“Good. Because if it
is
the Clan, rushing in is exactly what
they’ll
expect you to do. And if it isn’t, if it’s the other guys, that’s what they’ll want you to do, too.” She swallowed. “Bombs and all. Which is why
I’m
going with you. Got it?”
“I—” Miriam forced herself to think. “Okay.” She stood up. “Let’s go.”
They went.
* * *
Paulette cruised down Iris’s residential street twice, leaving a good five-minute interval before turning the rental car into the parking space at the side of her house. “Nothing obvious,” she murmured. “You see anything, kid?”
“Nothing,” said Miriam.
Brill shook her head. “Autos all look alike to me,” she admitted.
“Great … Miriam, if you want to take the front door, I’m going to sit here with the engine running until you give the all-clear. Brill—”
“I’ll be good.” She clutched a borrowed handbag to her chest, right hand buried in it, looking like a furtive sorority girl about to drop an unexpected present on a friend.
Miriam bailed out of the car and walked swiftly to Iris’s front door, noticing nothing wrong. There was no damage around the lock, no broken windows, nothing at all out of the usual for the area. No lurking Dodge vans, either, when she glanced over her shoulder as she slipped the key into the front door and turned it left-handed, her other hand full.
The door bounced open and Miriam ducked inside rapidly, with Brill right behind her. The house was empty and cold—not freezing with the chill of a dead furnace, but as if the thermostat had been turned down. Miriam’s feet scuffed on the carpet as she rapidly scanned each ground floor room through their open doors, finishing in Iris’s living room—
No wheelchair. The side table neatly folded and put away. Dead flowers on the mantlepiece.
Back in the hall Miriam held up a finger, then dashed up the stairs, kicking open door after door—the master bedroom, spare bedroom, box room, and bathroom.
“Nothing,”
she snarled, panting. In the spare bedroom she pulled down the hatch into the attic, yanked the ladder down-but there was no way Iris could have gotten up there under her own power. She scrambled up the ladder all the same, casting about desperately in the dusty twilight. “She’s
not here
.”
Down in the ground floor hallway she caught up with Paulette, looking grave. “Brill said Iris is gone?”
Miriam nodded, unable to speak. It felt like an act of desecration, too monstrous to talk about. She leaned against the side of the staircase, taking shallow breaths. “I’ve lost her.” She shut her eyes.
“Over here!” It was Brill, in the kitchen.
“What is it—”
They found Brill inspecting a patch of floor, just inside the back door. “Look,” she said, pointing.
The floor was wooden, varnished and worn smooth in places. The stains, however, were new. Something dark had spilled across the back doorstep. Someone had mopped it up but they hadn’t done a very good job, and the stain had worked into the grain of the wood.
“Outside. Check the garbage.” Miriam fumbled with the lock then got the door open. “Come on!” She threw herself at the Dumpsters in the backyard, terrified of what she might find in them. The bins were huge, shared with the houses to either side, and probably not emptied since the last snowfall. The snow was almost a foot deep on top of the nearest Dumpster. It took her half a minute to clear enough away to lift the lid and look inside.
A dead man stared back at her, his face blue and his eyes frozen in an expression of surprise. She dropped the lid.
“What is it?” asked Paulette.
“Not Iris.” Miriam leaned against the wall, taking deep breaths, her head spinning.
Who can he be?
“Check. The other bins.”
“Other bins, okay.” Paulette gingerly lifted the lids, one by one—but none of them contained anything worse than a pile of full garbage bags which, when torn, proved to contain kitchen refuse. “She’s not here, Miriam.”
“Oh thank god.”
“What now?” asked Paulie, head cocked as if listening for the sound of sirens.
“I take another look while you and Brill keep an eye open for strangers.” Steeling herself, Miriam lifted the lid on the bin’s gruesome contents. “Hmm.” She reached out and touched her hand to an icy cold cheek. “He’s been dead for at least twelve hours, more likely over twenty-four.” A mass of icy black stuff in front of the body proved to be Iris’s dish towels, bulked up by more frozen blood than Miriam could have imagined. She gingerly shoved them aside, until she saw where the blood had come from. “There’s massive trauma to the upper thorax, about six inches below the neck. Jesus, it looks like a shotgun wound. Saw a couple in the ER, way back when. Um … sawed-off, by the size of the entry wound, either that or he was shot from more than twenty yards away, which would have had to happen outdoors, meaning witnesses. His chest is really torn up, he’d have died instantly.” She dropped the wadding back in front of the body. He was, she noted distantly, wearing black overalls and a black ski mask pulled up over his scalp like a cap. Clean-shaven, about twenty years old, of military appearance. Like a cop or a soldier—or a Clan enforcer.
She turned around and looked at the back door. Something was wrong with it; it took almost a minute of staring before she realized—
“They replaced the door,” she said. “They replaced the fucking door!”
“Let’s go,” Paulette said nervously. “Like right now? Anywhere, as long as it’s away? This is giving me the creeps.”
“Just a minute.” Miriam dropped the Dumpster lid shut and went back inside the house.
Iris phoned me when the shit hit the fan,
she realized distantly.
She was still alive and free, but she had to leave. To go underground, like in the sixties. When the FBI bugged her phone.
Miriam leaned over Iris’s favorite chair, in the morning room. She swept her hand around the crack behind the cushion; nothing. “No messages?” She looked up, scanning the room. The mantlepiece: dead flowers, some cards … birthday cards. One of them said 32 TODAY. She walked toward it slowly, then picked it up, unbelieving. Her eyes clouded with tears as she opened it. The inscription inside it was written in Iris’s jagged, half-illiterate scrawl.
Thanks for the memories of treasure hunts,
and the green party shoes, it said. “Green party shoes?”
Miriam dashed upstairs, into Iris’s bedroom. Opening her mother’s wardrobe she smelled mothballs, saw row upon row of clothes hanging over a vast mound of shoes—a pair of green high-heeled pumps near the front, pushed together. She picked them up, probed inside, and felt a wad of paper filling the toes of the right shoe.
She pulled it out, feeling it crackle—elderly paper, damaged by the passage of time. A tabloid newspaper page, folded tight. She ran downstairs to where Brill was waiting impatiently in the hall. “I got it,” she called.
“Got what?” Brill asked, her voice incurious.
“I don’t know.” Miriam frowned as she locked the door, then they were in the back of the car and Paulie was pulling away hastily, fishtailing slightly on the icy road.
“When your mother phoned you,” Paulie said edgily, “what did she say? Daughter, I’ve killed someone? Or, your wicked family has come to kidnap me, oh la! What is to become of me?”
“She said.” Miriam shut her eyes. “She hadn’t been entirely honest with me. Something had come up, and she had to go on a journey.”
“Someone died,” said Brill. “Someone standing either just outside the back door or just inside it, in the doorway. Someone shot them with a blunderbuss.” She was making a singsong out of it, in a way that really got on Miriam’s nerves.
Stress,
she thought.
Brill had never seen a murder before last week. Now she’s seen a couple in one go, hasn’t she?
“So someone stuffed the victim in a barrel for Iris, went out and ordered a new door. Angbard’s men will have been watching her departure. Probably followed her. Why don’t you call him and ask about it?”
“I will. Once we’ve returned this car and rented a replacement from another hire shop.” She glanced at Brill. “Keep a lookout and tell me if you see any cars that seem to be following us.”
Miriam unfolded the paper carefully. It was, she saw, about the same fateful day as the first Xeroxed news report in the green and pink shoebox. But this was genuine newsprint, not a copy, a snapshot from the time itself. Most of it was inconsequential, but there was a story buried halfway down page two that made her stare, about a young mother and baby found in a city park, the mother suffering a stab wound in the lower back. She’d been wearing hippy-style clothes and was unable to explain her condition, apparently confused or intoxicated. The police escorted her to a hospital with the child, and the subeditor proceeded to editorialize on the evils of unconventional lifestyles and the effects of domestic violence in a positively Hogarthian manner.
No,
Miriam thought,
they must have gotten it wrong. She was murdered, Ma told me! Not taken into hospital with a stab wound!
She shook her head, bewildered and hurting. “I’ll do that. But first I need some stuff from my house,” she said, “but I’m not sure I dare go there.”
“What stuff?” asked Paulie. Miriam could see her fingers white against the rim of the steering wheel.
“Papers.” She paused, weighing up the relative merits of peace of mind and a shotgun wound to the chest. “Fuck it,” she said shortly. “I need to go home. I need five minutes there. Paulie, take me home.”
“Whoa! Is that really smart?” asked Paulette, knuckles tightening on the steering wheel.
“No.” Miriam grimaced. “It’s really
not
smart. But I need to grab some stuff, the goddamn disk with all your research on it. I’ll be about thirty seconds. We can ditch the car immediately afterwards. You willing to wait?”
“Didn’t you say they’d staked you out?”
“What does that mean?” Brill asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”
Miriam sighed. “My house,” she said. “I haven’t been back to it since my fun-loving uncle had me kidnapped. Roland said it was under surveillance so I figured it would be risky. Now—”
“It’s even
more
risky,” Paulette said vehemently. “In fact I think it’s stupid.”
“Yes.” Miriam bared her teeth, worry and growing anger eating at her: “But I
need
that disk, Paulie, it may be the best leverage I’ve got. We don’t have time for me to make millions in world three.”
“Oh shit. You think it may come to that?”
“Yeah, ‘oh shit’ indeed.”
“What kind of disk?” Brill asked plaintively.
“Don’t worry. Just wait with the car.” Miriam focused on Paulette’s driving.
The answer will be somewhere in the shoebox,
she thought, desperately.
And if Angbard had my ma snatched, I’ll make him pay!
Familiar scenery rolled past, and a couple of minutes later they turned into a residential street that Miriam knew well enough to navigate blindfolded. A miserable wave of homesickness managed to penetrate her anger and worry: This was where she belonged, and she should never have left. It was her home, dammit! And it slid past to the left as Paulette kept on driving.
“Paulie?” Miriam asked anxiously.
“Looking for suspicious-acting vehicles,” Paulie said tersely.
“Oh.” Miriam glanced around. “Ma said there was a truck full of guys watching her.”
“Uh-huh. Your mother spotted the truck. What did she miss?”
“Right.” Miriam spared a sideways glance: Brill’s head was swiveling like a ceiling fan, but her expression was more vacant than anything else. Almost as if she was bored. “Want to drive round the block once more? When you get back to the house stop just long enough for me to get out, then carry on. Come back and pick me up in three minutes. Don’t park.”
“Um. You sure that you want to do this?”
“No, I’m not sure, I just know that I have to.”
Paulie turned the corner then pulled over. Miriam was out of the car in a second and Paulette pulled away. There was virtually nobody about—no parked occupied vans, no joggers. She crossed the road briskly, walked up to her front door, and remembered two things, in a single moment of icy clarity. Firstly, that she had no idea where her house keys might be, and secondly, that if there were no watchers this might be because—
Uh-oh,
she thought, and backed away from the front step, watching where her feet were about to go with exaggerated caution. A cold sweat broke out in the small of her back, and she shuddered violently. But fear of trip wires didn’t stop her carefully opening the yard gate, slipping around the side of the house, and up to the shed with the concealed key to the French doors at the back.
When she had the key, Miriam paused for almost a minute at the glass doors, trying to get her hammering heart under control. She peered through the curtains, thoughtfully.
They’ll expect me to go in the front,
she realized.
But even so…
She unlocked the door and eased it open a finger’s width. Then she reached as high as she could, and ran her index finger slowly down the opening, feeling for the faint tug of a lethal obstruction. Finding nothing, she opened the door farther, then repeated the exercise on the curtains. Again: nothing. And so, Miriam returned to her home.
Her study had been efficiently and brutally strip-searched. The iMac was gone, as were the boxes of CD-ROMs and the zip drive and disks from her desk. More obviously, every book in the bookcase had been taken down, the pages riffled, and dumped in a pile on the floor. It was a big pile. “Bastards,” she said quietly. The pink shoebox was gone, of course. Fearing the worst she tiptoed into her own hallway like a timid burglar, her heart in her mouth.
It was much the same in the front hall. They’d even searched the phone books. A blizzard of loose papers, lay everywhere, some of them clearly trampled underfoot. Drawers lay open, their contents strewn everywhere. Furniture had been pulled out from the walls and shoved back haphazardly, and one of the hall bookcases leaned drunkenly against the opposite wall. At first sight she thought that the living room had gotten off lightly, but the damage turned out to be even more extensive—her entire music collection had been turned out onto the floor, disks piled on a loose stack.