The Last Commandment

by Scott Shepherd

  “I know enough to wish that I’d been there.”

  “You were in Scotland. It’s not like you could be in two places at once.”

  Scotland.

  Grant shook his head, dozens of thoughts colliding. “Still . . .”

  Frankel was looking increasingly uncomfortable.

  “This is between the two of you. But I know Rachel really wants things to be the way they were before all that happened.”

  Grant noticed Frankel glancing past him. The commander turned to see his brother and Rachel on their way back with an entire cistern of coffee and pieces of cake.

  “So, what have you two been discussing?” asked Rachel as she placed dessert in front of Frankel and her father.

  “Cop talk, what else?” replied Frankel, mustering up a smile.

  “The two of us were talking about Switzerland,” said Everett as he retook his seat. “We were considering heading over Monday—give ourselves a day to get settled before the New Year festivities. What do you think?”

  At that point, Grant wasn’t thinking about Switzerland.

  For the first time in days, he actually wasn’t even wondering where Monte Ferguson had disappeared to.

  Grant was trying to remember when he’d last been in Scotland when Allison was still alive.

  And what he could have possibly missed on that day.

  30

  Saturday.

  Rachel crumpled up another piece of paper and tossed it across the room at the trash can behind the desk. Swish.

  She was sitting in the armchair by the window in Frankel’s hotel room, trying to get started on her feature piece. The only thing she’d succeeded in doing was making about fifty percent of two dozen crumpled jumpers—not a bad percentage, even for LeBron James, but an exercise in pure futility for her.

  Having fulfilled a promise to her father not to write a story unless the case was over, she had spent a couple of hours trying to find an entry point or angle on the Commandment Killings. But nothing felt right. Either she glorified Prior Silver’s grisly accomplishments, or cast her father and Frankel in an unflattering light because Silver had run them ragged on two continents and then further shamed them by killing himself before they could bring him in.

  A distinct pall had hung over both her and John since leaving her father’s farewell party. Whether it was watching Grant put on a false front for a hundred well-wishers or the toll from being a slave to the stress of Silver’s sickening spree (should she use that alliteration somehow?), the last thing either felt like doing was celebrating. They’d just ordered room service and gone to bed early, so down in the dumps that all they could do was cling to each other until they restlessly fell asleep.

  She glanced at John sitting atop the bed working his iPad, catching up on the case’s endless paperwork. Even with light streaming in from an unseasonably sunny (but cold) wintry day, Rachel could tell John was still troubled, especially when he looked up and gave her a slight smile that disappeared as soon as it formed.

  Suddenly, the room was feeling incredibly cramped.

  “You getting as much done as me?” she asked, nodding at the crumpled papers surrounding the trash can.

  “If that means typing the same statement four times, it’s a resounding yes.”

  “What do you say to getting out of here for a while?”

  “Another resounding yes?”

  “Good answer.”

  Since John hadn’t been in London since his holiday of debauchery with his college buddies two decades ago, Rachel suggested they do whatever he wanted to do but hadn’t gotten around to back in the drunken day.

  They did a mini-Beatles self-tour with the obligatory stop at the Abbey Road crosswalk where some teens took their picture. John convinced a couple of them to help form a quartet with Rachel taking the Lennon lead and Frankel bringing up the Harrison rear. After that, it was off to Savile Row, the London street famous for selling posh men’s suits, specifically building No. 3, the former home of Apple Records where the Fab Four recorded the second half of Let It Be in the basement, then performed a forty-five-minute concert on the roof. John couldn’t get over the fact that that had been their last live performance and it had been broken up by local constables for causing too much noise.

  “If I’d been on duty that day, I’d have let them play till the sun went down.”

  Later, Rachel accompanied him to Baker Street where he was disappointed to discover there was no actual 221B, the address that reputedly belonged to Sherlock Holmes. There was a hotel and museum at a different address (with the 221B shingle on the door) that was set up to recreate Holmes’s flat where he’d lived and conducted his consulting detective business with Dr. John Watson. Rachel was amused to see John soak in each artifact like the Holy Grail.

  “I read all his cases when I was a kid,” he told her. “It’s the main reason I wanted to become a cop.”

  “You do know that Sherlock Holmes was a fictitious character and those were stories, not cases.”

  He bent and nuzzled her ear.

  “Indulge an eight-year-old boy’s fantasy.”

  She gave him a mock sexy look. “Right here?”

  “That’s the thirteen-year-old boy’s fantasy,” he said, nuzzling her other ear. “Maybe we can investigate that later.”

  “Whatever you say, Detective.”

  It was a welcome moment of lightness on a day when their moods were anything but.

  By the time they returned to the hotel, after eating fish and chips in a pub that John swore he’d been drunk in before and a West End play through which they took turns snoozing, Rachel was increasingly convinced something was wrong.

  It wasn’t that she could fault the sex; John had lived up to his Baker Street promise and had delved into, investigated, and brought The Case of the Passionate Lovers to more than a satisfactory conclusion, exactly what one would have expected from a Master Consulting Detective.

  But something had changed.

  She was looking forward to heading to Switzerland more than ever.

  Sunday.

  Rachel had been sitting on the cast-iron bench her father had donated to Highgate Cemetery for thirty minutes by the time he arrived. She hadn’t minded the time alone; it had allowed her to carry on an unspoken conversation with her mother, as this was the first time she’d been here since they had laid her to rest the previous year. Rachel shared the abundance of feelings racing through her brain and heart; the tortuous time apart from her father, their unexpected reunion, the whirlwind courtship with John (she actually said out loud, “I think you’d really like him, Mum”), and, of course, how much she missed her every single day.

  “Sorry, time slipped away,” said Grant as he sat down on the bench beside her with a bouquet of blush-pink roses tucked under his arm.

  “Still looking for Monte Ferguson?”

  “That—and a few other dangling threads.”

  “You’re supposed to be retiring, Dad. Remember?”

  “Old dog, no new tricks.”

  Grant nodded at the two flower bouquets lying atop the gravesite—one was another fresh bouquet of blush-pink roses wrapped in cellophane and a pink ribbon, the other just stems, thorns, and some withered brownish petals.

  “Nice of you to remember,” he told her.

  “How couldn’t I? They were her favorite. I presume the others were yours?”

  “I bring them every Sunday.” He bent down to gather up the dead roses and replace them with the new arrangement. “I missed last week. As you probably remember, we were all a little preoccupied.”

  Rachel thought back to seven days ago. So much had happened, it was almost impossible to keep her head from spinning. That had been the morning they’d arrived back in London to discover Sergeant Hawley’s body. She started to shiver—and not from sitting in a graveyard or the dreary weather.

  “I most certainly do,” she murmured.

  She drew the heavy coat she had been smart enough to pack more
tightly around her. Her father placed a tender arm around her shoulders.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “No, I’m glad we came. Really.”

  She smiled and he let her go. They sat in silence for a few moments.

  “It’s really gorgeous here,” Rachel finally said.

  “It’s where she wanted to be.” Grant looked down the hill toward a building in the distance. “She insisted I come here and make the arrangements. I kept telling her it wasn’t time, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  When he turned back, she could see the mist in his eyes.

  “That was so like your mother—taking care of everyone else but herself.” Grant brought up a hand and squeezed the tears from his eyes. “I will never forget coming here to do what she asked. It suddenly all became so real. I think that was the saddest day of my life.”

  Rachel couldn’t remember her father speaking so openly from his heart. He’d always been the solid rock, keeping everything bottled up. She felt herself choking up inside as well and took his hand. He clasped it gratefully.

  “I’m really glad you came home, Rach.”

  “Me too, Dad.”

  “Maybe when the holidays arrive next year, we can celebrate them properly.”

  “You can come to New York. It’s not like you’ll have the Yard to deal with.”

  “I’d really like that.”

  He gently let go of her hand and shuffled around in his overcoat.

  “But more than anything, I’d love to put all this stuff behind us.”

  He pulled the coat tight to ward off the sudden chill they both felt. But Rachel realized it wasn’t the breeze picking up, it was the shift in the conversation.

  “Dad, we’ve been through this . . .”

  “Hear me out, Rachel.”

  His somber tone left her no choice. After all, he was her father.

  “I know whatever you promised your mother to not tell me happened when I was up in Scotland.”

  Scotland? Her mind started racing. How does he know? Was it something she had said?

  “It was that thing with the broken unicorn and the cut on her arm, wasn’t it?” Grant shook his head. “I knew she wasn’t telling me the whole story about it just being an accident, but there was so much going on with her sudden diagnosis and everything, that I just let it go. But there was something more, wasn’t there?”

  And suddenly she knew.

  John.

  Rachel felt tears of anger and sorrow filling her eyes.

  “He shouldn’t have told you anything!”

  “I don’t think he meant to. If anything, all John was doing was trying to help you,” Grant implored. “Help the two of us.”

  “That still didn’t give him the right to tell you . . .”

  “That doesn’t matter right now!” Grant exclaimed vehemently.

  His words echoed through the empty graveyard. Rachel, bewildered and upset, openly sobbed. When her father resumed speaking, there was a quiet but desperate plea in his voice.

  “Just tell me the rest, Rachel,” he begged. “You know me—I won’t stop until I find out.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “You’re the only thing left in the world that I care about. The Yard’s done and I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself after this. But if there’s one thing the past two weeks have taught me, it’s that my life means absolutely nothing without you in it. Whatever you promised your mother can’t be worse than that.”

  “You don’t know that’s true.”

  He pointed at Allison’s grave. “What I know is if your mother was here with us right now, seeing the wedge this has put between us—she’d want you to tell me.”

  Rachel wiped her eyes dry, then looked from her mother’s final resting place back up at her father.

  “You know that I’m right,” he softly said.

  Rachel closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and finally nodded.

  “How could you go and do that?!”

  “I didn’t mean to!” John shook his head in frustration. “I didn’t even tell him anything!”

  “You told him enough!”

  It was early evening and they were standing on opposite sides of the bed in the Covent Garden hotel room. Rachel had spent the grayest afternoon she could recall, traipsing through London, wondering what she would say to John.

  She had even ducked into a pub for some liquid courage; but all that had done was feed her anger and sadness. A couple of men had offered to buy her a drink, which she had declined—in a not-very-nice-way.

  By the time she returned to the hotel room, she knew John was in a state himself. He had texted her more than a few times and she hadn’t responded, saving it all up for the moment she came through the door.

  And boy, had she let him have it.

  “Your father’s actually the one who brought the whole thing up,” he said. “He asked me if you’d mentioned the promise you’d made to your mother and I figured he knew more than he was letting on.”

  “So, you just betrayed what I told you in confidence?!”

  “All I said was it happened the day he was in Scotland. He acted like he knew that much!”

  “The man’s a cop, John! And a bloody good one! All he needs is one bone and he’ll dig to the center of the earth to find where the rest have been buried.”

  John stepped around the bed and Rachel instinctively backed up toward the window.

  “But I didn’t say anything else. I told him he should talk to you about it.”

  “Well, he certainly did that!”

  Frankel made the mistake of stepping closer toward her. “I’m so sorry, Rachel . . .”

  “Don’t!”

  She pushed him away. Not violently—but enough for him to stand in the middle of the room looking totally helpless.

  “What do you want me to do, Rachel?”

  “I don’t know!” She shook her head. “What I didn’t want was you taking something I told you in total confidence, the only person I ever told, and spilling it to the one person I promised my mother I’d never tell it to.”

  She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself.

  “How did your father take it?”

  “How do you think he took it? He was devastated.” She lowered her eyes. “You should have seen the look on his face when I was telling him. It was like he was Old Yeller and I was the boy with the gun standing over him. Only I didn’t put him out of his misery; I just caused it.”

  “That’s not fair to you, and you know it.”

  “Well, that’s how I feel,” she murmured. She turned her back on him and walked to the window. “I knew something was wrong ever since we left my dad’s party at the Yard. You should have told me you’d said something. At least I might have been prepared . . .”

  “I guess I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “Obviously.” She stared out into the blackest of winter nights.

  “Did he have any idea who the man was who did that to your mother?”

  “He doesn’t have a clue. But now that he’s got nothing to do, I’m sure he’ll obsess over that!”

  “If there’s anything I can do to fix it . . .”

  Rachel turned back around and gave John a look that stopped him in his tracks. He immediately corrected himself.

  “I guess that’s how we got to this spot in the first place,” John mumbled. “I have no idea what to do here.”

  “Neither do I,” Rachel told him. “But I have to be able to trust the person I’m involved in a relationship with.”

  Suddenly she found it impossible to look at him and lowered her gaze.

  “Rachel, wait. Are you taking about . . .?”

  When she looked back up, there was a plea in her eyes.

  “I need some time, John.”

  “But I thought we had something special here.”

  “I thought so too,” Rachel said. “Or I think we do. I just don’t know! Everything has
happened so fast!”

  “Rachel, please don’t do this . . .”

  “Think about it, John. Two weeks ago, we didn’t even know each other! And now we’re what? Living together? A couple trotting all over the globe?”

  “It’s been extraordinary circumstances, I’ll give you that,” said John. “But it’s also been extraordinary! Unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

  “The same’s true for me,” echoed Rachel. “But if it’s really meant to be, time will tell. We’ll both be back in New York soon enough.”

  He stared at her, as if not totally comprehending. “So, you’re saying I should go back home?”

  “Maybe . . .?”

  She barely said it aloud. But the look on his face caused a deep pang in her gut. Somehow in the past two hours, she’d managed to stab the two men she cared about most directly in the heart and only needed a few words to do it.

  Rachel started to gather up her things and place them in her duffle.

  “If that’s what you want,” Frankel finally replied.

  She turned around. “Don’t you get it, John? I don’t know what I want.”

  “So, where are you going?”

  “I really don’t know.” She finished packing. “If I tell you I’m going one place right now, in an hour I’d probably be somewhere else.” She threw the duffle over her shoulder. “The one place I can’t be right now is here .”

  She gave him a small but sad kiss on his cheek, then made sure she got out the hotel door before she broke down sobbing.

  As she stood by the door, Rachel wondered if she’d made a mistake coming there. She knocked anyway.

  “Your father thought you might end up on my doorstep.”

  Everett’s warm and sympathetic smile eased at least one burden for Rachel as she let herself fold into his arms.

  “He called you?”

  “On his way home from the cemetery. He was worried about the way you went running out of there.”

  “Me? What about him? Did he tell you what happened?”

  “Every word,” Everett replied, ushering her inside. “You know your old man can’t keep anything from me.”