To Dwell in Darkness (17 page)

When Gemma took the phone, she saw that the screen was slightly cracked. Even though the phone was obviously not new, she had to wonder at parents buying such an expensive gadget for a twelve-year-old. Just this year, they'd bought Kit a cheap phone with a limited number of texts, and he was fourteen.

She focused on the photo. It had been taken from a distance and was slightly out of focus, but she recognized the location immediately—it was outside the Starbucks next to Brixton tube station. And the man in the photo was definitely Dillon Underwood. The date stamp was indeed two weeks before Mercy's murder.

Enlarging the image, she saw the other figure more clearly. Mercy.

Dillon seemed to be talking to her, urgently, and reaching towards her. Mercy was looking down, her face half hidden by the cloud of her hair. Even at twelve, Mercy Johnson had been beautiful—mixed race, Gemma guessed from the lightness of her skin, with delicate features and dark, curling hair that fell just to her shoulders.

She enlarged the image again, then looked up at Izzy. “He's handing her something. What was it?”

“We think it was a phone. She wouldn't tell us.”

Gemma waited.

After a moment, Izzy went on, sounding aggrieved now. “She said it was none of our business. We were her best friends! And she said if we told her mum she'd kill us.”

“You didn't think it was strange that she wanted to keep it a secret?”

“Well, sort of. But she was already in trouble . . .” Izzy swallowed, and went on. “See, she'd lost her phone. It wasn't an iPhone, but it was pretty nice, and she was supposed to be responsible. She had a limit on her texts, and her mum checked them.” She gave a quick glance at her own mother, as if hoping she wouldn't get any ideas. “So there was no way Mercy was getting a new phone anytime soon, and she was afraid her mum wouldn't buy her the computer she wanted because she'd lost the phone.”

Gemma considered this. “Okay. But that still doesn't explain why she didn't want you and Deja to know about the phone.”

“She'd been—I don't know—funny, for a couple of weeks. Ever since she started looking at computers.”

“And talking to Dillon Underwood?”

Izzy nodded.

“Did Dillon ever talk to you?”

“Nah. Not really,” said Izzy, mouth turned down in a pout. “He had this way of, I don't know, sort of singling Mercy out. But then she was the one wanting the computer. Deja and me—we've had them forever.” She shrugged—the disdain of the haves for the have-nots.

“Did Dillon know that Mercy had lost her phone?”

Izzy frowned. “I should think so. She thought she might have dropped it in the store. She went back in there all upset and crying.”

“How long after that was this photo taken?” Gemma tapped the phone.

“I don't know. Maybe a week.”

Gemma looked at the photo again, checking the date tag. Six days before Mercy's death. “Tell me about the day you took this picture.”

“It was Mercy's idea. She said we needed to study for our history exam and we should meet up at Starbucks. But she was all, like, distracted. She even spilled her chai latte all over my papers. We thought maybe she'd had another fight with her mum. Then she wanted to leave and told us to go on, she'd see us at school. But when we looked back, she was talking to him.”

“What did she do then?” asked Gemma.

“She glared at us for a minute, and we were like, we're not going anywhere. So she just walked away from him. But she wouldn't talk to us, and she wouldn't tell us about the phone.”

Shara spoke up for the first time. “So how did Dillon Underwood know Mercy would be at Starbucks that afternoon? You think she meant to meet him, and that's why she was so fidgety?”

“Yeah. She must have,” Izzy answered, nodding.

“There were no calls to his mobile or to the store's phone from Mercy's mum's landline. And no calls to unidentified numbers.” Shara tapped her pen on her notebook. “Did she use your phone at any time before that meeting, Izzy? Or Deja's?”

Izzy shifted in her seat. “Well, yeah. After school that day. She sent a text.”

“Izzy!” Emily Lamar had gone paler and paler as she listened to her daughter's recital. “Why on earth didn't you tell anyone?”

“ 'Cause she deleted the text, see? I didn't think—we didn't think it would make any difference.”

“But why didn't you tell us you'd seen Mercy talk to that man outside the electronics shop?”

“Because . . . because she didn't go back to the shop after that. And then, after she was . . . we were afraid . . .” Izzy's voice faltered.

“Go on,” said her mother more gently.

Izzy's words came out in a rush, as if the thought behind them had been too long dammed up. “We—we thought that if we'd told someone, that maybe—maybe Mercy wouldn't have been killed. We were afraid that it was our fault.” She began to cry, knuckling her eyes like the child she was.

“Oh, love.” Emily Lamar gathered her daughter into a hug and patted her back. “You couldn't have known.”

Exchanging a glance with Shara, Gemma gave them a moment, then said, as calmly as she could, “Izzy, we're going to need your phone. Our forensics people should be able to retrieve that number. And we're going to need you—and Deja when one of her parents can accompany her—to make a formal statement.”

“But—”

“Don't worry. It's not hard. Detective Constable MacNichol here will type up what you've told us from her notes. Then you and your mum can read it, and if you feel comfortable with it, you can both sign it.”

She stood, signaling the end of the interview, but Emily Lamar stopped her with a touch. “Detective, can I have a word?”

“Of course.”

“Come on, Izzy,” said Shara. “Let's find your friend.” She shepherded Izzy from the room.

Emily Lamar looked at Gemma, her gaze unflinching. “Detective, is my girl in danger from this . . . monster? And Deja? Tell me the truth.”

The last thing Gemma wanted was to start a panic among the parents in the area. As diverse as Brixton was, it was a tight community. If Dillon Underwood was harassed or hurt by frightened citizens, it could cost the police a case against him. But she was a parent, too, and she had a duty to protect these girls. If Dillon Underwood was indeed Mercy's killer, he could not be sure that Mercy hadn't told them something damning.

“Detective?” said Emily again.

“Mrs. Lamar, you understand I can't tell you anything officially. We have no proof that Underwood did anything other than show Mercy computers. But if Izzy and Deja were my daughters, I'd see that they were supervised outside of school hours. But please don't discuss this. Rumors could be damaging to our investigation.”

Emily Lamar nodded. “You will catch him?”

“Yes. We will,” Gemma assured her with more confidence than she felt.

When Gemma had seen Emily out, she met Shara in the corridor. “He groomed her,” said Gemma. “Separated her from her friends. Gained her trust.”

“And her missing phone—”

“The phone she thought she dropped in the shop—”

“What do you want to bet he picked it up when she was distracted,” Shara finished. “If he is what we suspect, it would have been irresistible. Pictures, texts—”

“And then, when she was so upset about the loss, maybe an unforeseen opportunity. Give her a phone, probably a cheap pay-as-you-go, tell her she could only use it to communicate with him or he would get into trouble,” agreed Gemma. “We couldn't figure out how he could have set up a meeting with her the night she was killed. Now I think we can guess.”

“So what happened to the phone?” asked Shara. “There was no phone on the body or in her belongings at home.”

“He took it.” In that instant, Gemma knew it with a certainty that went bone deep. “After he'd killed her.”

They looked at each other. Shara shook her head. The red beads on the ends of the dozens of tiny plaits in her hair bounced with emphasis. “He wouldn't have been so stupid as to keep it.”

“Probably not. But we can hope,” said Gemma. “And at the very least the photo on Izzy's phone will get us a search warrant.”

By the time the glow that presaged dawn had begun to light the eastern sky, he'd left the main road.

He smelled the river before he saw it, a deeper, earthier dampness carried by the cold wind. His canoe was where he'd left it, camouflaged by carefully arranged brush in an overgrown area near the river's edge. Stowing his gear, he dragged the boat to the bank and slid it gently into the water. He pulled the canoe against the bank, stepped in, then turned the canoe as he pushed off. He rested the paddle across the bow as the little boat nosed through the rushes towards open water.

The sky in the east showed pink now, through tatters of cloud. It was only then that he realized the wind had died with the dawn. There was nothing, not the chirp of a bird or the rustle of reeds in the breeze. The silver surface of the river spread before him, polished as glass.

The silence enveloped him. He felt he might have slipped into a vacuum in time. For that moment, he forgot that his hands and feet burned with the cold. He forgot everything that had happened, and everything that he knew was to come.

The sky bloomed rose, then morphed almost imperceptibly to gold.

Then the reeds swayed, dark clouds blotted the sky, and the current took the boat.

The first word that came to Duncan's mind when he saw the girl was
ethereal
.

Her skin was alabaster pale, with a translucent quality to it. Her hair, which cascaded over her shoulders like candy floss, was so fair it was almost white. She was slight, even in a padded jacket, and looked younger than the age on the ID she'd given the desk sergeant—twenty.

The desk sergeant had put her in the conference room with a cup of tea—in a china cup and saucer, no less—but the drink sat untouched. When she looked up at him, he saw that she wore no makeup, and that her eyes were a blue so light they were almost colorless.

“I'm Detective Superintendent Kincaid,” he said, taking the chair across the table. “And you're”—he glanced at the notes the sergeant had scribbled for him, although he didn't need to—“Ariel. Is that right? That's very Shakespearian.”

“My dad's a history professor at UCL.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. “But he loves Shakespeare.”

“Mine, too. I'm Duncan, by the way.”

“Oh.” She smiled, visibly relaxing. “The Scottish play.”

“For my sins. Do you mind if I call you Ariel?” Her last name, he saw from the notes, was Ellis.

“No, that's fine.” She touched the cup, but didn't lift it. “I'm afraid I don't drink tea. I didn't want to say.”

“That's okay, Ariel. I had no idea the sergeant knew how to make a decent cup of tea. So, how can I help you?” Kincaid wanted to hear what she had to say without any lead-in from him.

She shifted a little in her chair but met his eyes. “Now that I'm here I feel a bit of an idiot. It's probably nothing, and I don't want to be the hysterical female.”

“Why don't you tell me anyway. I promise I won't think you're hysterical.”

Ariel Ellis bit her bottom lip, then sighed. “It's my boyfriend. His name is Paul Cole. We had a bit of a . . . row . . . yesterday morning. I knew he meant to go to that demonstration at the railway station, and I haven't seen him or had a text or anything from him since. When I saw on the news last night that someone was . . . killed, I guess I started to get a little panicked. Then this morning, I went to Matthew's flat, and there was a policeman on the door. I didn't know what to do. Then I saw you on the news. So I thought you were the person I should talk to.”

“So you know Matthew Quinn?” Kincaid asked.

Ariel shrugged. “Matthew was one of my father's students. He got his ‘save historic London' ideas from my dad's walking tours. Dad's a bit of a fanatic about it.” Ariel drew together brows that were as pale as her hair, and Kincaid noticed she did nothing to define them. It gave her face a slightly unfinished look. “I mean in a good way,” she went on. “It's Dad's passion, but he'd never do anything destructive.”

“So your dad wouldn't condone demonstrations?”

“Not if someone might get hurt. The demonstrations were Matthew's idea. He and my dad pretty much parted ways after that.”

“What about your boyfriend, Paul? Is he one of your father's students, too?”

“He was. That's how he knew Matthew and some of the others. And me, of course. Paul's still officially enrolled at uni, but he hasn't been going to classes lately.”

“That's UCL?” Kincaid asked.

Ariel nodded. “That's one reason I was worried about him. I think Paul's dad is a bit of a bully, and Paul was worried about what he would do when he found out Paul was failing his courses.”

“Did Paul stay at Matthew's flat?”

“I don't know. Sometimes, I think. But he still has his student accommodation.”

“What about you? Do you stay at Matthew's?”

Making a face, Ariel said, “Sleep on the floor and be bossed about by Matthew? I don't think so. I live with my dad. We're not far from here, actually. Cartwright Gardens.”

Kincaid made a note. “You're still at university, then?”

“Finishing my degree in graphic arts.”

“So tell me about this row.”

Ariel Ellis flushed a becoming rose. “It wasn't—we hadn't been getting on too well lately. I thought he was letting Matthew make a mess of his life. And then I—” Her color grew deeper. “I got—pregnant. It was so stupid. My dad doesn't even know. Paul thought we should get married. I told him he was daft. I wasn't ready to get married, and what would we live on? He was furious. And then—” Her eyes filled with tears, but she made no effort to wipe them away, even when they began to trickle down her cheeks. “I—I had a miscarriage. It was a baby I didn't even want, and I never imagined I could feel so awful about anything.”