Suzie and the Monsters (23 page)

Ian nods thoughtfully, then points to the ballistics report. ‘The gun that shot Kosta has been used in several recent execution-style hits. What do you know about that?’

I hunt through the photos for the two I saw earlier. ‘The gun belongs to this man. His ID said John Smith.’

‘I see. And where is the gun now?’

‘At the bottom of the Thames, for all I know.’

‘And John Smith?’

‘I dare say he’s hanging around still.’

Ian doesn’t know how to interpret that. ‘Will we see him again?’

‘I honestly don’t know, but I doubt he’ll be killing anyone else.’

Ian leans back with a sigh, deep in silent thought. He must be mid-fifties, his grey hair is neatly trimmed, and he’s still in excellent condition. He strikes me as being a genuinely nice man, but also ruthlessly capable.

‘How is it you can track me down so quickly, but a criminal like Valon can operate practically unnoticed?’

‘Because you are just one person, while Valon is wrapped in layers. It would be easy for us to pick up girls one at a time and send them home but that wouldn’t get us the evidence to put the traffickers away.’

Really? From what I’ve been reading in the newspapers recently, they can’t even find the girls, let alone the traffickers.

‘And much as we’d sometimes like to,’ he continues, ‘we can’t go round killing them. Indeed, it would be professionally irresponsible even to suggest that someone might do that.’

I can’t believe my ears. ‘What possible incentive could there be for someone to do that?’

He just shrugs. The barman arrives at that point with the tea, and Ian starts to pour milk into my cup. ‘No milk!’ I interrupt quickly.

He finishes making the tea, and I sit back with my cup, breathing in the aromatic steam. Ian meanwhile turns to the back of the folder. The final sheet is a copy of my contract with Iverson.

‘SIO Roberts was rather surprised to receive this yesterday. He said it makes the whole investigation rather pointless.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Ian smiles. ‘So it would seem that no one at SOCA or the Met is terribly interested in the enigmatic Suzie Kew any longer. What curiosity remains could, I’m sure, be forgotten.’

‘You people never forget anything,’ I say, and the friendliness in his eyes cools. ‘But I must admit to a certain optimism.’

Ian studies me for a minute, then laughs. ‘You are a strange one, Suzie Kew.’

Cleo arrives in the lobby, bringing colour and youthful energy. Her smile when she sees me is like a blaze of sunshine. ‘Good morning, Officer Wallace,’ she says cheerfully.

‘Hello, Miss Lane. May I say you look quite stunning today. Quite a difference from Friday.’

‘Friday wasn’t a good day for me.’

‘Well, ladies, if you’ll excuse me...’ Ian puts the folder away into his briefcase and stands up. We shake hands again, and then he’s gone.

‘What was that all about?’ Cleo asks.

‘A reprieve, and one last mission, for Suzie Kew.’

*

Jenny’s awake and in the shower when we get back to the room. In unspoken alliance, Cleo and I strip, then carry the protesting girl, still wet and soapy, straight to bed, continuing more or less where we left off last night, only this time we’re not satisfied until Jenny has satisfied us both. Whatever her feelings about us, Jenny’s enjoyment of this treatment is unmistakeable. She’s still pale and exhausted, but she lies there afterwards smiling dreamily as she gently caresses her sex with one hand, and last night’s bite mark on her thigh with the other.

‘Cleo and I are meeting a friend for lunch,’ I tell Jenny, after covering her with the duvet. ‘Why don’t you stay here and relax, get Room Service to send up breakfast. Or lunch. Or both.’

‘Okay, Suzie,’ she murmurs, puzzling me until I remember Cleo calling out my name after my traitorous Tributes wounded me this morning.

*

We meet Alia at Dalla Terra for lunch, Alia ordering Antipasto for herself while I order a bottle of the Allegrini La Poja for the three of us to share, and a Rosso del Conte for later. The Allegrini is a beautiful rich, spicy wine with overtones of cherries and blackcurrant. I relax and enjoy the wonderful aroma while Alia eats and Cleo chatters excitedly, telling Alia how amazing it is to be a vampire while carefully editing out minor details like blood, corpses and nymphomania. I’m in no hurry to say what I don’t want to say.

Alia, who knows me too well, glances at me from time to time but is otherwise happy to engage with Cleo’s teenage enthusiasm and moral innocence. It’s only after her lunch has been cleared away, leaving the three of us alone with the sexy La Poja, that she taps a finger to her lips to quiet Cleo down, and asks, ‘What is it, Suzie?’

I don’t answer immediately. I twirl the stem of the wine glass for a few seconds, staring into the dark elixir. ‘I don’t like to talk about my origin,’ I say, and can feel Alia and Cleo staring at me with a new intensity. An abrupt anxiety makes me want to panic, to escape deep into the anonymous city, leaving behind all questions and judgement. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. When Cleo takes my hand in an attempt to comfort me, it makes me jump with shock, wine splashing red across the back of the hand holding the glass.

I force myself to calm down, consciously easing the tension from my muscles. ‘I don’t even like to think about it,’ I continue. ‘It’s not that anything terrible happened to me as a child. It’s the vertigo I get looking back across so many years, centuries of fear and rage and hatred, of blood, death and grief.’

This time it’s Alia who takes my hand. ‘Ssh, Suzie,’ she says, ‘you don’t need to talk about it. It’s who you are now that’s important, not your real name or age.’ But she’s lying. I can see she’s dying to know.

‘I was born in the early hours of the first of April, 1519,’ I tell them.

Alia’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Today’s your birthday?’

‘Today is April first?’ Cleo asks a moment later.

‘Yes and yes,’ I reply. ‘Today’s my birthday. I’m four hundred and ninety three years old.’ I let this sink in in silence for a minute. ‘My early childhood was nothing very special. My father’s brother was steward of the estate of Sir Henry Courtenay, Earl of Devon, and my father assisted him in the running of the estate. My mother was a chambermaid. We certainly weren’t aristocracy, but while life wasn’t easy we never went hungry, unlike some. I remember very little really about those days, or my parents. I don’t even have a clear idea of what they looked like, but I do remember love and happiness. I remember one summer there was a big celebration, and I guess that must have been in 1525 when Sir Henry was made Marquess of Exeter.’

It always seems unfair to me that the historical record is so blind to good, honest people like my parents. In my occasional searches through what local records exist, I have seen the names of my uncle, the steward, and my aunt, the midwife, but no mention yet of my parents. I was their only child, and even I disappeared without a trace.

‘At ten years old, I was just a young serving girl, running around doing errands while trying to stay invisible, ever fascinated by the riches and behaviour of the nobles we served on the rare occasions they stayed in the country. One day, while I was scrubbing the stone floor, I forget where exactly, I looked up to discover Sir Henry himself watching me. I was really quite frightened, and tried to gather my stuff and leave, but he ordered me to follow him, through to the ballroom, where he positioned me under one of the portraits, and stood back to examine me.

‘The portrait was of his first wife, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Devon. I knew it well, for the lady had died on the same day that I was born and I had been named for her.’

‘Was she your real mother?’ Cleo asks.

‘Yes. Stop jumping ahead of the story.’

‘Elizabeth?’ Alia asks. There are tears in her eyes.

‘Yes. Anyway. I never got a complete explanation of what happened, so this is mostly conjecture, but the Earl and his retinue had been at court, and the steward was also away, so my father, the steward’s brother, that is, was in charge of the house, and my mother’s sister was the midwife not only for Elizabeth, the Countess, but also for my mother who gave birth within an hour of my own birth, in a room across the hall. Unfortunately, the other child did not survive. It seems that my mother had given birth several times, but none of the children survived.

‘On that night there was a double tragedy, since Elizabeth died in childbirth. She was barely fourteen years old. A child lost a mother, and a mother lost a child. It was the middle of the night, and an opportunity was taken. History says that Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Devon and Baroness of L’Isle, died childless.

‘Ten years later my resemblance to my birth-mother, her portrait painted shortly after she was betrothed at the age of ten, was enough to convince Sir Henry of my true parentage. I was taken away from the only family I knew, the mother and father I loved. I was kept hidden away, and a tutor appointed to strip away all the commonness from me, and to give me at least a basic education. For two, three years, I don’t think a day passed that I wasn’t whipped with birch sticks. I was completely miserable, but I was slowly transformed, from a happy but ignorant peasant girl into an elegant, curious young woman.

‘I have to say, suddenly discovering your great-grandfather was King of England certainly changes your world view.

‘At the age of thirteen, I was finally declared “presentable”, and I was taken in secret to the court. By this point I was able to understand some of the need for secrecy. When my mother died, Elizabeth, that is. More and more I was thinking of Elizabeth Grey as my mother, wondering what she had been like. She was orphaned when she was only seven, narrowly escaping one betrothal, to her ward Sir Charles Brandon, only to be passed along to Catherine of York, Sir Henry’s mother. By the time she was my age she was already married. The struggles that I imagined she must have faced made me feel a kinship to her, and it helped me to accept my strange fate.

‘So, I should have inherited the Barony of L’Isle, but this passed instead to my mother’s aunt, another Elizabeth Grey.’

‘Are you related to Lady Jane Grey?’ Alia interrupts.

‘Only very slightly, and that through my father. I don’t know if there was a family connection to my mother. Anyway... if Sir Henry had presented me straight to the king, saying, “Here’s my long-lost daughter, give me her inheritance,” you can imagine how many feathers would have been ruffled. This at a time when King Henry VIII was trying to divorce Catherine of Aragon. 1532, that was. I never did get to see the king, except once or twice in the distance, but I did get to see Anne Boleyn, that year, before she married the king.

‘Oh, wow,’ Cleo says.

‘Anne Boleyn and my mother were cousins — their mothers were sisters. As far as I know, she is the only person that my father, Sir Henry, revealed my true identity to.’

‘What was she like?’ Cleo asks.

‘I was in awe. She was beautiful. Over thirty by that time, but still beautiful. Graceful. Intelligent. Completely in charge of her own life and subservient to no one, not even the king. And very kind to me. Smiled and said I looked just like my mother, whom she remembered playing with when she herself was a child. I only spoke to her that one occasion, and it’s my most treasured memory of my childhood. The following year she married the king, became Queen of England, and gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, when everyone had been hoping for, and even expecting, a son. It was a tragedy for her, and whatever plans Sir Henry had had for me were quietly forgotten.’

‘So I guess that makes you second cousin to Elizabeth I,’ Alia says, shaking her head in disbelief.

‘Yes, but I never got to meet her. By the end of 1533, everyone in England hated Anne Boleyn, except me. I was removed from court, my identity never revealed again, and given in marriage to a young man who had made Sir Henry’s acquaintance. He was handsome and gallant, wasn’t demanding a dowry, and was the first person in years, apart from Anne Boleyn, to look at me with kindness. Of course I didn’t object.’

*

Living in Salisbury for a few years until late 1730, I got to know Sarah Fielding. She and her brother Henry went on to become two of the finest English novelists of the eighteenth century. Even as a young woman she was refreshingly intelligent and very opinionated, forever criticising women who gave into lust, vanity, ambition, and so on. She was very focussed on the need for reason and restraint, the only allowable passions for a woman being compassion and love. It sounds very conservative by today’s standards, but really she was arguing that women needed to be educated and careful in what was very much a man’s world, fraught with perils for foolish women. Something she wrote later, in response to Sam Richardson’s Clarissa, always makes me smile: ‘A Prude cannot, by an observing eye, be taken for a Coquet, nor a Coquet for a Prude, but a good Woman may be called either, or both...’

I, of course, was not a good woman, though I played one often enough. I admired Sally for her intelligence, and I would have left her alone if she hadn’t annoyed me with absurd theories about Anne Boleyn dumping Henry Percy out of vanity and her ambition to be Queen of England. I mean, what right did she have to slander one of history’s greatest women in this way? Anne Boleyn should have been a study of self-determination in the face of almost overwhelming pressure from parents and crown to be the king’s mistress.

Walking alone with her one day in a secluded garden, I confronted her angrily. ‘You talk about reason and restraint, but you have no passion. Will you be so constant when winds assail your heart?’

‘I will make love the source of my strength, and hold fast,’ she replied.

I didn’t bother to argue. Instead I grabbed her and kissed her fiercely. I had seen the way she was distracted around me, and the way she positively glowed around her friend Jane Collier. Sally pulled away from me, flustered, breathing fast, speechless with anger and confusion. ‘It’s easy to resist men when you have no attraction to them,’ I told her, making her blush a bright red.