I flipped through page after page, all chronicling what should have been a bright path for a less corrupt copper. She’d even snuck in a couple of articles that seemed to be about criminals who got away, which was odd. Like the Lukin Streeters, a street gang who’d been extorting businesses near Whitechapel to pay protection money. It read like an episode of a bad cop drama, only instead of miraculously finding that one piece of evidence that took them down and locked them up for good, the gang was never seen again, which was bad for justice but good for the people of Whitechapel, who no longer had to fear extortion.
The article had nothing to do with my dad. It wasn’t about him receiving an accolade or praise for some good work, but still it was glued beautifully into the book just like all the others, with a date written next to it in my mum’s perfectly slanted script. As was the article pasted in three pages later, which was about some kind of drug ring that reportedly used smaller satellite bank locations to launder money. This one had a picture, and I could just make out DS Day standing in full constable uniform in the background. Still, like the other, this story didn’t have so much a happy ending as it did just an ending.
No justice, but the bank branches in question were clean as of their last inspections.
After finding two more articles treated in a similar way, I finally settled on a reason why my mum might have immortalized all of it. It was evidence. What would make a gang flee when the law didn’t stop its operation? Make a corrupt banker bow to what was right rather than the might of a drug lord?
Perhaps a corrupt band of brothers in blue.
And my mum had chronicled every moment of it, from the mysterious death of the man who had killed Mrs. Greeves’s son to the accident that took the life of a well-loved police chief. This scrapbook was a collection of stories about my father, and when I saw them as a list of all my father’s crimes and all the ways he had benefited from them, suddenly every page had new meaning. And the worst was what it said about my mum.
All these years, she’d known exactly who my father was.
I caught myself staring at my mum’s handwriting because there was something there, something odd. I flipped back to the beginning of the book and then through the pages, only looking at the writing. It was all written with the same pen. And the articles had all aged the same. She hadn’t known all along. She’d collected these all at once.
I’d probably never know why, but I could guess. Maybe this was going to be the thing that kept him from following her when she took us and left. Maybe this book was going to be used to force him to leave forever. Regardless, she never used it. And the thought of what could have been made me dump the book on the trash heap. It didn’t matter anymore. He was gone and so was she.
I heard the clank of the post slot just as I snatched the book back, and I tossed the thing on my mum’s bed to run for the door. But by the time I opened it, whoever had dropped the postcard had also disappeared into the foot traffic on Baker Street. Which left just me and another sloppily drawn M in the entry. I thought about tearing it to shreds, packing up my life, and escaping to America to leave it all behind me. But if Alice were alive, she’d find me there. It was her country, after all. And then I’d have put the boys in the middle of it all again.
So I picked up the postcard from the floor and read the first of three phrases on the other side.
I want my money back.
“Alice,” I said aloud. She was no longer hiding.
But first you’ll do me a favor.
I stared at the writing, trying to remember what Alice’s handwriting looked like. But then this was Alice. A grifter, con artist, charlatan. She could write like anybody.
Your next target is murderer Stan Gareth. He killed Grady. He knows where you’re hiding your brothers.
“He couldn’t,” I said aloud. And Alice couldn’t be alive. There were too many couldn’ts about this mess, and an address at the bottom of the card, which meant she wanted me to play her assassin once more. Only I barely knew Stan. He wasn’t on my list, nor was he part of my father’s group of dirty coppers.
He knows where you’re hiding your brothers.
I read it again and felt hollow inside. It had been my only solace, that my brothers were safe—out of reach of all this. Far, far away from here. But if someone knew. . .
No. This had to be more of Alice’s lies. She was trying to use me again, this time to kill a man who’d worked for—and probably knew too much about—her. This postcard was just another trick. I wouldn’t be Alice’s pawn. Even if he did know where the boys were, it didn’t matter. My father was dead. Alice would eventually out herself. I had other ways of keeping my brothers safe. I wouldn’t be bullied into killing anyone I didn’t want to. Doing that meant letting her win.
The mail slot clanked again, and I ripped open the door before the postal slot had even shut properly. A young boy, maybe Freddie’s age, was staring at me like he was too afraid to stay and too afraid to move at the same time. He started to run down my front steps, but I was faster. I grabbed him by his shirt before he reached the walk and spun him around.
“Who sent you?” I demanded.
He didn’t answer, not that I expected him to.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Just tell me who sent you here.”
“Dunno. Lady in the park gave me a fiver. Promised me another if I told her how you reacted.” Which was why he’d come back. To peek through my mail slot and watch me.
“How was I supposed to react?”
“Said if you didn’t look scared, I should give you this.”
He held out an envelope. I grabbed it and reached into my back pocket to pull out all the money I had there. Two ten-pound notes. I offered them to the boy, who tried to snatch them right away, but I held them up. He wasn’t so terrified anymore.
“Go get your money and tell her I ripped the letter in two and started to laugh. Tell her I said, ‘Pathetic. I’m not her sword.’ Got that?”
“Not her sword. Got it.”
I handed him the money and he smiled wide enough to show off some gaps in his teeth where they hadn’t quite grown back in. Then he ran in the direction of Regent’s Park. I thought about following him, but I didn’t need to go to Alice. If he passed on my message, she would come to me. Eventually.
I grinned at the thought of Alice’s scowl when she heard how little I cared for her lies. I was still grinning when I opened the envelope the boy had delivered, but all of that stopped when I saw what was inside—a Polaroid of Olivia and my brothers all crowded into what looked like first-class seats on a train car. Liv stood in front of the boys, acting as a shield, but she looked scared. So scared. I knew there would be a message on the back, and I knew it would change everything.
Take care of Stan, and I’ll drop them off to take their flight at 8 p.m. tomorrow night. If he’s not gone before then, there will be only three in tomorrow night’s picture.
Alice had my brothers again, which meant I belonged to her until I could find them. It also meant I’d be playing the part of her sword after all.
Chapter 17
I used one of the burners Jason Kim had given me to call Olivia’s emergency phone, but she didn’t answer. I got dressed in my red-wig disguise and tried calling again. And again. I called all the way to Willesden Green Station and again when I stood in front of the address that Alice had written along the bottom of the postcard she’d sent. I’d torn the card to bits and shoved it in the rubbish bin on the way out of my house so she could see what I thought of her threat if she looked. But I kept the photo with me.
Stan had rented a flat in a four-story building almost directly across from the Tube station, which made things both simple and difficult. Simple in that I wasn’t forced to wander around a strange area for long, looking for the place. Difficult in that any fighting we did would easily alert the neighbors he had on all sides, bringing attention I couldn’t afford.
I stopped in at the pharmacy before I approached his
building, buying disposable gloves along with dish soap and sponges to make it look like I was going to be doing some cleaning. I started to head back toward his building, but something caught my eye as I passed the large window of a café, and I decided to go inside.
The café tables to my right were mostly full of customers, but the window was filled with computer desks, all of the monitors shaded to keep down the glare. The bright, shiny, red new painted across the window had caught my eye, and sitting just beneath it was Stan himself.
I kept my head down and found a seat on the café side, though the place was small enough to hear almost anything that was said. That included the tall, stocky waitress who bumped her hip against Stan’s office chair as a “Hello.”
“Didn’t expect to see you here, Stan,” she said, leaning down beside him to place his tea. “Weren’t you the one going on about all the money you were coming into?”
Stan brightened. “And why would that keep me away?”
“I thought the first thing you’d do was buy yourself a computer for home.”
“Maybe I did do that.”
The waitress shoved out her bottom lip in a pretty little pout and shifted her serving tray to the other hand. “Then why come here?”
He leaned in closer to her and loud-whispered, “Can’t muck up mine with all these porn sites, now can I?”
Stan winked, she giggled wickedly, and I rolled my eyes in disgust. I could think of much more pressing reasons to use a public computer. Though if his goal were to hide his identity, using the computer on the bottom floor of the building next door wasn’t the cleverest trick.
When Stan finally got up from his cubicle, he grabbed a page off the printer and headed for the door of the café. I thought about following him up to his flat and getting on with my task, but his empty desk chair called to me. It was only a remote possibility, but if he did know where my brothers were heading, I had to know. If he didn’t, I had to know that as well. So I scribbled a name on the sign-in sheet and sank down into Stan’s still-warm chair to have a look.
When I was sure no one was watching, I opened a command window, ready to pull up the cache, but at the last minute thought better of it. Stan didn’t strike me as much of a superspy, so I opened the browser history instead and found what I was looking for. He hadn’t even bothered to cover his tracks. I suppose he decided that by the time anyone thought to look for his searches here, so many others would have used the computer it would push his sites well down the list.
That or he didn’t care who saw. Because I was probably the only person in the world who would see a grown man’s search of American boarding schools as sinister. A quick scan through the list of sites he’d visited showed that he hadn’t been on the website of the school where my brothers were enrolled, but that only meant he hadn’t looked it up in this latest search, of course. And more telling to me, anyway, was that he’d started his afternoon on a site called MoneyGram, which allowed anyone to send money the same day and had a pickup location at a jewelers not half a mile from the café.
Stan was my father’s inside man, I was almost sure of it. He’d been the one on the other side of the phone call I’d overheard. I was less sure, however, that he’d killed Grady. Killing someone would only bring attention he wouldn’t want if he was trying to get information to feed my dad, and the end result was to accelerate Alice’s timeline, which gave him less time to get that information.
So, at worst, he’d spied on us all for my father, possibly shot at Alice, and Alice was using me to exact her revenge. But she didn’t need to threaten me. I’d do what she asked, ending a life to keep my brothers safe. And then I’d end hers for the same reason. Because while I didn’t want anyone to know where my brothers would be hiding in the States, I couldn’t have Alice anywhere near them ever again. They needed to be away from all the death and threats and chaos. They needed a chance that I’d never have, to live a normal life.
And I’d give them that chance.
I was determined when I left the café. Ready. I thought about waiting in the area for Stan, to catch him outside and unaware, then end him in an alley to rot with the rest of the garbage. But it was too risky, and I still had to save my brothers from Alice. I couldn’t be caught now—not this time.
So I stood outside the entrance of Stan’s building, pretending to be searching my bag for a key. An older man took pity and let me in without any fuss. He only commented on how it was too warm out for me to be wearing such a bulky coat before getting onto the elevator. I climbed up the stairs to the third floor.
Outside Stan’s door, I closed my eyes to take in all the sounds that I could. There was a TV on two doors down, loud and playing some kind of show with an audience. There was a distant baby’s cry somewhere down the hall too, but the apartments on either side of me were so quiet they seemed vacant. And then I heard footsteps in Stan’s flat and the sound of water running. He was home. I just had to get in.
In any city the size of London, where people are used to crime, no one ever wants to get involved. The idea that anyone would come to the aid of a damsel in distress becomes a myth when there are too many damsels and too much distress. Bystanders are notoriously deaf, dumb, and blind in the face of a scared or injured woman. If you’re sick, bystanders are afraid to catch whatever you have. If you’re in trouble, they look away, not wanting to entangle themselves in police statements or trials and not wanting to get hurt themselves.
But there is one exception. Everyone will stop and watch the drunk girl, because you never know when you’ll get a good laugh. And I’d seen enough drunken behavior to emulate it perfectly.
I stumbled into Stan’s door and tried to get in using one of the keys I’d gotten from Lily Patel. It slid into the lock easily enough, and when it wouldn’t turn, I whimpered. I tried again and then a third time, jiggling the knob until Stan came up to his peephole to yell through the door.
“You’ve got the wrong flat!”
I lurched forward to press my cheek against the door, then opened my gloved hand to slap it against the metal. “Let me in, Stephen!” I slurred. “My key isn’t working.”
I glanced down the hall to make sure no one was going to come out to see who was causing the ruckus, and no one did. They must have a couple of drunkards in this building.
“No Stephen here!” Stan shouted through the door. “Go away.”
I stood upright, but made sure to keep my face down as I put my hands on my hips. “You let me in right now, Stephen.” I wagged my finger and then swayed on my feet, only barely catching myself. “Right now, or I’ll scream and keep screaming until the whole place knows how you mistreat me!”
I heard Stan curse and then click open the locks, which was when I slid my knife free and prepared myself. I’d have one shot at this. The very moment the door opened, I pushed in, trapping Stan up against the wall while the door swung shut behind me.
“What the bloody—?”
Those were his last words. I shoved my knife into his trachea, silencing him without all the spraying blood that occurred when I killed my father. I stood aside to pull it out and then watched as he held his hand to his throat and slid down the wall to sprawl on the ground. I was out of breath when I backed into the kitchen, and I couldn’t seem to look away from Stan. He made a choking sound and blinked his eyes a lot, and it took him minutes and minutes to die, so long that I started to wonder if I shouldn’t go over and put him out of his misery.
But in the end, his eyes stopped blinking and there were no more sounds. I knew I’d done it. I’d killed another man. My third. Just as many as Alice. A few short of my father’s spree.
It had been so very easy to kill this man—too easy. A person shouldn’t be that fragile. Adrenaline pumped through my whole body, but my mind was still. Was I supposed to justify this? Remind myself that he’d possibly killed Grady in the dark with no mercy? That he’d informed on us to my father? That if he wasn’t dead, either Olivia or one of my brothers wo
uld be by tomorrow?
Were those things supposed to make me feel better?
Perhaps.
But I didn’t feel particularly bad. I’d killed him and I just felt. . . normal. A little hyper. Quiet. Not even my thoughts plagued me, it was so quiet.
I dropped the knife into the sink, and the sound of it brought me back to a more practical state of mind. I used some of the liquid soap I’d purchased to wash the blood from it and my gloves. Then I used the shopping bag they’d given me at the pharmacy to hold my bloodstained trench coat. I left my wig and glasses on, and the gloves, until I made it outside the building and down the little alleyway to where the dumpsters were. They were all full, which was a good sign. Trash pickup was probably the next day. I shoved the bag with the trench coat deep into one dumpster and my glasses and gloves into another. Then I started back toward the gate, dumping my wig in a smaller can on the way and donning some sunglasses I’d stowed in my handbag.
I was still wiping the glove powder from between my fingers when I stepped out onto the street and came face-to-face with Sherlock Holmes. I watched his expression as it rose and fell like a wave, from determination to confusion and then to sorrow.
“I’m here to stop you,” he said, though his heart wasn’t in it.
“You’re too late. And you’re an idiot to be here.”
I fed myself a mantra of truths, that I couldn’t be responsible for Sherlock Holmes anymore. That he wasn’t my business. That he could take care of himself. But I knew that he was there because of me. I’d dared him to stop me, and there he was. And if anyone saw him approach the building, he’d be brought down on charges for sure.
“I’ve called the police.”
“You haven’t.”
He waved me off, as though he wasn’t just caught in a lie. “I have to—”
“Go inside? Become a witness? What are you even doing here?”
“What are you doing here, Mori? What have you done?”
Final Fall Page 11