Original Sin (17 page)

De Witt suddenly said: “Innocent House. Well, here we are …”

His voice held a note of spurious jollity as if they had all returned from a boat trip, but his face was stern. She wondered what was the matter with him, what he was thinking. Then slowly, with the others, she carefully made her way up the tide-washed steps onto the marble patio, bracing herself to meet whatever the day had in store.

George Copeland, standing behind the protection of his reception desk in embarrassed ineptitude, heard the clatter of feet on the cobbles with relief. So the launch had arrived at last. Lord Stilgoe halted his angry pacing and they both turned to the door. The little group came through in a bunch with James de Witt at the front. Mr. de Witt gave one look at George’s worried face and asked quickly: “What’s wrong, George?”

It was Lord Stilgoe who answered. Without greeting de Witt he said grimly: “Etienne’s missing. I had an appointment to meet him in his office at nine o’clock. When I arrived there was no one here but the receptionist and the cleaner. It’s not the way I expect to be treated. My time is valuable even if Etienne’s isn’t. I have a hospital appointment this morning.”

De Witt said easily: “How do you mean, missing? I expect he’s got held up in the traffic.”

George broke in: “He must be here somewhere, Mr. de Witt. His jacket is over the chair in his office. I looked there when he didn’t reply to my ring. And the front door wasn’t locked when I arrived this morning, not with the Banham. I got in with just
the Yale. And the alarm hadn’t been set. Miss Claudia’s just arrived. She’s checking now.”

They all moved, as if driven by a common impulse, into the hall. Claudia Etienne, with Mrs. Demery at her shoulder, was coming out of Blackie’s office.

She said: “George is right. He must be here somewhere. His jacket is over the chair and his bunch of keys in the top right-hand drawer.” She turned to George. “You’ve checked at number ten?”

“Yes, Miss Claudia. Mr. Bartrum’s arrived but there’s no one else in the building. He had a look and rang back. He says that Mr. Gerard’s Jaguar is there, parked where it was last night.”

“How about the house lights? Were they on when you arrived?”

“No, Miss Claudia. There wasn’t a light in his office either. Not anywhere.”

At this moment Frances Peverell and Gabriel Dauntsey appeared. George saw that Mr. Dauntsey looked frail. He was walking with a stick and there was a small sticking-plaster on the right of his forehead. No one remarked on it. George wondered if anyone but him had even noticed.

Claudia said: “You haven’t got Gerard at number twelve have you? He seems to have disappeared.”

Frances said: “He hasn’t been with us.”

Mandy, coming in behind and taking off her helmet, said: “His car is here. I saw it at the end of Innocent Passage when I drove past.”

Claudia said repressively, “Yes, we know that Mandy. I’ll take a look upstairs. He must be somewhere in the building. The rest of you, wait here.”

She made briskly for the staircase with Mrs. Demery at her back. Blackie, as if she hadn’t heard the instruction, gave
a little gasp and ran clumsily after them. Maggie FitzGerald said, “Trust Mrs. Demery to be in on the act,” but her voice was uncertain and when no one commented she blushed as if wishing she hadn’t spoken.

The little group moved quietly into a semicircle, almost, George thought, as if gently pushed by an invisible hand. He had switched on the lights in the hall and the painted ceiling glowed above them, seeming to mark with its splendour and permanence their puny preoccupations and unimportant anxieties. All their eyes were turned upwards. George thought that they looked like figures in a religious painting, staring up in anticipation of some supernatural visitation. He waited with them, uncertain whether his place was here or behind his counter. It wasn’t for him to initiate action by joining the search. As always he did what he was told, but he was a little surprised that the partners waited with such docility. But why not? It was pointless for a whole crowd of them to go charging round Innocent House. Three searchers were more than enough. If Mr. Gerard was in the building Miss Claudia would find him. No one spoke or moved except James de Witt who had stepped quietly to Frances Peverell’s side. It seemed to George that they had been waiting, frozen, like actors in a tableau, for hours although it could only have been for a few minutes.

Then Amy, her voice sharp with fear, said: “Someone’s screaming. I heard a scream.” She looked round at them, frantic-eyed.

James de Witt didn’t turn to look at her but kept his eyes on the stairs. He said quietly: “No one screamed. You imagined it, Amy.”

Then it came again, but this time louder and unmistakable, a high desperate cry. They moved forward to the bottom of the stairs but no further. It was as if no one dared to take that first
upward step. There was a second’s silence, and then the wailing began, at first a distant lament and then rising, getting closer. George, rooted in terror, couldn’t identify the voice. It seemed to him as inhuman as the wail of a siren or the scream of a cat in the night.

Maggie FitzGerald whispered: “Oh my God! My God, what is it?”

And then, with dramatic suddenness, Mrs. Demery appeared at the top of the staircase. It seemed to George that she materialized out of the air. She was supporting Blackie, whose wails were now subsiding into low heaving sobs.

James de Witt’s voice was low but very clear: “What is it, Mrs. Demery? What’s happened? Where’s Mr. Gerard?”

“In the little archives room. Dead! Murdered! That’s what’s happened. He’s lying up there half-naked and stiff as a bloody board. Some devil has strangled him with that sodding snake. He’s got Hissing Sid wound round his neck with its head stuffed in his mouth.”

At last James de Witt moved. He sprang for the stairs. Frances made to follow him, but he turned and said urgently, “No, Frances, no,” and pushed her gently aside. Lord Stilgoe followed him with an old man’s ungainly waddle, grasping at the stair rail. Gabriel Dauntsey hesitated for a moment then followed.

Mrs. Demery cried: “Give me a hand, can’t you someone? She’s a deadweight.”

Frances went immediately to her and placed an arm round Blackie’s waist. Looking up at them, George thought that it was Miss Frances who needed support. They came down the stairs together almost carrying Blackie between them. Blackie was moaning and whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Together they supported her across the hall towards the back
of the house while the little group looked after them in appalled silence.

George went back to his desk, to his switchboard. This was his place. This was where he felt secure, in control. This was where he could cope. He could hear voices. The awful sobbing was quieter now but he could hear Mrs. Demery’s high expostulations and a babble of female voices. He shut them out of his mind. There was a job to be done: he had better do it. He tried to unlock his security cupboard under the counter but his hands were shaking so violently that he couldn’t fit the key into the lock. The telephone rang and he jumped violently then fumbled for the headset. It was Mrs. Velma Pitt-Cowley, Mrs. Carling’s agent, wanting to speak to Mr. Gerard. George, shocked into initial silence, managed to say that Mr. Gerard wasn’t available. Even to his ears, his voice sounded high, cracked, unnatural.

“Miss Claudia, then. I suppose she’s in.”

“No,” said George, “No.”

“What’s wrong? That’s you, isn’t it George? What’s the matter?”

George, appalled, switched off the call. Immediately the telephone rang again, but he didn’t answer and after a few seconds the noise stopped. He gazed at it in trembling impotence. Never before had he acted like this. Time passed, seconds, minutes. And then Lord Stilgoe was towering over the desk and he could smell his breath and feel the force of his triumphant anger.

“Get me New Scotland Yard. I want to speak to the Commissioner. If he’s not available, get me Commander Adam Dalgliesh.”

Detective Inspector Kate Miskin, nudging aside a half-empty packing case, opened the balcony door of her new Docklands flat and, grasping the rail of polished oak, gazed over the shimmering river, up to Limehouse Reach and down to the great curve round the Isle of Dogs. It was only 9.15 in the morning but already an early mist had cleared and the sky, almost cloudless, was brightening to an opaque whiteness with glimpses of soft clear blue. It was a morning more like spring than mid-October, but the river smell was autumnal, strong as the smell of damp leaves and rich earth overlaying the salty tang of the sea. It was full tide and beneath the pinpoints of light which flicked and danced on the creased surface of the water like fireflies, she could imagine the strong tug of the flowing current, could almost sense its power. With this flat, this view, one more ambition had been achieved, one more step taken away from that dull box-sized flat at the top of Ellison Fairweather Buildings in which she had spent the first eighteen years of her life.

Her mother had died within days of her birth, her father was unknown and she had been cared for by a reluctant and elderly
maternal grandmother, who resented the child who had made her a virtual prisoner in the high-rise flat she dared no longer leave at night to seek the conviviality, the glitter and the warmth of the local pub and who had grown increasingly embittered by her grandchild’s intelligence and by a responsibility for which she was unsuited, by age, by health, by temperament. Kate had realized too late, only at the moment of her grandmother’s death, how much she had loved her. It seemed to her now that in the moment of that death each had paid to the other a lifetime’s arrears of love. She knew that she would never break completely free of Ellison Fairweather Buildings. Coming up to this flat in the large modern lift, surrounded by the carefully packed oil paintings which she herself had painted, she had remembered the lift at Ellison Fairweather, the smeared and filthy walls with their graffiti, the stink of urine, the cigarette ends, the discarded beer cans. It had been frequently vandalized and she and her grandmother had had to lug their shopping and washing up the seven storeys, pausing at the top of each flight for her grandmother to catch her breath. Sitting there surrounded by their plastic bags, listening to the old lady’s wheezings, she had vowed: “When I’m grown-up I shall get out of this. I shall leave bloody Ellison Fairweather Buildings for ever. I shall never come back again. I shall never be poor again. I shall never have to smell this smell again.”

She had chosen the police service through which to make her escape, resisting the temptation to enter the sixth form or try for university, anxious only to begin earning, to get away. That first Victorian flat in Holland Park had been the beginning. After her grandmother’s death she had stayed on for nine months knowing that to leave at once would be a desertion, although she was not sure from what, perhaps from a reality that had to be faced, knowing too that there was expiation to be
made, things she had to learn about herself, and that this was the place in which to learn them. The time would come when it would be right to leave and she could close the door with a sense of completion, of putting behind her a past which couldn’t be altered, but which could be accepted with its miseries, its horrors—yes, and its joys—reconciled and made part of herself. And now that time had come.

This flat, of course, wasn’t what she had originally imagined. She had pictured herself in one of the great converted warehouses near Tower Bridge with high windows and huge rooms, the strong oak rafters and, surely, the lingering smell of spice. But even with a falling property market this had been beyond her means. And the flat, which after careful searching she had chosen, wasn’t a poor second. She had taken the highest mortgage possible, believing that it was financially wise to buy the best she could afford. She had one large room, eighteen feet by twelve, and two smaller bedrooms, one with its shower en suite. The kitchen was large enough to eat in and well fitted. The south-west facing balcony, which ran the whole length of the sitting room, was narrow but still wide enough to take a small table and chairs. She could eat out there in the summer. And she was glad that the furniture originally bought for her first flat hadn’t been cheap. The sofa and two chairs in real leather were going to look good and right in this modern setting. It was lucky that she had rejected black in favour of fawn. Black would have looked too smart. And the simple elm table and chairs looked right too.

And the flat had another great advantage. It was at the end of the building and with a double outlook and two balconies. From her bedroom she could see the wide gleaming panorama of Canary Wharf, the tower like an immense cellular pencil with its lead topped with light, the great white curve of the
adjoining building, the still water of the old West India Dock and the overhead Docklands Light Railway with its trains like clockwork toys. This city of glass and concrete would become busier as new firms moved in. She would be able to look down on the multicoloured, ever-changing pageant of half a million scurrying men and women leading their working lives. The other balcony looked south-west over the river and the slower immemorial traffic of the Thames: barges, pleasure boats, the launches of the River Police and the Port of London Authority, the cruise liners making their way upstream to berth at Tower Bridge. She loved the stimulus of contrast and here in the flat she could move at will from one world to another, from the new to the old, from still water to the tidal river which T. S. Eliot had called a strong brown god.

The flat was particularly suitable for a police officer, with an entryphone system on the main entrance and two security locks and a chain fitted to her front door. There was a basement garage to which the residents had their own keys. That, too, was important. And the journey to New Scotland Yard wouldn’t be too difficult. She was, after all, on the right side of the river. But perhaps she might occasionally travel by riverboat to Westminster Pier. She would get to know the river, become part of its life and history. She would wake in the morning to the cry of gulls and step out into this cool white emptiness. Standing now between the glitter of the water and the high, delicate blue of the sky she felt an extraordinary impulse which had visited her before and which she thought must be as close as she could ever get to a religious experience. She was possessed by a need, almost physical in its intensity, to pray, to praise, to say thank you, without knowing to whom, to shout with a joy that was deeper than the joy she felt in her own physical well-being and achievements or even in the beauty of the physical world.