Anne Perry - A Christmas Odyssey

“How the hell do I know? Look, I never dealt in this kind of thing!” He was indignant now. Did Henry really think this was commonplace to him? “What kind of a …”

Henry shook his head. “The question was rhetorical.”

“What?” Squeaky was hurt.

“A question that does not expect an answer,” Henry explained. “I don’t really imagine that you know, any more than I do, what creates this out of people who must once have been … normal.”

“Oh.” Squeaky was relieved. A heavy, stifling weight had been lifted from him.

He was straightening his jacket and beginning to look around him when he saw her. She was standing almost ten feet away from them, leaning slightly backward against one of the pillars that held up the ceiling. It was not her laughter that had caught his attention, or any movement of the man facing her, it was the extraordinary grace of her body. Her face was lifted to look at the man, her profile delicate, her long white throat smoothly curved. Her hair was jet-black and her lips artificially red. She was the only person in the noisy, hysterical room who was absolutely motionless. And yet her very stillness was more alive than any action of the rest of them. It was Sadie. It had to be. Which meant Rosa was dead—or Niccolo.

“Crow!” he hissed urgently. “Crow!”

Henry looked at him, then turned to Crow, touching him on the arm.

Crow swung around, then froze. His eyes widened.

“Go on,” Henry urged. “Now.”

“But she’s …” Crow protested.

“We’ve got no time to waste,” Henry told him. “Do it now, or I’ll have to.”

Crow hesitated.

Squeaky moved behind him and gave him a hard shove in the middle of his back.

Crow shot forward with a yelp and stopped a yard short of Sadie.

She looked at him, smiling with amusement. “That’s original—even inventive.” She looked him up and down, quite openly appraising him.

The young man she had been speaking to snatched Crow’s arm hot-temperedly and said something almost unintelligible to Squeaky, who was watching.

Henry was clearly anxious. He started to intervene.

“No!” Squeaky said sharply. “Leave him!”

Crow gave the young man a dazzling smile, all white teeth and wide-open eyes. Then he kicked him very hard in one shin. The young man howled with anger and surprise. Crow seized Sadie and marched her away to a moderately empty space hard up against the wall.

Henry and Squeaky followed almost on her heels.

“They’re my friends,” Crow explained simply. “We need to talk to you,” he added.

“You’re Sadie?”

She nodded.

Sadie was amused. Crow was unusual-looking—not unattractive, just eccentric. Perhaps that appealed to Sadie more than the typical spoiled and demanding sort of young man who frequented such places. Also, he was sober and did not have the faded, rather pasty look of so many of the other inhabitants of the night world of the West End.

Sadie raised her elegant eyebrows. “Really? About what?”

“About Lucien Wentworth,” Henry replied.

Sadie’s smile froze.

Squeaky moved around to stand closer to her to block her retreat. At this particular moment the dim lighting of the room was an advantage; even the crowding helped. They could hear from the distance cries and moans of all sorts, raw farmyard emotions under the gaudy paint of sophistication.

“He’s … dead,” she said, her voice faltering.

“No, he isn’t, any more than you are,” Squeaky snapped. “It was Niccolo or Rosa who was murdered, and you know that. Maybe both. Lot of blood on the ground. Who was it, Sadie, and why?”

She kept her face toward Henry, as if he were the one most likely to believe her lies. “I don’t know. I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You may not have held the knife,” Henry agreed. “But you sharpened it, and gave it to someone. Who? And why?”

She swallowed. The pallor of her skin was almost ghostly in the subterranean light. Her eyes were brilliant, very wide, with black lashes. There was a feline grace to the way she held her body. Her beauty was strangely disturbing, but there was something ephemeral about it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she said angrily. “If somebody’s dead, it’s nothing to do with me.”

“That’s a clumsy lie,” Henry told her. “You don’t survive here not knowing who’s been murdered, and why. If it was Niccolo, then you’ve lost a lover. If it was Rosa, then it could be you next.”

She stared at him with venom naked in her eyes. “You bastard!” she said between clenched teeth. “You touch me and I’ll make you pay for it in ways you can’t even imagine. You’ll wish someone would put a knife to your throat—quickly!”

“Is that what it was?” Henry asked, his expression barely changing. “Revenge? Discipline for taking something that belonged to you, perhaps?”

She looked harder at his face, and saw in it something she did not recognize. Perhaps it stirred in her a memory of some better time.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” she said, still between her teeth, but more slowly, as if she was now afraid.

“But you know who did, because you led them to it, didn’t you?”

She shook her head and made short, jerky movements of denial with her hands.

“I couldn’t help it! I have to do what he tells me, or … or he won’t give me any more cocaine, and I’ll die.” Something in her hectic eyes brought back to Squeaky’s memory the first brothel he had ever been in. He had been almost six, taken there by his mother, told to start work on cleaning up behind the customers, sweeping, washing, always being polite to people. “They put the bread on your plate,” she had told him. “Don’t you ever forget that, boy.”

There had been a young girl there then, for her first time. He could recall the smell of sweat and blood and fear, no matter how hard he tried to forget it. And he had tried. He had filled his mind with a thousand other things: his own pleasures in women, some of whom he had even liked, victories won over men he hated, good food, good wine, warmth, the touch of silk. But he could still smell that fear sometimes, alone in the middle of the night.

“Then you’ll lead us to him now,” Henry said to Sadie, his voice breaking the spell in Squeaky’s head and forcing him back to the present.

“He won’t help you. Leave him alone.”

Crow moved slightly. Squeaky saw the distress in his face, which was composed of embarrassment, revulsion, and an anger within himself that he could do nothing to control.

“I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with Shadwell,” Crow said deliberately. “You killed Rosa and Niccolo. I don’t know how. Maybe you killed Niccolo first. You could have held him in your arms, and put a knife in his back, then cut his throat. You lured Rosa there, and when she was stunned at what she saw, you used the knife again. Perhaps she bent over Niccolo’s body, maybe weeping. It wouldn’t be hard for you to come at her from behind. One single slice from one ear—”

“I didn’t!” Sadie cried, lunging forward as if to scratch at his face, everything in her changing from the pleading to the attack.

Squeaky grabbed her, pinning her arms to her sides. She struggled, and she had the strength of desperation. He kicked her hard and her legs collapsed under her, pitching her forward.

Henry was startled and profoundly disconcerted. He bent forward to help her up. “I think you had better take me to Shadwell,” he said clearly. “See what he has to say about it.”

She surrendered with startling suddenness, as if all her strength had bled away.

Squeaky knew better than to trust her this time. He stood well back, watching, ready to move quickly if she changed her mind.