Michael Robotham - Lost

“Don't you recognize a kindred spirit?” She cackles hoarsely, claiming to be a Gypsy. “Your mother told my fortune once. She said I would always be a great beauty and could have any man I wanted.”

(Somehow I don't think she was talking quantity.)

Daj had a gift all right—a gift for doing cold readings and predicting the bleeding obvious. She took people's money and tapped their spring of eternal hope. And afterward, having ushered them out of the door, she ran to the liquor store and bought her vodka.

There's a sound from upstairs: something falling. Mrs. Wilde looks up quickly.

“It's just one of my old girls. She stays sometimes.”

Her milky blue eyes betray her and her hand shoots out to stop me from rising. “Let me tell you the address of the clinic. They might know where she is.”

I brush her hand aside and move up the stairs, leaning out to peer between the banisters above me. On the first landing there are three doors, two open and one closed. I knock gently and turn the handle. Locked.

“Don't touch me! Leave me alone!”

It sounds like the voice of a child—the same one I heard on the phone during the ransom drop. I step away, bracing my back against the wall, with only my hand protruding past the door frame.

The first bullet hits six inches to the right of the handle at stomach height. I sit heavily letting my feet hit the opposite wall, letting out a low groan.

Mrs. Wilde yells up the stairs, “Is that my door? If that's my bloody door you'll be paying for it.”

A second bullet rips through the wood a foot above the floor.

Mrs. Wilde again: “Right, that's it! From now on I'm taking a fucking deposit.”

I sit quietly, listening to my own breathing.

“Hey, you out there,” says the voice, just above a whisper. “Are you dead?”

“No.”

“Are you wounded?”

“No.”

She curses.

“It's me, Vincent Ruiz. I'm here to help you.”

A long silence follows.

“Please let me come in. I'm here alone.”

“Stay away. Please go.” I recognize Kirsten's voice, thick with phlegm and fear.

“I can't do that.”

After another long pause: “How's your leg?”

“Half an inch shorter.”

Mrs. Wilde calls up the stairs. “I'm calling the police unless someone pays for my door!”

Sighing heavily, I tell Kirsten, “You can keep the gun if you shoot your landlady.”

Her laugh is cut short by a hacking cough.

“I'm coming in.”

“Then I'll have to shoot you.”

“No, you won't.”

I ease myself up and face the door. “Are you going to unlock it for me?”

After a long wait there are two metallic clicks. Turning the handle, I push the door open.

Heavy drapes are drawn and the bedroom is in semidarkness. The room has high ceilings and mirrors on two walls. A large iron bed occupies the center and Kirsten is marooned amid the covers, with her legs drawn up and the gun resting on her knees. She has cut her hair and dyed it blond. It falls in sweaty ringlets down her forehead.

“I thought you were dead,” she says.

“I could say the same about you.”

She lowers her chin onto the barrel of the gun, staring forlornly into the shadows. The cheap chandelier above her head catches the light leaking from the curtains and the mirrors reflect the same scene, each from a slightly different angle.

I lean against the windowsill letting the curtains sag against my back. I can hear the raindrops hitting the panes of glass.

Kirsten shifts slightly and grimaces in pain. Boxes of painkillers and torn silver foil litter the floor around her bed.

“Can I have a look?”

Without acknowledging me, she raises her shirt high enough to show me the yellowing bandage, crusty with blood and sweat.

“You need to get to a hospital.”

She lowers the shirt but doesn't answer.

“A lot of people are looking for you.”

“And you get the prize.”

“Can I call an ambulance?”

“No.”

“OK, we'll just talk for a while. You want to tell me what happened?”

Kirsten shrugs and lowers the gun, resting it between her thighs. “I saw an opportunity.”

“To play with fire.”

“To make a new life . . .” She doesn't finish the sentence. Dampening her lips, she makes a silent decision and starts again. “It was almost a joke at first; one of those ‘what if' ideas that you toss around among yourselves and laugh about. Ray was good at the technical side. He used to work in the sewers. I kept an eye on the little details. At first I thought Rachel might even play along. We could set the whole thing up and she'd finally get what she deserved from her family or her ex-husband. She was owed.”

“She wouldn't play along?”

“I didn't ask. I knew the answer.”

I look around the room. The wallpaper has a honeycomb design and within each octagon is the outline of a naked woman in a different sexual pose.

“What happened to Mickey?”

Kirsten doesn't seem to hear me. She's telling the story in her own time.

“We would have been fine, you know, if it hadn't been for Gerry Brandt. Mickey would have made it home. Ray would still be alive. Gerry should never have let her go . . . not alone. He was supposed to take her home.”

“I don't understand. What are you talking about?”

A painful smile steals across her face but doesn't part her lips. “Poor Inspector, you haven't worked it out yet, have you?”

The truth grows in me like a tumor with the cells doubling and dividing, invading the empty spaces and the gaps in my memory. Gerry Brandt said he let her go. They were his last words.

“We only had her for a few days,” says Kirsten, gnawing at a fingernail. “Then he paid the ransom.”

“What ransom?”

“The first one.”

“What do you mean, a first ransom?”

“We were never going to hurt her. Once we got the ransom, we told Gerry to take her home. He was supposed to drop her at the end of her street but he panicked and left her at an Underground station. The fucking idiot! He was always a loose cannon. Right from the first day he jeopardized everything. He was supposed to be looking after Mickey but he couldn't resist going back to Randolph Avenue to see the TV crews and police.

“We would never have included him except we needed someone to look after Mickey who she couldn't identify. Like I said, we were always going to let her go. She told Gerry she knew the way home. She said she'd change trains at Piccadilly Circus and catch the Bakerloo line.”

This information seeps into my stomach and joins forces with the tepid nausea. My mind is tallying the details. Mr. and Mrs. Bird saw Mickey at Leicester Square. It's one stop from Piccadilly Circus.

“But if you let her go, what happened?”

Her misery is complete. “Howard Wavell!”

I don't understand.

“Howard happened,” she says again. “Mickey made it home but she ran into Howard.”

God, no! Surely not! It was a Wednesday night. Rachel wasn't home. She was on News at Ten making another appeal. I remember watching her on TV at the station. They used footage of the press conference earlier in the day.

“I tell you we didn't mean to hurt her. We let her go. Then you found her bloodstained towel and arrested Howard. I wanted to die.”

An image presents itself. I picture a small, terrified child with a fear of being outside, crossing a city alone. She almost made it. Only steps away—not even eighty-five of them. Howard found her on the front steps.

My legs go weak and I struggle to stand. It's as though my insides have become liquid and want to flood out, throbbing and glistening on the floor. My God, what have I done? I couldn't have been more wrong. Ali, Rachel, Mickey—I let them all down.