I took out my whistle, put it to my mouth and blew a few random chords. A, C and then G took me by a sort of natural progression into ‘Henry Martin’, a wholesome little tune about murder, exploitation and the irreversible loss of innocence.
When Henry Martin was swinging from the gallows tree, I moved on to another equally pleasant ditty, and then another after that. The evening wore on into night as I played, and an unsettling feeling crept over me by degrees: a solid conviction based on the most fleeting and ephemeral of impressions.
Imagine you woke up to find yourself a prisoner in an unfamiliar room, in total darkness, with your hands and feet tied. Unable to move, unable to see, you’d have no way of finding out what kind of place you were in. But when you shouted for help, the echoes of your own voice would come back to you, and give you some sense of the size of the room: the extent and maybe even the shape of the volume of air that surrounded you.
That was kind of what I felt right then: playing the whistle woke up my death-sense, and my death-sense told me that the world had changed. The echoes of the simple, dolorous tune described a space that was subtly, infinitesimally altered from what I knew, what I’d expected. I wondered what in Hell that might mean.
Disconcerted, I lowered the whistle. I was about to try another tune when I saw Pen standing in the doorway, staring in at me. There was a tension in her pose and in her expression. ‘You’re upsetting the birds,’ she said.
I put the whistle down on the table beside my bed. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ I deadpanned.
She stared at the whistle for a moment, then shook her head, visibly giving it up. She turned away, towards the stairs, but an afterthought struck her and she stopped on the top step, looking back at me over her shoulder. ‘You had some calls,’ she said.
‘When I was . . . out?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Some woman named Pax. She called lots of times. She said she had some news for you.’
Trudie could keep on stewing. There was nothing she could tell me that I wanted to hear. Her heart belonged to Mother Church, and I wasn’t interested in the rest of her, shapely though it undoubtedly was.
‘What else?’
‘Someone from the Brent Library Service. A woman . . .’
‘Susan Book.’
‘Sounds about right.’
That was more interesting. Susan is married to Juliet, and Juliet is always interesting, just by virtue of being Juliet.
‘And Gary Coldwood,’ Pen finished up. ‘He rang just now, but he couldn’t stay on.’
‘How come?’
‘He said he was on his way to a murder scene. And he wanted you to read it for him.’
3
Which brings me back around to where I was, more or less: standing in Ginny Parris’s drying blood and swallowing the bitter pill of her true identity with a growing sense of dread.
‘Rafi’s girlfriend.’ I repeated the words.
‘Yeah,’ Coldwood confirmed with a laconic nod. ‘I note the pained emphasis, Castor. I know Pen Bruckner is the only woman who deserves that label in your book, but this is all ancient history now. Ginny Parris was named on the incident sheet when Ditko was first brought into the Stanger for psych evaluation. Her statement was still there in the paperwork, and that’s how she described herself. Relationship to patient: girlfriend.’
He stared at me for a moment, as if he was expecting me to argue the point. It was the last thing on my mind.
‘So,’ I said, my casual tone sounding hollow even to me, ‘did your forensics boys come up with anything?’
Gary shrugged with his eyebrows. ‘They took prints,’ he said.
‘From where?’
‘The door. The broken table. The light. Even a good virtual from the dead woman’s throat. Whoever it was didn’t go out of his way to be discreet.’
‘Whoever it was?’ I must have sounded like I was clutching at straws.
Coldwood’s eyebrows rose and fell in a virtual shrug. ‘We haven’t had a chance to match them yet,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re doing now. Ditko’s prints are on file. If it was him, we should get a positive in the next couple of minutes.’
He looked past me towards the door. ‘So he comes in through the door,’ he said didactically. ‘We’ll assume it’s a he. He doesn’t force it. Doesn’t have to. Left hand on the knob, which is consistent with using a key. Smeared print on the lintel above the door, which we’re taking to mean . . .’
‘That’s where she kept the spare,’ I said.
Coldwood smiled dryly. ‘You’ve got a larcenous mind, Fix.’
‘I keep the wrong company. Coppers, mainly.’
Gary let the insult slide, turning his head as his gaze travelled from the door to the broken table and then on to the bed. ‘She hasn’t heard him yet. Most likely she’s asleep. He walks towards her. Maybe he smashes the table then, to wake her up, to get her attention. Maybe he just says her name. But she hears something anyway, and she reaches out for the light.’ He glanced down at the bedside lamp lying on its side on the floor: its feeble little pool of radiance reminded me of a votive candle in a funeral chapel. ‘She turns the lamp on, but her hand slips – probably she’s panicking a little. The lamp falls but doesn’t break. She can see him now. Her gentleman caller – again, just for the sake of argument. He doesn’t touch the lamp himself. No prints of his anywhere around there. So evidently he doesn’t mind being seen.’
Coldwood turned again, to look at the window. My gaze followed his, and a little bile rose in my throat as I stared at Ginny’s broken body.
‘The fingerprints on the throat were a telling little detail,’ Coldwood ruminated. ‘I mean, given that the cause of death wasn’t strangulation. It ties in with what you said about him being in here with her for a long time. He held her by the throat, but he wasn’t trying to kill her. Not straight away.’
‘You don’t know that.’
Gary was measuring angles with his eye, his head turning to the bed, to the window, back to the bed. ‘Yes, we do,’ he said absently. ‘Well, if it’s Ditko we do. Because he could have snapped her neck one-handed in half a second. He might have been giving her a shiatsu massage, or intimidating her, or feeling for a pulse, or doing pretty much anything else, but the one thing he wasn’t doing right then was killing her. So . . .’
He paced out the distance from the corpse to the bed, walking around the tangle of bedclothes.
‘So there was something else,’ I finished. ‘Something he did first. Or tried to do.’
‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Gary knelt at the head of the bed, staring at the headboard. I’d only just noticed that there was blood on it, and on the pillows beneath it. ‘What do you make of this?’ he asked, pointing.
I thought of the emotions – recent, strong – that hung in the air of the room like a visible fog. Fear had been the most vivid of all, but hope had been in the mix too. Ginny Parris knew what Rafi was now: who he bunked with. But at least once after she woke up and realised she wasn’t alone in the room, she had thought she might make it out of this alive. What did that mean? That she saw Rafi, as well as Asmodeus? Spoke to him?
