Hard Light (11 page)

I thought of the photo of a young Morven in the Dunfrieses' bedroom. I wondered again who took it; also, who the third girl had been. She too seemed vaguely familiar, but the connection between Morven and Poppy was of little interest to anyone, even me. Adding Mallo Dunfries and Adrian Carlisle and illegal drugs to the daisy chain made it marginally more interesting, if only to a member of law enforcement.

Yet I had the nagging sense that there was something else going on, some hidden pattern I wouldn't be able to discern unless I broke my memory's skin and watched it bleed. Just as Morven's face had lit up some long-buried sector of my brain, so did Poppy Teasel's name.

And Adrian Carlisle's. A song echoed through my mind: no title, just the melody and a few words.

The wind, the wind, the wind blows high …

One of Poppy Teasel's—I could hear her hoarse alto prolonging the word
high
like it was the last drag on a cigarette. I closed my eyes and tried to summon the title from my memory.

It was hopeless. If Quinn's musical memory palace was a meticulously restored 1952 Seeburg C, mine was a demolished Sears Lift 'n'Play. I ground my fists against my eyes, pulled the sleeping bag over my head, and tried to sleep.

At some point I woke. It was still dark, save for the blue glow of the gas heater. Behind the wooden screen, something moved, very slowly. Not something: Adrian. I stiffened and watched through slitted eyes, fearful he'd shine a light on me.

But he didn't emerge from behind the screen. It was too dark to see any silhouette or sign of movement, but I could hear him step stealthily from the mattress to the floor. After a moment, I heard another noise, so faint as to be nearly imperceptible—the sound of a carpet being pulled back—and then the faint but distinct scratching of fingernails on a wood surface.

I held my breath and very carefully extended my hand from the sleeping bag until it rested flat against the worn floorboard. I heard a soft
thump,
and beneath my palm felt the floor vibrate slightly.

Where do you think she hides them? I pulled up the floorboards, there's nothing there.

It takes one to know one. I withdrew my hand into the sleeping bag and listened as Adrian picked up something. After a few minutes, he set it back into the floor. I heard a furtive kiss of wood as he replaced the board, drew the carpet across it, and returned to his bed.

I lay awake, trying to judge from his breathing whether he was awake, asleep, or just pretending to be asleep. What was hidden beneath the floorboard? Drugs, probably, or whatever it was that Adrian was helping Mallo smuggle.

But it could also be something that would pose a more immediate threat to me: namely, a gun. I huddled in my sleeping bag and watched light gradually trace the outlines of the room's sole window, until it shone brightly through a rip in the newspaper covering it.

At last Adrian stirred beneath his blankets. I kept my eyes slitted, feigning sleep, and watched until he at last sat up and stepped out from behind the wooden screen. Like me, he'd slept fully dressed. He rubbed his forehead, blinking; then stood and crossed to the kerosene heater and adjusted its setting. A low
whoosh,
and he held his hands over the gas mantel to warm them. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing him to leave. After a few minutes he yawned, then padded from the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

I scrambled from the sleeping bag, darted to the door, and locked it. If Adrian returned I'd say I wanted to get dressed and was worried someone would walk in on me. I hurried to his bedside, dropped to my knees, and slid my hand beneath the kilim rug, running my palm back and forth across the worn wood boards until I felt a small gap. Quickly I yanked back the carpet.

The wooden planks were wide and four or five feet long—the original oak flooring, sanded but unfinished. Old square-head nails pierced the fine grain, but they had been removed from one board and replaced with newer, round-head nails. When I prised my fingernails beneath the edge of this board, it lifted easily. Beneath was the subfloor, its ancient, pitted wood black with age. There was a rectangular gap between two of the boards. I glanced over my shoulder and thrust my hand into the hole.

It was surprisingly deep, and even colder than the room around me. For a moment I was afraid I wouldn't be able to reach whatever was hidden there.

Then my fingers brushed something soft. I grabbed it and pulled it out—a small gray canvas bag, like an old-fashioned mailbag. I opened it and reached inside. My fingers closed around an object, one of several, none larger than my hand. I turned toward the window to get a better look.

It was an arrowhead. Flint, I guessed; the length of my middle finger and not much wider. Beautifully worked, its edges serrated. The stone was so thin it seemed impossible that someone could have created it without the flint splitting.

I withdrew one of the other objects: a bone, not much larger than a matchstick. I held it up to the light, then tipped the contents of the bag into my palm. Another arrowhead, so tiny I wondered what it might have been meant for—fish? Mice?—and a number of small bones.

I arrayed these on the floor and stared at them. To my unpracticed eye they appeared human. I moved them around as though they were the pieces of a puzzle, arranging them into the shape of a skeletal hand.

Can't keep up with the demand,
Adrian had said. For a long moment I stared at the gruesome little tableau, then swept bones and flints back into the canvas bag, folded it, and replaced it where I'd found it. I dropped the floorboard in place, covered it with the rug, and hastily unlocked the door.

I didn't need to hurry. Several more minutes passed, and still no Adrian. I checked to see if my boots had dried, making sure the ziplock bag with my money and passport was still safe, and did a circuit of the room to see if there was anything useful I might have missed last night.

If there was, Adrian had hidden it even better than the artifacts. Other than a few framed pictures propped on the windowsill, I saw nothing new.

I picked up a photo of a younger Adrian with Vivienne Westwood, and another photo of a tall, strong-jawed woman who stood with arms outstretched atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. Judging from her bobbed blond hair and makeup—frosted pink lipstick, blue eyeshadow—the photo dated to the late 1960s.

The only other picture looked as if it had been clipped from a magazine. It showed a stately home of rosy brick, with wood-framed casement windows, turrets, and a neatly raked, circular gravel drive in front. I recognized it as the same Tudor-era building that Mallo had a photo of on the wall beside the Mortensen print. The highly saturated color suggested it had been taken in the late 1950s. A caption ran beneath the image.

Kethelwite Manor, ancestral home of

The rest of the caption had been cut out of the frame.

Behind me the door opened. I set the photo back onto the sill and turned to see Adrian toss a towel at the clothing rack.

“Bathroom's free.” His lugubrious voice filled the room. “I'd take advantage of that before someone else does.”

I scooped up my bag and headed down the hall, musing on that magazine photo. The name Kethelwite Manor was unfamiliar, but the place had the look of one of those abandoned country homes taken over by rock stars who'd hole up with snowdrifts of blow and a dozen teenage hangers-on. Fairport Convention at Farley Chamberlayne, Led Zeppelin carousing in Aleister Crowley's Boleskine House. These days they're owned by Russian oligarchs and the same members of the Saudi royal family who'd invested in Adrian's squat.

Why would Adrian and Mallo both have pinups of the same stately home?

There weren't any hints in the hallway here. In daylight, the house was even more depressing. I saw no signs of the anarchic glee I associated with squatting on the Lower East Side half a lifetime ago. No posters or graffiti, no attempts at painting walls or repairing broken windows, beyond covering them with newspaper or cardboard. A baby's thin wail echoed from upstairs, and a black plastic bag tossed in a corner smelled unmistakably of shit.

The bathroom was occupied, so I waited until the young woman I'd seen the night before emerged. Her dreadlocks were now covered by a blue scarf, and she wore faded hospital scrubs patterned with flowers.

“All yours,” she said, and gave me a tired smile.

I cleaned up best I could. I ducked my head beneath the cold water tap, then toweled my hair with a newspaper I found on the windowsill. The gash on my cheek was still fresh enough to seep blood if I touched it, so I left it alone and hoped it wouldn't get infected. The star-shaped scar beside my eye shone stubbornly through, no matter how much concealer I used.

In the last three months, two people had said I carried the dead with me. I was starting to look it.

Back in Adrian's room I beelined back to the heater. Adrian had changed into black pants, black Doc Martens and a black Alexander McQueen sweater with a tiny grinning skull on the collar.

“There someplace around here I can get coffee?” I asked.

Adrian stared intently at his mobile, shaking his head. “Caffè Nero down the street. There's some strange shit coming down.”

“Meaning what?”

He held up the mobile so I could see a jittery soundless video of running figures silhouetted against a wall of flames, a building engulfed by smoke. Dark starbursts blotched the screen, falling snow or maybe ash from the fire.

“What the hell is that?”

“Police car responding to a call went off the road and smashed into a pump at a petrol station by Sainsbury's. Went up in a fireball. A lot of people were doing their shopping because of the storm; they don't know yet if anyone was killed.”

More images flashed across the screen: a woman's mouth open in a silent scream, overturned cars. People crowded outside the entrance to a big-box supermarket, staring in horror at something just out of my range of vision. It was hard to imagine anyone
hadn't
been killed.

“Jesus. Is that nearby?”

Adrian shook his head. “Alperton. They're saying he was going after some kids throwing snowballs at cars. They ran for the petrol station and he plowed right into them. Fucking filth. This is how it starts. Soon they'll be kettling all those folks, right?”

He swiped at the screen. “Yeah, look.
Looters by Canal at Alperton
. Narrowboat in flames, someone says they saw people throwing someone or something from a rooftop. Shit. Now there's a flashmob by Wembley Stadium. Let's go.”

He stood and headed for the clothes rack. I stared after him. “What the hell? You're going
out
?”

“We have a job to do.
You
have a job to do. Alperton's an hour and a half away. You hear anything out there?”

He gestured at the window. I walked over and pressed my ear against the glass. “No.”

“London is a very big place. But if transport gets fucked up, you'll be on foot. Come on.”

I remained where I was. Adrian yanked his overcoat from the rack, glancing over his shoulder. “Did you hear me? Get your stuff, we're leaving.”

He pulled on his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck, stared at his top hat before heading to the door without it.

I got my bag and followed him downstairs, out the back door, and across the rank lawn. Frozen grass splintered beneath my feet, shining in the morning light. A car alarm whooped in the street, setting off a volley of barks from the house next door. High overhead a jet droned. No sirens, nothing but the ordinary sounds of a waking city, somewhat muffled by the snow.

I ducked behind the ivy-covered panel, trailing Adrian. He walked quickly, following the chain-link fence until it ended at the edge of a small parking lot. We crossed the lot without speaking and trudged on to the Highgate Underground Station.

An hour later, fine snow swirled through the streets as we exited at Stepney Green. Despite the bad weather, people still rushed to work, cursing as they slid on the icy street. Snow shovels and calcium chloride appeared to be unknown here. I saw a few shop owners sweeping ineffectually at the sidewalks outside their doors, but no plow trucks or sanders. I stopped at a stall and bought a cheap black watch cap and gloves to replace the ones I'd lost in Iceland, along with a knockoff McQueen scarf covered with tiny grinning skulls.

“Four quid?” Adrian looked offended. “Some Chinese kid got paid ten pence for that.”

“Right, and you're the conscience of the nation.” I reached to flick the collar of the McQueen sweater peeking from his overcoat. “What did that cost?”

“More than four quid.”

“Explain how that's a better thing?”

He remained silent and stony faced as we trudged through the snow. On the train, he'd scrawled a map on the back of one of his cards, along with a phone number. When we reached a busy intersection a short distance from the station, he stopped.

“You're on your own. Ring me when you've done the drop.”

“How am I going to do that without a phone?”

He held up a TracFone. “That number goes to this mobile. After I hear from you, it's gone.”

He handed me the TracFone, and I pulled the watch cap down over my ears. “That's it? I deliver this and I'm free to go?”

Adrian shrugged. “If Mallo wants you, he'll find a way to be in touch.”

With a flick of his long black coat and scissor legs, Adrian disappeared back down the snow-driven sidewalk. I hunched into my jacket and tried to make sense of the map he'd drawn for me, shoved the card into my pocket, and crossed the street.

This part of Stepney was an expanse of aging tower blocks and council housing, pound stores and kebab shops, puncuated by a few terraces that hadn't been bombed to rubble during the Blitz. Blowing snow imparted the grainy texture of damaged film stock: backward glimpses into the ruins of wartime or a keyhole image of a grim near-future. The cold did nothing to cut the stinks of diesel and scorched grease and cigarette smoke. I ducked into a Caffe Nero for some coffee and popped a Focalin from what was left of my stash. I'd have to find another source, or steel myself for the scratched-eyeball panic of withdrawal.