Lost (43 page)

“I know al about you. You're a Gypsy.” My surprise pleases her. “They used to say your mother had a gift.”

“How do you know her?”

“Don't you recognize a kindred spirit?” She cackles hoarsely, claiming to be a Gypsy. “Your mother told my fortune once. She said I would always be a great beauty and could have any man I wanted.”

(Somehow I don't think she was talking quantity.)

Daj had a gift al right—a gift for doing cold readings and predicting the bleeding obvious. She took people's money and tapped their spring of eternal hope. And afterward, having ushered them out of the door, she ran to the liquor store and bought her vodka.

There's a sound from upstairs: something fal ing. Mrs. Wilde looks up quickly.

“It's just one of my old girls. She stays sometimes.”

Her milky blue eyes betray her and her hand shoots out to stop me from rising. “Let me tel you the address of the clinic. They might know where she is.” I brush her hand aside and move up the stairs, leaning out to peer between the banisters above me. On the first landing there are three doors, two open and one closed. I knock gently and turn the handle. Locked.

“Don't touch me! Leave me alone!”

It sounds like the voice of a child—the same one I heard on the phone during the ransom drop. I step away, bracing my back against the wal , with only my hand protruding past the door frame.

The first bul et hits six inches to the right of the handle at stomach height. I sit heavily letting my feet hit the opposite wal , letting out a low groan.

Mrs. Wilde yel s up the stairs, “Is that my door? If that's my bloody door you'l be paying for it.”

A second bul et rips through the wood a foot above the floor.

Mrs. Wilde again: “Right, that's it! From now on I'm taking a fucking deposit.”

I sit quietly, listening to my own breathing.

“Hey, you out there,” says the voice, just above a whisper. “Are you dead?”

“No.”

“Are you wounded?”

“No.”

She curses.

“It's me, Vincent Ruiz. I'm here to help you.”

A long silence fol ows.

“Please let me come in. I'm here alone.”

“Stay away. Please go.” I recognize Kirsten's voice, thick with phlegm and fear.

“I can't do that.”

After another long pause: “How's your leg?”

“Half an inch shorter.”

Mrs. Wilde cal s up the stairs. “I'm cal ing the police unless someone pays for my door!”

Sighing heavily, I tel Kirsten, “You can keep the gun if you shoot your landlady.”

Her laugh is cut short by a hacking cough.

“I'm coming in.”

“Then I'l have to shoot you.”

“No, you won't.”

I ease myself up and face the door. “Are you going to unlock it for me?”

After a long wait there are two metal ic clicks. Turning the handle, I push the door open.

Heavy drapes are drawn and the bedroom is in semidarkness. The room has high ceilings and mirrors on two wal s. A large iron bed occupies the center and Kirsten is marooned amid the covers, with her legs drawn up and the gun resting on her knees. She has cut her hair and dyed it blond. It fal s in sweaty ringlets down her forehead.

“I thought you were dead,” she says.

“I could say the same about you.”

She lowers her chin onto the barrel of the gun, staring forlornly into the shadows. The cheap chandelier above her head catches the light leaking from the curtains and the mirrors reflect the same scene, each from a slightly different angle.

I lean against the windowsil letting the curtains sag against my back. I can hear the raindrops hitting the panes of glass.

Kirsten shifts slightly and grimaces in pain. Boxes of painkil ers and torn silver foil litter the floor around her bed.

“Can I have a look?”

Without acknowledging me, she raises her shirt high enough to show me the yel owing bandage, crusty with blood and sweat.

“You need to get to a hospital.”

She lowers the shirt but doesn't answer.

“A lot of people are looking for you.”

“And you get the prize.”

“Can I cal an ambulance?”

“No.”

“OK, we'l just talk for a while. You want to tel me what happened?”

Kirsten shrugs and lowers the gun, resting it between her thighs. “I saw an opportunity.”

“To play with fire.”

“To make a new life . . .” She doesn't finish the sentence. Dampening her lips, she makes a silent decision and starts again. “It was almost a joke at first; one of those ‘what if'

ideas that you toss around among yourselves and laugh about. Ray was good at the technical side. He used to work in the sewers. I kept an eye on the little details. At first I thought Rachel might even play along. We could set the whole thing up and she'd final y get what she deserved from her family or her ex-husband. She was owed.”

“She wouldn't play along?”

“I didn't ask. I knew the answer.”

I look around the room. The wal paper has a honeycomb design and within each octagon is the outline of a naked woman in a different sexual pose.

“What happened to Mickey?”

Kirsten doesn't seem to hear me. She's tel ing the story in her own time.

“We would have been fine, you know, if it hadn't been for Gerry Brandt. Mickey would have made it home. Ray would stil be alive. Gerry should never have let her go . . . not alone. He was supposed to take her home.”

“I don't understand. What are you talking about?”

A painful smile steals across her face but doesn't part her lips. “Poor Inspector, you haven't worked it out yet, have you?” The truth grows in me like a tumor with the cel s doubling and dividing, invading the empty spaces and the gaps in my memory. Gerry Brandt said he let her go. They were his last words.

“We only had her for a few days,” says Kirsten, gnawing at a fingernail. “Then he paid the ransom.”

“What ransom?”

“The first one.”

“What do you mean, a first ransom?”

“We were never going to hurt her. Once we got the ransom, we told Gerry to take her home. He was supposed to drop her at the end of her street but he panicked and left her at an Underground station. The fucking idiot! He was always a loose cannon. Right from the first day he jeopardized everything. He was supposed to be looking after Mickey but he couldn't resist going back to Randolph Avenue to see the TV crews and police.

“We would never have included him except we needed someone to look after Mickey who she couldn't identify. Like I said, we were always going to let her go. She told Gerry she knew the way home. She said she'd change trains at Piccadil y Circus and catch the Bakerloo line.”

This information seeps into my stomach and joins forces with the tepid nausea. My mind is tal ying the details. Mr. and Mrs. Bird saw Mickey at Leicester Square. It's one stop from Piccadil y Circus.

“But if you let her go, what happened?”

Her misery is complete. “Howard Wavel !”

I don't understand.

“Howard happened,” she says again. “Mickey made it home but she ran into Howard.”

God, no! Surely not! It was a Wednesday night. Rachel wasn't home. She was on
News at Ten
making another appeal. I remember watching her on TV at the station. They used footage of the press conference earlier in the day.

“I tel you we didn't mean to hurt her. We let her go. Then you found her bloodstained towel and arrested Howard. I wanted to die.” An image presents itself. I picture a smal , terrified child with a fear of being outside, crossing a city alone. She almost made it. Only steps away—not even eighty-five of them.

Howard found her on the front steps.

My legs go weak and I struggle to stand. It's as though my insides have become liquid and want to flood out, throbbing and glistening on the floor. My God, what have I done? I couldn't have been more wrong. Ali, Rachel, Mickey—I let them al down.

“You don't know how many times I have wanted to change things,” says Kirsten. “I would have brought Mickey home myself. I would have walked her right to her door. Believe me!”

“You were
friends
with Rachel. How could you do that to her?”

For a fleeting moment her sadness turns to anger, but takes too much energy to sustain. She whispers, “I never meant to hurt them . . . not Mickey or Rachel.”

“Why then?”

“We were stealing from the ultimate thief—taking money from Aleksei Kuznet, a monster. He murdered his own brother, for God's sake.”

“You wanted to take on the biggest bul y in the playground.”

“We live in a new feudal age, Inspector. We fight wars over oil and we hand out reconstruction contracts in return for political donations. We have more parking wardens than we do police officers—”

“Oh for pity's sake, spare me the speeches!”

“We didn't want to hurt anyone.”

“Rachel was always going to be hurt.”

She looks at me with wet eyes. I can almost taste the salt in them.

“I didn't mean . . . we let Mickey go. I would never have . . .” She lowers the gun between her knees and her head fol ows, rocking back and forth. “I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry . . .” Her self-pity irritates me. I keep pressing for the rest of the story. Kirsten doesn't look at me as she describes the cesspit in the basement and the underground river. Ray Murphy inflated a boat below ground and drew a map for Gerry to fol ow. He only had to travel a few hundred feet before bringing Mickey up through a storm-water drain.

“Ray knew a place to keep her. I never went there. My job was to send the ransom letter.”

“Where did you send it?”

“Directly to Aleksei.”

“What about the bikini?”

“Gerry held on to it.”

“What was she wearing when he let her go?”

“I don't know exactly.”

“Did she have her beach towel?”

“Gerry said it was like her security blanket. She wouldn't let it go.”

I'm struggling now. Of al the scenarios to contemplate I had left Howard out, convinced of his innocence. I had weighed up the evidence and the odds and decided he had been wrongly accused and convicted. Campbel said I was blind to the obvious. I thought he couldn't see anything except his own prejudices.

“Why in God's name did you try for a second ransom? How could you put Rachel through it again? You convinced her Mickey was stil alive.” Her face creases as she sucks back the pain. “I didn't want to. You don't understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“When you arrested Howard for Mickey's murder Gerry went off his head. He kept saying we helped kil her. He said he couldn't go back inside—not for kil ing a child. He knew what they did to child murderers in prison. Right away I knew we had a problem. We either had to silence Gerry or help him disappear.”

“So you got him out of the country.”

“We gave him double what he deserved—four hundred grand. He was supposed to stay away but he poured his money down slot machines or shot it up his arm.”

“He bought a bar in Thailand.”

“Whatever.”

“And then he came back.”

“The first I knew about the second ransom was when Rachel received the postcard. Gerry came up with the idea al by himself. Mickey's body had never been found. He stil had her swimsuit and strands of her hair. I went bal istic. His greed and stupidity threatened us al . Ray said he was going to stop Gerry before he gave us away . . .”

“You could have walked away then. Nobody would have known.”

“I wanted to kil him—I real y did.”

“What changed your mind?”

“None of us thought Aleksei would say yes—not after paying one ransom—but then straight off he agreed. I almost felt sorry for him then. He must have real y wanted to believe Mickey was stil alive.”

“He didn't have a choice. Fathers are meant to believe.”

“No, he wanted revenge. He didn't care what it cost. He didn't care about Mickey or Rachel. He wanted us dead—that's the only reason.” Maybe she's right. Aleksei has always preferred to dispense his own brand of justice.

Outside Wormwood Scrubs Prison and again at the police station, Aleksei had said, “I don't pay for things twice.” This is what he meant. He had already paid a ransom for Mickey and wouldn't easily surrender another one.

“You must have used the same drop procedure. That's how Aleksei found you.”

“We didn't have time to come up with a new one. Aleksei figured it out. It's like I said, we didn't expect him to go through with it. We had to scramble to get everything ready. I didn't want to go ahead but Ray needed the money and he said it would be easier second time around.”

“You knew I was in the car with Rachel.”

“No. Not after we made her change vehicles. And we didn't expect anyone to be foolish enough to fol ow the ransom through the sewers.”

“During the ransom drop, I heard the sound of a child's voice. It was you, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

The room has grown darker and she seems to be turning to shadow. The distance between us has grown wide and cold.

“When the shooting started, I thought it must be the police. Then they just kept firing.”

“Did you see the sniper?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone?”

She shakes her head.

Although exhausted she looks almost relieved to be talking. She can't remember how long she spent in the water. The tide carried her east past Westminster. Eventual y she crawled onto the steps at Bankside Jetty near the Globe Theatre. She broke into a pharmacy and stole bandages and painkil ers. She slept in a shop that was being refurbished, lying beneath painter's sheets.

She couldn't run and she couldn't go to a hospital. Aleksei would have found her. Once he knew who had kidnapped Mickey he was never going to stop looking.

“And since then you've been hiding?”

“Waiting to die.” Her voice is so soft it might be coming from another room.

The cloying smel of sweat and infection thickens the air. Either everything Kirsten has told me is the truth or an extraordinarily elaborate lie. “Please move away from the window,” she says.

“Why?”

“I keep seeing red dots. They're burned into my eyelids.”

I know what she means.