Quick and the Dead

by Susan Moody

  She pulled some papers towards her, pushed others towards me. ‘Before we begin, tell me about this accident, this fall you had.’

  I explained.

  ‘And you’ve no idea who or why?’

  ‘None at all. Just a random nutter, I suppose.’

  ‘You were fortunate that there was someone around to call the emergency services.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, as long as you think you’re up for it …’ she said doubtfully.

  We settled down to look at the proposals she and Bob had drawn up. They all seemed fair and above board. And very generous. There didn’t seem to be any hidden pitfalls, either, though after a while, I had to acknowledge that my concentration was beginning to slip. I hated to admit it, but I began to wonder if Sam had been right, and I wasn’t yet recovered enough from my concussion to have undertaken the journey up here. I tried to concentrate, desperately resisting the urge to put my head down on the table and go to sleep. Across the desk from me, I could see Mercy’s look of concern.

  After a while, she reached across and said, ‘Would you like to lie down for a while? I have plenty to be going on with, so I wouldn’t take offence or anything.’

  ‘Well … let’s see how I go.’

  ‘If it’s anything like the way you’ve been going for the last ten minutes, my dear, I would say taking a short nap is the best thing you could do.’

  I argued a bit, but in the end I agreed to go and lie down in one of her spare bedrooms. ‘Just for half-an-hour,’ I said. ‘I need to get back home reasonably soon.’ It was already getting dark; the lamps around the Square had come on, and the bare black trees were casting sinister shadows across the grass.

  I wondered what Sam had done when he’d discovered I’d given him the slip – which was what it amounted to. He would be furious, I knew. And I also knew I shouldn’t have come. He was right: I wasn’t ready.

  Gratefully, I took off my shoes, lay down on the bed and let Mercy cover me with a cashmere throw. On the wall facing me was a Blue Period Picasso painting, three painfully thin women embracing each other at the edge of an ocean. The Three Graces, I wondered. Or the Fates? Clotho, I told myself. Or was it Thalia? Euphros—

  I had no idea for how long I slept, but when I awoke, the sky outside was black, and there was almost no sound of traffic. So was it late, or did the Lamonts have really efficient double-glazing? I tried to open my eyes in order to check my watch, but they felt unreasonably heavy, as though they had been glued shut. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep, but I was already embarrassed enough at having brought an untimely end to the discussions I had come here for.

  Somewhere down the passage from the room where I lay, there was the sound of some kind of disturbance. Knocking and banging. A doorbell pealing non-stop. Mercy shouting, telling someone to go away. Her voice sounded very different from her usual well-modulated tones. More like Madame Montras behind her fish stall in the Dordogne.

  I could make out muffled yelling. More banging. A voice that I vaguely recognized. Mercy screeching.

  It occurred to me that I should get off the bed and see if she needed help. On the other hand, my arms were refusing to obey my brain and fling off my coverlet. Nor could I swing my legs over the side of the bed to the floor. What was wrong? Had I been struck with paralysis? Was this what captured flies felt like, cocooned in silk thread, ready to make a gourmet meal for some hungry spider?

  ‘Help!’ I cried. My voice sounded pitifully frail, a squeak rather than a shout. With an enormous effort, I opened my eyes. The room seemed the same except that while I slept, a small cinema screen had been erected on the wall at the foot of my bed, and a blue image came hurtling towards me and then was drawn back before hurtling again.

  I tried to lean on my elbows, but couldn’t. ‘Lachesis!’ I exclaimed in a faint mouse-whisper. It was the Picasso, but something terrible had happened to my eyes.

  I made another supreme attempt and managed to lift myself up so that I was half-sitting against the headboard. Which was when I realized that although my hands were free, my arms had been bound to my sides with gaffer tape, so that in effect, I was trussed up like a Christmas joint.

  What? Why? How had that happened?

  Feebly I pushed with my upper body, trying to shake off the throw which Mercy had put over me before I went to sleep (minutes, hours, weeks ago?), and discovered that my legs too were immobilized in the same way. Who had done this? I’d work that out later. Meanwhile, there was Mercy. She needed my help and I must get out of this room and go to her.

  Beside the bed was a carafe of water with a glass over the top. I wanted it. I needed it. My throat was parched, and thirst had spread like a virus throughout my body. I had to have that water or I would die. Grunting with effort, I managed to move my body round, inch by inch, until my bound legs swung like a single limb to the floor. Which was now covered in a large piece of heavy plastic sheeting. Big enough to hide a body in, one part of my brain thought idly. And then thought it again, very much less idly.

  Speed was not just of the essence, but absolutely vital. I gazed round the room: was there anything I could use to slice through the tape and cut myself free?

  I heard Mercy shrieking. I heard police sirens in the street below. I thought I heard my own name.

  Getting free was paramount. I presumed that art thieves, whether a gang or a couple of individuals, had deliberately targeted the flat to coincide with the upheaval of removing the paintings into storage. They must also have been aware that Mercy’s husband would not be there. The carafe on the night-table gleamed with thirst-quenching water, its bulbous body reflecting the rectangle of dark window, like one of the Dutch flower-paintings I had collected to include in Ripe for the Picking. My dry throat yearned for the water it contained. Using my fingers, I inclined my upper body towards it, flapped my fingers and knocked it to the floor. The damn thing landed on the plastic sheeting but didn’t break. Water spilled over my feet.

  I sat back on the bed then brought my legs down hard on the drinking glass. And again. The third time, the glass smashed. I bent down, scrabbled around with my fingers, found a good-sized shard. Awkwardly, I began to slice through the tape which bound my legs together. Gaffer tape is not duct tape. It’s basically a sort of coarse cotton cloth which has been heat-treated with a strong adhesive. It is not easy to cut through, especially by someone whose movements are restricted. I managed it in the end, my nerves screaming with impatience. My legs were bleeding from various cuts and nicks made by the piece of glass I’d been using, but at least they didn’t hurt. Not yet.

  Afterwards, I was to ask myself why I felt so little fear or apprehension. But at the time, I believe I must have segued immediately from anthologizer into senior police officer mode. There was a job to do, and I was the only one who could do it.

  I used my right hand to hack clumsily at the tape binding my left arm to my body. I’d never be able to wear my expensive cardigan again, but that was the least of my worries. The adrenalin racing through my body meant that I felt none of the muscular pain from the attack on me. My left arm released, I did the same in reverse.

  Finally, I was free. I bent down and pulled off my wet tights. Sucked at them, for the moisture. Slipped my feet into my shoes. I ran, as quietly as I could, to the bend in the passage. Mercy stood there, her back to me, staring at the front door, which shuddered under the blows from the other side. She was screaming silently, her head arched backwards. Veins stood out on either side of her neck.

  ‘I’m here, Mercy,’ I said. ‘The pol—’

  She swung round. ‘What the fuck?’ she snarled. ‘How the hell did you manage to …?’

  I took a step back. The change in her was astonishing. Her face was mottled red, her eyes glared, her lips were pulled back in a ferocious grimace. She looked like a wild animal. She was clearly insane. I backed away from her as she came towards me. It was hard to reconcile her with the sophisticated blue-blooded art collecto
r I was familiar with. Terror can do that to a person, I thought. And then I saw the gun in her hand.

  A gun? Mercy Lamont? What was going on? And then, like beads on an abacus click-click-clicking precisely into position to produce a grand total, everything fell into place. ‘And now it’s your turn,’ she snarled. ‘You’ve ruined everything with your probing and suspicions.’

  ‘They’d have caught you eventually,’ I said, as calmly as I could.

  She gave a scornful laugh. ‘Bob would have arranged things.’

  ‘Paid the police off, you mean?’

  ‘He always has in the past.’

  ‘This isn’t the Deep South, you know. This is England.’

  ‘Money talks just as loudly here as in the States.’

  There was more banging on the door. A voice shouted, ‘Police! Open up.’

  ‘They’ll never get through that door,’ she said, sounding quite rational. ‘It’s steel-reinforced.’

  She looked at me again. I didn’t like the way the gun shook in her hand. Nor the way her fingers seemed to be flexing.

  ‘Give me the gun, Mercy,’ I said, holding out my hand, but she jittered away from me like a nervous horse. One of her eyes began to twitch, as though a fly was trapped beneath the skin.

  ‘Keep back,’ she said.

  Another voice shouted, ‘We have reason to believe you are holding a hostage. Please release her immediately and we can negotiate a peaceful solution to this situation.’

  ‘Peaceful?’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘There is no solution. Except death.’ She raised the gun higher and pointed it at me.

  ‘What on earth good would it do to shoot me?’ I knew that in these circumstances, the longer you kept the perps talking, the more likelihood there was of a positive outcome. But my body was filling with apprehension as I realized that I was unlikely to survive the next few minutes. Like Macbeth, she was in blood, stepped in so far that one more victim wasn’t going to make much difference. I had been so fixated on Laurence Turnbull that I had failed to see the signs right under my nose of who the killer really was.

  ‘That bitch,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘That vile callous wicked bitch.’ Her gaze seemed to turn inward, as if she were seeing some other place, not a London hall with the police outside the door. ‘I want you to know that I’m glad I killed her. Glad that she knew it was me, glad that she was terrified and in agony as I gouged out her eyes, smashed her beautiful heartless face. It was all I could do for my boy.’

  The primeval sound she made was chilling. Just so had bereaved mothers expressed their grief and loss through the centuries. Just so did they still mourn, beating their breasts, plucking at their hair, weeping in despair. The desolate look I remembered from our first meeting had taken over her face.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked. Keep her talking while the cops figure out a way into the place.

  She turned those unseeing eyes on me. ‘The bitch killed him,’ she said.

  ‘Amy Morrison killed your son?’

  ‘She stole his heart, then his work, then his book. The book he had worked so hard on. The book which would have made his name. It killed him. So I killed her.’ She produced a mirthless grin which reeked of death and murder and heartbreak. ‘Tit for tat.’ She gave an ugly snorting laugh. ‘And an eye for an eye.’ Those punctured eyes. That missing nipple – I didn’t want to go there.

  ‘Book?’ I said quickly.

  ‘The Magic of Illusion,’ she said. ‘And if ever there was an illusion, it was that bitch of a woman. Fooling everyone into thinking she wrote it, when she had absolutely no right to it. And when I saw her being praised and feted for the work which my poor deluded boy had done, I just couldn’t …’ She shook her head.

  Behind her, a door opened, so quietly that even though I saw it move, I didn’t hear a thing. A man slipped through the gap. He was wearing black. He had a gun in one hand and a black-jack in the other.

  ‘I’m going to have to kill you too,’ she said. ‘You can see I have no choice.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you knew it was me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, actually …’ I coughed. My throat was so dry. ‘Do you really think you’ll get away with this?’ I was praying that the man behind her didn’t warn her in any way of his presence, because if he did, sheer surprise would tighten her finger on the trigger and I’d probably be dead.

  ‘Killing the Bitch Goddess was one thing, but I was sorry about Doctor Drummond. She was a nice woman, and it wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘What exactly did she do?’

  ‘It was more what she was going to do. As soon as she started to read the book she’d know it was me. She’d been Dante’s supervisor at art school. She would recognize at once that she was reading Dante’s work. She knew perfectly well that the Morrison slut hadn’t written the Masaccio book and my son had.’ I remembered Helena saying at the Masaccio launch party that she hoped when she got round to reading the book, she wouldn’t recognize that she’d read it before. I remembered too, the annotated copy she had been reading at my parents’ house, the exclamation marks and underlined words.

  I was interested in the way her high-class accent had deteriorated from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

  ‘Was that really a reason to kill her?’ I calculated the distance between us and figured I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting to her in time to wrest the gun from her hand before she shot me.

  ‘Not really. Killing Amy Morrison should have been enough.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘So what do you have against me?’

  She seemed surprised that I should ask. ‘You must have known it was me,’ she said. ‘You had me down on the floor in your apartment, had your arms wrapped round me. You must have realized I wasn’t a man.’

  Slight, slender, wiry … just like Turnbull. My lack of recognition was understandable.

  ‘Pretty unobservant of me, one way or another, but I didn’t, actually,’ I said. I kept my voice loud. The man behind her was moving with infinite care. He too was holding a gun.

  ‘After my son … died, I looked for his thesis and then realized she’d stolen it. And then when I heard all the praise she was getting, read all the reviews which should have been my son’s, I just …’ She shook her head. ‘It was too much.’

  Behind her, a second man had crept into the passage. He was a burly bloke, dressed in black like his colleague. I raised my voice to cover any noise the two of them might make.

  ‘Helena had absolutely nothing to do with any of this,’ I shouted at her. ‘Who do you think you are, God or something? What gives you the right to decide who lives and who dies? Such arrogance, such contempt for others. Helena was a woman who contributed to the world in so many ways, whereas you … you’re just a rich parasite. Sponging on society. Used to having your own way. Used to buying whatever you want.’

  For a moment her head reared back, as though I had punched her. ‘How dare you!’ she screamed. She aimed the gun directly at my head. ‘How fucking dare you? I contribute in all sorts of—’

  And as she spoke, the first man leaped forwards and drove Mercy hard to the floor, landing on top of her. Beneath him, Mercy struggled, trying to shake him off. I could hear her gasping for air. The second man joined him. He bent down as the first officer tried to pull her arms out from under her and cuff them behind her back. Before he could do so, there was a muffled shot. The three of us stared down. Blood was slowly seeping along the floor. Mercy was still.

  ‘Hell’s teeth,’ said the second officer. ‘She managed to pull the bloody trigger.’

  The two of them turned Mercy over onto her back. It was obvious that she was dead, although between us we attempted to resuscitate her. The bullet had gone straight into her heart. A lucky shot, I thought. Lucky for her.

  When we opened the front door, Sam Willoughby was standing outside. He came in and took me hard into his arms. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘Not ever.
You don’t know what nightmarish situations I’ve imagined you in.’

  I relaxed against his chest. It felt good to let someone else take charge.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘She married Luigi Vendamo when she was sixteen,’ said Bob Lamont. ‘Couldn’t get a divorce, being Catholic. Had the twins – Dante and Cesare. Luigi was an alcoholic brute, and she left him when they were four. Luckily – or unluckily, depending on your point of view – he fell off some scaffolding two years later. She got compensation from his employers, which made things easier for her. She managed somehow. Then she met me …’ He buried his head in his hands. ‘Oh dear, oh God … this is all so terrible.’

  Sam passed him a clean handkerchief so he could wipe his eyes. We were sitting in the Connaught Hotel, coffee in front of us, along with DI Felicity Fairlight. Neither Fliss nor I were particularly sympathetic. I simply sat. She had her arms folded across what was generally regarded as a formidable bosom. As she had kept reminding me, it wasn’t her case, but we felt that Bob would talk more easily to her. All this, of course, was strictly unofficial, though I knew Fliss was hooked up to a discreet voice recorder.

  He raised his head and looked at the three of us. ‘She had a tremendous business head – it was because of her that we began to diversify, strengthen our position in the markets.’

  And get richer and richer, I thought, remembering Mark and his desire to help people much worse off than himself.

  ‘I was happy to give her whatever she wanted,’ Bob was saying. ‘Show her the world. She was like a sponge, soaking up painting and architecture and food and museums, all the things she’d never had access to. She was the one who started collecting paintings, researching them, her ancestors and mine. They were wonderful years. She fit right in.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ asked Fliss.

  ‘Cesare was in his second year at Harvard and died in a car crash. Mercedes never got over it. Neither did Dante. He became doubly precious, was forced to become both her sons, himself and Cesare’s stand-in. It was particularly hard because he was the absolute image of his twin. Mercedes had had so many plans, so many ambitions for them both. And then Dante got himself … mixed up with Mrs Morrison. Quite apart from the fact that she was married to our good friend Dexter, she was a … sorry, but she really was a bitch. Mercedes hated her on sight.’