by Emma Jameson
Peter still said nothing.
“When Mariah found a Uni boyfriend, Peter went through a sort of crisis,” Hannah said. “I was relieved. I thought, ‘Right. Brilliant. Mariah’s finished playing daddy’s girl and Peter’s fallen back to earth. We can have another go at making our marriage work.’ But Peter didn’t turn to me. He burrowed into his secretary’s arms. Excuse me. Administrative assistant. She doesn’t like to be called a secretary. I wouldn’t, either, if my job duties were as onerous as hers.”
“You’ve spent long nights at the lab over the years,” Peter retorted feebly. “How do I know you weren’t carrying on with Dr. Millet?”
“Because Dr. Millet and I professionals trying to cure leukemia.”
“Yes. Well. Twenty years and you haven’t put forth a single drug that made it through clinical trials. Missed the cancer at home, too.”
Time to intervene, Tony thought. Peter shook with half-suppressed shame; Hannah looked dangerously energized by her screed. Either might say anything now.
“How were Mark and Mariah introduced to Sir Duncan?” he asked. “Who initiated the relationship?”
“We don’t know,” Peter said.
“No one knows.” Hannah laughed bitterly. “No one admits to having seen a thing. Of course, Mariah was passionate about ecological issues and Peter’s first position in government was at DEFRA. He met Godington several times over the years. No doubt that’s just a coincidence. Except I don’t believe in those.”
Peter’s cheeks, already bright pink, grew pinker. Tony didn’t have to ask if the accusation was true. Clearly, Peter had played some role in initiating his twins’ relationship with Sir Duncan. Yet he refused to admit it, even now.
“How was your relationship with Mariah at the end? In November or December of last year?”
“Strained.”
“Ask him why,” Hannah said.
“I shall. But first,” Tony turned to her. “How was your relationship with Mariah? Did you have a happy Christmas?”
“I worked that day. Monitoring a critical test at the lab.”
“New Year’s?”
Hannah shook her head.
“She hadn’t spoken to Mariah since Bonfire Night,” Peter announced triumphantly. “Mark, either. Poor Mariah suffered two months like that, her mother refusing to speak to her, before she killed herself.”
“Mariah didn’t kill herself,” Hannah bellowed. “And I didn’t refuse to speak to her. Or Mark. I simply waited for one of them to make the first move. I was well within my rights. They owed me an apology.”
“For what?” Tony asked.
“For speaking disrespectfully.”
“For speaking truthfully,” Peter said. “Mariah told Hannah she was a terrible mother. Mark stood by and nodded. Hannah can’t bear to be challenged. So she gave our children the keys to the street. And we haven’t seen them since.”
Chapter Three
“Get out,” Hannah told Peter.
“Gladly. I’ll be gone within the hour.” Redness suffused his face; even his ears were scarlet.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. You’ve slept in Mariah’s bedroom for three months. You can sleep there another night if that’s what it takes to get you out for good. I don’t mean an overnight bag. Take everything you’ve ever touched,” she said. “Whatever of yours I find after you’ve gone, I’ll burn in the front garden for the neighbors to see.”
“May I suggest an armistice for the remainder of the afternoon?” Tony interrupted mildly. Here his long-perfected rhetorical device, the patrician tone of command, was useless. Not only because he addressed blue bloods who occupied a higher place on the aristocratic food chain, but because it was a warring couple. Only imbeciles took on embattled spouses on their own turf.
“That is,” he continued, “if you’ve decided to allow me to take over the case as Ms. Wheelwright proposed. Assuming you have, I’d quite like to interview each of you separately, in greater detail. Also, to view the twins’ bedrooms, if you’ve maintained them.”
“She’s already boxed up Mark’s things,” Peter accused.
“Because I’m not a ghoul. Wait till you see Mariah’s room. Kept up like a bloody shrine,” Hannah said.
I’ll take that as acceptance of my professional services, Tony thought. He’d expected his first real case to begin with fee negotiations, a contract, perhaps a nondisclosure agreement. A hard-nosed career woman like Kate would have insisted on all three, plus twenty-four hours to read the fine print. The Earl and Countess of Brompton, by contrast, seemed willing to proceed as Peers of the Realm so often did—by a verbal contract. It wasn’t because they were more honorable than the hoi polloi. It was because the law had great difficulty proving, or disproving, an unwritten agreement after the fact.
Hannah regarded Tony tiredly. She looked drained of all emotion, as if she might never weep again. “Which of us will you interview first?”
“Lord Brompton,” Tony said. He always wanted a go at the psychologically weaker person first. Also, statistically speaking, the father of a dead or missing child was the most obvious person of interest. Followed by the mother, the second most obvious.
“Very well,” Hannah said. “I’ll be upstairs. Ring my mobile when you’re ready for me.” Gathering the tea-things onto the tray, she made as if to exit, then turned back.
“Lord Hetheridge. Remember what I said. We were never honest in our family life. I’m convinced my husband—my soon-to-be ex-husband—has secret knowledge of Mariah’s final days. Knowledge he’s never disclosed to anyone. Do try and carve it out of him. Even if it’s something ghastly. Something you might imagine a mother couldn’t bear to hear. At this point, any pain is preferable to the hell of not knowing.”
After Hannah closed the door behind her, Peter covered his face with his hands. A full minute passed before he took a deep breath, removed his hands, and shot Tony an embarrassed glance. “Right. Lovely. So good to have a witness for all that. Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Still got your balls?”
Tony glanced down at himself as if to check. Peter chuckled.
“You know what? You’re all right. Tony, is it? Sorry I was an arse. Who knows, maybe you can help us. Get to the bottom of why Mariah did it.” He knelt to retrieve the mass of papers that had burst out of his briefcase. “How many years?”
“Married? Five months. Well—nearly five.”
“Still counting, eh? Those were the days. Wait, didn’t I read something about it? I did. Your first marriage?”
“Better late than never.”
“Can I make a friendly observation? One married man to another?”
Tony nodded.
“When it comes to marriage, you’ll never hit bottom. No matter how far you fall. Even the blackest pit has a trapdoor.”
“Lord Brompton. I wonder if—”
“Leave off the Debrett’s rubbish. I’m Peter.” He looked up from his hastily re-stuffed briefcase. “Shall I show you Mariah’s room?”
“Please.”
Hannah hadn’t exaggerated. The room was grotesque. Tony, who’d had the unhappy duty of viewing many carefully-preserved rooms over the years, wasn’t easily surprised. But the sight of Mariah Keene’s bedroom, and her father’s evident pleasure in revealing it, startled him. The man was smiling. Grinning like a politician at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“This is my sanctuary, now,” he said.
Fortunately, Tony never had to wonder if his facial expression gave him away. He’d been born poker-faced. When it suited an investigation, he retreated instinctively behind that wall. Sometimes he had difficulty emerging.
Affecting a cough, he made a show of studying the room. “Remind me of Mariah’s age again?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Yes, of course. Twenty-one.” Folding his arms across his chest, he looked up at the ceiling. “Are those bits of crystal I see? Forming the rings of Saturn?”
&
nbsp; “Yes,” Peter said proudly. “An artist friend painted the ceiling. Hannah and I asked for a celestial fantasy—signs of the Zodiac and all that. The artist took it upon herself to paint our solar system instead. The overhead light serves as the sun, you see. Crystal embellishments for the planets came later. Hand-glued. Countless hours on the ladder. A literal pain in the neck, if I’m being honest.”
“You did it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind if I took pictures? Bit of video?” Tony pulled out his iPhone.
“How will that help?”
“I don’t know yet. Sometimes photo documentation reveals little or nothing. But in my last official case for the Yard, it was everything. Better to waste time looking too closely than to neglect even the smallest clue.”
“Yes, of course. Only….” Now it was Peter’s turn to employ that time-honored transition, the manufactured cough. “There’s something we have to get straight. I’ll need your assurance that the pictures, video, etc., will stay with you. Or, if need be, the authorities. It can never be published or made available to the public in any way.”
So he isn’t totally round the bend, Tony thought. He’s still sufficiently cognizant of parental norms to understand how all this would look to the world. Or at least, his voters.
“I don’t foresee a circumstance where your privacy would be violated,” Tony said. “Unless I uncover evidence compelling enough to open a criminal case. In that event, the relevant images would become evidence.”
Peter didn’t look convinced. Rather, he looked very much like a man formulating an excuse to refuse. Or at least put it off long enough to give the room a private once-over first. Time for a distraction.
“May I suggest you ring your family solicitor?” Tony asked. “I’m happy to sign an NDA governing my use of such photos.”
Peter brightened. “Yes. I should’ve thought of that. There’s a bloke on my staff—we call him Dr. Optics. His real name is Aaron. He started as an IT consultant. Now he helps me safeguard my political image. He’s a genius. Indispensable. I intend to stand for PM in a few years, you know. Others have let ‘optics,’ if you will, muck up their campaigns before they begin. I’m determined not to make that mistake.”
Tony nodded. Peter’s assertion, anodyne to most people’s ears, triggered a thrill along his secondary nervous system, the one detectives grew. How many murders had happened because someone with a prized public image sought to erase a mistake?
As Peter went off to ring his counsel, Tony worked quickly to document the room: pictures, video, and even video in the round, which a detective with a standard smart phone could now perform on the fly. At a fresh crime scene, formalities mattered. Where there was blood spatter or a chance of touch DNA, CSIs were indispensable. Here, a PI with an iPhone could do the job nicely.
Mariah’s furniture was white with gold-leaf accents: bed, desk, bookshelf, chair, and doll-sized tea set. The bed had a canopy, but it wasn’t supported by four posters like the canopies Tony had glimpsed in so many homes. Rather, it was a massive, curtained affair, with a bower made of gauzy purple netting. Accented by white fairy lights, the bower hung suspended from the ceiling, trembling faintly.
The duvet was pink with white daisies. Atop a mound of assorted pillows sat a stuffed unicorn, its mad plastic gaze made all the madder by glittery purple eyes. Only in the last year or so had Tony noticed soft toys on offer with that style of plastic eyes. Had Mariah been a collector, even into adulthood?
The pillows were all in similar vein, fuzzy lightweight yarn or glitzy silver finishes. He dug into them, feeling within the shams. Nothing was stashed inside. On impulse, he sniffed them. Again, nothing, apart from the chemical-fix that textiles received before being shipped to the high street.
Undeterred, Tony searched deeper. Some clichés sprang out of truth. He’d always found that adult children living at home really did stash valuables where their younger selves had: in or around the bed.
The sheets were pristine, but the mattresses weren’t—far from it. The top mattress, stained and bearing evidence of frequent spot-cleaning, looked thirty or forty years old.
The covering on the old-fashioned box spring was torn in spots. Working his fingers under the fabric, Tony snagged something. He pulled it free. It was a small plastic bag. Inside was roughly an ounce of brownish-green stuff.
Tony sniffed. It smelled powerfully of cloves. This wasn’t weed. It was the synthetic version of marijuana known as K2, or Spice.
He tucked it into his coat pocket. In theory, K2/Spice and its most famous varieties, like Black Mamba, were illegal in the UK and most of the western world. However, declaring a substance illegal meant outlawing its precise chemical composition. Each time that drowsy Leviathan, Law, bestirred itself to declare a variety of Spice illegal, chemists would simply tweak the outlawed formula, adding or subtracting to produce a brand-new substance.
This exploitation of the legal loophole had been so successful, health and safety advocates had shifted to public education to quell the “lawful” high’s demand. Like any street drug, Spice carried the usual risks: contamination, combination with a highly addictive opioid like Fentanyl, and unsavory dealers. Moreover, there was growing evidence that certain varieties of Spice triggered psychiatric disorders, including psychosis.
Reminds me of “Angel Dust,” back in the day, Tony thought. Individuals on PCP did terrible things. Some even jumped off buildings, trying to fly. Could that be why Mariah jumped?
Under the bed, Tony found two storage boxes. One was stuffed with ladies’ shoes, British size 8.5. Definitely the province of a grown woman between 5’9” and 6 feet tall. Most of the shoes were strappy sandals or four-inch pumps, black, taupe, and red. No little girl styles or colors.
The other storage box was more interesting: a cache of personal belongings. Tony sorted through them swiftly, aware that Peter might return at any moment. Although he’d given permission for Tony to search the room, he was likely to balk at the sight of a near-stranger touching his dead daughter’s things. Especially if he had something to hide.
The box contained, in no order: Sharpies, a 1937 threepenny bit, bangle bracelets, a cube of yellow Post-Its, sunglasses, Boots No. 7 waterproof mascara, a student ID from Cardiff University, a bottle of essential oil labeled Geranium, a box of colored pencils, bras, knickers, and knit socks. The socks were novelty items, probably gifts. One set had a phrase beginning on the sole of one and concluded on its mate.
IF YOU CAN READ THIS
BRING ME WINE
Another sock bulged, concealing something heavy. Tony shook it out. It was a palm-sized, silicone rubber-coated item with a shape that suggested nothing to him. He saw no visible switch, only a USB charging port. As he pondered the item, he spied a near-imperceptible divot. He pressed.
The device vibrated exuberantly, continuing till he thumbed the divot again.
Mystery solved. Tony slipped the personal massager back in its sock. He had no intention of telling Kate such an item had momentarily flummoxed him. Maybe he’d mention it to Paul someday, over a pint. It was good to occasionally compare notes with a younger man.
Next, he searched Mariah’s desk. Stuffed teddy bears occupied most of the bookshelf real estate, apart from an illustrated children’s Bible and a couple of Harry Potters. The soft toys were beautifully constructed and, like the unicorn with the glittery eyes, apparently never touched by sticky childish hands.
Inside the desk drawers, which had pink glass rosebuds for pulls, he found childhood mementos. An old diary full of complaints about the burden of a twin brother, written in messy block print; photo albums; a couple of half-dressed Barbies; report cards; a stack of letters written by Mariah to her parents from camp when she was ten years old. These were sorted by date, tucked into their original envelopes, and tied with a pink ribbon.
“Revolting, isn’t it?”
Tony turned. Hannah stood in the doorway, a glass of white wine i
n hand.
“It seems to have been redone. Is any part of this room unchanged from when Mariah was alive?”
“What do you think?” Hannah stuck to the corridor, as if stepping over the threshold into her daughter’s room constituted some form of violation. “I suppose the bed is still hers, under all that airy-fairy froufrou. The mattress and box spring, I mean. But it’s no good searching that desk for clues to anything other than Peter’s madness. He bought it, dragged it up here, and decorated it with props to remind him of his perfect child’s perfect childhood.” She laughed.
“Was there a specific incident?”
Hannah studied him for a moment. “No,” she said at last, without conviction. “Mariah could be grasping and greedy, like any child. She was disciplined in school for drugs—marijuana. She lied sometimes, and pulled Mark into those lies. His worst mistakes were always at her urging.”
As Tony took that in, Hannah continued, “The original desk might have helped you, but it’s gone. Along with everything in it, I suppose.” Something about the way she swirled her wine right to the very rim of the glass suggested she was on the brink of inebriation. Either she’d consumed plenty of alcohol since the end of their interview, or she was mixing wine with prescription tranquilizers.
“You should’ve seen it,” she continued. “Peter up on a ladder, hanging that purple monstrosity over the bed, hot-gluing bits of crystal to the ceiling. Two things Mariah wanted as a child that we said was too expensive, or too much bother. Now that she’s dead, nothing is too much.”
“Did you keep all of Mark’s things?” Tony asked.
“Yes. Boxed up, like Peter said.”
“Why boxed up? Don’t you think that after he’s found, he’ll be willing to return home?”
Hannah shook her head. “We put the ultimate burden on him. Drove him away. Even if he forgives us, I can’t imagine he’ll live here ever again. Perhaps after you find him, he’ll allow me to set him up in a cozy flat somewhere close. That’s the most I can hope for.”