The iron gates folded away before him, as if the name he spoke into the monitor was a secret password. Martin Rooke eased the Mercedes onto the road leading down into the valley of the Dale estate. His hands were steady; the shaking had stopped somewhere on the highway.
The car slid beneath the arches of the overhanging trees and then out into the sunlight. There must have been lawns once, he thought, wincing as a bramble scraped against the side of his car. And gardens. He had a sudden vision of figures in white, playing croquet and sipping tea, overlaid like ghosts on the heavy growth of weeds and brush.
He swore softly. Ghosts . . . Christ! This was not the way to deal with this job. From the start, he’d looked at the whole mad scheme as just another business problem. It didn’t matter whether or not he believed any of it—Althea Dale believed it. And the first thing he’d learned when he became head of Special Projects for Havendale was what Althea Dale believed, was.
Special Projects was the top, short of the President, or the Board of Directors. It was about as high in the corporate structure as you could go. When it came to status, nobody seemed to mind that no one knew precisely what Special Projects did.
No one in the mainstream company, that was.
For Havendale’s shadowy underground corporate ladder, Special Projects was also the top. Whoever ran Special Projects got his orders from Althea Dale herself. Whoever ran Special Projects gave the orders that moved the drugs, the guns and the currency that were Havendale’s other business. And for the last year, the man who ran Special Projects had been Martin Rooke.
Of course, after today, it might not be.
He stopped the car in the circular driveway at the base of the flagstone steps. From here, only the red tile roof of the Dale ancestral home was visible, lying like a bloody-scaled snake along the top of the low hill. Climbing the stairs, Rooke realized again how quiet it was here. The woods enveloping the estate swallowed all the street noise, all voices, all sounds that would betray the fact that twentieth-century subdivisions surrounded the nineteenth-century mansion.
The grey fieldstone walls and the long, low length gave the house the look of an ancient stone fence, stretched across the ridge as if guarding something. But behind the house, Rooke knew, there was only an empty swimming pool and an old, unused tennis court. Or maybe what it was guarding was inside, he thought. The Dales had their share of secrets.
The elderly maid answered the door on the second clang of the heavy iron knocker. “Miss Dale is waiting in the office,” she said slowly and turned to lead him down the dark hallway. He bit back the urge to say he knew the way; he knew she wouldn’t pay any attention. He was never unescorted in the Dale house.
The interior of the house echoed the outside—the modern world had barely penetrated it. The lights in the hallway were electric, but their glow was filtered through dim, yellow shades and sucked away by the dark panelling and wallpaper. Portraits lined the walls. Five generations of Dale scions watched him pass, from old mutton-chopped Archer to soberly suited Arthur. Rooke suppressed a grin as he passed that last one. There was no hint in it that old Arthur was rumoured to have ended his days deep in Howard Hughes territory, a paranoid recluse with five-inch nails, poor personal hygiene and a reputation for business cunning that meant no one gave his eccentricities a second thought. There were other rumours too; whispers about women driven to the estate in dark limousines and well-paid not to talk about it, older stories of accidents that happened to people who stood in the way of what Arthur Dale wanted.
There was no portrait of Althea Dale yet. She’d better get one done soon, Rooke thought wryly, before she gets even crazier than daddy was. She might be crazy like a fox when it came to business—the bottom line in the four years since Arthur’s death could attest to that—but this latest craziness could wipe it all away, Havendale family name and all.
The thought sobered him, bringing back memories of the asylum and the edgy tension that always accompanied his meetings with Althea Dale. And that had been when things were going well. . . .
The maid paused in front of the office door, knocking with timid knuckles at the dark wood. A muffled voice called out, then the maid opened the door and ushered him in. “Mr. Rooke,” her voice whispered, then he heard the door close behind him.
Althea Dale was sitting at the massive old desk that looked like it must have first belonged to Archer. Rooke was once again struck by the contrast of the aging glory of the room, with its book-lined walls and ancient wooden filing cabinets, and the smooth blankness of that desk, marred only by the sleek grey metal of the computer terminal on one side and the compact black telephone on the other.
He knew his employer through those two things; through her voice on the telephone and her words glowing on the computer screen. He had only met her in person twice before. Once before his appointment to head Special Projects and once when she called him in to explain the true nature of her current obsession.
Like her father, Althea Dale never left the house.
“Rooke.” Her voice was quiet, controlled.
“Miss Dale.” He sat down in the chair opposite her and waited.
“How did it happen?”
“We’re not sure. The lock to the cell wasn’t broken so someone must have used a key. It might have been one of Roias’s men, Peterson. We found his body in the cellar. The others, including the actors and the cameramen, were all killed near the studio. The films were all exposed or erased.” He kept his voice calm, letting out no hint of what it had really been like to walk into the studio strewn with three-day-old corpses.
“How did he get away?”
“I’m not sure. The vehicles in the garage were all damaged. But the woods around there are pretty thick. It . . .” He caught himself suddenly, remembering her insistence on using the male pronoun, “he could still be there.”
“He won’t stay there. He’ll come to the city eventually.” She fell silent for a moment. Rooke watched her carefully. She’d grown thinner in the last year, face turning bony and gaunt, making her look much older than forty-two. The long, greying brown hair was caught back in the customary braid and she was wearing a white shirt and dark pants. He wondered if they were the same ones she’d been wearing the last two times he’d seen her.
She rose abruptly and paced across the room, hands over her elbows, holding her arms crossed against her body. Rooke felt the back of his neck prickle as she passed behind him, as if her brittle tension was communicable. He found himself unconsciously waiting for her to light a cigarette. As far has he knew, she did not smoke, but her angular edginess always seemed to suggest that she should, that her long, thin fingers were crooking to hold something besides empty air.
“What did you do with the bodies?” she asked at last.
“Called the cleaners in to bury them out in the woods, like Roias did with the women.”
“Can they be trusted?”
“That’s what we pay them for.” He caught the swift, sideways glance of her sunken eyes. “We might have to eliminate them later.”
“Why not now?”
“It’s too soon after the others, those students.”
“That can’t be traced to us.”
“Probably not. But if the police get too many unsolved murders they get nervous and suspicious. Give it a month or two.” She frowned for a moment, then waved away the problem with a brief flicker of her hand. That meant kill them, Rooke decided. That was the one method of problem elimination that Althea seemed to consider foolproof.
“You will get him back.” It wasn’t a question.
“Of course. But he could have gone anywhere.”
“No, he couldn’t. He hasn’t got a passport. He hasn’t got any money. He doesn’t know how to drive. He’ll come back to the city, because it’ll be the only place he’ll find anything he recognizes.”
“Toronto’s a big place,” he began carefully, watching her stalk towards the window to his left. She paused for a moment, staring out at something he could not see.
“He has to kill to survive. He will leave a trail, if you look for it in the right place.” Rooke heard the impatience in her voice.
“I’ll contact our people in the police department. If any unusual deaths or reports turn up, they’ll let us know. And a reward promised to the right organizations should get their soldiers looking for him for us. I can take a print off that film of Roias’s.” She nodded, eyes still trained outward.
“Get the rest of the copies of those films back if you can find them.”
“Buy them back?”
“Whatever.” She shrugged the question away. “I want the laboratory moved here.”
“Here?” Rooke couldn’t help his astonished echo.
“Here.” She looked over at him. “You made a mistake with Roias. I made a mistake letting you. When you get him back, I want him where I can see him. And maybe that will keep more of the scientists from hanging themselves.” He should have known that was coming, Rooke acknowledged. If his mistakes were going to be itemized, Goodman’s suicide was going to be right up there. Never mind that he’d used Havendale’s resources and international crime connections to buy, bribe and blackmail five of the leading researchers in North America without causing any serious rumours in the scientific community . . .” There’s a file on the disk in the computer. It has all my requirements for modifying the left wing for the laboratory. Get the workmen started tomorrow.”
When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to move, he rose and stepped around her desk to retrieve the disk. As he pocketed it, he glanced up and out the window past her still figure. Beyond the empty pool and the cracking asphalt of the tennis court, he could see the faint gleam of something against the trees.
“My father’s grave,” Althea said suddenly, as though she could feel his gaze through her back. “I had him buried there. Outside.” The word came off her tongue as though it was wrapped in barbed wire.
It seemed like a dismissal. Rooke moved towards the door. Her voice caught him. “Get him back, Rooke. And for making me bring the laboratory here, in here,” she paused in distaste, “inside, the modifications are coming out of your salary.”
Rooke swore silently. Knowing her paranoia, the changes could cost more than two hundred grand. But he just nodded and shut the door between them.
The maid was waiting to walk him to the entrance.
He didn’t look at the portraits this time. They didn’t have the answers he wanted, not unless one of them had miraculously changed into a picture of Althea Dale’s soul. He couldn’t get a grasp on that, no matter how he tried. She should have been easy to read, with her neuroses and her tension and the secrets that lurked behind every closed door and lingered like the smell of sickness in the air. He should have been able to find the buttons to push, the weaknesses he could exploit to make her controllable. Every time he thought he found a way to twist her paranoia to his advantage, something would slip and he would catch the glimpse of an amoral, brutal madness that was so far beyond any motive he could understand that he would abandon his plans.
Arthur Dale wasn’t the only one that there were rumours about.
It wasn’t until the safety of his car that he let himself relax. Two hundred thousand dollars was a small price to pay . . . and there were always ways that amount could be reduced. He’d gotten off remarkably lightly, all things considered.
After all, the price for failure at Havendale wasn’t a golden parachute. It was a long, long fall with no parachute at all.