The Seventh Man, page 6
The rising sun silhouetted the buildings in the mists as they climbed a short flight of steps to a large, old mansion evidently converted to flats. He inserted a key in the front door lock and entered, checking the doors on each side as they walked down the dim cavern of a hall leading deep into the house. He kept her in front of him until they reached a set of descending stairs. At his silent urging, Celia took tentative steps down into a gloomy basement. He guided her through shadows to a nondescript door, which he opened with a key.
Her new home was a cold, lightless one-room flat with a tiny opaque window near the ceiling on one wall, barred of course. It fit her mood: stark white walls with the type of dark wooden bed and dull green tables and chairs that could be found at any cheap furniture store. It smelled dank and musty. There was nothing to indicate who lived there because no one did. And though the first apartment had been much nicer, Celia realized it felt just as cold, just as empty and unloved.
Once the stranger had put the things he’d bought on the table and turned on the radiator, he pushed Celia toward a chair.
“No, not again!” She skittered away. “Please.”
He caught her in the corner near the door, but she strained against him, made him work to pin her to the side of the small refrigerator behind her.
“Don’t tie me up again.”
“Do you want to eat?”
“I’ll scream.” She squirmed in his grip.
He tightened his hold on her. “No, you won’t.”
With his face inches from hers, she succumbed again to the cold of his steely eyes. Their chill coursed through her like a physical thing, freezing her will, freezing her bruised sense of survival. The emptiness of her stomach chose that bitter moment to take its toll.
“Why didn’t we buy food while we were walking?”
He didn’t answer. Celia sagged against the fridge. He pushed her over to the chair and shoved her down. She slumped like a limp rag doll while he pulled her right arm over the low back of the chair and her left under it. With the tape from the bag, he wrapped her wrists together and taped her ankles to the front legs of the chair. It was an awkward position, causing her to lean to one side. If she fell over, not only might she hurt herself but there would be nowhere to go.
He tore one last piece of tape from the roll. She shook her head. “Please, no, I swear I won’t—”
He seized her head, held it still, and taped her mouth shut. She tried not to weep because then her nose would be blocked and she wouldn’t be able to breathe. She blinked rapidly and kept the tears back by thinking that if he talked of food, he meant to keep her alive. There was always hope if she was alive, wasn’t there? But hope for what? He left her alone, bound and gagged, with the silent hanging light for company.
After he’d gone, Celia strained to hear anything, hoping there would be someone in the hall, someone outside by the window. There was nothing to hear but the normal creaks and groans of an old building. No soundproofing here. Who needed soundproofing in a basement? She kept blinking. She couldn’t afford to cry.
Eva and Philip deemed hers a sad and lonely definition of a life, but it had been hers, safe and uncomplicated. Accustomed to seclusion after her parents’ deaths, sometimes she even enjoyed it, but not now, not like this. She hated this eerie stillness, broken only by the sound of her own tortured breath.
She couldn’t shake the thought, running circles in her head, that this was what she got for writing books and making the world aware of her existence.
11
Random song lyrics about time played in his head while Thain sat through the next set of films with mind-numbing attention. It was late, but he viewed with a slow yet careful precision. That’s how St. John did it. That’s why he’d requested the PC. Darkness had fallen outside long ago and their brought-in dinner sat like a greasy lump in his stomach. They both saw the man at the same time, but St. John recognized him and pointed first.
“This looks like the same guy. Thain, what do you think?”
Thain leaned in closer.
St. John continued, “It looks like you were right about him changing his coat. See what I see?”
“Possibly. He doesn’t have a hat on,” Thain said.
“But look at his walk.”
“Yes. I see what you—what’s he doing?”
They watched the man thread his way through a dense crowd in front of a department store. He slipped up to what looked like a young woman hemmed in by the crowd. She looked harried and a bit confused as the mass of people propelled her along.
“Can’t be our man if he’s with that woman,” St. John said.
“Is she with him?” Thain took a deep breath and held it. It couldn’t be . . . “Where’s this footage from, St. John?”
“Liberty, front entrance.”
Liberty. Liberty was a few blocks west of the bank and close enough to be more than noteworthy. “I think I need that photograph.”
“What photograph?”
“Mm. A photograph of a missing writer.”
“What does she have to do with the films?” St. John looked truly puzzled, of course. Thain explained about the Kings and their missing person.
“Well, what did you do with the photograph?” he asked.
“I put it in a desk drawer in the murder squad room.” Thain jumped to his feet. “I’ll see if I can get Rae to bring it to us, if she’s still there.”
“Where else would she go? Chief said we’re all on until this is finished.”
“Out following a lead? I don’t know.” He pulled his cell out of his jacket pocket and called Rae Bell. She answered on the first ring. “Rae, are you still here at the Hendon?”
“Hello to you too.”
He could almost hear her frowning, and he certainly heard a chair squeak. “Sorry, can you do a favor for me?”
“Depends on what kind of favor?”
“I need a photograph that Sergeant Clarke from MPU sent to me earlier today. I left it in the desk drawer where I answered phones in the murder room.”
“Now?”
“Now, please?” Thain squinted, hoping she’d say yes.
“That’s better. I guess I could use some exercise.”
“You are absolutely mint.”
“Of course.”
A drawer opened. He heard some paper shuffling as she found and opened the envelope.
“Who is this?” she said.
“A missing person. An American writer.”
“Got something on her?”
“Are you walking as you talk?”
“Stupid question. Answer mine.”
“I might, and it might have to do with our murder.”
“I’m hurrying now.”
“Thank you, Rae.”
He started to hang up, but she said, “What’s the rush?”
Thain remembered to be nice to the one person who was unfailingly nice to him. “You’ll walk faster, maybe even run, if you aren’t talking on your phone?”
“Right. Signing off,” and she was gone. Her curiosity would give her wings.
He forced his mind to clarify, to calm down, to think of one problem at a time as they waited for Rae. He no longer considered his wild hypothesis of the Wraith being involved as a valid line of inquiry. Their suspect couldn’t be the Wraith. The Wraith would never kidnap anyone. Still, Thain couldn’t afford to be wrong. He’d have to check all possibilities. If the murderer wasn’t the Wraith, then Celia Wight was probably dead. Because while the man he’d studied never killed innocent people, most assassins were notorious for it. This was one of the many things that set his assassin apart in the field of dealing death. But was Celia Wight as innocent as the Kings believed? A sudden vision of her eyes unsettled him.
Concentrate, Alban.
Ten minutes later Rae burst through the door. For such a small person she could stir the air in a room like a storm. “Hello, St. John,” she said. “All right, Thain, what’s this about?”
“The photo?” He reached out and took the envelope she offered to him. Easing back into his seat, he propped the black-and-white up by St. John’s screen. He’d purposely avoided thinking about it until he’d seen the footage outside of Liberty. He’d been relieved to be rid of it when he’d tucked it in the desk drawer in the squad room, relieved because he’d been nice to the Kings and done what they’d asked. Accepting the photo had meant he could try to forget it, to forget her. Now, gazing at the photo again, the woman in the black-and-white dominated the room as fully as Rae did, and she wasn’t even in it. He could seriously lose his logical, impersonal interpretation of life within the very personal distress peering out from behind her eyes. Celia Wight’s eyes. The eyes of a woman he had never heard of before today.
St. John picked up the photo. “This the missing American, is it?”
“Hmm.” Thain glanced at St. John to see his reaction to her. He didn’t like it when St. John also gawked.
“She’s beautiful, but she looks so sad,” Rae said. “She’s a writer?”
“Yes.” He tapped St. John on the shoulder. St. John blinked as if he’d just woken up. He knew exactly how St. John felt. “Come on. Let’s get back to Liberty. Run the film from the beginning. Tell me what you see.”
St. John fast-forwarded through yesterday’s early morning images of Liberty storefront, cold and hard in the steady light of a snow-cloudy day. Celia Wight’s eyes drew his back to stare at the photo beside the monitor. He couldn’t tell their color, but they were lighter than brown, perhaps blue or green. They seemed like beacons of loneliness signaling to him. As if a siren’s entreaty from the sea, her eyes reached out, touched him so thoroughly again that he shut his own against their plea. Agatha . . . When his lids flickered open he avoided her gaze even as he made the effort to memorize her carefully neutral face. Even so posed a black-and-white photograph couldn’t mask her consciousness that life had thrown one too many bricks through her windows. Agatha had worn this same look after . . .
In his work he’d seen such effects too often, but not one had ever impinged upon him the way Celia Wight’s did. It was as if this woman had read his soul, discovered a match with hers, and cried for him to rescue her from her killing loneliness. A loneliness he knew too well.
He jerked his attention back to the video. “Slow down, St. John, you’re going too fast,” he said.
St. John slowed the footage until the clock on the film showed right after nine thirty a.m. then let it run normally.
Rae leaned in. “Is she in the footage?”
“You tell me,” Thain replied.
The three of them concentrated on the crowd, trying to spot the woman with haunted eyes. Shoppers milled about, ever changing, never still, in and out of the store. Time clicked off on the clock and he narrowed his focus, alert to every movement, every nuance of shadow on the film.
He stopped himself from pointing at Celia Wight as she came out of Liberty around ten forty-five, pushing the door open with her elbow because her hands were loaded with shopping bags. She stood amongst the throng as if uncertain for a moment, and then hesitantly edged her way through the thick crowd. Heads turned in the direction the bank would be in, as if hearing a commotion down the street. Caught up in the mass of people, she too turned to look toward the evident sound.
“She’s definitely your American,” St. John said. “And there’s our man.” St. John pointed to the now familiar figure wearing a Burberry coat slipping through the dense crowd. St. John zoomed in on the face, but again the man kept it down and away from the cameras. Celia Wight didn’t, though. She was clear to see. “I wish we could get a good shot of his face,” St. John said.
I’ve been saying that for ten years about my guy, Thain thought, but said, “He knows the locations of all the cameras.”
“The other thieves didn’t care,” St. John said.
“Celia Wight doesn’t care about the cameras either. Look how clearly we can see her face,” Rae said as if she’d read Thain’s thoughts. “She doesn’t seem to have any idea of being caught on camera.”
Amongst the mix of people coming and going from the store, while others strained to see what was happening further down the street, the man angled toward Celia Wight, actually bumped right into her. He put his arm around her and herded her in the opposite direction of the crowd, and of the bank. Celia looked as if she’d started to protest, but the man urged her along, his arm around her, his head bent to hers in an intimate fashion.
When the police arrived and started checking through the gathering of humanity in front of the store, the man ducked into the entrance alcove, put his back against the storefront sign, and pulled Celia to him in one motion, unpretentious, unhurried, as if he did it every day, again taking trouble to make sure his face was never fully exposed. In the alcove it was hard to see them, obscured as they were, by the shadow of the overhang and the people still entering and exiting the store. He leaned in close to her, head to head, and then jerked back with a small, sharp movement, as if he’d been bitten.
“What’s he doing now?” St. John leaned in closer, as did Rae and Thain.
In the dimness of the alcove, the man in the Burberry coat kissed Celia Wight.
“Whoa, look at that. Looks like she knows him all right. Maybe she’s in on it with him,” St. John said. “That would make it eight on the heist then.”
Shaking his head, Thain couldn’t understand the wrench in his psyche the kiss gave him. It was too badly lit and far away for them to get any real detail, but he would have sworn from her eyes, from the photograph, that she wouldn’t actually kiss a man in public, no matter who he was. Her body language didn’t say she wanted to be near him, much less kiss him. And if he still entertained the thought of this man being the Wraith, well, the Wraith for sure would never kiss in public. The Wraith never did anything in public except kill, and even then no one was ever aware of it when he did.
The man in the Burberry seemed unaware of the police officers combing the crowded sidewalk, and yet he abruptly stopped kissing Celia Wight as soon as they disappeared. He talked to her for an instant and then pulled her down the street in the opposite direction from the Royal Bank of Scotland. She stumbled, but the man righted her immediately. Thain cursed when the couple rounded the corner and the camera lost them.
“We need that lot of film round the other side of the store. We need to see which direction they went.” He wanted to say that he was sure she hadn’t wanted to go with him, but he didn’t, not yet.
“She kissed him. Does that mean we have three to find instead of two?” St. John stared at the monitor.
Thain looked at Rae. “What do you think? Do you think she knows him? Is she in on it with him?”
Rae studied the halted image on the screen. “Could you replay from where she leaves the store, St. John?”
“Sure.” St. John reversed the film and played it again. Rae paid exclusive attention to the screen, and Thain watched her. He wouldn’t say what he thought until he saw and heard her responses to his questions.
St. John watched the footage, as she did. He asked, “What’re you thinking, Thain? You don’t sound convinced, even with the kiss.”
Thain wasn’t ready to volunteer what he thought. He wanted to hear what Rae would say.
She straightened and looked at him. “When she comes out of the store, she doesn’t look like she’s waiting for someone else. She isn’t looking for anyone. It seems as if she’s completely alone and unhappy about it.”
Shoving both hands in his trouser pockets, Thain looked back at the frozen image on the screen as Rae continued. “I think she looks surprised when he comes up and turns her around, as if she’s frightened. She reminds me of a puppy that’s been kicked instead of hugged. And to me it looks as if she’s arching away from him before he kisses her. If you want to be kissed you lean into it.”
St. John pushed away from the edge of his desk and leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “You saw all that from that distance? You should be in here helping me.”
Thain asked him, “Do you really think it looked like the two of them could be together?”
“Well, you can’t deny the kiss.” St. John looked at Thain. “Are you going to tell the DIs?”
“Of course, but I want to check something first,” he said. He didn’t bother contradicting St. John about the kiss or how “together” the two might look. Why should he? He had no proof of anything.
“In the meantime,” he continued, “we need to get someone out there looking for the missing hat, somewhere between the bank and Liberty.” Thain called Clive Patterson and told him what they had found so far. Next he called Greene. “Can you put in a call to action to find a missing hat? Yes, we’ll send over the footage. The description should be in the secretary’s statement. Can you take care of it? Right. Good. Thanks.”
“Feel like staying, Rae?” He asked as he sat down and St. John set up another film.
“Yes, I think I do. This is more interesting than I thought it would be.”
As more footage spilled across the monitor, Thain glared at it. In spite of the seeming evidence, his brain wouldn’t let go of the Wraith. Maybe he really had studied the Wraith too long. Questions kept circling, like buzzards over carrion: If the man on the video was the Wraith, why had he made such a blatant mistake? And if he wasn’t the Wraith, how could Thain convince the chief that the man on the video wasn’t a bank robber? Did he believe the man on the video could be the Wraith? Well, maybe he couldn’t prove who the man on the video was, but it might be possible to prove he wasn’t one of the bank robbers. Thain was good at finding proof, normally. That skill had saved him—and what reputation he still had—from Carter in a big way. Not to mention his former position in Scotland and at Interpol. They’d let him go, but not because of his performance. No, they’d objected to his obsession, and here he was thinking again about a man who everyone said didn’t exist.
