Killing the Shadows (2000) (22 page)

“You know what I think about those muckrakers,” Kit protested. “How can you be sure they’ve got it right about her relationship with the undercover guard? Maybe they were just mates. Maybe he was just a contact that she milked for ideas and deep background.”

Fiona shrugged. “I can’t be certain. But they’ve obviously got some very high-level sources and they exploit them to the hilt. So unless we hear otherwise, I’d take what they say at face value.”

“Easier said than done,” he muttered.

“One thing that might help set your mind at rest when you’re ringing round to see if anybody else has had threatening letters, see if anybody knows whether Jane had one. If she didn’t, then it’s even more evidence to support my theory that people who write death threats aren’t the ones who kill.”

“Maybe I should just ring the local police and ask them.”

“Yeah, right. Like they’re going to tell you.”

“They might tell Steve.”

Fiona acknowledged the sense of his statement with a dip of her head.

“And I’m meeting him tomorrow night anyway,” Kit continued, taking the roasting dish of vegetables out of the oven and tipping them into the couscous. He placed the food on the table with a flourish and sat down facing Fiona. “I’m going to ask Steve if he can find out about whether Jane got any death threat letters,” he said. “If she didn’t, then you’re probably right, and Georgia and I are in the clear. And in the meantime, I promise to be careful without being paranoid. Will that do you?”

Fiona smiled. “That’ll do me fine. But if somebody does come after you with a knife, no heroics. Just leg it.”

“What? You don’t want me to stand my ground and be a man?” Kit teased.

“God, no. I’m far too busy to take time off to organize a funeral.” Fiona tasted her dinner. “Mmm. Wonderful. Take care of yourself, darling, I could never afford to replace you in the kitchen.”

Kit pretended to look hurt. “Only in the kitchen?”

“If I don’t eat every day, I die,” she said. “I’d miss shagging you, but it wouldn’t kill me.”

“You think not?” he said dangerously.

“Let’s not put it to the test.”

He grinned. “Right answer, Doctor. So, do you fancy a quiet night in?”

“Kit, we’ve never had a quiet night in. Why would we start now?” She raised her eyebrows provocatively. “But I wouldn’t say no to fucking your brains out.”

“You talked me into it, you smooth bastard.” Kit’s grin promised to take no prisoners.

Jane Elias would soon be cold in earth. Neither of them had forgotten that for a moment. Keeping the ghosts at bay was the most important thing they could do for each other, and they knew it. It was, as so often in the past, their unspoken contract.

G
eorgia Lester sat at the kitchen table, hands cradling a china cup of weak Earl Grey tea, staring unseeingly down past autumn-bedraggled herbaceous borders to the skeleton apple trees at the bottom of her cottage garden. She didn’t register the perennials that were due to be cut back, the roses that would be pruned when next the gardener came. That was neither her interest nor her job. She only ever noticed the garden when it was beautiful. Ugliness she preferred to tune out. There was enough of that in her head without adding to it from outside.

What she enjoyed about her cottage was the peace. Being Georgia Lester was a tiring business. It was a constant effort to maintain the image of sophisticated beauty and elegance that the world expected from her. Of course, she had created that expectation herself, a conscious invention of a persona and style that would mark her out from the herd. But that didn’t make it any easier, and these days, whenever she looked in the mirror in the morning, it seemed as if the mountain was looming higher every day. Perhaps it was time for another visit to that charming man in Harley Street who had done such a good job with that loose skin around her jawline.

But here at the cottage, she could absolve herself from the need to maintain the facade. Well, she could when she was here alone, she amended, a sly smile of reminiscence lifting the corners of her mouth. A girl did need distraction now and again, and devoted as Anthony was, he couldn’t quite provide the stimulus of a taut young body with all the sexual energy that accompanied it. None of her flirtations lasted long, she made sure of that. Nor did they mean anything more to her than a kind of blood transfusion something necessary but somehow impersonal.

This weekend, however, Georgia had a different agenda. No dressing up for lovers, just working on her rewrites. Unlike most of the writers she knew, Georgia loved the revision process. It allowed her to step back from the nuts and bolts of getting her first draft on paper and focus on the quality of the writing itself. She’d established a reputation for finely crafted prose, and she always maintained that came from her attention to the detailed sentence-on-sentence shape of her book. She had three clear days of her favourite work ahead now, and she was looking forward to it.

Already, her mind was racing onwards to the section of the book she would be working on that day. The typescript was already sitting on her desk, next to the Mont Blanc Meisterst¨ck fountain pen she always used to make the revisions her secretary would later transfer to the computer. She wasn’t even going to bother dressing yet. She’d slob around in her fluffy dressing gown, hair hidden in a silk turban, until lunchtime. Then she’d soak in the bath while she listened to The World At One. A snack for lunch, then she’d have to venture out into Dorchester. There was plenty of food in the freezer, but she’d inexplicably run out of white wine, and dinner without a glass of chilled Chablis was unthinkable. She firmly believed that writers needed the discipline of routine. And that included the small pleasures of life as well as the habits of mind that made it possible for her to turn out a book a year.

Georgia finished her tea and poured a fresh cup. She planned to make the most of these three days. When they were over, she would be plunged into an author tour to promote her latest hardback. Thinking of it reminded her that she still hadn’t persuaded her publisher to foot the bill for the handsome bodyguard she’d hired before leaving London. She didn’t really think anyone was after her, in spite of her protestations to dear, sweet Kit that they should take those tiresome letters to the police. But she had no objections to cashing in on the possibility. It never hurt to keep one’s name firmly in the public eye. The notion that she was sufficiently significant a writer to attract the attention of a stalker would inevitably draw new readers to her, curious to discover what it was about her that was so special. And once drawn to her, Georgia was utterly convinced they would remain to devour her backlist in its entirety.

Thanks to astute planning like that, she had climbed to the top of the heap. She was well aware that her activities earned her disapproval from many of her fellows. It bothered her not a whit. They could pretend all they liked that they were too high-minded to stoop to her tactics. The reality was that they were jealous of the column inches she gathered.

Unaware that she was about to generate the greatest publicity of her career, Georgia sipped her tea and felt very, very contented.

F
iona was running late. Literally. Dodging students, she swerved into her secretary’s office. “Bloody Northern Line,” she gasped, trying to wrestle her coat off and open her office door at the same time. She crossed the threshold, shedding jacket and briefcase and reaching for the folder of notes for the departmental meeting that had been due to start five minutes earlier, her secretary following her.

“There’s a Spanish policeman been trying to get you,” she said. She consulted a message sheet in her hand. “A Major Salvador Berrocal. He’s been ringing every ten minutes for the last half-hour.”

“Shit, shit shit!” Fiona muttered savagely.

“He said would you call him back as soon as possible,” her secretary added helpfully as Fiona dithered between desk and doorway. “It sounded urgent.”

“I’ve got to go to this meeting,” she said. “Barnard’s been trying to dump half his seminars and I don’t want to be landed with them.” She ran a hand through her hair. “OK. Call Berrocal and tell him I’m unavoidably detained but I’ll get back to him as soon as I can. Sorry, Lizzie, I’ve got to run.”

She raced down the corridor and skidded to a halt outside the meeting room, attracting curious looks from those who had only ever seen Fiona in cool and elegant mode. She paused for a moment, smoothing her hair and taking a deep breath to regain her composure, then swept in with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, tube,” she muttered, taking her place halfway down one side of the conference table. Professor Barnard neither faltered in his convoluted sentence nor graced her with a glance.

It felt like the longest meeting in history, and Fiona had to force herself not to fidget restlessly as they ploughed through seemingly endless departmental minutiae. She managed to contain her impatience, refusing to allow Barnard’s domineering presence to fluster her into accepting more than one additional seminar group. But even as she argued her case, half her mind was on Berrocal’s urgent message. He must have a suspect in custody. Or so she hoped.

At the end of the meeting, Fiona scooped up her papers and swept out, earning raised eyebrows and an exchange of meaningful looks between those of her colleagues who preferred to dismiss her as being too arrogant by half. Back in her office, she asked Lizzie to hold her calls and started to dial Berrocal’s number before she was even seated.

“Major Berrocal?” she asked when the phone was answered on the second ring.

“Si. Dr. Cameron?” His tone gave no clue to the nature of his news.

“I’m sorry not to have called back before this, but I couldn’t get away,” she gabbled. “You have a development?”

He sighed. “Not the sort I had hoped for. I am afraid we have another murder.”

Fiona’s heart sank. This was the news she had been dreading so much she had refused to consider it a serious possibility. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said inadequately.

“I am calling to ask if it is possible for you to come back to Toledo and consult further with us. Perhaps the information generated by this latest murder might help you pinpoint where we should be looking for our suspect now.”

Fiona closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, hoping he could hear the genuine regret in her voice. “It’s impossible at present. I have too many commitments here that I can’t avoid.”

There was a ponderous silence. Then Berrocal said, “I was afraid you would say that.”

“There’s no reason why I can’t examine the evidence if you can fax the details to me,” she said, her sense of duty kicking in ahead of her common sense.

“That would be possible?”

“I’ve got a very heavy schedule, but I’m sure I could make time to analyse the material,” she assured him, already wondering how she would fit it in.

“Thank you,” he said, his relief palpable even over the phone.

“Perhaps you could give me the bare bones now?” Fiona asked, pulling a blank pad towards her and tucking the phone between ear and shoulder.

“The body was found inside the courtyard of the Alcazar.” Berrocal’s voice was clipped and clinical now. “An Englishwoman, Jenny Sheriff. Twenty-two years old, from Guild-ford.” He split the unfamiliar place name into two words. “She was working as a receptionist at the Hotel Alfonso the Sixth on a year-long exchange to improve her Spanish. Her shift ended at ten last night and she told a colleague that she was meeting a man for coffee in the square. She said he was fascinating, he knew all there was to know about Toledo.”

“Did she mention his name?” Fiona asked.

“No. We have a barman who says he served her and a man with coffee and brandy just after ten. He remembers because he had noticed her several times before, drinking there with friends. But he didn’t notice the man she was with because he was sitting with his back to the bar. The barman doesn’t remember them leaving, because a group of tourists came in for drinks shortly after that.”

“When was she found?”

“This morning, the custodian who opens up for the rest of the staff at the Alcazar found the staff entrance unlocked. When he walked into the courtyard, he saw her lying there. She had been stabbed several times in the stomach. Our preliminary report indicates that the murder weapon was probably a military bayonet. The death matches those of many of the Republicans killed by Franco’s forces when they relieved the siege of the Alcazar in the Civil War. This ties in with the theme you identified of tourist scenes associated with violent death. And there is a further connection. Like Martina Albrecht, her vagina had been mutilated after death by repeated insertions of a broken bottle. And finally, there was also a city tourist map from the hotel in her pocket. So, I think there is little doubt that we are dealing with the same man. Delgado or whoever.” His voice was edgy with frustration.

“No signs of forced entry?” she asked.

“No. It looks as if he must have had keys. We are working on that angle. He may have a friend who has access to the keys, or he may have somehow acquired his own set. We’ll be checking all the key holders home addresses. It’s possible that wherever he’s hiding out might be near one of them. He could have made an illegal entry and got his hands on their keys that way.”

Fiona sighed. “I’m really sorry about this, Major. When you told me you had a suspect, I hoped that would be an end to it.”

“Me too. But Delgado seems to have disappeared into the landscape. Every police officer in the city has his name and his picture, but we don’t have a single sighting of him to follow up.”

“It must be very frustrating for you.” She frowned as she spoke, trying to snag something at the edge of her consciousness.

“It is. But we will keep on trying. I will fax the material over to you as soon as it becomes available.”

After she put the phone down, Fiona stared at the wall, waiting for her subconscious to throw up whatever was lurking there. Nothing came. Then the phone rang again, pulling her back to the immediate demands of the work she was supposed to be doing.