The Other Side of Midnight (20 page)

Still, he did not turn. He reached into his overcoat pockets, as unhurried as a man taking a leisurely break, and removed a cigarette case. His back still to me, he raised a cigarette to his unseen lips, and I heard the scrape of a match. He tilted his head as the flame briefly lit the side of his face, and I glimpsed an ear below the brim of the hat, a tuft of dark hair combed neatly behind it, a smooth temple and the knob of the back of his jaw. Then he righted his head again and his face retreated into the shadows under his hat brim.

He stood for a long moment, smoking. Watching the lane, the yards and streets beyond it. Waiting for movement or sound. Contemplating me, who I was, where I had gone, what I had seen. Weighing, perhaps, whether I would telephone someone, thinking where he might find me.

He did not rush through the gate, hot in pursuit. He did not search the back garden, thrashing me from my hiding place. He simply stood and smoked, and as the silence stretched on, my nerves frayed and I felt the wild impulse to jump up, to scream—anything. I became wildly convinced that he knew exactly where I was, that he was only playing with me. That I should give myself away and end it now. He did not rush after me—not because he was fooled, but because he would find me eventually. There was no need to hurry after someone who was already dead.

He smoked the entire cigarette while standing there at the back gate. I watched him finish and then I watched him lower the lit stub, watched him raise one elegant foot, watched him douse the embers of the cigarette on the sole of his shoe. He straightened again and dropped the stub into the pocket of his overcoat in a smooth, deliberate movement. As the last tendrils of smoke drifted away in the wet air, he turned and walked away, back the way he’d come.

I didn’t see his face in the darkness. I only heard his footsteps, easy and measured, as they retreated down the other alley. I swallowed, dropped my hand, leaned back against the wall again. I was more terrified now than I’d ever been, more even than when I had seen Ramona’s dead face outside the window of the elevator door.

He had pocketed the cigarette.

He had not thrown it away; he had not ground it out underfoot and left it. He had doused it out very carefully on the damp sole of his shoe, placed it in the pocket of his expensive overcoat. As if a cigarette stub were an object of great value.

Because it was.

I thought of myself standing in Gloria’s flat with Davies, running one of Gloria’s scarves through my hands. Psychometry, it was called. James had written about it in one of his papers. It wasn’t my specialty. But I could do it. There was a chance—though not a guarantee—that I could pick up the stub of a man’s cigarette and get a picture of him, images, thoughts, even a name. And somehow—God, I didn’t know how—he knew it. He knew who he was dealing with, and he knew what I could do.

He knew me.

Too afraid to move, I waited as the rain began to fall softly. What if I walked to the front of the building and the man was still there, waiting for me? In the abject darkness of my terror, it didn’t matter that I was in public, that he wasn’t likely to assault a woman screaming in the middle of the street. All that mattered was the blackness of the shadow over his face and that stub of cigarette, his unhurried assurance that I was already his.

And so I sat there, my feet numb in their heels, my thighs aching from squatting, as I inhaled the stink of the dustbins and growing damp, even after I heard someone enter the front door of the building, even after I heard someone—probably the same person—throw up the sash of a window on the third floor.
The devil is coming,
Ramona had said.
He is coming for you. He is coming for me. He is coming for everyone.

When I finally got the courage to move, I didn’t take the alley to the front of the building. I pushed myself away from the wall and tottered into the back garden on cramping legs. I stood for a moment where the man had been. Then I forced myself through the gate and into the lane, nearly stumbling as I made my way back to the crowded streets of London.

I
walked. I walked as the sky darkened, as the rain spattered the streets in fits, as the wind gusted against my damp skin with the first breaths of cold autumn. I walked through the sounds and smells of London, motorcars and shouts and clanging bells and laughter and the heavy, oily scent of wet pavement, the tang of cigar smoke, the smoggy London itch at the back of my throat. I walked in crowds, the larger the better, so I would not be alone. I walked without knowing where I was going, without looking around me, without seeing anything, my feet vaguely hurting in their heels, my hands in the pockets of my coat. A knot of young men in cloth caps catcalled at me—blond hair always being a magnet for catcalls, the sound of it as meaningless as a how-do-you-do?—and as I brushed past them, jolting one of them with my shoulder, I discovered that the abject terror I’d been under had dissipated, replaced with a hot, low-grade anger.

Without my realizing it, while I had walked, my terror-numbed mind had pondered the question of the man in the houndstooth jacket.

The man I had seen at Ramona’s flat was, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind, Gloria’s killer. I needed no evidence to know it, no psychic vision. I had been within twenty feet of him, watched him smoke a cigarette, and I had done it after finally dodging my unwanted pursuer, the houndstooth gentleman. What if things had gone differently? What if I had failed to dodge him, and he’d been there when I’d encountered the murderer? Would he have helped? Made an arrest? Would he have done anything at all, or were his orders simply to watch and report?

Report what? My movements? Or my death?

Suspicion, I discovered, works like a lens. Once you have looked through it, and seen everything you thought you knew in a different way, its version of the truth does not recede. Once you can see through that lens, you can no longer ignore it.

I pushed into a telephone box as the rain splashed the pavements again, and closed the familiar red door behind me. Outside, the crowds still flowed by, silent now beyond the windows of the box. It smelled pungently of cigarette smoke in there, as if the last caller had smoked his entire supply. I stared at the telephone for a long time, my mind moving back and forth like a rocking horse, going over the same ground again and again. Rain splashed the glass. My feet were cold and sore. Finally, I picked up the receiver and had the operator connect me to the exchange George Sutter had given me: Hampstead 1207.

The woman who picked up the line was nasal, businesslike, obviously a secretary of some kind. She did not speak a greeting. “To whom am I speaking?” she said in my ear.

“My name is Ellie Winter,” I replied, my voice croaking. I had not spoken for hours. “I have a message for George Sutter.”

The woman made no comment. “What is your message?”

“Where is he?” I asked her, knowing I would get no answer.

“What is your message?” the woman asked again.

I closed my eyes. I smelled the cigarette smoke, the damp, close
air of the telephone box. I listened to water patter on the roof. I was speaking to a stranger I couldn’t see, sending my message down the lines to a woman who did not know me, did not care if I lived or died. No, I was no longer afraid. I was angry.

“‘You missed him,’” I said, each word lifting off me like a weight. “‘Ramona is dead.’” I thought it over, and added, “‘I resign.’ That is the message.” Then I hung up.

There was a hard rap on the glass door, and I jumped. I turned to see a fortyish man in a heavy mackintosh holding an umbrella over his head, knocking on the door and gesturing impatiently for me to get on with it. I blew out a breath, then gestured back at him.

“Go away,” I called through the glass, and picked up the receiver to make my next telephone call.

*   *   *

I
t was raining fully by the time James found me at the Saratoga Hotel. I had taken a seat on one of the plush chairs at the back of the lobby, next to a luxurious fern placed in the corner. My shoes were slowly drying by then, and I’d taken off my dripping hat. A drink sat untouched on the table before me.

James wore a coat of dark gray, his umbrella folded under his arm. He dropped into the seat across from me without a word. I watched his strong, easy movements, smelled the cool, rain-scented air he brought with him, ran my gaze along the shadow of blond stubble on his jaw. He looked at me for a long time as people flowed past behind him and laughter came from a group exiting the elevator and heading out into the night.

“All right,” he said finally. “It’s done. I went past there myself. They’ve taken away the body, and the crowd of neighbors is starting to disperse.”

I licked my lip. “Thank you.”

He sighed and took off his damp hat, tossing it onto the seat next to him. “Of all the telephone calls, that one was the least expected.”
He nodded toward the drink in front of me. “Are you going to drink that?”

“I couldn’t leave her there,” I said. “Just leave her—like that. You know I couldn’t. I had to know that someone had found her.”

“Well, it looks like Sutter got your message and called the police. Or, more likely, had a lackey do it.” He picked up my drink and took a swallow, the strong muscles of his throat working. He caught my glance and the smile he gave me was bitter. “Don’t worry. I’m not a drunk anymore. I’ve just had a hell of a day.”

“What about Davies?” I said. I’d asked him to check on her, to see whether she had ever come home. Then I had sat here, waiting for him as the centuries ticked by, knowing deep down what the answer would be.

James leaned his sleek bulk back in his chair and shook his head. “She hasn’t come home. I even checked with that fake skimmer who rents the shop on the ground floor. She hasn’t heard anyone come or go, and she’s been taking clients since four o’clock.”

“There was time,” I said, the words tumbling out of me, though I didn’t move. My body felt frozen in place, my legs stiff. “I’ve been thinking about it while I’ve been sitting here, waiting for you. There was just time for the same man to have taken Davies and killed Ramona. If he was—if he was quick with Davies . . . If he disposed of her somewhere . . .”

“Stop it,” he said, his voice hard.

“I failed them.” The words seemed to crack me open. “I failed them both. I could have been half an hour earlier. Twenty minutes. When I stood on Ramona’s front step, I could have turned around and waited for him and screamed.”

“You’d have had a knife in the ribs for your trouble,” James said. “Quick and quiet. This man is no amateur, Ellie. He’s no madman running around the streets speaking in tongues. He’s some sort of professional. Your best action was to run.”

“I keep coming back to the rope.” I leaned forward now, put my elbows on my knees. A man in an evening jacket passed us, looked me up and down, and carried on. “The rope and the sign that said the stairs were out of order. He’d set it up. He knew the layout of Ramona’s building. He knew when she’d be home, how to get her to let him into her flat. He knew how much time he needed. He knew the lift made a lot of noise. He took the time to bring
supplies
with him. What kind of man does that?”

“Jesus, Ellie.” James leaned forward, took my hands in his. He gripped me hard, his fingertips pressing into my wrists past the edges of my gloves, and in the middle of everything I reveled almost painfully in that touch, enjoyed the fire it set in my veins with a fierceness I did not recognize. “Shut up, will you? It’s driving me insane, just thinking of how close you came.”

“George Sutter has been having me followed,” I told him. “But I’d lost him by then. So I have no other witnesses, no one who saw.”

James’s grip grew even harder on my wrists. “What did you say?”

So I told him about the man in the houndstooth jacket, how he had followed me to James’s flat that morning—it felt like decades ago—and to Piccadilly Circus, and how I’d lost him. James stared at me for a long minute when I finished, his gaze on me. His mood was as wild as mine, I realized, and the thought made my heart thump and my blood sing crazily.

“That conniving bastard.” James dropped my wrists and leaned back in his chair. “Bloody hell. He’s been manipulating you. Manipulating us.”

“I’ve been going over and over it,” I said. “Why would he contact me, hire me, if he’s already two steps ahead of me?”

“Don’t you know why?”

He waited for me to answer. I wished I could swear like a man, like a sailor, but my mother’s training was too ingrained. “It’s one thing to know who the murderer is,” I said, “but it’s another thing to
know
where
he is, isn’t it? I was bait.” I rubbed my hands roughly over my temples. “James, the killer knows who I am. He knows. He wasn’t in a hurry, didn’t need to rush. How does he know everything?”

“Ellie,” James said, “the Dubbses have left England.”

I dropped my hands. “What?”

“I tried to set up an interview today. I couldn’t reach anyone, and I finally found their occasional housekeeper. They packed up and left for the continent. They’ve gone.”

“So they were in on it,” I said.

“Or they’ve been threatened, and they’re afraid.”

“How easy for them,” I said. I grabbed my coat and stood. “I have to go.”

As I crossed the lobby, my heels ringing hollowly on the marble tile, I knew he was following me. I felt his presence like a solid mass behind me, watching me, not letting me go. The hotel doormen were assisting well-dressed couples into taxis waiting on the street outside, men in evening coats and tails, women in silk gowns and jewels. Through the glass doors to my right I could see the hotel bar, could hear laughter and the clink of glasses and the soft tinkle of a piano. A Friday evening in London. The man who killed Gloria was out there somewhere. I pushed past a doorman and out into the rain.

The water was icy on my neck. Water splashed through my shoes and up the backs of my stockings. I pushed through the crowds of people headed for Charing Cross. Behind me, Waterloo Bridge loomed low over the Thames, the river hurling angrily at the base of its arches.

An arm came around my shoulders and I was pulled against a hard, familiar body. An umbrella snapped open overhead. “This way,” he said, his voice rough.

He steered me down a side street, his arm heavy around me. I smelled wet pavement and damp wool and James. My skin sang, even through the layers of clothing, and there was water on my cheeks. He swung me into the notch of a church doorway, out of the rain, my
back against the brick. He closed and dropped the umbrella and his face was stark in the light from a far-off streetlamp.

“Come here,” he said, and kissed me.

It was harsh and gentle at the same time. He was warm against my cold lips, and his big hands came up and cradled my head, his thumbs against my cheeks. He tasted like salt and gin and rain. There was a rushing in my ears, darkness before my eyes, and in a prickling explosion of sensation nothing existed but James. He pressed my shoulders hard into the cold brick and his stubble scraped my skin.

My reaction was instantaneous. I grasped the lapels of his coat and pulled him closer, kissing him harder. He pushed back, gripping my shoulders, and I moaned, biting his lip. He used the opportunity to open my mouth and slide his tongue along the inside of my upper lip, tasting me, raw with anger and emotion and his own bottomless need, and as lights seemed to go off in my brain I fell harder in that moment than I had ever thought possible for any man.

My hands hurt from my desperate grip on his coat. Part of me knew that I was cold and damp and that the bricks behind me were rough, but none of it mattered. He lowered his hands and I slid my arms around his neck, feeling the strength of his shoulders under the coat. He put his hands on my hips and kissed his way down my neck, behind my ear, his skin prickling mine. He bit my earlobe, and when I gasped at the sensation, he kissed me again. I couldn’t breathe; I didn’t want to breathe. I only wanted it never, ever to stop.

When he finally broke the kiss, his hands still on my hips, I let my head tilt back against the wall, the rainy air vivid against my flushed skin. “Why did you wait so long?” I asked, catching my breath.

He leaned in and I felt his breath against my ear. “You hated me until three days ago,” he said. “I was biding my time.”

“I’ve forgiven you for that,” I said.

“Good.” He took his hands from my hips and placed them against the wall on either side of me, blocking me in, his unbuttoned coat
falling open. His gaze held mine, dark and possessive. He seemed to be searching for something in my face, his breath coming hard. I felt his heat. I dropped my hands.

“I want to go to your flat,” I told him. “I have something to show you.”

He smiled a little, raw need overlaid with humor. “Interesting,” he replied. “I think that’s my line.”

“What— Oh!” My cheeks flushed. It was ridiculous that I would feel embarrassed in front of a man I’d just kissed like that, but there it was. I wished fiercely that I was more sophisticated with men, but there was nothing to be done about it now. “I don’t mean that. I mean—”