Moriarty Returns a Letter (20 page)

Now the desk clerk appeared at the entrance to the dining room. He looked about for a moment, and then came directly to their table.

“Are you Mr. Heath?”

Reggie admitted it.

“We have a phone call for you, sir.”

Laura gave Reggie a questioning look.

“I’ve no idea,” he said. “Only Lois knows where we are, and I told her to hold all calls.” Reggie started to exit the dining room with the clerk, but then looked down and saw that he still had the briefcase open on the chair. “Watch that for me?” he said to Laura.

“Of course.”

Reggie went to the front desk and picked up the phone.

It was Wembley.

“You’re damned hard to get a hold of, Heath,” he said.

“That’s intentional,” said Reggie.

“I’ll give you the summary version,” said Wembley. “Darla Rennie has escaped. And she’s killed again.”

Reggie absorbed that for a moment.

“Heath? You still there?”

“How in hell did that happen?” said Reggie.

“Slight breach of protocol at the mental health institute. According to the guards, she must have just got up and walked out of the examination room, and when her psychiatrist caught up with her in the storage closet she whacked him a couple of times on the head with a blunt instrument. O’Shea is on her way there now.”

“Bloody hell, Wembley, the woman’s bonkers and that’s the best they can do?”

“My words to them exactly.”

“When?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Are you looking—”

“Of course we’re looking for her. That’s why I rang you. I’ve notified the police in Dartmoor, but they can’t do much more than keep an eye out, and it’s a lot of territory to cover. I’ve got the fisherman’s place in Canvey under surveillance, in case she tries to go back there. No leads on that, by the way. So if she didn’t kill him—which we’ve all assumed must be the case, since you provided her that hamburger wrapper alibi—we’ve no idea who did.”

“So your point is,” said Reggie, “if Laura and I had kept our mouths shut, Darla Rennie would have been charged with the fisherman’s murder, would still be in jail pending arraignment rather than going directly to the mental facility for evaluation on the earlier crimes, and would not now be on the loose to stalk us.”

“I’m not making a point at all, Heath. I’m just telling you how things stand. And we think her original delusion is back—assuming it was ever gone. Apparently she was reading another gossip column about your fiancée.”

“Thank you for the heads-up,” said Reggie.

He got off the phone and returned to Laura at their table.

“It’s the most amazing thing,” she said, as he sat down. “In the time that you were gone, the busboy has come by no less than three times, asking if he could clear my plates. And I think it was perfectly clear that I was still eating.”

“Clear your plates?” said Reggie. “Is that what the next generation is calling it?”

“I’ve no idea what you mean. Anyway,” she said, picking up the now-closed briefcase from the empty chair, and handing it to him, “I noticed you still have that Sherlock Holmes letter in there, mixed up with everything else.”

Reggie had to think about that for a moment.

“You mean the one from the hotel?” he said.

“Yes. I shut it back up tight inside. If you lose it, Mr. Rafferty will have your head.”

“I think we have more pressing concerns,” said Reggie.

Laura delayed a bite of breakfast and looked up.

“The phone was Wembley,” said Reggie. “Darla Rennie has escaped custody. She is at large.”

Laura took a moment to look at Reggie and absorb the significance of that.

Then she reached for the maple syrup.

“Well, it’s a shame,” she said. “But we’re not letting it spoil our holiday. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, you’re fine, of course,” said Reggie. “But it’s me I’m worried about.”

Reggie thought about it for a moment further, as Laura continued with the French toast. And then Reggie stood.

“I need to make another call,” he said.

“Who?” said Laura.

“I think I need to make sure Nigel made it across the pond.”

“Of course he did. Why wouldn’t he?”

“No reason,” said Reggie. “But I think I’ll just check.”

22

Nigel Heath arrived at Butler’s Wharf by cab in the early morning, having spent the previous fourteen hours on a flight from LAX to Heathrow.

It was a red-eye with a stopover, which Nigel had selected because it was affordable—cheaper by half than anything quicker and more direct.

So he’d hardly slept, but he was in excellent spirits even so.

It was no small thing to be allowed to house-sit his brother Reggie’s penthouse for a few days. Reggie had always been stingy with such invitations in the past. He was mellowing a bit now—under Laura’s influence, in Nigel’s opinion; as part of a couple, Reggie was beginning to allow for things that had not occurred to him when he was so completely single, and that included extending an invitation to his brother to stay in his expensive, fancy digs when Reggie himself was out of town.

And at the moment, Reggie and Laura were both very much out of town. Even out of mobile phone range—Nigel had already tried from the airport.

That was fine. He would have the place to himself for a bit, before journeying to Laura’s aunt’s castle himself, to participate in the engagement festivities.

He was a little concerned that he might need to come up with a toast for that soiree. He knew he had to have one for the wedding; he wasn’t sure about a mere engagement party. He had asked Mara if she knew what the protocol was, but she had responded that she didn’t understand the British at all.

Which was not entirely true, of course—she seemed to understand Nigel himself rather well. That was true from the moment they met in Los Angeles, and it was still true now that they were living there together.

If a toast was needed, he supposed he could come up with some sort of joke about being Reggie’s best man at the wedding and the better man at the party. Or something to that effect. Which might be amusing to the people who knew them both well. Nigel was fine in pubs, but he found these formal occasions a bit intimidating. Special forks, special plates, special foods. Things that should be said or not said. It was all very high-pressure.

Right now, he was just looking forward to going out on the penthouse deck and settling in with a pint of Guinness and a fine view of the city lights.

The cab departed, and Nigel went to the glass-walled exterior lift—the one that went from the ground level of the old dock directly and exclusively to Reggie’s penthouse.

Nigel opened the security panel next to the lift, and punched in the code.

Nothing happened. It should have beeped. It should have flashed green. It should have announced that the code was accepted and that access was granted.

He tried it again.

Still no announcement, but this time Nigel noticed the LED display.

SECURITY DISENGAGED,
it said, with the red letters flashing faintly against the black display.
ALARM OFF.

That was odd. Reggie would never leave it that way.

Nigel pressed the button to call the lift. A hydraulic motor whined into action, and the lift from Reggie’s penthouse began to descend toward Nigel at ground level.

So Reggie had gone off on his engagement trip without activating the security system. Very odd indeed.

Nigel got in and took the lift to the top of the building. He stepped from the lift into the unlocked foyer of the penthouse. He called out, “Reggie?”

He didn’t expect an answer; Reggie wasn’t supposed to be there. But Reggie being present was the only explanation Nigel had for all the security measures being down.

“You here?”

No answer.

Nigel walked into the wide, glass-walled dining area, which he knew had been foremost in Reggie’s mind in buying the place. It looked out over the Thames, it let in the moonlight, and you couldn’t ask for a better Saturday night date setting. It was where most of Reggie’s courtship of Laura had taken place.

The dining-courting room looked fine. Nothing out of place there. Nigel walked on into the kitchen.

Here, too, everything was fine—Reggie had a cleaning service, and he was not sloppy in any case. There was nothing lying around on the counter, nor would there be, with Reggie gone on holiday.

The kitchen had its own little square Formica breakfast table, with four plain, minimalist chairs, which to a stranger would have seemed just a little out of place in the otherwise elegant furnishings of Reggie’s penthouse.

But the table had belonged to their parents. It was what they could afford when Reggie and Nigel were growing up in the East End, and Nigel understood why Reggie had kept it.

Their father had died ten years ago, of heart failure precipitated by business failure. Their mother had followed shortly after. It had marked the first point in Nigel’s life when he had begun to suspect that optimism might not always be justified. That life was not fair. That often the people who belong together might not ever find each other, and that when they did the world might grow envious and resentful, and try to drive them apart.

Or, failing that, just somehow kill them.

Nigel—in his last year of university at the time—had resolved then that the next time he saw such an injustice again begin to take shape on a truly happy couple, barring the basic ravages of old age, of course, because there was only so much that one could do, he would do his damnedest to prevent it.

And he had not forgotten that resolve.

He moved on from the kitchen now and checked the bedroom. It was perfect, and improved from what Nigel had seen of Reggie’s digs in earlier years. The loo as well was as it should be. There were some of Reggie’s things in the cabinet, and even more of Laura’s.

Finally, Nigel went into the office—or the den, really—it wasn’t that large a room, and Nigel knew that Reggie didn’t use it that much; generally if he worked late, he would remain at chambers to do so.

The room had a window—but not with the wonderful Thames view that the dining room had. This window was just an exchange of views with the windows in another residential building across the street.

There was a chair and a desk, built-in track lighting in the ceiling, a tower-style personal computer below the desk, a separate display monitor on the desk, and next to that a small lamp.

The room was dark, and Nigel flipped the wall switch.

The overhead lights came on—and nothing else. Not the computer. Not the monitor. Not the desk lamp.

Nigel reached down and flicked the individual switch for the lamp. It came on. So did the computer and the monitor when he tried them. They started up with the expected log-on screen—no information to be gained there.

But still it was odd. Nigel knew that Reggie liked his electrical devices simple and obedient and, unlike Nigel, he was not particularly concerned with how much electricity he used. When he flipped the wall switch for the overhead lights, he wanted everything else to come on as well, no matter how many kilowatts he was consuming.

But someone had turned all of these devices off individually.

And probably not for low energy consumption.

More likely just to avoid attracting attention from anyone in the building across the street.

Nigel picked up Reggie’s desk phone, and he rang Lois at chambers. It was a bit early in the morning, but she might be there.

She picked up.

“Nigel! Are you back?”

Nigel acknowledged that he was, but just for Laura and Reggie’s engagement party.

This was the third time that Nigel had returned to London since moving to Los Angeles two years ago, and each time Lois, and also Rafferty on the leasing committee, would ask if he was back for good, and each time he would say no.

He made a point of mentioning to Lois that Mara would be coming out with him when it came time for the actual wedding. Then he got to the reason for his call:

“I’m at Reggie’s place now. I think it’s been burgled. Or at least searched—I can’t tell if anything’s been taken, but someone has been here and tried to hide that they were.”

“Oh, dear. Intruders there, too?”

“What do you mean, ‘too’?”

“Mr. Rafferty is almost certain that someone has gotten into the letter storage room on the top floor on Baker Street. He won’t say how he knows this—apparently he’s changed the locks and established some sort of secret tracking mechanism since that thing with the Texans last year—but he says he’s certain that someone did break in and rifle things, though they tried to disguise it, and apparently did not actually take anything.”

“Bloody hell,” said Nigel. “You’d think I could go away for a few months and everything be fine.”

“Yes, you’d think,” said Lois.

Now the phone that Nigel was using—Reggie’s phone—began to beep annoyingly.

“I’ll get back to you,” said Nigel. “I think Reggie is getting another call.”

Nigel picked up the incoming call. It was Reggie.

“How was your flight?” said Reggie.

“Crying babies,” said Nigel. “And a crying adult, too, when I saw what the meal service was. But I’m glad you called. The place looks great, but I have a question or two about your security system here.”

“You got in all right?”

“Obviously. But that’s my point. The system was off. I’ve looked around, and nothing has been taken that I can see, but I think someone has been here.”

There was a long pause now from Reggie. Longer than Nigel would have expected.

“Darla Rennie is alive,” said Reggie, finally.

Now there was a pause from Nigel.

“We have a bad connection,” said Nigel. “Whatever you just said—I think you should probably say it again.”

“I said Darla Rennie is alive.”

Nigel’s chest tightened. “Darla Rennie drowned in the Thames,” he said.

“No such luck,” said Reggie.

“She survived the fall? And the river?”

“Apparently. She’s been living with a fisherman from the Thames Estuary. He was found stabbed a few nights ago, with her fingerprints on the murder weapon. And under the floorboards was a newspaper clipping. Just one—the itinerary of our engagement trip to Laura’s aunt’s castle. And Rennie’s fingerprints were on that clipping.”