Detective Fleet sat in the wingback armchair of the newly conversational sitting area. It was the seat nearest the hearth, just beneath the formidable painting of Lord William. Brown tweed suit, one leg crossed ankle to knee and otherwise extraordinarily stiff and proper, he might have been a painting, himself.
“You’ve had guests?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“Four glasses.” He pointed them out with a long forefinger—and Jo could feel the heat of a blush sliding up the back of her neck.
“I was, erm, toasting my ancestors.” Jo lifted one from its place on the mantel. Was it rude not to offer? Or was he on duty? “Would you like one?”
He smiled the way waiters did at posh restaurants. Like he didn’t mean it.
“I’d like you to tell me about the paintings,” he said.
Jo had been left without an answer on the whisky question. She decided to set it on the side table nearest, as a neutral zone. The Barbizon school of landscape painters and portraitist Augustus John jumped to her frontal lobe—but she felt reticent about sharing, suddenly. It was his bearing, maybe: gray hair and gray tweeds, toothless smile and fingers splayed on the chair arms. She’d associated Sid with Reynard the Fox, almost from first meeting. Perhaps because of it, Fleet now reminded her of Isengrim the Iron Wolf.
“What do you want to know?” she asked. His posture didn’t change.
“Are you still looking for your lost portrait?”
“No. Well, yes—sort of.” Jo cleared her throat and endeavored to think in a straight line. “I ended up being more interested in Evelyn as a person. She’s a long-lost relative of mine. I think she died in childbirth. It’s hard to tell from the records because unmarried women sometimes hid their pregnancies or were afraid to call a doctor...” Jo trailed off. She couldn’t tell if Fleet had even been listening. He’d picked up the tumbler and nosed the glass.
“Talisker, isn’t it? That’s MacAdams’ favored brand. I used to be very fond.” The way he held the crystal seemed extraordinarily precise, even priestly. “Your lost painting was on the wall upstairs. I examined it with the forensic unit.”
“Yes. But I found it on the floor. Maybe it fell.”
“From grace?” Fleet asked.
“Um?” Jo’s head was buzzing, though not from whisky. Some idea was forming just out of her reach; she felt hypervigilant and slightly unfocused. Meanwhile, Fleet smoothed each pant leg as though scattering imaginary crumbs and then got to his feet—still carrying the whisky glass.
“Everyone has a breaking point. Some fall further than others.” A wind had picked up outside and it found its way through the house’s cracks to flutter the candle flames. Fleet held the tumbler under his mustache, as though breathing it. A faint twitch appeared at the corner of his mouth—and without warning, he drained the glass in a single shot. Fleet then slid one finger along the mantel finial, and tapped at the whisky glass meant for William.
“I celebrated my twelfth year of sobriety last August,” he said, picking it up. “It’s a shame.” Fleet drained the whisky glass, again in a single swallow. At odds with his every other motion and manner, it was somehow frightening. Jo pulled her knees to her chest, as if this would help anchor her somehow.
“What is it that you—want?” she asked.
Fleet turned back to the mantel, where he deposited the empty glass and picked up the last one—the one that should have been Evelyn’s.
“I should say the truth,” he said. “But people lie. For all kinds of reasons. You say you didn’t know Sid Randles. And yet, he came to see you once here, twice at the Red Lion. I’ve thought about this a great deal.”
F-f-f-f—Jo was already gripping at her thumbs, but her usual retinue of repeatable words failed her.
“He—he came the second time to—to shout at me.”
“This is certainly what we’ve been made to think. Sid telling the room that he hadn’t stolen anything—and you, half fainting from fright. And yet you’ve shown such remarkable composure ever since.”
“You don’t believe me,” Jo said, feeling the sudden need to explain herself. “Why would I pretend?” She could almost hear her own pulse in her ears, but Fleet went on.
“I said before, sometimes we lie for good reasons.” Fleet drank the third glass and refilled it from the bottle. “Perhaps Sid came to you that first night with a proposition. You, new to the town, would be the perfect accomplice. Maybe he played upon your sympathies—your family owed him—you guiltily oblige.”
“Oblige to what?” Jo felt like her scalp was shrink-wrapping to her skull, and she jumped at the next peal of thunder.
“Too strong?” Fleet made another of his quarter turns. “I am willing to believe he beguiled you. I’d believe that he forced you—threatened you. Maybe you didn’t understand the value of what he’d entrusted to your care.”
“But the painting was mine to start with!”
“Oh. The painting.” Fleet made a tsk sound, and then wagged a finger at her slowly. Jo had too many words trying to get out of her mouth—and so said none of them.
“You see, Ms. Jones, a detective must work backward from the fact. Mr. Randles was so keen to have this out-of-the-way hideout that he blackmailed your lawyer for it. Does that surprise you?”
It really fucking did, but Jo still hadn’t managed to unlock her jaw.
“Not just the cottage, for his little business. But this place. This sad, lonely, empty house.” He swept one hand around the room’s dim, ragged corners. “So excellent for hiding in. And now Elsie Smythe—Elsie Randles—has told us you had the painting all along.”
“But I DON’T!” Jo said, finally. She’d jumped up from her chair, every muscle twitching. “I don’t—I don’t!”
“Now, now, Miss Jones.” Fleet made a sudden, erratic gesture. It halted and silenced her, because if his stiff command had been intimidating, the loss of it was terrifying. “Now, now,” he repeated. “I am very generous, you see.”
Fleet now made a circuit of the room—one that included Jo as its center. His gait had changed, and his tongue had loosened.
“I’m not arresting you. I could. Blackmail is a prison offence.”
“What blackmail?” Jo asked. Fleet grasped at his collar with his free hand, pulling the tie loose. His lip curled up when he spoke, a tic of some sort, a snarl.
“You must have known what you had after Sid was—Well. After. But I’ll believe you didn’t. No one ever need know. Only you will give it to me!”
Jo recoiled against the mantelpiece and thought of storybook foxes. Reynard always got away. Until he didn’t. A tremor vibrated in her muscles and ran stairs down her spine, with all the bells ringing.
“Sid,” she said thickly. “Sid had something you wanted? He was blackmailing you? And you—you—” Oh God. Oh fuck.
Fleet drank the last glass of whisky, a tall one, and Jo felt as though a final door had just been shut somewhere.
“Now what makes you say such things?” he asked, his voice a whispered hiss. He leaned over her where she clung to the mantel—long and gaunt, a twist of mouth under the mustache. A mash of conflicting stories were screaming across Jo’s synapse: Reynard and Iron Wolf, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock and Watson. Nothing had prepared for the real denouement—but here it was, anyway: Fleet murdered Sid Randles.
And now, Fleet knew that she knew.
“I gave you opportunity,” he said, bathing her in whisky breath. “You could have said you didn’t know—you could have produced the missing painting—or the documents within. I would have made it all go away. Why can’t you just do as I say!”
Jo swallowed a bubble of panic and began inching backward along the mantel and its big blue vase. Blood pulsed into her ears—keep it together. Her fingers had reached the beveled edge. She felt the cold ceramic and took a breath.
“I don’t w-want to be murdered.”
“Do you think I meant to? I’ve never meant to,” Fleet said. His animal breathing labored at the edge of speech, and under it lurked something raw and mean and desperate. “Killing. It’s ugly. Messy. Wars are messy—but we can always make the bad things go away.”
“What bad things?” Jo chirped.
“Any bad thing. People make mistakes. They do little things—and bigger ones to cover the little things. Soldiers, civilians. Just give it to me, and this will all go away.”
Jo panted, her mind racing. She didn’t know what he wanted. She just needed to get out. Distract him, she told herself. Make him look away. Buy time. Lie.
“I—I hid what you want. In this room,” she lied. “On the bookcase.”
Fleet spun about to face the ruined, gutted (empty) shelves. He wouldn’t find anything there. But it wouldn’t matter now; Jo felt the reassuring weight of the pepper spray canister in her palm. She extended her arm, finger on the aerosol depressor, and waited for him to turn around—
“Jesus,” Green breathed as MacAdams narrowly avoided clipping the car in front of them, its brake lights bleary in driving rain.
“Sorry.” It had been helter-skelter since they raised alarms at York station; Green had been on some dozen phone calls already and the traffic had snarled under thunderheads. They didn’t have all the answers. But they had some.
Confirmed—Fleet had gone back to Abington early that morning, without telling MacAdams.
Confirmed—he had not checked in at Abington CID. Andrews had been trying to reach Jo Jones, but no luck.
“Did you tell them to send a squad to the estate?” MacAdams asked. Again.
“Yes. Twice. But they are being thrashed by this storm, too. Power is out everywhere, trees down.” Green cringed as MacAdams took another swerve round slow traffic. “We don’t know anything is wrong, boss. Remember, we don’t know.”
“I fucking know,” MacAdams growled. Elsie had played them, but she’d played Fleet, too. That was why she kept looking through the two-way glass as she spoke; she knew Fleet was bound to be there—and she wanted him to blame Jo, not her and Jack. “Fucking move, you slow fucking bastards!” MacAdams changed lanes again, and this time Green clung to the overhead handle.
“All right, I can believe Elsie is a guilty party easy,” she agreed. “And we know Jack had something on Fleet, who helped him get the more lenient sentence.”
Confirmed. Though not the sole witness to the murder (a team had been trailing Jack, after all), Fleet was first on the scene. He claimed Jack didn’t know the victim was inside the car, and in fact tried to save him. Manslaughter, not murder, on Fleet’s word alone.
“What I don’t get, though, is how Sid becomes involved at all,” Green continued. “He wasn’t in service with them, and doesn’t appear to have known Fleet before the blackmail started.”
“Sid was married to Elsie,” MacAdams said simply.
“But why would she involve him? He’d be a liability.”
“Remember the dead roses, dead birds sent to Olivia? Elsie gets revenge, and Sid had wronged her.” MacAdams had been falsely assuming she was a victim of Sid’s extortion. Elsie, for her part, probably knew MacAdams was bound to see her as victim instead of the mastermind of a convoluted blackmail and money laundering plot. “I’m sure Jack used something against Fleet to get off his murder charge, but he’s not the brains behind this, and neither was Sid.”
Green cringed at the gap between lorry and tour bus that MacAdams had just squeezed through.
“Then why would Fleet not go after Elsie—or Jack—in the first place?” she asked. “Why murder Sid with an antique derringer in an empty cottage? Is doesn’t make sense.”
And of course, she was right. MacAdams was still missing something—something that predated Jack’s arson conviction. Though for the moment, he didn’t give a damn what it was. He replayed Elsie’s words from the interrogation.
It was all his idea, anyway. We had nothing to do with it.
“Call the station again, and this time stay on the line till someone confirms they’re at Ardemore House,” he demanded.
It wasn’t like the movies. A detonation of searing spray exploded into Fleet’s eyes, nose, and mouth—but the overspray burned Jo’s fingers and turned the air bitter in her own lungs. Fleet made a retching, coughing shriek and collided with the mantel. Jo leapt backward, only to collide with the overturned coffee table. He was cursing her, a foamy guttural over the sound of shattering glass as his windmilling arms sent vases and candles crashing to the floor.
Fuck, fuck, fuck played on repeat in Jo’s brain as she slid sideways into the hallway. Her own eyes were bleary, her thoughts scattered. And Fleet was far from off his feet.
“Give it to me!” he demanded. Jo darted to the front door, but despite purpling face and streaming eyes, Fleet was taller, faster, and stronger. He lunged and Jo squealed in recoil, putting the hall table between them.
“I don’t even know what it is!” she shouted. Fleet was foaming but focused, the startling blue of his iris floating in a sea of red.
“Clapham’s letter, you fucking bitch,” he wheezed. Spittle formed in the corners of Fleet’s mouth as he spoke, his fingers clutching the table edge white-knuckled. “Give me the letter!”
Jo didn’t know who Clapham was. She didn’t care, either; one foot braced against the wainscoting and she shoved the table hard at Fleet’s midsection. It bought a little time; Jo bolted through the dining room and on to the back pantry. No door—no lock. Jo sized up the enormous China cabinet and shoved with all her might. It shuddered and tipped, dust-coated crystal smashing on the floor below—but it hadn’t blocked the door, and Fleet was already there. His arm shot forward, gripping her shoulder.
“I’ve no more money—do you hear me? It ends NOW!” She was pinned, half squatting between the wall and the hutch, fingers scrabbling behind her for a missile of some sort.
“I don’t want your money!” she shouted, groping wildly.
Fleet responded by yanking her to her feet—but Jo’s fingers had located the smooth neck of the decanter, still intact. She swung it by way of reflexive action, the heft carrying it on her arm like a pendulum. It connected with a sickening sound. A spurt of blood followed the crunch, and after that, Fleet’s desperate howl of pain.
Oh God, oh God—Jo tore herself away, reseeing the blueprint in her head. Through the kitchen! Wrap around the back, past the cellar, to the front hall. The house was a circuit; if she could beat him, she could get to the front door...
But something was very wrong.
Light pooled on the hallway floor, shining and intense. She saw red and yellow, heard a sizzling that wasn’t rain on roof tiles. The upturned candles had caught the curtains, and a river of hot wax spilled fire across the carpet. From their prone position on the floor, William and Gwen stared back, faces alive and glistening as heat sweated the varnish. The library—her library—was on fire.
For a moment, nothing else mattered. Jo grasped the drop cloth that once covered furniture and attempted to smother flames, but the heat billowed it back. She tried again, and again, but too little, too late. The empty bookcase spouted fire at the ceiling, and the air was growing wavy and warped in the heat. It was Jane Eyre all over again, “the building one mass of flame.” Everything was going to burn, and Jo staggered backward from the heat.
“Going somewhere, Ms. Jones?” came the guttural growl as long-boned fingers closed on Jo’s throat. She gulped and gagged and kicked the floor. Fleet responded by hauling her up to his ruined face. His nose crumpled to one side and blood fouled his mustache and ran into his spittle-flecked mouth.
“We have to get out! It’s on fire!” Jo choked.
“Is it here?” he demanded. His fingers clutched the base of her neck as he jerked her along. Jo twisted against his grip, but size did matter; she was a rag doll in his grip. They were in the dining room again, the foxhunt winking above the table in reflected orange light.
“Clapham said just the three of us would ever know. But three can’t keep a secret, can they?” He spat clotted blood. “Is it here? If so, it can burn.”
If she agreed, she’d never make it out of the fire. She knew it, could see the whole plan in a flash: his word against a dead woman’s... He might even say he tried to save her.
“It’s not here,” she shouted over the roar of thunder and fire. “Let me go and—and I’ll show you—”
“WHERE?” he roared. The fire roared, too. They were running out of time.
“You can’t want me dead—you’re a policeman!” she cried. After it came a crackling, bone-sucking sound: Fleet laughing through his broken nose.
“That’s just what Sid said,” he coughed. He dragged her toward the flames, using her as a heat shield. Jo’s mind spun; was he going to roast her until she gave in? Cook her to death. Get. Out. Now. Jo had been scrabbling against every surface, trying to free herself from his grip around her neck—but that wasn’t the way. Endless courses of self-defense, but she could only remember one thing: deadweight. Jo dropped suddenly to the floor like a stone.
It hurt more than she expected. Fleet tipped forward and her shoulders connected hard with the floor amid his cursing and coughing. The air was better close to the ground, though, and she took grateful breaths. Fleet gagged above her, and then let her go. She was on her hands and knees in a moment, scrabbling forward in a world gone black and red. A heavy dark cloud rolled above, smothering the edges of doors and windows. Solicitor, solstice, Sanskrit, seconds. She’d made it to the hall, but couldn’t see the front door. There was no door. Just a ball of fire and searing heat—and a wail that was, or should have been, human. Fleet, his coat in flames, arms waving like fiery pinwheels. Look away, she told herself, look away and get yourself out—except the only way out was up.
Jo darted for the stairs in a crouch, holding her breath. Up one. Up two, three, four. Heat radiated from the floor and all the timbers crackled. Her eyes stung with tears, but she’d come to the place beyond feeling, where only the answer mattered. Lightning flashed through the hall and the house wailed, snapping and moaning.
One way out.
Through Evelyn’s room.
Smoke plumed up from below and gathered at the roofline. Jo pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth as she approached the little door. It danced in front of her, wavy with heat. She grasped the doorknob, and it sizzled in her grip. Dammit! The library inferno below had made the room an oven.
In her mind, she could still see Fleet, bony, red-eyed, and blood-mouthed, filling the space like death itself. He was dead. She was going to be if she didn’t hurry. Jo grasped the handle again, ignoring the sear of flesh, and thrust herself into Evelyn’s room.
It had come alive. Distorted by refraction, the wallpaper writhed, and the ceiling beams bent. Flames licked from the floorboards and danced firefly embers against walls of sepia-pink. At the far end, she could see the open window, its purple night bisected with fractures of lighting. It might be a thousand miles away.
You will do this, though.
Jo clutched fingers to fists and ran for the black window. The floor burned, her face burned, her lungs burned. Then, she had one leg out the window, one foot dangling in empty air...
She jumped, falling onto the scaffold platform outside.
“Oh. My. God.”
The ground heaved below, and a bleary streak of colored lights lined the drive. Men were shouting at her, maneuvering ladders and trucks. But so far down; she couldn’t climb—she couldn’t move. Jo wrapped numb fingers around icy steel, closed her eyes, and waited for the end.
The first murder case of which MacAdams had any part took place in Glasgow. They discovered the body of a college girl in an alley not far from Kelvingrove. Still a constable, he’d been first to find her, and he remembered the scene as if painted: her body propped against the stone wall, autumn leaves caught in her dark hair. A bicycle had been locked nearby, unrelated, but somehow part of his memory as though a key piece of it. Most young police officers could share an experience like it, a threshold moment, where you knew you were leaving one kind of lived experience for another and wouldn’t go back.
This was one.
Ardemore House rose from the hilltop as a skeleton, black-rib chimney towers and a collapsed rubble of timber and slate. MacAdams stopped the car, left it running, and ran into the knot of firefighters shouting Jo’s name. He didn’t remember Green following him. He didn’t remember his own uniformed officers, plus a rain-soaked Gridley, trying to keep him from stumbling into quarters of the still smoldering structure. It was all just raw and numb at once, the ice of dread and the gut-realization that one of their own had done this—that MacAdams had spent days and nights with the man, the murderer, and had never suspected—that this same man had killed Jo Jones.
Except, thank God, he hadn’t.
“James, for God’s sake! She’s in the emergency van!” Green finally managed to say. And so she was, smoke-smeared and wrapped in an NHS-issue blanket. The relief he felt manifested as both a desire to yell at Jo and the desire to embrace her, neither of which were appropriate to the situation. So he stood there, mute and largely useless.
“I climbed out on the—the thing.” She sniffed and pointed to a twisted wreck of scaffold, from which (Gridley explained) she’d been rescued by the fire brigade.
“I’m glad.” And because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he climbed into the van and sat next to a wet and bleary-eyed Jo. “How—how did you manage it?”
“Jane Eyre,” Jo said. “They ask Jane what she should do to avoid the fire pits of hell. She tells them she must keep in good health and not die.” She looked at her hand, which had been bandaged against the burn. “I decided to not die.”
MacAdams felt an odd hitch in his throat; the incongruity of Jo Jones wasn’t easy to overcome. In fact, the whole woman wasn’t easily overcome.
“The other detective is dead,” she said after a long silence. “It wasn’t nice.”
“No. But he was not nice,” MacAdams said. It would be quite a while before they could dig him out. Bits of him, anyway.
“He said Sid was blackmailing him.” Jo said the words as if she were trying them out for the first time. “With a letter. He thought I had it.”
“A letter. Not the painting?” MacAdams asked. They were searching the house in York as they spoke and would soon be overturning the hideaways of all her various aliases.
“He seemed to think it was in the painting?” Jo said. “Not in a clever way.”
MacAdams had to sit with that a minute; she meant, he gathered, not a puzzle. “As in stuck to the back of it, or inside it?”
“Mhmmph.” Jo sniffed and rubbed her nose. “I think? Clapham’s letter, is what he said.”
MacAdams heard the name with a jolt. Commodore Alexander Clapham, superior officer to Jack and Jarvis. MacAdams felt the click and lock of two separate ideas... Fleet had come to help Cora sort through “papers” at Clapham’s funeral. And he had still been poking through them, hadn’t he...?
“Boss?” Green had appeared with tea for Jo, and a mobile phone for MacAdams. “Back in Newcastle. You aren’t going to believe this.”
“Try me,” he said.
“They found the painting. And that’s not all.”