The Hidden Family

“Someone died,” said Brill. “Someone standing either just outside the back door or just inside it, in the doorway. Someone shot them with a blunderbuss.” She was making a sing-song out of it, in a way that really got on Miriam’s nerves. Stress, she thought. Brill had never seen a murder before last week. Now she’s seen a couple in one go, hasn’t she? “So someone stuffed the victim in a barrel for Iris, went out and ordered a new door. Angbard’s men will have been watching her departure. Probably followed her. Why don’t you call him and ask about it?”

“I will. Once we’ve returned this car and rented a replacement from another hire shop.” She glanced at Brill. “Keep a lookout and tell me if you see any cars that seem to be following us.”

Miriam unfolded the paper carefully. It was, she saw, about the same fateful day as the first Xeroxed news report in the green and pink shoebox. But this was genuine newsprint, not a copy, a snapshot from the time itself. Most of it was inconsequential, but there was a story buried halfway down page two that made her stare, about a young mother and baby found in a city park, the mother suffering a stab wound in the lower back. She’d been wearing hippy-style clothes and was unable to explain her condition, apparently confused or intoxicated. The police escorted her to a hospital with the child, and the subeditor proceeded to editorialize on the evils of unconventional lifestyles and the effects of domestic violence in a positively Hogarthian manner. No, Miriam thought, they must have gotten it wrong. She was murdered, Ma told me! Not taken into hospital with a stab wound! She shook her head, bewildered and hurting. “I’ll do that. But first I need some stuff from my house,” she said, “but I’m not sure I dare go there.”

“What stuff?” asked Paulie. Miriam could see her fingers white against the rim of the steering wheel.

“Papers.” She paused, weighing up the relative merits of peace of mind and a shotgun wound to the chest. “Fuck it,” she said shortly. “I need to go home. I need five minutes there. Paulie, take me home.”

“Whoa! Is that really smart?” asked Paulette, knuckles tightening on the steering wheel.

“No.” Miriam grimaced. “It’s really not smart. But I need to grab some stuff, the goddamn disk with all your research on it. I’ll be about thirty seconds. We can ditch the car immediately afterwards. You willing to wait?”

“Didn’t you say they’d staked you out?”

“What does that mean?” Brill asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”

Miriam sighed. “My house,” she said. “I haven’t been back to it since my fun-loving uncle had me kidnapped. Roland said it was under surveillance so I figured it would be risky. Now—”

“It’s even more risky,” Paulette said vehemently. “In fact I think it’s stupid.”

“Yes.” Miriam bared her teeth, worry and growing anger eating at her:

“But I need that disk, Paulie, it may be the best leverage I’ve got. We don’t have time for me to make millions in world three.”

“Oh shit. You think it may come to that?”

“Yeah, ’oh shit’ indeed.”

“What kind of disk?” Brill asked plaintively.

“Don’t worry. Just wait with the car.” Miriam focused on Paulette’s driving. The answer will be somewhere in the shoebox, she thought, desperately. And if Angbard had my ma snatched, I’ll make him pay!

Familiar scenery rolled past, and a couple of minutes later they turned into a residential street that Miriam knew well enough to navigate blindfolded. A miserable wave of homesickness managed to penetrate her anger and worry: This was where she belonged, and she should never have left. It was her home, dammit! And it slid past to the left as Paulette kept on driving.

“Paulie?” Miriam asked anxiously.

“Looking for suspicious-acting vehicles,” Paulie said tersely.

“Oh.” Miriam glanced around. “Ma said there was a truck full of guys watching her.”

“Uh-huh. Your mother spotted the truck. What did she miss?”

“Right.” Miriam spared a sideways glance: Brill’s head was swiveling like a ceiling fan, but her expression was more vacant than anything else. Almost as if she was bored. “Want to drive round the block once more? When you get back to the house stop just long enough for me to get out, then carry on. Come back and pick me up in three minutes. Don’t park.”

“Um. You sure that you want to do this?”

“No, I’m not sure, I just know that I have to.”

Paulie turned the corner then pulled over. Miriam was out of the car in a second and Paulette pulled away. There was virtually nobody about—no parked occupied vans, no joggers. She crossed the road briskly, walked up to her front door, and remembered two things, in a single moment of icy clarity. Firstly, that she had no idea where her house keys might be, and secondly, that if there were no watchers this might be because—Uh- oh, she thought, and backed away from the front step, watching where her feet were about to go with exaggerated caution. A cold sweat broke out in the small of her back, and she shuddered violently. But fear of trip wires didn’t stop her carefully opening the yard gate, slipping around the side of the house, and up to the shed with the concealed key to the French doors at the back.

When she had the key, Miriam paused for almost a minute at the glass doors, trying to get her hammering heart under control. She peered through the curtains, thoughtfully. They’ll expect me to go in the front, she realized. But even so… She unlocked the door and eased it open a finger’s width. Then she reached as high as she could, and ran her index finger slowly down the opening, feeling for the faint tug of a lethal obstruction. Finding nothing, she opened the door farther, then repeated the exercise on the curtains. Again: nothing. And so, Miriam returned to her home.

Her study had been efficiently and brutally strip-searched. The iMac was gone, as were the boxes of CD- ROMs and the zip drive and disks from her desk. More obviously, every book in the bookcase had been taken down, the pages riffled, and dumped in a pile on the floor. It was a big pile. “Bastards,” she said quietly. The pink shoebox was gone, of course. Fearing the worst she tiptoed into her own hallway like a timid burglar, her heart in her mouth.

It was much the same in the front hall. They’d even searched the phone books. A blizzard of loose papers lay everywhere, some of them clearly trampled underfoot Drawers lay open, their contents strewn everywhere. Furniture had been pulled out from the walls and shoved back haphazardly, and one of the hall bookcases leaned drunkenly against the opposite wall. At first sight she thought that the living room had gotten off lightly, but the damage turned out to be even more extensive—her entire music collection had been turned out onto the floor, disks piled on a loose stack.

“Fuck.” Her mouth tasted of ashes. The sense of violation was almost unbearable, but so was the fear that they’d taken her mother and found Paulie’s research disk as well. The money-laundering leads were in the hands of whoever had done this to her. Whoever they were, they had to know about the Clan, which meant they’d know what the disk’s contents meant. They were a smoking gun, one that was almost certainly pointing at the Clan’s east coast operations. She knelt by the discarded CD cases and rummaged for a minute—found The Beggar’s Opera empty, the CD-ROM purloined.

She went back into the front hall. Somehow she slithered past the fallen bookcase, just to confirm her worst fear. They’d strung the wire behind the front door, connecting one end of it to the handle. If she hadn’t been in such a desperate hurry that she’d forgotten her keys, the green box taped crudely to the wall would have turned her into a messy stain on the sidewalk. Assassin number two is the one who likes Claymore mines, she reminded herself edgily. The cold fear was unbearable and Miriam couldn’t take any more. She blundered out through the French doors at the back without pausing to lock them, round the side of the house, and onto the sidewalk to wait for Paulie.

Seconds later she was in the back of the car, hunched and shivering. “I don’t see any signs of anything going on,” Paulie said quietly. She seemed to have calmed down from her state at Iris’s house. “What do you want to do now? Why don’t we find a Starbucks, get some coffee, then you tell us what you found?”

“I don’t think so.” Miriam closed her eyes.

“Are you alright?” Brill asked, concern in her voice.

“No, I’m not alright,” Miriam said quietly. “We’ve got to ditch the car, now. They trashed the place and left a trip-wire surprise behind the front door. Paulie, the box of stuff my mother gave me was gone. And so was the disk.”