

She took the train to Lancaster and a cab to the Royal Infirmary.

There was a policeman guarding Hargreaves’s door who demanded to see some form of ID. She showed him her passport and signed in while he scanned a notepad and—more discreetly—checked what looked to be a grainy black-and-white photograph. CCTV images, she guessed. The castle was a prison, after all. Cameras everywhere.

The policeman—a young man in a black uniform sweater, tall and prematurely balding—followed her into the room and stood behind her at the door.

“Just pretend I’m not here,” he said.

Deborah nodded and took a seat by the bed.

Hargreaves was unconscious. He looked old. His face was pale and waxy, and his eyes were sunken, though some of that was probably because she was unused to him not wearing his
glasses. His chest and left shoulder were heavily strapped, and he was hooked up to drips and monitors that beeped periodically. On impulse she took his hand, which was large and strong but whose skin felt silky, paperish.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my fault. I should never have asked you to help.”

She glanced over her shoulder to the cop, but he was pointedly looking away as if trying to afford her some privacy. Deborah scribbled her cell phone number on a pad on the nightstand, added her name and a sincere but inevitably inadequate apology, then got up to leave. At the door she hesitated, looked at Hargreaves one more time, then stepped out into the hallway, the policeman at her heels.

“Known him long, have you?” asked the cop.

“No,” she said. “We just met.”

“Good of you to visit,” he said.

Deborah wasn’t sure if he was probing, but it seemed as good an opportunity as ever.

“Do you have an ID on the attacker?” she said.

He seemed taken aback, and his manner seemed to shift. He stood a little straighter and his voice stiffened as if he was reading a teleprompter.

“No official identification of a suspect has been completed at this time,” he said. “Investigations are ongoing.”

“Could I see those pictures?” she asked.

“Pictures?”

“The CCTV images that you used to see if I was a match for the possible attacker,” she said evenly.

“Oh. Those,” he said. “Well, those are official...”

“I think I might be able to identify one of the people in them.”

“Actually, we have identities for most of them,” he replied, slightly affronted. “Most are castle employees, and most of the visitors on the tour paid their entrance fee by credit card, so we already have their names.”

“Most,” said Deborah. “But not all. Not your prime suspect. The woman.”

He raised his eyebrows, but his expression relented.

“I spoke to the boy who works in the gift shop,” she said. “Can I see?”

He hesitated, debating with himself, then impulsively dragged the glossy pictures out and passed them to her. They were grey and grainy, full of bright spots and deep shadows where you could see nothing useful, but just clear enough to make out the details of the faces on the huddle of people in the castle hallway: Barry, a family with a boy, a couple of teenagers, and a man in a dark, old-fashioned suit. At the back of the group was a middle-aged woman in a voluminous raincoat and a plastic headscarf. Her face was long, heavy, and unmistakable.

Marissa Stroud
.

“Anyone look familiar?” said the policeman.

Deborah thought quickly. If she told him what she knew now, she’d never get out of town today.

“Afraid not,” she said. “But could I take down a contact number in case something occurs to me?”

The policeman fished a business card from his pocket, and she thanked him, apologizing for not being more helpful. She traced her way back to the front door and took a cab to the station. Twenty minutes later she was on the train to London, but she
waited ten more minutes before calling the policeman back and giving him Marissa Stroud’s name, hanging up as soon as she was sure he had it down right.

She slept a little on the train, waking briefly in Crewe, and then again at Watford, where she watched a businessman using a laptop and realized he was getting a wireless signal provided by the railway. From there on she used her laptop to download everything she could find on George Withers and Henry Mildmay. The former, it turned out, was a poet, and the latter—the Knave of Diamonds—a public servant of sorts. Their lives were quite separate but intersected over a single extraordinary incident. Deborah’s mind raced.

Once in London, she took a series of tube trains and emerged into the rain, umbrella-less and weary. She walked down to the river close to Tower Bridge in sight of the
HMS Belfast
. It was the city as she might have imagined it, sprouting antique church steeples and postmodern glass towers, impressive, straddling time, so that even though it made her feel like a tourist, she didn’t mind so much. She bought her ticket a stone’s throw from where the infamous gallows had once stood and walked down to the sprawling urban fortress that was the Tower of London.

Gloria Pickins was hungry. She reached into her desk drawer and found the packet of devil’s food cakes. They were low-fat, and the chocolate tasted waxy, but they were still an indulgence, and she ate them furtively, like a squirrel nibbling acorns before some stronger rival stole them. As she munched, she brushed the crumbs off the manila folder in front of her. Mr. Powel had been gone most of the morning but she expected him back in the office within the hour.

She liked Mr. Powel. He was a good boss who respected her professionalism and made no unreasonable demands on her. He paid her absurdly well and gave her seasonal bonuses, though it wasn’t always clear to her what the season was that prompted the gift. Christmas, certainly, but others were scattered throughout the year, appearing without clear regularity or warning and identified with obscure names she had had to look up: Lamastide was one. Whitsun and Michaelmas. They were
old English names that he borrowed whimsically, but the money was real enough. He would call her into his office and ceremonially present her with an envelope of anything from two to five thousand dollars.

“Excellent work, Mrs. Pickins,” he would announce. “Here is your Whitsun bonus.”

He smiled that open, avuncular smile of his, so that she was never sure if he was quite serious. He always did it when they were alone, and he always concluded the meeting with the same words: “And remember, Mrs. Pickins. This is just between us.”

Sometimes he winked, sometimes he just turned back to his computer and began tapping away, picking at the keys like a bird eating seed.

And she did keep it to herself. She didn’t even tell Albert where the extra money came from, not that he would notice. Mr. Powel paid her minimal attention, which was fine by her. Gloria liked her privacy too, so it was an even exchange. It was part of why they got along so well.

So it felt like a small violation entering his office by herself, and she knocked cautiously to make sure he hadn’t snuck in without her seeing. But he had trusted her with a key, so it was acceptable. He would understand.

Still, she turned the knob cautiously and opened the door only partway so she had to step around it to get in, as if that made it less of a crime. She had the manila folder tucked under her arm. She was used to the office, of course, but rarely saw it without him behind the desk, and it felt different. The photographs, for one. There were so many of them.

Angela. Smiling, skating in tournaments with her gold pendant necklace, or heading out onto the ice in practice sweats.

She was a lovely girl, but the number of photographs struck Gloria as a little overwhelming, and it made Powel’s office feel like a shrine. Maybe because of that, it felt almost like she was barging into a sacred place when she reached for the mahogany cabinet, took a breath, and opened both double doors wide. A light came on inside so that the contents on the glass shelves seemed to flash then glow with an unearthly brilliance that made the pupils of her eyes contract. For a moment she just looked.

There were books, old books, stained and spattered, their titles etched in obscure languages into the cracked leather binding. There were parchments in glass frames, marked with strange symbols, some abstract, some stylized images of heavenly bodies and animal heads. Some looked like ancient seals or stamps. There was a pair of glass chalices into which had been set heavy candles the color of old blood, and ancient amulets and figurines cast roughly in metal or chipped from stone. There were animal horns wound with cord and carved with obscure runic letters, and there were large mounted crystals of various colors. In the center was one more photograph of Angela, this time simply sitting beneath a tree with yellowing leaves. Beneath the photograph sat a human skull, brownish and mottled, and in goblets on either side were smaller bones soaking in some black, viscous fluid. Beside the skull was the thing she was looking for: a finely made wooden box lined with black velvet on which nestled a strange knife. Its blade was made of what looked like dark, greenish glass, the edges irregular and flaked but lethal-looking. She picked it up gingerly and considered it.

“Mrs. Pickins,” said a voice behind her.

Gloria spun to find her employer standing right at her elbow. In her surprise the knife slipped through her fingers and fell, but
Powel stooped fast, catching it by the handle before it hit the floor.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Powel,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“No harm done,” he said, “though we were lucky there. I could have got a nasty cut or—worse—the blade could have hit the floor. Obsidian is very fragile.”