The Administration Series (244 page)

Almost over.

Tarin had been cut out of the family in the letters Kate had written to her absent husband and excluded from the portrait. That left Toreth with the uncomfortable awareness that
he
wasn't in the picture, either. That omission was purely a function of time — the picture had been painted before he'd met Warrick. But had Toreth's name been in the recent letters?

Other considerations affected how much danger he was in. Did Kate know that he knew about her secret? Did whoever Warrick had contacted to arrange her release know? Could they have found out about his old mistake of pulling Leo Warrick's file?

Warrick had said that he'd had messages from Kate, sent from outside the Administration. If she was free and clear, was it really likely that she was behind this?

Toreth pushed his hair back, realising as he did that he was sweating. He nudged the tap with his toes, letting a little cool water into the bath. While it ran, he debated the merits of going downstairs and telling Warrick about his teacher eyewitness. The longer he left it, the worse Warrick would be about the omission. However, he didn't want to give Warrick any ideas about leads to chase down. With any luck, Toreth had bought himself a few days' grace to decide what to do.

When Toreth went downstairs, he found that Dillian had returned, and she, Warrick and Philly were locked in a deadly serious-sounding conversation in the living room. Toreth left them to it and spent a moderately entertaining evening talking to Jen. He managed to steer her away from amusing anecdotes about Warrick's childhood and towards stories about teenaged Dillian. A little ammunition was always welcome.

He didn't have a chance to talk to Warrick until they both went upstairs to bed.

"How's Tarin?" Toreth asked out of a vague sense of duty as he roughly folded his clothes — which was getting to be a habit — and stacked them on a chair.

"He's — " Warrick shook his head. "No. I'm sorry, but I've been talking about it all day, with doctors and family. I'll tell you in the morning."

"Hey, don't bother. I don't give a fuck anyway."

Warrick stopped stripping, his shirt half unbuttoned, and stared at him.

What now? Toreth wondered. It wasn't as if it was a surprise: Warrick had said yesterday that he knew Tarin's health was of zero interest to Toreth.

Warrick laughed suddenly, brief and humourless. "Lucky you. Sometimes I wish — "

"What?"

Warrick shook his head. "I wish we were back at the flat."

Obviously not what he'd been about to say, but it made a successful distraction. "What, right now? Why?"

"Because then there wouldn't be anyone sleeping in the next room. Or at least no one I'm related to."

"If you want to play, I can keep you quiet."

"'Want' doesn't really cover it." Warrick sounded strained and he glanced around a little helplessly. "But we don't have anything here. Not even the belt. And Philly's sleeping on this floor."

Warrick stopped speaking as Toreth took his hand. He held it for just a couple of seconds, his thumb stroking gently over the palm, before he shifted his grip to Warrick's wrist and twisted it up behind his back, following the movement smoothly round to end up standing half behind him. Warrick hissed at the sudden pain, his hand flexing.

"Is this it?" Toreth asked.

"We can't . . . "

He twined his fingers in Warrick's hair and pulled his head back, leaning in to breathe the words into his ear. "Is this what you need?"

Warrick's eyelids closed, lashes dark against his skin, and he moaned softly.

"I asked you a question." He twisted Warrick's arm further up, forcing the pace. "Is it?"

"Ah! Yes. Yes, I need it . . . "

"That's right. I've told you before — if I want to take you, I'll do it anywhere I like. Any way I like." Toreth let go of his hair and stroked possessively down Warrick's neck, round his collar and inside his open shirt, cataloguing the textures under his palm: smooth skin, rougher hair, hard peaks of nipples. He ducked down to bite Warrick's neck, wanting to hear his breath catch.

"Toreth, please — don't let me make any noise."

"And I can do it with or without toys. I don't need props. I don't need anything to make it work. Do you?"

"No." Warrick let out a long breath. "God, no. Only you."

"That's right. Only me."

Only me. Only me. The words stayed in his head in a constant background counterpoint.

In the end they had props, even if only the basics. He pulled Warrick's shirt forwards over his head and down his arms, leaving the wrists still buttoned, then pushed him face down on the bed. Toreth followed quickly, not giving Warrick time to find out that he could wriggle out of the sleeves if he tried.

With his arms trapped and Toreth's weight holding him down, Warrick was already lost in the game, his eyes glazing, dark and pleading. Toreth had made vague plans, ideas drawn from the stock he kept ready for impromptu sessions, but he dropped them all in favour of 'just fuck him'. Right now, that was enough. Nothing more elaborate needed for either of them.

Only me.

Only me, he thought, as Warrick struggled under him, cloth tearing in staccato bursts because even strong, expensive corporate-shirt cotton can only take so much abuse.

The ripping cloth sounded louder than it was, but much quieter than Warrick. Toreth pinned him to the bed, fucking him hard while he kept his hand clamped tight over Warrick's mouth, smothering the noise.

And, God, it felt good. Unexpectedly, shockingly good, in a way it hadn't felt for a long time. Not just each deep thrust or Warrick's body hot against him, but the game itself: power and control, the rules building a wall around them, a solid barrier against the chaotic world outside the room.

Only me. Only us.

When the comm chimed, Toreth was surprised to see the clock say eleven. They'd been in bed for only half an hour. However, the comm hadn't woken Warrick — he slept deeply beside Toreth, and in the dim light he reminded Toreth of the pictures at Cele's. He looked younger and very peaceful, oblivious to the strain of the last few days. Not wanting to wake him, Toreth grabbed his dressing gown and slipped out into the corridor.

He had assumed it was work or Sara. No one else he knew called him in the middle of the night. However, it was Cele, looking exhausted.

"Toreth, can you come over? I've got something to show you."

"Can it wait until tomorrow? Tomorrow evening would be better." There was a limit to how much time he could take off work.

"I think you should come." Her agitation finally registered, and some of the haze of sleep lifted. "I might have a name for the man in the picture."

Fuck. This could be difficult, especially if she wanted to tell Warrick. "I'll be there."

While he dressed, keeping as quiet as he could, he noticed the pain in his left hand — a deep ache that meant a bruise. When he was back out in the light of the corridor, he found a rough oval marked in the fleshy part of his palm, below his little finger. At some point Warrick must have bitten him, and damned hard, but he was fucked if he could remember it happening.

When Cele opened the door to her studio flat at quarter past twelve, she was wearing an eye-watering screened-silk dressing gown which seemed designed to prove that the human eye really could distinguish sixteen million colours.

"Come in," she said. "I just made some more coffee."

Inside the flat was more paper than Toreth had seen since the systems failures at I&I after the revolt. Single sheets covered every flat surface and made piles of varying heights on the floor. Portfolios took up the remaining space.

The windows were clear and the blinds raised. At night the flat seemed higher than in the daytime, and Toreth was acutely aware of how exposed he and Cele were, standing in plain view and backlit.

"You look like shit," Toreth said as he dropped his coat on a chair.

"And that's the flattering version." She waved round the room. "I was up almost all last night, like a good little detective. I knew I'd seen the face somewhere, and I decided in the end I'd drawn it."

"Had you?"

"No. Or at least I don't think so. I don't know who he is, but I know who he looks like."

He tried to hide his irritation at the wild goose chase. "Really? Who?"

She led him over to the window, to the only clear space in the room, and picked up a closed portfolio from a crowded sketching table and handed it to him. It was labelled in Cele's writing, 'LW for K. Prelims. Pnc/Pho.'

Inside he found a copy of the drawing she'd done for him at Kate's house, and three older sketches in pencil. In the old sketches, a smiling young man sat in a chair, with a baby in his arms and another slightly older infant on his knee. Toreth recognised him at once, with a rock-solid certainty that refused to supply a name or a context.

"Who is he?" Toreth asked.

"Keir's father, Leo, with Keir and Dilly. I did it for Kate from a photograph, a long time after he died. She'll have the finished picture at her house somewhere — she loves it."

He stared at the sketches, old and new. God, she was right. He'd only ever seen Leo Warrick once, in an old picture from a long-closed security file, but she was
right
. Add thirty-five years and this would be pretty damn close. And if that was true, it opened up all kinds of nasty possibilities.

For one thing, he'd left the sketch of the suspect at Kate's house. Warrick, Dillian, Jen — any one of them might suddenly see the resemblance. So might any old family friends who turned up at the house to lend support in a crisis. The first thing any of them would do was what Cele had done — show the picture to someone else and ask if they saw the resemblance too. If Warrick found out he would never let it go.

'I did it for Kate, from a photograph, a long time after he died. She'll have the finished picture at her house somewhere — she loves it.'

At her house somewhere. In the house with Warrick, who could notice it any moment. With luck, everyone would still be tucked up safely in bed, and he could get back to the house and find the damn thing before it precipitated a disaster.

Coming back to the present, he realised his heart was beating double time and Cele was watching him intently.

"It can't be him, of course," she said, "and he didn't have any close family that I know about. So it's just one of those Strange-But-True freaky coincidences, isn't it?"

He tilted the pictures towards the light and frowned. "Do you really think they look alike?"

Now she looked surprised. "Don't you?"

"Do you do a lot of age enhancement?"

"Well . . . no."

Thank fuck. "I do. Or a reasonable amount. Aged-up files for wanted suspects and missing corporates, that sort of thing. This doesn't grab me right away."

"Oh?" She didn't sound as if she entirely believed him.

"Don't get me wrong — I really appreciate the effort." He gestured round the chaos in the studio with the portfolio. "Look, I'll take the old pictures into I&I and get them properly aged up, and we can compare them with the sketch, how about that?"

He tried to put as much 'I'm just humouring you' into his voice as he could, and from her disappointed expression she seemed to buy it.

"Sorry to drag you out of your nice warm bed and haul you all the way out here for nothing," she said.

"No problem. It's not your fault. Look at enough pictures, you see what you want to see." He grinned at her, trying to hide his desperation to get out of there. "It was worth it just for the dressing gown."

Back at Kate's house, all was quiet and still. The living room light was on, and as Toreth closed the main door, the SimTech guard stepped out into the hall, hand on his gun. Toreth greeted him in his best faux-corporate dismissive manner. He must be getting good at it, because the man nodded and disappeared back into the room at once.

A quick, quiet tour of the darkened downstairs rooms revealed no picture of Leo Warrick. Toreth had expected that — he was fairly sure he'd remember the picture if he'd seen it previously, and he'd been in all the ground floor rooms except Kate's study. That was locked, so he'd have to hope the picture wasn't in there.

On the top floor, where Warrick was hopefully still fast asleep, there was a junk room and three guest rooms: one with Dillian, one with Warrick, one empty. None of them were likely to contain a prized picture. That left Kate's bedroom as the most likely target.

On the first floor landing, he set the lights low and considered options. On this floor, one room was where he'd found Warrick looking out of the window. Toreth had assumed that was Tarin's room, and he didn't remember any pictures in there. He knew that one door was the bathroom. Valeria's name was on the door to the right of that, which left two other rooms, of which one would be Jen's. But unlike Valeria, the older members of the household didn't helpfully label their doors.

He opened a door, waited for a minute, then stepped inside, only to hear low breathing. He eased the door open wide enough to illuminate the room and found Jen asleep in the centre of a double bed. Cosy, and he was struck once more by the thought that for her age she was still a looker. A resemblance to Warrick always helped, he thought as he closed the door.