“Dad …” I wanted to prevent the rest. He'd said enough. He'd gone through enough: not only to have lived through her suffering but also to have lived through her death. And before that death, to have borne his own grief, my mother's, and no doubt his parents' …
Before I could finish what I'd wanted to say to him, I heard my grandfather all at once again. I felt the breath leave me as if I'd taken a punch to the gut, but I had to ask. I said, “Dad, how did Granddad cope with all this?”
“Cope? He wouldn't attend the trial. He—”
“I don't mean the trial. I mean Sonia. How she … how she was.”
And I can hear him, Dr. Rose. I can hear him howling as he always howled—Lear-like—although the storm that raged round him was not of the moors but of his own mind. Freaks! he's shouting. You're capable of giving me nothing but freaks! There's spittle at the corners of his mouth, and although my grandmother takes his arm and murmurs his name, he hears and is aware of nothing but the wind and the rain and the thunder in his head.
Dad said, “Your grandfather was a troubled man, Gideon. But a great and good man. His demons were fierce, but so was his battle against them.”
“Did he love her?” I asked. “Did he hold her? Did he play with her? Did he think of her as his grandchild?”
“Sonia was ill for a great part of the time she was with us. She was very fragile.”
“So he didn't, did he?” I asked my father. “He didn't … anything.”
Dad made no reply. Instead, he rose and walked to the railing. The Old English sheep dog yelped in near soundlessness, pawing at his own rails with an eagerness that was as obvious as it was pathetic. “Why do they do that to animals?” Dad said. “For the love of God, it's so bloody unnatural. If people want a pet, they should accommodate the pet. If they don't, they should damn well get rid of it.”
“You aren't going to tell me, are you?” I asked him. “About Granddad and Sonia. You aren't going to tell me.”
“Your grandfather was who your grandfather was,” my father replied. And that was the end of it.
8
LIBERTY NEALE KNEW that if she'd only had the luck to meet Rock Peters somewhere in Mexico and to marry him there, she wouldn't have been in her current position because she could have divorced the creep in a micro-flash and that would have been the end of it. But no, she hadn't met him in Mexico. She hadn't even gone to Mexico. She'd come to England because she'd been such a total zero in foreign language in high school that England was the closest place to California that resembled a foreign country, where people spoke a language that Libby understood. Canada hardly counted.
She would have preferred France—she had a major thing for croissants, although the less said about that the better—but a few days in London had provided her with a wider range of eating experiences than she'd anticipated, so she'd managed to settle in happily, out of the reach of her parents and, more importantly, thousands of miles away from that living example of human perfection, her older sister. Equality Neale was tall, thin, intelligent, articulate, and disgustingly successful at everything she did. And she'd been elected homecoming queen at Los Altos High School, which was enough to make anyone blow major chunks into the next time zone. So getting away from Ali had been priority numero uno, and London had made that possible.
But in London, Libby had met Rock Peters. In London, she had married the creep. And in London—where she hadn't yet got round to scoring anything closely resembling a work permit or a permanent resident's card despite her marriage—she was at Rock's mercy, whereas in Mexico, it would have been “kiss my ass, Jack,” and money or not, she could have gotten away from him. She still wouldn't have had the bucks to do it, but that wouldn't have mattered because the thumb spoke a universal language and she wasn't afraid to put herself out on the road and use it. Which was something she couldn't do from England since hitching a ride across the Atlantic to get away from Rock wasn't exactly possible.
Rock had her … well, he had her by the balls, figuratively speaking. She wanted to stay in England because she didn't want to go home and admit defeat when every letter she got from California was filled to the brim with Ali's latest success. But to stay in England, she needed money. And to get money, she needed Rock. True, she could have made some bucks even more illegally than she was already making them, but getting caught would have meant getting deported, which would have meant back to Los Altos Hills, back to Mom and Dad, and back to “Why don't you go to work for Ali for a time, Lib? In public relations, you could—” blah blah blah. No way in hell, Libby told herself, was she going to put herself anywhere near her sister.
So when Rock wanted something, she was basically his slave. Which was why she was back to screwing the shithead two or three times a week upon demand. She'd try to avoid it, usually by pointing out that there was a delivery needing to be made and since she was the most reliable of his couriers, shouldn't she make it? But that usually didn't work because when Rock wanted sex, Rock wanted sex, and it never took him much time to ride the train to the station anyway.
That was what had happened this day, back in the Bermondsey hovel above the grocery store where, if she concentrated on the traffic noises below, she'd always been able to avoid hearing Rock grunting in her ear like a constipated pig. As always, she'd been so pissed off after screwing him that she wanted to amputate his cock with a saw. That not being possible, she'd gone to her tap-dancing lesson instead.
She'd tapped herself into the sweat of the century, shuffling, chugging, flapping, and spanking till she was dripping wet. The instructor kept yelling, “Libby, what are you doing over there?” above the strains of “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” but Libby had ignored her. It hadn't mattered whether she was in step, out of step, in line, out of line, or even in the same hemisphere as her fellow tappers. What mattered was doing something hard, something fast, something that was demanding and physical in order to put Rock Peters from her mind. If she didn't do that, she'd end up in front of the closest refrigerator, and approximately six billion calories later, she'd find herself recovered from Rock's brand of blackmail.
“Think of it this way, Lib,” he'd say when it was over and she lay beneath him, defeated again, “It's tit for tat, pardon the pun,” and he'd offer that grin she'd first thought so cool and later learned to recognise for the sign of contempt it actually was. “You scratch my itch and I scratch yours. 'Sides, you're not getting any from the fiddler, are you? I know when a bird's been rogered proper and you've the look of someone who hasn't had a decent shagging in more'n a year.”
“That's right, I haven't, you total dickhead,” she'd snap. “Think about it, Rock. And he's not a fiddler. He plays the violin.”
“Ooooh. Pardon my French,” he'd say. And it mattered exactly zero to the former Rocco Petrocelli that she'd put down his ability as a lover. To him, success in bed meant getting his rocks off. What happened to his partner was left to self-stimulation or coincidence.
Libby departed the dance studio in a better frame of mind, her leotard and tap shoes stuffed into her backpack and that outfit replaced by the leathers which she wore when she made her courier stops. Helmet under her arm, she strode to the Suzuki and she used the kick starter instead of the electric ignition, the better to think about tromping on Rock's face.
The streets were clogged—like, when weren't they clogged?—but she'd spent enough time on the bike to know not only which side streets to take but also how to squeeze between cars and delivery trucks when traffic had come to a standstill. She had a Walkman that she usually wore on deliveries, the recorder tucked into an inner pocket of her leathers and the helmet holding the earphones in place. She liked bubble-gum music, she liked it loud, and she generally sang along, because the combination of music blasting against her eardrums and her own voice singing at maximum volume pretty much took care of whatever was left in her head that she didn't want to think about.
But she didn't use the Walkman today. The tap dancing ha
d wiped away the image of Rock's hairy body mashed on top of her and his salami-red cock shoving between her legs. And as for the rest of what was in her head: That was something she wanted to think about.
Rock was right: She still hadn't gotten Gideon Davies to bed—as in really to bed—and she couldn't figure out why. He seemed to like being with her, and he seemed normal in every way other than what wasn't happening between them in the sack. Yet in all the time she'd been living below him and hanging with him, they'd never progressed beyond the point where they'd been that first night when they fell asleep on her bed while listening to a CD. That was it with a capital I as far as the sex part went.
At first she'd thought the dude was gay and her radar had gone totally down for the count after being with Rock for so long. But he didn't act gay or do the gay scene in London or even have younger guys, older guys, or obviously twisted guys up to his place in private. All he had was his dad—who hated her guts and was all Mr. Major Attitude whenever she and he were actually breathing the same air for five seconds—and Rafe Robson, who hung around Gideon day and night like a case of the hives. All of this had long ago made Libby conclude that there was nothing strictly wrong with Gideon that a decent relationship couldn't straighten out … if she could just get him away from his keepers for a while.
Having left the South Bank, where her tap lesson was, having woven her way through the worst of the traffic through the City and upwards to Pentonville Road, she opted to shoot through the byways of Camden Town rather than take on the crush of cars, taxis, buses, and trucks that were always making a mess of every street within spitting distance of King's Cross Station. Her route to Chalcot Square wasn't a direct one as a result, but that was cool as far as Libby was concerned. She didn't mind having more time to plan an approach that might work as a breakthrough with Gideon. To her way of thinking, Gideon Davies had to be more than simply a man who'd been playing the violin since he was just out of diapers. Yeah, it was cool that he was a major big deal as a musician, but he was also a person. And that person was more than just the music he made. That person could exist whether he played the violin or not.
When Libby finally arrived in Chalcot Square, the first thing she saw was that Gideon wasn't alone. Raphael Robson's ancient Renault stood at the south edge of the square, parked with one wheel on the sidewalk like he'd been in a hurry. Through the lit window to Gideon's music room, Libby noted that the unmistakable shape of Rafe—handkerchief, as always, mopping up the sweat on his face—was moving about, and he was talking. Preaching, more likely. And Libby knew about what.
“Shit,” she muttered as she gunned up to the house. She revved the engine a few times in the cause of letting off steam and she pulled the Suzuki onto its kick stand. Rafe Robson didn't usually turn up in Chalcot Square at this time of day, and to have him here now—no doubt droning on and on about what Gideon ought to be doing that he wasn't doing, which was naturally whatever Rafe wanted him to do—was a real bummer that, in combination with what she'd already been through, having to screw Rock Peters, really ticked her off.
She shoved through the gate in the wrought iron railing and didn't stop it from clanging against the concrete that defined the upper steps to the house. She flung herself downwards, banged her way into the basement flat, and without a second thought dived straight for the refrigerator.
She'd been trying to stay on the No-White Diet, but now—tap dancing be damned—she was definitely craving something pale. Vanilla ice cream, popcorn, rice, potatoes, cheese. She thought she might freak if she didn't have it.
Months ago, however, she'd prepared the refrigerator door for a moment just like this. Before she could open the appliance, she was forced to look upon a picture of herself at sixteen years of age, a tubbo in a one-piece bathing suit standing next to her size-five sister in a butt-floss bikini … and with a perfect tan, of course. Libby had put a sticker over Ali's face: a spider wearing a cowboy hat. But now she peeled the sticker off, gazing long and hard upon her sister, and just for good measure she read the message that she'd penned for herself across the refrigerator door. IN THROUGH THE LIPS AND ONTO THE HIPS!!! She took her inspiration where she could.
She sighed and backed off, which was when she heard it: the violin music floating down from above. She thought for a moment, “Omigod! He's cracked it,” and she felt a surge of pleasure at the realisation that Gideon's problems might be over, that his most recent plan for solving his problem had actually done the job.
This was very cool. This would make him happy. And it had to be Gideon who was playing upstairs. It wouldn't, after all, be Rafe Robson, who couldn't possibly be so uncool as to torture Gid by playing the violin in front of him while Gid was having such trouble playing himself.
But just as she was celebrating the fact of Gideon Davies' return to his music, the rest of the orchestra started grinding away. A CD, Libby thought despairingly. It was Rafe's little pep talk for Gideon's ears: See how you once played the music, Gideon? You did it then. You can do it now.
Why, Libby wondered, wouldn't they leave him the hell alone? Did they think he'd start playing if they bugged him enough? Because they sure as hell were beginning to bug her. “He's more than this stupid music,” she snarled at the ceiling above her.
She left the kitchen and marched to her own small CD player. There, she selected a disk that was guaranteed to drive Raphael Robson right up the wall. It was bubble gum squared, and she played it loud. Just for good measure, she opened her windows. Banging on the floor above ensued in short order. She turned the volume up to full blast. Time for a nice long bath, she thought. Bubble-gum music was, like, so perfect for soaking, soaping, and singing along.
Thirty minutes later, bathed and dressed and feeling that she'd made her point, Libby turned off the CD player and listened for any more sounds from above. Silence. She'd made her point.
She left the flat and popped her head above the level of the street to see if Rafe's car was still in the square. The Renault was gone, which meant Gideon might be ready for a visit from someone who cared more about him as a person than as a musician. She trotted up the stairs from her flat to his front door, where she gave a hearty knock.
No answer prompted her to turn back to the square, taking a look for Gideon's Mitsubishi and seeing the GPS five cars along. Libby frowned, gave another knock, and called out, “Gideon? You still in there? It's me.”
This roused him. The dead bolt was released from the other side of the door. The door swung open.
Libby said, “Hey, sorry about the music. I sort of lost control and—” She cut her own words off. He looked like hell. True, he hadn't looked good in weeks, but now he was positively bird-doo on a cracker. Libby's first thought was that Rafe Robson had worked Gideon over by making him listen to his own recordings. Bastard, she thought.
She said, “Where's good ol' Rafe? Gone to make his report to your dad?”
Gideon merely stepped back from the door and let her in. He went up the stairs, and she followed him. His destination was where he'd obviously been when she'd knocked on his door: the bedroom. The imprint of his head on the pillow and his body on the bed looked pretty recent.
A dim light was burning on the bedside table, and the shadows not dispelled by its glow fell on Gideon's face and made him look cadaverous. He'd been surrounded by an aura of anxiety and defeat since the Wigmore debacle, but Libby saw that there was something more edging that aura now, something that looked … what? Excruciating, she realised. So she said, “Gideon, what's wrong?”
He said simply, “My mother's been murdered.”
She blinked. Her jaw dropped. She snapped it closed. “Your mom? Your mother? Oh no. When? How? Holy shit. Sit down.” She urged him over to his bed and he sat, his hands hanging limply between his knees. “What happened?”
Gideon told her what little there was to know. He concluded with, “Dad was asked to identify her body. The police've been to see him since. A detective, Dad said. He rang a while
ago.” Gideon clutched his arms around himself, bent forward, and rocked like a child. He said, “That's it, then.”
“What?” Libby asked.
“There's no hope after this.”
“Don't say that, Gideon.”
“I might as well be dead, too.”
“Jeez. Hey. Don't say that.”
“It's the truth.” He shivered as he said this and glanced round the room as if looking for something while he continued to rock.
Libby thought about what it meant that his mother was dead. She said, “Gideon, you're going to get through all this. You're going to get past it,” and she tried to sound like she really meant those words, like whether he played his music or not was as important to her as it was to him.
She noticed that his shivering had turned to trembling. At the foot of his bed was a knitted blanket, and she grabbed this and dropped it around his thin shoulders. “You want to talk about it?” she asked him. “About your mom? About … I don't know … anything?” She sat beside him and put her arm around him. She used her other hand to close the blanket at his throat till he grasped it as well and clutched it.
He said, “She was on her way to see James the Lodger.”
“Who?”
“James Pitchford. He lived with us when my sister was … when she died. And it's odd because I'd been thinking of him myself recently, although before that he hadn't crossed my mind in years.” Gideon grimaced then, and Libby noticed that the hand not clutching the blanket was pressed into his stomach as if something inside were burning his guts. “Someone ran her down in James Pitchford's street,” he said. “More than once, Libby. And because she was on her way to see James, Dad thinks the police are going to want to track down everyone who was involved … back then.”
“Why?”
“Because of the kind of questions they asked him, I dare say.”
“I don't mean why does he think the cops want to track down everyone. I mean why would they want to track down everyone. Is there a connection between then and now? I mean, obviously if your mom was going to see James Pitchford, there's some sort of connection. But if someone from twenty years ago killed her, why wait till now to do it?”