The Deadly Embrace (14 page)

The fragment of the elusive recollection about Joss flickered in her brain again. Joss hadn’t looked like a girl who lived on the wild side, but she was into things that made even J.P. blush. When Kilgore confided some of it to her, J.P. had refused to believe it. Joss was so poised and intelligent. And she was royalty, too.

But J.P. had learned for herself that the stories were true. She hadn’t told anyone about those nights. If Kilgore found out, he would have probably sent her home. And there was no one waiting for her at home.

When they first arrived in London, Kilgore had found her the little apartment near Charing Cross. The kitchen was nothing to speak of, but she rarely cooked anyway. There was a quaint living room, with ancient wooden beams running across the ceiling and a cozy brick fireplace. On the mantelpiece, she was able to showcase the collection of hatpins Lloyd had found for her during his travels before the war.

Kilgore had hated the apartment’s bathroom on sight. He loved to stretch out in an oversized tub, and there was just a shower stall in the tiny room. Right after moving her in, he ordered one of his army contractor friends to knock down the wall of the spare bedroom, which more than doubled the bathroom’s size.

The enormous pink enamel tub, along with the sinks and matching toilet, had been shipped over from the States in one of the B-17s assigned to SHAEF. Kilgore had also ordered a U.S.-made hot-water heater that, unlike the English models, allowed him to fill the tub with steaming water.

The army contractor had spent almost a week reconstructing the bathroom to Kilgore’s personal design. When his men were finished, the walls and floor were tiled in white and red, and there was a glossy white cabinet to hold his thick, luxurious Afghan towels, plus all the creams and perfumed ointments he had bought her.

Once she had removed her necklace and earrings, J.P. put them in the lockbox sitting on the sink. She pulled off her torn dress and tossed it in the wastebasket. After washing off her tear-blotched mascara, she thoroughly rinsed her mouth with a strong mouthwash. She took her aromatic bath salts from the cabinet, poured two full measures into the tub, and began running a hot bath.

Standing naked in front of the mirror, J.P. took stock of herself. She was probably a few pounds heavier than the last time she had been with Lloyd in Manila, but J.P. was confident he would never notice the difference. Her “best feature,” as Kilgore referred to them, showed no signs of sagging, and her legs were as firm and lovely as ever.

She tried to ignore the new age lines in her face. God only knew what Lloyd would look like after years in a Japanese prison camp, but it didn’t matter. She would make him the best wife he could ever hope for when the war was over.

Turning off the hot water, J.P. climbed into the tub and dropped down into its fragrant warmth. After shampooing the cigar stink out of her hair, she sank back up to her neck, luxuriating in the solace of its restorative power, and slowly cleansing away the reek of the man she had been with.

The phone began to ring in the bedroom. It was probably Kilgore, she concluded. The general rarely slept more than two hours at a time, and he was probably looking for an update on the “Georgie” situation. Well, it could wait until morning. That was when she planned to tell him she was through being his tramp.

The phone stopped ringing. Ten minutes later, she turned on the hot spigot again to add a few inches of hot water to the bath. She was starting to nod off in the blissful warmth when a sudden jet of cold air came through the half-open bathroom door, chilling her shoulders. From past experience, she knew it always happened when someone opened the front door of the apartment. But she had locked the front door behind her. She was sure of it. A moment later, the stream of cold air abruptly stopped.

“Everett, is that you?” she called out.

There was no response. This is ridiculous. I’m not in an Alan Ladd movie, she thought. She imagined Kilgore in the bedroom, taking off his uniform, then suddenly yanking the door open and leaping naked into the tub. He had done that before, and scared her half out of her wits.

“Everett, I know you’re out there. Stop playing your childish games and get in here. I have something important to tell you.”

When there was still no response, she became mildly concerned. What if it was the kind of prowler that Kilgore had warned her about when he had given her the little automatic that was sitting in the drawer of her bedside table?

She heard the creak of the old pine flooring in the living room. She even knew exactly where it creaked like that—right in front of the fireplace. She was about to climb out of the tub to lock the bathroom door when she recalled that the lock was broken.

She felt a tremor of irrational fear and looked around the bathroom for something to defend herself. The only things that registered in her frantic eyes were hairbrushes, powder jars, tubes, oils, talcum, and towels. Then she saw Kilgore’s razor sitting on the cabinet shelf. It wasn’t a straight razor, just one of the new nickel-plated kind, with a double-edged blue Gillette blade.

Vaulting upward, she grabbed the razor and dropped back into the tub, sloshing soapy water over the side onto the tile floor. She unscrewed the handle of the razor and removed the blade.

The water suddenly seemed cold. Her skin began to quiver. She sat there motionless, as if being silent might make her invisible. The lights went off in the bedroom.

God… someone was definitely with her in the apartment. She dropped down into the water up to her chin. Too late, she remembered that the light switches for the bathroom were on the wall just outside the door.

“Everett, stop this,” she loudly demanded.

When the lights went out, she suddenly remembered the elusive fragment of memory that had bothered her all evening. Her body began to shake uncontrollably, and the blade slipped from her fingers. A flashlight beam found her terrified face.

“Please don’t hurt me,” she begged into the darkness.

CHAPTER 12

“M
y God, you shall pay for this. I’ll wring that obstinate little heart…. Noel.”

Using a magnifying glass, Liza studied the handwriting segment on the piece of cream-colored stationery. She concluded it must have been written with some form of quill pen, with the writer frequently dipping the point into a blood pool. The letters were consistently thick, and of approximately the same height and width. None of them were smudged. She slowly moved the magnifying glass down to the second handwritten segment.

“9 August. I asked you not to send blood but Yet do—because if it means love I will have it. I cut the hair too close & bled much more than you need—I pray that you put not the knife blade near where quei capelli grow.”

She decided that the writing instrument for the second segment wasn’t a pen of any kind. For one thing, there was no consistency to the blood flow. Some of the letters were thick and pudgy, others slivery and barely registering on the paper. A pin, she thought, possibly a long hatpin.

The lab at Scotland Yard had already examined the notepaper, finding no latent fingerprints on it. They had also done an analysis of scrapings from the written segments, as well as the hair clippings that had been folded into the paper. Both segments had been written in blood. The first was written in AB negative, the rarest blood type found in human beings. The second passage had been written with type 0 positive blood, which was a match for Joss Dunbar, and the most common type.

Liza removed a short letter from Joss’s service record that had been written in her own hand. When she put it side by side with the second passage on the notepaper, she used her magnifying glass to compare the script in both documents. Although she was not a handwriting expert, there were enough common features to the letters for her to be fairly confident that Joss had written the second note.

“That’s great,” said Taggart when he learned the results of the blood work. “Assuming our killer wrote the first segment, that only limits the potential suspects on this island to about a million people.”

After the Yard technicians compared the hair clippings folded into the paper with hair samples from Joss’s body, they had concluded that almost half of them matched her own unique characteristics. The other half were from another human source, as yet unidentified.

Liza tried to remember the many lectures she had attended that dealt with blood attributes. One thing she knew was that it tended to fade very quickly. Although Sam had suggested to her the possibility that the notes might have been written a hundred years earlier, she knew that was impossible: the writing would have disappeared long ago. She concluded that the notes were probably no more than five years old. Liza copied the words of the first segment onto a blank index card.

“My God, you shall pay for this. I’ll wring that obstinate little heart…. Noel.”

Were the words possibly written in jest? she wondered. What kind of person could have written them, if indeed they were original to the author? The line suggested someone passionate, possessive, and cruel. Perhaps Sam was right, and Joss’s death had resulted from a combination of factors—a girl threatening suicide, and the man she was in love with becoming a willing and sadistic accomplice.

She copied the second passage onto a separate card.

“9 August. I asked you not to send blood but Yet do—because if it means love I will have it. I cut the hair too close & bled much more than you need—I pray that you put not the knife blade near where quei capelli grow.”

She tried to imagine Joss as the author of the words, but found it hard to imagine her writing them. Joss had received her education in France and Switzerland, and she was probably fluent in several languages. But the words had an archaic construction, one that harkened back to a different time. She decided to ask Taggart and Drummond where she might send the lines for another opinion, perhaps to an Oxford don with a knowledge of the classics.

Next she turned her attention to the hair samples. They were in a clear cellophane bag. To the naked eye, they all appeared to be the same color, but the Scotland Yard technicians had examined the hair under a microscope and concluded that the cortex contained slightly different pigment granules, which confirmed it came from at least two different sources. In both cases the granules were evenly distributed, indicating Caucasian hair. The words suggested that the two lovers had each contributed pubic hair. But why? she wondered. She was writing another reminder to herself when a courier entered the office and walked straight up to her desk.

“This is marked ‘urgent,’ Lieutenant,” he said. “I was told to bring it straight to you.”

The note was from Sam, hastily scrawled on the back of an envelope.

“Order a staff car and come immediately to the following address,” it commanded.

Twenty minutes later, her car was inching through the fogbound London morning. From the side window, she watched people on the sidewalks emerging and then quickly disappearing into the ghostly pale. The driver pulled up at a small row house off Charing Cross Road. Two English bobbies were standing guard at the front door.

After presenting her identity card to one of the policemen, she was ushered inside. An old Persian carpet runner led to an open doorway at the rear of the ground floor. A half-dozen crime technicians were swarming through the living room when she stepped through the door.

“Is Major Taggart here?” she asked one of them.

He pointed to the bedroom. Through the open door, she saw the backs of Sam and Inspector Drummond. Both were standing at the foot of a brass double bed. They looked up and nodded as she joined them. It was very hot in the room, and she smelled the faint reek of fecal matter. It was much stronger near the bed.

“The cleaning lady found her at a little after eight o’clock this morning,” said Inspector Drummond.

Liza did not recognize the woman lying naked in front of them. One of the technicians was taking photographs of her, and the bloated face flashed incandescently in the glare of the flashbulbs, the eyes bulging out like some monstrosity in a freak show, before receding again into shadow.

“It’s Janet Barnes,” said Taggart, noting the confusion in Liza’s eyes.

“J.P.?” she said, uncertainly.

She forced herself to stare at the corpse. What had once been human and distinctive about her had completely disappeared. The fact that another person she had worked so closely with was dead almost took her breath away.

“Seems a bit more than coincidence that two young women working in the same office have died under such mysterious circumstances,” said Drummond.

J.P. was lying on her back, her left arm flung away from her chest, the right bent back toward her chin. A small semi-automatic pistol was loosely clenched in her right hand. There appeared to be an entry wound in her right ear. It had already turned a glutinous black. Liza saw that there was no exit wound. The hydrostatic pressure of the bullet inside her brain had transformed her face into a clownish nightmare of doughy pulp.

“Any sign of forced entry?” asked Sam.

Drummond shook his head.

“The front-door lock has a spring mechanism. It engages automatically when the door shuts. The cleaning lady said it was locked when she arrived, although the dead bolt wasn’t shot home. There is no back door.”

Liza went around the side of the bed and placed her fingers against J.P.’s cheek, gently massaging the surface of her skin.

“Rigor is already setting in,” she said. “Is there any preliminary estimate of time of death?”

Drummond shook his head and said, “No one in the house knows when she came home, or if she even went out last night at all. The woman upstairs is a sixty-year-old spinster. She told me somewhat disapprovingly that Lieutenant Barnes entertained several different men in her apartment. At least one of them is a high-ranking American officer, possibly a general. Apparently, there were a lot of your army chaps in here doing the whole place over from stem to stern before she moved in.”