The Shadow Cabinet Page 4

  Her blazer hanging in the hall. It was wet.

  They talked about some kind of ancient Greek mystery. Ell—

  I couldn’t quite remember the word, and I don’t think I could have spelled it if I had.

  They said they were going to defeat death, whatever the hell that meant.

  It wasn’t much of a list. I set the pen and paper down on the coffee table and sat there, my hands on my lap, until Boo came back in with several plastic bags. She examined the chop job I’d done on my head.

  “Yeah, I need to work on this,” she said. “Come on.”

  Boo dragged one of the kitchen bar chairs into the bathroom and set to work fixing the damage I’d done. In a relatively short time, I had a bob, one that wasn’t crooked.

  “Your hair is a bit thick,” she said, examining her work, “but it looks right. We’ll have to keep it trimmed. Now . . .”

  She got the plastic bag from the floor that contained the dyes.

  “We’ll need to bleach you out first before we add the color. I got red. It’s nice.”

  She held a box of hair color in front of my face, and I looked at the model smiling back at me with her head of thick and luscious auburn hair.

  “It won’t look like that on me,” I said.

  “It will. Now . . .”

  The next part of the hour was all plastic gloves, tubes of gunk, and crap being squished into my head. In the end, my hair was in an uncomfortable stage between yellow and orange and terrible, terrible mistake. Boo turned me around and put the red goop on. Again, we waited and rinsed. The result was supposed to be “natural copper” but it came out “nuclearaccident strawberry blond.”

  “I told you,” I said.

  She held up a finger and produced another dye kit from the bag, a brown one. The process was repeated, and this time, my hair turned out in a color known to nature—a bright brown-red, sort of the color of a well-used penny.

  My hair smelled like cat food and felt like massaged steel wool, but it didn’t look too bad.

  “I got some makeup,” she said, digging out more packages from the bag and picking off the cellophane wrappers. There were makeup sponges and liquid foundation, which was applied all over my face. It made me look tan—the kind of tan my gran has when she comes back from her annual booze cruise down the Mississippi, when she’s been out on the deck too long with her mai tais. This was the first time I’d ever really seen my resemblance to Granny Deveaux, and it was a little scary. I mean, I love her, but she doesn’t have a look I’ve ever wanted to emulate. This is a woman who gets discount Botox shots from her dog groomer because he found a hookup who sells them illegally. My parents have repeatedly tried to explain that Botox is a poison and probably shouldn’t be put into the human body under the best of circumstances, but definitely not by a dog groomer—but whenever they do that, she starts talking about getting a discount chin lift and tummy tuck package, and everyone shuts up.

  I was going to turn into Granny Deveaux. It was getting worse with every second, as Boo plucked at my eyebrows. Gran had made me a standing offer to pay if I’d get my eyebrows waxed. She’d been encouraging me to do it since I was twelve, and she never understood why I didn’t want hot wax near my eyes and wire-thin eyebrows like hers. I imagined myself turning into my gran—my gran, with all her over-sixty friends hanging off the rail of the Miss A Drinky as it paddled into the sunset toward New Orleans and oblivion . . .

  That life was over.

  I looked into Boo’s eyes as she worked on my face. They were bloodshot. She’d been crying again. Her eyeliner was smudged. It looked like she’d tried to clean it up a bit, but there were traces under her eyes.

  “Okay,” she said, stepping back.

  I was not myself anymore. My eyebrows had been plucked until they were almost gone, then darkened and arched. My fake tan almost matched my new, copper penny-red hair.

  “Clothes,” she said, picking up the larger bag from the floor. “Just basic stuff. Jeans. Hoodie. Trainers.”

  She left, and I dressed. The clothes had the feeling of plastic. My transformation was complete. It had taken a few hours to disassemble my appearance. It had taken only a few minutes for Stephen to die. Nothing in life was as stable as I’d been led to believe.

  3

  WHEN I EMERGED, THORPE HAD HOOKED HIS LAPTOP UP to the television. He’d taken off his suit jacket and pushed up his sleeves to the elbow, which, for Thorpe, was almost like he’d taken his shirt off entirely. He finished furiously spooning some yogurt into his mouth and set the container down on the edge of a bookshelf.

  “Sit,” he said. “Boo, close the blinds.”

  The yogurt container tipped to the side under the weight of the spoon. Thorpe didn’t set it upright, or even seem to notice. All of this combined—being in Thorpe’s house, the pushed-back sleeves, the yogurt, and the air of urgency and secrecy—it made my internal engine start running faster again. There was the rapid heartbeat. There was the rush of blood to the face, the zing down the arms.

  “No one knows I’m here?” I asked.

  “Officially, you’re not. Unofficially, though, you are now a member of this team. This means you take orders from me. You do not have the training the others have, but you have an ability, and you have information. You were also the subject of a kidnap attempt, the perpetrators of which are still at large. So keeping you secure is going to be a priority.”

  Boo finished with the blinds and perched on the edge of the sofa, knees flexed, as if at any second she was ready to spring up and run ten miles. That’s what competent secret ghost police looked like. I, on the other hand, was slouched, absently touching the bristle-stiff ends of my new, smelly hair.

  Thorpe returned to the fake German dictionary and took out some more bills. He handed these to me.

  “The key to remaining undetected is to keep it simple and not return to any places you are known. You’ll use cash for everything. You do not, under any circumstances, contact anyone else. You don’t go online, because you’ll only be tempted to reach out. You don’t reach out. You never go out without one of us. Boo and Callum are both extremely able. On that point, we need Callum here.”

  “I’ve been trying his phone,” Boo said.

  “Well, he’ll be hearing from me, and he had better respond. For now, though, I’m going to share with you what was found when we pulled the files on Jane Quaint that were requested last night, along with some information we gathered after the accident. I asked for CCTV footage from the area in Barnes where the accident occurred. That particular lane is not well serviced by CCTV, so there’s no direct image of the cars involved, which is probably for the best. We don’t want an actual record of the accident.”

  It was also good because there was no way I was going to watch that.

  “We do have footage from other streets.” He clicked on a folder and brought up some low-quality video of three people making their way down a street. I’d have known those figures anywhere. Jane, with her wild red hair. Jack with his slicked-back blond hair. Devina, so waiflike, walking a bit unsteadily.

  “That’s Jane, we know. Are these the Devina and Jack you mentioned earlier?”

  “That’s them,” I said.

  “Last names?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll see what we can do in terms of fingerprints or materials we find in the house. The three abandoned the car and left via Barnes Common. The common isn’t well covered, so we found no record of their exit. We lose them in Barnes. So we went back and pulled CCTV from London to try to trace Charlotte.”

  He clicked a few more times and brought up some footage taken from a vantage point somewhere on Jane’s street.

  “We began on Hyssop Close,” he said. “This is Jane’s house here. We have footage of Charlotte walking in, completely on her own, at ten thirty-seven.”

  I saw a
blob of red hair and a blurry image of a person connected to it making her way down the sidewalk and turning toward the house, disappearing behind the wall that fronted Jane’s garden.

  “At eleven fifteen, this red car appears at the house and pulls into the drive, then pulls out again twenty minutes later. There’s no further sign of Charlotte coming out of this house, so it is a reasonable assumption that she was removed in this car. We traced the car down the connecting streets. It drives west on the Fulham Road and north toward Earl’s Court, where it turns onto a road that isn’t covered, and we lose it. Everything from the surrounding roads was checked. Whatever path they took at this point, it wasn’t covered by CCTV. The car is registered to a Laura Falley of West Wickham, who died in August. The car was left, along with a few other belongings, to a niece who now lives in America. As far as anyone knew, the car was sitting in a garage next to the empty house while the affairs were being settled from abroad. An excellent car to steal, if someone knew where to look. So, stolen car, untraceable route. A well-planned affair.”

  “How would they have planned it?” I said. “I ran away. And why take Charlotte?”

  “It’s an excellent question,” he said. “There are a number of possibilities. One, the plan was originally intended for you, and for some reason, they decided they had to take Charlotte as well. Charlotte may have heard or seen something that she shouldn’t have. Or perhaps they wanted Charlotte all along, for reasons that are currently unknown to us. When we looked into Jane Quaint, things became more oblique. She was born Jane Anderson in Danby, which is a small town in the moors outside of York. She is a licensed psychologist. Very little history on the books of her seeing patients, but what information is there is straightforward. That’s the only part of Jane’s life that makes any sense on paper. But when we looked back at her personal and financial records, things got very strange indeed. All records of her being in Danby end in 1968. The next we see of her is in London in 1970, when she registered at a local surgery. She listed her address as 16 Hyssop Close. 16 Hyssop Close belonged to a Sarah and Sidney Smithfield-Wyatt, known to friends and acquaintances as Sid and Sadie. And this, perhaps, is where we start looking, because this is where the story starts to come into the rather unusual territory that we currently occupy. This is Sarah and Sidney Smithfield-Wyatt.”

  He pulled up a picture of two very tall, very blond, very pale people. They were almost exactly alike in stature, in face, and even in expression. Their gold-blond hair was of different lengths. The one I assumed was Sid had it cut short and slicked over, almost exactly like Jack’s. Sadie’s was longer, brushing her shoulders, winged back lightly from her face. Their eyebrows and eyelashes were seemingly nonexistent, so their faces were nearly bald. Both wore slashes of duck-egg-blue eye shadow and had silver disks painted on their foreheads. He wore a wide-lapel white suit and a gold lamé tie; she wore a modified kimono in a green silky material. This kimono opened low at the neck and came up high and wide in a revealing slit in the front. It would have fallen open if not for a thick brown leather belt marked with the image of a triangle. Both wore matching high platform boots of the same bright gold as Sid’s tie.

  So, not casual dressers.

  “Fraternal twins,” Thorpe said. “But verging on identical in appearance.”

  “They look like aliens,” Boo said.

  “It was the fashion of the time, I gather,” he said. “They were the sole heirs to a large fortune. Their parents died in an automobile accident, in which they were also involved, when they were fifteen years old.”

  “Near death when they were fifteen?” I said. “Jane said she was part of a group with the sight.”

  “A fair assumption, given what we know. For three years, the family estate was managed by lawyers. At eighteen, Sid and Sadie gained access to some accounts, and at twenty-one inherited it all. They had quite the reputation. Most references to them appear in the footnotes of rock musician biographies—they were known for the parties at their house on Hyssop Close. Several sources claim that they were involved in what is only referred to as ‘the occult.’ They had no arrest records, but the police kept a bit of an eye on the property because the neighbors were alarmed by the people they saw going in and out—not unusual for that period either. On the twenty-eighth of December, 1973, the police were called to the house by Jane Quaint. She had legally changed her name by that time. She said she had been away for the holiday, and when she returned, she found a note in the upstairs study.”

  He pulled up an image of a handwritten note, scrawled in green ink on a piece of yellowing paper:

  Dearest Jane,

  Our curiosity has gotten the better of us. We are children of blessed Demeter and blessed Hecate, living in the doorway, always wondering what’s inside. We’re bored, and we must know what comes next. They’ll never find us, dearest. What we have planned is simply too wonderful for that. It would never do just to die and rot on the floor like pensioners.

  Don’t mourn us—you know how silly that is. Take care of our lovely things.

  You will see us soon.

  With love,

  Sid and Sadie

  “The investigators at the time were deeply suspicious,” he said. “Two rich young people, everything left to the care of another young person, and a questionable suicide note that indicates the bodies won’t be found. They searched the house. The investigation notes make for interesting reading. The police clearly had very little idea what to make of what they found there: incense-covered altars, statues of three-headed dogs, strange plants that they thought were cannabis but turned out to be perfectly legal, if unusual, herbs. There were drugs found on the property—none in Jane’s quarters, but plenty in Sid and Sadie’s bedrooms, in boxes in the living areas, in the kitchen in containers marked for tea and coffee and sugar. Jane was briefly detained for this, but the house wasn’t hers, and therefore, neither were the drugs.”

  He flicked through a few black-and-white photos taken of the inside of the house. It looked like it was dirtier. Some of the electronics and appliances were different. The television was some kind of massive cabinet. The refrigerator and stove were smaller. Aside from those things, though, it hadn’t actually changed much since 1973. Jane really had kept most of the decor exactly as it was. There were lots of close-up photos, with pointing fingers indicating what the police found suspicious—tea canisters loaded with what must have been pot, boxes with glass hypodermic needles and rolled bits of tinfoil, leather books that were all about magic and the occult practices, curved knives, goblets.

  “Jane,” he went on, “according to the record, was nothing more than a housekeeper and assistant. Furthermore, the police concluded that no effort had been made to clean up the house before they were called, which added veracity to Jane’s account. She said that Sid and Sadie had an interest in the occult, which was obvious from the books and objects in the house, and dabbled in what she called ‘death magic.’ The neighbors confirmed that there were unusual goings-on. The notes indicate that the police believed Jane. Still, the twins’ accounts were frozen for several years. Jane continued maintaining the house. She went to university. Finally, in 1980, she asked for a small amount of money to be unfrozen so she could repair a bit of the roof that had developed a leak. Since seven years had elapsed and everything seemed to be in order, Sid and Sadie were declared dead and the assets unfrozen. Jane’s activities were monitored for a short time, but she didn’t remove any large sums or change her lifestyle. She seemed to have no interest in profiting from their death. Any investigation into the matter was closed in the mid-eighties.”

  “So she murdered them and got away with it?” Boo asked.

  “We don’t know that. It’s just a possibility. What matters more right now are the property records. We’ve run checks on any additional properties that might be owned by the SmithfieldWyatts. There were some, but they were sold off in the late 1960s and early 1
970s, further adding to the massive cash reserves the pair had. The only house they kept, that we can find, is the one in London. We checked the bank accounts. There have been no significant lump sums removed, but in the mid-nineties, smaller amounts were moved around and withdrawn over a few years, about one hundred thousand pounds in all. This is not a large amount, considering the wealth here, but that was certainly enough for a small house somewhere. There’s nothing in Jane’s name, so it’s likely in someone else’s. We’re running Jane’s relatives and known associates.”

  “How does Charlotte get found?” I asked. “If you can’t find this house?”

  “There’s an alert at all airports, train stations, and ports. Her photo has been released to all police stations around the country and is already on the BBC website and will be on the news. Given everything we’ve heard and that we know, she’s likely still in the country.”

  “What about that thing they say about the first forty-eight hours being important? Is it true? It’s already been a day.”

  I was hoping he would tell me that’s just something they say on TV, but he didn’t.

  “We need to get moving,” he said. “I’ve managed to keep the news about Stephen quiet, but that won’t last. Once it’s out, I don’t know what will happen to this team. If they decide to close us down, they’ll send a team to his flat and take everything. We need to get there first and preserve any records Stephen kept.”

  “We can check to see if Stephen is there,” Boo said, nodding. “It’s as good a place as any to start looking.”

  “Is the flat secure?” Thorpe said. “Did either of you tell anyone where it was?”

  I was about to say no, and then I remembered something else about that last day.