Home Before Dark (39 page)

At eight o’clock, the time when the performance was due to
begin, there was still no sign of her. I made one last sortie
to the lobby of the Met which, apart from a few scurrying
late arrivals, had emptied like an hourglass.
I had no right to feel disappointed; the girl said herself she
doubted she would make it, and yet I felt both let down and
slightly resentful. Turning away, I loosened my tie, unbuttoned
my shirt collar and wandered slowly back to the steps.
I gave her another five minutes. Let that stretch out to ten.
Then, finally resigned to the fact that she wasn’t coming, I
descended to street level, looking for a taxi back to the hotel.
An elderly couple grabbed the first cab. The second that
pulled into the area was still dropping off a passenger as I
approached. I held up a hand to get the driver’s attention.
She was the passenger.
I recognised her a few seconds before she saw me. I can’t
say that my pulse quickened or my heart missed a beat.
Mostly I just felt irritated as I watched her rummaging in her bag for the fare, until I stepped in and thrust some notes
at the driver. She turned around then and with a harassed 'I
know, I know . . . I’m late’ shot me a defiant glance, as if
somehow her lateness was my fault.
I let out a sound, something between a laugh and a gasp
of exasperation, which masked the sense of wonder I felt she
looked so incredibly beautiful – as well as my secret
delight in knowing now for certain that it was Jelly.
'What the hell kept you?’ I asked.
'I’m here, aren’t I?’
Gilmans Landing

62

It was after eight now, dark out, still no sign of anyone.
Campbell got up from the desk in the parlour where he’d
set up his laptop and went through to the kitchen to get
another cold drink. Mrs Fielding had told him to make himself
at home before she went upstairs to take a nap, still insisting
Eddie would be back shortly from the village. That was over
an hour ago.
He returned to his laptop and, taking a sip of Diet Pepsi,
squinted at the screen. He scrolled back and re-read their
last conversation – the one where 'Adorablejoker’ politely tells
'Templedog’ it’s over, there’s someone else; and he’s not really
listening, refusing to take no for an answer. She stands firm,
makes it clear that she’s not 'in love’ with him, never has
been, but he either can’t or won’t see it.
' know you feel the same way … you just don’t realise it yet.’
The first warning signs.
The girl seems aloof, increasingly reluctant to talk, which
makes him only more persistent. The tone of his e-mails and
instant messages changes, becomes not so much threatening
as creepily affirmative; and, in the irrational, hopeful spin he
puts on every word he writes to 'Jelly’, every thought he
shares with her, there’s coiled aggression. The classic stalking
scenario of 'the guy who can’t let go’.
Campbell had seen it all before. He took off his glasses
and knuckled his eyes, then rolled the cold can of soda across
his brow.
He’d come across the material almost by accident. Exploring
the house earlier, he’d wandered into the study and out
of professional nosiness had gone through the desk. In an
unlocked drawer, he’d found a bunch of CDs, mostly business
correspondence, with Ed Lister’s name on some of the files.
It was no surprise to learn that Ed looked after the old lady’s
affairs. One of the CDs caught his eye.
Under the general label, 'Insurance’, he’d noticed a subheading
titled, 'For Keeps’. Maybe it was meant to stand out,
he wasn’t sure, but it had made him curious enough to boot
up his laptop and open the folder. The moment Campbell
realised what he’d stumbled upon, he downloaded the files,
carefully put the CD back where he’d found it, then took his
laptop into the parlour.
Just in case Mrs Fielding was right and Ed did show up.
Where he was sitting he would see the lights of a car coming
up the driveway.
He’d spent the past hour and a quarter wading through
the chronicle of a cyber-relationship gone bad – nearly two
hundred conversations, messages and e-mails over a six
month period from the recorded instant that Ed and the girl
met online, until a couple of days ago, when he arrived in
New York. He understood now why his client had been
reluctant to let his laptop be swept by the police. Why he’d
been scathing about the profile he’d put together of Sophie’s
killer as a 'love obsessional’. Why he hadn’t seemed in any
great hurry to meet up.
He tried Ed’s cell again; it was still switched off. He decided
to wait until the old lady reappeared, then order a taxi back
to New York. He thought about calling Kira, just to tell her
he loved her, but decided to put it off till he was done here.
Campbell had no qualms about reading Ed and Jelly’s secret
history. It was like discovering a cache of old letters in an attic
trunk. Some of the language Ed used Campbell felt he’d seen
before, recently. He cross-checked with the dialogue in the text
of Ward’s webcast, but could find no connection. Looking out
for the vivid, incoherent runes of synaesthesia identified by
Professor Derwent, he ran searches of Ed’s documents for 'words with an iron shape’ and other examples of Ernest Seaton’s
unusual condition. They failed to yield a result.
He felt relieved, but not all that surprised. The idea that
his client and Ward might be the same person Campbell had
considered and rejected early on in his investigation. He was
the wrong age, wrong nationality, wrong background, didn’t
have the IT skills. Plus, if Ed Lister was Ward, why would
he have hired him? He’d thought about Sam Metcalf 's murder – Ed couldn’t possibly have been on that train.
And Sophie, his own daughter? Forget about it.
Either his client was being set up or the links between
things were not what they seemed. Even after reading the
telltale correspondence, Campbell found it hard to get his
head around the idea of Ed Lister as a stalker.
Then he discovered the letter.
He was searching the folders for image format files, in case
Ed had stored the girl’s photo somewhere on the disc, when
he came across a jpeg file named 'Casebow’. Again it
happened almost by chance, but this time he felt sure someone
was meant to find and open the file.
It contained a single scanned image of the letter, dated July 29th 1979 which June Seaton wrote her lover but never got
to mail.

Darling dearest,
We can’t wait any longer. I’m so afraid I won’t be able
to hide my feelings and he’ll know. Last night, when we
talked about destiny bringing us together, your words lit a
fire in my heart that will never go out. I realised then that
you are the other half of my being as – yes, my darling — I
am yours.

He had an image of June Seaton, weeping and terrified, being
forced to read the passage aloud to her drunken husband.

It feels as if I’ve always known you, Eddie, but now that
we’ve found each other we mustn’t let go. The boy already
senses change coming. You were right when you (word illegible)
that if we don’t take risks in life, the price can sometimes
be far higher. I understand now.
I’m leaving him. Come tonight, June

The facsimile letter, written on blue Skylands notepaper in
a backswept feminine scrawl, appeared authentic enough with
its passionate underlinings, scorings-out, ink-smudges and
what might have been bloodstains. The letter didn’t prove
that Ed Lister was June Seaton’s lover or that he had been
at the house the night of the tragedy, or that he killed her.
But the arrows were all pointing one way.
What bothered Campbell was how Ed came to have a copy
of a letter he supposedly never received. Did he find the original
at the murder scene years ago and remove it then? Or
had it been in Grace Wilkes’s possession all this time? He
could understand his wanting to destroy what might be seen
as incriminating evidence, but why keep a copy? And then
leave it lying around? Every question led on to three more.
There were too many variables.
Yet there was no doubt about the similarities between what
June Seaton reported Ed as saying to her in 1979 and the evangelical
tone he uses with the girl, 'Jelena’, when he tells her
about his love for her. At one point, word for word. 'If we don’t
take risks in life, the price can sometimes be far higher .. '.
Jesus. Campbell wiped the sweat from his face.
Everything in the 'For Keeps’ folder made it look like Ed
Lister had stalked and possibly even killed before. He thought
about Jelly, and wondered if she had any idea what kind of
danger she was in – it was textbook that where the victim
and her stalker once had a relationship, violence was the likely
outcome.
But was he on the right track here? The evidence could
have been tampered with – it could all have been fabricated.
And where did Ernest Seaton come into this now? Campbell
knew he had to resist the obvious interpretation, respect his
own mantra: online nothing, but nothing, is ever what it
seems.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes felt tired. He
could have happily closed them for a while, taken a nap,
which reminded him that he didn’t have a place to stay in
New York. Focus.
In the moment-to-moment unfolding of the 'love story’,
he’d caught glimpses of a cyber-stalker at work, yet there was
nothing to show Ed had been gathering information about
his victim – usually a key sign of obsessive behaviour. Jelly’s
personal details would have been simple enough to obtain
without alerting her. He had her photo, he knew what she
looked like. Still, Campbell would have expected him to ask
more questions about her life, work, family, friends, her activities
outside their relationship – he shows interest in her musical
ability and offers to help her study in Paris, but doesn’t
even bother to ask her her real name.
Ed seems perfectly content to keep things at the level of
an online friendship, safely apart from his real life. He fails
to realise he’s let her under his skin until the moment he’s about to lose her and, then . . . boom, he falls madly in love. She rejects him and now, suddenly, he’s obsessed, he can’t
be without her – at least, that’s how it looks from Templedog’s
files – so he comes over to New York to find the girl, track
her down . . . and then what? Kill her?
It occurred to him that Ernest Seaton could have been
trying to warn him about his client all along. It would explain
where Skylands came into the picture, why the son might
want to let him see that Ed Lister had murdered his mother – and was getting ready to repeat the performance.
This could be about some delayed form of revenge.
Campbell stood up suddenly and walked over to the
window.
He’d heard a noise, a light scraping sound, coming from
the terrace. He held up a hand against the room’s reflection
in the glass and peered out, but it was too dark to see anything.
Raccoon most likely. The idea that Ed Lister could still be
on his way back here was making him jumpy.
Another thought struck Campbell then: if what he’d just
found out about his client was even half true, he could forget
about getting paid, let alone the bonus.
He had just become expendable.
He returned to the desk, went online and quickly pulled
up the homebeforedark website. He entered the password and,
as soon as the graphics loaded, found himself on the back
porch of the virtual mansion.
There were lights on in the house. Waiting for 'Mrs Danvers’
to come out to meet him, he remembered poor Grace Wilkes
sitting in the chair in the TV lounge with her skull split open.
When the avatar failed to appear, he set off alone on the path
through the woods to the graveyard.
It was a moonless night. No owl to be heard. Without a
flashlight he could just make out the arrowy pines, the cast
iron ornamental fence around the cemetery, but not the
graves. Looking back through the trees at Skylands, he
noticed the house seemed brighter, glowing in the darkness
like a ship at sea. Then he saw smoke billow from an upper
window and the next instant orange flames were licking
the eaves of the roof. Within seconds the fire had spread
and the whole mansion was ablaze. Campbell realised at
once that he wasn’t just witnessing a simulated disaster, the
encrypted self-destruction of Skylands suggested that the
murder-haunted website had finally come to the end of its
useful life.
This was Ward signing off.
With a feeling of dread, the detective dragged his cursor
away from the burning house and back over the little cemetery
in the woods. By the lurid flickering light of the fire, he was
able to confirm his fears.
A name had appeared on the third headstone.

Jelena Madison Sejour

Her dates hadn’t yet been carved into the stone, and the
grave was still open. But for how much longer? He had just
watched his paycheck go up in smoke, and knew only too
well what that meant as far as his future was concerned;
but Campbell couldn’t stand by and let this prediction be
fulfilled.
He had to find the girl before Ed Lister did, or else she
was going in the ground.
A girl who could be anyone, anywhere.

63

'You were someone else earlier,’ I said. 'It made things easier.’
She took a sip of wine and looked at me over the rim of
her glass. 'You really didn’t know?’
'I couldn’t be sure. Not until I saw you get out of that

taxi.’
'I’m sorry.’
'Don’t be. I enjoyed having lunch with the person in your

photograph.’
Jelly smiled. 'I wasn’t checking you out, you know.’
'It’s okay, even if you were. We met as total strangers . . .
well, maybe you had a slight advantage there.’
'It was the only way I could go through with it.’
'I understand. I’m glad you changed your mind.’
'Our souls had already met.’
'What?’
She laughed. 'It’s what people say who get to know each
other online before they meet in real-time. You know, like
their relationship grew from the inside out.’
'I imagine it leads to a lot of disappointment.’
'Are you disappointed?’
'Not yet.’
She made a face and stuck out her tongue – I saw its
glistening pointed pink tip and felt a sudden shiver of desire.
'Well, you’re about to be.’
I wondered if Jelly really meant that, or if she was just
teasing. She must have known it was, potentially, a dangerous
statement.
I sat staring at her across the narrow table lit by a candle.
We were in a restaurant downtown that’s meant to have the
best Italian food in New York – not that I remember what we ate. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I tried not to make
it too obvious by holding my gaze below the level of hers
_ focused on a shoulder or a bare arm, her hands, those
long beautiful fingers, a stretch of throat. All evening her
physical presence had an effect on me that was to say the
least disconcerting.
I’m trying to keep this account dry and plain. Two hours
of sitting beside her in the dark listening to Tchaikovsky had
raised the temperature.
She wore a thrift-shop dress of black tulle – an ironic reference
to the ballet, I imagined – put together cleverly with
other items of inexpensive clothing and jewelry themed on the colours pink and black, so that she looked modern and
old-fashioned at the same time. She had the bones and the
verve to carry it off. Her hair was a frizzy cloud. The effect was original and utterly enchanting.
'I can’t tell any more what you’re thinking.’
'The old
ESP
letting you down?’ I smiled. 'I’m thinking if
I touched your hair I’d get an electric shock.’
'Nope, definitely not working. When we were online I
always knew what was on your mind.’
'It’s like blind people who recover their sight. Their other
senses, which became heightened to compensate, go back to normal’
'Is that really true?’
I shrugged and reached over suddenly and touched her hand and the shock went through us both. If we’d lost the knack of knowing what the other was going to say next, almost
of being inside each other’s heads, something else had taken its place. A sense of connection that I think we both found
a little overwhelming.
There was no effort involved. We got along as if we’d always
known each other, picking up a conversation that had been
going on forever. We talked among other things about music
and her place at the Conservatoire in Paris (there was still
resistance there) and, of course, Sophie. She asked me if
they’d caught the person who killed her and those poor girls
on the train. I said, not yet.
She understood that I didn’t want to discuss it and we
moved on.
'You don’t work in a kindergarten?’