CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Wren
I come round in a bathroom.
That's the first indignity. Not a dungeon, not a cellar, not a stone room with rings in the wall — a bathroom, an extremely nice one, marble and brass and one of those enormous rainfall showers, and I'm on the floor of it with my hands zip-tied in front of me and a folded towel under my head, because somebody put a towel under my head.
The tenderness of it makes me want to be sick.
The second thing I know, before I know anything else, is that Cassius is northwest of me and about two miles away and coming.
That's what it's like. Not words. A direction, a distance, and a weather, and the weather is the worst thing I have ever felt off another person, and I lie on a marble floor with my hands tied and think, very clearly: oh, you poor man.
"You're awake," Lucien says.
He's sitting on the edge of the bath in a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he looks tired, which I don't expect.
"Where am I?"
"My house. Not the club — my actual house, which nobody's ever seen, so please appreciate it.
" He rubs his face with both hands. "You're in the bathroom because it's the only interior room without a window and I couldn't think of anywhere else to put you, which I want you to understand is embarrassing for me.
I've had a hundred years to plan for something like this and I've ended up with a woman on my bathroom floor and a bag of frozen peas on my hand where the zip-tie gun got me. "
"Lucien—"
"He'll come, of course. That's rather the point.
" He looks up. "Do you know he lied to the Matriarch?
First lie in a hundred and ninety years, and it was about you.
The whole court's been humming about it for two months.
Absolutely no one is talking about anything else.
It's been the best two months of my life. "
"You've killed five people."
That lands. His face does something small and complicated.
"No," he says. "I haven't."
"There's a list—"
"There's a list in a locker at a bus station that I have been paying to read for eleven months, because I am a nosy man with money who likes to know where everyone in this city gets their dinner.
" He stands up. "Somebody has been killing feeders in Ashmoor for a year and making it look like the Ferrow, and I thought, at first, that it was rather funny.
And then in April I worked out that whoever it was had started before the Ferrow business began, and that the deaths run in a line up the coast road, and that if you plot them on a map they get closer and closer to one particular launderette on Pell Street. "
The bathroom is very bright and very quiet.
"They were finding you," Lucien says. "One feeder at a time. It's a stupid method and it's taken them a year and it's the method you'd use if you couldn't come into the city yourself."
"You told me all this three weeks ago."
"I told you two-thirds of it three weeks ago.
" He crouches down. "Here's the third I didn't. On Tuesday a man I have never met paid four thousand dollars into an account of mine that only eleven people know exists, and there was a message on the transfer, and the message said she will be at Fennick Lane at eleven on Thursday and I would rather it was you than me. "
I stare at him.
"He gave me you," Lucien says. "Whoever he is. He put you on a plate and handed you to the most obvious suspect in the city and I took it, Miss Kelleher, I took it inside four seconds, because I have been grey since 1954."
◆ ◆ ◆
"So take me to Vespera," I say. "Right now. Take me down there and put me in front of her and tell her exactly that."
"Yes, I thought about that."
"Then—"
"And then I'd be a man who'd handed the only anchor in the world to a hundred-and-ninety-year-old woman with a room in her basement," Lucien says, "and got a thank you.
" And there is nothing charming in his face at all now.
"I'm a hundred and four years old. Everyone in that vault treats me like a boy.
I have been grey since 1954 and I have never once — not once, not for a single second — known what any of it was for. "
"Lucien."
"And there is a man in this city who has known for two months," he says quietly, "and who used it to buy corn."
He reaches out and takes my forearm, gently, and turns it over.
"I'll be quick," he says. "I've been told I'm quick."
◆ ◆ ◆
He is quick.
I'll give him that; he is quick, and he holds my arm the way you'd hold something at a chemist's, and it's over in about fifteen seconds and it doesn't hurt anything like as much as I've spent two months expecting.
What happens to him is the bad part.
Lucien Ivo comes off my forearm and sits down on the bathroom floor with his back against the bath, and his eyes go enormous, and he makes a noise I have only ever heard once before, in a house on a cliff, from a man on his knees in front of a chair.
And then he starts to cry.
Not artfully. Not the way he does anything else. He puts both hands over his face and sobs like a child in a marble bathroom at one in the morning, and I sit six feet away with my wrist against my chest and I cannot enjoy it, which I resent enormously.
"There's a garden," he says, through his hands.
"What?"
"Downstairs. There's a garden, I bought this house in 1991 because of the garden and I have never once—" He drags in a breath.
"It's raining. Miss Kelleher, it's raining out there and I can smell it, and I have been standing in rain for seventy years and it has been like standing in nothing, and I thought that was—"
"Normal," I say.
"I thought it was what we were."
"It's not."
He takes his hands down. His face is wrecked.
"Then what is it?" he says.
And this is the moment. This is the exact moment, and I know it while it's happening, which almost never happens in a life.
I could tell him now. I could sit on this floor and explain the green book and given freely and taken by force and what is happening in his body at this second, and there's a version of the next ten minutes where he's so shattered by it that he puts me in a car and drives me to the Custom House himself.
There's also a version where a hundred-and-four-year-old man who has just been handed the world for the first time in seventy years finds out he has one day of it, and decides to spend that day drinking all of me.
Northwest of here, a mile and a half away and closing, there is a man who would want me to tell him.
I look at Lucien Ivo crying on his own bathroom floor, and I make a choice that I am going to have to carry, and I say:
"It's what you took."
"What?"
"You're clever," I say. "Work it out."
And I don't tell him.
◆ ◆ ◆
He locks the door at two and goes downstairs to stand in his garden.
I get eleven minutes alone, and I spend all of them on the floor with my back to the bath doing the maths on how much blood I've lost — six ounces at the vault a week ago, and whatever this was — and the answer is not good but not yet dangerous, and then I stop doing maths and start doing what I actually am, which is a woman with a job.
I've got no knife. He took the penknife on Fennick Lane. I've got zip-tied hands, a folded towel, a marble bathroom, and eleven minutes.
There's a shaving kit on the shelf.
There's a razor in the shaving kit. Not a safety razor — a straight razor, because of course it is, because Lucien Ivo is exactly the kind of man who has a straight razor and a badger brush and a bowl of French soap he cannot smell.
I get it open with my teeth.
I get the zip-tie off in about ninety seconds, which is nothing to be proud of, because zip-ties are not actually very good.
And then I sit in the middle of the floor and look at the door frame, and understand that it's veneered chipboard with a plastic architrave and that the wards need wood.
Under the sink there's a bath panel.
Behind the bath panel, because this house was built in 1908 and somebody in 1991 spent a lot of money making it look like it was built in 1908, there are joists.
I take the panel off with the back of the razor.
I open my thumb. And I lie on my side on the floor of Lucien Ivo's bathroom with my arm inside the bath frame and I cut two curves and a line through into a hundred-and-eighteen-year-old floor joist, and I say four words, and then I do it again because my grandmother wrote cut it deep and cut it twice.
The air goes tight.
I do eleven of them. Along the joist, up the studwork, and one, awkwardly, on the underside of the door threshold where the carpet's been lifted. My hands stop working properly at about number eight and I do the last three badly and slowly and I have to stop twice.
And the entire time, northwest, half a mile away now, there is a man who can feel every single one of them going in, and who has no idea what they are, and who must be going out of his mind.
At ten to four Lucien comes back upstairs and unlocks the door and pushes it open.
And can't come in.
He stands in his own doorway in his own house and puts his hand into the space and takes it back like a man touching an iron, and looks up at me sitting on the floor in the middle of his bathroom covered in my own blood with a straight razor in my fist.
"What have you done," he says.
"I've made it expensive," I say.