How do you know where his house is?
“We’re lucky I’m more observant than you. Trust me, the address is right inside my little head.” She taps my head. “Oops. Your little head.”
You shouldn’t have hung up on Storm, I complain. I wasn’t done talking to him.
“Sorry about that,” she says. “But you were spilling our business. Let him go after his suspect and we’ll go after ours.”
He said he already has the murderer, I mutter.
“Pssht,” she scoffs. “If you’re going to give up at the last hurdle, then it’s just as well I’m taking charge.”
I never said I was going to give up, I snap.
“Excellent. So we both want justice for Raif and Lynesse, and we’re both agreed I should do this next part?”
I’m not fully happy with this arrangement. And yet I know that without her I wouldn’t have gotten this far. She knows she has me in a tough spot.
“Ooh, look who’s coming our way,” she murmurs.
Smithers is stalking towards us, a greasy grin on his face. It is like he thinks he owns me and is coming to claim his prize. I grimace, but she keeps a smile pasted on my face.
Fine, I mutter resentfully. But please don’t kiss him or anything, or I’ll barf.
She struts towards Smithers with that smile on her face. As he gets close, Smithers extends his arms for her to walk into. The thought of dancing with him makes me feel sick. He will probably try to feel me up.
She puts out my arm as if to take hold of his hand, but as she reaches him, she shoves her palm smack into his chest. The impact makes Smithers fall over. She doesn’t pause to check if he is okay. She keeps on walking.
I am aghast. I’ve no love for Smithers but I hadn’t expected that. I don’t know whether to laugh or to tell her off.
“Just thank me,” she says out loud, not caring that people nearby are looking at her. At me. They saw what she did. None of them care enough to confront her about it.
Her eyes, my eyes, are fixed across the room, where Princess Caroline is holding court talking to the diva singer who has just arrived. She is proudly displaying Xander on her arm, as if he is a trophy. The diva is admiring him appropriately, batting her eyelashes, and doing her best not to flirt. Xander has that effect on women.
“You’ll love this,” says the little voice.
Please don’t do anything to make a scene, I beg her. If you touch Caroline, her bodyguards will arrest us on the spot. She’s a princess. It’s probably treasonous. I don’t want to go to jail.
“Relax,” she says, and as she approaches Caroline she calls out loudly, “Hello Caro!”
Caroline’s head turns. When she sees it is me she sneers.
“Caro is right isn’t it?” says the little voice. “It’s what your friends call you? I bet it’s what you made them call you in your teenage years thinking it sounded cool, as if you were anything but a horse-mouthed sloany-pony leeching off the nation’s taxes since her birth.”
Caroline’s mouth drops open, as does the pop diva’s.
The little voice giggles. “Only kidding! “she says brightly. “So anyway, what were you saying about education earlier? That I should give your fiancé a lesson on the dance floor? How about it Xander?”
Xander looks amused, though he doesn’t accept my outstretched hand. Princess Caroline clings firmly to his arm. “We think not,” she says stiffly.
“No dance lesson? I’m so disappointed. How about a little something for good luck then? On the occasion of your forthcoming marriage. You need it, because it seems to me your marriage is never coming.”
She hooks my arm around Xander’s neck and drags his mouth down to mine for a kiss. A long kiss. A kiss where she uses my tongue in ways I have never dreamt of. Xander stiffens for only a moment, then he relaxes into it. When she pulls away, he looks mildly stunned. She pats him on the cheek. “Good luck, Xander Daxx. You’ll be needing it.”
Beside him Caroline is gaping at me. “How dare you?” she utters, as the diva suppresses a giggle.
The little voice blows Caroline a kiss. “You’re welcome. Toodle pip.” She struts away.
I can’t believe you did that.
“Believe it, baby,” she says out loud, mortifying me because the bystanders who are goggling at me can clearly hear her. “And don’t pretend you never enjoyed it. He tasted quite nice. You should go for him. I bet he’d love it.”
He’s taken!
“Pfft. They’re never taken. Now where’s that sweet little Benny of yours?”
Oh God. Please don’t kiss Ben. Don’t do that to him.
“Relax. He’s not my type,” she says.
But that doesn’t stop her from flirting with him when she finds him in the kitchens. She croons in his ear, asking him to drive us in one of the catering vans to Raif’s house. “Please Benny. You’re my last resort. I wouldn’t ask if I really didn’t need it.”
“But… But I’m at work,” he objects, looking severely torn between the desire to help me and the fear of skiving off work.
“It’ll only take twenty minutes,” she begs. “It’s not far. You’ll be back in forty minutes, and this party is so busy that Smithers won’t even notice. Please Benny? Pretty please?”
She opens my eyes wide and flutters my eyelashes. Ben’s shoulders sag. He has reached the conclusion that his heart can’t possibly say no. Once we are in the van, Ben still nervously looking over his shoulder as if convinced that Smithers is following us, she punches the postcode into the sat nav.
Twenty minutes later we pull up outside a row of large terraced houses whose market value is clearly too far out of my budget. Ben peers out of the van window at them. He finally looks a bit suspicious. “You don’t live here, do you?” he asks hesitantly.
She turns around in her seat to face him. “Listen, Benny, if anyone asks you, you didn’t bring me here tonight. Okay?”
Ben’s brows draw together with concern. “What do you mean if anyone asks me?”
She takes hold of his jaw in one hand and squeezes it a little too firmly. “Anyone at all, Benny. Because information is power, so I’m giving you my power. You don’t want to give my power away, do you?”
“Er, no, Of course not. But—”
“Wonderful,” she trills patting him on the cheek, before opening the door and climbing out. She ushers him away. “See you later Benny. Off you go now. And remember…” She holds her finger up to my lips. “Shhh!”
Ben looks baffled, but his anxiety about getting back to work before anyone notices that he is gone wins. He drives away.
There was no need to be so condescending to him, I complain.
“The less he knows, the better for him.”
She turns to contemplate the house. All of the windows are dark. Clearly nobody is inside.
How are you planning to get in? I ask. Did you happen to magically find his house keys in his office as well?
“Nope. Don’t need a key. Just need my wits.”
She marches jauntily around the side of the house and easily climbs over the gate that leads into the back garden. No skulking for her. She doesn’t even seem to care that people might be seeing us.
She whistles as she walks up to the back door, which has police tape on it. She opens my bag and takes out a pair of rubber gloves that I can’t remember packing. She pulls them on. She turns my body sideways towards the door and bends my elbow towards it.
Realising what she is going to do, I urgently hiss, But what if there’s an alarm?
“Unlikely,” she says. “The police will have had the alarm company switch it off.”
How do you know that?
“Experience.”
What’s that supposed to mean?
She shrugs, not bothering to answer. She smashes my elbow into the glass pane of the rear door. The glass breaks. It doesn’t even hurt. Then she pulls the end of my jacket sleeve over my hand, and reaches through the hole in the broken glass to the lock.
The key is in it.
“People are so stupid,” she says, turning the key to unlock the door.
She walks into the house, locks the door behind us, and then strolls through the kitchen into a hallway, and up the stairs. Here she opens all the doors one by one.
She does not switch on the lights, seeming to be okay with the minute amount of light coming in through the windows. She finds a bedroom, a bathroom, another bedroom, a study, and then finally the smallest bedroom, clearly a guest bedroom. She goes inside, shuts the door, flings herself onto the bed, and lies back with her hands behind her head.
She lets out a leisurely sigh.
Shouldn’t we be hiding? I hiss at her.
“Maybe later,” she says.
But shouldn’t we be looking for the key? Raif said he had it. We can give it to that poor girl so she can unlock that awful collar and go live her new life. Imagine how scared she is. If the fae haven’t found her already that is.
“Maybe later,” she says again.
We should look for clues to her location. How else are we going to find her?
“Are you going to be quiet, or what? I need to listen.”
I go quiet, trying to enjoy lying back in this bed, trying to relax, wondering what the hell is going to come next. Every time I hear car drive by outside the window, its headlights briefly lighting up the room, I tense up. She does not. She is perfectly at ease. I’m surprised she’s not humming to herself.
What feels like an hour ticks by. Literally ticks. I can hear the second hand of the clock on the wall moving. Its sound winds me slowly like a spring, filling me with tension.
Eventually I can’t stand it any longer. What if she is not coming? I say. What if it was all for nothing?
“She’s coming,” says the little voice. “She is definitely coming.”
Fifteen minutes later she is proved right. A car drives down the street, but instead of passing, it parks up somewhere nearby.
“Told you so,” she says.
Chapter 24
DIANA
We hear the car’s door slam shut. The little voice does not get up to look out of the window like I would have. She lies calmly on the bed, waiting.
In the darkness and the silence, it is easy to hear the key being inserted into the lock of the front door. Beatrice Grictor has a key to this house. Or at least I hope it is Beatrice Grictor.
The front door opens and then quietly shuts. Then someone walks into the house, and climbs up the stairs, and goes into the room opposite the one that I am in, the room which is Raif’s study. The little voice doesn’t even twitch. She lays utterly still on the bed, listening.
We can hear the person moving around in there. Then a scraping noise against the wall that I can’t quite identify, and then small taps and shuffles, like she is searching, moving small objects aside. I hear a voice mumble something, a voice which sounds like Beatrice Grictor’s. And then louder and more frustrated, “Where is it?”
The search continues. The sound of things being shoved aside more angrily and carelessly now. The sound of books being tossed off shelves. The desk squeaking as it is moved, possibly to check behind it. All the while Beatrice mumbles, and finally there is an angry crash, and a hysterical cry of, “Where is it!”
And then quiet. I imagine Beatrice scrutinizing the room, trying to figure out where the key that she wants so badly is. The sound of searching commences again.
The little voice gets up from the bed, opens the door and walks to the open doorway of the office. The light is on inside. I am clearly visible, just standing there.
Even so, Beatrice does not notice. She is on her knees, picking up books one by one to rifle through the pages and then tossing them aside.
The room is in disarray, the contents of the shelves now on the floor, the desk and chair askew. On the floor a large mirror is propped a up, leaning against a wall. Above it, on the spot where it had hung, is a hidden wall safe, now revealed. Its door is open.
Beatrice clearly had the combination to it. I wonder how she got it.
The little voice clears my throat, and Beatrice’s head jerks up. She twists around towards us. When she sees that it is me, she looks almost relieved. She gets to her feet.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“I hope you don’t mind,” the little voice says. “I was so eager to begin the search that I persuaded Storm to lend me a house key. But I’m surprised to find you here. I thought you were an intruder there for a minute.”
She glances at my hand, looking for a phone. The little voice holds my hand up, showing her it is empty. “Oh, I never called anyone. I heard you talking so I realized it was only you. But what are you doing here?”
“Same as you,” she says. “I was so intrigued that I couldn’t resist beginning the search already.”
“I’ll help. I’m pretty good at this stuff.”
Beatrice watches me as I pick carefully through the things that she has discarded from the wall safe. The little voice sees it the same instant I do. It looks like a circular pendant that someone could wear on a necklace. It is made from a piece of smooth silver, and when the little voice picks it up it feels as comforting and heavy as a flat stone.
On both sides are those etchings, engraved sigils that look remarkably like the ones on the Grey Queen’s symbol, but on closer inspection the pattern is different. It looks like an ordinary thing, to have cost so much.
“I think this is what you’re looking for,” the little voice says.
Beatrice Grictor had stayed where she was, watching us. She takes a step closer to me now and scowls at the silver pendant I have picked up.
“You said a key. The key to a safe deposit box.”
“But this is a key. You recognize it, don’t you?”
“It’s the key to a water sprite’s collar. It’s useless.”
“Not to the water sprite it belongs to.”
“What do I care about a water sprite?”
“True. And anyway, you’re not really after a key, are you? What you want is the money.” My hand holds up the silver disc. “This is the money. Doesn’t look like much does it?”
“What are you talking about?” she says through gritted teeth. She is looking at the object in my hand as if it is a piece of rubbish.
“All the money that Raif embezzled from your charity, and that he got when he sold your business properties without your permission.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Sort of. He used all of that money, millions, to buy this thing.” The little voice tosses it. It spins end-over-end in the air like a coin and then lands back in my hand.
“Is this some sort of trick?” Beatrice demands. “Why would he do that?”
“Because this key belongs to a special water sprite, one who apparently is the property of the Grey Queen.”
Beatrice scoffs in her little breathy voice. “The Grey Queen isn’t real.”
“I have it on good authority that she is.”
“Raif would never spend that much money on one key. Why save one sprite, when he could save thousands? Raif was all about saving the world. Otherworld, to be specific.”
“That changed after he met his beloved Zarina.”
“Zarina? God, men just can’t keep it in their pants.” Then she shakes her head. “No, I don’t believe it. Raif would never give it all up for one water sprite.”
“Not even his own daughter?”
Her eyes open wide, and then she gives a bitter little laugh. It is as if she finally understands. “The bastard!” she whispers. “He thought he could steal from me just so he could have the family he always wanted.”
She holds out her hand. “Give me the key.”
“Why? It’s not worth a single penny to anyone but Zarina. It’s not like you can sell it to get the money back.”
Realising this is true, she drops her hand.
“How did you know it was me?” she asks, her voice hard now, the sweet breat
hy tone gone.
“Because you lied. You said you didn’t care about a safe deposit key, and yet here you are tearing this place apart for it.”
She shrugs. “Raif gave me a key to his house. I came because I lost one of my credit cards here. I was looking for it. I’m sure the Agency will understand.”
“Nice try,” says the little voice. “But Storm’s going to find it suspicious that you never told him you were married to the murderous Dr Carrington.”
Copycat Killer Page 21
