Harold’s chair was half turned toward the rear of the room. He sat in it, head thrown back as if in surprise. His left eye was intact, but seemed to have been replaced by a crimson marble. I stepped behind the chair to get a look at the back of his skull but saw no exit wound. I shot a glance at the French doors. Closed. One toile curtain was awry.
“Cut the light,” I called to Gryffin, still standing in the doorway. He did, though the desk lamp remained on.
I crossed to the French doors. Had someone jimmied the lock? Was it possible Harold didn’t bother to lock them? I fumbled the cotton gloves from my pocket and pulled them back on, turned, and held up my hands so Gryffin could see them. Quickly he did the same.
I turned back to the doors, gingerly touched one’s handle. It was open. I tugged the curtain back into place, and again stepped over to Harold’s chair.
All I know about forensics comes from watching cop shows. But I can calculate shutter speed, distance, and time, and working in a darkroom taught me how certain chemicals, metals, and gases interact with one another, and with human physiology. You don’t want to be inhaling mercury or spilling silver nitrate on your skin.
The gases and trace elements of heavy metals discharged by firing a bullet interact with certain media—like human flesh or blood—not unlike the way that old-fashioned photo chemicals interact with sensitized paper. At very close range, the combination of gases, smoke, and metallic residue can cause flesh to blacken. They also alter the chemistry of blood—the color changes from dark crimson to that cherry-candy red you see in Hammer horror flicks.
This wasn’t a contact wound. And it wasn’t a bullet wound. There was no telltale blackening of lacerated skin where the projectile had entered his eye socket. Which ruled out suicide. Plus, why would a guy who’d just made the sale of his life off himself?
I peered more closely at the eye. Other than the crimson orb itself, I saw no trace of blood, no torn flesh. The pupil of the other eye had contracted to a black speck. Otherwise, it appeared undamaged.
What could have done this? A high-velocity weapon? That would suggest someone outside in the overgrown garden; someone with very good aim. I looked around for damage to furniture or a wall or the floor. Nothing. I groped for the camera that was no longer around my neck, then turned to Gryffin.
“Your phone,” I whispered. He slipped across the room and gave it to me.
I’d never handled a mobile’s camera before. I found it insultingly easy to use. I crouched to shoot Harold head-on, getting as close as I could to focus on that swollen eye. As I withdrew, I noticed something on his forehead. I tentatively moved aside a lock of hair and saw a symbol drawn on the skin in blood: three interlocking triangles. Just above it, blood seeped from a small, deep gash—soon the symbol would be unrecognizable. I took a quick photo of it, shoved the mobile into my pocket, and stood to survey the room one last time.
A piece of paper had slipped under Harold’s desk, the color of strong tea and splashed with indigo and scarlet—a loose page from The Book of Lamps and Banners, maybe the same one Harold had examined earlier.
I hesitated, feeling a superstitious unease. Finally I picked it up. I darted into the hall, retrieved my bag from the closet, and returned to the library. I grabbed the copy of the Times Literary Supplement from the coffee table, slipped the page inside, and once more looked around.
Absolutely nothing seemed to have been disturbed. On one side of Harold’s desk, stacks of papers were lined up neatly beside his laptop. On the other side sat the black morocco slipcase containing The Book of Lamps and Banners. Whoever killed Harold had neglected to take the most valuable thing here. I grabbed the slipcase, slid it and the TLS into my bag, then nudged Gryffin into the hall, shutting the door behind us.
We ran to the closet. Gryffin halted to stare at me, glassy-eyed. “Is Harold—he looked dead.”
“He looked dead because he is dead.” I tossed Gryffin his overcoat. He made no move to catch it, and it fell to the floor at his feet. I snatched it up and shoved it at him, along with his mobile, then grabbed my leather jacket.
“Listen to me.” I pulled him close. “Put on your coat and walk slowly out that door with me, now.”
“What are you even saying?” Gryffin’s panicked voice echoed through the empty hall. “We have to call the police—”
“No, we don’t. Let’s go.”
I started for the door, but he remained frozen. I took a deep breath.
“Gryffin—listen to me. Your friend’s dead. I don’t know what kind of arrangement the two of you had, but I bet it doesn’t have much to do with the IRS or Inland Revenue. If you call the cops, you’re fucked.”
He blinked, and I could see the lights go back on inside his skull. “The book—where’s the book?”
“I have it,” I said, and he finally pulled on his coat. “Is there CCTV inside the house?”
“No.”
“What about outside?”
“Not here. Other places, probably.”
“Well, keep your head down and stay with me. Look like we’re a couple.”
I linked my arm through his and we slipped outside. “Gloves,” I said, yanking off mine as we headed into the shadows.
The narrow street was empty. A cold wind rustled the branches of a holly tree. On a neighboring doorstep, a tortoiseshell cat regarded us, unblinking. Mellow lights shone in nearby houses. There was no sign of any disturbance, no sirens or raised voices or alarms.
“Get us out of here. Not the way we came.” I tightened my hold on his arm, inclining my head toward the darkness that was the Heath. “There.”
He nodded, and we followed the road through the Vale of Health, past all those fairy-tale buildings with their blue plaques and hybrid vehicles, the muffled sounds of conversation and television from behind curtained windows, a glimpse of a teenage girl hunched over a tablet. I felt dazed, no longer drunk but dreaming. Was this still the real world? If it was, what did that mean for me?
I pushed away the question. The chilly air braced me. My racing heart began to slow, and after a few minutes I relaxed my grip on Gryffin’s arm. The sidewalk became a path of beaten earth that skirted the edge of the Heath. From the high street, headlights shone through the trees, the murky globes of streetlamps. I heard a dull rumble of traffic, the rush of wind in the trees. Still no sirens.
“What if we’re on CCTV?” asked Gryffin.
“Nothing we can do about it. But we’re innocent.”
“Not of stealing the book.”
“We’re not stealing it. We’re protecting it.” I tried to remain calm. “You’ve never been arrested here, right? Me neither. As long as they don’t have our fingerprints or faces in their database, we’re good. That’s why you don’t want to go to the police. One reason, anyway,” I added. “I can think of more.”
Because once the cops got hold of me, they’d know I was in the country illegally, using a stolen passport. Maybe the police back in the U.S. no longer wanted to question me, but I was connected to a trail of other killings that stretched from Helsinki to Reykjavík to London. As the line of headlights drew closer, Gryffin steered us onto another path, crashing through knee-high brush.
“Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.
“No,” he said, panting. “But I think the big meadow’s down there, the one that overlooks Parliament Hill.”
He paused to catch his breath. Enough gray light leaked from the sky that I could see his face was streaked with tears.
“What happened?” He tore off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Why would someone do that?”
“You tell me.”
He didn’t reply, or move. I reached into my bag for the bottle of Lagavulin, took a long pull, and handed it to him. He stared at me like I’d offered him a live chicken, but recovered enough to knock back a healthy mouthful.
“Better?”
He nodded. I capped the bottle and dropped it in my bag. “How could you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Take pictures of someone dead.”
“It’s what I do.” The whiskey had loosened the fear coiled in my chest. “It’s what all photographers do, unless you’re just shooting landscapes. Weddings, birthday parties, selfies—sooner or later, they’re all photos of the dead. That’s what photography is. A massive necropolis. The dead, we carry them with us everywhere we go.”
“You’re crazy. No photographer thinks like that.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
He pushed past me and began to run, stumbling through the gorse. I caught up with him at the edge of the woods. The sound of grass rippling in the wind might have been that of the sea. Flickers of light indicated where people made their way across a vast field, like winter fireflies. Overhead, a dark fragment broke away from the trees and arrowed toward us. Gryffin stared at it, frowning.
“Is that a bird?”
My reply died in my throat. It wasn’t a bird, but an object with two sets of whirring propeller blades and a squat rounded body, so compact I could have held it in my hands. It stopped, hovering in the air above us, and I saw its single black eye and glowing red light. A drone.