To Dwell in Darkness (2 page)

But it went deeper. Since childhood she'd been obsessive about her privacy, for good reason. Only a few of her closest friends knew that Melody's father owned one of the most successful—and most sensational—national tabloids. If that connection became public, it would mean career suicide for her. Not to mention that she had not told Andy. She was going to have to come clean with him—but not today.

“Not that I'll have any trouble seeing you from the back in that.” She gave the sleeve of the cardigan a playful pinch, trying to deflect a row. “Maybe Poppy could be persuaded to color coordinate with a few blue streaks in her hair.”

Andy rolled his eyes. “Don't even suggest it.” Poppy was already a flower child gone wild without any encouragement.

“Well, come on, then. Are you going to be brave?”

He eyed her speculatively. “Will I get a reward?”

“There's always afters.” She gave the sleeve of the cardigan a deliberate caress.

The salesclerk, who'd been eyeing Andy with interest, gave a little tsk of disgust.

“Sorry, mate.” Melody winked at the clerk as she slipped the cardigan off Andy's shoulders. “No joy for you. But at least you made a sale.”

Detective Inspector Gemma James stared at the report on the computer screen in South London Station's CID room and tried to resist putting her head down on the desk. The hum of voices, the clatter of keyboards, the ringing of phones were all fading into a soporific buzz.

Last night had been the first time Charlotte had been ill since she had come to live with them the previous autumn, and Gemma suspected she and Kincaid had both overreacted to an ordinary childhood cough.

Now she was counting the minutes until she could justify a midafternoon coffee. She stretched, blinked, and tried to refocus on the screen.

Gemma and her colleagues on the South London murder squad suspected a man of having abducted, raped, and murdered a twelve-year-old girl named Mercy Johnson. It was the team's most pressing case. So far, however, they had nothing concrete enough for a search warrant, much less an arrest.

Dillon Underwood was white, middle class, and manipulatively charming, while Mercy had been working class and black. Gemma and her team feared that Underwood's slick plausibility would help his defense, hence the hours spent going over files for something that might give them enough ammunition to at least search his flat and get a DNA profile.

Gemma's detective sergeant, Melody Talbot, had spent the afternoon reinterviewing Underwood's colleagues in hopes of finding a snippet of information they might have missed.

Nor would Melody be coming back to the police station—she'd told Gemma she meant to go on to St. Pancras International, where her guitarist boyfriend was playing a concert.

The thought made Gemma smile. Her tidy, precise, impeccably dressed detective sergeant with a slightly scruffy rock guitarist.

She glanced back to the computer screen and the details of their suspect's life. Twenty-two-year-old Dillon Underwood worked in a local electronics store as a salesclerk and was apparently quite successful at it. Especially, according to the other employees, with female customers. Mercy Johnson had visited the store numerous times in the weeks before her death, daydreaming over the computers, one of which she hoped to talk her single mother into buying for her thirteenth birthday. But they had no footage on the store cameras of Mercy being served by Dillon, only the word of her best friends. Again, circumstantial, and the testimony of two twelve-year-old girls could easily be discredited by the defense.

On the night of Mercy's disappearance, Underwood had witnesses placing him at a busy club in Brixton Road, although it was the sort of place where it would be easy to lose a friend in the throng for an hour or two.

Mercy's body had been found two days later by a dog walker in the scrub on Clapham Common. Underwood had no car, so if he left the club for long enough to meet and kill Mercy, he had done so on foot. And he would have had to agree to meet Mercy on the common.

When the mobile on Gemma's desk vibrated, she grabbed it, hoping it was Duncan. She'd been worried about him since he'd started the new job at Holborn. Not that she hadn't expected it to be an adjustment, but it had been weeks and the situation didn't seem to be improving.

But the call was from Kit, her fourteen-year-old stepson, and when she glanced at the time she saw that it was late enough for the children to be out of school.

Fumbling the phone to her ear, she said, “Hi, love. Is everything all right?”

But it wasn't Kit. Her six-year-old son Toby's voice rang so loudly in her ear that she jerked the phone away.

“Mummy, Mummy. Kit let me use his phone. We found a cat. In the garden. With babies!”

“Babies? Where? What garden?” she asked fuzzily, still trying to switch gears.

“Kittens!” Toby was emphatic. “But they're really little. Like, like pigs.”

“Pigs?” Gemma asked. Then she heard Kit's voice in the background, obviously correcting Toby. “Toby, lovey,” she said, “let me speak to Kit.”

There was the sound of fumbling and Kit came on the line. “Gemma.” Her heart sank. When Kit was relaxed or teasing, he called her Mum.

“What's this about a cat in the garden?” She glanced out the window of the CID room at the leaden sky. The temperature was hovering near freezing and she knew the wind was icy.

“You know the shed?”

Their house in Notting Hill backed onto a communal garden, and a small shed in the garden's center housed the grounds-keeping equipment.

“We were out with the dogs,” Kit went on, “and they heard something.” Tess was Kit's rescued terrier; Geordie, Gemma's blue roan cocker spaniel. Good hunting instincts, both. “When we got the door open—”

“What about the gardener's lock?” Gemma broke in.

There was a pause, then Kit said, “I used a hammer. We heard crying. We thought it might be a baby or something.”

Gemma let it go for the moment. “And?”

“There was a pile of sacking. I made Toby hold the dogs outside. There was a cat in a sort of nest. With four kittens. Gemma, she's so thin. And the kittens are so tiny. I'm afraid they'll die.”

“But, Kit, she's not our cat. Maybe she belongs to one of the neighbors—”

“She's starving, Gemma. She can barely lift her head. We have to do something.”

Kittens. Oh, heavens. “Okay, Kit, wait a minute,” Gemma said, trying to collect herself. “You can't just move her into the house, not with Sid and the dogs, even if she'd let you.” She bit her lip, thinking. “Bryony,” she said. “Call Bryony.”

Bryony Poole was their vet, the very one who had talked her into adopting Geordie. “Bryony will know what to do.”

“Will you be home soon?”

She heard the slight quaver in Kit's voice. He tried so hard to be grown-up, but he couldn't bear anything to be helpless or hurt, or worse, abandoned.

“Yes, love,” she said. “I'll be home as soon as I can.”

Nothing Paul Cole did was ever good enough according to his parents. Nor according to his teachers when he'd been at school. And now, not according to anyone in the group. Not according to Matthew, who thought he was God's gift to the entire world.

And especially not according to Ariel.

She hadn't believed he'd go through with things today, but he was going to prove her wrong.

He shifted his backpack, feeling the sweat break out under his arms even though it was frigging bloody freezing in the upper concourse of St. Pancras International. He stood near the top of the escalators at the north end of the concourse, so that he had a good view of the length of both upper and lower levels. Moving to the glass guard wall, he looked down at the thickening rush-hour crowd. People were pushing and shoving, intent on getting their shopping and making their commuter connections. They were like scurrying rats, never looking up, oblivious to the glory of the sky-blue station vault.

Nor did they care anything about the trains. Beyond Searcys, the yuppie champagne bar that straddled the center of the upper concourse, two sleek yellow Eurostar trains bound for Paris idled on their platforms. The bespoke-suited men and women sipping their after-work bubbly had no clue as to how incredible these trains were or what it took to keep them running. They took everything in their overindulged lives for granted. Well, they might not be quite so complacent when they went to their beds this night.

Paul drew his eyes from the trains and checked his watch, then scanned the lower concourse again. The others should be here soon. Directly below Searcys, he could see musicians setting up for a concert. It was the first act of the station's March music festival. That was one of the reasons they'd chosen this particular day—the crowd gathering to watch the band would concentrate more people in a small area, and the press coverage of the band would be an added bonus.

A slight girl with spiky ginger hair knelt and lifted a bass guitar from a case, while a blond bloke fiddled with an amp. Passersby were starting to stop and watch. Showtime.

Then he saw the group, coming in from the direction of the tube station at the far end of the concourse. Matthew, unmistakable with his height and loping stride, even with a watch cap pulled over his dark curly hair. Cam. Iris. Trish. Lee. And Dean, pulling the flat suitcase that held their placards, ready to be assembled. They wouldn't have much time.

He searched for Ariel but didn't see her with the rest of the group. But she would be there somewhere, he was certain. As would Ryan.

Paul frowned. There was something about Ryan Marsh that had never seemed quite right. And after what had happened with Wren, there'd been a look in his eyes that frightened Paul. Not that he could blame Ryan, God, no. He felt sick just thinking about it. But still, sometimes Ryan made him uneasy. He'd tried to talk to Matthew about it, but Matthew had blown him off, just like Matthew had blown him off that morning. Bloody Matthew always knew bloody best. Except maybe this time he didn't.

The big station clock over the sculpture of “the lovers” ticked round to five thirty. The musicians played a few sound-check bars on their instruments. The crowd in the center of the lower concourse seemed to move and swell like a living thing. The group had separated and wandered into adjacent shops, not wanting to be noticed until the band was in full swing and media cameras were rolling.

Then, after a last tuning of their instruments, the ginger-haired girl spoke into the mic, and the guitarist hit the first bar.

Showtime, indeed.

Heart thudding in his throat, Paul shifted his backpack to one shoulder and stepped to the top of the escalator.

Melody took the tube straight from Brixton to King's Cross/St. Pancras. There was no way she could have crossed London at rush hour in her car and got to the station in time for Andy and Poppy's concert. Even so, when “person under a train” came over the speaker as the train pulled into Oxford Circus, she felt a moment of panic. She hated being stuck on the tube. When a second announcement advised all passengers on the Central line to reroute, she breathed a sigh of relief.

The accident wasn't on her line. There was nothing she could do, and she couldn't help feeling relieved that the mess wasn't on her watch. She'd dealt with a jumper once, when she was still in uniform, and there weren't many things worse.

She shivered at the memory, in spite of the bodies packed against her in the back of the train car. But she was determined not to let work interfere with her enjoyment of Andy's moment in the limelight—the first of many, she felt sure. And she couldn't wait to see if he had actually worn the blue cardigan.

Seeing her smile, the middle-aged woman squashed beside her smiled back. Nodding, Melody took the small contact as a good omen. Most Londoners weren't too bad, given half a chance. And bless London Transport—they did their best to keep things running.

But when the train idled far longer than normal at Warren Street, then again at Euston, Melody's anxiety rose. Andy would be crushed if she didn't make it. She'd almost decided to get out at Euston and walk the rest of the way when the train doors closed and the train moved out of the station.

When the train pulled into King's Cross, Melody was first out the doors. She sprinted for the Underground ticket barrier, then started for the St. Pancras concourse at a jog. Good thing she'd worn boots that day because of the cold, she thought, rather than her work heels and one of the suits Andy loved to tease her about. Warm and red-cheeked by the time she entered the south end of the station, she stopped a moment to catch her breath.

The music came to her faintly, in intermittent bursts, but she recognized it instantly. Before she met Andy, she'd have been hard-pressed to tell a guitar from a banjo, but now she would know the distinctive sound of Andy's guitar anywhere. And there, on another wave of sound, was Poppy's unique, rich vocal, with Andy singing harmony.

If she stood at the back, perhaps Andy wouldn't notice how late she'd been.

As she came into the concourse proper, she glimpsed, beyond the glass elevator, the crowd gathered round the small temporary stage. Moving closer, she saw the duo clearly—Poppy, in a floaty white top over a short flowered skirt and her usual tights and boots; Andy, resplendent in the sky-blue cardigan, the light glinting from his tousled fair hair and his brilliant red guitar.

Andy hadn't seen her. He and Poppy were into a new song now, both of them playing and singing, their focus intense. Melody felt the same thrill of excitement she'd had the very first time she'd heard them perform. They had something electric together, Andy and Poppy, the whole bigger than the parts, and Melody could feel the energy move through the gathered crowd.

Under the edge of the café arcade to her left, she saw Tam and Caleb, Andy and Poppy's respective managers. They were standing, holding their coffees and watching the stage intently, grinning from ear to ear.