2 Witch and Famous (6 page)

“You’ll find something,” Victoria insisted, “because you won’t make all the assumptions about Jess that the police did. Look, come through to the kitchen. I’d say the living room, but…”

But, according to the file, that had been where they’d found Jessica Hammersmith’s body. She’d been found hanged, and it had probably been Victoria who found her, if she was the only one here. I could practically taste it in her reaction. The police’s opinion of the circumstances was obvious. Just by the fact that there wasn’t a forensics team sweeping every inch of this place, it was clear that the police had decided it was a suicide. Not just a suicide, but an open and shut one. People said a lot of things about the police, but one thing I’d found over the years was that when it seemed like there was even a
possibility
of a serious crime, they made sure that they checked. They didn’t want to be seen to have ignored something like a possible murder.

Jessica Hammersmith’s house was nice enough inside. It was expensively decorated, but with a certain sameness to it that suggested it had been done by an interior decorator. There were a few more homey touches in the form of pictures on the wall, a couple of framed newspaper cuttings, that kind of thing, yet the impression I got was of a place that someone came back to occasionally, rather than a place they lived. One photo caught my eye, of a young woman in her twenties, standing on a stage. She was petite, dark-haired, and pretty. There was something so delicate about her that it was almost ethereal, yet I could almost feel the power of the performance coming through the image.

“Jess’s career was just starting to take off,” Victoria said as she led the way through to a large kitchen that looked like hardly anyone used it. “She’d only just bought this place, as a way of saying to herself that she’d made it, I guess. She loved to sing, and now people were seeing how special she was. Only… this happened. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

I could feel her fighting to keep her emotions under control, so I sat her down at the kitchen table, found some coffee, and started to make it for both of us.

Victoria took the glass dome off a marbled coffee cake in the center of the table. It was a strangely domestic moment given what had happened here, but if it helped her to feel that things were normal, I could work with it. I cut us each a slice and plated them before getting us forks. She replaced the glass dome. I sat down with her and nibbled on the cake as she spoke.

“There were journalists here earlier, when the police were,” Victoria said, out of nowhere. “It’s why I thought you might be one. They got a whiff of a story: ‘Promising young star takes own life.’ I guess that’s all Jess will be now. Some tiny story in the local press. Probably not even front page. She’d hate that.”

I could feel the regret, along with a tangle of other emotions that felt like more than anything even a friend would have felt. I handed Victoria her coffee. She nodded gratefully.

“You and Jessica were lovers?” I ventured.

Victoria hesitated. “Sometimes. Maybe. It was complicated. It was always complicated, with Jess. She still wasn’t sure about a lot of what she wanted. She was worried about what her family would think, they were very High Kirk, and of course, it was all just one more thing for the police to pick up on. As if somehow, two women being lovers would have something to do with Jessica’s death.”

“Just one more thing?” I asked. “To go with what else?”

Victoria shook her head. “Oh, I told them that Jess had just left her record company, and they assumed that she’d been dumped by them. They found…Jess wasn’t into drugs, not seriously, anyway, but in their heads by that point, she was this big rock ‘n roll cliché, you know?”

“Fame plus drugs leads to death?” I added.

“That’s the picture they painted for themselves before they even finished looking around. I couldn’t exactly deny what was next to the b—” She paused. “Isn’t it crazy that I can’t even say ‘the body’? It’s not like it changes anything. She’s gone.”

“I am so sorry, Victoria.”

“I can’t believe she’s gone. She was…so vibrant. So full of energy.”

I reached out to touch her hand, lightly. Her emotions welled into me. I stopped after a few moments, realizing that there were some things I shouldn’t intrude upon like that. I slowly withdrew my hand from Victoria’s.

“I do need to ask, Victoria. What is it that makes you think that Jessica—Jess—didn’t kill herself?”

“She wouldn’t,” Victoria insisted. “It was something she would never do. She was happy. There was no reason for her to even think about killing herself. The record company thing was nothing. It would have blown over with a little gossip for the music industry, but nothing else. Six months from now, Jess could have started her own record company. We were talking about plans for her own label just the other day.”

“Interesting.” Assuming that was the only reason. Suicide was rarely that simple.

“Miss Chambers, she had so much to live for. Plus, there was no suicide note. The police—”

“I can guess. The police would have said that people don’t always leave suicide notes.”

Victoria nodded. “That’s right.”

“Did the police also say that people who are contemplating suicide are also good at hiding what they felt from the people around them?”

“Exactly.”

What I didn’t say was that some people even seemed happier once they’d decided to go through with their death, because at least that part of their lives was settled. There was no more of the agony of indecision, because they had decided. I knew I couldn’t say all of that to Victoria, though. At least not until I’d investigated properly. Not until I was sure.

“I’ll need to see where you found her,” I told Victoria. “I’ll need to know the exact spot. I know it’s hard, but do you think you can come in the living room and show me?”

She nodded as though steeling herself, then showed me through to what had probably been a comfortable, modern-styled living room before the Lothian and Borders constabulary had gotten through with it. The furniture was currently pushed back against the walls, while someone had taken the carpet up and removed it, probably because it was ruined or had evidence. Dead bodies tended to leave stains.

“There,” Victoria said, waving a hand vaguely in the direction of a spot beneath an exposed beam. “I found her there.”

“Thank you, Victoria. You don’t have to stay in here,” I said. “If it’s too hard, I’ll come through to the kitchen when I’m done. I want to get a…
feel
for what happened here.”

Victoria shook her head. “No. This is… this
was
her favorite spot in the house. It feels like I should be here, too, you know? Hanging on to the last little bits of her spirit, if they linger? You understand?”

I nodded. I understood, at least a little. Although it did mean I would have to be a little subtler about what I was doing when I soaked in the last traces of Jessica’s emotion in the room. Thankfully, though, my skills weren’t exactly of the type that needed a full chalk circle, along with a complete set of unpleasant-looking runes. Although a few of the insurers I’d worked for would probably have sanctioned even those if they thought it would save them money.

“What are you going to do to investigate?” Victoria asked. It was a reasonable-enough question, especially considering the morning she’d probably had. All those police going through the house, probably not explaining anything, would have left her wanting to find some way to keep a grip on the situation.

“First, I’m going to take a look around,” I explained casually. “I want to get a feel for who Jessica was, and for what happened here. Is that all right?”

Victoria nodded.

I tried to ask the next question as delicately as I could. “I was called in by the insurers. Are you the main beneficiary of Jessica’s insurance policy?”

Victoria shook her head to that one. Apparently, being in the same room where Jessica had died was taking its toll. “Not the main one. I get some, I think, but most of it goes to her family. She has…
had
a little sister.”

“Tell me about her little sister.”

“Lucy. She’s still pretty young. Jess… she was always so good about making sure her sister was taken care of.” Victoria sighed heavily. She looked up at me suddenly. “I don’t care about her sister getting the money. It’s what Jess would have wanted.”

I nodded.

“I know why the insurers sent you,” Victoria said. “If it was a suicide, they won’t pay, right?”

“That is an exemption in most insurance policies,” I said, honestly. The least Victoria deserved right then was honesty. “My job is to just gather facts and then I let the insurers decide what to do with them. I’m sorry.”

“Talking about Jess in the past tense feels so wrong,” Victoria said. “Everything is out of kilter. Everything is gone…” She drifted into soft murmurs that I couldn’t quite understand. I could have tried comforting her, but right then, I suspected that the best thing I could do for Victoria was to get on with my job and get out of there.

I tried to tune her out then, focusing on the room. Emotions leave marks on a building. Emotional events with enough power can leave scars deep enough to trap ghosts. And they usually are scars. All too often, the events powerful enough to leave a mark are dark ones. I let my mind settle into the space it needed to feel things in detail… and I caught what I could only describe as an echo.

Hands. Her own hands. The feel of the rope. The despair. The endless, crushing despair. The wish that it would all just stop. That it would just…

I pulled myself back from that echo of Jessica Hammersmith’s last moments alive. I’d never had something like that before, thoughts and flashes of physical sensation bound up with the emotion I sensed. It wasn’t what I did. Was it something to do with what I’d become? I’d have to ask Niall how to handle this as an enchantress. Had this been why he’d wanted to come along? Had he suspected I might run into something like this? If so, he could have
said
something.

Of course, I might not have listened.

For now though, there was one certainty in this room where a promising young musician and performer had died. Jessica Hammersmith hadn’t been anywhere near as happy as Victoria thought. Everything I could feel from the echo of the moments of death pointed to her killing herself. I could feel it in the air. The darkness. The hurt.

But there was something more to it, something so dark, so evil and so heartbreaking that…

Suddenly, I had to get out of that room.
I had to.

“I-I’m just going to look upstairs,” I said hurriedly.

“Upstairs?” Victoria looked at me blankly.

“To get a feel for Jessica’s life. I want to see the spaces where she spent time.”

That seemed to be good enough for Victoria, although she still watched me like a mother hen as I went around the upper part of the house, obviously worried that I would damage something precious to Jessica, or take something, a souvenir from a rich and almost-famous person.

The truth was simpler: it was as far as I could get from the living room without actively running from the house.

In Jessica’s bedroom, I found scrapbooks and more pictures. They held flashes of happier emotions, enough to bring me out from under the lingering effects of the weighty depression in the living room.

Yet, I knew I was just using that to distract myself from what I needed to do. Turning over photos of Jessica Hammersmith on stage or meeting real stars didn’t change anything.

She was still just as dead as she had been earlier.

Her happiness had been as beautiful as she had been, but it didn’t change what I’d felt downstairs. I ought to tell Victoria that the person she so obviously loved
had
killed herself.

Except that then, I
felt
it. I didn’t notice it at first because it was so subtle, and because frankly, it was a feeling I was used to feeling every day. A faint, but familiar, taste mixed in with the rest of everything there that had no place in that room. There had been another emotional vampire in the house. One whose power I could sense, clinging like smoke as it drifted over everything Jessica Hammersmith owned.