It chafed me. Men underestimated me at every turn—Paul Golding, Inspector Merriken, even James Hawley, though at least he had apologized. Certainly George Sutter seemed to think me nothing but a pawn for some mysterious end of his. All right, then—he could find me.
I continued to stare into the shop window like a dunce. I adjusted the set of my hat in the reflection in the glass. Then I looked in the next shop window, and the next, for all the world like a silly girl going shopping, a girl who has forgotten that she is in the middle of a murder investigation because she’s spotted a nice pair of shoes.
At the entrance to the Piccadilly Circus tube station, I ducked inside, bought a ticket, and hurried down the stairs. It took him exactly sixty seconds to follow me; I knew because I watched him from behind a set of scaffolding, covered by a canvas tarp, that was set up near the entrances to the platforms. The station was under construction, thank God. This time, from my vantage point, I got a clear look at his face. I watched Mr. Houndstooth look this way and that, then move through the gates, his eyes scanning the crowds. I turned to find two construction workers staring at me, one of them with a cigarette in hand. The other one waggled his eyebrows at me.
“Old boyfriend,” I said to them, making my tone brassy. “He’s the last bloke I want to see!”
Their laughter followed me up the stairs and out into the street.
Perhaps it would work, I thought as I quickly boarded a passing omnibus. Or perhaps it wouldn’t. At the very least, it would buy me some time. At least I knew now where to go next. George Sutter had suggested I interview Ramona again, and despite myself, I agreed. I would get off this bus after several more stops and use George’s money to take a taxi to Streatham.
* * *
Dusk was falling when I arrived, the light fading from the bruised sky. I paid the taxi driver and hesitated in front of Ramona’s building. As before, there was no sign of life. I glanced across the street at the soon to be shuttered wig shop, thinking of how I had stood under its awning in the rain waiting for Ramona’s séance. I didn’t want to think about the séance, and I certainly didn’t want to go back into Ramona’s awful block of flats. But there was nothing for it, so I plunged ahead.
The vestibule and the hall were as dark as I remembered, and the grimy smell was the same. Since the previous night, however, a thin rope had been strung across the entrance to the stairwell, a simple handwritten paper sign over it: OUT OF ORDER.
I approached the rope and peered up the dark stairwell. How could a flight of stairs be out of order? I waited and listened, but heard no sounds of ongoing work. Perhaps some of the stairs had caved in, or a section of ceiling had fallen. If so, any workers that had been hired to fix it must have left for the day.
That meant only the horrible old elevator could get me to the fourth floor. I gritted my teeth and slid open the diamond grille, pulling at the door and stepping into the yawning black space inside. Only a small eye-level window in the door lit the interior of the elevator, letting in the fading gloom. There had been a light in here last time I’d used it, but it must have broken. I fumbled in the dark for a long moment, looking for the lever. Outside the window, nothing moved and no one came or went.
There was a distinct smell in there, as of someone who hadn’t washed in weeks, underlaid with a more sinister odor. I breathed shallowly and slid my gloved hands over the controls, no sound but my own breathing in my ears. I was about to give up and try the hazardous stairs when I finally pressed the lever the right way and the elevator began its shuddering ascent.
It seemed, if possible, even slower than the last time. Something creaked high overhead as we passed the second story, and the floor juddered under my feet; I grasped the wall with one hand, wondering whether I would have to burn my gloves. I wasn’t certain I wanted to look at them in the light once I was out of here.
The third story passed by slowly out the window. I slid into the bored stupor of the elevator captive, staring out the window and waiting for my floor. Then the fourth floor came into view and I froze, the hairs on the back of my neck on end.
On the other side of the tiny window, Ramona stood in the hallway.
She was in front of the door to her flat, barefoot, facing me. She watched as the elevator finished its climb and my face appeared in the window. She was wearing only a brightly patterned dressing gown in the Chinese style, its pink and blue muddy in the dim light of the hallway, the belt tied loosely around her waist, the top gaping open to reveal the bony center of her small chest. Her dark hair was untidy, her makeup smeared.
The elevator stopped with a lurch. Silence fell, complete and stifling. Ramona stared at me.
The back of my neck roared into life, an itching crawling from the base of my skull, and a nauseating smell overpowered me.
“No,” I said softly.
I reached one gloved hand to the handle of the elevator door. Ramona shook her head, the motion slow and eerie, the dim light from the high window glowing pale on the high skin of her forehead.
“No,” I said again.
She raised one white hand, palm out. Her arm shimmered in the air, and the movement was uncanny, like the imperfect imagination of how a human might move. I had seen too many dead in my life to misunderstand, yet part of me refused to believe it. I had just left her the night before.
She held her hand out to me, and I recognized Mr. Bagwell’s gesture. Stay. Only this time it was directed at me. I remembered the first time I had come here and knocked on her door, how I’d seen a vision of her lying dead on the floor of her flat. She shook her head again.
My heart flipped in my chest and I backed mindlessly away until I hit the wall of the elevator chamber. A strangled sob came from my throat. Someone has murdered her, I thought, and he is still in there.
And he must have heard the elevator move.
I fumbled in the dim darkness for the lever again, my hands slick inside my gloves. The elevator started with a sound so loud to my ears that I gasped out a whispered scream. She can’t be dead, I thought in high-pitched disbelief. First Davies gone, now Ramona dead. Is Davies dead, too? Am I too late for everyone? Pulleys creaked, the cab juddered again, and I began to lower. I backed against the wall as I watched Ramona disappear through the window, first her head, then her wasted body in its awful dressing gown. When her feet vanished past the top of the window, she still had not moved.
He would hear me. He would have to—everyone in the building would have been able to hear this execrable elevator. Had he heard my ascent? Had he—whoever he was—stood just inside the door of Ramona’s flat, waiting for me to exit the elevator and come to the door?
I pounded the wall with the heel of one hand, the strangled sob emerging from my throat again. Move! The killer, if he heard me, had no need to wait for the ancient elevator to come back. He only needed to step past the rope closing off the stairs to beat me to the hall and meet me there.
The car creaked patiently to the ground floor, and I peered out the window. The front hall was empty. When the elevator had stopped and silence fell again, I hesitated for only a moment, weighing the possibility that the murderer was waiting in a spot I couldn’t see against the possibility that he had not yet come down the stairs. In either case, it was impossible to stand in this stinking car any longer, waiting to be killed. I gripped the door handle and pulled it back, sliding the metal grate with my other hand.
The door creaked with a sound like a scream. I slid out into the hall before it was all the way open and ran to the building’s front entrance, my heels clicking on the tile. From upstairs came the sound of unhurried footsteps descending the stairs.
I burst out onto the front walk, gasping. The street was empty, darkness falling in pillowy folds. A thin, misty rain was beginning. I looked left to right and for a horrifying second my body froze in the most paralyzing, utter indecision I had ever experienced. I should run
from the murderer behind me. I have nowhere to hide from him. I should turn and identify him. I gasped another breath, wasting time, before self-preservation asserted itself and won out. I darted around the side of the building, ducking into the narrow alley that separated it from its neighbor.
I moved as quietly as I could, the walls of the two houses nearly brushing my shoulders in the dim, narrow space. At the end of the alley, I braced myself against the corner and glanced behind me. There was no sign of movement, but the hairs standing upright on the back of my neck prompted me to keep running.
The alley emptied into a ragged back garden, its few paving stones overgrown with weeds, a pot of dying flowers in one corner. I crossed the space quickly, thought about exiting by the open back gate, then changed direction and ducked around the other side of the building. In the alley on this side, just as narrow as the other, stood two large dustbins smelling of old rot. I slid behind one of them, crouched low to the ground, and waited.
It didn’t take long. Footsteps came from the alley into the back garden. They stepped forward once, twice, and stopped.
I closed my eyes. I could hear my own breathing inside my rib cage. I pressed my back to the brick wall, trying not to move.
Another footstep came from the garden, unhurried.
I pressed a hand over my mouth. For the first time, it fully bloomed in my mind what a deadly game I was playing. The rope on the stairs with the sign—why had I not seen it before? It had been a sham, a ruse calmly set up by a murderer going about his business. Put up a rope and a sign, and anyone who approaches during your deadly work would have to take the noisy lift. Just as I had.
And when he had heard the clatter of the lift, indicating he had an intruder, he had calmly finished his killing and started down the stairs after me. Even now he was in no hurry, his footsteps measured in the back garden.
Passionless and planned—just as Gloria’s murder had been. What had I thought of when George Sutter first told me of it? Someone who hadn’t even cared enough to hate her.
Two more steps sounded; they seemed to aim for the back garden gate, which I remembered stood open. A careless neighbor, perhaps, or one of the residents leaving by the back way and not bothering to close the gate. Outside the gate was a lane that ran between the backs of the two sets of buildings, a convenient path to quickly get from building to building or out to the street. It would have been a logical assumption that I’d fled that way—in fact, it would have been the smartest route if I’d been thinking properly, instead of hiding behind dustbins six feet away. If I’d had the presence of mind to flee out the back gate, I’d be hidden in the crowds on the Streatham High Road by now.
Decided, the steps now fully approached the gate. My hand still pressed to my mouth, my breath still heavy in my chest, I shifted carefully on my numbed, squatting haunches and leaned forward. One inch, two. I looked past the edge of the dustbin.
The man stood at the garden gate, his back to me. He was not tall, though taller than me; not bulky, though of average size for a man; not fat, nor thin. Something about his very blankness frightened me. He wore a black overcoat that fell without a flaw from his shoulders to the middle of his calves, beneath which I glimpsed black trousers and expensive shoes. His hat was also black, as if he were dressed for a funeral, its shadows smeared in the rainy, darkening light of early evening. As I watched, he put one black-gloved hand on the open gate and looked out into the lane, one way and then the other.
I pressed my hand tighter to my mouth and did not breathe.
Still, he did not turn. He reached into his overcoat pockets, as unhurried as a man taking a leisurely break, and removed a cigarette case. His back still to me, he raised a cigarette to his unseen lips, and I heard the scrape of a match. He tilted his head as the flame briefly lit the side of his face, and I glimpsed an ear below the brim of the hat, a tuft of dark hair combed neatly behind it, a smooth temple and the knob of the back of his jaw. Then he righted his head again and his face retreated into the shadows under his hat brim.
He stood for a long moment, smoking. Watching the lane, the yards and streets beyond it. Waiting for movement or sound. Contemplating me, who I was, where I had gone, what I had seen. Weighing, perhaps, whether I would telephone someone, thinking where he might find me.
He did not rush through the gate, hot in pursuit. He did not search the back garden, thrashing me from my hiding place. He simply stood and smoked, and as the silence stretched on, my nerves frayed and I felt the wild impulse to jump up, to scream—anything. I became wildly convinced that he knew exactly where I was, that he was only playing with me. That I should give myself away and end it now. He did not rush after me—not because he was fooled, but because he would find me eventually. There was no need to hurry after someone who was already dead.
He smoked the entire cigarette while standing there at the back gate. I watched him finish and then I watched him lower the lit stub, watched him raise one elegant foot, watched him douse the embers of the cigarette on the sole of his shoe. He straightened again and dropped the stub into the pocket of his overcoat in a smooth, deliberate movement. As the last tendrils of smoke drifted away in the wet air, he turned and walked away, back the way he’d come.
I didn’t see his face in the darkness. I only heard his footsteps, easy and measured, as they retreated down the other alley. I swallowed, dropped my hand, leaned back against the wall again. I was more terrified now than I’d ever been, more even than when I had seen Ramona’s dead face outside the window of the elevator door.
He had pocketed the cigarette.
He had not thrown it away; he had not ground it out underfoot and left it. He had doused it out very carefully on the damp sole of his shoe, placed it in the pocket of his expensive overcoat. As if a cigarette stub were an object of great value.
Because it was.
I thought of myself standing in Gloria’s flat with Davies, running one of Gloria’s scarves through my hands. Psychometry, it was called. James had written about it in one of his papers. It wasn’t my specialty. But I could do it. There was a chance—though not a guarantee—that I could pick up the stub of a man’s cigarette and get a picture of him, images, thoughts, even a name. And somehow—God, I didn’t know how—he knew it. He knew who he was dealing with, and he knew what I could do.
He knew me.
Too afraid to move, I waited as the rain began to fall softly. What if I walked to the front of the building and the man was still there, waiting for me? In the abject darkness of my terror, it didn’t matter that I was in public, that he wasn’t likely to assault a woman screaming in the middle of the street. All that mattered was the blackness of the shadow over his face and that stub of cigarette, his unhurried assurance that I was already his.
And so I sat there, my feet numb in their heels, my thighs aching from squatting, as I inhaled the stink of the dustbins and growing damp, even after I heard someone enter the front door of the building, even after I heard someone—probably the same person—throw up the sash of a window on the third floor. The devil is coming, Ramona had said. He is coming for you. He is coming for me. He is coming for everyone.
When I finally got the courage to move, I didn’t take the alley to the front of the building. I pushed myself away from the wall and tottered into the back garden on cramping legs. I stood for a moment where the man had been. Then I forced myself through the gate and into the lane, nearly stumbling as I made my way back to the crowded streets of London.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I walked. I walked as the sky darkened, as the rain spattered the streets in fits, as the wind gusted against my damp skin with the first breaths of cold autumn. I walked through the sounds and smells of London, motorcars and shouts and clanging bells and laughter and the heavy, oily scent of wet pavement, the tang of cigar smoke, the smoggy London itch at the back of my throat. I walked in crowds, the larger the be
tter, so I would not be alone. I walked without knowing where I was going, without looking around me, without seeing anything, my feet vaguely hurting in their heels, my hands in the pockets of my coat. A knot of young men in cloth caps catcalled at me—blond hair always being a magnet for catcalls, the sound of it as meaningless as a how-do-you-do?—and as I brushed past them, jolting one of them with my shoulder, I discovered that the abject terror I’d been under had dissipated, replaced with a hot, low-grade anger.
Without my realizing it, while I had walked, my terror-numbed mind had pondered the question of the man in the houndstooth jacket.
The man I had seen at Ramona’s flat was, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind, Gloria’s killer. I needed no evidence to know it, no psychic vision. I had been within twenty feet of him, watched him smoke a cigarette, and I had done it after finally dodging my unwanted pursuer, the houndstooth gentleman. What if things had gone differently? What if I had failed to dodge him, and he’d been there when I’d encountered the murderer? Would he have helped? Made an arrest? Would he have done anything at all, or were his orders simply to watch and report?
Report what? My movements? Or my death?
Suspicion, I discovered, works like a lens. Once you have looked through it, and seen everything you thought you knew in a different way, its version of the truth does not recede. Once you can see through that lens, you can no longer ignore it.
I pushed into a telephone box as the rain splashed the pavements again, and closed the familiar red door behind me. Outside, the crowds still flowed by, silent now beyond the windows of the box. It smelled pungently of cigarette smoke in there, as if the last caller had smoked his entire supply. I stared at the telephone for a long time, my mind moving back and forth like a rocking horse, going over the same ground again and again. Rain splashed the glass. My feet were cold and sore. Finally, I picked up the receiver and had the operator connect me to the exchange George Sutter had given me: Hampstead 1207.
The Other Side of Midnight Page 19