by Bronwen John
“Fait accompli,” Chris Adams said, pausing in his walk. “It’s a great turn of phrase; it means a thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it. Esther Crook is well enough in Norway; there is no trace of her arriving in the UK and joining the cruise ship as you claim.” He looked at Innocent. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Kid hides in Norway from you and America because of all those tales that he spun to you about her mother being the reason for your wife’s death. Tells you on multiple occasions that she’s as much a victim as you. He pays off the kid to buy a painting that is a forgery, kid turns up dead and you’re caught… great tale.”
“You’ve got to admire the criminal act. Makes you wonder who the real con artist is!” Holmes tried to step back as Innocent lunged for him. “And you got that kid killed! A poor sixteen-year-old! Spinning…”
“Now, now, Mr Innocent, it won’t do.” Christopher Adams grabbed his hands and offered a smirk. “I want you in the USA, not the UK… I might be back for you, Holmes.”
Holmes looked around at his former friends and quietly prayed that Adams would be true to his word, and wished he could join those he had thought to be Esther Crook and Azeri in the mortuary. He was just resigning himself to this thought when his phone received a text. He looked down at it and broke into a feral grin at the one word. Laudanum.
“Paulsen!” he snapped, the man coming quickly to his side. “Get hold of the morgue. Tell them I want a blood check on those two.”
“Boss, that’s the coppers’ job,” said Paulsen.
“Well, get them to go with you; we’re on a timescale,” Holmes said. “I got a feeling, in the words of Ezra, that Esther Crook has been watching too much of The Sting.”
“I can’t believe it’s your last night, Bart.”
The younger porter flushed. Nicholas Russell looked at him. The pay was terrible but the young man had proved to be a good gurney-pusher for the mortuary.
Apart from one clerical error on the part of Brixton Mortuary, where two Jane Does’ bodies had ended up going missing on their watch this morning, Bartholomew ‘Bart’ Proulx had done a wonderful job in Russell’s opinion. Might’ve been able to work his way up to transporting living people, the way he was going.
“Better hours, better company… not that yours is bad,” Proulx hastened to add.
“I don’t take offence,” Russell chuckled. “Any plans?”
“Apart from to lock up tonight, not really.” Proulx grinned. “Say, why don’t you go on ahead of me? Get a few pints in?”
Russell nodded. It was against protocol for one person to leave, but the kid was trustworthy. “Sure. Got two kids in there need to be put away.”
“Don’t worry. Are they young?”
“Yeah. Shame. Looks like murder, more than likely, or pushed into suicide… heard some cops talking upstairs. They’re taking a pool on the boss that they reckon sold them out. They think he’ll be dead within two months definitely.”
“Ah, it’s a tragedy for the poor kids.”
“True… any pint in particular?”
“Nah, any will do.”
Russell watched Proulx walk into the mortuary and sigh heavily. Perhaps it was better that the boy was out of this job. It’d seem that it had affected him more than Russell had thought.
If Esther Crook had been living, she would’ve told Ash how, at the beginning of the classic movie Sunset Boulevard, the scene where William Holden is lying face down in the pool had had to be shot at the last minute due to poor test audience reactions. Holden’s narration suited the scene better.
She would’ve gone on to explain how the scene was supposed to open in Los Angeles Morgue, where three dozen corpses were having a discussion about how they died, which both opened the film and closed it. Not the famous maddened gaze, but the very narrator being wheeled away as a nobody after telling his story.
Ash, if living, would’ve remarked on the situation with a laugh, as in the London Morgue there were only four bodies; two carefully stored and dressed in clothes that didn’t belong to them. If they could’ve spoken, they would’ve thanked their new friends for the duds, then queried the reasons behind them and listened in fascination to Esther’s explanation.
But this was not a movie. And the sleeping remained deathly asleep.
The Blow-Off
Twenty-Two
Esther gasped for breath, jerked and cursed as she fell halfway off the table. She rubbed her eyes and looked around, half relieved and half disappointed to be alone.
She’d always wondered what it would be like to come back from the dead, as it were, just as she was wheeled in for an autopsy. She had read somewhere that curare numbed you so efficiently that, in the olden days, a few unlucky victims had woken up mid operation. She had to read better books, Esther thought to herself as she surveyed her surroundings.
Ash was on the next table, still unconscious. Esther took a deep breath and slid off the slab, walking towards her clothing that was in a bag at the foot of said slab. Once she had dressed, she walked to the telephone, stretching her still-stiff limbs. She glanced casually around as she dialled the numbers, humming to herself as she waited for her designated contact to pick up.
Caelan’s voice soon rang out. “Yeah?”
“Ready for our pickup. Tell everyone to wait for me.”
“For two?” Caelan asked drily. “Or has she clocked you and stormed off yet?”
“Not even up.” Esther heard a quick intake of air and a choking cough behind her. “Never mind; antidote has finally kicked in. Make it fast.”
“See you soon.”
“No need… I figure the kid wants to say goodbye,” Esther said, rubbing the mark of her scar. “You get out. Leave the appointments in with one of the guys. I’ll track it down.”
“Sure thing. See you soon, sis.”
Esther offered a similar greeting before watching as Ash began to truly rouse. She smirked as she watched Ash’s panic turn to confusion, then alarm, then calculation.
“Welcome back.”
“Est. What…?” Ash looked around the room, then down at her own naked body. She shook her head. “Never mind, I get the ‘what’. How?”
“Nice little drug I know. Curare. Once used for anaesthesia but produces enough of an effect to knock us out… good old plastics.” Esther tugged at a fleshy piece of neck and pulled it off, smiling at Ash’s yelp of distress. “Don’t worry, it’s a trick. Hides the slightest of pulses that curare still lets you have; if you give a tug to the right of your neck you’ll get it off you. Right, now, let’s just say we’re good and dead. There are two unfortunate souls that went missing from Brixton Mortuary that suit our needs.” She threw the bag at Ash. “Now, if you can learn a thing or two more, we might just have a bright future ahead of us. A really long one. You interested?”
Ash’s wicked grin was enough of an answer.
There weren’t many people in the airplane hangar when they arrived in Denver via a small light aircraft. Of course, they had been the only passengers. But there’d been little conversation, despite the close quarters, due to Esther’s focus on finishing up several loose ends of the plan when they’d stopped off in Oslo for exactly three days. She’d been very busy.
Esther had needed to make sure all bases were covered, visiting the French Embassy to confirm her identity and that she was safe. Some ridiculous notion that she was Darnell Voleur when her passport quite clearly showed that she had been in Norway since the tail end of the previous year, and now was heading to America for her wedding and to see her family before finishing her degree.
Ash was travelling with her, under her own name once more. Safe and sound, with little need for anything else. Esther had taken the opportunity to teach her Four Corners, and later on President’s Cabinet, which Ash had witnessed
her playing. Once she had shown her the basics, she’d left the precious cards in her friend’s hands, then began to read over some documents that she had brought with her.
The two ran through the hangar, Ash glancing at Esther. How they had gotten here, she was convinced, was with steam under her. Eleanor was up ahead, waving, with what looked to be Caelan and Anton.
“You managed to get him here?” she asked.
Esther flashed a grin. “Isn’t that the way all good films end?” She spun on her heel. “With the lovable rogue walking off into the distance?”
“Ash!”
Esther looked behind her at the same time as Ash. Dee. She looked healthy. Happy and healthy.
“Dee!”
Dee laughed as Ash ran forward to catch her foster sister in a tight hug, the two sharing tears and kisses on the cheek. Eleanor joined Esther for a handshake, before giving her a bear hug.
“How was the flight?” Eleanor laughed. “Less than your usual five-star service?”
“Private and surprisingly quiet. Everyone get off okay?” Esther asked.
“Yeah, love the ranch… pity about the agents wafting about. They banned Anton from leaving when they saw he was reading a book on Monet.”
“I hope he didn’t take my wedding joke seriously,” Esther said, grinning roguishly.
Ash looked up from her hug. Esther looked at ease, like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, though this was soon ruined by Anton charging over and heaving her up off the floor.
“Anton!”
He laughed and planted a kiss on her lips. “You are the triumph of the world, my love!”
“Get your thieving Russian hands off of my girl!” Chris Adams had approached, as silent and deadly as a panther. Esther merely threw an amused look in his direction, though Anton dropped her. “That was a damn dangerous trick, Est.”
“It was. How was your flight?” she asked politely.
“You know the damned man complained the entire time.”
“Pernickety,” Esther said, with almost hearty affection.
“Probably wanted to smoke, too,” Caelan agreed, the two siblings sharing a hug. “Nice death?”
“Pity about waking up; you must show me how you do your version. It’s utterly fascinating,” Esther said, as Chris growled a warning. “Mind, I give Holmes all of a month before he either sells out or gets killed. I have no care which.”
“How’d you mean?”
“Death is easy. It’ll be a madman who’ll get off on lighter charges… has he?”
“His wife has already agreed to show the brothels in the UK for a lighter charge.” Chris flashed an insincere grin. “Seems she didn’t realise she was exchanging one sentence for a worse one.”
“Any news on Holmes?” Esther asked, although there was renewed tension around her eyes at the sombre look on Chris’s face. “It wasn’t enough, was it?”
“No. The man is more slippery than an eel. He broke it down to his wife buying goods, and until she can prove that then it’s not of much use. He managed to correctly guess that the bodies in the morgue weren’t yours as they hadn’t been filled with the drugs that would’ve still been there if they were you two. Even thought, wrongly, that it was laudanum. I had to release Innocent.”
Esther shot him a betrayed look.
“Est. You’ve done more than your fair share.” Chris placed his hands on her shoulders. “You can let it go.”
“Not until the fat lady sings.” Esther’s voice was a guttural growl of warning as she looked at Ash. “I promised Ash I wasn’t above working at his level… but I most certainly won’t work below.”
“You didn’t trust me?”
“I don’t trust my own shadow, and besides, I told you. I knew what was going on.”
Ash frowned and continued to look into the distance over the rugged landscape of the Colorado ranch. The Adams Ranch was 525 acres of spectacularly remote landscape surrounded by farmland. In the distance, horses grazed, and from the bunkhouse she could hear the whoops of Vin and the others. Esther was quiet, reading through an overlarge book, while Anton lay half in her lap and half out. Caelan and Eleanor were bickering about their movie selections.
It turned out that Chris Adams lived a two-hour commute from Denver, in his ‘proper’ home with his wife Keri, two sons and one adoptive daughter, with horses on the pastures. It made an ideal hiding spot for Dee, who’d given evidence. It was also a second home for the twins and where they had spent their last years of childhood, and where Esther had touched base with her adoptive family to keep track of her mischief.
So far, though, Esther was polite, quiet and busy playing cards. She occasionally helped with the horses, or fiddled with a jeep. An ongoing job, according to the ecstatic Vin, who enjoyed listening to her curse in French. Sometimes she went on long, solitary walks, returning at dusk, looking exhausted but with a calmer air around her. When Chris drove in, she generally went into Denver with him and looked irritated when Ash asked to join them.
It was about the only time since the argument in the airport that Esther had seemed annoyed. That could’ve been because Chris had basically manhandled her back into the car with a torrent of warnings about what he would do if he caught her going on the con-artist game again. Esther had remained quiet and promised not to try anything until Chris and his team – which, she discovered now, included Vin, Buck and Wyatt, as well as three other individuals, one of whom was her own father – had done what they needed to do first.
“Dee said you did well in your GCSEs?” Eleanor said to Ash, looking up from waving The Brides of Dracula in Caelan’s face.
“Any plans to go back to college?” Esther asked, evidently changing the subject.
Ash scowled at her, and Esther shook her head in amusement.
“I take it that’s a no?”
“Not sure.”
“Good… I have an opening?”
“New crew?” Ash asked politely.
“Semi-crew. The three letters that I so adore,” Eleanor said, as Caelan coughed. “Oh, hush… they want an interdepartmental group.”
“Basically, a con-artist group who work with those agencies but not for them officially. An independent espionage agency, as it were.” Esther smirked. “You know, we get to select our own missions, get paid handsomely and, if we can, make a side profit.”
“So, kind of like Robin Hood?”
“We just get to err on the wrong side of caution,” Eleanor finished. “Now, we seem to have done pretty good on a small scale, but we figure a small-time operator like yourself still needs guiding hands.”
“And we’re willing to teach,” Caelan agreed, leaning on the wall nearest to them. Anton joined him, and they shared a grin. “It’s got to be kind of boring to be totally on the straight and narrow.”
“It is. Fingers have been itching,” chuckled Eleanor.
“Feels all kinds of wrong,” Anton said, rubbing the back of his neck. “But this job does offer a kind of freedom… Est, El, what do you think?”
“I don’t know – this whole business of being crooks but on the straight and narrow…” Eleanor said, scratching her chin. “It raises a whole bundle of questions about what kind of jobs we can get… let alone what fun we can have any more?”
“Less fun than committing them?” Esther asked, half-agreeing with her best friend.
“But we didn’t commit any crimes,” Caelan joked, giving Anton a nudge with the edge of his knee. “And I know it seems overly complicated… in fact, downright wrong.”
“Even if you know someone’s guilty, it hardly gets you anywhere,” Esther said, deciding to argue the case that an ATF agent had put to her when her father had pulled her to one side. “You know the old adage?”
“‘There’s no honour among thieves’?” Eleanor said, smirking at the young woma
n.
“No, not that one. Although I suppose it applies well enough,” Esther said thoughtfully. “‘Set thieves to catch thieves.’ We get the profit. We get the fun. After all, not every criminal is merely an amateur with good taste and modest desires.”
“Well, right now I want to make sure that Vin doesn’t get my burger from the grill,” Caelan said, standing.
Ash considered. It promised everything. A legitimacy that would satisfy Dee, and she had no doubt that, if it involved Esther, she’d make sure there’d be some sort of education involved. The woman who, before she’d left the US, had been studying for a degree in law, ironically enough.
She glanced at Esther, her eyes narrowing as she saw her setting up the cards again. Solitaire. Esther threw her a quick smile before returning to her game.
“I don’t see why we’re even bothering with movie night, Est,” said Anton, eyes still closed as she swatted him away with a book lying to one side of her. “You’ve got those damned cards out again.”
“If it helps me sleep, I’ll take anything.”
“Even if the night air gives you pneumonia?” mocked Ash. Then a sudden realisation washed over her as she looked at the two, a memory slipping through her mind.
It’s just static. Normally plan cons. Play cards or watch a movie.
Esther wasn’t done.
The distant crowing of cockerels ran through Esther Crook’s mind, replacing the diminishing static. While it had once been an irritant, it now proved to be disconcerting in its absence. Yet, as if to prove that the universe can occasionally be kind, the rest of the house remained innocuously asleep, allowing the con artist to sit back and consider her actions.
The dawn was just beginning to break, and Esther looked yearningly over the mountains. She longed for the day when her name would no longer be the stuff of legend… but while Holmes remained, those days would never be.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
She looked up sharply to see Chris standing there, arms folded across his chest.
