The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  Her own little Ford Ka was parked at the other end. The sight of it was tempting. She could be home and in bed in under the hour. This had been a long stretch without sleep. But her curiosity wouldn’t allow her to leave.

  More lights and cables were humped across the gangway and down to the vans. The dolly track had been lifted and stacked away and so had the cameras. The crew had been swift to dismantle everything. The lateness of the hour made for a slick operation.

  A woman’s voice carried to her and for a second she thought the wait was over. Then the last of the make-up and wardrobe people came by. The woman Ingeborg had spoken to in the saloon said, “Are you still waiting for Lee?”

  “She doesn’t seem to have left the ship yet.”

  “Playing games with her boyfriend, I wouldn’t wonder. Rather her than me. He’s a nasty piece of work, but she has him on a string.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “We all think so, anyway. Goodnight, love.”

  Presumably someone would be along soon to close the gangway and secure the ship. Ingeborg was in a dilemma now. Almost everyone had gone ashore—except for Lee. Without the TV lighting, the deck had become a stark, eerie place. Streaks of moonlight were the only illumination. She was tempted to leave, yet strongly suspected one more dramatic scene would be played here, and she would be a fool to miss it.

  The sound of an engine being started prompted her to look down at the dockside again. The last of the TV vans was moving off. She watched it head for the gate at the end and disappear from view.

  Now only two vehicles remained: her own at the far end and Nathan’s, much closer. She faced a practical difficulty she hadn’t foreseen. When she came off the ship she’d have to pass the black limousine to reach her Ka. But the longer she stayed here, the more suspicious her behaviour was going to appear—as if she was implicated in Lee’s non-appearance.

  A car door slammed.

  Then someone from down there shone a flashlight beam straight at her. She backed away from the rail.

  “She’s up there,” a man’s voice said.

  This was getting worse by the minute. They’d mistaken her for Lee.

  “Don’t fucking stand there, then, you moron,” she heard Nathan say. “Get after her.”

  She didn’t fancy waiting where she was to explain the confusion. The top deck offered nowhere to hide except behind the funnel and the masts, so she made for the nearest companionway and down the stairs and then down another flight to the deck below. It was in darkness.

  This would be where the steerage passengers had once been housed. She pressed her hands to the wall and edged sideways until she felt a door handle. One of the cabins? She would never know because it was locked.

  Heart pounding, mouth dry, she groped her way further from the stairs, furious with herself for getting into this situation. Here she was, acting the fugitive, trapped in a dark corridor in the bowels of the ship. Stupid and demeaning. She should have stuck to her original plan and left immediately after meeting Nathan.

  She still couldn’t decide what the real agenda was. There was clearly more to the relationship between this oddly matched couple than she had been led to believe. What was Lee’s game—to be discovered cowering somewhere and then dragged off the ship and bundled into the car, driven home and punished? Was she sexually aroused by Nathan’s anger? That strange gratified look when he’d blown his top and threatened to leave had had more than a hint of masochism about it. Or was she more assertive than she appeared and deliberately defying him?

  A long interval passed and Ingeborg heard nothing. Looking at the situation coolly and sensibly, it’s unlikely they’ll come down here, she told herself. The vast ship was more than three men could search. They would be bound to give up before long. They might even have left already.

  She allowed more minutes to go by. Then she retraced her way to the stairs and crept up them, alert at each step for the sound of anyone nearby.

  It remained quiet.

  At the top of the second flight she paused. Out on deck she would be conspicuous. There wasn’t much light, but the moon’s silver glow would make any movement obvious. If Nathan and his heavies were still about they’d surely expect her to head for the gangway. They could be waiting somewhere near. The smart way to avoid them was surely to come out on the starboard side. She might then outflank them, move a safe distance away and cross to the port side and discover if the car was still down there.

  She held her breath and took the first heart-stopping steps out onto the stretch of deck where the filming had taken place. So far, so good. For a short distance she would have the great black funnel between herself and the gangway. After that only a series of skylights projected above deck level. Her movement was more like gliding than striding, a steady progress towards the aft end of the ship. Good thing she wasn’t wearing heels. The smallest sound would have been like drumming on the deck. She was prepared any second to be caught by the flashlight beam. You can’t escape the speed of light.

  But her eyes were getting used to the conditions and her confidence was growing with each step. She kept as close as possible to the side at this stage and must have gone thirty yards when she spotted something lashed to one of the posts supporting the rail.

  A rope ladder hanging over the side of the ship.

  She leaned over the rail, but it was impossible to see how far down the ladder went.

  Now she could make an informed guess as to what Lee Li had done. She’d made an escape bid. She wasn’t staying to face Nathan’s wrath. The stupid thug had been lulled into thinking the gangway was the only possible means of quitting the ship. Stupid—or merely guilty of failing to think outside the box? Ingeborg herself had fallen for it.

  Maybe, after all, it was understandable.

  She peered over the side again. The sturdy ladder of thick, coarse rope with wooden rungs looked reasonably new. Even so, using it for a descent must have called for strong nerve and agility. The curve of the enormous iron hull meant that she would have been dangling free of the side, further away with each step down. And she couldn’t possibly have seen what was below.

  From the other end, near the gangway, came voices. Ingeborg froze. Then, as her heart beat faster, she felt a rush of blood from her head to the pit of her belly. Turning, she saw the flashlight beam being played over the funnel. Nathan and his heavies hadn’t given up. Worse, they were coming in her direction. It only needed a speculative sweep of the flashlight and she’d be caught in its glare.

  If she wanted to avoid being caught, she had no option.

  She grasped the rail, got her legs over and her feet on a rung of the rope ladder and started descending. Briefly she toyed with the idea of clinging on shortly below the rail where she would be screened from the light. But she guessed they’d soon spot the ladder and point the beam over the side. The only practical option was to keep going, rung by rung, right down.

  It wasn’t easy. The ladder was swaying dangerously, and the movement increased the further she went. She didn’t know what she was lowering herself into. They called this a dry dock, so presumably she’d be going right down to where the hull was stabilised in a system of buttressing.

  But then she glanced down and saw to her horror that there was water below her. It couldn’t be. She stopped, clung on and looked again in case she was hallucinating.

  No. Against all reason she was swaying over a sheet of water. She could see the ripples. The hull’s black immensity was darkly reflected in the moonlight.

  This was crazy. The Great Britain was in dry dock, laid up for over forty years. The ship hadn’t moved and the sea hadn’t flooded the dock.

  She moved down a few more rungs and looked again. She was about six feet from getting her feet wet. Then she realised that the surface had a strange stillness. The ripples were an effect of the moonlight filtered by clouds.

  “Bloody idiot,” she said aloud.

  A memory had stirred in her brain
of a news report about the ship. A survey in the late 1990s had revealed that the hull was corroding badly in the humid atmosphere of the dock. The owners had come up with a remedy. At the original waterline, sheets of toughened glass were fitted, allowing dehumidifiers to keep the space below at a steady and safe level. The glass was shaped and coloured to look like sea water.

  Deeply relieved, she let herself down the remaining rungs and felt her feet come in contact with the firm glass. But it was like stepping on ice. She had some difficulty getting a footing before she allowed her smarting hands to let go of the sides.

  She looked up to where she had come from. Nobody was there yet. She was well placed to climb out of the dry dock and make a dash for her car.

  Which was when she experienced a sensation of warmth on the back of her neck. She turned to look and felt hot breath on her cheek. Nathan Hazael had been standing right behind her. He must have been waiting there, watching her climb down. He grabbed her right wrist and twisted her arm violently up her back.

  14

  On the rear seat of Nathan’s limo, wedged between the crime baron and one of his bodyguards, her wrists tied behind her back, Ingeborg cursed herself for making such a disastrous start to her so-called undercover assignment. If Diamond or any of the others in CID could see her now she’d be mortified. She’d made the wrong call over and over. Her cover story of the photo-journalism was looking like a non-starter. Lee Li clearly wasn’t the single-minded wannabe she’d taken her for. There was a strong possibility she had been using Ingeborg as a distraction device rather than the other way round. Lee’s getaway down the rope ladder had fooled everyone. Yet it was Nathan who had been quickest to work out what was happening and ambush Ingeborg when she’d wrongly supposed he was still aboard ship with his two henchmen.

  Humiliating.

  However …

  There was one thing on the plus side, even though she couldn’t take much credit for it: her objective had been to gain entry to Nathan’s house and it looked likely to happen. They were definitely driving in the direction of Leigh Woods. They had crossed the Avon on Brunel Way and looped northwards on the west side of the gorge, cruising at speed along deserted roads into millionaire country.

  “Technically, this is abduction,” she said in as calm a voice as she could raise.

  The minder on her right said, “Shut it.”

  Nathan told her without a glance in her direction, “You don’t seriously expect to throw shit at me and walk away?”

  “I’ve done nothing. I only met you an hour ago.”

  “Don’t give me that. You and Lily pulled this off together.”

  “If you’re talking about Lee Li, I only met her for the first time tonight.”

  Nathan didn’t answer. But the reason Ingeborg was his prisoner was made clear. He now believed she and Lee had conspired against him. Lee had chosen this night to cut loose and because Ingeborg had used the same escape route, it was taken to be a joint arrangement.

  She, too, lapsed into silence.

  The hanging woods towering over the river on the Somerset side of the gorge rank high among the glories of the British landscape, making even Brunel’s suspension bridge look a modest structure. By night the blue-grey gap between plunging masses of black is decorated by the necklace-like lights of the bridge. From Rownham Hill the glow of the city on the opposite side confirmed to Ingeborg that she had correctly predicted the route. She was urging herself to be positive. Her earlier mistakes shouldn’t matter now she was being driven in style to Nathan’s mansion—even though her wrists were bound.

  Near the top they took a right. The road map in her brain told her they were now heading towards North Road, a haven of affluence in an area known as Nightingale Valley, where many of the major properties were sited.

  Sure enough, they reached a T-junction, turned left and travelled a short distance before braking in front of a substantial entrance between high stone walls. The driver pressed a remote. In silence the steel gate rolled aside.

  A dog was barking nearby. Escaping from here wouldn’t be a breeze, Ingeborg noted as they started up a long drive. It wasn’t surprising Lee had chosen to decamp from the ship, rather than this penned-up place. Exactly what had prompted the escape bid was less certain. Things must have gone badly wrong for her to cut loose at this point. Nathan’s support of her career in pop had seemed to underwrite the relationship.

  Well, he wasn’t Prince Charming, for sure.

  Security lights blazed as they approached a tall, coal-black building with gothic features any director of horror movies would have sold his birthright to acquire.

  Someone was awake at this hour of the morning and stepped forward to open the car door. He looked a clone for the other bodyguards.

  Nathan stepped out without a word and made a gesture for Ingeborg to follow. She felt a cautionary hand on her shoulder from the heavy who had shared the back seat.

  They passed through an arched doorway into a tiled entrance hall the size of a barn, with suits of armour displayed on the walls, along with shields, swords and lances. What message was that supposed to give out? An owner with delusions of grandeur? An interest in medieval history? Or a need to divert suspicion?

  The collection of modern weapons would be stored somewhere less obvious, Ingeborg decided.

  The doorman helped Nathan out of his coat. The pinstripe three-piece underneath definitely hadn’t been bought off the peg.

  “Will the lady be in the guest room, sir?” the doorman enquired. Perhaps, on consideration, he was a butler.

  “The tower room,” Nathan said.

  “I need a bathroom first,” Ingeborg said.

  “It’s en suite, madame,” Nathan said with mock servility. “Tonight you’re my guest.”

  “Your prisoner, you mean.”

  “Have it your way.” He turned to the bodyguard. “Search her. She’s got a phone in her pocket. I need that.”

  It wasn’t pleasant being frisked, but the handling was workmanlike. The man didn’t make it an excuse for a grope.

  Nathan was handed her iPhone. He pocketed it. “I’m going to get some sleep. We’ll talk later. You will, anyway.”

  The hand on her shoulder tightened. She was steered across the hall and through a door. A stone staircase spiralled upwards. They were in the tower already.

  “Move it,” the minder said.

  “It would be easier if you untied my hands. I’m not going to take you on.”

  The suggestion was ignored. She climbed two floors and waited while a door was unlocked and a dim light switched on.

  “The penthouse suite?” she said, stepping inside. Her wit was lost on the bodyguard.

  In this house they must have been used to unwelcome guests. The light was mounted on the wall in thick glass behind a steel grille. The furniture consisted of a wooden camp bed that looked a relic from the 1950s, with two thin brown blankets lying across the canvas slats. The en suite was a bucket with a lid and no other comforts. A cat might have squeezed through the narrow lancet windows, but no human would.

  “Now do I get my hands untied?”

  This small mercy was conceded without comment. The door slammed behind her and she heard it locked. At four thirty in the morning you don’t spend long fretting over accommodation, especially when there’s nobody to listen. In under ten minutes Ingeborg was out to the world.

  When she woke, she didn’t need long to recall where she was. Judging the time of day was more difficult. Although it still seemed early she looked out of one of those niggardly windows and saw that the sun was high. It could have been noon already. Lack of illumination was why she was disorientated.

  The camp bed had not been comfortable, but she’d had enough sleep to get her thoughts straight and ponder what might happen next. Nathan had said they would talk later, as if he expected to find out things. She hoped his questioning would be confined to Lee’s disappearance. She could handle a grilling about that. The danger was that
he might suspect she wasn’t after all a journalist. From there it was a short step to discovering she was more interested in him than in Lee—in which case she would be exposed as either from the police or a rival gang.

  The next hours would be a minefield.

  She heard steps on the stairs not long after, and the door was unlocked and opened inch by inch. Greatly to Ingeborg’s surprise, a woman was standing there in a pink sweater and jeans. She looked about fifty, short and a bit overweight. She said in the Bristol accent, “I’m not alone, so please do exactly as I say. My name is Stella and I’m Mr. Hazael’s housekeeper. Follow me and you’ll get a chance to shower and freshen up. Then you’ll get coffee and whatever you want for lunch.”

  Good call. Things could only get better now.

  The same bodyguard from last night was standing to the right of the door, looking as meek as a muscleman can. Starting a fight didn’t feature at all in Ingeborg’s thoughts. A shower would be bliss.

  At the bottom of the stairs they emerged from the tower, crossed the hall and entered a more furnished section of the house, a corridor carpeted in red, with wood panelling hung with ancient jousting shields. Nathan clearly had pretensions of grandeur, with his interest in weaponry extended to this archaic décor.

  The bodyguard remained in tow as Stella the housekeeper led them into a lift at the end.

  The doors parted a level higher in what was clearly a woman’s dressing room, with a wardrobe, dressing table and shower cabinet. A disquieting probability was put to rest when Stella instructed the bodyguard to go through to the bedroom and wait behind a screen. “I’ll tell you when to come out.”

  To Ingeborg, she said, “Take your time. He’ll behave himself. You can wash your hair if you want. Everything you need is in there.”

  The glass sides of the shower were part-frosted, but Ingeborg had no inhibitions about stripping. She was confident from Stella’s superior manner that she outranked the bodyguard in this household and God help him if he stepped out of line.