The Seventh Man, page 2
“There’s been a murder, Thain, in the same damn bank. Bell will meet you there.”
“We’re on our way, sir.” His jacket lay over the back of his chair. He reached for it, hung up without a goodbye, and shouted, “Clive, come on. There’s been a murder at the Royal Bank of Scotland.” Veering around the corner from his desk into the hall, he almost collided with Detective Sergeant Clive Patterson, who skimmed down the hall pulling on his own jacket.
“The bank that’s just been robbed?”
“The very same.”
“North assigned it to us?”
They took the stairs two at a time down to the ground floor. “Us and Rae Bell.”
“Sometimes catching up on paperwork is worthwhile,” Clive remarked.
“Sometimes, like now,” Thain agreed, since that’s what they’d been working on all morning.
An hour or so later, as he stood to one side of the office turned crime scene, Thain didn’t wince when familiar, yet irrational, discomfort rippled across the thick, two-inch scar on his abdomen. He kept his eyes on the lab sergeant, Ralph Harris, while he finished going over the naked and mutilated body of Mr. Richard McLean, onetime banker and now murder victim. The victim was a mess, and Thain knew what the mortal wound must have felt like. The room closed in on him, he felt like it had dampers in the walls muting the sounds of the crinkly plastic, the soft shuffling of shoes covered with protectors, and the clicks of cameras going off. A low murmuring of voices, relaying a constant stream of information as it was discovered, helped to calm him, bring him back to the here and now. Watching the science team do its job allowed his mind to busy itself contemplating and calculating what he’d gleaned since he’d arrived. Work always provided a useful distraction from the past.
Patterson and Thain had been assigned the initial investigation into the murder as soon as DCI North heard that the bank heist was not the only crime committed that morning in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Clive landed the job of calming the frantic secretary found trussed up in a closet, while Thain talked with the lab sergeant in charge of the crime scene. Detective Sergeant Rae Bell conferred downstairs with the Flying Squad, the detectives working the heist.
By the time the science team packed up to leave, Thain’s thoughts had begun to find some order. A few rogue lines of theory signaled in the back of his mind, but so far, he ignored them. He didn’t need to pay those lines of inquiry any attention right now, much less tell Clive or Rae Bell about them. As he always did, he would work in his own way until he was certain that what he half suspected could not be the truth. If the rogue theories proved positive, then this was a doomed investigation from the start. Not that anyone would believe him. But disbelief hadn’t stopped him in the five years since he’d joined the London Metropolitan Police Service. After his service in Scotland and Interpol, the LMPS had finally honed his attitude from brash—and frankly naïve—to invisible, at least most of the time.
Glancing a last time around the room, he not only made mental notes but jotted on his cell phone the pertinent features of the murder.
“The mess on the desk should have provided some clues, but as yet, I’ve found no noticeable forensic evidence of the executor, not even usable shoe impressions on any of the rugs,” Ralph said, noticing Thain’s perusal of the room and desk. “I’ll know more, of course, once the lab tests are done.”
Thain nodded. “The murder appears to have been done with deliberate intent to cause extreme pain for the victim.”
“This wasn’t a random hack job, in my opinion. Seen enough to take an educated guess.”
“I should think so . . .” The weapon was a letter opener with RM on the handle, which evidently had been taken from the desk. The killer had left it in the wound. That the murder weapon belonged here spiked one of those signals Thain didn’t want to think about. So did the fact it had been left in the wound. And the single witness they knew of still breathed. He had reason not to like that, too. Not that he wanted her dead . . . He looked up from his notes as Clive approached the doorway, careful to stay out of the actual crime scene. Thain asked, “The witness?”
Clive glanced at his notes. “After I calmed her down a bit, I sent her over to West End Central to give a statement. She’s the victim’s secretary and her name is Melissa McConnell. She’s pretty shaken but seems certain of what she saw, which gives us almost nothing to start with.”
Clive Patterson was a year or two younger than Thain, red haired, and near Thain’s height of six feet. Clive never wore footwear that wasn’t American cowboy boots. He also tended to be precise in his work and had surprised Thain a year ago, when he’d first started in the LMPS, with his easy, yet adept, manner. Clive didn’t play petty office politics, which was a relief because politics was the one thing about being a police detective Thain actually hated. “What did she give us?” he asked.
“The man wore a Burberry coat, a hat, and glasses. He looked right at her, she says, before he grabbed her, taped her up, and stuck her in the closet. Said he looked about six feet tall.”
Touching his smart phone, Thain closed his notes app. “I’ve already ordered CCTV footage for the surrounding area. We’ll start with that as soon as we get a viewing room set up.”
“Good. With her description we should be able to pick him out pretty quick.”
“Sarcasm, Clive?” Thain almost smiled. “A color on the Burberry? The eyes?”
“Burberry, dark but no color. No color on the eyes behind the glasses. Rae Bell is still downstairs. She’s talked with the Flying Squad and is interviewing the security guards now. The guy had to pass through security before he’d make it in here. Maybe they’ll remember more about him than the secretary did.”
Thain nodded, absently running his thumb across the smooth surface of his phone, which he used like a worry bead. It helped him think. “Wonder why he didn’t kill her?” Thain turned his attention back to the corpse now being readied for removal. The initialed letter opener still sat in the bloody chest. Thain swallowed and quickly shifted his gaze to the victim’s clothes lying in a crumpled pile at the man’s bare feet, minus the white, blood-soaked shirt still caught on the handle of the weapon. Richard McLean hadn’t died a quick or painless death, but there was nothing else here to tell them more. They would have to wait for the forensics report to see if the killer left something behind, something invisible to the naked eye. Before Patterson left, Thain said, “Clive, I’m heading back to West End to put my notes on the computer. Meet you there?”
“I’ll be right behind you as soon as I find Rae Bell.”
Thain said, “If you hear before I do, let me know when and where the chief wants to hold the first meeting?”
Clive winked. “Of course. Glad he’s the one handling the press. There’s a swarm of them out front already.” He disappeared down the hall, tapping his notebook against his knuckles, a habit he’d picked up from some cop show on TV. Thain found it amusing. Sometimes he wished things in real life actually went the way they did on TV shows. On a TV show, they’d have a decent shot at catching this murderer.
3
Celia Wight pushed open Liberty’s heavy wooden door with her shoulder, and the chilly winter air hit her rosy, warm cheeks. She faltered, wanting nothing more than to slip back into the heated store and wait for the crowds to thin. Her already tepid Christmas cheer had dampened severely at the overcast day when she’d left the hotel early, before her book signing, to do some mandatory holiday shopping. But she’d forced herself to face up to the challenge anyway, and her efforts had proven successful. Her gloved hands were now weighted with bags of presents for Eva, her dearest and best friend, and Philip, her literary agent. Eva and Philip King had come to England so that when her book tour concluded they could celebrate Christmas together, adding some friendly color to stony-gray London. None of them had expected their Christmas to be white. Though Eva and Philip were British, they lived in the States as did she: Atlanta, Georgia, where most days, even in winter, the sun shone hot and bright.
Inhaling the morning city-tainted air, Celia hesitated. The narrow London sidewalk outside Liberty’s was packed with shoppers like her, and she wasn’t quite ready to push among them to make her way toward Oxford Circus tube station. She was tired and more than ready for some tea at the hotel, but she was due at the bookstore at eleven and to have lunch with Eva and Philip afterward. She eked her way toward Oxford Street, though she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her.
Celia didn’t like crowds, but at least no one really saw her amongst an anonymous mass of moving persons. She did like that. But today she was more nervous than usual. Because of the book signings, she thought. They always made her a bit jumpy. In Atlanta she was accustomed to the way the city moved. She knew Atlanta, and if she didn’t feel completely safe, at least it was familiar. London was huge and she loved to visit, but she didn’t know it well enough to feel safe in it. Atlanta seemed to have more space. Here, the strangers mulling around her, pushing, pulling, laughing, and griping, jangled her nerves. When police sirens started to wail farther down the street, coming closer, the noise added to the chaos and her discomfort. The racket echoed, and she couldn’t decide which direction the sirens were coming from. She twisted, trying to see what was happening, but was blocked on all sides. She felt trapped by the crowd, propelled by the tide of humanity. At least she was going in the right direction.
Until somebody bumped into her from behind. But her bags tangled against her legs and she couldn’t move any faster. Before she could react, someone grabbed her sleeve, spun her around, and put an arm about her shoulders, shoving her face into the middle of his chest before she could see him clearly.
Celia reacted instantly, pushed back against him with her elbows, protest on her lips. But before one word escaped, before her heartbeat aligned with her already escalating panic, the stranger shoved his other hand beneath the back of her coat. A thin, inflexible point pricked her ribs. A knife. “Please, God no—” Then, inside her head panic exploded and she started to scream.
The man reacted, pulled her closer, his head next to hers, his breath hot against her ear as he said, “Be quiet. I can, and will, puncture your heart if you make one sound.”
The knife pressed harder, silenced her, reinforced his threat. She started to hyperventilate. Police sirens beat the air. She heard patrol cars screeching on overworked brakes, congesting the traffic all along the constricted Great Marlborough Street. She shot a glance to the side when she heard cops yelling and the rhythm of running feet on pavement. The police plunged through the crowds, rummaging like rabid shoppers looking for a good deal. “Bloody hell,” the stranger cursed and tightened his grip on her, blocking out any thought she had except one.
Life or death was all her head could deal with as he pushed her back through the crowd, away from Oxford Street and her tube station. In the alcove sheltering the great wooden doors to the Liberty store she’d just left, he stepped around one of the dark-gray lion statues to the side and backed up against the brown sign proclaiming “Liberty.” Enclosed by the foot traffic entering and exiting the store, he turned her to face him and lowered his head next to hers. Even knowing the danger, she couldn’t stop struggling against him. When he gripped her tighter, she surprised herself and bit his ear, clamped down, and metallic warmth surged onto her lips and tongue. She jerked back, trying to spit his blood out of her mouth, but he grunted and twisted the knife against her, the point cutting through her turtleneck sweater. Blood for blood. She tasted his in her mouth, on her tongue, felt a queasy slickness on her teeth. He wiped his ear with a movement so fast she barely remarked it before she inhaled to scream. His gloved hand smeared the red stain from her mouth as he pulled her face to his. His lips, which weren’t soft or warm but harsh and cold as the winter air, covered her own. She squirmed beneath the tense pressure, but he held her fast. She couldn’t breathe. She willed herself away, eyes shut against the reality of him. She strived for escape; her body twisted in the wicked man’s steely grip. Her survival instinct cut through her fear as thoroughly as the knife cut through her sweater to puncture the skin of her back. Her mind still whispered, fight! She fought him again, but his vice-like grip tightened and the knife sliced deeper. Her skin started to sting.
Like a rejected lover, the stranger held her too fast, too close for her to see him clearly. The pressure of his brutal lips lessened for a breath, returned, softened, and pressed into the warmth of a kiss, a real kiss. Then he broke contact with a sudden jerk of his head, as if she had burned him. When she dared open her eyes, his own flashed ominous and angry through his rimmed glasses before he pushed her head against his chest so she couldn’t see his face.
“What have you done?” The words escaped through his teeth, clipped and accusing, but not disguising his British accent.
“Me?”
The stranger remained silent. She felt his head moving as if his eyes were sweeping over the area. He seemed to be weighing his chances of—what, escape? “They’ll come back,” he said.
Celia hadn’t noticed that the sirens now echoed farther down the street. The police cars had vanished.
“They’re looking for you,” she said. For an instant she wondered what he’d done, but the thin plastic handles of her forgotten, and now leaden, shopping bags cut into her gloved fingers. How could she still be holding them? They started to slip.
“Don’t drop your bags.”
Surprised, still in shock, she fought to get a better grip. “I, I—”
“Walk with me. Now,” he said, pulling her with him.
Celia’s heart flip-flopped, pounding against the rhythm of her stumbling feet. His knife still touched her skin. Sweat beaded at the base of her spine as her instinct once again stole the reins from her fear. Another scream rose in her throat, harmonizing with the wavering wail of retreating sirens.
“Not a sound.” His demand cut her as surely as his blade had. She choked. Her feet stumbled on the sidewalk. The pressure of the knifepoint had eased slightly, but it remained firm on her back, the stinging raw now as he steered her around the corner and into a pedestrian street. She looked up at him.
“Don’t.”
Celia snapped her gaze back to the crowds flowing around them, the few café patrons daring the winter weather dotting outside tables. But she’d caught a glimpse of clean-shaven cheeks and short dark-blond hair.
“Wait.” Celia pulled back, squeezed her eyes closed. “You don’t need me anymore.”
“Don’t argue.”
She baulked. “No! I won’t look—”
He pressed his point, literally. “Don’t make me use this.”
Desperate now, she told a partial lie. “People will worry—”
“I don’t care.” He didn’t stop. He didn’t let her go.
Farther down the way, sleet started to fall. She stopped dead in the middle of the pedestrian way while people popped open their umbrellas or ran for shelter.
“But why—” She kept her eyes closed.
“Don’t ask. Open. Your. Eyes.”
This was a dream—a really, really bad one. The dream turned into a full-fledged nightmare as the stranger propelled her under a sign arched over the pedestrian way proclaiming “Welcome to Carnaby Street.”
After that, no thought Celia had was straight. Instead, her thoughts ran crooked and bent like the streets he led her down. Searching for landmarks she recognized, she tried to clear her mind, tried to push aside the shock and fear hindering any chance she had at rational thought. But no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t forget the ever-present blade wedged against her back.
4
The lift hummed down to the main floor, and Thain skirted around the tape that closed off the entrance to the bank and the reporters crowded like flies around his boss, Chief North. Glad he didn’t have to deal with the press, he walked fast toward the West End Central police station a few blocks away. Starting up the steps at the entrance, he quickly pulled back as a couple, a man and woman, came out of nowhere from the left and almost knocked him over. If he hadn’t been paying attention he would have ended up on his backside and halfway down the steps. The man had his arm around the woman, his head down near hers, neither one aware of their surroundings.
“Excuse me?” Thain said. Some people . . .
The man, tall and slight of build, looked up, his expression troubled. “So sorry. Please, are you a policeman?”
Hesitating, Thain answered, “Yes. Detective Sergeant Alban Thain.” He didn’t pull his credentials, as they were at the station and the man didn’t ask for them. “Is there a problem?” His impatience to get to the computer clipped his words a fair bit past politeness.
“Yes, Detective, there is a problem.” The man reached out and shook Thain’s hand in a tight grip. “Maybe you can help us. I’m Philip King.” Philip King stood at least six feet two or three, and though thin, he wasn’t bony. He had short, well-groomed blond hair and penetrating green eyes, eyes now shadowed with concern. He wore a clean-cut black suit and looked on the upwards side of wealthy. Being only six feet, with dark hair and even darker brown eyes, and not so wealthy, Thain had to ignore his juvenile envy of the man’s looks. Philip King motioned toward the redheaded woman by his side. She had alabaster skin and was small of stature, refined, almost regal, and smartly dressed in brown boots and a mid-calf blue wool skirt with matching jacket.
“This is my wife, Eva,” he said.
Thain nodded a greeting, thinking that though she was attractive, she wasn’t his type—as if he had a type.
“We need to file a report for a missing person,” Mr. King resumed as the three of them continued up the steps. Thain held the door open for them.
“I’m sure the front desk can direct you to that unit,” Thain said, but his words were lost as a wave of sound engulfed them. The desk was completely hidden behind a teeming mass of people crammed into the space in front of it. Of course. The Royal Bank of Scotland stood just around the virtual corner. Hundred-to-one odds bet these assumed “witnesses” to the heist had all seen something important. It was Christmas, after all, and far too many people were out holiday shopping.
“We’re on our way, sir.” His jacket lay over the back of his chair. He reached for it, hung up without a goodbye, and shouted, “Clive, come on. There’s been a murder at the Royal Bank of Scotland.” Veering around the corner from his desk into the hall, he almost collided with Detective Sergeant Clive Patterson, who skimmed down the hall pulling on his own jacket.
“The bank that’s just been robbed?”
“The very same.”
“North assigned it to us?”
They took the stairs two at a time down to the ground floor. “Us and Rae Bell.”
“Sometimes catching up on paperwork is worthwhile,” Clive remarked.
“Sometimes, like now,” Thain agreed, since that’s what they’d been working on all morning.
An hour or so later, as he stood to one side of the office turned crime scene, Thain didn’t wince when familiar, yet irrational, discomfort rippled across the thick, two-inch scar on his abdomen. He kept his eyes on the lab sergeant, Ralph Harris, while he finished going over the naked and mutilated body of Mr. Richard McLean, onetime banker and now murder victim. The victim was a mess, and Thain knew what the mortal wound must have felt like. The room closed in on him, he felt like it had dampers in the walls muting the sounds of the crinkly plastic, the soft shuffling of shoes covered with protectors, and the clicks of cameras going off. A low murmuring of voices, relaying a constant stream of information as it was discovered, helped to calm him, bring him back to the here and now. Watching the science team do its job allowed his mind to busy itself contemplating and calculating what he’d gleaned since he’d arrived. Work always provided a useful distraction from the past.
Patterson and Thain had been assigned the initial investigation into the murder as soon as DCI North heard that the bank heist was not the only crime committed that morning in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Clive landed the job of calming the frantic secretary found trussed up in a closet, while Thain talked with the lab sergeant in charge of the crime scene. Detective Sergeant Rae Bell conferred downstairs with the Flying Squad, the detectives working the heist.
By the time the science team packed up to leave, Thain’s thoughts had begun to find some order. A few rogue lines of theory signaled in the back of his mind, but so far, he ignored them. He didn’t need to pay those lines of inquiry any attention right now, much less tell Clive or Rae Bell about them. As he always did, he would work in his own way until he was certain that what he half suspected could not be the truth. If the rogue theories proved positive, then this was a doomed investigation from the start. Not that anyone would believe him. But disbelief hadn’t stopped him in the five years since he’d joined the London Metropolitan Police Service. After his service in Scotland and Interpol, the LMPS had finally honed his attitude from brash—and frankly naïve—to invisible, at least most of the time.
Glancing a last time around the room, he not only made mental notes but jotted on his cell phone the pertinent features of the murder.
“The mess on the desk should have provided some clues, but as yet, I’ve found no noticeable forensic evidence of the executor, not even usable shoe impressions on any of the rugs,” Ralph said, noticing Thain’s perusal of the room and desk. “I’ll know more, of course, once the lab tests are done.”
Thain nodded. “The murder appears to have been done with deliberate intent to cause extreme pain for the victim.”
“This wasn’t a random hack job, in my opinion. Seen enough to take an educated guess.”
“I should think so . . .” The weapon was a letter opener with RM on the handle, which evidently had been taken from the desk. The killer had left it in the wound. That the murder weapon belonged here spiked one of those signals Thain didn’t want to think about. So did the fact it had been left in the wound. And the single witness they knew of still breathed. He had reason not to like that, too. Not that he wanted her dead . . . He looked up from his notes as Clive approached the doorway, careful to stay out of the actual crime scene. Thain asked, “The witness?”
Clive glanced at his notes. “After I calmed her down a bit, I sent her over to West End Central to give a statement. She’s the victim’s secretary and her name is Melissa McConnell. She’s pretty shaken but seems certain of what she saw, which gives us almost nothing to start with.”
Clive Patterson was a year or two younger than Thain, red haired, and near Thain’s height of six feet. Clive never wore footwear that wasn’t American cowboy boots. He also tended to be precise in his work and had surprised Thain a year ago, when he’d first started in the LMPS, with his easy, yet adept, manner. Clive didn’t play petty office politics, which was a relief because politics was the one thing about being a police detective Thain actually hated. “What did she give us?” he asked.
“The man wore a Burberry coat, a hat, and glasses. He looked right at her, she says, before he grabbed her, taped her up, and stuck her in the closet. Said he looked about six feet tall.”
Touching his smart phone, Thain closed his notes app. “I’ve already ordered CCTV footage for the surrounding area. We’ll start with that as soon as we get a viewing room set up.”
“Good. With her description we should be able to pick him out pretty quick.”
“Sarcasm, Clive?” Thain almost smiled. “A color on the Burberry? The eyes?”
“Burberry, dark but no color. No color on the eyes behind the glasses. Rae Bell is still downstairs. She’s talked with the Flying Squad and is interviewing the security guards now. The guy had to pass through security before he’d make it in here. Maybe they’ll remember more about him than the secretary did.”
Thain nodded, absently running his thumb across the smooth surface of his phone, which he used like a worry bead. It helped him think. “Wonder why he didn’t kill her?” Thain turned his attention back to the corpse now being readied for removal. The initialed letter opener still sat in the bloody chest. Thain swallowed and quickly shifted his gaze to the victim’s clothes lying in a crumpled pile at the man’s bare feet, minus the white, blood-soaked shirt still caught on the handle of the weapon. Richard McLean hadn’t died a quick or painless death, but there was nothing else here to tell them more. They would have to wait for the forensics report to see if the killer left something behind, something invisible to the naked eye. Before Patterson left, Thain said, “Clive, I’m heading back to West End to put my notes on the computer. Meet you there?”
“I’ll be right behind you as soon as I find Rae Bell.”
Thain said, “If you hear before I do, let me know when and where the chief wants to hold the first meeting?”
Clive winked. “Of course. Glad he’s the one handling the press. There’s a swarm of them out front already.” He disappeared down the hall, tapping his notebook against his knuckles, a habit he’d picked up from some cop show on TV. Thain found it amusing. Sometimes he wished things in real life actually went the way they did on TV shows. On a TV show, they’d have a decent shot at catching this murderer.
3
Celia Wight pushed open Liberty’s heavy wooden door with her shoulder, and the chilly winter air hit her rosy, warm cheeks. She faltered, wanting nothing more than to slip back into the heated store and wait for the crowds to thin. Her already tepid Christmas cheer had dampened severely at the overcast day when she’d left the hotel early, before her book signing, to do some mandatory holiday shopping. But she’d forced herself to face up to the challenge anyway, and her efforts had proven successful. Her gloved hands were now weighted with bags of presents for Eva, her dearest and best friend, and Philip, her literary agent. Eva and Philip King had come to England so that when her book tour concluded they could celebrate Christmas together, adding some friendly color to stony-gray London. None of them had expected their Christmas to be white. Though Eva and Philip were British, they lived in the States as did she: Atlanta, Georgia, where most days, even in winter, the sun shone hot and bright.
Inhaling the morning city-tainted air, Celia hesitated. The narrow London sidewalk outside Liberty’s was packed with shoppers like her, and she wasn’t quite ready to push among them to make her way toward Oxford Circus tube station. She was tired and more than ready for some tea at the hotel, but she was due at the bookstore at eleven and to have lunch with Eva and Philip afterward. She eked her way toward Oxford Street, though she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her.
Celia didn’t like crowds, but at least no one really saw her amongst an anonymous mass of moving persons. She did like that. But today she was more nervous than usual. Because of the book signings, she thought. They always made her a bit jumpy. In Atlanta she was accustomed to the way the city moved. She knew Atlanta, and if she didn’t feel completely safe, at least it was familiar. London was huge and she loved to visit, but she didn’t know it well enough to feel safe in it. Atlanta seemed to have more space. Here, the strangers mulling around her, pushing, pulling, laughing, and griping, jangled her nerves. When police sirens started to wail farther down the street, coming closer, the noise added to the chaos and her discomfort. The racket echoed, and she couldn’t decide which direction the sirens were coming from. She twisted, trying to see what was happening, but was blocked on all sides. She felt trapped by the crowd, propelled by the tide of humanity. At least she was going in the right direction.
Until somebody bumped into her from behind. But her bags tangled against her legs and she couldn’t move any faster. Before she could react, someone grabbed her sleeve, spun her around, and put an arm about her shoulders, shoving her face into the middle of his chest before she could see him clearly.
Celia reacted instantly, pushed back against him with her elbows, protest on her lips. But before one word escaped, before her heartbeat aligned with her already escalating panic, the stranger shoved his other hand beneath the back of her coat. A thin, inflexible point pricked her ribs. A knife. “Please, God no—” Then, inside her head panic exploded and she started to scream.
The man reacted, pulled her closer, his head next to hers, his breath hot against her ear as he said, “Be quiet. I can, and will, puncture your heart if you make one sound.”
The knife pressed harder, silenced her, reinforced his threat. She started to hyperventilate. Police sirens beat the air. She heard patrol cars screeching on overworked brakes, congesting the traffic all along the constricted Great Marlborough Street. She shot a glance to the side when she heard cops yelling and the rhythm of running feet on pavement. The police plunged through the crowds, rummaging like rabid shoppers looking for a good deal. “Bloody hell,” the stranger cursed and tightened his grip on her, blocking out any thought she had except one.
Life or death was all her head could deal with as he pushed her back through the crowd, away from Oxford Street and her tube station. In the alcove sheltering the great wooden doors to the Liberty store she’d just left, he stepped around one of the dark-gray lion statues to the side and backed up against the brown sign proclaiming “Liberty.” Enclosed by the foot traffic entering and exiting the store, he turned her to face him and lowered his head next to hers. Even knowing the danger, she couldn’t stop struggling against him. When he gripped her tighter, she surprised herself and bit his ear, clamped down, and metallic warmth surged onto her lips and tongue. She jerked back, trying to spit his blood out of her mouth, but he grunted and twisted the knife against her, the point cutting through her turtleneck sweater. Blood for blood. She tasted his in her mouth, on her tongue, felt a queasy slickness on her teeth. He wiped his ear with a movement so fast she barely remarked it before she inhaled to scream. His gloved hand smeared the red stain from her mouth as he pulled her face to his. His lips, which weren’t soft or warm but harsh and cold as the winter air, covered her own. She squirmed beneath the tense pressure, but he held her fast. She couldn’t breathe. She willed herself away, eyes shut against the reality of him. She strived for escape; her body twisted in the wicked man’s steely grip. Her survival instinct cut through her fear as thoroughly as the knife cut through her sweater to puncture the skin of her back. Her mind still whispered, fight! She fought him again, but his vice-like grip tightened and the knife sliced deeper. Her skin started to sting.
Like a rejected lover, the stranger held her too fast, too close for her to see him clearly. The pressure of his brutal lips lessened for a breath, returned, softened, and pressed into the warmth of a kiss, a real kiss. Then he broke contact with a sudden jerk of his head, as if she had burned him. When she dared open her eyes, his own flashed ominous and angry through his rimmed glasses before he pushed her head against his chest so she couldn’t see his face.
“What have you done?” The words escaped through his teeth, clipped and accusing, but not disguising his British accent.
“Me?”
The stranger remained silent. She felt his head moving as if his eyes were sweeping over the area. He seemed to be weighing his chances of—what, escape? “They’ll come back,” he said.
Celia hadn’t noticed that the sirens now echoed farther down the street. The police cars had vanished.
“They’re looking for you,” she said. For an instant she wondered what he’d done, but the thin plastic handles of her forgotten, and now leaden, shopping bags cut into her gloved fingers. How could she still be holding them? They started to slip.
“Don’t drop your bags.”
Surprised, still in shock, she fought to get a better grip. “I, I—”
“Walk with me. Now,” he said, pulling her with him.
Celia’s heart flip-flopped, pounding against the rhythm of her stumbling feet. His knife still touched her skin. Sweat beaded at the base of her spine as her instinct once again stole the reins from her fear. Another scream rose in her throat, harmonizing with the wavering wail of retreating sirens.
“Not a sound.” His demand cut her as surely as his blade had. She choked. Her feet stumbled on the sidewalk. The pressure of the knifepoint had eased slightly, but it remained firm on her back, the stinging raw now as he steered her around the corner and into a pedestrian street. She looked up at him.
“Don’t.”
Celia snapped her gaze back to the crowds flowing around them, the few café patrons daring the winter weather dotting outside tables. But she’d caught a glimpse of clean-shaven cheeks and short dark-blond hair.
“Wait.” Celia pulled back, squeezed her eyes closed. “You don’t need me anymore.”
“Don’t argue.”
She baulked. “No! I won’t look—”
He pressed his point, literally. “Don’t make me use this.”
Desperate now, she told a partial lie. “People will worry—”
“I don’t care.” He didn’t stop. He didn’t let her go.
Farther down the way, sleet started to fall. She stopped dead in the middle of the pedestrian way while people popped open their umbrellas or ran for shelter.
“But why—” She kept her eyes closed.
“Don’t ask. Open. Your. Eyes.”
This was a dream—a really, really bad one. The dream turned into a full-fledged nightmare as the stranger propelled her under a sign arched over the pedestrian way proclaiming “Welcome to Carnaby Street.”
After that, no thought Celia had was straight. Instead, her thoughts ran crooked and bent like the streets he led her down. Searching for landmarks she recognized, she tried to clear her mind, tried to push aside the shock and fear hindering any chance she had at rational thought. But no matter how hard she concentrated, she couldn’t forget the ever-present blade wedged against her back.
4
The lift hummed down to the main floor, and Thain skirted around the tape that closed off the entrance to the bank and the reporters crowded like flies around his boss, Chief North. Glad he didn’t have to deal with the press, he walked fast toward the West End Central police station a few blocks away. Starting up the steps at the entrance, he quickly pulled back as a couple, a man and woman, came out of nowhere from the left and almost knocked him over. If he hadn’t been paying attention he would have ended up on his backside and halfway down the steps. The man had his arm around the woman, his head down near hers, neither one aware of their surroundings.
“Excuse me?” Thain said. Some people . . .
The man, tall and slight of build, looked up, his expression troubled. “So sorry. Please, are you a policeman?”
Hesitating, Thain answered, “Yes. Detective Sergeant Alban Thain.” He didn’t pull his credentials, as they were at the station and the man didn’t ask for them. “Is there a problem?” His impatience to get to the computer clipped his words a fair bit past politeness.
“Yes, Detective, there is a problem.” The man reached out and shook Thain’s hand in a tight grip. “Maybe you can help us. I’m Philip King.” Philip King stood at least six feet two or three, and though thin, he wasn’t bony. He had short, well-groomed blond hair and penetrating green eyes, eyes now shadowed with concern. He wore a clean-cut black suit and looked on the upwards side of wealthy. Being only six feet, with dark hair and even darker brown eyes, and not so wealthy, Thain had to ignore his juvenile envy of the man’s looks. Philip King motioned toward the redheaded woman by his side. She had alabaster skin and was small of stature, refined, almost regal, and smartly dressed in brown boots and a mid-calf blue wool skirt with matching jacket.
“This is my wife, Eva,” he said.
Thain nodded a greeting, thinking that though she was attractive, she wasn’t his type—as if he had a type.
“We need to file a report for a missing person,” Mr. King resumed as the three of them continued up the steps. Thain held the door open for them.
“I’m sure the front desk can direct you to that unit,” Thain said, but his words were lost as a wave of sound engulfed them. The desk was completely hidden behind a teeming mass of people crammed into the space in front of it. Of course. The Royal Bank of Scotland stood just around the virtual corner. Hundred-to-one odds bet these assumed “witnesses” to the heist had all seen something important. It was Christmas, after all, and far too many people were out holiday shopping.
