True Grey

by Clea Simon

  Table of Contents

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Clea Simon

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Clea Simon

  CATTERY ROW

  CRIES AND WHISKERS

  MEW IS FOR MURDER

  SHADES OF GREY *

  GREY MATTERS *

  GREY ZONE *

  GREY EXPECTATIONS *

  TRUE GREY *

  *available from Severn House

  TRUE GREY

  A Dulcie Schwartz Feline Mystery

  Clea Simon

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Clea Simon.

  The right of Clea Simon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Simon, Clea.

  True grey.

  1. Schwartz, Dulcie (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-328-0 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8215-8 (cased)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Jon

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my wonderful first readers: Jon Garelick, Karen Schlosberg, Lisa Susser, Brett Milano, and Naomi Yang. You saved me from numerous inconsistencies and conservatorial no-nos. All errors remaining are mine, not yours. My agent Colleen Mohyde is a constant source of encouragement, as are the wonderfully supportive Sophie Garelick, Frank Garelick, Lisa Jones, and writing buddies Caroline Leavitt and Vicki Constantine Croke. Editor Rachel Simpson Hutchens and her staff are a writer’s dream. Purrs out, people. May your days be filled with love.

  ONE

  Blood. So much blood. She had not realized that the human corpus could contain so much. But the precious ichor glistened jewel-like no longer. Much like her terror, like the screams frozen in her throat, life’s elixir had begun to solidify and darken, staining the red-gold hair a dull brown, its very essence transform’d before her eyes, which too began to dim . . .

  It was like a nightmare. Like the nightmare. The room, the bookshelves. The marble statue, dripping blood. Only, instead of her reading of the horror – and then having it appear, laid out in all its dreadful gore – she had stumbled upon it, with no warning. No warning she could have interpreted, that is.

  Before her lay Dulcie’s worst dream, her vision of predawn terror – down to the cast-iron bootjack, one boot still stuck between its outstretched jaws. Down to the book splayed out on the floor, the title on the front – Lives of the Saints – a rebuke to everything she knew. This was it: the nightmare made flesh. The scene she had been forced to view every night this week, until she’d woken up gasping and drenched in sweat.

  Only this was worse than her nightmare, because there was no waking from the vision before her. No playful kitten to cuddle until the horror faded, and no purr to lull her back to a more peaceful sleep. No, this was not a phantom of the dark. The time was one in the afternoon. Broad daylight. And the carnage before her was real.

  ‘What? What?’ Dulcie stood there gasping. Unable to get enough air. Unable to think, especially as the stars began to circle and close in, the darkness taking out her field of vision. Unable to leave . . .

  ‘Dulcie, step back.’

  The unexpected voice, so soft and so calm, startled her into a hiccup. ‘Mr Grey?’

  ‘Dulcie, please step back.’ It was, without a doubt, the voice of her late, great cat. Unless, of course, she was hallucinating. ‘Trust me, Dulcie. Please.’

  And so she did, in the process closing her mouth and ending the cycle of hyperventilation that had nearly caused her to pass out. And as she drew back into the doorway, she realized, not everything was exactly as she had dreamt it. There were, in fact, several crucial differences.

  The boot stuck in the boot-jack was a high-end cowboy style, with the kind of patterned leather that had begun its life on some large reptile’s back, rather than the formal rust and sable two-tone proper to a hunt outfit. The marble bust on the floor, its ear broken off and its pointy nose covered in blood, was not of a Roman senator, but of the great horror writer Edgar Allen Poe. The matted hair, still glossy despite the clotted gore, was black rather than rich auburn. And the body that lay sprawled across the rug was not some horrible but anonymous apparition, the manifestation of angers and anxieties freed only to emerge at night. It belonged to the woman Dulcie had come to meet. The woman who, less than forty-eight hours before, she had publicly sworn to kill.

  With her wits finally returning, Dulcie took a further step back and one more again. Catching herself as she reached for the knob, she fr
oze for a moment. Close the door? Leave it open? The heavy wooden door had been ajar when she’d arrived, the afternoon light casting its shadow down the hall. The visiting scholar’s suite was isolated for privacy; the only other door off the hall opened on to the junior common room. The odds of anyone coming by were slim. Though someone – Dulcie realized with a chill – had certainly been here before her.

  Unless . . . She looked at the Poe and up at the shelf. Could a freak accident, a stray vibration, have sent the heavy bit of statuary tumbling down?

  ‘Dulcie . . .’ It was Mr Grey again, the edge of a growl in his tone.

  ‘It’s possible,’ she murmured to the dust motes. ‘I mean, if she were standing in just the right place. And I know I didn’t do it . . .’

  Her eyes came down to the body again, to the gore fast turning dark on the rug, dulling the blue-black sheen in the raven’s-wing hair. ‘I couldn’t have—’ She choked. The room started to spin again, the stale air thick and cloying.

  ‘Dulcie!’ A sharp pain like raking claws along her back startled her upright, pulling her eyes away from the floor, the woman . . . that. At the same time, she heard voices, a flight or more down the stairs. Several voices, raised in alarm, and the clatter of feet as people rushed up to the suite.

  ‘Dulcie!’ The voice was still soft, but now it carried an undeniable urgency. A sense of command. ‘Dulcie, run!’

  And so she did.

  TWO

  ‘Oh, my,’ a small, soft voice said. ‘Oh, my.’

  Only two days earlier, Dulcie had been happy. Hard at work three stories below ground in a windowless room that let in none of the glorious late-summer sun, she had gladly given up the warm September afternoon and its accompanying breeze for the pile of burnt-looking papers before her. As the low hum of the air-conditioning system kicked in, keeping the ambient temperature and humidity about right for a salad bar, she should have been utterly blissful. Would have been, in fact, were it not for the fussing of the little clerk standing beside her.

  ‘Oh, my,’ she heard again. ‘Oh, my.’ Coming from anyone else, the muted cry – almost a whimper – could have been the sound of agony, or even despair. Dulcie knew Thomas Griddlehaus, however. As quiet as he generally was, the slight, balding man was not naturally calm and could as easily be stressing out about a misplaced box of paper clips as a family tragedy. He was, like all librarians, a bit of a zealot.

  In a good way, of course, Dulcie reminded herself. As the chief clerk of the famed Mildon Collection, Thomas Griddlehaus had a greater knowledge of rare books and documents than anyone Dulcie had ever met, an intimacy he had been more than willing to share with her, a mere graduate student. But as fussy as a cat, with a lot less fur, he could be a tad annoying.

  He had, however, helped her authenticate the printed page that now lay to her left. One of only a few that had survived a fire – and the subsequent water damage – in Thomas Paine’s original library, it had no cover and no title page. But coming, as it did, from the great statesman’s library, Dulcie had no doubt that it was from a mysterious horror novel the American statesman had praised in his letters. A novel, she was sure, that had been written by the author of The Ravages of Umbria.

  Doing her best to tune out the bespectacled clerk, she read the printed page again: ‘The essential ichor besmirched his raven locks. All life, all essence, lay there, turned now to cooling mass, his heart forever still’d. Her own raced like a stallion into the dark and windswept night. A night as black as sable, as black as the lifeless head that now lay stain’d, upon the library carpet.’

  From the print, Dulcie turned to the handwritten page before her, maneuvering an oversized magnifying glass above it. A mere scrap of paper, stained and ragged inside its protective polypropylene wrapper, this page contrasted sharply with the sterile surroundings of the rare book collection. It was, however, the reason she was here today, her rationale for sacrificing the last gasp of summer. A sacrifice that would be worth it, if only she could concentrate.

  ‘Blood. So much blood. She had not realized that the human corpus could contain so much. But the precious ichor glistened jewel-like no longer.’ It read so much like the printed version, Dulcie could barely contain her excitement. Could this be a first, rough draft of that story? ‘Much like her terror, like the screams frozen in her throat, life’s elixir had begun to solidify and darken . . .’

  ‘Oh, my,’ Dulcie heard again. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the little man wringing his delicate, white hands, and tried not to be distracted. She didn’t think she’d been doing anything wrong. The librarian had already replaced the first batch of papers she had requested – the special collection’s policy restricted users to five of the fragile fragments at a time – and she was being very careful, only touching the edge of the clear film with her gloved hands. It was only recently that he had granted her the right to remove the pages from their cushioned, non-acid storage box herself, and as she turned back to her reading, she wondered if stacking even five high was too much for a treasure like this. With its crumbling edges and dark blotches, it looked like the filter from last week’s coffee. What it could prove to be, however, was immeasurably more invigorating.

  ‘Much like her terror, like the screams frozen in her throat, life’s elixir had begun to solidify and darken . . .’ She read again, doing her best to ignore a faint creak, as Griddlehaus shifted from one lace-up oxford to the other.

  It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic. The unassuming little clerk – Griddlemaus, she sometimes thought of him – might be twenty years her senior, but she counted him as a colleague. He had already been incredibly helpful over the past year as she expanded her work on her thesis: from an analysis of The Ravages of Umbria to a more comprehensive study of the novel’s author. In addition to judging her adequately trained to handle documents, he had granted her the right to keep a private file folder in the library, an honor usually reserved for postgrads. Plus, his help navigating the collection’s huge inventory of uncataloged, unidentified remnants had resulted last month in her first major academic paper: Political Vision and Proto-Feminist Theory in the Early Gothic Novel. Just today, they’d started on a new stack of boxes, identified simply as ‘PHILA, 1805–10’, and the uncharted treasures within. If only he would give her the quiet she needed to study them.

  ‘Much like her terror,’ she read, for the third time, ‘like the screams frozen in her throat, life’s elixir had begun to solidify and darken, staining the red-gold hair a dull brown, its very essence transform’d before her eyes, which too began to dim . . .’

  Something was different. Dulcie closed her tired eyes. It had taken her more than an hour to decipher the ornate and faded script this far, carefully maneuvering the mounted lens over the brittle surface, and now she doubted what she had read. It seemed so familiar, so dreamlike. But, yes, she saw when she looked again: this was what the handwritten page said. It sparked a memory, and Dulcie grabbed the soft pencil, the only writing implement allowed in the Mildon, and scribbled out the passage. It had changed from what had made it, ultimately, to the printed page. But not, she hoped, in any essential way.

  Another creak, and something that sounded suspiciously like a sigh, but Dulcie tuned them out. This, in front of her, was what mattered. Could it be? The actual handwritten draft of that second novel?

  Despite the doubts of her thesis adviser, Dulcie had come to believe that the book existed, that this second novel, even better than The Ravages, not only had been written but could be found. Some of her peers, and Dulcie had learned to shoulder their scorn, didn’t even consider The Ravages to be a great novel. Dulcie knew otherwise, however, and unlike these naysayers, she hadn’t been willing to dismiss the unnamed Gothic author’s subsequent silence as the result of critical disappointment or something even more dire, be it ill health or family responsibilities.

  No, Dulcie had known that ‘her’ author, as she privately thought of her, had kept writing. Through her careful t
extual analysis, Dulcie had already traced her literary footprints – following a trail of daring political essays as the author moved from London to the fledgling United States in the first years of the nineteenth century. Even her thesis adviser had conceded that Dulcie had made an important discovery. But to find another novel? That was the ultimate prize for a scholar: a lost work. And it just might be within her reach.

  For comparison’s sake, Dulcie reached for her Mildon folder, checking what she already knew to be true. Yes, that same passion showed up in the author’s political writings. Dulcie reread one bit of an 1803 essay:

  A woman, some say, has no place in the world, lest she be daughter or widow or wife. The first we all are, tho’ the family ties may chafe as we gain majority. The next occurs by chance, and guarantees not freedom from those onerous ties of family, not of blood, perchance not e’en of choice. The last, though, is most to be pitied. Those who submit to such disequal bonds may be bless’d by affections and by the gift of a child. Too often, those bonds cripple us, tearing all natural joys from our hearts, our babes from our arms, and our affections from all that we would hold dear. No, ’tis better for a woman to stand alone, for to be friendless is to know that which is true for our Sex. ’Tis better far than the False Hope of Love.

  ‘The False Hope of Love.’ Dulcie nodded. That would have made a dandy title, perfect for the dramatic romance of a book like The Ravages. But the few hints that Dulcie had found of the lost second work suggested something darker. Last spring, at this very table, she had read a letter from Paine’s library, suggesting that such a novel existed – a great work, but one that played on horror, rather than love. And this one piece of paper, so brown and blotted inside its protective cover, just might be the beginning of it.

  ‘Those red-gold locks, besmirch’d by life’s gore, she now aggrieve—’ No, that was wrong. Dulcie squinted. Addressed? Yes. She read on: ‘—addressed. The Si—’