by Blake Banner
Outside, the blackbird went quiet, and inch by inch, the dark closed in. I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
TEN
The door opened and a woman stood framed in the ancient Tudor archway. She was in her early fifties, attractive, nicely curvaceous, dressed in a white satin evening gown with a single string of pearls at her throat. Her face was attractive too, but she was drawn and pale, and the makeup around her eyes could not quite conceal the redness or the swelling from where she had been crying. She stood with extraordinary dignity and smiled at us. Her voice, when she spoke, was husky, slightly nasal, as though she had a cold.
“Have you been left alone? That really is too bad of Chiddie. I shall scold him when he gets back.”
I stepped forward. “Lady Chiddester. How do you do? I am John Stone. May I present my wife, Carmen?”
She laughed and it was a surprisingly earthy sound, almost like a gurgle of pleasure. “Oh please, we are friends here, and at home. Call me Fiona, or better still, Fi. All that Downton Abbey stuff gets so tiresome, don’t you agree?” The question was directed at Carmen, who smiled and took her hand but didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
So she grinned and said, “Yes, very tiresome.” She turned her grin on me. “Isn’t that what I’m always telling Mo? ‘Enough with the Downton Abbey stuff, already!’”
Lady Chiddester, Fi, hooted and smacked Dehan’s arm. “I’m going to like you, you’re naughty! Now, do you think you can persuade your gorgeous husband to fix me a very strong martini, New York style?”
Dehan winked at me. “Make it happen, Stone. Two drinks for the naughty girls.”
I found the drinks tray and started mixing a dry martini with what I told myself was a Bronx kicker, but was simply an extra dash of vodka. I figured she needed it. Meanwhile, she linked her arm through Dehan’s and led her to the sofa.
“I suppose Chiddie has told you everything…” They sat and Fi made a noise that was wistful. “People of our generation don’t really show our feelings much, you know. It’s not considered the done thing. At least in our circle. God alone knows what everybody else does. I know you Americans positively encourage it. Perhaps you’re right to, I don’t know, but it does make it awfully hard to cope if you’re blubbering all over the place, doesn’t it?”
I handed them their drinks and sat in a comfortable old chair opposite.
She smiled her thanks. “Life doesn’t get any easier, does it, just because we feel entitled to be upset?”
“I guess it doesn’t. Lord Chiddester suggested that you might have a perspective on Katie that he lacked. If you feel up to…”
“Oh, goodness, with a couple of your martinis inside me, I’ll be up to anything. For heaven’s sake, don’t be kind.” She gazed at the open window for a moment. The last of the light had finally gone beyond the horizon, leaving only an inch of pale glow behind the inky silhouettes of the trees. “Perspective?” she said, vaguely. “I know she would have done anything on Earth to please her father. She adored him.” She gave a small, distant smile. “Poor love, she never realized that he felt exactly the same way about her.” She blinked and seemed to return from a distant place, then turned her watery eyes on me. “No man was ever good enough, naturally, for either of them. He is…” She sighed. “He is a hard act to follow. There is an awful lot of him, and you tend to get it all at once, without let up. Most men sort of wilt in his presence.”
I thought of Harry and couldn’t help smiling. “You were aware of her project?”
“Yes.” Her face said she had found it distasteful. “She could have done so many things. But they were both obsessed with this national thing, England had to be saved. Not Britain, you understand, Scotland and Wales could sod off. England had to be saved… And I suppose they were right, to some extent. But we have paid such a heavy price, and what have we achieved?”
I waited a moment, watching her, then said, “We won’t know that until we find who did this. But whatever she did achieve, it will never be enough.” She didn’t answer, and after a moment, I asked, “You were aware that she had let her relationship with Mark slide…”
“Oh!” She waved a hand at me. “That boy! He should have been Italian. The pink lips, permed hair and those appalling suits. He even wore slip-on shoes without socks! Can you imagine? I don’t think there was a drop of testosterone in his body. And men’s perfume! I ask you! Surely that is an oxymoron! Men do not use perfume! Men smell of men!”
Dehan screwed up her face and hugged Fi’s arm. I had never seen her do that before. I gave a small laugh and continued with my question. “I’m inclined to agree, Fi, but my question was: she was briefly involved with Sadiq Hassan, but that didn’t last and he claims that she was involved with a Jewish man. Have you any idea who that might have been?”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Honestly, those three religions. You know, Taoists, Buddhists, Shinto… unless they are monks and dressed in some peculiar get up, you just don’t know when you’ve met one, do you? But these Judeo-Christians, they are forever telling you about their version of God. It’s like the whole gay thing. They are forever telling you, and, I mean, I really don’t care whom you enjoy sex with or whom you pray to. I have no idea which of my friends are Christian or Jewish, or anything else for that matter. I suspect some of the more interesting ones may be into witchcraft.”
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to laugh or not. I drew breath, but Dehan cut me short. “Let me rephrase the question, Fi. Were you aware that Katie was involved with anyone other than Sadiq or Mark?”
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. It’s possible. We never pried, you understand. But certain comments she made, I got the impression that she was involved with a man and that she was somewhat ambivalent about him.”
“I’m curious,” I said, “as to how she indicated she was ambivalent about this man, if she didn’t tell you she was involved.”
She raised a withering eyebrow at me. “Are you cross-examining me, Mr. Stone?”
I offered her my blandest smile. “Only a little, Fi.”
She turned to Dehan. “Isn’t he naughty? I see why you like him.” She took a sip. “She would speak in generalities and abstractions. ‘Do you think it’s possible, Mama, to love a man who has no principles?’ ‘Mama, if you were to fall in love with a man whom you knew to be no good for you, what would you do?’”
I nodded. “I get the idea. And are these actual questions she asked you?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“How long ago?”
“We last saw her just over two weeks ago.”
Dehan sucked her teeth and sat forward, with her elbows on her knees. “Those questions could easily have been about Sadiq.”
“Oh, good heavens no! She couldn’t stand him. Vile little man, that’s how she described him. Couldn’t bear him!” Dehan and I exchanged a glance and she caught it. “What? Why the secret glance?”
Dehan answered. “He told us they were intimate…”
“He was lying. She was unequivocal about it. She found everything about him repulsive. She described him as a nasty, revolting bully. He was forever trying to get intimate and she was forever putting him off.”
I stared at her. “Forgive me for being blunt, Fi, but this could be very important. Are you absolutely certain you are not…” I searched for a polite way of saying it.
She helped me. “Kidding myself? Absolutely not. Katie has been with inappropriate boys a few times in the past and I have just had to live with it. And she has never lied to me. She was adamant about Sadiq. She was stringing him along and, in her words, would not sleep with him if he were the last man on Earth. She actually shuddered when she said it.”
I held Dehan’s eye.
Fi said, “What are you not telling me?”
The door opened and Chiddester stepped in. “My sincerest apologies. I had some, um, ah, unavoidable business to attend to…” He
trailed off. His eye flicked from Dehan’s face to his wife’s and then mine. “I am afraid I have interrupted something.”
Fi held out her hand to him. “Not at all Chiddie, darling. Come and sit down. We were just discussing Katie and that nasty little man Sadiq. I think Stone and Carmen may have something to tell us.”
There was something severe in his expression. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Really? Something that didn’t come up before?”
He crossed the room and sat, ignoring his wife’s hand. I nodded a couple of times.
“When you told us that Katie had not had intimate relations with Sadiq, I’m afraid we both dismissed it as a daughter not sharing intimate details with her parents, and a parent not wanting to see a disagreeable truth. We took this view for a very particular reason.”
Dehan took over. “Sadiq was adamant that he and Katie had been intimate. That of itself doesn’t mean anything, but when we told him we were testing her sheets, and the whole apartment, for fingerprints and DNA, he became terrified. He told us that we would find his DNA at her apartment, but he swore it was there because they had been intimate. But now, from what you are telling us, that isn’t true. So it raises the question, why is his DNA there?”
Her face went like stone and she looked at her husband. “So, Chiddie, it was him, then.”
“I hope,” I said, looking into my glass, “that you are not intending to do anything rash. Personally, I think your daughter’s assessment of Sadiq Hassan was accurate, and I am pretty sure Dehan would agree. But if you make a rash mistake now, you could cause irreparable damage to what your daughter may have achieved.”
Chiddester muttered, “What do you mean?”
“First of all, I am pretty certain Sadiq did not kill your daughter. There are unanswered questions about how his DNA got there, but the answer to those questions is not that he killed her. So that means, if he didn’t, somebody else did. Somebody with a more complex motive, somebody Sadiq Hassan thought was Jewish. Now, if I am right, that could mean that Katie had opened a big can of worms. And if she did, and we handle this investigation right, then her death need not have been in vain. But if you go off half cock and do something rash, you not only end up in jail, you also damage your own cause, and your daughter’s sacrifice ends up being for nothing.”
He nodded. “You’re right. Absolutely right. We’ll play it your way for now, but make no mistake, Stone. At some point, somehow, that little shit will pay with his life for what he did to my Katie.”
Fi nodded at him. “Hear, hear, spare no expense.”
I was spared from having to answer their comments by Trout opening the door behind me and saying, “Dinner is served, M’Lord.”
At dinner, they both seemed exhausted, and conversation was stilted and formal in a way that our previous talk had not been. They both made it clear that the discussion about Katie was closed, and the truth was, I didn’t think they had anything more to tell us. So we discussed Broadway, a subject about which I know little, the West End, about which I know less, hunting, shooting and fishing, about which I know absolutely nothing, and the difficulties of being a cold cases cop in the Bronx, a subject in which they had next to no interest at all, though they both said it was ‘frightfully interesting’.
As soon as we had finished our coffee and cognac, Dehan and I excused ourselves, saying we had to make an early start in the morning, and were shown up to our room by Trout.
It was a sultry night. We had the windows open and all the covers thrown back, save a single sheet. Outside, the moon was brilliant, turning the sky an almost green shade of turquoise. There were birds I could not identify. One may have been a nightingale, the other kept repeating two high-pitched dots, as though sending the message, ‘I’ over and over again in Morse code, echoing into infinity, lost under the moon.
Dehan had her head on my shoulder, with her black hair pressed against my cheek. “This is a very strange place, this archipelago. It has been a very strange honeymoon.”
“You want to go home? We don’t have to do this.”
She shook her head, rubbing her hair into my face. “No, I want to find who killed Katie. I like these people, they’re nuttier than squirrel shit, but I like them.”
“Nuttier than squirrel shit? Seriously?”
She raised her head to look at me from less than an inch away, so her eyes looked huge. “Yeah, you know, crazier than a soup sandwich.”
“Crazy as a cat in a dog factory?”
“Loopy as a cross-eyed cowboy.”
“I get it, the wheel’s turning but the hamster is dead.”
She laid her chin on the backs of her hands on my chest, making her nose and eyes even bigger. I didn’t want to tell her, so I stared at the ceiling instead. She said, “Justin Caulfield, an anti-Semitic Marxist pretending to be a mainstream socialist. I wonder if we could wangle a visit?”
“We could try. But what would it achieve? This case is beginning to feel very political and very British. I confess the link with the original serial killings is just slipping through my fingers. What are we saying…?”
She sighed. “I know…”
“That a man who could be Prime Minister of Great Britain in a year or two is also a serial killer? And how do we explain the fifteen years of inactivity? What’s he been doing for the last decade and a half? It doesn’t make any sense, and, more to the point, it doesn’t fit the profile of any serial killer I ever heard of. The vast majority have below average IQs, are under achievers and are socially inadequate. Not an ideal profile for a guy who has to persuade half a nation to vote for him.”
She pursed her lips into a vast pink haze on the corner of my eye. “Not a known serial killer profile, unless,” she said, “you count Hitler and his crowd of crazies as serial killers.”
“That is a very unsettling thought, Dehan. I think we need to be searching for a simpler explanation, not a crazier one.”
She gave me a big, wet kiss on my cheek, without having to move forward at all, then rolled on her back and closed her eyes.
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda,” she said without opening them, “praeter necesitatem.”
I turned to stare at her. “What?” But she was already asleep.
ELEVEN
I called Harry on the way back to London the next morning, and he met us in the lobby at the hotel. He looked embarrassed and kept saying, “Right!” like he was gearing himself up to do something. I pointed to a nest of chairs and a sofa in a quiet corner and guided him over. As we sat, he said, “So, do anything nice yesterday? Sorry I didn’t call.”
Dehan grinned and said, “Yeah, we went down to visit Chiddie and Fi. It was a scream, wasn’t it, Stone?”
He laughed like he should know what we were talking about, but didn’t. I said, “Lord Chiddester and his wife invited us down to Sussex, for dinner and a chat.”
The laughter melted out of his face. “You have to be bloody kidding me. What are you like? How’d you manage that?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you later. But first, you have something on your mind, Harry. What is it? Unburden yourself.”
He sighed. “I’m getting a bit of flack, to be honest. The people upstairs are asking questions about the direction this case is taking. It started out a clear cut case of murder, and now suddenly we have senior political figures getting dragged in…”
I raised my eyebrows. “We do?”
His look of embarrassment deepened. “Well, Lord Chiddester…”
Dehan was frowning. “I’m confused. Isn’t he the victim’s father? That isn’t exactly getting dragged in, Harry. He’s not her father because somebody came up with a crazy theory. He’s her father because Chiddie and Fi begat Katie.”
“Yes, I know that, but…”
“But all the clues keep leading to politics instead of guys in tinfoil hats.”
He sighed again. “Something like that.”
Dehan made a face and leaned back in her chair. “You’re not wrong…” She
glanced at me and I nodded. She went on, “Chiddester and his wife believe that Katie was investigating ties between the Labour Party, Marxist groups and Al Qaeda cells in London.”
He rubbed his face with his hands. “Bloody hell, I was dreading as much.”
I said, “It gets worse, Harry.”
He looked away and shook his head. “How?”
“She thought the trail led back to a shadow cabinet minister… Justin…?”
Dehan said, “Justin Caulfield.”
“The Shadow Foreign Secretary.”
He had gone the color of wet ash.
I spread my hands. “If she was right, it could be your chance, Harry. Pull it off, close the case, write the book, get rich and save your marriage.”
He showed me a face that said I was out of my mind. “You have to be joking.”
“C’mon, Harry! What happened to your killer instinct? If she’s right, you have a son of a bitch poised to become Foreign Secretary, or worse, Prime Minister; a bastard who is prepared to foster terrorism and murder a young woman to save his own neck. Go get this bastard!”
He sighed. “Do you give credence to it?” He turned to Dehan. “Do you?”
Dehan made a face. “Right now, I don’t see any reason not to. Plus…” She glanced at me.
I said, “Harry, if you’ll forgive me, I think you are looking at this the wrong way. I think you’ve got so freaked by the political implications that you have stopped looking at the evidence. You are a cop, you are not a politician. Let them worry about the politics. You follow the evidence, wherever it may lead. And you nail the bastard.”
“So you do give it credence…”
I raised my thumb. “One, it is not the serial killer from fifteen years ago. So stop looking for him. Now follow the evidence. Where does it lead?” I frowned and dropped my hand. “Speaking of which, I didn’t hear from the lab. What happened with Johnson’s sample? Also the sheets from Katie’s apartment and her house.”