Home Before Dark (31 page)

In the subway, waiting for a train back to Manhattan, I thought
about what had happened on the street. It was nothing really,
a combination of not enough sleep and mild heatstroke. The
whole incident had lasted a couple of minutes and I was now fully recovered. It was just the hand at the elbow that bothered
me – a firm, intimate grip that I could still feel.
I imagined Jelly coming down here at rush hour. She must have walked along this platform thousands of times, perhaps even sat on this same bench – that is, if she really did use the Church Avenue stop, if I could trust anything she had told me.
I remembered asking her once if she’d read Truman
Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and being surprised by her
sharp, indignant reaction. 'You think I’m like the girl in that
book? You really think I’d lie about important stuff?’
I wondered what the expression on her face had been when
she typed that. Maybe Will was right and the only reliable
assumption about the internet is that everybody tells lies all
the time. A worldwide tissue of lies.
I was still thinking about Jelly when the Sixth Avenue
local trundled into the southbound platform on the other
side of the station. Half paying attention, I watched a dozen
people get off and make for the exits. The train pulled out
and then I noticed, across the tracks, a young woman left
behind in the middle of the platform, lost in concentration
while she fiddled with her cell phone. She was no one I’d
ever seen before, and yet something about her seemed
familiar.
She was standing in profile, her head slightly bowed. Tall,
slim, elegant just in the way she held herself— at that distance,
I couldn’t be certain. Then she turned towards me, laughing
into the phone.
She was taller than I’d pictured her, or it may have been
that her hair looked different – it was lighter and frizzier and
tied up in some elaborate sort of way. She turned and the
instant I saw her face, I knew.
It was strange how it affected me, how unprepared I was
for a moment I’d anticipated often enough. I was struck not
so much by her appearance – though I could tell she was
everything I’d dreamed – as by the simple fact that she existed,
that she was really here in the world. It confirmed what I
already knew in my heart to be true. I recognised her as the
same person that I loved.
At the time it had the overwhelming force of revelation.
Jelena hadn’t spotted me yet. I didn’t know whether to
wave to her, call out her name, or run back up the stairs,
cross the street and approach her on the far platform. I was
mesmerised, afraid that if I made any kind of move the spell
would be broken. Somebody walked through my line of sight.
I saw them only as a blur.
I don’t remember hearing the train until seconds before it
came hurtling through on the middle track. I stood up then,
Jelly looked across the rails, and for a brief instant our eyes
met.
She didn’t smile; as far as I could tell her face never changed
its expression. I just saw her shoulders stiffen as if in shock
or fright. . . that’s the only way I can be sure she recognised
me. The next moment we lost each other.
The train that had suddenly come between us, a Coney
Island express, seemed to go on forever. I tried to keep eye
contact with her through carriage after carriage of brightly
lit windows as they streaked past, but it was hopeless.
When the far platform came back into view, I was already
sprinting for the Macdonald Avenue exit. Jelly had vanished.

'You said there used to be a piano up at the house.’ She was
protecting someone, Campbell thought, or else afraid.
Grace nodded. 'An old upright in the parlour . . . it’s still
there. June loved to play. She was such a talented, creative
person.’
It occurred to him that Ernest Seaton might have got to
her first. In which case, every word would likely find its way
back. He was tempted to tell Grace about the more recent
murders he was investigating and that he believed were
connected with what happened at Skylands. But it was too
soon. He asked her instead if the boy had inherited his
mother’s musical gift.
'Ernie?’ Grace smiled. 'He didn’t care at all for music,
when he was little, if anyone so much as hummed a tune
around him, he’d clap his hands over his ears and howl. They
had his hearing checked, turned out to be perfect.’
He recalled Dr Stilwell’s description of the orphaned boy
comparing Mozart to the taste of dead flies. Grace didn’t
seem aware of StilweU’s diagnosis.
'He must have had difficulty coping with everyday life.’
'Some,’ she said, hesitating. 'He was a solitary child. Ernie
didn’t make friends easy, but that’s how he preferred it. The
other kids just thought he was weird.’
'I meant because of the way he was affected by music’
'I know what you meant,’ she said. 'Anyone put on a record
or played the radio around him, he’d get upset… his father’d
say, “Boy’s just seeking attention” and turn up the volume.’
'But you knew it caused him genuine distress.’
She nodded. 'I remember one time June was in the parlour
practising, playing the same tune over and over, when all a
sudden I heard this almighty crash. I ran in to find her bowed
over the closed piano-lid. The notes still jangling. Ernie was
standing by her, his face kind of a dusky red, glowering out
from under his brow with a look that . . . well, it scared me.
I could guess at what had happened, but June acted like it
was an accident. She covered up for him.’
An outsider born and bred, Campbell thought, smart not
crazy, yet predisposed to psychosis, unlikely to feel remorse
or understand the feelings of others . . .
'Do you remember the name of the tune?’
'You’ve got to be kidding.’
Campbell glanced around the empty coffee shop. Then he
leant forward and started to whistle for Grace, slightly off
key, the opening bars to 'Fur Elise’. He saw her eyebrows
crawl towards each other, her mouth fall open in disbelief.
'How in the name of Jesus did you know that?’
He didn’t answer, letting her think about it for several
seconds.
'You have to help me find him, Grace.’
Her eyes filled with tears. 'I’ve already told you everything
I know . more than I should have done.’
'Does the name “Ward” mean anything to you?’
'No.’ She didn’t hesitate.
'I think there’s a chance that the Ernest you raised and
loved has become a danger to others. Grace, you’d be helping
him '
'I never raised him. Did I say that?’
She broke down then, sobbing quietiy, shielding her eyes
with her hands. He waited until she recovered, then he asked,
'Has he been back in touch?’
'I’m sorry, I can’t… I have to go now.’ She swept up her
pink cell phone, then reached for the gaily decorated crutches
and clumsily got up, her mouth set in a straight line like a
stubborn old pony’s as she manoeuvred her way out of the
booth.
He just sat there, knowing he’d blown it, feeling a kind of
pity for her.

Campbell paid the check and followed Grace Wilkes out to
the parking lot. She was trying to put the key in the door of
a black late-model Taurus, her hand shaking so much she
was having difficulty.
'Here, let me get that for you,’ he said.
She reluctantly handed over the key. 'Are you married, Mr
Armour?’
He smiled and held up his left hand with the gold eternity band on the ring finger. 'Four years in August. We have a little girl, Amy.’
He opened the car door for her. She threw the crutches
in first and swung herself into the driver’s seat. Reaching for a pack of Newport Lites, she tapped out a cigarette and lit UP— She blew a thin stream of smoke out of the corner of her
mouth, directing it away from Campbell. 'Then go home,’
she said, glancing back up at him, 'go home to them. Leave
this alone.’
'I have to find Ernest Seaton first,’ Campbell said, leaning
through the car window. 'And when I do, I plan to ask him
about the murders of Sophie Lister and Sam Metcalf. If you
change your mind, you have my numbers, call me.’
She took another drag. 'I should have never talked to you
in the first place.’
'Before somebody else gets hurt, Grace. He might listen

to you.’
Staring ahead through the windshield, she exhaled noisily
and then waved her hand to disperse the smoke; her face
half in sunlight had an unhealthy sheen. Cigarette between
her lips, she turned the key in the ignition and, without
looking at Campbell, said in a small flat voice, 'He doesn’t
know.’

51

Investigator Morelli was standing in the middle of Sam
Metcalf’s empty living room, thinking about lunch. This
was day three of the diet and he was looking forward to a bistecca fiorentina and salad at a family-run trattoria he liked
near the Porta Romana. At home, the challenge of sticking
to a low-carb regime was complicated by the fact he hadn’t
told Maria yet he was trying to lose weight.
He could expect, when he did, a narrowing of her black

eyes.
He wasn’t sure what had brought him back here. He just
happened to be in the Oltrarno, driving past Sam’s door, and
decided to take another look around. He’d know it when he
saw it, he told himself, as he threw open a window to let
some air into the hot, stuffy apartment.
He thought about the young American woman he’d first
encountered on a slab in the morgue in Linz choosing to
call a dump like this home for most of her adult life. Her
belongings had been shipped last week. The few remaining
sticks of furniture belonged to the landlord. Even her absence
had started to fade. You really had to know Sam’s story,
Morelli thought, to get the melancholy feeling that hung
about the three bare rooms. A new tenant moving in on
Saturday.
He was reminded of the painful telephone conversation
he’d had with Sam’s parents in Boston. His colleagues
claimed it was the worst part of being a cop, informing the
next of kin, and never got any easier. In Morelli’s experience,
talking to those who knew and loved the victim best helped
him do his job. He’d hoped to give the Metcalfs positive
news about the way the investigation was going, but the
forensic report on the train from the Austrian police wasn’t
encouraging.
The murderer had left the sleeper inexplicably clean; just
as he had the grotto at the Villa Nardini. Not a ghost of an
identifier. When he considered what the creep had got away
with on that train, he could understand the Viennese media
branding him 'the Master of Death’, but it really didn’t help
matters,
Morelli went through to the bathroom. He looked under
the old-fashioned claw-foot tub and inside the medicine
cabinet; then removed the top of the cistern and felt behind
it before flushing the toilet. His men had crawled all over the
Place. They wouldn’t have missed much.
He frowned at his reflection in the mirror-fronted cabinet
while he washed his face and hands, going into a daydream
about Gretchen. On the phone, she had suggested meeting
up for a romantic weekend in Paris. Maybe it wasn’t such a
bad idea. If he could find a way of linking the trip to his
work. He needed to have a talk with Laura Lister, which
might qualify as a valid reason for foreign travel. There was
a question mark over her husband and Paris.
He wandered into the kitchen and sat at the table listening
to the wall-clock above the stove ticking away in the stillness.
He felt depressed. Sam Metcalf had been dead a week and
he had nothing, not a single lead. His suspicion that Ed
Lister was having an affair with a woman half his age hardly
counted as a development. Morelli sank lower in his chair,
considering the Listers and the damage done to their
marriage; something told him that the secret to solving the
case still lay with their daughter, Sophie. He’d been looking
at what happened here from Sam’s perspective. He needed
to go back to the beginning and try a different path – focus
on Sophie Lister coming to the flat to use her friend’s
computer.
He had to assume that she never confided in Sam about
the stranger he was convinced she was chatting to online, or
Sam would surely have mentioned it to Sophie’s father? Yet
the drawings in the artist’s sketchbook suggested that she knew
there was reason to be wary. Maybe she was embarrassed to
talk to the older girl, or afraid, or intended doing so but left
it too late – Sam flew back to Boston to visit her family the
week before the murder. If Sophie had been intrigued enough
to meet up with the stranger in real-time, which Morelli felt
sure was what happened, it made it less likely she would have
spoken to anyone.
But say Sophie did agree to meet her killer, she was bound
to have been somewhat concerned about safety. She might
have taken precautions; left a note perhaps, or some clue to
the man’s identity, even a description, as insurance in case
something happened to her. The trouble was that, other than
his screen-name, it was unlikely she’d have known much about
him – unless she saw him again.
With a gloomy sigh he looked up at the Annunciation clock,
the one obvious place he hadn’t checked during his
perfunctory search. The Angel Gabriel’s outstretched arm
stirred a memory of his wife, after they got married, offering
her bridal bouquet to the Madonna in the church of
Santissima Annunziata for good luck.
He rose from the table and, pulling a chair over to the
ancient stove, climbed onto the hob. Balancing precariously
on the cast-iron grills, he reached up to the clock and felt
behind the laminated panel of its long rectangular face: the
angel’s stubby wings, the orchard trees, the loggia where Mary
sat at a lectern. Oily dust and grime stuck to his fingers; there
was nothing there.
He lifted the clock away from the wall and revealed some
suspect-looking electrical wiring, but that was all. He heard
his stomach growl.
Time for that rare bistecca fiorentina and, sacrilege, a glass
of water.

The investigator pulled Sam’s old front door shut behind
him. As he removed the yellow crime-scene tape, bundling
it up and tossing it in a corner of the landing, he noticed
with irritation how filthy his hands had become.
He hesitated – he could hear rock music blasting from the
Iranians’ apartment below that struck him, unreasonably
perhaps, as disrespectful – then he unlocked the door, went
back inside.
In the bathroom he washed his hands for the second time.
Consulting his image again in the mirrored doors of the
cabinet, he patted his cheeks and thought, Yes, maybe you
do look a little thinner, Andrea.
He smiled, and then he got it.
'Ma stai scherzando,’ he said aloud. It was staring him in