Lady of the Shades (35 page)

‘Naturally. How else could she have replicated the voice? Etienne was my weakest creation. You would have seen through her if you hadn’t been so preoccupied. I never really got under
her skin. I threw on a lot of make-up and clothes, but I never felt like a true medium.’

I grin grudgingly as I think back. He’s right — I should have seen it. The forced joviality, the heavy make-up, the pitch-perfect voice when she summoned Andeanna, the facial
similarities. Last night, when I was putting it all together, I assumed that the mystic was a paid cohort, but of course it was much safer for the master actor to simply assume another disguise and
play the part himself.

I frown as I think back to what Greygo said —
others
, plural. ‘Who else were you?’ I ask, running through all the faces I’ve encountered recently, searching for
any that might have been Greygo in drag.

‘Only one more,’ he says, his smile slipping.

‘Who?’

He hesitates. ‘It’s not relevant.’

‘Tell me,’ I growl.

‘You won’t like it. I had to get close to you, to know what made you tick, to keep tabs on you.’

I don’t know what he’s getting at. Who could he have been? One of the staff at the Royal Munster? I think of Fred Lloyd and smile at the absurdity. I flash on more faces, as many as
I can recall, but none matches. ‘I give up,’ I mutter.

‘You really want to know?’ I glare at him archly. ‘OK,’ he says, removing his wig and lowering his head. He rolls his shoulders and spreads his legs, instantly becoming
more masculine, even in the dress and make-up. When he looks up again, he’s smiling, and there’s something hauntingly familiar in that smile.

In spite of the feeling that I should recognize him, I can’t place him until he speaks in a light northern brogue. ‘Have a good trip up north, Ed? Should have taken me along. We
could have gone to the footie. You haven’t seen the beautiful game played properly till you’ve seen it in the Stadium of Light.’

Regardless of the face, I’d know that voice anywhere. It’s the voice of the one true friend I’ve made since Belinda tricked me all those years ago, the one person apart from
Andeanna who I let into my life.

Joe
.

In an instant, the rest of the mystery clicks into place. Joe was the one I turned to when I ran into trouble with Andeanna. He was a sympathetic audience, always there for me, except when
Andeanna was around. Greygo was both my lover
and
my best friend. What one couldn’t find out about me, the other could. As shocked as I am, I have to admire the genius behind it.
Gregory Menderes is in a different class. I’ve known some sly bastards in my time, but Greygo puts them all in the shade. He played me with contemptuous ease. His only mistake was to not
finish me off after I’d killed his father. I wonder how he botched such a vital part of the plan. Were there others he wanted me to kill while I was at it?

‘I spent months dressing up as her, slipping further into the disguise.’

The words come suddenly out of the silence. Looking up, I see that Greygo is wiping away the make-up. He’s still wearing the dress but is speaking as himself now, not as Andeanna or Joe. I
must have blanked out for a while, but he hasn’t seized the chance to turn on me.

‘I’d never tried so hard to become someone else. It had to be perfect if it was going to work. I went on holidays and masqueraded as my mother the whole time, sleeping as her, eating
as her, flirting as her. I took men back to my room and made love to them, testing the bounds of my disguise. I made mistakes to begin with, but eventually I learnt to mask every last masculine
trace. I discovered how to make a man love me but never know me, how to
be
and not just
be like
. Then I was ready.’

He licks his lips. Small dabs of lipstick cling to them like faded bloodstains. ‘You weren’t the first,’ he says sheepishly. ‘There were two others before you, a couple
of your fellow assassins. I approached them as I approached you, tried to make them fall in love with me. It didn’t work. I could attract them, but I –’

‘Wait,’ I interrupt. ‘I don’t get it. Why not just hire someone to kill him?’

‘I tried, several times, wheedled names out of Bond and my father, approached a variety of contacts openly and offered them a fortune to accept the hit. They wouldn’t bite. In the
guise of my mother, I had to be a woman with no history — they all thought that she was dead, so I had to use my Deleena Emerson alias. The trouble was, no assassin would take on a target
like the Turk when their would-be employer was a nobody who couldn’t offer them protection from the Turk’s men when they came gunning for revenge. As Greygo I might have been able to
convince one of them, but I couldn’t authorize a hit as myself. It had to be as my mother. So I decided to create a scene.’

‘A
scene
,’ I grunt. ‘That’s it. You staged a film noir plot. A scheming femme fatale seduces a capable but gullible patsy, spins him a tale of woe involving life
with her abusive husband, and . . . ’ I nod at the cunning of it.

‘That’s how it was,’ Greygo agrees. ‘Only it didn’t work to begin with. I wasn’t able to believe in the scene. I could calmly plot in the safety of my room,
but out in the real world I had to become one with the story. I needed to be as convinced by the piece as those I sucked in. I couldn’t do that with the first two assassins. I was beginning
to think I could never do it with anyone. Then you fell into my life.’

He crosses the room and kneels in front of me. Extends his hands and cups my face. If he dropped his fingers, he could wrench the gun from me and fire before I had a chance to react. But he
doesn’t.

‘If it’s any comfort, I really am a fan of your books. I read
Nights of Fear
and
Summer’s Shades
before I learnt your true identity.’

I blink. ‘Do you really think this is the right time to be praising my work?’

He giggles. ‘It’s relevant, because that’s how it started. I found myself discussing your books with a friend of my father’s at a party one night. That friend was Carter
Phell.’

‘Carter,’ I groan. I should have known my old mentor would come back to haunt me. The past is never truly dead and buried.

‘To Phell’s credit, he changed the subject,’ Greygo continues. ‘It was only later, after he’d had a few drinks, that he tracked me down and asked if I knew who you
used to be. He wanted to share his juicy titbit with the one person he’d met who’d actually read Ed Sieveking’s books. He didn’t do it to drop you in the shit — he
knew I wasn’t part of my father’s seedier affairs, that I wouldn’t try to exploit the information. In his own strange way, he was proud of you and wanted me to know how far
you’d come.

‘I’d researched the other assassins as best I could, but there’s only so much you can unearth about men who operate as hired killers. You can’t get close to them. Writers
are different. They welcome questions and love to share. It’s much easier to get to know a writer, to learn about him, to consume.’

Greygo tells me how he scoured the internet for interviews with me. He attended conventions where I was present, sometimes flying halfway round the world to hear me speak. He tracked down those
who knew me, agents and publishers, and carefully pumped them for info about me.

It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get inside my head. He didn’t want to approach me cold, as Andeanna, so he invented Joe to get close to me. He corresponded with me, taking his
time, doing nothing to arouse my suspicions. He had no set plan for luring me to London. But he had a hunch that one day things would fall neatly into place. As they did when I got interested in
spontaneous human combustion after he had mentioned it in a few emails.

‘From that moment, you played into my hands,’ he sighs. ‘There was nothing odd about me inviting you to London then — it looked like I was doing it in response to your
plans to write a book about a subject I had turned you on to. It was natural that, in my excitement, I’d ask you to come here so that I could share the research with you.

‘I made Joe a child of the Troubles, allowing me to cover up — because of his supposed scars, I was able to wear thick clothes and stick padding down the arms and legs to make me
seem larger than I am. You accepted the beard because I had a good reason for wearing it. You also didn’t look at my face too closely because you didn’t want me thinking that you were
searching for traces of my scars.’

‘You thought of everything, didn’t you?’ I snort.

‘I had to,’ he mutters. ‘I was nervous the first time we met, but the more time we spent together, the less acting I had to do, until by the end, Joe was every bit as real to
me as my mother. You never thought of connecting either of them to Gregory Menderes, because both were real, individual, complete.

‘I think you can work out the rest,’ Greygo says, rocking back on his heels. ‘I juggled the alter egos, careful never to cross my wires. It wasn’t easy going from your
arms as Andeanna to your side as Joe, remembering what you’d told me as one and trying not to let that knowledge leak through the lips of the other.’

‘A virtuoso performance,’ I remark bitingly.

He shrugs. ‘I don’t think you can summarize it that simply. I wasn’t acting — like I told you already, I became those people. I created souls, not just faces and bodies,
and carried them within me, as separate and whole as my own.’

‘Fancy words,’ I snort.

‘The truth,’ he insists.

‘What do you know about truth?’ I sneer. ‘You’re one big walking, talking, stalking fucking lie.
Souls?
You have to be human to comprehend the quality of a soul.
I’ll tell you this, though.’ I raise the gun and press the muzzle to his forehead. ‘Souls are real. They do move on. And when you die, yours is going all the way to hell, you
sick, twisted fuck.’

He doesn’t display any fear, just gazes at me with a look that’s half pity, half . . .
what
?

‘Don’t you understand?’ I growl. ‘I’m going to kill you.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’

‘It doesn’t bother you?’

He makes a gurgling sound. ‘Life hasn’t been much to speak of recently. Part of the reason I slipped so easily into character was because I preferred being Joe and Andeanna. They
were sweet. They could sleep at night, untouched by nightmares. They didn’t look into mirrors and see a monster. I was happier as them. If I could go on being them, maybe I’d fear
death. But I’m Greygo now. It’s just me. And I hate myself. That’s why I’m not afraid. Without my mother, my father, Joe,
you
. . . I’m nothing, just an empty
shadow of a man. Death will be a relief.’

Tears trickle down his cheeks. It could be an act – he is, after all, an actor of the highest calibre – but I don’t think so. I believe he’s truly as miserable and lonely
as he claims.

‘Why didn’t you kill me?’ I sob, tears coming again to these once barren eyes. ‘Wasn’t that the plan, to set me up and have me murdered too?’

He nods. ‘Once you’d killed my father, it would have been simple to step into his room and remove the evidence of Sebastian Dash, plant my own in its place. I had articles of yours
stored away, to frame you with. And I was ruthless enough. I lured poor Axel to his death to test you, a trial run for the real thing. As Andeanna, I could be as brutal as I needed to
be.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ I scream.

‘You know why,’ he says.

‘No. I don’t.
Why?
’

He looks down, tears blackening his face. When he looks up again, there’s a world of wanting and pain in his eyes. ‘I couldn’t kill you,’ he weeps. ‘I turned
somersaults to spare you. I knew we were finished as Ed and Andeanna, but I hoped we could continue as Ed and Joe. I wanted you to flee and carry on with your life. I would have followed. We could
have been friends. Even though I knew it might backfire on me, I couldn’t bring myself to finish you off. I had to . . . let you . . . go.’

He’s sobbing deeply. So am I. We’re almost beyond words. But I have to know. Before the end, I must have it all explained. ‘Tell me the truth. Why didn’t you betray
me?’

He looks up, locks gazes and says in as close to silence as a whisper can ever be, ‘Because I love you.’

I thought I’d fallen as far into the madness as I could.

I was wrong.

‘You
love
me?’ I splutter, incensed by the disgraceful claim.

‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ he croaks.

‘You can’t mean that. You can’t!’

‘But I do. I love you, Ed, and I know you’re going to kill me anyway, but you forced me to say it, so I have.’

‘You can’t love. You’re a monster.’

‘I wish I was,’ he says softly. ‘But this was always about love. Love for my mother and father, then love for you. It wouldn’t have been so fucked-up if I could have
distanced myself emotionally from any one of you. Love’s a bitch. You know love brought us here. Deny it all you like, but you
know
. It doesn’t make sense any other
way.’

I look inside myself for a scathing remark, only to find to my dismay that he’s right. About everything. I wish with all my being that he wasn’t, that he was an evil, calculating
bastard, or a sick fuck who’d put me through hell for kicks, but he isn’t. He’s a lonely, hurt, resourceful, talented young man whose love for those closest to him has led to the
ruin of us all.

‘You know the really crazy thing?’ I ask quietly. My lips lift in a self-mocking sneer. ‘I love you too.’ He stares at me wordlessly, not shocked by the revelation, but
by my expression of it. ‘After all you’ve done, regardless of your sex, you’re still the person I fell in love with, the one I would have given the world for.’

‘Ed . . . ’ he moans.

I look down at the gun, then toss it to the floor. Killing him isn’t an option. Manipulator and liar though he is, he’s Andeanna, he’s Joe, he’s all that has come to mean
anything to me. I can hate him, but I can’t kill him, just as I couldn’t kill Belinda when she betrayed me. Gregory Menderes chose his patsy well.

As if in a dream, I rise and face the door.