Wilderness of Mirrors (24 page)

Samantha had nothing now, save for Nigel’s crumpled and blood-soaked jacket. She held it loose and low in her unmoving hands. He didn’t take it from her even when others in the waiting area stared at his disarrayed state of dress.

“Come here, where the light’s better.” She didn’t move; so he tilted her chin into the path of fluorescence, which illuminated the welt along her hairline. Luckily, the bullet had only grazed her. O
n its way out of the dog’s shoulder?

Nigel was no vet, but he didn’t believe Tam’s wound was mortal and he knew, with almost complete certainty, that the bullet had exited the dog’s shoulder muscles. The bone there felt broken and had probably changed the trajectory of the shot.

“He saved your life.”

“An old habit.” Her skin was hot to the touch, but her speech was clear. She was alive no thanks to him.

“Do you have a headache? Dizziness?”

She shook her head.

Nigel cleared his throat of emotion. “I don’t think you’re concussed, but I want you checked out.”

“I don’t want to leave him.” Her eyes darted to the closed doors.

“At least sit down.” He introduced her to the bench beside the front desk, caught the eye of the harried receptionist and said, “I know you’re busy, but could you keep an eye on Ms. Bond for me?”

The cardigan-wrapped woman topped her head with crooked glasses before pressing a hand across the phone’s mouthpiece. “Aye. I’ll get her a cup of tea too.”

“Ta.” He set the Audi keys on the counter before dropping to Sam’s eyelevel. “I’m going to call Brad. He’ll bring you to hospital or wherever your GP practices. But you’ve got to go, yeah? Tam’ll be fine. There’s nothing you can do here that you can’t do elsewhere.” He touched her bloodied hands and resisted an unholy urge to scrub her skin. “The receptionist is going to sit with you while I make a few calls.”

Sam sighed, long and deep. There wasn’t any fight in her today.

“Good lass.”

Her hand took his, just as he was straightening. “It was Dylan’s brother, wasn’t it? In the car. I remember his face. There’s a painting of them above the fireplace in the sitting room at Barkley.”

Nigel flinched. “Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.” She released his hand and looked away.

Me too.

And like that, William was gone, before Nigel had even bothered to know him.

The door to the vets swung closed behind him, and Forsythe was alone on the street with the remnants of a once-perfect winter’s day and a huge vendetta. He punched Brad’s number into his mobile.

“Yeah?”

“I need a few favors.”

Samantha stared into her tea until the receptionist ushered a Burberry-cloaked Pomeranian and its cooing owner into one of the empty examination rooms. Nigel had fought the men on the street with unerring accuracy. He wasn’t an actuary anymore than she was an angel.

So he’d lied to her.

In the end, it mattered little. She’d done the same.

Even if he were able to fend off AG a second or third time, eventually, they’d get him - just like they had Marc and William.

She left the mug steaming on the bench beside Nigel’s coat and her stained mittens. Let the receptionist think she’d gone to get a tissue. By the time anyone bothered to look, her trail would be cold as the edges of her nerves.

A blast of frigid air hit her as she exited the building. She glanced around looking for Nigel. He was nowhere to be seen. The street outside was suburban in its plainness. Everywhere she turned, 360º of semi-detached sameness stared back at her through the blank rectangles of soul-less windows. In that instant, she viewed Britain with savage disgust.

Tamar Street, despite its name, had nothing of her shepherd’s vicious whimsy. The sunless charcoal sky was the color of her mood. She crossed the litter-strew street, her open jacket clearing the way for a drift of wet, sooty wind. There was a bus stop. A green, hunched shelter plastered with the peeling carcasses of outdated movie posters and STD fact sheets.

She lingered just outside of it, hit a number on her cell and texted her attorney a brief message concerning Tam and her mother’s books. Catching sight of herself in the pitted Plexiglas, she realized her hair was a wet and bloody mess. She dug through her bag until the broken-in sweetness of her grandfather’s cap gave her fingers some solace.

Wrapping an elastic around her hair, she shoved the mass up beneath the cap.
Now, to find a library
. She tapped on her cell’s rain-flecked screen until she found one. Langley Library. Just around the corner on Trelawney Ave.

Samantha glanced up as two men sidled into the far side of the canopy. One tipped his head to light a cigarette; the other posted her a salacious leer that made her want to scream for Tam.

Fortunately, the bus’s diesel came just a foul breath ahead of it. She fished out her Underground pass and climbed the gritty, silver-treaded stairs after the creepy duo.

She aimed to keep her voice low. “Langely Library, please.” The driver yanked at the door handle with a gnarled fist. If he noticed she’d spoken, he gave no indication. Samantha slumped into the graffiti-ridden vinyl seat behind him, hoping he was driving in the correct direction, and awaited a return message. When it came at last, steel replaced her spine.

‘
Will do.’

One thing less to worry about.

She pocketed her cell and watched pedestrians dodging the rain blitz. One way or another, she’d end this. There was no way to bring back William, her grandfather, John or Marc. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to lose any more good men. Two stops later, the driver swerved out of the traffic and shuddered the bus to a stop. He eyed her in the rearview.

“Thanks.” She pulled her coat across her chest and dashed for the library’s covered entrance. The assholes who’d gotten on behind her, had exited on the High Street so there was no need to worry they’d followed her. She ran a hand across her face and assessed her surroundings.

The semi-industrial neighborhood was more of Slough’s grimness, but a nearby church and school bettered the integrity of the street populace. The building itself was two stories of tan stucco and bright brick-red lettering.

Satisfied, she pushed through the double doors into an oppressive blast of heat and the gluey scent of freshly laid carpets. Everything was brand new. New enough to have been doused in last week’s paint darlings: teal and lavender. Sam felt her jaw clench. She would have volunteered to repaint the interior herself under different circumstances.

Instead, she kept her face out of the surveillance camera’s line of vision, walking past the circular reference desks until she docked at a horseshoe-shaped bank of empty computers. She parked herself at the last one, quickly setting up a false gmail account, registering it to a fictitious man with an Indian name and a Yorkshire address. Then she entered the address into an outgoing message and added, ‘
I’ll do it’
to the body of the email.

She pressed send and waited: wondering if Nigel had gone to the hospital or Barkley, wondering what Brad would do when he couldn’t find her, wondering if Tam was awake and if he’d miss her.

The screen blinked.

‘The Temperate House. Southeast entrance. Thirty minutes.’

So they’d taken the bait. Figured she was finally willing to try her hand at a highly technical local job.

Sudden fear rattled her. What if she wasn’t correct? If
he
hadn’t been behind this all along. What then?

She let her eyes wander the shelves of Encyclopedias. They had a certain marching symmetry, a hint of intellectual vigor. Something to use in the future.

She was stalling.

What would Nigel or Brad do in her Wellies?

They were so very different from one another. Brad had the easy gait of a wolf, a don’t-fuck-with-me aura. Nigel flowed through life like a taut ghost. He disappeared into his surroundings and lost himself in the shadows of a midday sun until, without warning, he exploded with precise and atomic force.

She felt a smile scratch the corner of her dry lips. Pushing out of the chair, she walked away from her coat and bag. She’d taken a photo of Tam from her wallet and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans. It rested there now, against the pressure of one white button. Reminders of what might have been.

That simply, with no fuss or further anguish, she was ready. For the first time in over a decade she was the one calling the shots.

Let Tam and Nigel be safe. Please, just that.

Then she walked into the evening’s congregating gloom.

N
igel never wasted time. He had little doubt Jaak was lurking close by, because Jaak was a superstitious little git who knew the Lord’s Prayer. And Jaak had double-crossed him using local boys.

So Nigel made for the Russian Cathedral of Dormition, without a care as to whether or not Her Most Holy Mother of God and Her Royal Martyrs would be upset with him for trespassing.

He’d seen the blue star-flecked onion-top on his way to Kew, once upon someone else’s life when he spent a lazy Sunday driving the M4.

This time he went by taxi, handing the red-eyed driver enough to make the nearest pub an oasis. No point having him circle back to Slough where anyone could ask if he’d picked up a hell-bent nobody.

The day’s light was watery by the time Forsythe jogged the gap between the Orwellian bulk of British Standards Institution and a crumbling brick newsagents. He could see the church’s steeple through leafless oaks, golden and iconic beneath a brow of heavy clouds. His fists were numb with cold and bruises; he flexed them as he went.

The borough of Hounslow was hushed despite the never-ending growl of its monstrous M4 neighbor. Someone had laid on a wood fire to stave off the evening chill. The scent of it filled the air. Rubbish bins lined the edges of the tidy gingerbread style homes. And just around one of those bins, a cat was expressing its desire to be next to that fire.

Nigel slowed to a walk when he came abreast the home directly behind the church’s white-washed back. A medley of fences, covered in the dried vestiges of summer’s rose brambles, divided the properties. Fortune favored him, for there was room enough to squeeze through.

Creeping low beside a Volvo wagon littered with Wimpy’s wrappers and toys enough to supply an orphanage, Nigel wended his way through overgrown shrubbery until he was just inside the church’s garden. Leftover Christmas lights hung drunkenly from the neighbor’s trees, blown off course by the wind or maybe Rasputin. Nigel ducked beneath them, hissing when a branch whipped along his ribcage.

The cathedral was out of place along this tree-lined neighborhood, but its humble lines and squat pose were attempt enough at reconciliation. A flicker of candlelight darted through the symmetric two-storied lines of the building’s rear windows, and the chanting cadence of the evening’s vigil muffled its way through a crack in the stucco surface. Wind picked at Nigel’s tattered shirt. And his thigh, stuck in the depressing agony of a crouch, bemoaned its fate. He did his best to ignore them and continued assessing. Some long minutes later, sensing no hint of Jaak’s taint, he traversed the yellowed grass until he was close enough to trip the hatch on the kitchen’s door. His heel squeezed something soft against the pea stone; a crush of old lavender blessed his entrance.

Bread had been baked. Black, like Irina had favored. Coffee too. Everywhere, the scents of Maslenitsa: the last week of dairy and a celebration before Great Lent.

Nigel surged forward in a sour mood, because he’d been in poverty-stricken countries during such weeks, and in his ungodly opinion, the poor were the only ones who deserved such revels. They actually believed
God
would rise again. Believed
He
would care even when everyone else had ignored or forgotten them.

Not here, though. Not in London with fast-food wrappers and Guinness soaked pubs breaking out like an urban rash.

He passed into the vestibule at the precise moment the choir reached its crescendo.

His heart flattened. They were singing Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, the only concert to which he’d ever taken Kate.
God, it must have been eighteen years ago
. He’d had two tickets to The Choir of King’s College Easter program. And for no reason he remembered now, had taken her. They sat in stony silence, like chilled English pillars. Later, she had thanked him and taken a cab to meet David. Nigel had walked into the nearest pub and lost himself in whisky and one too many wishes.

What the bloody hell was he here for anyway? Did he actually believe Jaak was hiding out in this holy place? Were the good sisters Nigel had judged for baking simple fare likely to give such a man sanctuary?

His answer sifted through a haze of incense. The chanting began to fade. They would be reading the Hexapsalmia next, if he remembered correctly. The Six Psalms. He would leave when the candles were extinguished. Only a moment more. A sigh threatened his lips. He hoped Tamar lived. Wished he were at the doctor’s beside Sam. Wanted everyday what they’d shared in the Headmaster’s study.

The church was silent and dark. Not even the blue vestiges of dusk tinted the glass. He should go to Sam or Kate or both.
What had he been thinking?
The only two women who’d ever meant a thing to him were alone, suffering losses deeper than the Mariana Trench.

He exhaled long and deep, wishing he knew how to be a different man. A better man.

“That sigh carried much weight, my friend.” The bodiless voice was rich with the drone of satisfied bees.

Nigel’s skin crawled. He let the knife he’d taken from the kitchen drop handle-first into the palm of his right hand.

From the shadows, in Russian this time, the voice came again. “You need no weapons here.”

Nigel admitted surprise with a soft snort. “You have ghostly feet, Batushka.”

There came a chuckle cloaked in blackness. “I found them in 1941 near Vitebsk. Useful things to soldiers, no?”