Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

Chiddester muttered, “What do you mean?”

“First of all, I am pretty certain Sadiq did not kill your daughter. There are unanswered questions about how his DNA got there, but the answer to those questions is not that he killed her. So that means, if he didn’t, somebody else did. Somebody with a more complex motive, somebody Sadiq Hassan thought was Jewish. Now, if I am right, that could mean that Katie had opened a big can of worms. And if she did, and we handle this investigation right, then her death need not have been in vain. But if you go off half cock and do something rash, you not only end up in jail, you also damage your own cause, and your daughter’s sacrifice ends up being for nothing.”

He nodded. “You’re right. Absolutely right. We’ll play it your way for now, but make no mistake, Stone. At some point, somehow, that little shit will pay with his life for what he did to my Katie.”

Fi nodded at him. “Hear, hear, spare no expense.”

I was spared from having to answer their comments by Trout opening the door behind me and saying, “Dinner is served, M’Lord.”

At dinner, they both seemed exhausted, and conversation was stilted and formal in a way that our previous talk had not been. They both made it clear that the discussion about Katie was closed, and the truth was, I didn’t think they had anything more to tell us. So we discussed Broadway, a subject about which I know little, the West End, about which I know less, hunting, shooting and fishing, about which I know absolutely nothing, and the difficulties of being a cold cases cop in the Bronx, a subject in which they had next to no interest at all, though they both said it was ‘frightfully interesting’.

As soon as we had finished our coffee and cognac, Dehan and I excused ourselves, saying we had to make an early start in the morning, and were shown up to our room by Trout.

It was a sultry night. We had the windows open and all the covers thrown back, save a single sheet. Outside, the moon was brilliant, turning the sky an almost green shade of turquoise. There were birds I could not identify. One may have been a nightingale, the other kept repeating two high-pitched dots, as though sending the message, ‘I’ over and over again in Morse code, echoing into infinity, lost under the moon.

Dehan had her head on my shoulder, with her black hair pressed against my cheek. “This is a very strange place, this archipelago. It has been a very strange honeymoon.”

“You want to go home? We don’t have to do this.”

She shook her head, rubbing her hair into my face. “No, I want to find who killed Katie. I like these people, they’re nuttier than squirrel shit, but I like them.”

“Nuttier than squirrel shit? Seriously?”

She raised her head to look at me from less than an inch away, so her eyes looked huge. “Yeah, you know, crazier than a soup sandwich.”

“Crazy as a cat in a dog factory?”

“Loopy as a cross-eyed cowboy.”

“I get it, the wheel’s turning but the hamster is dead.”

She laid her chin on the backs of her hands on my chest, making her nose and eyes even bigger. I didn’t want to tell her, so I stared at the ceiling instead. She said, “Justin Caulfield, an anti-Semitic Marxist pretending to be a mainstream socialist. I wonder if we could wangle a visit?”

“We could try. But what would it achieve? This case is beginning to feel very political and very British. I confess the link with the original serial killings is just slipping through my fingers. What are we saying…?”

She sighed. “I know…”

“That a man who could be Prime Minister of Great Britain in a year or two is also a serial killer? And how do we explain the fifteen years of inactivity? What’s he been doing for the last decade and a half? It doesn’t make any sense, and, more to the point, it doesn’t fit the profile of any serial killer I ever heard of. The vast majority have below average IQs, are under achievers and are socially inadequate. Not an ideal profile for a guy who has to persuade half a nation to vote for him.”

She pursed her lips into a vast pink haze on the corner of my eye. “Not a known serial killer profile, unless,” she said, “you count Hitler and his crowd of crazies as serial killers.”

“That is a very unsettling thought, Dehan. I think we need to be searching for a simpler explanation, not a crazier one.”

She gave me a big, wet kiss on my cheek, without having to move forward at all, then rolled on her back and closed her eyes.

“Entia non sunt multiplicanda,” she said without opening them, “praeter necesitatem.”

I turned to stare at her. “What?” But she was already asleep.

ELEVEN

I called Harry on the way back to London the next morning, and he met us in the lobby at the hotel. He looked embarrassed and kept saying, “Right!” like he was gearing himself up to do something. I pointed to a nest of chairs and a sofa in a quiet corner and guided him over. As we sat, he said, “So, do anything nice yesterday? Sorry I didn’t call.”

Dehan grinned and said, “Yeah, we went down to visit Chiddie and Fi. It was a scream, wasn’t it, Stone?”

He laughed like he should know what we were talking about, but didn’t. I said, “Lord Chiddester and his wife invited us down to Sussex, for dinner and a chat.”

The laughter melted out of his face. “You have to be bloody kidding me. What are you like? How’d you manage that?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you later. But first,