If he’d behaved as he should after striking Aiken, if he’d even opened his own office door a crack when he realised the other person had come in, the attacks on Dan and Jane and sweet Kate could have been avoided. On himself, too, for that matter. But he’d been a coward, he’d have to face that. An absolute snivelling coward, always looking out for Number One.
He hadn’t changed. He wasn’t Edward, no matter how hard he’d tried, all these years. If he could have given Stryker even one tiny thing to go on, but no, not a clue, not a sight nor smell nor taste nor sound had he remembered that . . . suddenly he sat up away from the pillows, staring out at the empty room.
‘Good God,’ he said.
Pinsky opened the door to admit the snow-caked figure that half-fell into Grantham Hall and led him to a bench in the Study Area.
Stryker peeled the snow from his face and hair in a thick layer that held together like a frozen bandage, only breaking at the last moment into lumps that showered down around his numb feet. Beneath the snow his skin was white, and his eyes red-rimmed and watering. He kicked his heels one by one against the bench supports to dislodge the clumps of snow that had built up on his shoes.
‘What are you doing here?’ Stryker managed to croak, at last. ‘Has something else happened while I was giving my first and last performance of Nanook of the North?’
‘Well, yeah, it has,’ Pinsky said. ‘Sort of.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Well, Fowler called me at home and I don’t live so far away as all that so I skiied over here . . .’
‘You what?’ Stryker suddenly became aware of Pinsky’s knitted bobble hat.
‘Skiied over here. Like cross-country? Anyway, I made good time because they’ve just been waxed and there’s a hell of a mess upstairs . . .’
There was a fresh blast of wind from the doors and Tos came in, his black overcoat piebald where the snow clung. He took off his hat, banged it against his side, then spotted Stryker and Pinsky. ‘I put on the light and the siren and drove on the pavement until I hit a mailbox. It just came through on the radio. Is she here?’
‘I’ve just been telling him,’ Pinsky said, patiently. ‘There’s a hell of a mess upstairs, and Mr Fowler is getting pretty upset. He thinks something might have happened to her because . . .’
‘To who? Whom?’ amended Stryker, remembering where he was.
‘. . . she’s gone in and she hasn’t come out,’ Pinsky finished.
‘Who?’ Stryker demanded, torn between trying to catch his breath and wasting what little he’d managed to get back on a scream.
Neilson came in, bringing more snow.
‘Is she here?’ he asked.
THIRTY
The Security Guard sat facing the windows.
The snow whirling beyond the glass was like one of the crystal balls that children have, which they shake and shake again, watching the snow dance wildly.
But he wasn’t watching the snow.
Occasionally the Mall cleared for a moment, and Grantham Hall would be visible, its windows blank, no lights on.
But he wasn’t watching Grantham Hall.
The light from outside was growing fainter and fainter and fainter as the blizzard clamped down. The light gleamed with a pearly sheen on his face. On his mouth. On his nose.
And on the two bloody sockets where his eyes had been.
THIRTY-ONE
After the howl and hiss of the blizzard outside, the darkness and silence of the Library seemed absolute. Kate, panting after her struggle with the storm in crossing the Mall, stood still in the gloom and tried to regain her senses. The drip of the melting snow hitting the floor around her seemed un-naturally loud. She could hear her own breathing, the rustle of her clothing, and the small struggles of the wind at the door behind her. Her face felt raw where the wind had scoured it. Having made the dash from Grantham Hall full of concern and zeal, she now felt hot and shaky inside her bulky coat. It was very warm in the Library.
Her eyes slowly adjusted to the faint suffusion of light coming from behind her through the doors, and from the clerestory windows set high on the walls. The area here at the entrance was all right.
It was that big blackness ahead that worried her.
The Library was large, four storeys of shelves ranked the width of the building like an army carrying knowledge in close formation.
They were in here somewhere – but where?
And why?
She took off her coat, for it was stifling her. They must keep the heating on all weekend in here, she thought, for the sake of the books. And the snow was insulating the building as it had Grantham Hall, so that everything within was very quiet. Very quiet.
She heard a laugh.
A sudden laugh, far-off and strange.
And then voices.
Somewhere upstairs, the next floor or the one after that. She had to find the stairway, then, somewhere in the centre of the building. She would have sworn that she could have found it blindfolded, so many hours had she spent in this place. And yet, within ten steps of leaving the semi-gloom of the entrance area, she walked straight into the first tier of shelves hard enough to raise a welt on her forehead. She steadied herself against the cold metal of an upright, her fingers resting against the ribbed spines of the books beside her. This part is Medical, she thought, trying to orient herself. I’m somewhere between Apparatus and Appendectomy, probably. Onward into Blisters and Boils. Somewhere water dripped, and a clock made a mechanical click overhead, moving the minutes along.
An icy finger of snow detached itself from her hair and slid down her neck under her collar. She shivered, felt for the edge of a shelf, and guided herself along it sideways until she came to a break. If she kept her hands outstretched, she probably wouldn’t run into anything else.
Almost immediately her foot encountered something that sprang away, and she pitched forward between the shelves, landing on her knees and outstretched hands. The thing she’d fallen over slid away – one of the rolling step-stools the librarians used to reach the high shelves. It had moved like something alive, like an animal in the dark. She found she was panting again, and her heart was making more noise than the wind outside. The rush of her own blood and breathing was nearly deafening her.
So loud . . . you’d think someone would hear.
She clamped her mouth shut with a snap and moved into a sitting position against the shelves. All right, she’d been an idiot to follow them, she accepted that, it was just the kind of thing she hated in the movies. It was so stupid.
The temptation had just been too great.
And anyway, Arthur would have called Stryker by now, so she’d be all right. All she wanted to do was get close enough to hear what they were saying, see what they were doing.
And perhaps to stop Richard from killing again.
It had all gone too far. She’d been wrong to protect him, lie for him. But she could do this one last thing. She didn’t think he’d do anything in front of her. Or to her. And if she could keep him talking long enough, Stryker would arrive in time to take charge. She must do this sensibly. The darkness had been getting to her, that’s all. This was a place she knew well, nothing frightening about it at all.
Well, hardly anything.
She got to her feet and began to move cautiously toward the staircase again. After a moment she found that if she closed her eyes, it was actually easier. She could concentrate more. She moved slowly from tier to tier of shelving, feeling the grit of polishing compound beneath her shoes, smelling the books and the paste and the metallic chemical odour of the photocopier. Ah – then she was near the stairwell. Yes – across the gap and her hands were on the painted bricks at last. She slid along, facing the wall, until she came to the doors.
As soon as she pushed one open, the voices became louder. Still indistinct, but louder. One low and
reasonable, the other high and almost demented. That’s right, she thought, keep him talking. One by one, her feet found the steps, and she gripped the wooden banister tightly, leaning against it and the wall for support. Now was not the time to slip.
She pushed open the doors to the next floor, and knew she’d been right. They were here – in English Literature, of course – beyond the inner doors on the right, in the stacks. The shelves were higher there, and set closer. The metal shelves with their burden of books distorted the voices, and as Kate moved along feeling her way towards the sounds, she found that they seemed to be moving, too. Sometimes she could almost make out a word, and the next moment the voices were blotted out, leaving only tatters in the river-rush of the wind around the building.
She reached the next set of doors and separated them slightly, her ear close to the slit, almost jumping when a voice spoke suddenly from only a few feet away.
‘Too kind. I could read between the lines, well enough. I don’t blame him, he has a responsibility to his firm, it isn’t often something like Aiken’s book comes along for a small house like that. Don’t you see? He didn’t say it, he’d never say it, but there was a question in his mind. It occurred to him that I had perhaps tried to edge into Aiken’s field. That I was a me-too, a follower-on.’
‘You could have refuted that . . . surely . . .’
‘I would be on the defensive, I had no proof that I had been working for so long on the thing, no more than Aiken himself. There was only the work itself, collated and annotated.’
‘You could have sued . . .’
An inarticulate cry, some animal stepped on, some gross but invisible injury beneath the skin. ‘You still don’t understand, do you? George didn’t say it, but the message was clear. My book was dull. Just as I’ve always been dull, no matter how I tried to be otherwise. All my life I’ve been considered sound. Solid and worthy, like some large, ugly table. Aiken’s book was controversial, clever, it danced and sang in its bitchy snide way. Anyone reading it would sniff new blood for the chat shows, he would become a media darling . . .’
‘That’s just popular nonsense, that’s not the same as being . . .’
‘Sound?’ There was something like a sob. ‘He didn’t need it, you know. He didn’t care whether fourteen desiccated professors in various universities nodded their heads over the work and said brilliant, he didn’t care whether there were dry monographs on this point or that in some little journal with a circulation of nine. And neither did I, when it came down to it. Looking at his book, I saw how it could have been done, perhaps even how it should have been done, to reach the most people and change them. And suddenly that mattered to me very much. Once, just once, to have someone say to me, “How clever you are.” Not sound, not sensible, not dull.’
‘But you could have published . . .’
‘Oh, no, Aiken saw to that, too. I was a fool. I kept everything to myself, told no-one what I was really working on. Not even you, in the end. It had taken me years to accumulate and organise my references and facts. It must have taken Aiken an hour to walk down the hall one evening, read through my files and notes, and perhaps another hour to photocopy them. That was bad enough, but what he did with it was worse. Even for Aiken, much worse.’
Kate suddenly felt cold and sick. The voice rose madly, was not the voice she had known and loved at all. It was as shrill as the wind outside, with as little control and as little direction. She had to stop this. Surely, between them, they could stop it. She pushed open the doors and the voice became clearer, the tone even more chilling.
‘I don’t understand . . .’
‘I found his first draft in his files, after what he said in the car that afternoon. The office keys are virtually interchangeable, and what he could do, so could I. It was my work, my research, but put together in an entirely new way, Aiken’s way, shallow and salacious and cruel . . . but witty. Oh, I knew what George meant, all right. It would sell.’
‘George?’
‘My publisher. I’d sent my manuscript off three weeks ago, and I got his letter back. He was amazed – and dismayed. If he’d only known I was working on this . . . but he’d already commissioned a work on the same subject from a fellow colleague of mine, and was expecting the completed manuscript within the next week or so. He didn’t feel he could profitably publish them both. He was very kind.’
There was a pause, and then the voice went on.
‘I was an ugly child, you know. And there was never much laughter in our house. Virtue was its own reward, and a thin gruel it was, too. One didn’t put oneself forward, one didn’t brag, one didn’t flaunt. Hard work and . . .’ The voice scraped, viciously. ‘And no ribbons.’
Kate felt her heart contract. She understood, and with understanding came a foolish, dangerous compassion. She spoke, through the half-open door, her voice light in the darkness.
‘Richard?’
Silence, sudden and total, and then the sudden rustle of movement – feet sliding along the floor, a thump, silence again. Kate spoke gently but firmly.
‘Look, it’s no good, the police will be here any minute. They know, Richard. You can’t do any good with more talk . . .’
She stood in the dark, waiting for a reply.
‘Richard?’
She could hear heavy, asthmatic breathing, now, somewhere within the network of shelves. Footsteps again, sliding along. ‘Who’s there?’ a voice asked.
‘It’s Kate, love. You need help. You can’t go on killing people and hiding . . .’
‘Oh, yes I can,’ the voice said, almost gleefully. ‘Each time I’ve been clever. Each time that something has gone wrong that wasn’t my fault, I dealt with it. I knew it was Edward who had knocked Aiken out when I saw him get a note just like mine on Monday morning. He had to be dealt with and was.’
‘Edward is alive, and awake. He’ll say you came to his apartment after Richard.’
‘He didn’t know.’ Again came a laugh, a low chuckle. ‘He was already asleep when I went in, it was was just a matter of making the sleep a little deeper, and then getting him over to the stove. He’s not so heavy, he’s only half a man, after all.’
‘But I know,’ Kate said. ‘I know how you did it.’
‘Clever little bitch,’ the voice said, right beside her, and a hand fell on to her shoulder, grasping it painfully.
Kate screamed and pulled away, crashed into a shelf, slid along it to an opening, went through and ran along again, trying to put some distance between herself and the horrible touch of that hand, the rasp of the mad voice, the smell of wet fur, stale tobacco, fresh blood, and lilacs.
Where was Stryker? Why didn’t he come?
She dodged down another narrow space between the shelves and ran straight into Richard’s arms. He wrapped them around her and pinned her arms to her sides, put his face close to hers, his mouth touching her ear. ‘How the hell did you know we were here?’ She started to speak but he put his hand up to her mouth. ‘We’ve got to keep moving . . . was that true? About the police?’
She nodded, against his chest.
‘Okay . . .’ He began to back down the space, taking her with him pressed close against his chest. There was a step on the other side of the shelves and he pulled her down to the floor. Silence, except for the whine of the wind and their own breathing. Slowly, slowly, they stood up and began to move again, towards the doors.
There was a sudden movement from the other direction.
A quick, scuttling movement. Richard gave a grunt, stiffened backwards, a hiss of breath sliding out from between his clenched teeth. The darker shadow beyond him sprang back, Richard turned towards it, slowly, and Kate saw that he had something in his hand.
A gun.
As his finger tightened on the trigger his other hand flailed impotently at the thing that was stuck in his ribs, but before he could fire darkness o
vercame him and he went down. The shadow beyond him darted forward like a spider to a fly in its web, and picked up the gun. Kate could see the dull glint of its muzzle, even in the gloom.
‘Now you, my dear. You complicate things, but I have no doubt I shall work out something. I intended Richard’s death to look like suicide after killing that damned Guard, but I suppose . . .’
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘Please . . . stop it now, before . . .’
‘I will work something out, I tell you, I always have before. You all underestimated me . . . oh, yes, you did.’
Suddenly the voice shrieked upward as Richard, lying on the floor, grabbed at a thin ankle and pulled.
‘Kate! The gun! Get my gun!’ His voice was weak, but it still had command in it, and Kate tried to obey. She leapt forward over Richard’s body and lunged at the off-balance and swaying figure. She tried to reach the gun as the arms flailed wildly.
The shape screamed, she screamed, the wind screamed.
It was like wrestling with an animal, literally, a fur-covered maddened animal sticky with blood. Richard’s blood? The Guard’s? Her own? Kate didn’t know.
The gun went off, she felt the heat sear her leg as she pounded and lashed out at the thing she’d once called a friend and that was now trying to kill her. They fell against the steel shelves and books avalanched from above. They went down and Kate felt her hands close over the gun that was still clenched in a bony hand. The gun was hot, its muzzle burned her, but she had to turn it away before it fired again. She twisted, hard, away from herself and against the bones of that other wrist. She felt them giving, grinding against one another, and heard a scream of rage and pain in her ear. She hit out blindly with her free hand, wanting to hurt, for Richard’s sake, wanting to kill, for Edward’s sake, wanting to destroy for her own sake, wanting, finally, to just survive and live, and thinking of nothing but that. They rolled and struggled in the darkness with the wind howling outside, until it seemed to Kate there was no up or down or sideways but just this grunting, panting thrust of will against will, body against body, in the dark, in the warm angular dark.
Monkey Puzzle Page 25