Innocent Blood

‘If it is him, it’s my belief that he’s trying to explain to us that he wasn’t just whipped, but seriously abused by his father and his father’s friends and other men, and that this experience was one of the factors that led him to become a suicide bomber.’

Lieutenant Chessman took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his nose. ‘Pretty tenuous theory, wouldn’t you say? What about the other bombers?’

‘I don’t know yet. But I did some psychic communication for Mr Bell here, to see if he could contact his son, Danny. We had a spirit visitation – not, in my opinion, from Danny, but from another spirit who used Danny’s image as a means of arousing Mr Bell’s sympathy. Whoever that spirit was, it appeared as if he had suffered from serious childhood abuse.’

‘So where does this take us?’

‘I don’t know with any certainty. But abused children commonly grow up to be abusers themselves, don’t they, and to seek revenge on society in general for destroying their self-esteem. Maybe this is what’s happening here.’

‘Your father belts you and so you blow up Disney Studios?’

‘It’s conceivable. Do you have any other ideas?’

Before he left, Lieutenant Chessman turned back to Frank. ‘By the way, Mr Bell, about your mystery woman.’

‘What about her?’

‘I have another witness who saw her walking along Gardner Street soon after the explosion at The Cedars. She identified her as wearing jeans and a creamy-colored shirt dress and one sandal, so that she was walking with a limp. She even stopped her and asked her if she was OK.’

‘I see.’

‘The witness said the woman was aged about twenty-three or twenty-four, with short brown hair. Very pretty, she said, in spite of the fact that she had smudges all over her face. Reminded her of somebody she knew, she said, although she couldn’t think who it was.’

‘Oh.’

‘Just thought that might help to jog your own memory, Mr Bell. Try to think of some TV actresses that she could have looked like.’

Frank thought about Astrid but he shook his head. ‘Sorry. I only write TV; I hardly ever watch it.’

While Nevile showed Lieutenant Chessman and Detective Booker to the door, Frank took a look around his library. On a side table he noticed a photograph in a silver frame – a slim, blonde woman, leaning on the parapet of a bridge someplace, wearing a straw hat. She had one hand lifted to prevent the hat from blowing away, and she was laughing.

‘Attractive lady,’ Frank remarked as Nevile came back in.

Nevile took the photograph away from him and gave it a wistful smile. ‘Yes. That was taken on Albert Bridge, in London.’ Pause. ‘We were supposed to be getting married.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘No, no. Don’t worry about it. That was all a long time ago. Nine years and three months, to be precise. Her name was Alison. She was a very clever girl, great fun. She wanted to be a QC.’

‘What happened?’

‘An accident. A boat party, actually, on the Thames, for somebody’s birthday. I was invited, too, but I was working with the Sussex Police that day, trying to find two little girls who had gone missing on the South Downs. It was such a fine summer evening that I drove all the way back to town with the top of my car down.

‘I was driving through Putney when I heard on the radio that a dredger had collided with a pleasure boat close to Westminster Pier, and that a number of young people had been drowned. Fifty-two, as it turned out, in the end; and Alison was one of them.’

‘I’m sorry. Jesus, you must have been devastated.’

‘Well, I was. I haven’t really got over it, even now. I keep thinking of what she would have been like now, if she had lived. Sometimes I’m driving along the street and I catch a glimpse of her, disappearing into a doorway, or climbing into a taxi. I know it can’t really be her, but I can’t get her out of my mind.

‘In fact, it was two years after Alison drowned that I experienced automatic writing for myself, so that’s how I know how reliable it can be.’

‘Alison wrote to you?’

Nevile nodded. ‘I was sitting by the Thames one August afternoon at Boulter’s Lock. It’s very peaceful there . . . several miles upstream from the City. I was writing notes for a lecture on psychic detection, but I had drunk one two many glasses of wine over lunch and I started to nod off. My writing hand started to go into a sort of a spasm, rather like a cramp, but not so painful. It circled around and around my notebook, and then it made all kinds of squiggles.

‘I suddenly felt that Alison was very close by – that she was leaning over my shoulder. I tried to resist turning around because I knew that she wasn’t really there, but in the end I couldn’t stop myself.’

‘And?’

‘I was right. She wasn’t there.’

Nevile paused for a moment, smiling wistfully at the memory. Then he hunkered down and opened one of the drawers underneath the bookshelves. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘the very piece of paper.’

Frank took it and tried to read it. All he could make out was RO smmr AD tom FFG.

‘Incomprehensible if you don’t know what you’re looking for,’ Nevile admitted. ‘But most automatic writing is very personal. If you fold the paper in the middle, the letters RO and AD join together to form the word ROAD, and The Road by Edwin Muir was one of Alison’s favorite poems.

‘It’s all about passing time. “There is a road that turning always|Cuts off the country of Again.” And the verse that Alison was trying to remind me of goes: “There a man on a summer evening|Reclines at ease upon his tomb| And is his mortal effigy|And there within the womb|The cell of doom.” See . . . “smmr” is “summer”, “tom” is “tomb” and “FFG” for “effigy.”’

He took the piece of paper back and returned it to the drawer. ‘She was telling me that everybody dies. Even when we’re laughing on Albert Bridge, we’ll soon be dead. Even after we’re dead, though, we still journey on, although only the dead know where.’

Seventeen

On the six o’clock network news, Police Commissioner Marvin Campbell announced that he had received a new coded message from Dar Tariki Tariqat. They had called for a total ban within seventy-two hours on ‘all films and television programs that glorify salacious or ungodly behaviors.’ The consequence for disobeying this warning would be ‘Armageddon for Hollywood . . . Starting at twelve noon precisely on Friday, a series of eleven bombs will be detonated around Los Angeles at twenty-four intervals, with the intention of bringing to their knees all those who disseminate licentiousness and blasphemy.’

Commissioner Campbell said he had no reason to believe that the message was a hoax and that he was treating it with ‘the utmost gravity.’ At the same time, he tried to reassure the citizens of Los Angeles that public security precautions had never been so stringent. ‘Not only that, our anti-terrorist teams are very close to making some significant arrests.’

‘You believe that?’ asked Smitty, popping open another beer. They were sitting on the porch, watching the dog rolling on his back on the grass.

Frank shook his head. ‘Two detectives came around to Nevile Strange’s house this afternoon, when I was there. If they’re still asking a psychic for answers, they can’t have any solid evidence, can they? I’m not saying that Nevile’s not a good psychic. In fact, I think he’s probably the best. It’s just that communications from the spirit world are not exactly a substitute for fingerprints and DNA.’

‘You know what I think?’ said Smitty. ‘I think it’s the end of the world as we know it.’

Frank drove back to the Sunset Marquis. When he walked into the lobby, he found Margot waiting for him, alone, looking pale and pinched, her hair wound up in a pale mauve turban.

‘Frank,’ she said, rising to her feet, ‘we really need to talk.’