Murder on the Hill (4 page)

He squeezed my shoulder and leaned closer in.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“Jewels to the value of what you owe me, plus a little on top. I’ll give you the four days.”

Before I could protest or do anything else, he had Frankie bundle me back into the boot of the car and drive me back to Cordi’s. When we returned, he popped the boot and threw the keys in with a sneer. “I’ll see you later, sugar tits.”

Sugar tits? Really? Was this guy transplanted from the ’70s?

His great bulk headed off down the street. I eased my body out of the car, dragging the laptop bag out from under the pile of crap. I closed the boot lid, locked the car, and took a few deep breaths.

So much for having it easier working for someone.

I thought back to the black diamond again. It was looking like my only way out. I didn’t want to bring more grief upon Mr. Bellman while he dealt with his wife’s passing. I might not be the most virtuous of people, but I wasn’t an uncaring monster.

Putting all that behind me for now, I trudged up the stairs and let myself back into the house. I reached the kitchen and placed the laptop bag on the table.

Cordi had piled the fragments of the doru into a dish and had made a pot of tea.

Her eyes widened with shock when she turned around from working at the sink to regard me. Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my, Harley, what happened to you? I thought it was taking a while. I completely lost the sense of time looking for Aunt Maggie’s gemstone directory.”

How could I explain what happened? I couldn’t.

So I lied. “I fell down the stairs. I’m okay, just grazed my knees.”

“Goodness! Take a seat. I’ll get the first aid box. You look like you’ve taken a real bump to your head. Perhaps I ought to take you to the hospital? I’m so sorry for making you go to the car. It’s all my fault.”

On and on, Cordi fussed. I stood and gripped her shoulders.

“Cordi, it’s okay, really. I’m fine. Let’s just focus on Mr. Bellman for now.”

“I’ll hear none of it. I’m not having my staff working while all banged up. Now sit, let’s get you cleaned up.” She fixed me with the stare of motherly threat.

I did as I was told, feeling oddly good about someone looking out for me.

While Cordi helped clean my wounds, I pulled the laptop from its bag and sighed.

“How old is this?” I asked.

“Not that old, I was given it back in… Oh, let me think, about nineteen ninety-five. There’s still an AOL disk in there for the Internet.”

How I prevented myself from planting my head on the table will remain a mystery. My phone had more computing power than this thing. I humoured Cordi and plugged it in. I switched it on and… nothing.

I made sure the outlet was switched on—it was.

“Is it broken?” Cordi asked.

“Not sure.” I removed the power cable and replaced it, pressing the power button once more. A great spark blew out the side of the machine and acrid smoke bellowed out.

The mini explosion made me jump back.

Cordi rushed to the sink and grabbed a wet tea towel to douse the flames.

“Well,” I said, “that was an experience.”

“Hmm, I should have never trusted my ex-husband. I should have thrown it out with his other crap years ago.”

The thought of Cordi throwing anything out seemed highly unlikely.

“We’ll drop in on the library tomorrow first thing,” Cordi said. “For now, let’s find you a place to sleep. I’m sure after all of today’s excitement, you’re going to want to get settled.”

That was quite the understatement.

CHAPTER 4

Day 2

I couldn’t sleep very well at Cordi’s place. I had excavated the sofa out from under a pile of catalogues with yellowed and sticky mould-covered pages. They were from some ’80s department store. Why Cordi kept them, I had no idea. Perhaps reliving her youth?

At least she had provided me with a clean sheet to put on the dust-encrusted sofa. But sleep didn’t come easily. It was like sleeping in a tomb with all the tall cabinets full of vases and dolls staring at me in the dark. Or at least that’s what I imagined.

It’s weird how the imagination puts evil in the dark. But then I spent many a night sleeping out on the streets and saw… things.

So anyways, sleep wasn’t forthcoming. My head was still throbbing from earlier, and my mind was turning over a hundred and one plans to get rid of Ivanov. Of course, I couldn’t get the black diamond out of my thoughts.

My watch, a Disney swatch watch, one of a kind, bought from a boot sale for almost nothing, told me it was approaching four a.m.

Outside, the birds were tweeting and fluttering about in the cool grey of predawn. The weak light filtered through into the stacked living room, and I got up to see if I could find where Cordi had hidden the gem.

She had said it was in a safe place, so I thought she might have a lockbox or a safe or something. I heard her snoring upstairs and set about my search.

Half the crap I found in the cabinets and bookshelves I couldn’t even find a name for. Other than endless catalogues and old books, I found something that looked like a sex toy, or perhaps some kind of whisk, it was hard to tell.

I shivered at the thought of anyone using it… well, you know. I won’t draw you a picture. My hands were covered in dust and the motes were floating about the air by the time I reached the rear of the room, stepping over an ancient pyramid of automobile repair manuals.

There, I found the tallest bookshelf going from floor to ceiling and some three meters wide. The shelves bowed under the weight of the triple-stacked books. On the shelf at about head height, I saw a gap—an area of little dust.

Almost as though it had recently been disturbed.

Feeling like a total boss, I reached into the gap, expecting to find the gem, when my foot slipped on a glossy magazine and I tumbled forward into the bookcase.

With my stomach in my mouth, I regained my balance only to find the case creaking toward me. Holy crap, I was going to be entombed! And given the state of the place, I doubted anyone would find my rotting corpse anytime soon.

I leapt back, tripping over the pyramid, and cursed Cordi’s utterly shambolic decor arrangements and hit the ground on my back, knocking the wind from my lungs. Above me a shadow loomed as the case continued to topple forward.

Books tumbled from the shelf and it gained speed. I tried to scramble free, but it was too late. The bookcase crashed down on top of me. I managed to get my hands in front of my chest and gripped the edge of the bulky piece of furniture, but still, the force made me wheeze. The weight of it pinned me to the ground.

Great. Just perfect.

And looking down at me from my right side was a glass cabinet full of dolls.

“Stop staring and help, you satanic little freaks,” I said, struggling to free myself.

I couldn’t shift the damn thing. It was too heavy and had got caught on the edge of a table that held some weird bronze-looking statue. It was like Dali had melted an elephant over a lampshade.

As much as I pushed, nothing moved.

Before I could call for help, I noticed a dark shadow dart by me on the left. My heart raced. What the hell was that?

A second later something moved past my face. Something furry…

Monty
!

The cat was purring and rubbing its backside against my head.

“Get your butt off me,” I said.

But that only made it curious. It turned around and sniffed me and then licked my face. Urgh, the breath!

I turned away, but it seemed to like my taste and licked my neck.

It was then I realised I would likely die here and my body would be eaten by Monty.

Of all the ways to die I had imagined, this one was the most embarrassing.

Luckily, I didn’t have to worry for too long.

The light flicked on, burning my retinas. I shut my eyes against the glare and heard Cordi suck in her breath.

“Oh my God. Harley, what happened?”

I reminded myself to be charitable. It was quite clear what had happened. “The cat did it,” I said. “All of it.”

“Oh my… hang on, I’ll get you free. Are you hurt?”

“Not yet, though your cat seems to want to eat me.”

Cordi shooed the beast away and knelt by my side. “Together we lift,” she said.

Although she was approaching her forties, I have to say I was impressed at her power-lifting technique. This was a woman who had clearly spent many an hour doing squats. With her help I managed to lift up the case and scramble free of the wreckage.

“I’m so sorry,” Cordi said. “With your fall earlier and now this… I feel awful.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“How did it happen?” Cordi looked from the sofa to the bookcase and must have realised I didn’t do it with telepathy.

“The cat,” I said. “I was fast asleep when it came running in and jumped up on the bookcase. It was crying, so I tried to get it down when it darted away and made the bookcase collapse.”

I have to be honest, I wasn’t comfortable lying like this to Cordi, but I could hardly tell her that I was scoping the joint for a gem to steal.

“Monty! One of these days, you horrible little fur-ball,” Cordi said, shouting into the hall.

A sharp
mrow
came from the kitchen.

I realised I had deepened the animosity between us, making a mortal enemy out of him. Oh well, Monty would have to get in line behind Ivanov.

“I think a cup of tea is in order,” Cordi said, wrapping her velour robe around her body. “Tea fixes everything.”

I wish it did. I’d have to find the gem another time. Perhaps find a way of checking out the rest of the house. However, that seemed like a task for those people on the hoarder shows. I wondered if there was an emergency hoarder-whisperer hotline I could call as I stepped into the kitchen to be appropriately caffeinated.

***

A twenty-minute drive later, we had travelled barely a mile. Honestly, I could have got there quicker on foot. The rush-hour traffic in and around Notting Hill was a nightmare.

We parked round the back of the library and ascended the steps, entering through the glass doors.

A couple of silver-haired pensioners gave us the stink-eye as we chatted on our way in. Ignoring them, we walked through the turnstile and into the library proper.

Stacks in rows lined the place, creating a multitude of dark passages.

It didn’t feel entirely different to Cordi’s front room. I had a nightmare vision of one stack crashing into the other like dominos, with me at the end, my corpse being eaten by a large grey cat.

“Hi,” a woman said from behind the reception desk. I looked up expecting an elderly lady but was surprised to see the librarian was in her thirties with short-cropped black hair sporting a blue-dyed stripe across the front. She wore dark red lipstick that was set off by a silver lip ring. It looked odd contrasted against her prim and proper starched white blouse.

“Can I help you?” she said to us both.

“Where can we find books on jewels and Japanese artefacts?” Cordi asked.

The punk librarian eyed me with suspicion. “I’m with her,” I said. “Research for a… thing.”

Wow, smooth.

Punk-Librarian rolled her eyes and tapped out some commands on the computer. She wrote down some reference numbers on a Post-it note and handed it to Cordi.

“Fourth row,” she said quietly, pointing her black-nail-varnished fingers to the appropriate stack.

“And computers?” I asked.

“At the rear of the library,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I broke away from her intense stare and followed Cordi into the library. “Let’s split up,” Cordi said. “You do your computer stuff, and I’ll stick with what I’m good at: digging through books.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” I said.

“Well, we should perhaps find out where those dorus come from, see if there’s anything local, and some information on the black diamond. It was cut quite distinctively, perhaps that’ll give us a clue.”

“Surely, Mr. Bellman would be the best one to ask for that?”

“Quite, but the more information we have to go to him with, the better he’ll feel that we’re doing our job. We always want as much context as possible in this game, Harley. Information is power, and power is money.”

Cordi flashed me a smile that made her look like a street urchin who just got away with stealing a loaf of bread. I was starting to like this woman. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

I headed to the computer tables at the rear beyond the stacks while Cordi hunted for the book references. When I got there, there were three LCD monitors on a circular table. Two were free. One was taken up by a rather lush-looking guy.

He was wearing a fitted biker’s jacket, worn at the elbows, giving him a wild look. It suited him with short dark hair just long enough to curl. A dusting of grey gave him an assured Harrison Ford look, as did his two-day stubble.

I must have been standing there staring when he looked up at me and fixed me in place with the most gorgeous grey-blue eyes.

And that smile… I melted somewhere inside.

“Hi,” he said, his voice deep and resonant. “Did you want to use this one?” He pointed to the monitor. Damn, I was staring.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s okay. These are free, I’ll use one of these.”

“Sure,” he said and returned to typing on the keyboard while scribbling notes into a moleskin notebook. I wondered if he was a writer. He had a seriousness to him that made me think he might be a writer. Perhaps he was doing research for a book.

Pulling my eyes from him, I turned my attention to the computer and fired up the web browser. Using Google Local, I searched for all antiques dealers and Japanese artefact dealers in a five-mile radius of Notting Hill.

A wider search gave too many results. Even within five miles there were ten antiques dealers and two who specialised in Far East artefacts.

One result in particular caught my eye. Ryu Kirino—expert Japanese art dealer. Only two miles away from Mr. Bellman’s store. The Kirino website showed beautiful photographs of high-end sculptures and artworks—and an image of a doru.