Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER
Twenty-Three
AS DUSK SETTLES over the street, Cassandra stands in front of Roth’s flat.
She might not know who killed Chiron, but Maud had been worried enough to warn her. And Maud’s bookshop had led her to Roth, who has been so doggedly interested in Chiron’s bookshop even before she knew he’d died. An interest that now feels suspiciously… specific.
It’s time to get some answers.
It turns out that breaking into Roth’s flat is relatively easy.
The wealthy playboys and billionaires’ wives are at last moving in, so the foyer is occupied by a burly security guard.
Cassandra has already spent a good few hours watching people trickle in and out of the block, so she’s fairly confident when she approaches it.
She’s raided her wardrobe for a black silk sheath dress, a clutch bag and the tallest heels she could find.
With a swipe of make-up, including a sharp red lipstick to distract, she looks close enough to the woman she’s seen stalking in and out of the block—most recently out, with no plans to return soon, she hopes.
She pulls out her phone, half-covering it with her hair to hide the old make and shattered screen.
Just as she enters, she starts talking into it—all absolute nonsense, of course, but enough to make it clear that she’s in no hurry to interrupt her so-called conversation for anyone, least of all staff.
“Madam, if you could—” the security guard starts weakly.
Cassandra ignores him, continuing to talk into her phone. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him sigh wearily and turn back to his computer. Success.
As soon as she’s in the elevator, she stashes the phone in her clutch, alongside the singed scrap of paper she’ll need to break in. She has no idea if Roth’s home—she hopes not—but if he is, she’ll handle it.
Despite all the promises she’s made to herself lately, it feels good to slip back into the role of Cass Holt, like a favourite jumper or worn dressing gown.
A weight lifts from her shoulders. She forgets, sometimes, how heavy the mantle of ownership sits on her.
But tonight, no one’s looking at her to be respectable, responsible Cassandra Fairfax.
Unlocking the door is an easy matter: a snatch of poem, whispered from an old fairy tale about thieves and lovers.
Her lips burn with its taste: a hint of black pepper, glazed with honey.
The ink twines around her hands, just long enough for her to turn the handle and hear the satisfying snick as it unlocks.
Black type rolls off her skin, disappearing before it even hits the plush carpet, as she steps inside.
The flat is dark, the blinds shut against the normally spectacular view. The shattered remnants of Roth’s expensive glass ornament has been whisked away, leaving a cold, blank space with an empty pedestal. The effect is of a museum, awaiting an archaeologist’s spoils.
Roth won’t like that much, she thinks. He’s a man who likes all his toys in front of him.
Cassandra’s footsteps echo as she takes her time wandering around his flat, the way she couldn’t on all the occasions she’s been here.
She opens every kitchen cabinet and drawer, making a mental note of anything of interest. She lets herself run her hands across the gleaming countertops; they’re just as buttery as they look.
So what if she leaves a fingerprint or two?
She’s been here recently enough that Roth would have a hard time pinning her down as the guilty culprit—if he even finds out that there’s anything for her to be guilty of.
But while she admires the decor, she notes the empty spaces where before there’d been expensive appliances, chef’s knives, hand-blown wine glasses so thin she used to be able to hear them sing as she walked past. His pantry is nearly empty; so’s his wine fridge.
Now that Cassandra thinks about it, there are a couple of paintings missing from the walls, too: a genuine Monet and a maybe-forged Cézanne, but one that had been too convincing to give up, he’d said.
The eighty-thousand-pound designer rug and the half a dozen Italian loafers normally kicked off in the hallway are gone.
For a tight, panicked second, she wonders if Roth’s already been robbed and she’s just standing in the debris like an idiot. Then she forces herself to take a deep breath and re-evaluate.
To steal this much in one go would require multiple hours and a van.
Multiple people to bribe or disarm the security guard at the front desk.
And—she glances inside Roth’s office—why leave the computer, so much more portable than paintings?
Why take the rug, and then move the couch back into position?
Another feeling, more worrying, surfaces. This isn’t the flat of a man who’s been robbed by anyone except his own bad choices. This is the flat of a man in debt.
Cassandra thinks of Roth’s endless bragging, of the inheritance he’d been so open about when she’d first met him, and then later, much more cagey about.
It’s true that he’d stopped asking for her services as often in the last few months, and that he’d more than once tried to ply a favour from her instead, promising a different kind of payment.
In other words, no payment at all. But he’s hardly the first client to push his luck, or try and slip out of an invoice.
She hadn’t thought much of it at the time.
Now, she’s thinking quite a lot more about it.
As she reassesses the state of the flat, more puzzle pieces fall into place.
The ivory chaise—which has always been pristine—is dotted with grey marks and smudged fingerprints.
As though he’s been sleeping on it, instead of in his bed.
Perhaps because he’s sold off his bed frame.
Or, Cassandra thinks, assessing the position, because he wants to be in sight of the front door, even in his sleep. Because he’s afraid of what might come through it.
“Who did you piss off, Roth?” she murmurs.
Finally ready to get what she came for, she walks into the library—and stops. Every single shelf is empty. Roth’s collection is… gone.
Seeing a library gutted, even Roth’s, makes her heart twist a little. It’s like looking at the ribs of a corpse, and remembering what it was like to hold its living flesh against hers.
Whatever ransacking took place must have been relatively bloodless because there’s little in the way to suggest that it was ever occupied.
Cassandra swipes a couple of shelves with her finger and comes away spotless.
It does, however, make it easier to notice the rest of the room.
The last time she was here, she hadn’t been thinking of it at all, except perhaps to feel a bit envious over the books.
But now she pays attention to the hard-edged furniture, the tell-tale paint square of yet another photograph or canvas sold off—and the whisper of a breeze between two apparently seamless bays.
Roth had bragged endlessly about his “special collection” and its oh-so state-of-the-art storage facilities.
He’d like the theatricality of a secret room, she guesses.
The ink to break into Roth’s flat is long gone, but Cassandra finds the asymmetry on one of the shelves easily enough. She presses an indent, and an entire bay swings open. Just like a supervillain’s lair. Classic Roth, again. Chilly white light spills across the floor.
She pauses, listening for a sign that someone else is down there. But the eerie silence is absolute.
Wariness creeping through her, she descends, leaving the door open.
The floorboards change to clinical tile, spattered with dark red.
Blood. And a wet, musty smell. A film of stagnant, brackish water coats the floor, pooling where the ground divots—and there are plenty. Cracked tiles give way to earth.
Cassandra is halfway down the stairs when she sees it.
In the centre, collapsed on the floor, is a figure—or what’s left of them. A silhouette, really, of a wet, bloody smear. Next to them lie glass shards that, if put together, Cassandra is pretty sure would resemble a vial of ink.
It takes her a moment to pinpoint what’s so terribly wrong about this image, beyond the obvious. She picks up a handful of earth and sifts it between her fingers, frowning. Earth.
This is a third-floor apartment.
She checks behind her to make sure Roth isn’t about to jump out from the entryway, then, very carefully, she closes her eyes and listens.
There’s the rattle of the climate-control system, defunct without its books; the whine of the lights above; her own breathing, slightly unsteady; the barest rustle of her dress as her chest rises and falls.
At last, she catches it. A susurration, struggling to be heard over the sound of her own heart pumping, but it’s there. The river.
Or, she reconsiders, a kind of river, maybe the dying trickle of something that was never really meant to exist in the first place. There’s too much wrongness here, a sense of an ouroboros. Time swallowing its own tail.
She opens her eyes again and reassesses the scene before her.
Roth found his reader, all right. Someone stupider than her, more arrogant—or maybe just more desperate, if this is where all Roth’s cash has gone.
Why not try to read the river into the basement of a flat that has no business possessing either?
What could possibly go wrong? An attempt of this magnitude makes the Templeton reading look like child’s play, like Cassandra heating up her pot of tea.
This isn’t the product of a few hastily recalled lines, or even just one book—it would be volumes of books.
But a reading is only as compelling as its reader, and only as complex as what they can hold in their mind. Whereas the river is infinite. The human mind, less so.
It would have been a quick death, Cassandra thinks. Not painless… but quick.
Upstairs, the door slams open. Roth’s voice is loud as he berates someone on the phone.
Fuck.
As quietly as she can, Cassandra steals back up the stairway to close the secret door, so there’s just a sliver of room for her to escape. She turns off the lights and takes off her shoes, mindful of the heel striking against tile. Then there’s nothing to do but wait.
Frantically, she runs through the last twenty minutes in Roth’s flat. Did she move anything? Did she leave anything behind?
The library doors swing open. Roth’s footsteps echo across the floor, his conversation no longer muffled.
“I told you, I’m working on it.” A pause. “Yeah, yeah, time is of the essence. Whatever. Of course I—hang on.”
Cassandra’s heart drops into her stomach. Roth’s footsteps have stopped, right at the entrance to the secret library.
“I’ll call you back.”
Slowly, the door creaks open. Light from upstairs spills downwards.
Cassandra claps one hand over her mouth to muffle her breathing.
There’s nowhere to hide, nothing she can use to defend herself. And with the river so far away—so unquestionably not in this room, no matter what Roth has tried—she can’t simply read herself out of it.
One step, then another down the stairs.
He’ll turn on the lights any second now. Maybe she should push past him, while she’s got the element of surprise. Maybe she could—
But the lights don’t come on. Roth stays where he is, outlined by the warm lamplight from upstairs. Cassandra presses herself as far as she can into the darkest corner, breath held.
“Bastard,” he mutters.
Then he turns around and walks back up.
His phone goes again. “What was I saying? Oh, right. Yeah, I just needed to pick something up. I’ll see you there.”
The library doors close. A moment later, the front door slams shut.
Cassandra waits until her heart stops pistoning in her chest, until it no longer sounds like Roth’s footsteps.
He’ll have gone now, but she’s already spent too long here.
Even though every instinct is screaming at her to run, she forces herself to look back at the blown-wide silhouette once more, just in case she’s missed anything.
In the glint of the light from upstairs, her gaze snags on a new fragment of glass. Not a fragment, but an unbroken vial. Dregs of ink swirl in the very bottom.
She touches it, then jerks back.
The ink has the same wrongness as this room, the same wrongness of the almost-river. She’s heard of books and readings gone bad, but ink?
There’s only one time that’s happened before and—
No—
But her thoughts, still tuned to Cass Holt, thief, are no match for her memories, surging over her like a tide.
Her fingers, slippery with a stranger’s blood, as she’d frantically tried to hold it at bay in his chest. The book askance on the floor, damage already done even though the pages were still wet with ink.
The crowd behind her, recoiling first in horror, and then in fear at being tainted by such a singular event.
She closes her eyes briefly. There had been a lot of blood then, too.
Carefully, she slips the vial into her pocket, taking care not to let it touch her directly.
There’s nothing else here for her, or at least nothing that she can make sense of.
She replaces the door, making sure she hasn’t trodden earth across the floor—at least this explains the scuff marks on Roth’s once pristine couch—her thoughts tumbling over one another.
It’s no secret that Roth was interested in the tributary bookshops; she’d assumed it was for the same reasons that most people hold: power, glory, magic.
But this desperation—this, she doesn’t like.
Desperate people are dangerous. And if he was desperate enough to try and recreate the river, to let a man splatter viscera all over his precious book storage…
Then Roth’s become very dangerous, indeed.