Sky Garden

by Jenny Schwartz

  “I didn’t know I was running,” Nick said, but Nelson had gone. He was alone on the rooftop of the cultural center. “I was running.”

  Time to make a few commitments.

  Phoning Lanie would make him feel better, but he needed to apologize and be there for her in person. He ran down the stairs, shamelessly used Nelson as a buffer between him and the few stragglers in the lobby who still wanted to talk with him, and entered his hotel. While the concierge organized a car to take him to the airport, Nick threw his few belongings together.

  He wouldn’t phone Lanie. He’d surprise her.

  The hours-long wait in the airport was a hindrance to his plans, but a discomfort he endured as a just punishment for selfishness.

  Being alone meant putting on a performance, Lanie discovered. If she looked calm and in control, people weren’t as likely to question her about Nick, his whereabouts, or her past. It helped that they had a school group through the museum that day and she could concentrate on them. She created an air of normality and pushed it at everyone, blocking their concern. But it was exhausting.

  As much as she usually enjoyed the museum volunteers’ enthusiasm and that of its visitors, she sighed with relief to close the door on the last of them. She paused, though, standing on the front steps and watching the busy street. Summer was dying, but tourists seemed determined to wring every moment from it. They wandered along, consulting their phones, craning their necks to look at everything, and providing moving, unpredictable obstacles for busy Londoners hurrying to finish their workdays.

  She could retreat to the roof garden to enjoy the last of the sun, but the vibe of life seduced her. She’d pop around the corner to the café where she could be part of things without having to do anything. A pretense at life to fill the void of Nick’s absence.

  She untied the museum’s banner from the railings, rolled it up and stowed it just inside the door. The previous one had gone missing a month ago, and she wasn’t taking chances with the new one.

  Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of the pocket of her jeans. Nick. Relief at hearing from him exploded into real delight. He was coming home. She noted the time he’d texted for arrival at Heathrow.

  “Meet me?” the text read.

  She checked the time. She could just do it, if she ran for the Tube. She raced up to her office, grabbed her purse and dashed back. She’d text Nick at the station. She keyed the security system and slammed the door behind her. A quick glance up showed that the green light of the system had engaged.

  She was security conscious, aware that Ann and Marshall wouldn’t both warn her of danger without reason. But daylight and busy streets reassured her—and this was Bloomsbury. There was CCTV everywhere. So she half-walked, half-jogged, darting around slower moving pedestrians and feeling free. Jubilant. He wanted her to meet his plane.

  Nick was coming home!

  Someone grabbed her arm and her own momentum swung her around and to a stop, just around the corner. She jolted, shocked.

  A man, a stranger, stood too close. A coldness, a gun, touched her ribs. “Get in the car.”

  She looked up into eyes hidden by sunglasses and shaded by a baseball cap.

  His mouth was a straight line, lips barely moving. “Or I kill you here and drive away.”

  It was a threat he could make true. He could shoot her here, get in the car, abandon it somewhere. If he had a plan—and she’d bet he did—then he’d have an escape route in mind. Even if he miscalculated and CCTV tracked him, if she was dead, that would do her no good.

  Calculate the odds, guess the outcome, act accordingly. How good a guesser was she?

  Lanie opened the passenger door of a white van. There might be a chance, as her captor entered, unless he had an accomplice driving, and even then…her brain spun. The driver’s seat was empty.

  She tensed to run. Always take your chances.

  A needle stabbed into her thigh and she collapsed in the passenger seat of the white delivery van, barely conscious of its door thudding closed, shutting her in. She never felt the van move off.

  Chapter 18

  Waking wasn’t pleasant.

  First, Lanie felt the grogginess, as if she was encased in cement. Yet below her struggling consciousness, panic lurked. She fought her way to the surface of her mind, pushing against the mental weight and physical lassitude to open her eyes.

  The roof was too far away, almost lost in shadows, all shades of gray stretching to a high wide window. A beam bisected it, running back from beside a window, cutting through the vaulted space. Beyond it, a patch of square light, angled. A skylight, dirty, the light filtering through it barely lit the darkness.

  Scuffing sounds, the shuffling of a person. Reluctant? Eager?

  Kidnapped. She’d been kidnapped, again.

  Her eyes came lower, focused.

  The gun was a big giveaway as to the man’s identity, but not to his name, not to who he was and what he had at risk.

  She needed to learn more.

  Lanie didn’t recognize his face. She’d made a point to learn the faces of all members of parliament; not an easy feat.

  He wasn’t one.

  He had a round face, unremarkable in its late middle age chubbiness. He’d shaved carefully and wore a cotton shirt and jeans, like a tourist, but he wore them uncomfortably. They were a costume.

  Lanie considered her own clothes, glad that she wasn’t wearing her 1950s clothes. High heels would have been the devil to run in, and she meant to run at the first opportunity. Her jeans had probably protected her, too, from the dirty concrete floor. Her shirt was rucked up, suggesting she’d been dragged here, away from the white van parked now a few meters behind the kidnapper.

  Where was she? How long had she been out?

  Not helpful questions. Not things that would save her.

  Focus, woman.

  The way the gun wobbled in the man’s grip was terrifying. His own fear made him unpredictable.

  At least with Purvis, the man’s conceit, his success at killing others, had given her time. She’d been able to read him, to find his vulnerabilities and, ultimately, to use them against him. What she had to do with this man was get him talking.

  “Who are you?” Her voice came husky from her dry throat.

  “You tell me.”

  She made the deduction swiftly. His question answered why she was still alive. He wanted to know what she knew of him, and who she’d told.

  Knowledge was her bargaining chip. She’d exchange it for time. She just had to gamble wisely. “Purvis told me how you met.”

  The gun jerked.

  Lanie kept her voice calm, level and unthreatening. This was a different man to Purvis, with different motivations.

  Purvis had been a raw-boned Yorkshireman in his early forties. His slow accent, large frame and ordinary looks would have appealed to many women. He’d been a plumber, and his trade had allowed him to find hidden places: cellars, sealed-up rooms, abandoned workshops. His van had let him pass unremarked. Who remembered a tradesman or his white van?

  He’d transported Lanie in that van and taken her to the cellar of a nineteenth century workshop. It had been one in a row of red brick buildings, their windows opaque with dirt, roofs dripping grime. A place fit for demolition.

  The cellar had been completely different. Purvis had painted it white and fitted things…cruel things that would let him kill torturously, and then, clean up scrupulously. And watching everything was a camera on a tripod.

  Purvis hadn’t just killed his victims. He’d filmed their deaths. And he’d shared those films with a friend.

  “You introduced Purvis to the thrill of killing,” Lanie said. “He was a boy. A potential serial killer, showing the signs with the torturing of small animals, but only a boy. He needed help, but what he got was you.”

  “Fate took a hand.”

  Lanie bit the inside of her mouth to stop herself showing her reaction. She’d hooked him. “It was a dog,”
she continued cautiously, forcing unchallenging confidence into her voice. She had to prove she knew things, without antagonizing the man. Her muscles weren’t numb, but they were cold and unwilling. Shock or the drug he’d shot her up with? “He was torturing a dog, out at a distance from the cottage his family had rented. They were on holiday in the country and he hated it. It was summer in the Peak District.”

  “Gray and lonesome with so many people choosing to stay inside. An election year. My first after leaving university.”

  From the nostalgia in his voice, she took a guess. “You were out canvassing for votes.” The beginning of his political career, whatever it was he did in Westminster.

  “Did Purvis tell you that?”

  “He said you appeared like the devil.”

  A slow smile transformed the man’s face. He lowered the gun. “I came out from behind a tumble of rocks after his sister caught him stabbing the dog. She was horrified, her face all screwed up ready to cry, and as red as her red hair. Purvis caught her, grabbed her, his pocket knife slipped. That first cut, it was an accident.”

  Lanie suppressed a shudder. If she wanted to lure this stranger into dropping his guard, she had to follow him into his memories. She steeled herself. “It was an accident, but the blood was so red and warm, and—” She guessed, “His sister whimpered.”

  “Just like the dog.” Her kidnapper smiled, eyes slitting.

  She could imagine the scene too vividly. This man, thirty years younger, standing behind the rocks and enjoying vicariously the torturing of the dog. And then the boy’s sister had turned up.

  “Purvis didn’t know what to do, but I did. I asked him, can you afford to let her talk? She screamed his name, ‘Scott, no!’, and he dropped his knife. He dropped the knife and stared at me. Maybe if she’d run…” He shrugged. “But she froze, and Purvis turned and strangled her. Those long, strong fingers of his.” There was a perversion of sexual hunger in the precise voice.

  “I picked up his knife and I told him to run home. Tell your parents that you’ve found your sister. Tell them you tried to carry her to them. That will explain the blood that covers you. Cry, boy.”

  “Purvis listened to you.”

  “Oh, yes. He always listened to me.”

  “You found him a few years later. Away from London, again. Away from Yorkshire.”

  “A chance meeting, but that red hair and his face. Those flapping ears. I recognized him. He recognized me.” Surprise, almost pleasure. Few would remember this nondescript man. “We played the game, again.”

  “But this time, Purvis learned your name.”

  The man snapped back to the present, to the reason they were there. The reason he would kill her. “He told you.”

  “He said his friend had become important, too important for games. But he knew you enjoyed them, so he sent you tapes. Anonymous packages with his snuff films inside. He liked to think that you watched them.” She paused, calculating, watching the wary, avid curiosity in the pale hazel eyes. “He was proud of you.” She kept her voice casual. He’d taken off his wedding ring, but its indent was clear on the man’s ring finger. “How did you hide them from your wife?”

  His jaw dropped a fraction in shock.

  She pushed. “Separate lives. She lives hers and you don’t care, as long as she’s discreet and you’re free.” She counted on his psychopathic lack of emotional connection to guess at their estrangement.

  She guessed right.

  “My life is none of your business.”

  “No?”

  He was clever and twisted, but he was a behind-the-scenes man. Even riveted with the need to discover what she knew, he couldn’t maintain eye contact with her. He was a lurker, the devil behind the rocks whom Purvis had known. This man instigated, voyeured, but he didn’t do.

  Would she bet her life on her character analysis? Pushed to the extreme, how would he react?

  The gun dangled from his right hand, awkward.

  She could imagine the pain of a bullet, bullets, and the nothingness. Her family’s anguish. Nick’s. She had to fight to steady her breathing. She had to remain in control.

  She considered the knife-sharp creases ironed into the front of his jeans and the stark whiteness of his shirt. Mess. This man hated mess. His desire for control was part of that. What had he said to Purvis? Something about having to explain his sister’s blood—and the dog’s.

  “Killing is messy,” she said. “Purvis didn’t mind. He was crude.”

  Oh yes. She watched the man’s nostrils flare, his upper lip lift. He’d enjoyed looking down on Purvis for the things Purvis could do, that he couldn’t. He hadn’t killed himself. Which wasn’t to say that he wouldn’t start, but it improved the odds for her survival.

  There had been so much rage in Purvis, bursting through the mask of easy-going humor that he wore for the world. But there’d also been something else: a twisted sense of guilt and self-hate. His first killing hadn’t just been his sister. She’d been his twin. That had scarred him. That was why each subsequent victim had been a red-haired woman.

  Lanie controlled another shudder. She recalled the trophy photos that Purvis had taped to the walls of his cellar. Photos that showed women with their red hair redder with blood, their bodies abused.

  He had told her the story of killing his sister because it was her, and not his wife, who truly haunted him. In killing her, he’d killed some part of himself.

  And the man in front of her, this unnamed, diabolical and nervously sweating stranger, had provoked that killing.

  Something of Lanie’s panic settled as she reached a decision. Perhaps an irrational one, perhaps not. She only knew that in this duel between them, it was about more than survival. It was about justice.

  Evil shouldn’t be free.

  She had let Nick and everyone except the police think that she’d tricked Purvis by convincing him that she could channel his wife. But that would have been too risky. His emotional tie to his dead wife had been weak—too weak for Lanie to extract clues about her, and too weak to trust that he’d be rattled by an impersonation of her.

  But his sister…his sister had been his vulnerable point.

  If you seek to control a person, you have to hold both their hope and their fear. Carrot and stick. Redemption and damnation.

  She had shaped her impersonation of Purvis’s sister by him. She had listened to his accent, sorted through it for Yorkshire words and the language, the slang of his youth. She’d drawn on her family’s theatre craft and magic. And then she’d unleashed it all on Purvis.

  “Scotty, why’d you do that, then?” She’d echoed the tricks of his body language and mannerisms, the interrogative jut of his head, the shift of his shoulders, the subtle similarities that family shared.

  “Heather?” His voice had cracked. He’d believed. For that one heart-stopping instant, he’d believed his sister had returned.

  And in the cellar, there’d been no devil emerging from behind the rocks to tempt him. There had only been the terrible vengeance of collapsing sanity.

  He’d waved the knife at Lanie, its confident threat wavering into an hysterical, superstitious pattern of denial. “Stay away!” A high shriek. “I did what I had to.”

  “Gi’ over, Scotty.” Lanie had stood. “Bagsy my turn. My turn, Scotty, to live.” She’d put her hand over his as it held the knife.

  He’d watched her, his own eyes wide, stunned and believing.

  She’d pushed, and the resistance in his hand had suddenly vanished.

  He put the knife to his own throat and stabbed.

  It was more than she’d ever believed he’d do. Almost more than she’d been able to believe. While he’d gurgled and choked on his own blood, she’d fled up the stairs and to freedom.

  Purvis hadn’t tied her. With him, leaving her free had been an exciting rule of the game. His calculation had been obvious. She couldn’t escape him, he was so much bigger and stronger, and her fighting him would excite him.
He’d enjoy overpowering her.

  Now, this stranger had left her free, too. But she didn’t think it was because he trusted in his strength, although he might trust in the gun. No, this man didn’t want to touch her.

  Interesting.

  “Purvis believed I could speak with the dead—or rather, that they spoke through me.”

  “You can’t. Nobody can.”

  “That’s true,” she said evenly. All she wanted was to plant the idea.

  “Say my name.” He pointed the gun at her. “Say it. Do you know who I am? Who have you told? Or do you know nothing? Is it all a trick?”

  Inside her shoes, she flexed her toes. She tightened and relaxed the muscles of her legs. She tested and thought that the drug or shock had worn off, leaving her in control of her own body. Adrenaline readied her for one final roll of the dice.

  “Oh no.” She smiled. “I know you.”

  And then she twisted her smile into a leer, into a gloating, powerful expression that she owned him—and despised him. Time had run out. She’d identified the faint trace of his Liverpudlian accent that hid beneath his precise speech.

  It was mothers who taught speech patterns. Children learned intonation and accent from them.

  Children learned their self-worth from them.

  Lanie pitched her voice high and sharp, and sought for a Scouse disparagement, the sort a Liverpudlian mum would have used. “Soft lad.” Disappointment and scorn, to which she added a touch of weary impatience. “Yer doin’ me ’ead in.”

  His hand spasmed and he dropped the gun.

  She ran.

  She couldn’t afford to tussle with him, but there were hiding places in the shadows of the warehouse.

  “Stop! You bitch.”

  Chapter 19

  Where was Lanie? Nick tried her phone again, but it was switched off. The flat was shut, locked, blinds and curtains closed, and when he hammered on the door, there was no answer. He didn’t think she was avoiding him, although he’d deserve it if she was.