Emma nodded.
“Under ordinary circumstances, number one on the list would be the husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or partner,” Nightshade said. “The investigation should work its way out from those.”
Emma looked at her. “I can’t imagine for a second that my dad wanted his pregnant fiancée dead.”
“Agreed. Considering Sophie could just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the killer was only after the Droeshout casket, this muddies the water.” Nightshade sighed. “Which brings us back to Ruby and Martin. Any word from your mother?”
Emma checked her phone and shook her head. “We know that Mum’s the only one with the means to open the vault. Are you saying she’s a suspect too?”
Nightshade smiled. “Killing someone so dear to your ex-husband under your own roof is not only reckless, but really dumb. Your mother is far from stupid.” She scratched her head. “I think we can rule out both your parents for now, but they’re the only ones. Martin and Ruby are at the top of the list. Everyone else is under equal suspicion. I believe this was an inside job.”
“You think it could be someone in either family?” Emma asked.
“It would appear the Greco and Hernandez clans have a lot of overlap, despite your parents’ best efforts to separate them in the divorce.” Nightshade puffed out air. “That overlap results in resentment and competition, no matter how thorough of a job they did keeping the peace.”
Emma racked her brains. She considered each person one by one and tried to figure out a culprit with a powerful motive, but drew a blank. She couldn’t believe her Uncle Martin would be involved. Ruby she knew very little about, but someone had got both the basement codes. Did Uncle Martin tell her his code? Emma doubted it. Still doesn’t explain how they accessed the vault without Mum. And why did the robber kill Sophie? Why not just tie her up?
“At the very least,” Nightshade continued, as though reading Emma’s mind, “a person on the inside sold information to an interested party. They knew of the casket and how to get at it.” She took a breath. “Now let’s discuss what else we know.”
As they headed across Waterloo Bridge, Emma gauged they were about ten minutes away, and would arrive at their destination a little before midday. “We know someone broke into the warehouse by hiding inside the statue.”
“Right,” Nightshade said. “They killed Sophie, accessed the vault by whatever means, and stole the Droeshout casket.”
“The power went out,” Emma added. “The killer used that plug gadget and switched off the cameras so they could get away unseen.”
“A reasonable assumption.” Nightshade inclined her head. “Even though the cameras were down, why didn’t Jacob see the guy leave the warehouse with the casket under his arm? Why didn’t he hear a gunshot?”
Emma’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. Is that why you think he’s in on it?”
“I’m keeping an open mind.” Nightshade ran a hand through her hair and teased out a few tangled strands. “We mustn’t forget about the wireless camera on the shelf.”
“The killer was watching us,” Emma said. “But why? Or was the camera there to check when the coast was clear? So they knew when it was time to climb out of the statue? He just forgot to take it with him when he was done.”
“Another valid assumption,” Nightshade said. “The perpetrator may have intended to stay hidden in the statue a while longer, but Sophie, being an expert in Chinese antiquities, spotted the warrior was fake and was about to sound the alarm.”
Emma frowned. “Still doesn’t explain why Jacob didn’t hear a gunshot.”
Nightshade nodded. “A suppressor isn’t out of the question. Would reduce the sound to a very loud crack. One that I would also assume Jacob could still hear from his hut. Maybe not realise it was a gunshot, but even so . . .”
Emma raised her eyebrows. “Why didn’t he admit that? Why didn’t Jacob say he heard something and just dismissed it?”
If Jacob was totally innocent, he would have said he’d heard something.
“I believe we’ll find the answers in due course,” Nightshade said. “Check the tracker is working.”
Emma pulled the tracked phone from her pocket and opened the app. Sure enough, red dots moved across London, while hers, in the middle, pulsated green. Neil had labelled each one with the person’s name. Emma leaned forward. “Mac?”
He turned around in the passenger seat.
She held up the phone. “Everyone seems to be on here except Mum.”
He studied the display and looked at Neil.
“She refused to take a phone.” Neil glanced in the rearview mirror. “Your mum said there was no point tracking her because she’d be at home for the rest of the day.”
Emma sat back and shook her head. “She’s never liked people telling her what to do.”
Nightshade smiled. “A woman after my own heart.”
A few minutes later, Neil pulled over at St Martin’s Place, next to the Edith Cavell memorial, an impressive forty-foot sculpture dedicated to a nurse who’d saved countless lives during World War I.
Emma, Nightshade and Mac jumped out and hurried across the main road, dodging traffic, and ignoring beeping horns as they headed toward the National Portrait Gallery.
The entrance stood on the sweeping curve of the road, faced in Portland stone. A carved horse-and-lion coat of arms stood above the door, with the three busts of the founders above, all topped with a portico.
Nightshade stopped short and Emma looked back at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Murder-suicide,” Nightshade mumbled. “East wing.”
Mac turned to her. “What murder?”
Emma went back to Nightshade. “We should keep moving.”
“A murder-suicide took place here in the 1900s,” Nightshade said, her eyes unfocused. “A wealthy businessman shot his wife in the back of the head, then killed himself.” She looked between Emma, Mac, and the building.
“I’ll go in alone.” Mac glanced back at the car. “I’ll get my gun.”
Nightshade shook herself and grinned. “No need. Just thought I’d point it out.” She marched up the steps and through the doors.
Emma hesitated, then hurried in with Mac.
Security personnel checked bags and scanned visitors, while Nightshade grew more impatient by the second.
Once inside the lobby properly, Emma checked the maps app on her phone. They were close. “This way.”
The three of them hurried through the gallery, striding over the parquet flooring, room after room lined with portraits, following the coordinates. Left, right, left again . . .
Emma stopped in a blue-walled room. “We’re here.” Her gaze fell on a portrait with a tortoiseshell frame—a dark image of a man with a bald head and bushy black hair jutting from the sides. He wore a black top with a large white collar, and a gold earring glistened.
Despite the cracked and discoloured varnish, the painting was the gallery’s most famous: NPG1, more commonly referred to as the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare.
Nightshade stared at the painting too.
Emma held her breath and looked about the room. She half expected a scream or a gunshot, but only tourists sauntered through the gallery, unassuming, unaware.
She faced the painting and frowned. “Why are we here?”
“Shakespeare,” Nightshade said under her breath. “Where’s Sophie’s coded message?”
Emma pulled it from her pocket.
Nightshade waved a hand at the Chandos portrait. “That’s what this means. That’s why we’re here. It’s a puzzle.” Her expression intensified. “I’m going to hazard a guess that the keyword needed to unlock the parchment cypher is Shakespeare.”
18
Emma sat down on a bench in the Portrait Gallery. She used the notepad app on her phone to work on the coded message from the parchment.
Under Nightshade’s supervision, she first typed ‘Shakespeare’ as the keyword,
then reduced it to the letters SHAKEPR, ignoring the repeated ones. Then she added the remaining letters of the alphabet to the end, which gave a result of:
SHAKEPRBCDFGIJLMNOQTUVWXYZ.
“Below each of those, type out the corresponding letters of the alphabet,” Nightshade said.
This gave the result:
SHAKEPRBCDFGIJLMNOQTUVWXYZ
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Working from the parchment’s coded message, I became an M, E remained E, as did T, B turned into H, C into I, and so on.
A couple of minutes later, Emma held her phone up to Nightshade. “You were right.”
It read:
Methinks I see thee now thou art so low
as one dead in the bottom of a tomb
“It’s a quote from Romeo and Juliet,” Nightshade said.
Emma frowned at the portrait of Shakespeare. “What does it mean?”
“A clue.” Nightshade stared at the phone’s screen. “I believe it’s pointing somewhere else. Somewhere local.”
“Why did Sophie have a clue?” Confused, Emma looked around the gallery at the tourists milling about. “A clue to what?” She examined the quote again but couldn’t extract any more meaning. By Nightshade’s puzzled expression, neither could she.
“No one knows London better than Neil,” Mac said. “We could try asking him about a tomb.”
“An excellent suggestion,” Nightshade said.
Emma took one last look around the gallery. Are we being watched? She jumped to her feet. “Let’s go.”
The three of them hurried from the building and raced back across the road toward the Rolls-Royce, its hazard lights flashing.
“Whatever this leads to,” Emma said, “I still don’t see how this will help us catch Sophie’s killer. We’re wasting time.”
“Not at all,” Nightshade said. “The more we understand the players and what they’ve been up to recently, the better we’ll grasp the mystery.”
A clock in the distance chimed twelve.
Emma knocked on the passenger’s-side window of the car. As it rolled down, she leaned in and said, “Neil, is there a tomb near here?”
He pondered the question for a few seconds. “Not a tomb. But there’s Café in the Crypt.” He pointed further down the road to St Martin-in-the-Fields church, an imposing neoclassical building with a facade resembling the Roman Pantheon.
Emma looked back at Nightshade. “Worth a shot?”
Nightshade winked.
Mac leaned through the open window, and grabbed what Emma assumed was his gun from beside the seat and stuffed it under his jacket.
Emma spun around and jogged down the street, passing a coffee shop. She resisted the urge to go in for a double espresso, and headed toward St Martin-in-the-Fields, its tall stone spire pointing to an overcast sky.
Between the buildings sat a glass structure like a giant cookie jar set into the concrete. Red letters above the doorway declared it to be ‘London’s Hidden Café.’
‘Hidden’ was the last word Emma would have used to describe the place.
Inside the jar was an elevator, and a flight of stairs to the left. Despite several signs politely asking people to take the stairs and not use the glass lift, the doors opened and Nightshade walked inside.
Emma gave Mac an apologetic look, followed Nightshade in, and pressed the button for the crypt.
The lift dropped, and Emma watched Mac descend the stairs, never taking his eyes off her, as a gift shop glided into view in the basement.
Emma and Nightshade stepped out of the elevator. Apart from a few people in the shop, the basement was empty. To the left a door stood ajar, with a sign in front that declared the café under refurbishment. No guards. No workers. It was Sunday, after all.
Even so, Emma tensed as unease washed over her.
Mac glanced back at the gift shop, making sure no one was watching, then scanned for CCTV cameras. He slid his hand under his jacket and over his gun. “Wait here.” He slipped through the door.
“I say we follow,” Nightshade whispered in Emma’s ear, and bounced from one foot to another. “We don’t want to miss any more clues.”
Emma hesitated, and then decided Nightshade had a good point, so went in after Mac.
Wall lights, turned low, lit the gloomy interior. A vaulted brick ceiling arched above them, held aloft by stone columns. Embedded into the floor were old headstones, worn down by foot traffic, but most still bore the original names and inscriptions. Several stacks of chairs and tables sat around the crypt, half covered in dust sheets.
Mac had headed left, and at Emma and Nightshade’s scuffing footsteps, he turned and glowered at them. “I told you to stay put.” He continued into the darkness, head cocked to one side.
In the left-hand wall another door stood open, revealing a kitchen lit by a single fluorescent tube. Water poured across the tiles and out the door, darkening nearby tombstones.
Emma, Nightshade and Mac sneaked through, careful not to slip, and stopped dead on the other side.
The kitchen stood empty for the most part, appliances stripped and walls bare, but in the middle of the room sat a metal water tank, eight feet tall and three in diameter. A hose connected it to a tap on the wall, and water sprayed from the valve on the tank.
Mac pulled out his gun and scanned the room while Emma tiptoed to the tap and turned it off.
“What is this?” She circled the tank. Painted dark green over metal rivets, nothing suggested its intended use, or why it dominated the middle of the kitchen. She stopped at a hatch mounted on the side, about a foot square, and reached for the handle.
“Careful.” Mac checked the corners of the room for the millionth time.
“I concur,” Nightshade whispered to Emma. “I advise extreme caution.”
Mac lowered his gun. “How about you don’t open it?”
“It’s fine. You keep an eye out.” With curiosity, not fear, her driving emotion, Emma grabbed the handle. Then a metal label caught her attention and her stomach tightened.
“What’s wrong?” Mac asked.
Emma ran her finger over a triangular logo. “This is one of Dad’s companies.”
The label read:
‘RJG Construction Ltd.’
Emma looked about her with a dark sense of impending doom. “Are they refurbishing this place?”
“Must be a contract,” Mac said.
Emma swung the hatch open. Beyond was a window made from inch-thick glass. She squinted into the dark water. “There’s something in here; I can’t make it out.” A mass floated on the other side of the window.
Emma pulled out her phone and switched on the torch. She held the light up to the glass, and it took a couple of seconds to make sense of the shapes.
She cried out, then scrambled backward, tripped over her own feet, and crashed to the floor.
Mac raised his gun and aimed it at the tank. “What is it? What’s in there?”
Emma’s heart raced, her body shook, and her lips moved but no sound came out.
Nightshade approached the glass and peered inside. When she saw it too, her face fell.
19
Lifeless eyes stared back at Emma from inside the water tank. She wanted to scream, but her throat was so constricted that she could hardly breathe.
The man’s arms were stretched forward, the tips of his fingers torn open from trying to claw his way out. The unmistakable Hernandez family tattoo, a tribal sun, stood in stark contrast against his pale forearm.
Emma’s head swam.
Mac moved beside her. “It can’t be.”
Everything seemed unreal: the room, the world, and Emma’s body. Her body was cold, as though it wasn’t hers—a mere lump of flesh. Detached. Numb.
Mac holstered his gun. “Emma?” When she didn’t respond, he crouched in front of her so that their eyes met. “Emma?”
“Darling?” Nightshade said in a soft tone.
Dazed, Emma first looked at Mac, then
Nightshade. Tears formed as a deep sadness washed over her.
Inside the tank, drowned, was Martin Hernandez: Maria’s twin brother and underboss. Emma’s uncle.
Mac looked about. “We should get out of here.”
Emma clambered to her feet and she staggered around the room as her brain worked through the ramifications.
When Maria found out that Uncle Martin was dead, and inside a water tank owned by one of Richard’s companies, war would follow.
Nightshade looked serious. “It’s my fault.” She squeezed her eyes closed. “I should have seen it coming.”
Emma frowned at her, dazed. “How could you have known?”
“I’m an idiot.” Nightshade stepped back. She shook her head. “Well, not the who, but the clues were right in front of me.” She gazed at the hose connected to the valve, then at the tap on the other end, and slapped her forehead. “If I’d figured it out more quickly, we could have got here before twelve, and saved him.”
“Can’t blame yourself,” Mac said, looking shaken. “You had no way of knowing.”
“I totally blame myself, and so should you.” Nightshade took a juddering breath. “The parchment clue was left for the person who took on the investigation.” Her eyes met Emma’s. “I should have realised the killer planted it inside Sophie’s bag after her death. It stood out so much. I should have also made it our top priority.”
Emma’s eyes widened as her sluggish brain caught up with the implications. She pointed at the tank. “The same person who murdered Sophie did this? Why?”
“We find the motive, we find the killer,” Nightshade said. “What links them? Who would want Sophie and your uncle dead?”
Emma’s eyes glazed over. “I don’t know.”
“Even if you had realised what was about to happen,” Mac said to Nightshade, “we couldn’t have prevented Martin’s death.”
Death in London: A Nightshade Crime Thriller (Emma & Nightshade Mystery Series Book 1) Page 11
