sixty-eight

Two spooks with shades wearing gabardine macs with rolled up collars. Long destroyed and scribbled over, Banksy’s creation on the crumbly walls of a house was, nevertheless, in rhythm with my mood.

In silence, Stannard caught hold of my elbow and propelled me down the road and through a narrow alleyway that was easy to miss. Passing several tiny houses on either side, he walked me right to the end, where he turned left into a small front garden with a woodshed. Behind was a dwelling so ditzy it could have housed a family of Hobbits. Despite the cuddly exterior, I held back.

“This is Nicholas Vellender’s home,” Stannard informed me. “Five minutes after he returned, he tore out of the alleyway with a phone pinned to his ear.”

“Any idea where he went?”

“He headed back towards town. You told me to locate the house, not the guy.”

“You didn’t see him with a short dark-haired Spanish-looking woman?”

“Should I have done?”

“You’re absolutely certain he wasn’t followed?”

“I’d have noticed.” Probably dismissing my persistence as febrile femininity, he said, “Shall we?”

I followed him up the paved path to a bolted stable-style door. To the right was a window, curtains semi drawn in a permanent expression of ennui. I pressed my nose against the glass, adjusted my line of vision, and jumped back with a start.

Stannard snickered. “I did exactly the same. It’s not real.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

I peered again at the mannequin. White-faced with geisha red lips, it had wild black hair, an indigo fringe, and blue shadow around the eyes.

“Blue represents negative emotions,” Stannard murmured next to me.

“How do you know that?”

“A monthlong visit to Japan,” he said. “The white kimono is a burial costume.”

My eyes spun to the wall on which hung a Samurai sword. “Shit,” I said.

“Freely available on the Internet,” Stannard informed me. “Still think our boy’s as clean as a monk in a monastery?”

I stepped back, tried to shake my thoughts into some kind of order. It was as if I were standing on an empty beach at night listening to the lonely cry of the sea. Stannard favoured Nick for a murderer. Up until that moment, I’d favoured Stacey. Unless …

“Kim?” I heard Stannard say, his voice low and distant.

Blankly, I turned towards him. “Do you think we could break in?”

“Why use brute force when you have one of these?” Stannard produced a wallet from which he selected what I took to be a lock pick. “A property developer’s best friend,” he explained.

“Is that legal?”

He hiked his recently fixed eyebrow, a triumph of surgery over disfigurement. “What do you think?”

I stood back as Stannard pried and fiddled with the lock. I reckoned it took him less than a minute to open the upper half of the stable door. Ten seconds to stick his arm inside and push across the bolt. “Easy when you know how,” he announced with an easy smile. “After you.”

Straight ahead there was a short dark corridor housing a washing machine. An overflowing laundry basket of clothes stood in front of it, the tang of dirty garments pervading the close air. “You go in,” I said. “I want to check through this.”

I pulled out underwear, sweatshirts, jumpers, jeans, and socks, none of which showed recent signs of staining with blood or human tissue. The contents of the washing machine yielded no extra clues. If Nicholas Vellender had killed Troy Martell I very much doubted it would be that easy to remove all traces. To double-check, I walked back outside and rifled through the contents of the dustbin and discovered nothing out of the ordinary.

Returning to the house, Stannard clomping about upstairs, I stood in the living room and started at the sight of three Japanese helmets squatting on custom-designed stands. The scariest was bowl-shaped with a facemask depicting a snarling open mouth with sharp teeth below a thick bulbous nose. The deadliest, finished in black hammered steel, was as wide as it was deep. Out of the top sprouted two immensely long wooden horns. Forbidding and, at a guess weighing several pounds, the helmet inhabited the room as if on guard.

I sniffed the air, caught the aroma of wood smoke and coal, the source an old Swedish wood-burner that jutted out from a deeply recessed fireplace on the outside wall. Above it hung the sword.

Stannard bowled back downstairs. “Nothing of interest; typical young man’s gaffe. Had a good gawp at the weapon of mass destruction?”

I gave him a dry look.

“It’s a fine specimen,” Stannard said knowledgeably. He pointed to the blade. “It’s called a ken. Exceptionally long, held in both hands, it allows greater control and cutting power.”

Unbidden, Troy Martell’s mutilated body flashed before my eyes. Blood and pain and dying. I noticed that the blade had a blackened edge; the hilt was wrapped around with brown cord.

“This baby can cut through bone,” Stannard continued, eyes sparking with enthusiasm. “Hand-forged in high carbon steel, it’s monstrously powerful. See the tip? It’s rounded to better thrust into the enemy. Beautifully ornate under the cut-guard.”

I blinked and strained forward. Fire-breathing dragons with grotesque features glared back at me.

“And these?” I indicated the helmets.

“Wouldn’t want to be on the sharp end,” Stannard agreed. “Fabulous as they are.”

I wasn’t sure I shared his artistic appreciation. “How much would they cost?”

“Anything between four and seven hundred pounds, particularly with a menpo.”

“A what?”

“Technical term for the facemask.”

I’d seen enough. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Convinced?” Stannard said.

“Absolutely.”

“So do we shop pretty boy to the cops now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He didn’t do it, Kyle.”

“Are you nuts? He had all this,” Stannard said, sweeping the room with a glance.

“Nick Vellender has a heavy interest in Japanese death rituals. He writes fantasy fiction and horror. He is disturbed, but it’s his mother who is the killer.”

“Paris?”

“His biological mother, Stacey Walton.”

“How many more times do you need to hear it? Stacey Walton is dead. Niven said so.”

“Niven said that she was presumed dead. There’s a difference.”

“You’re saying Stacey faked her own death?”

“Played dead, yes, just like Nick Vellender. Stacey reinvented herself as Gabriella Perona, the woman who works in Otto’s kitchen. Her only quest was to find her kids. She’d been searching for them for years. What she found were the broken remains of her family.”

“And now she wants vengeance,” Stannard said, eyes alight with sudden realisation. “If she tracked the case as far as Otto and Paris, she knew about everyone. She could have killed the social worker Joyce Conway and the judge.”

“Exactly. The point is I’ve led her straight to her own son and, if we don’t hurry, there will be at least two more bodies on her revenge list: Otto and Paris Vellender.”