Sherlock and I got off the bus at Regent’s Park and wandered through the closest entrance. We followed paths I’d never seen before, trying to get my little red dot closer to the blue dot that was supposed to be the burner phone. But the blue dot didn’t stay still, and the app didn’t work well on the unmapped expanse of park. Sometimes the dot would disappear altogether only to reappear in a place far from where it had been. I was so turned around by the time the dots were almost on top of each other that I didn’t realize where we were until I heard overly boisterous laughter followed by a voice I recognized. “Cheers to that as well! Cheers to that bloody woman you married!”
It was Lily Patel, kneeling in the mud and facing the tree where her father’s body had been found. Behind her, the clearing was cluttered with the scattered remains of a mixed-flower bouquet and four crumpled, empty beer cans. She poured a bit of liquid onto the ground from the can she held, then drank deeply, not coming up for air until foam was escaping from the corners of her mouth.
“Cheers!” she cried again, crashing her beer can against the tree trunk so hard, it sprayed up a bit onto her head. She took turns laughing and coughing.
“Looks like I was right,” Lock said quietly.
I looked down at my phone, which showed the blue dot moving in weird stuttered circles around my dot despite the fact that we were both being relatively still. But it didn’t matter what the app said anyway, because if it was Lily, there was one way to find out for sure. I shoved my phone into my pocket and pushed through the brush toward Lily right as she lost balance and started to tip over in slow motion.
I caught her before she fell completely and righted her. “Okay, let’s be done with this, yes?” I pulled the beer from her hand, which was practically empty, but she grabbed it back with both hands and scowled at me.
“No! This is mine.”
Sherlock released a soft laugh, and I glared at him through the growing shadows of dusk. “A little help maybe?”
He managed to hold her up so I could focus on keeping the girl from drinking any more. “Can we share more of this with your dad?”
Lily smiled and let me tip her hand enough to pour what little remained onto the ground at her knees. She instantly smashed the can in her hand and tossed it over her head to join its brothers. Before I could stop her, she had the last unopened beer in her hands. Luckily, her depth perception was gone, and she couldn’t get her hand on the pull tab. She winked one eye shut and still couldn’t make her fingers land on the top of the can. Nor was she a patient drunk, it seemed. After three misses, she held the can out in front of her and whined. When I didn’t immediately take the can from her hand, she whined more loudly and bounced her whole body against Sherlock until I relented.
“Open,” she commanded.
“I’m pretty sure your dad’s had plenty. Maybe save this one for next time?”
Her face crumpled a bit. “There is no next time. Give it.” She lifted her arms and made grabby hands in the air. She even crawled toward me on her knees a couple of steps.
I knelt down next to her and tried not to wince away from the smell of alcohol on her breath when she whined pitifully. “Enough,” I said.
She shook her head for a good ten seconds before she said, “No, no. You don’t understand what she did. She took it, but it was mine.” Lily grabbed for the can, and when I held it too high for her to reach, she yelled, “I hate you! Just like her!”
At least the alcohol was making her honest for once. I shifted my body a little and slid the can behind my back out of her sight line. It felt familiar, this game, playing hide the booze from the angry drunk. “What did she do?” I asked, to distract her as I patted down her coat pockets. I shook my head at Lock. No phone.
“She took it all.” Lily’s expression dropped from anger to despondence in the time it took me to blink. “That was for me and Dad, but she took it and threw it away.”
“What did she throw away?” The phone wasn’t in the pockets of her trousers either.
Lily started to tip forward, and Lock caught her before she scraped her face on the bark of the tree. “Dad’s beer. She found where I’d stashed most of it.” Lily waved her hands around her head at the cans behind her. “Those are all that’s left.”
“And now those are gone too.”
Lily immediately started to cry. “You shouldn’t take it. Not the last one. It’s mine.”
“I’ll just hold it for you, then. Just so you still have it tomorrow.”
Lily wiped muddy hands across her cheeks, her tears all but forgotten. I spotted Lily’s handbag, slung across a wilted bouquet of flowers on the far side of the tree. I upended the bag and scattered the contents across a patch of grass. No burner phone. Not even her regular mobile. And as I shoved all Lily’s things back into her bag, I realized what that meant.
“It’s not her,” I said to Lock.
Still, according to the app, the phone was right next to us, which meant the person who was after me was somewhere close. Somewhere close enough to be watching. Lock stood up and while Lily whimpered in the mud, we both looked around, but all I could see were bushes and trees falling deeper into shadow by the second.
“Anything?” I asked under my breath.
Lock shook his head. “I’ve a question. Why was the burner hanging around near Lily before we got here?” He leaned closer to speak into my ear, so that Lily couldn’t hear what he said next. “And what might have happened if we hadn’t shown up when we did?”
I hadn’t thought of that, but the minute he said it, all I could imagine were headlines of Lily being slaughtered at the same place where her father had died.
“Help me get her up.” I slung her bag over my shoulder and we helped Lily to her feet. But then Lock let go and started backing away from us toward the trees.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re so close,” Lock said. “We need to know who it is.”
I pulled out my mobile and watched the little blue dot stuttering away from my red dot slowly. Then I shoved the mobile at Lock. “Take this and find whoever it is. I’ll take Lily back to my house.”
There was almost no light left in the sky, but I could see Sherlock’s expression in the glow from my mobile, and his eyes were already bright with the adventure of chasing off into the night. “Be careful.”
“Maybe I’ll look for a stick on my way.”
“A cane or staff,” I called after him. “Never a mere stick.”
And then he was gone, and I was left in the dark with a groaning, drunken Lily Patel.
“You’re bad,” she said once we’d made it up onto the path. “You’re a bad one.”
I gritted my teeth to guide her around the corner when she threw her full body weight the other way. “That’s the rumor.”
She swung her body around so that we were eye to eye, her face so close to mine, all I could smell was stale beer. “Bad stock.”
I took a quick look behind us, but it didn’t seem like we were being followed.
“Not feeling well,” Lily mumbled into my hair. It was suddenly very tempting to leave her there in the park, sprawled out on a bench for one of the park staff to discover at closing. But I didn’t. She and I weren’t friends, but I didn’t want her to die. Not by some creeper with a burner phone, anyway. So I hoisted her, step by step, out of the park and up Baker Street to my empty house.
What would the paparazzi have made of us? I wondered when I got to our stoop. Apparently, Alice’s marks had gotten the memo that the family was at the hospital. All but me, the wayward child who couldn’t even sit vigil beside the brother for whom she claimed to care so much. And the press? Who knew. Maybe Alice’s men had run them off for good.
“Bad stock,” Lily slurred again. I leaned her back against the door to dig out my keys. “Daughter of a thief and a killer.”
“Shows what you know.” I unlocked our door and repocketed my key. “They were both killers.”
Lily smiled. “I’ve only just the one killer. Got you beat.”
She lifted a finger and tried desperately to make it touch my face somewhere. Was she saying something real? Or just hyperbolizing over her angst with her mother? “Do you have secrets too?” I asked quietly.
Lily’s fingertip finally connected with my cheek just above my jaw and she burst out in a fit of giggles. I indulged in a deep breath, which I huffed away. More likely, she was extremely drunk and had no idea at all what she was saying.
I managed to haul her inside the house and lock us both in, but I knew I’d never be able to repeat the feat all the way up our stairs, so I dragged her into Alice’s room and fell back onto the bed with her to catch my breath. A knock at the door brought me right back to my feet. Lock pushed his way inside, out of breath, covered in dust, twigs, and leaves, and practically glowing with excitement.
“Did you see who it was?”
He shook his head. “The signal went dead just outside the park, and when I reached the spot, a bus was driving off. No luck.”
I nodded and took back my mobile when he held it out.
“I’ll get Jason to put that app on my phone as well so we can surround whoever it is next time. How’s the drunkard?”
“Whimpering into Alice’s pillows.”
“Ah. Alice. She called.”
Michael. I started to dial her back on my mobile, but Lock covered my hand with his.
“It’s no good. She’s turned hers off for now. Michael came out of surgery and is in intensive recovery.”
“And she can’t have her phone on in there.”
“He hadn’t woken up yet, but she said the surgery went well and she’ll call in the morning.”
I nodded, and scowled at the floor. A few twigs had fallen, and it was difficult to keep from picking them up. I needed something to do just then, to keep my mind off of Michael.
“So, what’s next?” Lock asked.
“For you? A change of clothes and sleep.”
Lock waved off both suggestions with one sweep of his arm. “Not tired.”
“You might as well go home and change. I’ve got a schoolmate to babysit, at least until she sobers up enough to tell me her address so I can call her a cab.”
“Leave her here and we can go out searching again.”
“Not a chance. The very last thing I need is to have the daughter of one of my father’s victims die of alcohol poisoning in my house while I’m out.” On cue, Lily groaned and I pushed a still-reluctant Sherlock to my front door.
“Call me the minute you get rid of her? No matter the time. I’m not going to sleep.”
I managed to push him out the door, but by the time I went back in the room, Lily had fallen into some kind of fitful sleep. “Hey, wake up. Give me your address, yeah?”
Lily winced away from my voice and curled up into a ball, this time with her back to me.
I pushed at her shoulder again. “Give me your address. You need to go home and do this. I’m not your nursemaid.”
When she wouldn’t budge, I gave up and lay down next to her on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. I really didn’t have time to waste like this, but I also couldn’t think of what to do next. The app wouldn’t do us any good until the burner phone was turned back on, and our only other lead was the posh boutique that was definitely not going to be open until the morning. I was stuck, and in just a few hours, Constance Ross would be giving a mostly coherent statement to police that she saw me throw my mother’s aikido sword into the Regent’s Park lake. And there was nothing I could do about it.
But there was one thing I could do. I could go back to the hospital to see if Michael was out of surgery. To sit with my family like a caring sister should and wait to see if he would still be himself when he woke up.
“Is this your room?”
I started to shake my head, but decided she wouldn’t want to know that she was sleeping in Dad’s old room, so I nodded instead.
“It’s big.”
I sat up and leaned back against the excessive number of throw pillows Alice had staged against the headboard.
“Are you sober enough to call for a taxi?”
Lily shook her head for a little too long, then held the sides of it, like she couldn’t stop the back and forth without her hands. “Don’t want to go home.”
“You can’t stay here. I have to go to the hospital.”
“For what?”
I ignored her question. “You can’t stay here.”
Lily waved me off. “Yeah.”
She was quiet for a while—a lulling quiet that made me think maybe she’d gone back to sleep. But then she said, “He can’t go free. He can’t get away with it.” She paused. “What if he gets out?”
“I will kill him.” I shouldn’t have said it, of course, but there was something satisfying about saying it aloud. “If he gets out, I’ll finish what I started.”
Lily managed to roll over and face me.
I kept my eyes trained up, but I could feel the intensity of her stare.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
I met her gaze, nodded, and then looked back up at the ceiling.
We lay on Alice’s bed just like that until morning, me staring up at the ceiling and Lily staring at me. When the sun was just starting to lighten the sky, Lily called for a cab. A few minutes later she stumbled out of the room, fought with our dead bolt, and left the house.
The next time I opened my eyes, the sky was a bit lighter and Alice’s clock said it was almost six a.m. I knew I needed to wake up, but my mind was warring for more sleep, right up until I felt a cool breeze blow into Alice’s room.
I sat up and leaned forward to peer into our entry way. The door was open, but only a bit. I moved slowly off the bed, trying not to make a sound, then crept out into the entry until I could just make out a shadowed lump of something pushing through the opening of the door. I was almost on top of it when I realized what it was.
An elbow.
The Lady Constance wasn’t going to make her meeting with DI Mallory after all.