by Maynard Sims
“And you have no idea.”
“From the ferocity of the attack, I would say some kind of large, wild animal. That’s all I can give you. Sorry I can’t be more help, unless you know of any wild beasts roaming the streets of Barking.”
“Can’t help you,” Harry said.
“That’s what I thought. We’ll just have to wait and see what the boffins at Regents Park come up with.”
He’d no sooner hung up the phone when it rang again. He picked it up.
“Haven’t you got something to tell me, Harry?” It was Violet Bulmer.
“Anton Markos is dead,” he said.
“Yes, I know. Jason told me. He bothered to call me from Austria and tell me. When were you going to get round to phoning me?”
“It was a busy day, Vi,” Harry said, but the truth was he’d been delaying calling her, afraid of upsetting her.
“I’m a big girl. I can take it.”
Was she reading his mind again? It wouldn’t surprise him. Violet had psychic powers that put his own minor ones into the shade.
“How did he die?”
“A single stab wound through the heart. But his body was mutilated. I’ve just had the Home Office pathologist on the phone. He suspects Markos was the victim of some kind of attack by a wild animal.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Vi? Are you still there? Vi?”
“I’m here. Just thinking. Will you be carrying on the search for Alice, now Markos is dead?”
“Of course,” he reassured her. “We still need to know what’s happened to her. When did you speak to Jason?”
“Late last night.”
“How did it go with the girl?”
“She didn’t show.”
“Shame.”
“But she did book him another lesson for later this morning.”
“Then we shall wait and see if she can throw any light on the world of Anton Markos.”
“And what are you going to do next?”
“Go to his apartment in Clerkenwell and have a look round.”
“How will you get in?”
“I’ll take John McKinley with me. He can pick most locks.”
“Then let me know if you find anything interesting. Hell, Harry, let me know if you don’t. Just keep me in the picture, okay? Anything is better than the scenarios my imagination conjures up when I’m kept in the dark.”
“I will, Vi. I promise.”
He got to Whitehall to find McKinley sitting in his office. McKinley had started a fresh thriller. Lee Child.
He put the book down as Harry entered the room.
“Do you fancy some house breaking, John?”
McKinley’s face broke into a wide smile. “Damn, Harry. I’ll say this: working with you is nothing if not entertaining.”
Karin Metz was waiting for Jason outside the refreshment chalet when he arrived on the slopes. She was dressed in the customary red today, but wore no hat. Her silver-blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders. She looked stunning.
“Jason,” she said with a smile. “I phoned the hotel to make this appointment. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he said.
The smile faltered. “About last night. I couldn’t…the hotel wouldn’t understand…and I don’t want to lose…”
He held up his hand to stop her. “It’s okay, really. I get it. You don’t want to lose your job. I understand that. Shall we get on?”
She nodded. “A little higher today perhaps.”
“Fine with me.”
Within minutes they were sitting in the ski lift, being carried up the mountain.
They reached the highest point they had skied from the day before and Jason made to alight, but she held him back in his seat. “A little higher. We agreed.”
Jason relaxed back and let the lift haul them up to the next stage. When they reached it, she said, “One more.” And they carried on.
Halfway to the next stage, she turned to him. “Are you working for my grandfather?”
“Pardon? What do you mean?”
“My grandfather, Wolfgang Metz? He’s the one keeping me in this ice palace, away from my family and friends. Away from Erik.”
Jason’s heart sank. Busted. She’d known she was being played, right from the start. Smart girl. He decided to bluff.
“Why do you think that?”
“Because it’s obvious you can ski. Certainly to the level I took you to yesterday. And you asked so many questions, about me, about my life. You were checking up on me. Here,” she said. “We get off here.”
She slipped from the seat and Jason followed. Standing on the compacted snow, with a freezing north wind cutting across the mountain, he looked about him. There was no one up here. They were alone. He saw the sign and his heart began to sink. “This is a black run,” he said.
“The only way down the mountain. Perhaps we’ll see how good you really are.”
“I’m not sure how…”
Her face was suddenly angry, and the true purpose of taking him up so high was revealed. “You’re working for my grandfather.”
Chapter Twenty
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jason said.
“Liar!” She made a swinging attempt to hit him, but he deflected it with his arm.
“Karin, let’s talk about this.”
“How much is he paying you to spy on me?”
“You’ve got the wrong idea,” Jason said. “I’ve never met your grandfather.”
She tried to hit him again. Again he blocked it. “Tell me about Erik,” he said.
She was breathing heavily, but the venom in her expression eased a little. “I love him,” she said. “And he loves me. But Grandfather won’t let us be together. He sent Erik away.”
“Tell me about him,” Jason said, sensing she was calming a little.
“He’s a marvelous man, so kind and gentle. And he worships me. He calls me his goddess. His wonderful Hecate.”
“Hecate?”
“His pet name for me.” She smiled at the memory. “His wonderful, beautiful Hecate. She was a goddess too. He told me.”
“Your family is very rich,” Jason said. “Perhaps your grandfather was concerned that Erik was only with you for your money.”
“No!” she shouted. “He doesn’t need my money. Erik is very rich—perhaps even richer than grandfather. It’s why I trust him. He loves me for who I am. He doesn’t look at me with dollar signs in his eyes.”
Jason decided to take a chance. “You’re wrong, Karin. You were nothing special to him. There were girls before you—girls who looked at lot like you. And there’s another girl, in England. That’s where he lives now. There’s another girl, another Karin, and he’s with her now.”
Karin’s face turned to stone. “Liar!” she spat, jumped around on her skis and pushed off, tearing down the black run. Within seconds she was a red dot in the distance.
“Shit,” Jason said. He’d blown it.
He stood there, with the freezing wind biting at his face, weighing up his options. He could follow Karin down the black run and risk breaking his neck, or he could stay here on the Kitzbühelerhorn and freeze to death.
He heard something creaking above the noise of the wind, and saw the ski lift pass by. He skied across to it and waited for the next pair of chairs. What had brought him up here would carry him down. He might earn a few mocking laughs from the experienced skiers, but that was better than the alternatives. He waited until the chairs were upon him and he mounted, to be carried up, around, and down the mountain.
“I blew it, Harry.” He called Harry as soon as he got back to his hotel room.
“What happened?”
Jason told him, almost word for word.
“What di
d he call her?”
“His wonderful Hecate. That’s the name of Markos’s followers—the Children of Hecate. So what do you think it means?”
“Obviously, it has great significance to him, but as yet I don’t know what.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Come home,” Harry said. “Unless you want spend another day skiing.”
“No,” Jason said. “I’ve had enough of snow for one winter. I’ll call the airline. See if I can use my ticket on another flight.”
“Okay. Do you want to tell Vi?”
“I’ll call her.”
“Right then. I’ll see you on your return.”
Jason sat on the bed and thought about Karin’s pure, porcelain beauty. “Ah,” he said to himself after a few moments. “Win some, lose some.” And then he tapped in Violet Bulmer’s number.
They pulled into a meter space on Goswell Road. McKinley was using the Audi again. It was the most comfortable ride he had ever experienced. The car easily accommodated his long legs.
“Parking in London is a major rip-off,” Harry said.
“Tell me about it,” McKinley said as he fed coins into the hungry meter. “Can I claim this back on expenses?”
“Fill in the form and give it to Crozier.”
“That’s a no then.”
“Stop bellyaching. The block is up here, on the right.”
The apartment building hadn’t been standing that long and it looked an expensive place to live—a brushed stainless steel and glass outer shell over a very desirable interior with rich granite flooring and Italian marble walls. It even had its own concierge, an elderly man in a very smart racing-green uniform who sat at a large walnut desk and eyed them suspiciously as they entered the foyer.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?”
Harry produced his Department 18 ID card and waved it under the old man’s nose. “We’re here to see the person who lives in the penthouse apartment,” Harry said.
The old man stared at the official-looking ID card as if mesmerized. “Yes,” he said. “Shall I call through to tell him you’re here?”
“No. We’ll surprise him,” McKinley said. They turned and walked towards the elevator.
“You’ll need this then. You won’t get up there without it.” He was holding out what looked like a hotel key card. McKinley walked over to the desk and took it from him. “There’s a slot in the control panel,” he said. “You’ll have to put the card in when you reach the twelfth floor if you want to go up to the penthouse.”
“Do I need to enter a PIN number?” McKinley asked.
“Don’t worry. The card has a magnetic strip. The panel reads it and identifies it automatically. State of the art,” the old man added proudly.
“I’m impressed,” McKinley said, and walked back to where Harry was standing at the open elevator doors.
“Is there likely to be any trouble?” the old man called. “Only I have other residents to consider.”
“No trouble,” Harry called back.
The old man frowned. This place was going downhill. Ever since that flash git moved into the penthouse. Riffraff and undesirables at all hours of the day and night. What was it now? He couldn’t comprehend the card Harry had flashed at him. What was Department 18? Some kind of MI5 spin-off? Possibly something to do with Special Branch? He’d had run-ins with the law in his much younger days. Now, when he saw any official-looking laminate, he didn’t question it. He really didn’t want to know.
McKinley performed the trick with the key card and the elevator carried on upward to the top floor of the building. The doors opened smoothly onto a short corridor with an expensive-looking carpet. The door at the end of the corridor looked robust and gleamed, black with gold door furniture.
McKinley reached into his coat and produced a huge bunch of keys.
“You sure you’ve got enough there?” Harry said, handing him a pair of latex gloves.
“A key for every occasion,” McKinley said “Well, most anyway.” He pulled on the gloves, stretching them down over his long, bony fingers. “Bear with me. This might take a while.”
It took two minutes.
“Always prepared,” McKinley said as he pushed open the door.
“I’d take my hat off to you, John…if I wore one. Come on, let’s look around.”
The main room of the apartment was large and square, with a deep-pile, cream-colored carpet and a dark purple leather suite. The couch alone would probably cost Harry a month’s salary. There was a fifty-inch flat-screen TV and a Bang and Olufsen stereo system with narrow, discreet speakers. A single bookcase stood against the far wall, but held few books, an atlas and a coffee-table book on ceramics being the largest, the rest being rag-bag of self-help guides and an encyclopedia of Greek mythology. A menu for a local Indian restaurant had been used as a bookmark. Harry opened the book at the marked page.
“Hecate,” Harry said. “Again. That name is following us around in relation to the Markos case. It’s significant, but why?”
“This might answer your question, Harry.” McKinley had drifted into the bedroom while Harry was perusing the books.
Harry followed the sound of McKinley’s voice and found himself in a room that was essentially a shrine to the Greek goddess. The closed drapes were dark red, as was the cover on the bed, but every available inch of wall space was covered with dramatic posters in gaudy color by painters of variable artistic ability and merit. Interspersed with the posters were monochrome photos of statuary depicting the goddess. A number of the pictures depicted a trio of women, and Harry went to retrieve the encyclopedia. He returned to the bedroom and turned to the relevant page.
“‘Hecate is often depicted in triple form, to express her manifold and mystic nature,’” he read.
“But if Markos was obsessed by this particular goddess, why his fixation with blue-eyed blondes? The women in the pictures on the wall all have dark hair.”
“I’m ahead of you, John. Look.” Harry had put down the book on the bed and pulled open the drapes, and covering the entire window was a single image. It measured twelve feet square and was an image of a woman naked, apart from a diaphanous gown that covered little of her lithe, taut body. The woman in the picture was holding two flaming torches. At the bottom of the picture, in bold capital letters, someone, probably Markos, had written, “MY HECATE”.
The woman in the picture had flowing blonde hair and blue eyes, and with daylight from the window diffusing into the room through the picture, the eyes appeared to be glowing. “He obviously had the obsession with Hecate, and a predilection for girls with blonde hair. This picture allowed him to combine and indulge his twin passions. I wonder how old it is?”
“Old enough,” McKinley said. “There’s printer’s mark in the corner and it’s in Greek. So he probably had the picture when he lived there and had it shipped around the world with him.”
“Unfortunately he’s not around to corroborate that, but I think you’re probably right. I wonder what a picture like that can do to a young adolescent mind. The image has an undeniable sexual power. That, combined with the hormonal surge puberty brings, probably set him on his path.”
“It was my father’s copies of Playboy that influenced my formative mind,” McKinley said.
“Penthouse and Men Only fueled my masturbatory urges, but we had the advantage, John.”
“What was that?”
“We weren’t mad.”
“And you think Markos was?
“Psychopathic from a very early age, I’d say, to lead the life he did. The need to control the women he desired probably didn’t develop until after puberty, by which time his mania was fully formed. I’d love to know what a real psychologist would make of him.”
“Seen enough?”
“Of this, yes, but we’ve still got to search th
e place from top to bottom for any clue as to Alice Logan’s whereabouts.”
McKinley nodded. “Best get started then. You do in here. I’ll take the rest of the apartment.”
They stepped into the elevator together. “That hasn’t moved us forward at all,” Bailey said. “Nothing to point us in a direction to even start looking for her.”
“And the only thing to suggest she was ever there was a single blonde hair found on the pillow in the bedroom.”
“And we’re not one hundred per cent sure it’s hers. That’s why I left it. When the police search the apartment, as they are sure to do, they’ll find it. Let them worry about the DNA testing.”
“You’re not going to give your tame DI the heads up then?”
“Susan Tyler is not my tame anything. And no, I won’t say we visited the apartment. That’s why I made sure we wore gloves. I don’t want our prints going on record as being found there. What we did was illegal. I know it wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m as sure as hell it won’t be the last. But we can do without muddying the waters right now. Let them get on and do their job.”
They passed the desk. The old concierge sat up straight. “All in order?” he said.
“Fine,” Harry said. “And if anyone asks, we were never here.” He tapped the side of his nose and winked.
“Poor old devil,” McKinley said when they got outside. “I’m surprised he didn’t salute you.”
“I’ve probably made his day. It’ll give him something to talk about with his wife over their cocoa.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Clusky sheltered under a tree as he stood and waited for his dealer in the middle of Epping Forest. Not that the tree was making much difference. The rain was still pouring through the bare branches, drumming a tattoo on his crash helmet and running in rivulets down the Plexiglas visor. Where the fuck is he? he thought and checked his watch for the third time in the last three minutes.
He was in a clearing, the usual meeting place. He liked this spot because it was hidden from the pathways that walkers used, but was still accessible from the road by bike. The problem was that, because of the dense undergrowth and closely packed trees, it limited his ability to see if his contact was approaching. He pulled out his cell phone to call him, but there was no signal. He swore under his breath and rammed it back in his pocket. He’d give him another five minutes and then he’d go.