Mirror Image (32 page)

“You've been watching too many cop shows, my dear.” She turned and looked at Miller. “Charge her with accessory to murder.”

“What … what … what are you talking about?” Manny's voice had grown shrill, strident.

“Where was your father last night, Miss Frazer?”

“I don't know.”

Margaret Haaren stood up suddenly. “We will make arrangements for you to be taken to the hospital…”

“I'm not going to the hospital,” Manny said firmly.

“Yes, you are Miss Frazer.” Haaren's tone was cold.

Stuart Miller stepped forward. “Miss Emmanuelle Frazer, I am formally charging you as an accessory to the murder of one John Doe. Anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you later. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I didn't murder him!”

The detective half turned her head, and Miller looked up from his notebook. “‘I punched him in the throat. He was holding his neck and gasping for breath…'” he read.

“Did you get Miss Frazer's statement, Detective?”

“Yes, ma'am. Sounded like an admission of guilt to me,” Miller said, face impassive. “Punched him in the throat…”

“You're under arrest, Miss Frazer. We will be taking you to a hospital for a sexual assault examination and then you will be brought to the local precinct for further questioning.” Haaren turned abruptly and walked from the room.

Stuart Miller caught up with her on the landing. “What do you think?” he said softly.

“Get rid of the rookie officer and substitute someone older, a maternal figure she can talk to. Have her run the ‘horrors of prison scenario.' We'll let the girl sweat for a bit and then I'll talk to her later today and we'll see if she still sticks to her story.”

“And Mr. Frazer?” Miller asked, stopping outside the bedroom door.

“Suspicion of murder, conspiracy to murder, and whatever else I can think of.”

“How do you read it?” he asked, genuinely interested.

“I think the scarred man was attempting to extort money from Frazer. He tried threatening him, killing off his employees, and maybe he tried to kidnap the daughter, or maybe it was rape as an example. Frazer comes in. There's a struggle. The guy is thrown against the mirror, and suddenly he ends up dead. The only problem is,” she admitted, “there's not a lot of glass around the base of the broken mirror.”

“Most of it ended up in the dead guy's back,” Stuart Miller reminded her.

“So we'll have Mr. Frazer down to the precinct as well for a few questions. Let him sweat, too; let's see what happens. This will be a pleasure,” she grinned, turning the handle and walking into the bedroom.

The room was empty.

 

71

S
HE WAS
a demon, John Dee had decided. Some creature from the pit.

And he was fascinated by her—completely under her spell.

They had been married for the best part of a year now, although the priest Edward Kelley had produced had been of dubious antecedents, and he wouldn't have been surprised to discover that the man had been a Papist, so he wasn't entirely sure if the nuptials were legitimate. But he didn't care: he loved the woman.

It had been an extraordinary year in many ways, and he sometimes thought he knew just as much about the woman now as he did on the occasion of their very first meeting. He still had to learn her name. She subscribed to the old pagan tradition—that was still current in some magical circles—that there was magic in a name, and to give that name freely and without thought to another person delivered you into their power.

She rarely spoke, and more often than not he seemed to find her in a trance, her cold black eyes glazed, looking at something only she could see. Often she talked through Kelley when he was in a mediumistic trance. She would speak some alien foreign tongue, that sounded a little like Welsh or the barbarous language of the Celts, and Kelley would translate.

Her knowledge of alchemy however, was profound, deeper even than Kelley's, whose knowledge was impressive. She was also versed in several of the arcane arts, and if some of her craft approached the darker side of magic then he felt that it was worth it in return for the knowledge gained.

But it was whilst working with the mirror that her extraordinary abilities became evident.

He had watched her perform—if that was the word, though it seemed so base a word for what she did—before the mirror every month when the moon was full. Standing naked and proud before the glass, she would arouse herself with complete abandon and then—at the precise moment of her greatest passion—he would spill blood down the length of the mirror.

The resultant images were profound, vivid, terrifying, and completely exhilarating.

And they had brought him recognition at court. Although he was already a favorite of the queen—she had even allowed him to choose the precise time and day for her coronation and he had prepared several natal charts for her—with the virtual banishment of Essex to Ireland, he was one of the few persons at court she asked for advice.

And she believed in magic.

In so many ways she was so practical, so level-headed, so firm in her convictions, it was difficult to believe that she should ever vacillate in any one thing. And yet she was quite prepared to take and act upon advice from outsiders.

But Dee's greatest advantage was that his advice was
good—
so good. The mirror's images were never wrong. Indeed, the queen had been so curious about the quality of Dee's information that he had been obliged to inform her of the mirror's existence, and had promised to show it to her when the time was propitious. She promised to ride out to Mortlake to see it soon.

Married for a year and now Dee's enigmatic wife was pregnant.

They had made love … no, that was not the correct term. The had engaged in congress together every night for two weeks, but there was no love involved in it, their coupling had been in the manner of a scientific experiment. She had been in control at all times.

Dee had thought he would have found some difficulty arousing himself as the nights progressed, but when the time came, one look at the woman's naked body had been enough. They had swived in front of the mirror, with the woman on top, and she always ensured that the great passion took them simultaneously. Then the mirror would explode into sights and visions that Dee was sure must emanate from hell. There was so much to see, so many images, from all the ages of man, from times he had heard about, places he had read of in ancient Roman and Greek texts.

He remembered one image in particular. It appeared on the last night of their lovemaking.

The mirror showed the woman and himself standing side by side holding a child by the hands—a female child—raven haired, gray-eyed. He saw the child drop its parents' hands and approach the mirror, stretching out its long-fingered hands toward the glass, and Dee saw the mirror come alive with sights and movement.

“A magical child,” the woman whispered, watching the mirror over her shoulder. And then she had crouched lower over Dee, pressing her full breasts against his thin chest. “Husband: I believe this night you have impregnated me.”

He didn't need to ask her how she knew; her natural magic would surely have told her. And later, when he worked out the birthdate of the child, he discovered that it was due around the midwinter solstice. Truly, a magical child.

Now when she came to the mirror, heavy with her babe, her breasts and belly swollen, he found he could still watch her with the same satisfaction, feel the same desire. Unselfconsciously, she squatted on the floor before the tall glass and proceeded to arouse herself with her fingers and a carved wooden stick. Colors flowed down the glass, images flickered in rapid succession … but one image in particular kept recurring … that of a knife rising and falling … rising and falling … silver when it fell, red with gore when it rose.

He had no idea what it meant.

 

72

 …
A
KNIFE
rising
and falling, rising and falling, silver when it fell, red with gore when it rose.

Jonathan Frazer came awake with a scream. He sat up in the tiny foul-smelling room and rubbed his face with his hands, feeling his stubble scratch against his skin. He felt—and looked—like shit. Swinging both feet out of the bed, he rested his elbows on his knees and buried his head in his hands. How had he gotten himself into this situation, he wondered dully.

How?

Why?

Why had he run away? He raised his head and looked into the speckled mirror on the battered dresser beside the filthy sink. He almost did not recognize the face that stared back at him. He looked like a junkie, his eyes sunk deep into his head, flesh tight across his cheekbones, his expression haunted.

He'd run away because he was close—so damned close—to solving the secret of the glass. He couldn't afford to be put in jail or taken in for questioning. Not now, not when the answers were within reach.

He wasn't finished with Celia just yet.

And then there was the image. He'd made a promise to her.

Feed me.

Free me.

And he couldn't do that in jail. So what was he supposed to do? Go up to that bitch of a detective and say to her, look, don't put me in behind bars at the moment, I've just discovered through my magical mirror that my wife's having an affair, and by the way, I've also discovered that there's some woman—some creature—trapped within the mirror?

Oh sure, she'd like that, and she'd believe him. She already suspected him of conspiracy or whatever; she'd use any excuse to haul him in, and then use whatever influence she could to keep him in.

They were probably looking for him now. They might even suspect that he had something to do with Talbott's death.

And what was he going to tell them when they finally caught up with him? He'd heard a crash of glass and come down to see his daughter lying naked beneath Edmund Talbott who looked like a piece of meat on a butcher's slab?

And how did the glass get there, Mr. Frazer?

Oh, the mirror broke of its own accord and the glass flew through the air at him.

Tell us the truth, Mr. Frazer?

Well, actually, I believe the woman trapped in the mirror sensed the danger to my daughter and was protecting her the only way it knew.

And you believe that, Mr. Frazer?

Absolutely. Why, less than an hour previously, I'd watched my wife in bed with another man. I scratched her face through the glass. Go and ask her if she's fucking her skiing instructor, and while you're there, see if she has scratches on her face.

Yes, he was sure they'd believe that, too.

So he'd made up the simple story of Talbott raping Manny. It was plausible enough to be true. He was raping her, she struck him a lucky blow that immobilized him and then Manny had dropped the mirror on him. He'd didn't think they'd investigate too closely; Talbott's death tied things up neatly and it would all be over.

Later, when he discovered the police officer posted outside his bedroom door, he knew he had a problem. They were going to take him in, and neither his nor Manny's stories would stand up to serious questioning.

Getting out of the bedroom was simplicity itself. The large double windows opened out onto a small balcony which was positioned directly over the sloping sunroom. The only problem he'd had was making sure he didn't put his foot through the glass panels of the roof. Keeping in the shadows, he'd crept to the furthest point of the garden, scaled the fencing and landed in the neighbor's yard. Staying in the bushes he made his way carefully to the street, then simply walked briskly down the road, away from the house. Dawn hadn't broken yet and the house was full of police activity. So now he was on the run. That brought a smile to his face.

He looked at his reflection in the glass. He was forty-five years old, and his only previous encounters with the police had been for the occasional parking fine, and now here he was a suspect in a murder. He had five hundred dollars cash in his wallet, his credit cards, and his cell phone. He'd used an ATM machine to take out the cash, all in twenties, but he knew if he used his cards again the police would be able to trace him. Also, he couldn't use his cell phone again. He turned it off, and then pulled out the battery; he'd read somewhere that police couldn't track phones that were powered down. He'd already spent twenty-five dollars on a cab and then seventy-five dollars for the night in some seedy motel on Vermont Avenue. So far this evening he'd had three women of various ages and conditions knocking on his door asking him if he was looking for any company.

What he needed now was a plan. Running away had been spur of the moment, now he needed to do something more constructive, more longterm. Obviously, he was going to have to clear his name. He'd need to talk to Detective Haaren, make her listen to sense.

And he needed to get back to the mirror again. He wanted to see the image again.

Feed Me.

Free Me.

Yes, and he was going to have to work out some way of freeing her, releasing her spirit. Talbott would have known … but he was beginning to wonder if everything Talbott had told him had been the truth. Maybe Talbott knew of the existence of the woman in the glass and wanted to keep her for himself. He nodded fiercely. Talbott wanted the woman for himself; that's why he wanted the mirror.

Jonathan Frazer stood and crossed the room, swaying slightly, suddenly realizing that he hadn't eaten in more than twenty-four hours. He searched through his jacket pocket, looking for a slip of paper, and a pen, finally finding his twenty-two karat gold Cross pen and two theatre ticket stubs:
Les Miserables
, the last time he and Celia had been out together. He smiled, remembering. It had been a good night. The smile faded as he turned the ticket stubs around in his hand. Unfortunately, there had been far too few good nights in the last few years of their marriage. He stood looking at the stubs for a moment, before he returned to the bed—there was no chair in the room—and sat down.