Chapter Ten #2
“Are you Laurence Fitzroy?”
“Yes,” Laurie replied. He was surprised he sounded so sure.
Something gave in the muscles of his legs, and he felt himself sit
down hard on the third step. “Who are you?”
“PC Christine Foster. This is Detective Paul Gray. We’re
investigating your sister’s disappearance.”
Laurie tried to take this in. It was one thing for Gibson to
look at him through her tears and say gone. That could almost have been an
extension of the unreal life of this household, where hothouse
games played themselves out behind sealed doors. But this woman was
so real that he could smell cold air in the serge of her
uniform. Gone was
somehow less than disappearance; Gibson could not
terrify him the way Christine Foster could, with her formality and
her careful choice of words. For a moment he couldn’t find any of
his own. Then they came out—weird, barely voluntary. “Please tell
me not just the two of you.”
Foster
almost smiled. “No. No, not at all. There’s a citywide alert out,
and children’s services all over the country have been informed.
Don’t you watch the news?”
“Not lately.” Laurie looked at his hand. It was still clutched
around hers, and its knuckles were white. He must be hurting her.
Quickly he disengaged. “Sorry,” he said. Then once more, roughly,
“Sorry. This isn’t true. It can’t be.”
“Well, we’re very concerned. To be honest, we didn’t think this
would come as such a shock to you. We wondered if that was why
you’d come home. You’ve been away this week, haven’t
you?”
“Yes. But I didn’t… I hadn’t heard a thing…”
“Okay. Try not to be too frightened. Most kids turn up alive
and well. But we’ll need to talk to you, obviously, and…” She fell
silent, looking at him more closely. “You’re very pale, Mr.
Fitzroy. You look underweight, and you have facial injuries. Who
did this to you?”
Laurie opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Brought up
not to tell tales, schooled in the doctrine that it was better to
suffer in silence than expose even the worst of bullies, he found
he could not speak. Her question slipped away from him
anyway. She’s been gone for three days.
Three days. Clara. Gone… “No,” he
whispered, vision clouding. “Christ, no.”
A shadow
fell. At first Laurie could not bring himself to notice it or to
put it together with the banging door, the heavy footsteps that had
preceded it. Then his nostrils prickled with the scent of familiar
aftershave and expensive scotch, and he jerked up in time to see
his father, an inexorable bulk arising between the two officers. He
tensed, ready to hear the old man add his lies to his own
silence…
But Sir
William said, to Laurie’s astonishment, “I’m afraid that was me. I
did it to him, Officer Foster.”
The
admission broke Laurie’s restraint like a well-placed hammer on an
eggshell. He sprang to his feet. The old man’s smell was a pressure
in his lungs, threatening to crack his healing ribs anew. The voice
hit him like a big hand. He lurched past PC Foster’s grip. He could
barely understand himself. He thought his instinctive movement upon
seeing his father again would be away, away, not this scramble
toward him, to do when he got there who knew what.
“You bastard,” he heard himself yell, his voice cracking up out
of its register as it had used to do when he was just a kid and it
was breaking. “Next time you lay a hand on me you better finish the
job and kill me, or—”
“All right, Mr. Fitzroy!” His shoulder was caught. When he
tried to free himself, he felt his arm tugged up his back. The
other officer had not moved, so he could assume it was Foster who
was holding him back from his father in an efficient restraint
grip. Incongruously, once she had stilled him and could spare a
hand, she began to rub his other shoulder, her touch unfazed and
soothing. “All right,” she said. “He admitted he did it. You can
press charges for assault if you want, but you have to be calm.
Okay?”
Sir
William, watching his son’s struggle dispassionately, said, “As I
recall, I punched him in the ribs, as well. How are
they?”
Foster
gave him a look, then nodded to her partner, who came forward and
unfastened Laurie’s coat. When Gray reached for the hem of his
T-shirt, Laurie tried to flinch back, but the woman’s solid bulk
behind him held him still. The detective leaned down and examined
Laurie’s side in silence, without touching, then straightened up.
“They’ve been treated,” he said grimly. “But in my opinion, Sir
William, your son could bring a charge of assault if he wanted
to.”
Laurie
looked from one to the other of them. These were not the usual
coppers—the cronies—with whom his father liked to surround himself
when he had dealings with the commissioners’ board. The sense of
being seen and heard took the edge off his rage, and feeling Foster
ease her grip, he swallowed and began to catch his
breath.
“I know he could,” Sir William said. He took a step toward
Laurie, and Gray shot out a warning hand. “We…haven’t been friends,
my son and I. It’s my fault. I have a hot temper, and I drink too
much. But I need him to help me now. Laurence, I’m very
sorry.”
Now
Laurie was quite frozen: Foster did not need so much to hold him
still as prop him up. A huge sense of unreality descended upon him.
Any second now he would wake in Sasha’s arms, tell him about this
hideous dream, and feel his kisses, sweet and clean as daylight,
melt it all away. The hallway began a slow rotation around him.
Hallway, stairs, upper floors, Clara’s empty room… He said faintly,
“Where’s my mother?”
“Upstairs, heavily sedated. She can’t withstand this, Laurence.
You know she can’t. Please help us.”
“I…” Laurie shuddered. He wiped his eyes, unsure when the tears
had come to them. “Yes, okay. Anything. What do need me to
do?”
Sir
William, unexpectedly, looked at the ground. After a moment, it was
Detective Gray who cleared his throat and held out a hand to him.
“We need you to look at some documents,” he said. “Through here.
Come on.”
The
other source of voices and radio crackle was his father’s study.
Laurie had not even noticed until now that the door was open. The
blinds were drawn, blue-white light emanating from three computers
screens that had sprung up around the old man’s desk. A third
officer, this one also in plain clothes, got to his feet as Foster
led Laurie into the room. He put out a hand, and once more Laurie
found himself taking it, as if they were meeting at a cocktail
party. “Is this…”
“This is my boy, Laurence.”
The
voice came from an inch off Laurie’s ear. An involuntary spasm of
fright seized him—muscle and bone still reacting to the hurt he
thought his mind had assimilated—and he pulled away from Foster,
almost falling, grabbing at a chair for support. Gray reached to
steady him. “All right, son,” he said, then turned on Sir William.
“Could you back off, please, sir? Give him some space. Laurence,
this is Detective Sergeant John Kucharski. He works with us and for
Interpol.”
Interpol. Now I know I’m bloody dreaming. Laurie subsided into the chair that Gray had pulled out for
him. Distractedly he decided he liked the look of DS Kucharski. Not
much older than himself, but Laurie guessed he’d turned the years
to better account than prancing about on a stage. His gaze was
broad and kind with experience, and he had what looked like a
knife-wound scar to the side of his neck. He said, “Okay, Laurence.
I’m the Interpol liaison for the central Met. These other officers
and I have just been looking through records for anyone who might
have had contact with your family recently, anyone who could give
us a lead to your sister.”
Laurie
nodded. This seemed reasonable enough. Kucharski was handing him a
sheaf of papers. He did his best to concentrate, though his brain
felt like a balloon, drifting near the ceiling somewhere, attached
to him by the most fragile of strings. He wanted to help. He wanted
to look as if he did, and he tried for the expression of respectful
attention with which he often convinced his tutor he was actually
there in the room with him. Contact with my family, he thought, a
ripple of shocky amusement clenching his stomach muscles as his
memory picked through the parade of music teachers, Mayfair society
doyennes and charity workers who made their way into his mother’s
living room. “Sorry,” he said, pressing a hand to his cold lower
lip to keep the quake of laughter from his voice. “I…I can’t think
of anyone who’d…”
“All right,” Kucharski said. “But I believe you know a young
man called Alexandru Petrica.”
Laurie
hardly liked to contradict him. Obediently he read through the data
and statistics on the first of the printouts Kucharski had handed
him, with its impressive Scotland Yard watermark. He didn’t. He
knew Sasha, of course, whose black-and-white photograph was paper
clipped to the sheet, as if there were some connection. He knew
Sasha.
Laurie
didn’t have a picture of him. This was the first thought that
struck him, followed by an absurd desire to ask Kucharski if he
could keep this one. He smiled. Sasha could not be other than
beautiful, even on a police mug shot. His dark gaze sought Laurie’s
across time, circumstance, celluloid. He looked calm and unafraid,
unconcerned by the alien name he was being forced to hold across
his chest for the camera. Alexandru Petrica… Gently Laurie
unfastened the photograph, drew it toward him. He ran his fingers
over its surface. “No,” he said, softly. “No, I don’t know
him.”
Kucharski took the photo carefully back from him. He put a
hand on Laurie’s wrist. The grasp was compassionate but firm. He
waited till Laurie looked up, and then he said, “He’ll have called
himself Sasha or maybe Sandru. He’ll have told you that his father
was a poet, driven out of Bucharest during the Ceausescu regime.
Some of that’s even true. But Alexandru’s father, Stefan Petrica,