by PT Reade
I had none to sell.
Biting my tongue was the only way to keep from arguing with him. I’d seen the accident. I’d heard the police. She was dead. At least whoever was driving her car was dead, alright. Sometimes we have to be cruel to be kind.
“Look,” I said. “I know you don’t want to think of her as being gone, but….”
He sat back in his chair and looked at me, exasperated. The anger was still there and it was growing. I was pretty sure he’d thank me later though. I knew very well how anger and determination could be the worst remedy for sorrow.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Damian continued. “Christina…my lovely, she wouldn’t die like this. Call it being a romantic or crazy if you want…but she’s still out there somewhere.”
Yeah, it’s called the morgue. It was a morbid thought, even for me.
I needed more coffee.
“Suit yourself,” Damian said, jumping to his feet. He headed for the door, huffing like a spoiled child. “Give up if you want. I’ll do it myself.” He then added a sarcastic, “Thanks for nothing.”
He stomped out and slammed the door behind him. I stared at the exit for a minute, sympathizing with him. I’d lost a wife and a son, so I knew all about loss. But I also knew that some people handled tragedy differently. I chose alcohol. Damian chose hope and denial. If it was going to take the belief that his girlfriend was alive and in hiding as she had been for the last two weeks, then who was I to rob him of that?
I climbed out of my chair and went into the kitchen where I downed two painkillers and poured another cup of coffee. I chugged from the mug greedily, trying to shake off the tension Damian had left behind.
Sometimes the truth hurts more than living a lie.
FOUR
The unease clung like morning dew.
I wasn’t at all surprised to find Damian still on my mind after a late lunch of store-bought noodles. The kid had been heartbroken, and there was nothing I could do for him. Didn’t mean I couldn’t feel sorry for the poor sap, though. All I had were pictures from the scene of the accident, and those sure as hell weren’t going to do him any good.
I was also not at all surprised that the coffee wasn’t nearly enough to soothe my nerves. I fidgeted, sorting through a few potential cases to take on. The calls were still coming in and business was brisk. I set aside the three most promising cases and then stopped kidding myself. I threw on my jacket and headed for the bar.
I barely needed the coat. Spring was in full bloom, and the chill to the breeze was minimal at most. It made for a pleasant walk to my favorite watering hole, making me wonder if maybe London wasn’t growing on me after all.
As I made the three-block walk to the pub, a buzzing from my inner coat pocket let me know that I had a call. I scooped my cell phone out and was pleased to see Nicole Remay’s name on the display screen. It had been a while since we had talked, and I had come to discover speaking to Remay sometimes helped take my mind off the chaos in my life.
“Hey,” I said. “Things alive and kicking over there at the morgue?”
“Funny guy,” she answered, dry as dust.
“One of my many admirable qualities. What’s up?”
“I thought I’d let you know there might be some kind of kink in your current case.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“So what are we talking? Whips, chains?”
“You’re a real comedian,” Remay said, and I could hear some amusement in her voice.
“Okay. Sorry. What sort of kink?”
“Well, you mentioned that your current case was with that model Christina Bishop, right? So I kept my eyes and ears peeled after I saw the news last night. I thought I might be able to do you some favors when the body got to the morgue.”
“Thanks. That would be helpful.”
“Well, it would be, except for the fact that I can’t get close to it. Given the high profile of the case, the police want the postmortem carried out by the senior medical examiner first. The body is so tightly tied up in red tape that I don’t have any access yet.”
“Damn. That’s frustrating.”
“It is,” Remay agreed. “Even though it’s a high profile case, there shouldn’t be this much hassle to it.”
“Well, thanks for trying anyway,” I said. “How about my case? You uncover anything?”
“Nothing you didn’t already have. I have a few names I need to look into, but that’s about it.”
“What names?”
“I’ll give them to you after I look into them, okay?”
Irritated, I knew from experience it was pointless to argue with her. “Deal. But look, I think we should maybe —”
But I stopped, my eyes suddenly anchored on the other side of the street. My pub of choice was less than fifty feet ahead of me, but I had forgotten all about it for a moment.
I stared at death.
A face across the road held my attention. A woman was coming out of a small corner shop on the other side of the street. She wore a plain scarf, pulled up to her chin, and a woolen hat scrunched down over her brow. But just for a split second, I had seen her face when she had looked briefly in my direction. It felt like a punch in the gut. Delicate features, full lips, and a smattering of freckles touched by a stray lock of auburn hair.
Christina Bishop!
FIVE
Death was mocking me.
Even thought I had only ever seen her in photographs, I became surer that the woman was Christina. And if it wasn’t her, then she had some twin sister that had been hiding away. Of course, this was not the case because I had a record of pretty near everything there was to know about Christina Bishop from my research on the case, and from interviewing Damian.
Yeah, a typical day in the life of Thomas Blume. Just trying to get to the bar and drown my sorrows but end up seeing a dead woman on the way.
The smoky whisper inside called for a drink now more than ever, but the very real possibility of seeing a woman who should be a corpse had a greater pull to it. I passed the bar without a second thought, my eyes locked on the figure on the other side of the street. She could dress down and hide her face all she wanted, but the strut that had carried her down so many catwalks and across so many photo shoots was still there.
I waited for the traffic to break and jogged across the road. When I reached the opposite sidewalk, the woman I was almost certain was Christina reached the corner. She quickly turned left, walking out of my line of sight, heading south towards Shoreditch and the river. I sped up. In the back of my head, I thought that I might be seeing a ghost—a ghost that would evaporate the moment it got out of my sight. It was easy to imagine her as a shadow in my mind that would disappear as I got close. After all, I had been at the crash scene.
As I reached the corner and started to turn, I almost cried out when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder from behind. And because it’s how I operate, my fear turned to shame and then anger in a split second. By the time I wheeled around to face the person who’d had grabbed me, I had my fist up, ready for action.
A memory from a few months earlier saved me. My fist was coming up quickly when the two familiar faces behind me registered. I hadn’t recognized who they were right away, but I knew that they meant trouble. I pulled my left hook just in time.
“Mr. Blume,” the man with his hand on my shoulder said. “You look like you’re in a hurry.” He smirked.
The memories came back as his voice filtered through my ears. I was looking at the same two cops that had shown up on my doorstep several months ago before I became a full-time P.I. That seemed like another place, another time. But here they were, staring me down like I was a trapped rat. The tall one with the chiseled mustache wore a cheap-looking suit as he glared at me. The short one with the pock-marked face gave away no emotion. He held a beige jacket in one arm, the other hand rested on a hip near his badge.
What were their names? Cagney and Lacey? Turner and Hooch?
&nb
sp; “I’m sort of on the clock,” I said, glancing over my shoulder. Christina was out of sight.
“Good for you,” the second cop said. “Productivity is always important. But I’m afraid we need a moment of your time.”
In that second, I nearly told them what I was doing—that I was chasing after a woman who was supposed to be dead. But I didn’t want these two goons involved so I kept it quiet. I had probably lost Christina’s trail, so I may as well appease Turner and Hooch here to get it over with.
“What do you need?” I said, trying to hide the frustration. And failing.
“Well, for starters, we’d like to know why you were at the scene of Christina Bishop’s car accident.”
The shock on my face made them both smile. I realized that my fist was still clenched and that I badly wanted to use it.
“Coming from New York, I guess you forgot about the security here across the pond,” the tall cop said. His hand had fallen away from my shoulder, but the smirk on his face made me still want to beat it into a quarter-pound hamburger steak.
“Before you try to lie your way out of it,” the second cop said, “you should know that you were caught on three different CCTV cameras. In one of them, you can be seen fiddling with an illegal police scanner.”
“Yeah,” I said, “But I—”
“I know, I know,” the first cop spoke. “You’re a big shot detective now. But unless you can provide a license for that scanner, it’s illegal. And unless you can provide proof that you were requested to be at the scene of Ms. Bishop’s accident, there could be repercussions for that, too.”
The anger now came back and was redirected at myself. Had I really gotten so careless in my work? I had gotten drunk last night. While I would have rather been lectured on this by anyone other than these two losers, the facts were the facts.
Still, I knew how the system worked. In the States, I would probably be in a heap of trouble based on what they were saying that they had on me. But here in London, things tended to be more by the book, and without concrete proof, I had a feeling they were trying to shake me down to see what fell out.
“A police scanner?” I asked incredulously. “Seriously? You can see that through your little spy cameras? My car just happens to have a radio.”
“And you just happened to be near the crash? In fact, you were right on the heels of it. We have your car on film from the surveillance chopper.”
“I was, in fact, just behind a cra-accident the other night. But that was when I was headed to this charming little tea and coffee shop near Whitechapel. They do an exquisite Earl Grey. You should try it.” My sarcasm was thinly veiled, but I didn’t care.
“Seriously?” the second cop said. “You expect us to believe that?”
“Yes. Seriously. I’m sure I still have the receipt somewhere.”
They shared a look of frustration. They couldn’t arrest me and they knew it. The first cop, clearly annoyed, looked like he would love nothing more than to throw cuffs on me and escort me to the nearest dungeon. The Tower of London wasn’t that far away.
“You parked around here?” he asked.
I grinned, giving him an A for effort. “Yeah. Somewhere around here.”
“Can we see your radio, then?”
I chuckled. “Sure. Just as soon as you bring me a warrant. No offense, but I don’t like either of you enough to let you into my car.”
“That hurts,” the first cop said. The second cop simply smiled.
“Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am in a hurry.”
I winked and started walking away, half-expecting to feel the hand on my shoulder again, but they let me go. I wandered off in the direction I had last seen Christina, not wanting to seem to be in too much of a hurry. When I was halfway down the street, I turned back and saw that neither of them had bothered to follow me. Short cop looked up, spotted me and gave a small nod that his partner couldn’t have seen.
Weird.
However, I didn’t have time to hang around and figure out what was up with these two. I picked up the pace and hurried along the street. I walked a few roads down but found no sign of Christina. I raced over crosswalks and retraced my steps around the three-block radius but couldn’t pick up her trail. In the end, my assumption was right, Christina had vanished.
Maybe she was a ghost after all.
SIX
I was chasing shadows into the dark.
As it turned out, I ended up at a bar anyway. I walked into the restaurant as the lunch rush was thinning out. The owner, my landlord and friend Amir, was out of sight. There were only two other people at the bar as I took my favorite stool. The bartender on duty–Caroline, an interminably upbeat brunette with a cockney accent so thick that I wondered if it was fake—had come to know me well. Without even asking what I wanted, she fixed me my latest drink of choice—a Scotch on the Rocks.
I briefly considered calling Damian Slater to tell him that maybe his girlfriend wasn’t dead. But I knew that was a bad idea. If I was jumping at shadows and that mystery woman had not been Christina Bishop, there’s no telling what sort of emotional turmoil I would be putting the poor sap through.
As I started draining my drink, I pulled the case notes out of my messenger bag and started leafing through the few folders of information I had. At first sight, the case seemed simple enough I thought I was a great judge of character, and although trust came hard, my research suggested Damian might have been telling me the truth from the start; Christina was innocent.
Of course, the events of the previous few days indicated otherwise.
Christina Bishop, sultry model and frequent cover beauty for a variety of glossy magazines, had been wanted by the authorities on suspicion of murdering her manager—a South African by the name of Jimmy Hughes. I’d dug into her background and discovered that Christina had a few unpaid parking tickets and had reported some abusive idiots online, but little else stuck out.
The only other note of interest came from last year. A complaint Christina had filed with Police claiming some guy, a “stalker” as she called him, had been harassing her. The cops had found no solid evidence, and assumed it was simply an over-zealous fan that had disappeared back into the woodwork or moved onto another celebrity. Until recently, that had been her only involvement with the authorities. It simply didn’t make sense that she would make the sudden switch to stone-cold killer overnight.
Still, the evidence had been pretty damning.
Witnesses at a Glamour Magazine after-party had found her passed out in the bathroom, next to the brutally sliced-up body of her manager. She’d apparently gotten drunk following a heated argument earlier that night. Rumors of romantic liaisons between Jimmy and Christina didn’t help her case. To make matters worse, she had bolted from the scene before the police could arrive and had been on the run ever since.
Prior to the previous night’s car chase, Christina had been missing for twelve days, assumed to be hiding from the law.
I started searching through some of the pictures I had taken the night before, trying to see if there was any way Christina could have survived the crash. The accident had been terrible, and I doubted it was survivable. Even if someone had managed to escape the carnage, how the hell would they have been discharged from the hospital already? This would have been particularly difficult for someone wanted by the police.
You’re trying too hard to keep this case from being closed. The woman is dead, Blume. Let it go.
Only there was one problem with that. My gut told me that I had indeed spied Christina Bishop on the street. The hair was darker, and she was dressed down, but I was ninety percent certain it was her. As usual, there was more to this case than the cold hard facts I had on paper. Not the simple case I thought I’d taken on.
Caroline came by again and refilled my drink. Doing everything I could to seem amiable, I asked, “Is Amir around?”
“Yes, Mr. Blume. He’s in his office. Paperwork or something.”
“C
ould you ask him to come out for a moment?” I asked. “Tell him I have a quick question for him. Oh, and call me Tom.”
“I’ll see what I can do, Tom,” she said, offering a smile that would have driven me crazy fifteen or twenty years ago. Back when I felt something more than regret anytime I looked at a woman.
I started on my second drink, and she sashayed away. The television in the corner displayed a soccer game rather than the usual news programs that ran on mute. I watched absently as a goalkeeper made an impressive save and then my attention was drawn down as Amir stepped through the doorway at the back of the bar.
“Thomas,” he said, taking the stool next to mine. “What can I do for you?”
“I need you to be my local guide once again,” I said, giving him a mocking toast with my glass.
Amir scowled at the whiskey. “Glad to help…if I can. What do you need this time? Although…I thought you’d know your way around the city by now.”
“I’m getting there,” I said. “But roundabouts. What’s that all about? Why can’t the Brits build a straight road?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
“Seriously though,” I continued, “I was wondering what sort of places someone might hide out around London if they really didn’t want to be found.”
“Oh, that’s a loaded question,” Amir said. “There are lots of seedy little holes in this town.”
“But let’s say someone came to you out of desperation and asked you because they needed to hide. What’s the first place you’d think of?”
“Maybe the homeless shelters,” Amir said, “but there isn’t much security around there. I also know there are a few low-rent hostels spread around…some of which are borderline illegal.”
“Not seedy enough,” I said.
“Looking for a new apartment?” Amir smiled. “I mean, the rent you pay upstairs is almost nothing anyway, but if you aren’t happy…”