Ripper (38 page)

Sleep he did.

A fitful sleep.

But sleep nonetheless.

Until Adrian Quirk knocked on the bedroom door.

Still in his uniform, now dusty, rumpled, and creased, Zinc stepped into the hall and quietly shut the door behind him. "Problem, Adrian?" The hall was deserted.

"Claustrophobia," Quirk said. "The walls are closing in. If I don't get some fresh air, I'm going to scream. You and Wynn are the only two I'd trust for company. And he's too weak to push the chair."

Chandler read something else in his face, then Quirk mouthed the sentence
We have to speak.
Whatever it was, he didn't want the hollow walls of Castle Crag to overhear. Zinc weighed leaving the house unpoliced against his own craving for a little fresh air. The urgency in Quirk's look convinced him. "Weather?" he asked.

"Snowing," Quirk said.

"I'll get my parka. Be with you in a sec."

Alex stirred on her bed as he fetched his overcoat. For the first time since Carol was killed, love had pierced his heart. If they survived this Hell, Heaven would be waking each dawn to share the day with Hunt.

"Rewedge the door," Zinc said. "I'll join you for break fast in the Banquet Room. Remember, just the halls. No de tours."

"Why the parka?"

"Something I've got to check."

He paused outside the room until he heard the chair wedge the door shut, then turned to wheel Quirk toward the Receiving Hall stairs. "Other way," Quirk said. "I found a hidden route."

Zinc's room was in the South Wing near the top of the dogleg stairs, while Quirk's room, across the hall, abutted the ceiling vault of the Ballroom below. Wheeling toward the end of the wing, they passed Luna and Katt's room next to Quirk's, then Lou Bolt's room next to theirs, approaching Hunt's abandoned room straight ahead. A narrow corridor

angled left to the front of the house, with bathroom facilities off it to the right. The wall across from the toilet looked like solid wood, but Quirk pushed up and it lifted like the door of a garage.

"The castle isn't wheelchair friendly," he said. "I bumped the wall last night trying to take a leak, and abracadabra, look what I found."

"Is it safe?"

"It's not a trap. I used it already."

"When?"

"Middle of the night. I rode down to the Banquet Room lor food."

"That was foolish."

"Hey, my life is charmed. I should be dead. It's all borrowed time."

"Don't push the envelope. They might call in the loan."

Five feet high, a dumbwaiter was hidden behind the wall. Zinc had to crouch to cram inside and pull the wheelchair in. They spent a minute in the dark while the box descended, Quirk cranking them down then raising the false wall across from the Scullery. They passed the Kitchen, turned right, wheeled to the Receiving Hall and turned right again, then left the mansion by the front door.

Raised on the prairies, Zinc
knew
snow, but this snowfall was unlike any he had ever seen. No fluffy flakes tumbled in unison. No gritty crystals bit into his face. Here funnels of snow, dozens of them, swirled and twirled like whirling dervishes in a Turkish bazaar, dancing in ensemble so they blocked his view, then separating for solos so he could see between them. It brought to mind a dust storm he had witnessed in Beijing.

"The bluff behind the Ballroom. Let's go up," said Quirk.

The path circled wide around the castle's South Wing, past the Billiards Room with its Turkish bath, winding west by the Scullery, Kitchen, and Banquet Room, before ascending to the cliff high above the Pacific. From the bluff to Skeleton Cove, the island tilted down like a playground slide.

The snow on the ground was unmarked.

The crest of the bluff was twenty feet back from the cliff, the ground tenting before it dropped off the precipice. Zinc pushed the wheelchair up the inland slant, stopping this side

of the crest so they didn't slip down the oceanside slope and plummet to the beach. The crashing waves of the Pacific pounded the shore below, building sand formations only to
have them broken down by the foaming surf. Glancing over his shoulder at the hulk of Castle Crag, Zinc glimpsed the idol of Satan behind the Ballroom windows and between two dervishes.

"It's like being in prison, not being able to walk, except my cage moves on wheels," Quirk said. "I used to hike before the accident."

"What happened?" Zinc asked, standing behind the wheelchair facing the cliff.

"I'm an
un
walking example of why you should always buckle up. Two friends and I were in the front seat driving home from a pub. I was in the middle, arms stretched along the back behind their shoulders. The car jumped the road and clipped a tree. I was thrown forward. They wore seat belts. Last thing I heard was my spine crack—and here I am."

"When?"

"Christmas Eighty-six. Just after Expo."

"You said we have to talk? What about?"

"I know who hanged Leuthard in the stairwell."

"Who?"

"Glen Devlin."

"Why suspect him?"

"I found the dumbwaiter at three
A.M.
when I went to piss. With all the commotion last night, I couldn't eat. That's why I rode the lift down to the lower floor."

"To the Banquet Room?"

"Yeah, for a hunk of beef. The meat was still on the spit where it was left when Cohen got shot. Slices off it. Someone else."

"Another foolish move. It could be poisoned."

"I left the Banquet Room to take the dumbwaiter up, and that's when I saw candlelight in the Receiving Hall. I thought it was you, investigating. Luckily my wheelchair doesn't squeak."

"You wheeled to the Hall?"

"Quiet as I could. Any sound was masked by the wind."

"What'd you see?" "Devlin. Kneeling on the stairs. Pulling nails out of the banister."

"Nails?"

"From the trapdoor. The underside. He leaned into the stairwell and used his fingers to wiggle them free. They must have been loose."

"What use would anyone have for nails taken from a gallows?"

"Souvenir of the killing? Some sort of ritual thing?"

"Where were you?"

"Foot of the stairs. Edge of the South Wing. Under the upper half of the staircase. I took the dumbwaiter back to my room."

"Devlin see you?"

"Doubt it. In case he did, I'm telling you."

"Why didn't you knock on my door at three—"

The scream that rode the wind could be from either sex, but Zinc's first thought was Alex had followed them, prompting the killer to follow her. Forty feet to either side, the path from the house to the cliff was clear of trees, creating a sunset sightline from the castle to the drop. Right and left of the swath were granite outcrops and thickets of stunted trees, trunks bent inland by the lash of the wind like the backs of galley slaves.

Another scream.

From the right?

Then a third.

Cut off abruptly as if by death.

"Stay here," Zinc said. "And wave at the castle to summon help." He ran to the right along the crest of the bluff, making sure his sprint straddled the upside down V of the great divide, knowing a slip on the west tent slope might slide him over the cliff. As if in conspiracy with the killer of Deadman's Island, the snow dervishes closed ranks the moment he entered the woods.

Zinc ceased running.

He strained to hear signs of life.

What was that?

A muffled cry?

From back at the bluff?

A fourth scream stabbed the woods like an ice pick from somewhere close ahead. Zinc pressed on, head down to hunt for tracks in the snow, then head up rotating like a Spitfire pilot checking for Messerschmitts. That's how he spotted the speaker.

Battery powered, the speaker was fastened to a scrawny pine, several feet above Zinc's eyes. Laughter barked from it as he cursed himself, followed by a Satanic whisper, "Now Quirk's dead."

Slip-sliding precariously along the crest of the bluff, Zinc ran back to where he'd left the disabled man. There he found
two
sets of footprints on the great divide, from which a pair of wheel tracks descended the slope to the edge of the cliff where they vanished into oblivion.

Leopold . . .

Vancouver 

8:17
A.M.

Havelock Ellis School for Boys looked more like a monastery or youth correction center than it did a school. It gave DeClercq the creeps. As a boy he'd served time in Quebec Catholic schools, and now every paper seemed to report another Father charged with lowering the shorts of orphans or native kids under his care. As he and Craven trod the halls of this hallowed institution, footsteps echoing off the ranks of metal lockers, live-in boys who crossed their path smartly acknowledging their usher as "Sir," images from the school's past formed in Robert's mind. He saw birchings in the Headmaster's office between cricket and classics, licensed barbarism intermingling with the niceties of Ovidian verse. He saw prefects overseeing hazing and peer-punishment, one boy riding another around the dormitory with spurs fashioned from pins. He saw chapel, hall, meals, and classes injected with so much ceremony they were rituals. And instead of ogling girls in class as boys have always done, and always will until someone rips out their endocrine glands, he saw the boys of Havelock Ellis eyeing the buns of their school chums as they traipsed into the shower.

Ah, the English "public" school.

Home of
le vice anglais.

The Headmaster sipped his morning tea as the cops were shown in. He greeted them with the enthusiasm he would a dentist about to ream a root canal. His body was a sack of bones rattling around in a hound's-tooth suit, topped by an oversize head with wavy white hair and spiked eyebrows resembling a phalanx of rockets about to be launched at Mars.

His stern face—
What have you boys done?
—
was marred by liver spots.

"Tea?" he offered.

DeClercq declined.

"Coffee?" Said with contempt as if it were the Devil's brew.

"No thanks," replied DeClercq.

"Your inquiry came to my attention when I arrived this morning. The staff referred it to my desk yesterday afternoon. I want the school kept out of this. Do you understand?" The bite of a birch stick was in his tone.

"Samson Coy," DeClercq said. "Was he a student here?"

"Do I have your undertaking? As a gentleman?"

"I'm investigating a crime in which one of your former pupils may be involved. I need all the background on him you can provide. I won't trumpet the fact he attended this school, but if it comes out it comes out."

"Chief Superintendent, these are woeful times. In today's economy, it's difficult for Havelock Ellis to keep ahead of the rabble. We offer the finest education at daunting cost to us, in an institution unbesmirched by any scandal."

"The crime is murder," DeClercq said. "Answer the question."

"Murder! My God!" The eyebrows launched. "Murder of whom?"

"Samson's mother."

"Delilah Coy?"

"Her real name's Brigid Marsh."

The Headmaster dropped his teacup, which bounced and spilled, slopping English Breakfast all over his inlaid desk. "Shitty ass bum fuck," he groaned. But groaned like a gentleman.

"When was Samson here?"

"Please, I need time to—"

"Headmaster, this is a warning, not a threat. Four women are dead, and we suspect Coy. We're here to learn everything you know about him. If you hold out on us and someone else dies, we'll be back to read you your Charter rights."

Tag-team tactics, Craven weighed in, "Which would be a scandal with a capital S."

"When was he here?" DeClercq snapped.

The Headmaster gave in. "Grades one to twelve, 1971 to '83. Coy was one of the brightest students we ever enrolled; 210 IQ. He topped every class."

"Description?" Craven said, opening his notebook.

"Blond hair, blue eyes, sickly lad. Adrenal insuffiency. Overactive thyroid gland. Cricket, soccer, rugby, aquatics— ours is an excellent program—but he was excused from all school sports, which prompted the more active boys to dub him 'Flea.' "

"Interests?" asked DeClercq.

"Applied science. His mind innately grasped electronics and mechanics. He built an array of Rube Goldberg devices to accomplish human tasks robotically, which prompted some of the duller boys to dub him 'the Crazed Genius.' On graduation, Coy won a scholarship to study engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Last I heard, he topped the school."

"In what?"

"Robotics."

"When was this?"

"Five, six years ago. Then he went to Cambridge."

"To study what?"

"Philosophy."

"Odd combination."

The Headmaster mopped his desk with several paper napkins. "As a rule, I applaud the marriage of science and ethics. In Coy's case, however, I'm not so sure. He idolized Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German who held—"

"The goal of evolution's struggle for survival is the emergence of a dominant Superman," said DeClercq.

The Headmaster blinked as if surprised the Great Unwashed could be literate, too. "I teach a class in ethics to all our boys.
Philosophy, the lumber of the schools."

"Swift," said DeClercq.

"Quite," the Headmaster replied. He peeked inside a thick tea-spattered file on his desk. "Coy's bible was Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
He considered himself
Ubermensch
." The Headmaster peered at DeClercq expectantly, as if to say
Definition?

"One not bound by the rules that govern other people."

"I asked our counselor to have a talk with him. He reported Coy's reply. 'I hate my mother. God would be cruel to make me her son, so I reject him. Satan is more to my liking. At least he offers something in return for my pain. My image of elation is cold-blooded intellect doing what it wants. Cutting out emotion is my religion. The universe is merely a mass of electrons. The mind is nothing but an electronic reflex center. There is no difference between right and wrong. Justice has no objective reality. The only crime is to squander intelligence. The only wrong is to make a mistake.' "