Lost (24 page)

“Ah, but he's telling the truth about the girl, she's missing,” wheezed Jenkins. “And it was a harsh dream. It was my daughter and it was not, in that indecisive, maddening way of dreams. She was talking to me, but she was clawed and chewed—”

“I don't want—”

“It gets worse. There was a fiend; she's lashed—”

“I
don't want,
” said Winnie firmly but picking her way as kindly as she could. “I have enough dreams of my own, and this is none of my business. I'm paying it no attention at all. It's John's being missing that's getting to you. To me too. Take some deep breaths now. It's okay.”

She waited for Jenkins to regain composure. Mac wandered back into the kitchen with a saucy expression. “Why does a whore stop having Sunday tea with her da?” said Mac. “He slags her off one time too many for having a job she can do lying down? His dream is all guilt, nothing but. What has he said to her that gets up her nose? It's his fault for being a silly preachy bugger. He's always telling me to make something of myself too. As if I need to hear his mind about it.”

She took a deep breath and said, “Look, fellows. This is your job and I don't care if you walk out or if you tear the wall down. I'm going to go to the police, and then I'm going to pack my bags and get out of here.”

She picked up her coat with as much dignity as she could and made her way down the stairs. Out the front door into the sentimental rain that colored the world in halftone shades, as in Jenkins's dream. How useless her mind was in this situation; it only knew how to work in stories. She couldn't think what could retract those nails into the wall that didn't have a supernatural origin.

She knew what Wendy Pritzke would make of this material, that was the curse: Wendy was with her, working on her own story even as Winnie went sliding and slopping down the hill, trying to remember where she might have seen a police station in Hampstead.

 

. . . that girl. Maybe one of those slim-hipped boy-girls, downright gaunt. Wearing clothes too big for her, all hanging on her like medieval rags—that coarse-woven stuff like burlap. She'd be out on the pavement where she usually did business, stalking the stalker. A modern-day Robo-prostitute, not to be trifled with, ready to wreak revenge at last on the ghost of Jack the Ripper. On behalf of all the women who'd died at his knife.

And what of this notion of Jack the Ripper, his ghost, howling up the chimney stack, ready to emerge when the time was right, ready to do battle again? He had been called the Ripper because of his tactics with the knife, his talent at bloody vivisection. Could some
fille
Jenkins or someone like her--some modern-day prostitute with an appetite for vengeance--take the life of a ghost? And how could you take the life of someone dead?

And how had he died? Who had ripped the Ripper
a hundred-some years ago? The paterfamilias, or an intended victim getting the upper hand?

 

But this was nonsense, a distraction. She had to focus. Could she remember where the police station was? Down Rosslyn Hill, was it? And what would she say when she got there? How could she tell the officer at the desk about superstitious Mac and skeptical Jenkins, and the rapping sound, and the retracting nails? Would the Metropolitan Police come by and tear the place apart? What if they did, and John showed up, having been out on an extended work emergency, or even a tryst of some sort that he was hiding from Allegra Lowe as well as Winnie Rudge? The authorities would be onto him about his plans to put an illegal staircase and deck onto a protected building without the proper permission.

The police would just get on the phone and call John's office; why hadn't she done that? Because she was in the custom usually of staying out of his life, she knew, but it was time to break that old habit.

She stopped and bought a phone card, found his work number in her book, dialed. “Adjusting Services,” said the voice that answered, a woman's efficient voice in that faintly curdled South African accent.

“John Comestor, please.”

“Who is calling, please?”

“Winifred Rudge.”

She was put on hold a minute. The rain battered at her back. “Sorry,” said the voice, returning, “he's not here.”

“This is his cousin. Is he out of town, do you know?”

“I don't know his movements. Frightfully sorry.”

“But has he been in this week? I've just arrived from the States and I'm hoping to see him while I'm here.”

“I don't work this department usually; I'm filling in today for Gillian, who's out sick.”

Gillian and John, an item? No. Gillian was married and sixty besides.

“Look, can you please ask around? I really need to know where he is.”

“I'm afraid I can't do that, miss. It's company policy not to reveal the schedules or destinations of our adjustors. I'm sure you can understand. There's little else I can help you with. I do apologize.”

“You can tell me if you've seen him at least. Please.”

“There are other lines going. Dreadfully sorry.” She rang off.

He was traveling on work; he'd been called away suddenly; why couldn't they just say?

Unless—and this was her fiction spasm happening again—the office staff there had been coached to respond to her with no information at all about him. Why would John do that to her?

Turning back from the phone, blinking into the rain, Winnie thought that if Colum Jenkins called John's office, maybe he'd get a different answer than Winnie had gotten. Maybe the temp would think, “Not a woman, so not the cousin he's avoiding; I can answer differently.” It was worth a try. There was nothing else to do.

Except, as she passed it, to step into the overheated offices of Bromley Channing Estate Agents, just as the thought struck her, and stand there dripping on the sisal matting. The properties were posted between laminated sheets in the window, hanging chicly on fishing line. Photographs of facades and aren't-we-smart parlors with fresh flowers. Winnie was grateful that the alibi of middle age made all kinds of mild lies possible. “I was thinking of buying and I saw your sign,” she said to the receptionist, “on a building in Holly Bush Hill, a flat. Is it taken yet?”

“Oh, a flat,” said the receptionist, as if dealing with anything less
than former mansions of Sting was not worth swiveling around in her chair to check on. “Not many of those this time of year. Spring is when they start to come on the market.”

“What's your range?” said an agent, bobbing forward between desks.

“I saw a sign,” said Winnie. She gave the address.

“That's in the three-to-five file,” said the agent. He meant three to five hundred thousand pounds. A hot market again.

“Oh, yes,” said the receptionist, finding the specs. “It happens we've got a broker over there at the moment. Aren't we lucky. Can you pop round?”

“I'm on foot,” said Winnie. “I don't pop anywhere, but I trudge pretty efficiently. Have him wait.”

“Let me get him on the mobile. He'll have to let you in. Hold on. Hello there Kendall Amanda here are you at the Weatherall Walk first-floor one-and-a-half bedrooms? Right. You just stepping out or will you be there a bit?” She aimed her pinky toward her mouth, ready to kill time by destroying her nails, then cocked her chin up toward Winnie to say, “You can get there in ten minutes, he'll still be there, your name is?—”

Winnie paused and then said, “Wendy. Wendy Pritzke.”

“She'll be right over, American lady. Miss Pritzke.” Amanda slammed the phone and withdrew a photocopied map of Hampstead Village from a drawer, but Winnie said, “I know where it is, I've told you. I'll just head over there.”

“He's Kendall Waugh,” called Amanda after Winnie.

 

Waugh was an overweight estate agent with a belt made of rattlesnake skin. He huffed and panted as he led Winnie toward the back of the flat, where a man and a woman were muttering to
themselves in disagreement. “My clients are nearly through here but we have another place to see down on Honeybourne Road,” said Kendall Waugh. “Let me just answer their questions, Miss Prizzy, and then I'll show you round quickly.”

“I can have a look myself,” she said. She was looking as she spoke. The layout of the flat for sale was identical to John's flat above and, she assumed, to Mrs. Maddingly's flat below. Three small rooms in the older building, facing Weatherall Walk, two additional rooms snugly joined to the newer house behind. The flat had belonged to Mrs. Maddingly several decades ago, but there was no sign of her whimsical disarray. The place was empty of furniture and sorely in need of sprucing up. The coping was dingy. But Winnie wasn't in the market for a flat, she was supposed to be hunting for some natural cause of the unnatural disasters occurring in John's flat upstairs.

She could see nothing of interest. The chimney stack rose from below and continued above, exactly as geometry and architecture would have it. In the large room it had once heated and lit, the chimney breast was boarded over. “Could this fireplace be opened up and made to work?” she said to Kendall Waugh.

“I'll just finish here if I may have a moment, one moment,” he called, affecting patience, but unconvincingly. Winnie stood in the gloom, in a box of cold room, and heard the voices in the annex. In certain sorts of rain, when the clouds come down close as they were today, it was sometimes hard to keep the mind fixed to the current year.

She'd noticed the syndrome mostly on gray February days, back when she was living in the more expensive and so more thinly developed Boston suburbs. The wet tree trunks, the low sky the color of tarnished silver, the muted smoky green of yews and white pines and arborvitae, the retracting mounds of dirty snow, the skin of the world pulling in phlegmy puddles, the occasional stab of red in
holly berries. In palette, at least, it was the same cold world of the Wampanoags, the Puritans, the colonists and revolutionaries, the Federalists and revivalists and Victorians and so on.

Similarly, in London, the wind bullied the windows in their casings as rattlingly as it must have done all through the past three hundred years and more. The gray skies drawn in over the mighty and inattentive Atlantic were the very same gray, corrected for reduction of pollution from coal fires, of course, thanks to the Clean Air Act.

She roused herself back to whatever of the here and now she could still trust, or care about. She heard Kendall Waugh answering a question. “That, I can tell you actually. We've got at the office a very fine pamphlet that talks about this street and actually mentions the structure. It was put up in the early nineteenth century, which makes it almost two hundred years old of course as you know, by a merchant named Rudge. Rudge House and all that. He was in imports, the tea trade.”

“He wasn't a merchant,” said Winnie, “he wasn't in tea. He started in Cornwall tin mining and became an expert in beam supports. Excuse me, and not to change the subject, but have you been showing people through here all day today?”

Kendall Waugh blinked as if she'd blasphemed against the Queen Mother. “There's quite a lot of interest in this property actually, I don't think it'll be on the market for long, everything is being snatched up, you won't see its like, its”—he glanced about the icy dusty cramped space—“period flavor.” Only of course it sounded like
flavour
the way he said it.

She said, “I'm very sorry but I have to ask. Have you seen or heard anything unusual in this flat while you've been here? Any poundings or noise? Anything out of the ordinary?” The prospective buyers looked sniffy, as if they suspected her of trying to scare
them from making an offer. She gave up and closed the door as silently as she could on her way out.

Upstairs, Mac and Jenkins were pacing. “Mr. Jenkins. Please. Call John Comestor at work,” she said to them, slamming her satchel down on John's good eighteenth-century occasional table and the hell with it. “Ask for him. I'm at my wit's end.”

He did as he was told. “Put it on speakerphone,” she told him, and when he wouldn't, she leaned over him and pressed the button herself.

There was the snippy receptionist again.

“I'd like to speak to Mr. Comestor, please. Mr. Colum Jenkins calling.”

“I'm afraid Mr. Comestor is away for a while. May I put you in touch with one of his partners?”

“Do you know when he'll be back, or can you tell me where he went?”

“I'm afraid I don't know the answer to either. If you call again when his regular secretary is in you'll be able to find out, I'm sure. She'll be back tomorrow.”

“Well,” said Winnie when Jenkins had rung off, “you got more than I did. She wouldn't even admit to me that he was away. But if that's the line she's giving out, then at least the company knows he's gone somewhere, and that eliminates the likelihood of”—oh, but she couldn't say the overheated words
foul play
.

They walked back to the kitchen, where they found Mac looking wild-eyed. “Christ,” said Jenkins.

“You're fecking right,” said Mac in a throttled voice. “I just thought of this at last.” Among the crowbars and screwdrivers on the floor lay a butcher's knife and a piece of Ethiopian silver. “I found it in the study, on the wall.” She knew the piece; John had
bought it in a market in Lamu, on the Kenyan coast. It was an elaborate cross, not all that finely finished, but beautiful in proportion and design, which probably derived from Byzantine-Coptic models. John was scarcely religious, but he'd liked the rectilinear turnings of its basket weave patterns. “A key as much as a cross,” John had said.

“I went up to the wall—” Mac was almost in seizures. “The thing shuddered, buckled; I mean the whole wall convulsed; the boards shook and waved; they went like this—” He undulated the air with his palms, waist to shoulder heights. “I was holding the cross and praying—”