by JL Merrow
But then, what if he’d planned this ages ago? He’d been hanging around for a while, she was sure of it. Doing the creepy stalker thing. He was probably the sort of person who didn’t deal well with people—seemed a fair enough guess, from what she’d heard and seen. This was the sort of bloke whose idea of social interaction was stalking people in underground bike sheds.
So where would he go? Somewhere out of town? Tiff’s heart sank. He could be anywhere. But then, did he even have a car? Could he have rented one? Bought one? He must be capable of acting human enough to get a bloody airline ticket, after all. Tiff chewed her lip in concentration. She didn’t know. But somehow she just had this feeling he was closer at hand. He’d been seen on Coe Fen—if he’d been living out in the wilds and he’d wanted to indulge his inner wolf, he’d have stayed out in the country, wouldn’t he? And well, he just seemed like the sort of psycho who’d want to keep as close an eye on Julian as he could.
She hoped.
So. Assume, for the sake of sanity, he was still in town. Where was he living? Not in a hotel, that much was obvious. And she doubted he had any friends in Cambridge—certainly none who’d be willing to give indefinite houseroom to a madman and his kidnap victim. A lone wolf. He’d probably have gone around looking for an empty house—even here, there were abandoned properties, their boarded up windows mocking the poor students who could only find somewhere to live way out past Girton. Derelict houses, investment properties. Squats.
But how did you find out about these places? If you were a wolf, she supposed, you just wandered round until you found a place that didn’t smell inhabited. Or you stayed in a hotel and looked around in human form, maybe. He’d had all the time in the world, after all.
But Julian didn’t. Julian needed to be found as quickly as possible. Tiff threw herself out of her chair and paced restlessly across the carpet. She could try an estate agent—they’d know about empty properties, wouldn’t they? Or would they only know about the ones owned by their clients? Tiff realized she didn’t have a bloody clue how it worked. But surely they’d specialize in nonabandoned properties, anyway? She needed someone who knew about potential squats. Maybe there was some sort of student network for finding them? Like Facebook, only seedier? Squatbook? Mysquat?
Tiff didn’t know. But she knew a man who would.
Crack.
Slinging on Julian’s jacket, she raced down to the Porter’s Lodge. Crack, Crack… what was his last name? Uppingham, that was it. He was a second-year social and political sciences student and, more to the point, he lived in a squat. He was famous for it—the closest thing All Saints’ had to a rebel, really, in the sea of awfully nice middle-class students from minor public schools. She’d never actually spoken to him, but then, she’d never imagined she’d want to speak to him before. She’d always thought he was a bit of a poser, really.
Tiff scanned the bank of pigeonholes for Uppingham, C. There it was: stuffed to bursting, mostly with flyers for student rallies by the look of it, but also with a big wodge of lecture notes, presumably copies brought over by a friend who didn’t mind being the one to get up early. So he hadn’t been into college yet today. Should she leave him a note or just hang around and wait? A couple more students bustled in, giving her brief, curious glances as she dithered. Clearly she couldn’t wait here. Maybe in Main Court with a book and hope he came in for lunch?
But what if she missed him? Belt and braces, she decided, and left a brief note saying she had to speak with him urgently about Jools. Hopefully the gossip factor would get his interest because her name certainly wouldn’t. Then she took a quick detour to the college library and settled down on a bench in the watery sunshine with Far From the Madding Crowd.
Tiff had just got to the part where Bathsheba tells Gabriel she doesn’t love him, and he replies, “But I love you—and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.” It was a load of bollocks, she decided. Didn’t he have an ounce of self-respect? She shut the book with a disgusted snap and only then noticed a slender shadow falling across her.
Crack.
He was tall, taller than Julian, even, and way, way thinner. If she sat on his lap, she’d be worried his legs might snap. Tiff wondered if he’d taken in his skinny black jeans himself—no shop sold jeans that narrow—or if he had an anorexic girlfriend back home who did it for him. Come to think of it, he’d probably nicked them from the anorexic girlfriend. Slung round his hips was a thick, studded leather belt that probably doubled his body weight. He was ghostly pale and had a long, straight nose—all the better to look down at you, my dear. Tiff shivered as she realized where that came from. God, was she seeing wolves everywhere? She gave him a searching look in the eyes—green, thank God, not amber—and then felt her face grow hot. As if he’d have wolf eyes in a human face.
Then she saw the faint smile curling those thin lips. Oh, bloody hell, he thought she’d been eyeing him up again. You could probably cook eggs on her face now, but Tiff was damned if she’d let embarrassment get in the way of anything that might help Julian.
“Crack! Um, thanks for… can we talk?”
He tossed his head, dead-straight black hair falling to one side. “I’m listening.”
“Um, do you want to sit down?” Tiff scooted self-consciously across the seat to make far more room than his skinny arse would need. He didn’t take it anyway.
“Nah, I’m good.”
Poser. “Well, I’m not. I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you,” she snapped before realizing this probably wasn’t the best way to go about getting him to do her a favor. Then again, he sat, so maybe she was doing all right.
With him sitting, they were almost of a height. Was he entirely made of legs? Bony knees jutted skyward, and Tiff remembered her earlier thought about sitting on his lap. She’d end up with major lacerations to the buttocks.
“I need to know about squats,” she blurted out before her head could get any more scrambled.
Crack raised both eyebrows. So it wasn’t just Tiff who couldn’t raise one on its own, she thought, pleased. “Squats? What, spent the rent money on drugs and pretty boys?”
“Yeah, right. No. I just need to know—is there some sort of network, or word of mouth, or something? I mean, how do people find out about places?”
“What’s this got to do with Julian Lauder?”
Bugger. “I think he might be in one, all right? With… with an ex-boyfriend.”
Crack nodded as if that’d entirely satisfied his curiosity. Then he tossed his hair back again and looked straight at her, green eyes piercing. “Why should I help you find him if he doesn’t want to be found?”
“Because the boyfriend’s a bastard who used to beat him up.” She felt horrible, giving away Julian’s secrets like that. She should have thought of something else. Sod it. There wasn’t time to worry about stuff like that. Crack blinked. Tiff could almost see him thinking, “But why would he stay with him, then?” like he’d never heard of domestic abuse before. “So, are you going to help me, or what?” she demanded.
Crack unfolded himself and stood, jamming his hands deep into the pockets of his leather jacket. “When do you think the boyfriend moved in?”
Just one more thing Tiff didn’t know. She resisted the urge to snap at Crack and thought for a moment. “Could have been anytime. But say around the start of term? Or just after, maybe. I don’t think he’d have come here before Julian did.”
Crack nodded, his black hair falling over his eyes. He tossed it back to hang over his left ear again. “Okay. That makes it simpler. Are you eating in Hall tonight?”
“Yes. You think you’ll have had time to ask around by then?” Tiff suddenly had butterflies in her stomach.
Crack started to nod again, then seemed to think better of it. Maybe his neck was aching from all that hair tossing. “Yeah. So I’ll see you tonight, right?”
“Right.” Tiff remembered her manners. “Thanks.” She drew Julian’s jacket closer around herself.
All the sunshine had faded from the sky, and it was starting to look like rain. She shivered and headed back to her room.
Chapter Sixteen
NICK WAS bone-weary as he walked stiffly through the Porter’s Lodge on his return from the University Arms. Despite determinedly ignoring everyone he passed, he didn’t make it even halfway to his rooms before he was accosted.
“Sewell? Been looking for you.” Angus Lemon. And all right, Nick’s Most Hated People list might have become quite a lot longer in recent weeks, but Angus Bloody Lemon was still impressively near the top of it.
“Yes?” Nick replied brusquely, not caring that he sounded rude.
“You’re wanted in the Master’s Lodge. Police are here again.”
Icy fingers twisted Nick’s intestines into tight knots as he hurried to the Master’s Lodge.
He was ushered up to the same room as before, where Detective Inspector Phillips sat at the desk as if he hadn’t moved since yesterday, wearing the same suspicious look as he watched Nick come in. This time, though, he wasn’t alone. A uniformed constable stood in one corner, hands clasped behind his back. Something in his posture made Nick think of medieval executioners, but even without this imagery, it seemed ominous that Phillips had apparently felt the need to bring in reinforcements.
Phillips evidently tracked Nick’s gaze. “Oh, Constable Rupresh will be with us today. Sit down, please, Dr. Sewell.” He’d called Nick by his academic title. That could either be good, or it could be very bad indeed.
Or it could mean absolutely nothing at all, Nick reminded himself angrily. He sat. “Any news?”
Phillips nodded. “We’ve been investigating last Saturday’s crime scene and the surrounding area, and one or two things have come to light.” He turned to his subordinate. “Rupresh?”
The constable demonstrated that he was not, in fact, made of stone by moving over to the side of the room, where he pulled a large zip-locked bag out of a briefcase. Nick’s heart stilled. The bag contained an item of clothing that seemed horribly familiar. Phillips took the bag and laid it upon the desk between them. “Would you say, Mr. Sewell, that you’ve seen this before?”
Nick cleared his throat. “It looks—it looks like Julian’s sweater. Where did you get it?”
Phillips didn’t speak for a moment, his lips tight. “Two streets away from the site of the murder. Would you care to give it a closer examination, Mr. Sewell?”
Without waiting for an answer, he unzipped the bag and shook out the turtleneck sweater Julian had been wearing Saturday night. Julian’s scent flooded the room, and Nick made a convulsive movement toward the sweater, which he quickly aborted.
He didn’t dare to hope that it had gone unnoticed. But Christ, that scent…. Maybe a scientist could have analyzed it, described each component: how many parts musk, how many parts fabric softener, how many parts expensive toiletries. To Nick, however, it was more an emotion in olfactory form, an elemental mixture of pack and mate and mine, mingled with a heartbreaking strain of stolen and lost. Couldn’t Phillips smell it? How could something so powerful not affect him?
Had the man no feelings at all?
“Would you be able to confirm that this is Mr. Lauder’s sweater?” Phillips asked mildly.
Nick blinked, his mind reluctantly returning from the language of his senses to that of the human world. “Yes. It’s Julian’s.” He drew in a shuddering breath, trying to make himself think as well as feel and react. “There’s no blood,” he added with a mix of relief and a strange disquiet he couldn’t, as yet, explain.
“Very observant of you, Mr. Sewell.” Damn it. Phillips was looking at him with an odd sort of stillness. As if he was a wolf, about to pounce. “Can you think of any reason why Mr. Lauder might want to get rid of his clothing shortly after a murder had taken place?”
“You can’t think Julian did it!” Nick snapped, hoping he’d only imagined the trailing off of his voice into a questioning tone at the end. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
Leaning forward on his elbows, Phillips didn’t drop his gaze from Nick’s face for an instant. “Now, I’m not suggesting it was premeditated murder. You said yourself that Mr. Lauder was promiscuous. Perhaps this other young man had just found out how free Mr. Lauder was with his favors? It’s easy to imagine a quarrel getting out of hand—”
“You obviously don’t have the first idea what Julian is like. I told you, he doesn’t fight. Bash in a man’s skull and break his neck? Don’t make me laugh!”
“If you wouldn’t mind sitting down again, Mr. Sewell,” Phillips said in a calm, even voice that made Nick want to rip his face off. “Mr. Sewell?” he repeated in a steelier tone, and abruptly Nick realized just how very thin was the ice upon which he was skating.
He sat down shakily. “It’s all baseless speculation in any case,” Nick protested, trying to remain calm. “Julian wasn’t seeing anyone except me.”
“Of course not, Mr. Sewell. Although one can never be sure, can one? Particularly with a young man of Mr. Lauder’s… history.”
“I’m sure!” Nick snapped and felt like an idiot for doing so. He could hardly tell Phillips that he’d have smelled it on Julian, had he been cheating on him. “I suppose now you’ll say I did it and killed Julian too?” he muttered bitterly.
“Jealousy can make a man do things he wouldn’t ordinarily dream of,” Phillips mused.
It wasn’t so much his words as his apparently sympathetic tone that made Nick’s rage flare once more. “Detective Inspector Phillips, I am a fellow of a Cambridge college. I’ve got more letters after my name than are bloody well in it. I am quite capable of recognizing your nasty little mind games.”
Phillips’s jaw tightened, Nick was pleased to see. “Nevertheless, Dr. Sewell, I’m sure you won’t mind my asking you a few more questions.” He cocked his head to one side. The grayish light trickling halfheartedly through the leaded windows cast eerie shadows on his face, making his lean features appear lopsided and sinister. “Perhaps we might just go over the details of your argument with Mr. Lauder one more time?”
Nick’s hackles rose at the same time as a hollow feeling made itself known in the pit of his stomach. Games within games. Was this bastard ever going to stop playing with him?
BY THE time Nick escaped from the Master’s Lodge, he felt more wrung out than he had after his long-ago finals. Phillips had gone over the events of that awful night in ever more excruciating, mind-numbing detail, obviously hoping to catch Nick in a slip of some kind. The worst of it was, Nick was quite aware he’d been within a hairsbreadth of making one several times over. Not the sort of slip Phillips had been looking for, but he had no doubt the man would be highly interested all the same. After all, evidence of insanity was all grist to the crime-solving mill, wasn’t it? And believing oneself a werewolf was clearly insane.
Nick gave a choking half laugh, making a couple of students nearby give him startled looks and quicken their pace through Main Court.
He wasn’t sure if his rooms, when he finally reached them, felt more like a haven or a prison. Pacing about, unable to settle to anything and wondering what the hell he was supposed to do now, Nick was almost relieved when the phone rang.
“Dr. Sewell? It’s the Porter’s Lodge here. Some gentlemen to see you—a Mr. Herrscher and two companions. Will it be all right to direct them to your rooms?”
“I—yes.” Nick had been about to offer to come down and meet them, as he would have done for any other visitors, but decided it might be better not to conduct any more business in public than could be helped. Especially not this sort of business.
Herrscher’s knock, when it came, was loud and aggressive. Nick took a deep breath, tried to rein in his irritation, and opened the door. The man in the middle must be Herrscher—he had an unmistakable aura of command. He was tall, blond, broad-shouldered—in fact he seemed more Nordic than Teutonic. Nick could easily imagine the man in an apocryphal horned helmet, raping an
d pillaging his way around the English coast. He was flanked by a couple of brutes whom Nick could only have described as henchmen. Nick could feel his hackles rising already as he was faced by three strange wolves—for that, they undoubtedly were—on his territory.
“Come in,” he said, trying to conceal his reluctance to allow them over the threshold.
Closing the door behind them only served to emphasize how small the room was with four full-grown werewolves inside. Herrscher nodded at Nick, but made no move to step forward and shake hands.
“This is Luther,” he said curtly, inclining his head about a millimeter to his right. “He is my lieutenant, you would say.”
“I would?” Nick looked at the bulky man. “I thought ‘enforcer’ was the common term these days. Although my knowledge of gangland slang is undoubtedly out-of-date.”
Herrscher ignored the sarcasm. “And this is Wahl. He will track Schräger and the boy.” Wahl was a slender man with overlong brown hair and a moustache. He looked ridiculously small next to Herrscher and Luther.
Bloody marvelous, Nick thought to himself. The muscle and the sniffer dog. “You seem very confident in his abilities.”
“Yes.”
Nick gave him a steady look, trying not to let his antipathy show. Apparently Herrscher had no such scruples. “You are my son’s lover?” he asked aggressively.
“Yes,” Nick said tightly. Obviously Herrscher had paused to acquaint himself with college gossip on arrival. Or possibly the police had told him. Not that it mattered which.
Herrscher sneered down at him. “You are not what I would have expected.”
