“Esther Little was by the river yesterday, but I never met her before. She gave me some tea. Green tea. Then she asked …”
The pale man’s stare drills into my forehead, like the answer’s written there. “ Whatdid she ask?”
“For asylum. If her …” I hunt for her exact words, “… plans went up in flames.”
The pale man lights up. “ So … Esther Little wanted you for an oubliette. A mobile safe house. I see. You! A used pawn so insignificant, she thought we’d forget you. Well.” He stands up and blocks the way out. “If you’re in there, Esther, we found you!”
“Look,” I manage to say, huddling, “if this is like MI5 stuff, about Ian and Heidi’s communism, I’m nothing to do with it. They just gave me a lift, and I … I …”
He steps towards me, suddenly, to scare me. It does. “Yes?”
“Don’t come near me.” My voice sort of shrivels up. “I’ll—I’ll—I’ll fight. The police—”
“Will be baffled by Heidi’s gran’s bungalow. Two lovers on the loungers, the body of teenager Holly Sykes. Forensics will have a proper farrago to disentangle by the time you’re found—especially if the triple murderer leaves the patio door ajar for the foxes, crows, stray cats … The mess! You’ll go national. The great, gory, unsolved British crime of the eighties. Fame at last.”
“Let me go! I—I—I’ll go abroad, I’ll … go. Please.”
“You’ll look adorable dead.” The pale man smiles at his fingers as he flexes them. “An unprincipled man would have some fun with you first, but I’m against cruelty to dumb animals.”
I hear a hoarse gasp. “Don’t don’t don’t please please—”
“Sssh …” His fingers make a twisting gesture and my lips, my tongue, and my throat shut down. All the strength drains from my legs and arms, like I’m a puppet with its strings cut, pushed into the corner. The pale man sits on the same rug I’m on, cross-legged, like a storyteller but sort of savoring the moment, like Vinny when he knows he’s going to have me. “What’s it like, knowing you’ll be dead as a fucking stone in sixty seconds, Holly Sykes? What pictures does your insectoid mind flick through just before the end?”
His eyes aren’t quite human. My vision’s going, like night’s falling, my lungs’re drowning, not in water but in nothing and I realize it’s been ages since I last breathed, so I try to but I can’t and the drumming in my ears has stopped ’cause my heart’s shut down. Out of the swarmy dusk the pale man reaches out his hand and brushes my breast with the backs of his fingers, tells me, “Sweet dreams, dear heart,” and my last thought is, Who is that doddering figure in the background, a mile away, at the far end of the lounge …?
The pale man notices, looks over his shoulder, and jumps up. My heart restarts and my lungs fill with oxygen, so quick I choke and cough as I recognize Heidi. “Heidi! Get the police! He’s a killer! Run!” But Heidi’s ill, or drugged, or injured, or drunk, her head’s lolling about like she’s got that disease, multiple sclerosis. Her voice isn’t the same, either—it’s like my granddad’s since his stroke. She pushes out the words all ragged: “Don’t worry, Holly.”
“On the contrary, Holly,” snorts the pale man, “if thisspecimen is your knight in shining armor, it’s time to despair. Marinus, I presume. I smell your unctuousness, even in that perfumed zombie.”
“Temporary accommodation,” says Heidi, whose head flops forward, back, then forward: “Why kill the two sunbathing youths? Why?That was gratuitous, Rhоmes.”
“Why not? You people, you’re so why why why? Because my blood was up. Because Xi Lo started a firefight in the Chapel. Because I could. Because you and Esther Little led me here. She died, didn’t she, before she could claim asylum in this female specimen of the great unwashed? A hell of a pounding she took, fleeing down the Way of Stones. I know, I gave it to her. Speaking of poundings, my sincere condolences over Xi Lo and poor Holokai—your little club of good fairies is de capitated. What about you, Marinus? You’re more a healer than a fighter, I know, but offer me some token resistance, I implore you.” Rhоmes does his finger-weaving thing and—unless I’m seeing things—the marble chopping board rises up from the counter in the kitchen and hovers towards us, like the invisible man’s bringing it over. “Cat got your tongue, Marinus?” asks the pale man called Rhоmes.
“Let the girl go,” says head-flopping Heidi.
The chopping board hurtles across the living room into the back of Heidi’s head. I hear a noise like a spoon going into an eggshell. It should’ve knocked Heidi’s body forward, like a skittle, but instead she’s picked up by—by—by—nobody, while Rhоmes spins his hands and makes sort of snapping motions, and Heidi’s body spins too, herkily-jerkily. Snap, crackle, pop, goes her spine, and her lower jawbone’s half off and blood’s trickling from a hole in her forehead, like a bullet went in. Rhоmes does a backhand slap in the air, and Heidi’s mangled body’s flung against a picture of a robin sat on a spade, then lands on its head and tumbles in a heap.
Now it’s like I’ve got headphones superglued over my ears and through one speaker I’ve got “None of This Is Happening” blaring and through the other “All of This Is Happening” going over and over at full blast. But when Rhоmes speaks, he speaks quietly and I hear every wrinkle in every word. “Don’t you ever have days when you’re just so glad to be alive you want to”—he turns to me—“howl at the sun? Now, I believe I was squeezing the life out of you …” He pushes the air towards me, palm-first, then lifts his hand; I’m slammed against the wall and shoved upwards by some invisible force till my head bumps the ceiling. Rhоmes leaps onto the arm of the sofa, like he’s going to kiss me. I try to hit him but both my hands are pinned back and once again my lungs’ve closed off. One of the whites of Rhоmes’s eyes is darkening to red, like a tiny vein’s burst: “Xi Lo inherited Jacko’s fraternal love for you, which pleases me. Killing you won’t bring my lost Anchorites back, but Horology owes us a blood debt now, and every penny counts. Just so you know.” My vision’s fading and the pain in my brain’s blotting everything out, and—
The tip of a sharp tongue slides from his mouth.
Reddened, metallic, an inch from my nose. A knife?
Rhоmes’s eyeballs roll back, and as his eyelids shut, I slip down to the floor, and he falls off the arm of the sofa. When the back of his head hits the floor, the knife blade is rammed out a couple more inches, flecky with white goo. It’s easily the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life and I can’t even scream.
“Lucky shot.” Ian drags himself in, gripping the counters.
It can only be me he’s talking to. There’s nobody left. Ian frowns at Heidi’s twisted body. “See you next time, Marinus. It’s time you got a newer vehicle, anyhow.”
What? Not “Oh, Holy Christ!” or “Heidi, no, Heidi, no, no!”? Ian looks at Rhоmes’s body. “On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?’ Then you see a scene like this and remember why.” Last, Ian twists his busted head my way. “Sorry you had to witness all this.”
I slow my breathing, slower, and—“Who …” I can’t do more.
“You weren’t fussy about the tea. Remember?”
The old woman by the Thames. Esther Little? How could Ian know that? I’ve fallen through a floor and landed in a wrong place.
In the bungalow hallway a cuckoo clock goes off.
“Holly Sykes,” says Ian, or Esther Little, if it is Esther Little, but how’s that possible? “I claim asylum.”
Two dead people are lying here. Rhоmes’s blood’s soaking into the carpet.
“Holly, this body’s dying. I’ll redact what you’ve seen from your present perfect, for your own peace of mind, then I’ll hide deep, deep, deep in—” Now Ian-or-Esther-Little topples over like a pile of books. Only one eye’s open now, with half his face shoved up on the squashed sofa cushion. His eyes look like Davenport’s, the collie we had before Newky, when we had him put down at the vet’s. “Please.”