The woman in white was a young Shepherd, but unmistakably and impossibly her. The Hollywood icon stood in Boone’s cramped little bedroom in the middle of the Rothery—the same Hollywood icon that had been buried in a cemetery in Los Angeles for twenty years.
Josh remembered the line from Isaiah’s letter when he confessed that he’d seen Eleanor Raines again, or thought that he had: she hadn’t changed. Not in the slightest. She was still the same heart-stopping beauty.… And here he was, face-to-face with another woman who hadn’t changed in the slightest from that same golden age of silent cinema, another actress who still wore the face she had during the ’20s.
It had the quality of a dream, at once illusive, chilling, and impossible to wake from; alone in a bedroom with one of the world’s first true sex symbols and there was nothing erotic about any of the thoughts tumbling blindly through his mind. Josh tried to back up a step, moving toward the doorway.
Myrna Shepherd moved another juddering step toward him, closing the gap to touching distance as she reached out for him.
Another burst of white noise crackled out of her mouth, but this time he could have sworn he heard his name hidden within the rush of static, full of sibilant hiss.
And then she was gone; those beautiful impossible features burning up like a strip of celluloid under the intense heat of the projector’s lens, and the faceless woman stood before him again. A smell—a fragrance he couldn’t name—filled the cramped bedroom.
She reached out a hand for his face, to make a connection. The tear in the featureless plain of her face opened, the crackle of static desperate, hungry.
The sirens were louder, but still too far away to help him.
Josh didn’t hesitate.
He ran.
Out of the room, down the stairs, through the door, and out of the house: away from the woman whose face had hung from his girlfriend’s wall and into the darkness.
6
MYRNA SHEPHERD’S EYES
Responding to a call in the Rothery was a case of taking your life in your hands at the best of times, and a late-night call promising a burglary in progress could never be described as the best of times. Police Constable Julius Gennaro—who had been saddled with the unfortunate moniker of Julie from his first day on the job eighteen months ago—and his partner Huw Carter—known forever as Taff—pulled into the cul-de-sac where the open door of Boone Raines’s house was backlit like something from a Spielberg movie.
They rolled to a stop outside the house. The headlights lit the front up like a Christmas tree.
“Fifteen minutes,” Taff grunted. That was how long until the shift change. Fifteen minutes and they would have been back in the station and the call to 11 Albion Close would have been someone else’s problem. Fifteen minutes and their lives would have been oh-so-very different—and in Taff’s case longer.
He reached up and killed the siren. He hated the damned noise. Every copper on the beat did.
“Come on then, Julie, let’s go be heroic for a few minutes,” the big Welshman said as he unclipped the seat belt and opened the door. Taff wasn’t in good shape, and it wasn’t just a few extra pounds, either. It was all about discipline or the lack of it, temptation, and excess. Taff Carter was just a boy who couldn’t say no. And as he’d always known, it would be the death of him.
He eased his girth out of the car and straightened the baton on his belt, ready for trouble. There was always trouble. It was just part and parcel of their everyday lives. It was getting worse though and had been for the last few years. The streets were nastier than they had been in a long time. Brexit had given people an excuse to revel in their prejudices. Race crime was up, religious hate crime was up, violent crime was up, criminal damage was up. But it was okay because the vicious little bastards had got their country back. There was an edge of brutality to it that hadn’t been there when he’d started out walking the beat thirty years ago, in that weird time between the ’70s brutality and the ’90s new police. It wasn’t just that people were more desperate now; they’d always been desperate if you looked far enough down the social ladder. Put simply, if they wanted something now, they’d take it. It didn’t matter if they were coveting mobile phones, laptops, fancy designer trainers, or cars, if it caught their eye, nothing and no one could stop them from taking it; especially not a fat old policeman like Taff.
Gennaro closed the passenger door. He was younger and fitter than his partner, and still idealistic enough to think that he could make a difference so his name was always the first up on the notice board for outreach programs and community policing days. Three nights a week he volunteered down at the youth club, playing table tennis and pool with kids who two hours later were out on the rob in Taff’s bitter, cynical world. Julie’s was different; where Taff saw shit, he saw the chance for things to get better, and Julie always saw the best in people when they were trying to make their lives better.
“What do you make of it?”
Taff pulled the baton from his belt and extended it, ready for the worst. “Keep your eye on the car.”
The big Welshman walked down the drive to the open door. Gennaro walked to the curb and waited in that no-man’s-land between the vehicle and the crime. This was always the worst part of any call: not knowing what they were walking into. It wasn’t anticipation; that was the wrong word. It was apprehension. Until they crossed the threshold they had no way of knowing what waited on the other side of the door. Anything was possible—right up until the moment it wasn’t.
There was something disquieting about the peculiar light spilling through the open door of number 11 Albion Close. But before unease could mutate into dread, Gennaro saw a woman emerge from the house. The light left her looking as though a thin gauze had been draped across her face like a veil, but even so her bob of blond hair and smoky eyes made stark by dramatic makeup was hauntingly familiar.
He felt like he’d seen her somewhere before, but that wasn’t his first thought as she came through the door. His first thought was: She’s far too beautiful for the Rothery. And she was. She was uncomfortably beautiful.
Taff retracted his baton and clicked it back onto his belt, an eager smile spreading across his chapped lips.
“Everything okay, love?” Taff asked as she walked toward him.
Julius Gennaro couldn’t hear her response as she leaned in close, but she seemed to sniff at Taff Carter’s neck. He was sure he heard the sharp huff-huff-huff of her breathing. Instead of dispelling the unease, the sight of the woman, dressed for the red carpets of Hollywood not the feral streets of the estate, only served to heighten it. There was a long moment when he felt sure she was more dangerous than any gang kid, but he couldn’t have said why, and then the sharp staccato crackle of the radio clipped to his belt broke the tension and she was just a beautiful woman on her own and they were her White Knights.
Not that she needed rescuing.
The woman turned her face toward Gennaro, and walked away from Taff Carter without another word. She moved with a curious faltering grace; a weird flickering interrupted each step she made. Gennaro found it hard to focus on her, but at the same time couldn’t take his eyes off her. He knew the woman, he was sure of it, but couldn’t place where he had seen her before. With no thought for personal space she leaned in close, her nostrils flaring as she sniffed around the young policeman’s throat, like she was sniffing out his pulse. He felt her lips against his skin; she had lips like clay. Julius Gennaro shivered—it was the kind of shiver that would have had his second-generation Italian mother saying someone had walked over her grave—and then she moved on, sniffing at the night air and he was left feeling like he’d just lost something precious to him.
Neither of them followed her as she walked down the middle of the road and out of the cul-de-sac, but both watched her every step of the way. She drifted between the pools of streetlights, flickering between the bright light and night as she went.
The night was colder than he remembered it
being when he’d clambered out of the car.
“What did she say to you?” Gennaro asked Taff Carter as the big man shuffled back up the drive toward him.
Taff shrugged and shook his head. He looked lost. Utterly and completely lost. “I have no idea,” he said, touching a fat finger to his neck where the thick vein pulsed. “I’m not sure she said anything, but did you see her? That’s a woman to lose your mind for, my friend.” There was something in the way he said it, something that was echoed in his eyes that said he already had. Gennaro couldn’t argue with him. She was something else. What, though, he wasn’t sure.
“We should check the house out,” he said, realizing the eerie blue light had gone, leaving number 11 in darkness.
“No need, Julie, it’s fine. False alarm,” Taff assured him. “Let’s call it in and head home.”
7
SECRET PLACES
It was difficult to run anywhere when he had nowhere to run to.
Josh thought about heading back through the estate toward the Scala and Boone’s memorial, knowing there were a few friendly faces there, at least, but the fact that there were friends gathered together in the bingo hall was enough to prevent him running that way—he didn’t want to bring this thing to their door.
So he kept his head down and ran hard, driving himself on, arms and legs pumping furiously even as his lungs started to burn. Running and thinking was difficult. It was conditioning: he ran to empty his mind. But now he needed to think. That thing—it was a thing, his mind kept screaming, a thing, a thing, a thing, because it couldn’t have been Myrna Shepherd, not really, the rational part of his mind knew that was impossible. But what was it then? It had come to Boone’s place looking for something.
It had ransacked the house and was still in the process of tearing things apart as he’d interrupted it, so it couldn’t have found whatever it was looking for. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The only problem with that line of thinking was that Josh had lived in that house for most of his life; if there was something to be found, he would have found it before now, surely?
So where else could Boone have hidden something?
It wasn’t as though the old man had a lot of secrets, but, even as Josh thought that, he remembered something Boone had said to him once: I’ll let you in on a secret truth, sunshine: a man has maybe a dozen secret places during his life. It may start with a camp in the woods and end with a shed at the bottom of the garden as an old man, but there are a good few in between. If you ever find all of them, you’ll truly know the man, but not until then. They’d been talking about women at the time, and how much of yourself you were supposed to give to a relationship because Josh had always found it hard after his dad’s death to let anyone in, but could Boone have been talking about something else as well? A secret place where his true self lived?
There were a dozen cars out on the road. They were the pack animals of the city. They hunted in numbers. He heard the deep-throated rumble of a gas guzzler redlining it around the roundabout three streets over. Josh risked a backward glance. He couldn’t see the woman in white, but he could see that lambent glow that emanated from within her lighting up the sky like a low moon.
It was hard to believe all of this was about a few clippings and assorted “treasures” of Isaiah’s obsessive research into Eleanor Raines’s disappearance. The woman had vanished over ninety years ago. Even if there was a crime there it was almost a century old and everyone involved was long gone. When Gideon Lockwood had said the past should stay buried, he was right; it really was time for a clean slate. There was no need for Josh and this new generation of Lockwoods and Raineses to get dragged into the feuds of their forefathers. But just because it hadn’t been a thug in a hoodie upstairs didn’t mean that his first instinct had been wrong—for all his talk about clean slates Lockwood was behind the break-in, and what else tied Gideon Lockwood to Boone apart from Isaiah’s papers?
Josh gritted his teeth and ran on, the soles of his trainers slapping against the paving slabs as he cut across the road toward a narrow path that squeezed between the terraces, leading through to a back alley lined with plastic wheelie bins overflowing with rubbish and torn bin bags. He didn’t slow down. He was in good shape without being a gym rat, preferring to run through the park or swim on a Sunday morning to the endless repetition of weights. He cycled into Soho half the time, when he felt like taking his life in his hands. Drivers in London were a special breed of impatient on the cramped and crowded roads. They treated cyclists like an inconvenience to be squashed. His breath came in ragged gasps as he reached the end of the alleyway. Up ahead he saw the cut that led to the allotments and realized he’d been running toward the sheds and the vegetable plots all the time. This was where his grandfather hid himself away from the world.
Low-hanging telephone wires were strung like garrotes over the entrance to the path. Despite the fact that it hadn’t rained for two days the ground beneath his feet was still muddy. The sides of the path were lined with thick hedgerows; a quintessential little slice of Britain in the middle of all of the concrete with the plots themselves on the side of a steep bank that ran all the way down to the river more than three hundred feet below. Josh ducked under the telephone wires and slipped and slid down the bank until he reached the red gate of Boone’s old allotment. The vegetables had run to seed and the hedges gone wild in the months it had been left untended. Rotten apples still hung on the trees in the middle of the tall grass. In the plot beside Boone’s the door of an empty pigeon coop rattled in the wind.
Josh slipped through the gate.
Boone’s shed was at the far side of the field. It was up on paving slabs so it didn’t sink into the earth with the torrential spring rains undermining it every year. The door was locked with a heavy padlock. Josh didn’t have the key. There were two small dusty windows, but neither was big enough for him to climb through even if he broke them. It was easier for him to worry the entire hasp out of the wooden doorframe than try to break the lock. Even so it took him the best part of ten minutes to pry the door open and get inside because he was a lousy boy scout and hadn’t come prepared.
It wasn’t exactly an Aladdin’s cave of treasures; there was an old grass-smeared lawn mower hanging up on a series of nails and thick loops of orange power cables coiled beside it; shears and hoes and spades and all manner of plant pots, both plastic and red clay lined the workbench; there was an old vice and a pair of wellington boots beneath it; there were saws and hacksaws with sharp teeth lying on oily rags and beside a tea chest that had been converted into a makeshift seat, a copy of a book his grandfather would never finish reading: Green Men and the Mythical Secrets of a Lost England. There were candles and a box of matches beside it. There was a bright red toolbox on the floor that was open, and inside it he could see an assortment of every screw and nail imaginable scattered around various screwdrivers and spanners. What there wasn’t, as far as he could see, was anything that might have hidden Isaiah’s legacy.
He closed the door and sank down onto the tea chest, cold and alone.
He was tired of running around in circles getting nowhere fast.
He didn’t risk lighting one of the candles. He didn’t want the attention an errant light might have drawn.
Josh had been looking at the set of keys hanging from a hook on the back of the door for a good five minutes before he realized what they were. He checked to be sure, but even before he measured the teeth side by side with his own, he was sure they weren’t for the house on Albion Close.
Could they be the keys to Boone’s secret place?
There was only one way to find out.
He pocketed them.
8
LONELY AVENUE
“Hey, Julie, I’ll drop you here if that’s okay,” Taff Carter said, pulling up beside The Hunter’s Horns. The pub traditionally marked the end of the Rothery and the beginning of civilization. He didn’t indicate as he slowed. An old woman shuffled down the street str
uggling with a bulging plastic shopping bag. No doubt it was stuffed full of cigarettes, a bottle of something to make the pain go away, and comfort food; what else would she venture out for at this time of night? The police station was a five-minute walk from the public house and looked more like a prison than a haven.
“I’ve got a couple of errands to run. It might drag on a bit. Figure you’d want to get home as soon as possible, not tag along with me.” It might have sounded reasonable, but for the fact that in the eighteen months they’d been partners it was the first time they hadn’t clocked off together. “Do me a favor, punch me out would you?” He handed his partner the key card from his wallet. It was also the first time Taff Carter had asked his partner to break the rules and clock him out. One change of habits wasn’t necessarily a red flag, two could, at a stretch, be a coincidence, but given Taff’s odd behavior back at the crime scene he was already looking at the third and final warning sign. It was the rule of three. The devil was in the details. It took three changes in behavior before the old bullshit detector went into the red zone and alarm bells started to ring. That weird look in his eyes when he came face-to-face with the woman in white didn’t count as a third thing by itself, but it all added up to something. What, exactly, Gennaro didn’t know, but something rather than nothing.
“No problem,” Gennaro said. “Catch you tomorrow, matey. Sleep well.” He pocketed his partner’s key card.
“You, too, Julie.”
Gennaro clambered out of the car and slammed the door behind him. Without thinking about what he was looking for, Julius Gennaro cast a quick backward glance in the direction of the Rothery. And for just a moment the reflections made it seem like there were two moons in the sky back there, but the trick of the dark soon faded. Head down, he trudged along the lonely avenue toward the station.
* * *
Taff watched him go.
Glass Town Page 5