The Deadly Embrace (19 page)

A cloud of choking smoke hung low over the street. In the glare of the searchlights, she suddenly glimpsed the man who had been running after her. He was lying on his back in the gutter at the edge of the sidewalk, his legs splayed out in two impossibly different directions, like a broken marionette.

Her ears were still aching from the bomb concussions when the door to the air-raid shelter screeched open behind her, and an elderly man with a grimy face slowly came out. His light-blue air warden’s uniform was covered with plaster dust. From the dark, cavernous shelter behind him issued a series of terrified screams.

The warden made his way slowly toward her through the haze. After stooping to help her up, he spied the body lying in the street and shone his flashlight into its face. As the earth beneath them continued to shake with bomb tremors, he said, “Sad … he almost made it. A friend, miss?”

She stared down at the corpse. His hat had fallen away, and she could see him clearly in the flashlight beam. The face was no longer human. One eye peered out of a hideous scarlet mask.

“No? I guess his own mother wouldn’t recognize him now,” the elderly warden murmured. He bent down next to the corpse and briefly searched the pockets of his suit jacket.

“It says he worked for the Irish Consulate,” he said, examining the man’s identification under the flashlight.

Liza looked down at the man’s right hand. Whatever he had been grasping in his fist was gone. She wondered whether it might have been a knife or gun. What if she had been wrong? It might have been anything. The whole idea of his stalking her suddenly seemed absurd.

Two sobbing women came out of the air-raid shelter behind them. One was obviously pregnant and clutching her abdomen. She lurched out into the street, pleading to be taken to a hospital. Liza calmed the woman down and stayed with her until an ambulance arrived a few minutes later.

It began to rain again as she walked home amid the carnage of smoking wreckage and damaged buildings. A wing of Buckingham Palace had been hit and was on fire. One of the Luftwaffe bombers had crashed into the woods fringing Green Park and was still a raging inferno. On almost every side street, firefighters were battling the spread of dozens of blazes as rescue workers dragged survivors from the rubble of their former homes.

The rain became a downpour, running down her collar and chilling her to the core. Somehow the icy water was a calming influence, serving to numb her brain and partially soothe her raw nerve endings. The distant drone of the last bombers faded away as she reached the Thames Embankment and saw that her hotel was undamaged.

In her room, Liza took off her wet, bloodstained uniform and fell exhausted into bed. Yet, as much as she willed it, sleep would not come, the events leading to her narrow escape continuing to play over and over in her fevered mind.

Power was out in most of the city, but one of the American engineers at the hotel had rigged up a generator on the ground floor to provide temporary electricity. The engine was very loud, and as she stared up into the darkness, it felt as if the room were part of some great machine moving slowly through the night.

CHAPTER 16

T
aggart was forced to stand in the driving rain outside the Admiralty Building while a South African military policeman personally checked the identification papers of every person seeking entrance. As each minute passed, the crowd became louder and more belligerent. A man in a bowler hat suddenly began shouting that his Member of Parliament would soon hear about it.

Taggart was already fifteen minutes late for his appointment with Helen Bellayne when he finally passed through the checkpoint. Inside, an English military policeman informed him that, thanks to a continuing power outage, the elevators weren’t working.

Still favoring his sprained ankle, Taggart joined the herd of people slowly making their way up the stairs. The bombing raid had caused jagged chunks of plaster to shake loose from the ceiling of the stairwell, and several times he was forced to dodge falling debris while making the long climb to the seventh floor. He paused for a minute outside her office to regain his breath before stepping inside.

“I have an appointment with Mrs. Bellayne,” he huffed to the wizened navy petty officer manning the front desk.

“I’m sorry, Major, but she never came in this morning,” he said. “I believe her street took several hits in the raid last night.”

“Shit,” said Taggart, fuming at his useless odyssey.

“Try to keep a stiff upper lip, sir,” said the petty officer. “I’m sure she’s safe.”

“Yeah, thanks,” said Taggart.

As he trudged back down the stairwell, echoing in his ears were Drummond’s words after the old inspector had interviewed Helen Bellayne himself: “I had the strong impression she was hiding something,” he had said.

Taggart needed to find out what it was and why. By the time he got back down to the lobby of the Admiralty Building, he had decided to go straight to her home. After calling the inspector’s office to get her address, he hailed a taxi and gave it to the driver.

“A posh one, that is,” the driver said, before heading out into the inevitable crush of military traffic.

The war-ravaged city was at its most gray and dismal as Taggart watched people digging out from the previous night’s raid through the grimy side window. Twenty minutes later, the taxi pulled up short in front of a bomb crater in the middle of a residential street in Belgravia.

“The place you want is up along there,” the driver said, pointing farther up the lane. “It looks like they took a real pasting last night. Sorry, but I can’t get you no closer.”

Taggart paid him off and went ahead on foot in the driving rain. Beyond the bomb crater, there were magnificent brick mansions on both sides of the avenue, relics of the golden eras of the British Empire.

Farther up the street, relief workers were sifting through what remained of one of them. Taggart smelled the sour odor of smoldering wood and rain-soaked plaster. As he walked by, several men were vainly trying to pry up a massive support timber from the largest section of rubble.

“I think there’s someone still alive down here,” screamed one of them with a voice like a macaw. Taggart was climbing toward them to help when another voice called out, “She’s had it, lads. Stand easy”

Helen Bellayne’s address was farther up the block, at that end of the avenue. There the houses had sustained cracked and broken windows, but none appeared to have taken a direct hit. The last property on the street was surrounded by an eight-foot-high brick wall and had an ornately carved iron gate in the center. A dull brass nameplate was embedded in the wall. It read, “BELLAYNE.”

Taggart pushed the gate open and headed up the long gravel driveway toward the front entrance. He saw that the grounds were overgrown with thornbushes and strewn with weeds.

The central wing of the mansion was probably a few centuries old and had been constructed with monument-sized blocks of white granite and polished stone columns. Two imperious brick wings extended away from the central structure like a miniature version of the U.S. Capitol.

He recalled Drummond telling him that the house had once been imposing. Now he understood the full meaning of his words. Even without the benefit of German bombs, the place was slowly falling to ruin. The roof on the left wing had begun to settle badly in the middle, like a swayback horse. White paint was peeling off the windows like mange on a dog’s back. A number of the window frames had rotted away and been replaced with raw boards. Pigeons were roosting in the crevices behind them. Sheltered from the cold rain, they silently watched him pass by.

Taggart arrived at a covered stone portico and pulled the bell chain next to the front door. Although it was nine o’clock in the morning, none of the blackout curtains had been drawn away from the ground floor windows. After waiting almost a minute, he pulled the chain again. It rang faintly behind the massive oak door.

He was just about to leave when he heard the sound of a dead bolt sliding in the lock, and the door slowly swung open. A slim figure was standing in deep shadow in the foyer. From her faltering movements, he thought she must be old and very frail. As she came tentatively out of the gloom, Taggart was shocked to discover that it was Helen Bellayne. A hint of recognition registered on her pallid face when she looked up at him.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, her voice seeming to come from a great distance. “I thought you were … Well … come in.”

She slowly closed the door behind him. For a few moments, they stood awkwardly together in the dark, high-ceilinged foyer as his trench coat dripped rainwater onto the black-and-white marble tiles. Taggart could feel no heat in the house, and he shivered involuntarily.

“Please come with me,” she said, walking toward another closed door. “It’s warmer in the library. I have a fire there.”

The high-ceilinged library faced onto a back garden. Its four bay windows had white lace curtains, trimmed on each side with maroon satin drapes drawn away from the windows with braided tassels. One of the blackout curtains had been pulled away allowing in a pale, filtered, greenish light.

The walls of the library were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, most of them crammed with books, photographs, and small family objects. The room was decorated with rosewood furniture. Comfortable chairs and couches were grouped together in each corner. Persian carpets covered the wide plank floors. A seven-foot-high grandfather clock stood silently against one wall.

As she led him toward the small coal fire, he could see that the furniture coverings were worn and frayed, the carpets cracked with age and water damage. There was an empty space over the fireplace where a large painting had recently hung. A thin coating of plaster dust covered everything in the room. He took off his wet trench coat and laid it next to the warm hearth as she slowly turned to face him.

“Forgive me, Major,” said Helen Bellayne. “I’m afraid I’ve just been wandering around here like Miss Havisham. I must really try to clean up this mess.”

She was wearing a gray cashmere sweater over a medium-length charcoal skirt. Despite the reference to the eccentric Dickens character, Taggart thought she was the loveliest woman he had met since arriving in England. Her gold-flecked amber eyes accented the heart-shaped, delicate face. In truth, she reminded him of his wife, even down to the slender body and tapered legs.

“You have blood on your clothes,” said Taggart gently.

Her eyes followed his own down to the dried stains on the front of her gray sweater.

“That is Gwendolyn’s, I’m afraid,” she said with a suggestion of stubborn weariness. “She … died last night…. One of the bombs caught her on her way back here from her daughter’s flat. They brought her home after the all-clear sounded. I thought you would be the person from the undertaker’s coming to get her.”

In the dim light, Taggart noticed an inert human form lying on a couch below one of the tall bay windows. The body was covered by a blue afghan.

“A relative?”

“No,” she said with a fragile smile. “But she worked for my mother and then me for almost forty years. Very much part of the family.”

She began to totter to one side.

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me,” she said, sagging backward into the chair near the hearth. The small coal fire had done nothing to remove the chill from the room.

“Have you eaten anything today?” asked Taggart.

She shook her head.

“Yesterday?”

Her eyes began to flutter, and one pale hand rose slowly to her throat. As he moved toward her, the arm dropped to her side and she fainted. When he picked her up in his arms, she was completely limp. He carried her back into the foyer, momentarily stopping to regain his bearings.

The two wings of the mansion headed off to the left and right. Along the passageways he could see open doorways to what were probably formal entertaining rooms. He assumed the bedrooms were upstairs. A wide marble staircase led up into the darkness, and he began to climb.

Taggart carried her into the first bedroom he found on the second floor and placed her on the canopied bed. Although the room appeared to have been in recent use, there were no personal items to indicate who might have occupied it.

Her hand was very cold, and he began to chafe her wrist. Feeling for her pulse, he found the heartbeat tremulous and elevated. He removed her shoes and covered her with a heavy feather tick that was rolled up at the foot of the bed.

A few moments later, the front-door chime began to peal downstairs. He went back down to the foyer and opened the big oak door. A man was standing under the portico, holding an open umbrella in one hand and a greasy bowler hat in the other. His pomaded hair was parted in the middle, and he was wearing a long black frock coat. A pimple-faced boy in blue coveralls was standing behind him, holding a folded canvas stretcher.

“I’m Mr. Feith,” the man said with a grisly smile. “I was called about a loved one who needs to be removed from these premises.” Over his shoulder, Taggart could see a dilapidated Black Maria backed up to the curb in the street.

“She’s in the library,” said Taggart.

After the undertaker and the boy had carried the body of Helen Bellayne’s servant out to the hearse, the man returned to present him with a bill for the service. Taggart thought the amount was probably enough to bury three or four people before the new German bombing campaign. Supply and demand, he realized.

“It will need to be paid before we begin all the necessary arrangements,” said Mr. Feith firmly. “I’m sure you understand.”

“I understand,” said Taggart. “You’re a vulture.”

After closing the door in his face, he left the bill on a table in the foyer and went looking for the kitchen. Heading down the hallway that led through the right wing, he passed a large formal dining room and a butler’s pantry before reaching the kitchen.

A big iron cookstove sat under a copper hood against the far wall. It was a wood-burner, just like the stove he grew up with in his family’s Yorkville tenement. Taggart quickly set a small fire with paper and wood chunks under the stove plates.