Part 12 (1/2)

Paul. Ugly Bob has asked me to dance naked in the school canteen. So is that OK with you, Paul?

”Paul,” she glanced over her shoulder, raven black hair swis.h.i.+ng luxuriantly. ”I'll have to go now. Sheena and Kari are waiting for me. Sorry about not being able to make it to the cinema.”

”That's OK.” It wasn't OK. It wasn't OK so much it sucked like the biggest Hoover in Christendom, but what the h.e.l.l could he do about it?

”Look,” she told him and touched his forearm. ”After I get back from my grandmother's I can meet you. That's if you can make it?”

He said that he could. And his heart beat a whole lot faster.

She nodded. ”OK. The cemetery gates at seven?”

He smiled easily now. ”I'll see you then.”

Suddenly she seemed to lunge toward him; her face came up close to his. For one wild moment he thought she'd actually kiss him in full view of the entire school.

Instead, she whispered with a nerve crackling intensity, ”Bring something with you.”

The smile he gave her before she darted away was knowing. Inside, his heart thundered against his ribs. He looked round at the others moving like a tide from block to block. Surely he must look different to them now.

What was the word?

Transformed?

Changed?

No, a far more powerful description: Transfigured.

That was the worda transfigured. It's what happens to saints when they've glimpsed paradise: they glow as if lit up from inside by a whole rack of halogen lamps. Paul Newton felt like that right now.

He glanced at his watch. Eight hours until he met Miranda. Then they'd enter the quiet clutches of the cemetery together. h.e.l.l. It couldn't come quickly enough.

4.

John Newton returned home. The dog took up a position on the gra.s.s bank where he could bask in the sun. Family Haslem's home was secure, if a little untidy. He'd get Paul to tackle the raw meat in the kitchen later; otherwise the property would become a holiday destination for every fly for miles around.

He made coffee, raided the cake tin, checked his e-mail, and then opened the computer file labeled Without Trace. For a whole three minutes he stared at the flas.h.i.+ng cursor.

”Well, what are you waiting for? The first chapter and synopsis has to be in the mail on Monday. Tom's going to be p.i.s.sed with you if you don't do it. Then you won't get the Goldhall contract, then the money stops coming in, then you lose the house, and poor little doggy and all your children go hungry.” He sang the words under his breath; part encouragement, part terror tactics to get his backside in gear so he'd write that first chapter.

But it wasn't coming.

There was no spark. Without Trace would be a hash of warmed over old mystery cases. Tom was right. The book he'd conceived didn't possess a shred of originality. Breathing heavily out through his nostrils he leaned back in his chair in disgust. As he did so his eye took in the shelf where Blast His Eyes sat. Now that was a book with att.i.tude. So it had started out as a true-life mystery, just as his six preceding books, but it had evolved into a real detective hunt.

He'd begun with the usual book and archive research, blowing the dust off old newspapers (well the dust off old microfiche files would be more accurate) as he'd unearthed the account of a murder case from 1889. Behind every murder is often a compelling human-interest story. What drove the individual to murder? How did they try to escape justice? Were they caught? How were they punished?

The St. Paxton-Wellman case was no exception. What gave the case an extra splash of glamour was that it told a story of riches to rags-a member of the English aristocracy brought low by all too human weakness.

Lord St. Paxton-Wellman, a distant cousin of Queen Victoria, inherited a country mansion in Lincolns.h.i.+re, just down the road from Lord Byron's estate. With the grand house came a fortune in the form of Indian tea plantations.

The boy was, as they say, set for life.

But instead of doing what the eldest sons of the English aristocracy should have done-that is acquiring a first rate commission in the army- he dedicated his life to pleasure. In turn that led to a pathological addiction to gambling by the time he was twenty-four. There were also rumors that he suffocated his illegitimate child borne by his scullery maid. However, good family connections meant he could pa.s.s the buck. A stable lad was convicted at the famous 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d Murder' trial of 1879. There were whispers at the time that the boy was a patsy. Even so, he was hanged at Lincoln jail, then buried in lime. As part of the research John visited the site where the stable lad and other hanged convicts had been interred. Innocently, the burial pit now lay beneath a supermarket carpark.

But even though Lord Paxton-Wellman evaded English justice he didn't slip the grasp of, perhaps, Divine justice. His wealth hemorrhaged from him like blood from a severed artery. By the time he was forty the estates were gone, his wife deserted him, he lost his manorial home.

Soon his lords.h.i.+p turned to crime. What's more, he had no hesitation in shooting anyone who got in his way. By then the nineteenth century was the age when science had begun to do the miraculous. He must have picked up a snippet of pseudo-scientific research that suggested the eyes of murder victims still preserved the image of the murderer, and that like a photographic plate could be developed. With the image of the murderer in police hands, an arrest would soon follow.

Well, that's how the theory ran. Of course it was all tosh. But Paxton-Wellman didn't know that. And so that's how the t.i.tle of the book originated. The wicked lord would literally blast out his victim's eyes with a pistol. Now the story alone would make Blast His Eyes a good commercial proposition for any publisher. But then came a minor miracle. John Newton carried on his book research, picking up tasty nuggets that would add weight to the book, and which eventually led to one of Paxton-Wellman's safe houses, where he found a box that had actually belonged to the man. John had been shrewd enough not to open the box there and then, but opened it live on a TV chat show the day the book was launched. Inside, there had been a monogrammed pistol (without doubt Lord Paxton-Wellman's); china figurines wrapped in newspapers (bearing the date 1889), a Spanish gold ducat, and, perhaps more strangely, diaries that detailed the results of several thousand backgammon games (the lord's obsession for backgammon knew no bounds, it seemed). John had even been able to round off the chat show with a satisfying account of the villainous lord's death by drowning when he tried to escape from the police by swimming across a lake.

Within days Blast His Eyes stepped neatly into the top ten hardback list. John and Val Newton went house hunting. And here they were.

”And here I am,” John murmured, turning back to the computer screen. ”Hunting for a follow-up.”

He stared at the screen for a full five minutes. Then he closed down the computer.

”d.a.m.n it.” He couldn't settle. As much as anything it was the events of the last twenty-four hours. Wondering about the origins of that letter he'd found in the garden had been nibbling away in the back of his head. Now he'd just learned that the Haslems had received the same-or similar letter. They'd burnt it in what looked like a good deal of panic, then fled the village.

But was there a connection between them running out like that and the letter? Was it just coincidence?

Leaning back in the chair, he stared into the blank eye of the computer screen. That blank gla.s.s eye stared right back into his, challenging him to make the connection. He felt a growing edginess. There were questions to be answered. He knew it. But then he should be working.

What's more it was no real business of his how people reacted to letters that were probably, when all's said and done, a prank.

But some weird prank. He poured more coffee. This was going to be a real caffeine bender today but so whata Restless, he switched on the radio, surfed through the channels, switched it off again, then picked up the letter that had arrived so mysteriously in the dead of night.

Mysteriously?

There you go again John Newton, he told himself, shaking his head. You've got a weakness for melodrama-just like old Lord Paxton-Wellman had a pa.s.sion for backgammon.

He stood with the coffee cup in one hand, the letter in the other, and read it through again: Dear Messr. John Newt'n, I should wish yew put me a pound of chock latt on the grief stowne of Jess Bowen by the Sabbath night. Yew will be sorry if yew do not.

Come on, please! Why had the prankster's imagination conked out at the end? Surely he or she could have signed off with some cryptic name-Mr. X. or Miss Y at least. Then why not something lurid like Yours Truly, the Skelbrooke Mangier or Billy Razor Hands?

All that for a bar of chocolate?

So why go to all the trouble of using what appeared to be genuine antique paper complete with Gothic handwriting right out of Edgar Allan Poe?

He took a hit of coffee. These questions had gotten under his skin. They itched so much he wanted to scratch them right out of there. His mind went back twenty-four hours. Keith Haslem's ranting as he bundled his family into the car was memorable enough. When Audrey Haslem complained to her husband that his language might be a tad colorful for the neighborhood he'd retorted: 'I don't care about the f.u.c.king neighbors. If the neighbors had any f.u.c.king sense they'd be clearing out, too.'