It was a clever idea: off a onetime junkie turned cancer patient using what had been her drug of choice. To any casual observer, Occam’s razor would suggest that Poppy had overdosed, intentionally or not. From what I knew, she had no next of kin. Considering her late-stage cancer, it seemed doubtful that the police would bother to mount an investigation. Unless they found signs of sexual trauma, or employed a forensic scientist who took a real interest in the case, they’d just see another dead junkie.
The fact that she was middle-aged and a woman probably wouldn’t help. No one would look for a killer, because the killer was sticking out of her arm.
The real killer was an amateur. I was sure of that. She or he hadn’t tied off Poppy’s arm with that bandanna—there’d been no bruising. It had to have been someone Poppy knew, or she wouldn’t have let them in. Morven Dunfries? Mallo? Adrian?
Whoever it was, Poppy had opened the front door; when the killer split through the same door, they’d left it unlocked because the dead bolt couldn’t be turned without a key. The attacker might have been armed. I tried to imagine Morven Dunfries standing in her old friend’s living room, forcing her at gunpoint to shoot herself up. The image was too bizarre even for me.
Poppy didn’t seem to have put up a fight. There was no overturned furniture, and I hadn’t noticed skin or hair under her fingernails.
But she hadn’t been the one to slam the plunger in. And her killer had done a lousy job of doing it for her. I’d seen enough Tarrantino movies to know that in certain circumstances, an amateur can be just as effective as a pro, and far more dangerous.
I stepped into Poppy’s office. The bottom drawer of the curio cabinet was ajar. I knelt and opened it, staring at the rows of small glass-topped boxes. None seemed to have been touched. I yanked open the other drawers: more of the same.
I stood and scanned the room. Poppy’s purple reading glasses were on top of her desk, but the mess of papers had been moved to one side. And the top drawer of the desk was open. Letters and envelopes were scattered on the floor beneath it, along with pens and paperclips. Poppy might have done that, if she’d been in a hurry, or if she’d been interrupted.
So might have an intruder, looking for something they hadn’t found in the desk or cabinet: the thaumatropes.
I raced to the kitchen. On the windowsill between the geraniums was the orange plastic Sainsbury’s bag. I grabbed it, reached inside, and felt three soft bundles of chamois cloth. Folded inside each was a thaumatrope. There was also a business card for a curator of European Archaeology at the British Museum, presumably the woman Poppy had mentioned.
I stuffed the business card into my pocket. Then, clutching the plastic bag, I returned to Poppy’s office and searched through drawers until I found several coiled lengths of rawhide. My hands shook as I peeled off my gloves and threaded a length of rawhide through each thaumatrope. I knotted the cords, slid each over my neck and beneath my black turtleneck, the bone discs cool against my bare skin. I put on my gloves and turned to go.
A chime sounded—the incongruously sweet tone of a Tibetan temple bell. Panicked, I looked around and saw something glowing on the desk. Poppy’s mobile. I grabbed it and hurried to the front door to retrieve my bag and cowboy boots. Peering outside, I saw it was pissing down rain again. A small crowd of kids swarmed around a bus shelter halfway down the block, and a police siren wailed. I closed the door, turned the dead bolt, and headed back to the kitchen, my bag in one hand and my boots in the other.
As I passed the living room I paused. The doorway neatly framed the dim space: Poppy seemingly asleep on the couch with her silvery wig askew, a scattering of dark petals and that tiny bright dart glinting in one arm. It looked like one of Cindy Sherman’s early Untitled Film Stills.
I shifted my bag and cursed under my breath. Like Weegee used to say, a camera’s like a gun—useless if it’s not loaded. I hadn’t yet loaded another roll of Tri-X in my Konica. I had Poppy’s smartphone but no clue how it worked.
Probably this was for the best. I stared at Poppy, fixing the image in my mind, and turned away.
In the kitchen, a back door led to a fenced-in area that had once been a garden. There was no dead bolt, just a cheap metal knob with a button you could depress so it would lock. I wondered why the killer hadn’t left this way. Too much of a hurry, maybe, or maybe they’d had a last-minute change of heart and hoped someone might find Poppy before she died. I stared out at a dreary dripping jungle of dead nettles, piles of moldering leaves, a sickly plane tree. I grabbed Poppy’s old yellow mackintosh from its hook beside the door and pulled it on, tugged the hood over my head, and shoved my feet into my boots.
I let out a stifled shout as something nudged my ankle. The white cat. I opened the door and tossed it outside. I didn’t like thinking about what it might get up to, locked in a house with a corpse.
I slung my bag over my shoulder and stepped out into the rain. I made sure the door was locked, then walked slowly down the steps. It was now dark enough that anyone who saw me might think I was Poppy.
At the back of the garden was a derelict wooden fence. A stone Buddha guarded its sagging door, the statue’s face leprous with lichen. I raised the door latch and stepped into an alley. When I glanced back, I saw a ghostly white shape creeping through the darkness, its beryl eyes flaring as they caught the light.
I walked as quickly as I could for several blocks, dodging crowds until I eventually managed to push my way onto a bus. I tried to catch my breath, staring fixedly at my soaked Tony Lamas while a young couple talked about the apocalyptic weather.
“… six inches in Reading. Stanstead’s shut down.”
“Gatwick, too.”
“Cop killed some kid in Alperton, see that?”
“Fuck.”
I staked out a place near the bus’s rear door and pulled out Poppy’s mobile. I might have been looking at a cartouche from Third Dynasty Egypt. Back in the city, my old connection Phil Cohen had given me shit for refusing to get a cell phone or digital camera.
“Yeah yeah, I get it—you’re old school.” He’d twitch even more than usual as he pronounced the last two words. “Graduation day, Cassandra Android. Stop being a fucking Luddite.”
Truth was, a few months ago I couldn’t have afforded a cell phone or new laptop. Now, with a few thousand quid stashed in my boot, I could.
Still, Phil was right—I was a Luddite. But I’d watched enough people with cell phones to have a vague idea of how to use one. I ran a finger across the screen of Poppy’s mobile. It lit up, and I stared at the rows of candy-colored icons. If they’d been pills, I would’ve popped a few. Instead I dropped the phone back into my bag and stared out at the rain.
I got off at the first stop where the announcement was for an Underground station and made my way into the street. In an alcove beside a shuttered Ladbrokes, a teenage girl wrapped in a garbage bag had passed out. Her dark hair was matted, and the soles had peeled from her zebra-striped Converse hightops. At her feet, a filthy baseball cap held a few coins.
I walked past her, then doubled back and ducked into the alcove. I stuffed a few ten-pound notes in a pocket of Poppy’s mackintosh along with my wet gloves, pulled off the raincoat, and draped it across the girl. Then, reaching beneath my layers of clothing, I touched the three bone discs.
These are my daughters.
I chose one at random, tugged the rawhide cord over my head, and held up the disc to see the faintly etched outline of a woman’s pregnant form. I bent and carefully looped the cord over the girl’s head, poking it beneath the plastic trash bag and the grimy sweatshirt she wore. She sighed but didn’t move. I headed for the Underground.