by Emma Jameson
“What do you mean, the ultimate burden?”
Hannah took another sip. “When they told us that Mariah fell thirty stories to her death, Peter didn’t believe it. He insisted it was a case of mistaken identity. He was half out the door, coat over his pajamas, ranting about incompetent cops and how it must be some poor Jane Doe. I told him we needed to send someone else. That I couldn’t do it and neither should he. He wouldn’t listen.”
“But then you said two words. ‘Smashed watermelon.’” Peter appeared beside her on the landing. “Gave me nightmares for months. Our daughter, dead on the pavement, with the head of an exploded gourd.”
Hannah shrugged. “Maybe when you stop sleeping in here, you won’t dream of her.”
“That’s all you have left to take from me, isn’t it? My access to the place where I feel closest to Mariah’s spirit.” Defiantly, Peter plopped down on the elephant in the room: his sleeping cot, which was pushed up against the foot of Mariah’s bed.
The cot was unmade and messy. Its blue tick mattress peeked out; the sheets and pillows were tangled. Under the cot, Peter had stashed his nighttime effects: carpet slippers, a John Grisham novel, a prescription bottle, and a glass tumbler. Tony had already noted the name of the prescription, Haldol, but hadn’t been able to Google it yet.
Could it be an antipsychotic? he wondered. Given all the times he’d been privy to the medical records of disturbed individuals, his working knowledge of psychiatric meds should have been better. As good as his knowledge of poisons and street drugs, anyway.
Perhaps he was just reacting to the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Mariah’s twin bed under its gauzy purple bower and a grown man’s flop-spot shoved up against it. The way Peter sat atop it, smiling from ear to ear as if the recipient of some cosmic comfort, gave Tony another chill along the detective’s nerve apparatus.
“You ghoul,” Hannah said, speaking Tony’s thoughts aloud. “You killed her. You did. Didn’t you?”
“Right! Well done, you.” Peter’s laugh was high and unhinged. “I drove her to a construction site in the middle of the night. I accompanied her up to the highest beam and gave her the push. Of course I did. Never mind that I slept beside you in our own bed the entire night. Never mind that heights make me so wobbly I won’t even walk across the Millennium Bridge. And when I was done killing my daughter, whom I loved more than I ever loved you, I put on a show of not believing she was dead. I was all set to burst into the Wapping morgue until you told me she was broken open like a dropped jack-o-lantern. And what did I do when your words sunk in? I fainted. Because that’s the sort of diabolical killer I am.”
“I mean you drove her to jump,” Hannah shrieked. “What did you do to her? What was happening in this room that I didn’t see?”
“Everything,” Peter roared. “Her entire life! You were too busy with Petrie dishes and gene splicing and your precious Mark to see anything at all.”
“Forgive me,” Tony said in a tone that sounded remarkably like two other words. Hannah and Peter goggled at him as if he’d interrupted their row with profanity instead of an apology. He seized on the silence.
“Lord and Lady Brompton, I understand you were frustrated by what you perceived as a lack of hands-on attention from Cecelia Wheelwright. I assure you, I will be available to a far greater degree. In return for my undivided attention, I must ask you to avoid one another, and this sort of unseemly display, during my investigation. If I want to interview you simultaneously, I’ll say so. Otherwise, separate is best. That means you, Lady Brompton, should remove to some other room while I discuss matters with your husband.”
“Fine.” Hannah knocked back the remainder of her wine. A drop slipped down her chin. She didn’t seem to notice. “I’m tired. Insomnia. Maybe I’m ready to sleep. Never mind today. We’ll crack on tomorrow.”
“Sorry about her,” Peter said after his wife had gone. “We’ve had this screaming match a dozen times already, but she doesn’t remember. She mixes horse tranqs and Sauvignon Blanc until she’s reeling, screams at me, sleeps through dinner time, then stays up all night Googling Sir Duncan and other serial killers. I can always tell when she’s close to passing out. She accuses me of driving Mariah to jump. It’s the only time she admits Mariah actually took her own life.”
“May I ask you an unpleasant question, Peter?”
“What? Don’t tell me you’re going to accuse me, too. If not of murder, of being a paedo?”
“No. It’s about this room. Why did you tear it down to mattress and box spring, then rebuild it this way?” Tony asked. “Complete with toys she never played with and children’s books she never read?”
“She read the Harry Potters,” Peter muttered. “As ebooks. I bought the hardcovers so I could see them on the shelf.” His gaze wandered to the floor and stayed there.
Tony allowed him a minute’s silence. Then: “Are you ashamed to tell me?”
“Of course I’m ashamed.” Peter’s eyes shone. “Hannah was never around. But neither was I, when it counted. I loved Mariah, I encouraged her, but I’m still guilty. She wanted a canopy bed and I said no. She wanted sparkles on the ceiling and I called her spoiled. She asked for soft toys and I lectured her about not playing with the ones she already had. Remaking this room was therapy to me. Just like packing up Mark’s room and fantasizing about moving him into a flat was therapy for Hannah.”
“If you’ll forgive me, Lord Brompton — Peter. I sense what you’re holding back is something you fear no one will understand.” Tony pinned his client with his gaze. “Something you suspect is relevant to the case. Perhaps even crucial. Yet at the same time, something you fear being found out. Even though you’ve hired me to dig up everything I can.”
Peter looked like he wanted to run away. Tony expected him to do just that. Instead, he squared his shoulders and spoke.
“I introduced Sir Duncan to Mark and Mariah. Encouraged the friendship. When she had a falling out with him, I told her she was being ridiculous. That was the last time I spoke to Mariah,” Peter said. “She rang me in my office to say she thought Sir Duncan was abnormal. I told her his friendship was worth putting up with a bit of eccentricity.”
“What sort of eccentricity?”
“A religion, of sorts. Sacred Geometry.” Peter sighed. “It’s all over my head. Not sure if it’s a cult like Scientology or just a woolly notion, like in that book The Secret. Anyway, Mariah said she thought it was bad for Mark. That Sir Duncan kept obsessing over their friendship. Said they formed a triangle. Or a triptych. Something like that. Looking back, it makes my skin crawl. But….”
“But what?”
“I was cross with her. Cross with Mark, too. I was expecting Sir Duncan to speak on my behalf during my reelection campaign and I didn’t want to rock that boat,” Peter said. “But mostly, I could sense that Mariah wanted permission to tell Sir Duncan to go to hell. So instead I told her, stick it out, be a friend, and encourage Mark to do the same. Once I was reelected, they could pull the plug if they wanted.”
Tony waited. Peter didn’t look like he was finished. Nor did he seem willing to go on.
“Tell me,” Tony said.
“I’ve said all there is to say.” Peter lifted his chin and stared, unblinking, at Tony. The liar’s stare.
I will find out, Tony thought. But aloud he said, “Explain this business about sacred geometry, then.”
Chapter Four
Deadenfall, Kate thought. How could she be expected to feel at home at a place nicknamed Deadenfall?
Of course, her discomfort with living at One Hundred and One Leadenhall wasn’t literally about the death of Mariah Keene. That was sad, but such things happened. No one could have expected the builders to abandon the project simply because an apparently disturbed young woman died on the site.
Nor was her discomfort superstitious in nature. There probably wasn’t a square foot of London that hadn’t been baptized in blood or used as a burial ground at some point. As rec
ently as 1811, a murderer had been staked through the heart and buried at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Tottenham Cross Road. At last count, a third of all Londoners believed in ghosts. Sometimes, Kate counted herself among them. New building or old, ghosts came with the territory in the city of her birth.
No—Kate disliked the name Deadenfall for more personal reasons. When she was thirteen years old, she’d suffered a traumatic fall from a building in which she, like Mariah Keene, had been trespassing. And the night before they moved into their sublet condo, Kate had dreamed of that near-miss.
Like most dreams, it had unfolded not as pure memory, but rather as a series of impossibilities. She’d been all grown up, alone, and standing atop the Leadenhall building, fifty-one stories high. Her friend and colleague, Paul Bhar, had been rappelling down the side of the Walkie-Talkie building, shouting her name, imploring her not to jump. At the same time, a menacing presence behind her crept closer.
The soft crunching sound of his footsteps, like trainers on pebbles or grit, had been eerily real. Whirling, dream-Kate had performed a roundhouse kick at her unseen attacker. In waking life, it was a move she’d twice used on the job, and executed perfectly. In the dream, she’d lost her balance and tumbled, shrieking, over the building’s edge.
It was absurd for a grown woman to connect a universal nightmare, falling, with the fate of Mariah Keene and that not-so-clever nickname, Deadenfall. Much less allow that association to follow her around like a personal raincloud. But Kate had always taken her dreams seriously. In the real world, she chased clues for a living. In her dreams, clues sometimes chased her.
In their five short months of marriage, Kate had been surprised by how easily she and Tony had combined two wildly different lives into one. He deserved most of the credit. He’d entered marriage with the philosophy that nothing could be held back. In his mind, Wellegrave House was no longer his alone. All its contents—the heirloom/Gilded Age/baronial folderol that had delighted her when they were dating and made her feel like a fraud once they were wed—was fully hers as well as his.
His calm in the face of catastrophic property damage was no stiff upper lip routine, she knew. As he saw it, guardianship of his brother-in-law, Ritchie, was now fully his as well as hers. This included meltdowns, Lego pieces strewn like caltrops across the living room floor, and the occasional million dollars in irreplaceable antiques. Many men, after forty years or so of serene bachelorhood, would moan, grumble, or collect pamphlets about care homes and drop them in strategic places around the house. He didn’t. There were numerous reasons why his character did not permit him to pursue matrimony so single-mindedly, then complain after the fact about the baggage that came with it. Kate preferred to collect all these reasons into one simple phrase: Tony Hetheridge was a real man.
He has an easier time seeing the big picture than I do. She was sitting in the lobby on the ground floor, a vodka martini with three colossal olives positioned at her elbow on the illuminated Lucite bar top. Staying at One-oh-One meant never having to venture out into the wind or rain for a drink. One-oh-One boasted several pubs — eight, to be exact – but the lobby pub, Archie’s, was the poshest.
Leave it to a place like this to make me long for a hole in the wall.
Viewed from thirty thousand feet, subletting a condo at the Leadenhall building was an experience most people in London (or England, or the world) would relish. Until Wellegrave House was restored, the Hetheridges would dwell in the very heart of the city. They would order meals up when the fancy took them. Take the lift down when they wanted a little light shopping. Savor breathtaking views of London whenever they pleased, night or day. Kate felt sure that if she, too, could ascend above the clouds, she’d see their temporary residence at One-oh-One as the privilege it was. Perhaps even a vacation. But she was too accustomed to the view from six inches, otherwise known as “in the thick of it.”
Archie’s was ultra-modern. The light-up bar top pulsed along with canned dance music. Every spot at the bar included a recharging port. There was no bartender. Drinks were ordered via touchscreen menus and dropped off by nameless rotating servers. Most of them tasted watered down. Kate had discovered they were injected into glasses via a computer-brained liquor dispenser. Bartenders who poured by eye tended to splash a little humanity into their drinks. An extra jigger of vermouth, a juniper garnish, a double shot for a regular’s big day, etc. Drink-dispensing robots never gave up an extra drop. Which was one reason why Kate, a lover of pale lager, had ordered a vodka martini at five o’clock in the afternoon. It was only marginally stronger. The other reason was to aggravate her older sister, Maura Wakefield.
Kate and Maura had spent their adult lives at war. Not always a shooting war. Sometimes they went months without speaking, a sort of East Germany-West Germany situation, separated by miles of psychological bricks and mortar. Sometimes promising diplomatic talks occurred. Other times military maneuvers were carried out in the DMZ, night and day.
After Kate married Tony, the Wakefield war had heated up again. Kate had predicted this during their short engagement. It had been one of the many reasons, along with her own insecurity, she’d been reluctant to accept Tony’s proposal. Kate’s mother, Louise, still very much a part of Maura’s life, was a bad influence. The two women shared a knack for acquiring dosh under shifty conditions and making it go poof. Kate called them grifters. They called her a stooge.
Soon after Kate said, “I do,” Louise and Maura swooped in demanding payouts. First came the guilt trip. How could Kate live in luxury while her own people dwelt in penury? Very well, as it turned out.
Second, attempts at flattery. Kate had chosen a remarkable groom. Tony was so dashing, so distinguished, so eminently capable of supporting his in-laws. Wouldn’t Kate like to intervene with him on their behalf? Nope.
Last came threats. So Kate liked playing mommy to her nephew, Henry? Couldn’t have babies of her own so she’d nicked someone else’s? Well, if she wouldn’t see her way clear to prop up dear old mum and down-on-her-luck sis, she’d better kiss the boy goodbye. Was Kate willing to put Henry through a custody lawsuit? She was, as it turned out.
That was better than committing to a decade of picking up Louise and Maura’s tabs. So now Maura was suing for full custody of Henry, the son she’d abandoned when he was four years old.
Kate sipped her drink. An aggressively average libation, as generic as Archie’s dance beat. But to Maura, it would be as tempting as a double portion of cheesecake to a slimmer.
That’s the best thing about family, Kate thought, munching an olive. No need guessing which buttons to push. They’re all clearly labeled.
The Leadenhall building’s lobby was public, according to its glossy brochures. Nevertheless, uniformed doormen alerted the security desk if someone not quite fit and proper entered. While awaiting the weekly hand-off—when Maura brought Henry back after her legally-mandated visitation—Kate had observed the workings of One-oh-One’s lobby. Professionals who looked the part (suits, laptops, self-important frowns) were permitted to get on with it. So were the tea room customers awaiting their table in the Leadenhall building’s neo-Victorian tourist magnet. Residents like Kate were never disturbed unless they raised a hand or glanced around in an imperious manner, in which case one or two employees fell over themselves to respond.
Sometimes people wandered in from the street. Within seconds, they were subjected to the sort of “service” that only the very naïve consider welcoming. Under the stare of an Impressive Concierge asking questions in an Impressive Tone (“How might I assist you today, sir?”) those interlopers got themselves to the bar or turned around and left. That was the desired effect: a force field of courtesy to drive out those who didn’t belong.
The Courtesy Force Field didn’t always work on the homeless. The uniformed doormen generally kept them out, sometimes with a threatening gesture or unkind word. Kate had never seen any of the doormen cross the line, but she found herself watching nonethel
ess.
Once, a ragged man laden with overfilled Tesco bags and wearing his entire wardrobe had somehow evaded the doormen and entered the lobby while Kate was there. On cue, the Impressive Concierge had sailed up and made a show of offering the man help. Specifically, a prepackaged sandwich, bottle of juice, and printed directions to the nearest shelter. The ragged man had rejected that. He’d plopped down on a sofa, saying he just wanted to sit down. The concierge had withdrawn, rang up the City of London police, and had him escorted out.
That memory stuck in Kate’s craw. She wasn’t sure why. Luxury high-rises catered to the wealthy. Such people valued privacy and well-kept surroundings, and why wouldn’t they?
Of course, it was no good living someplace enviable without permitting others to envy it. That’s why they allowed well-groomed tourists to play Jane Austen in the tea room and take selfies in front of the Twombly. But homeless people? Bathing in the lavatory sinks and napping under the potted ficus trees? Never. Not even Kate, who wanted to be inclusive and progressive and a lot of other “ives,” liked the thought of that. Not if she was being honest. So why did the memory sting?
Because of the Kabuki theater. The sandwich and juice and list of resources. It isn’t meant to spare the homeless person’s feelings. It’s meant to spare my feelings. Mine, and every other resident or guest who has a “right” to be here. So we don’t feel bad when the doormen show them out, or the City of London police take them away.
She checked her phone. Maura was fifteen minutes late. It wasn’t surprising, given the hour. Nevertheless, Kate resented it. A responsible adult would expect the evening rush and take steps to compensate. But complaining about small infractions would do no good. In Family Court, the judge had insisted that Maura be permitted weekly visitation, usually from Friday after school until five o’clock Saturday evening. Kate had ranted and raved until their solicitor, whom Tony had selected from a top-drawer firm near London Bridge, set her straight about what adoption would and wouldn’t do.