Hemlock and Roses

Chapter 4 Gate 23

The colour went out of him all at once, as if someone had pulled a plug. His mouth opened. The paper cup slipped from his hands and hit the floor, and coffee spread across the shining tiles in a dark, widening pool, and he didn't even look at it. He was looking at her. His eyes were enormous.

"No," Victor Ashby said. "No. Not you."

Iris stopped walking.

"Mr. Ashby, I'm only here to talk-"

"Keep her away from me." He was on his feet now, stumbling backwards, the holdall tipping over. His voice cracked high and thin, like a boy's. "Keep her away. Keep her away from me."

People were turning to stare. One of the security officers moved forward. Morrow was there in two long strides, one hand raised, palm out, the voice he used on jumpers and drunks. "Easy, Mr. Ashby. Easy. Nobody's going to hurt you."

"You don't know what she is." Ashby's back hit the glass of the window. He was staring past Morrow's shoulder, straight at Iris, and his eyes were wet. "How dare you come here. After what you did. How dare you."

The airport noise seemed to fall away. Iris was aware of the coffee on the floor, a few drops on the toe of her shoe. She was aware of her own heartbeat, very loud and very slow.

"I'm sorry," she said, and her voice came out gentle, because she could not think what else to do with it. "I think you've confused me with someone else. I've never met you, Mr. Ashby."

Something happened to his face then. It was not relief. It was a kind of horror that had found something worse beneath it.

"Never met me," he whispered.

"No."

He stared at her for a long time. Then he started to laugh: a thin, awful sound, with no breath behind it.

"Ask her," he said to Morrow. "Ask her what she did."

And then, as if a door had shut inside him, he sat down on the floor of Gate 23 with his back against the glass, put his face in his hands, and said nothing more except, over and over, the word lawyer.

"He's off his head," Morrow said in the car park, rain dripping from the brim of his hat. "That's all. Seven years of guilt, a dead colleague, a guilty conscience, and he sees the daughter of a man he used to work with. Brain short-circuits."

"Morrow."

"You look like your dad. Same eyes. Maybe that's it."

"He wasn't afraid of my father," Iris said. "He was afraid of me."

Morrow didn't have an answer to that. He took out his cigarettes, remembered he'd quit, and put them back.

"We can hold him," he said finally. "The insurer filed a fraud complaint after the fire. It never went anywhere, but it's still technically open. Combined with a flight risk, that's enough for forty-eight hours."

"Then hold him." Iris looked at her watch. 9:47. "And drive me to Catherine Bell's house."

"The DA? At ten o'clock at night?"

"You want Elias Vane charged at nine tomorrow?"

Morrow sighed, and started the engine.

District Attorney Catherine Bell opened her own front door in reading glasses and a cardigan, holding a glass of red wine. She looked at Iris, then at Morrow, then at the rain.

"Professor Hale. Unless someone's dead, I'm going to be very cross."

"Someone's dead," Iris said. "That's rather the point."

Bell's mouth twitched. She stepped aside.

Iris did not sit down. She stood in Catherine Bell's warm, lamp-lit kitchen with rain running off her coat onto the slate floor, and she laid it out the way she would have laid it out for a room of first-years: one step at a time, so simply that every step felt obvious, so that by the time you reached the end you had already agreed to it.

"Elias Vane leaves Walter Crane's apartment at 11:20. Crane is alive; we know that because at 11:24 he makes a two-minute phone call from his own mobile to Victor Ashby. Do you think a dead man makes phone calls, Catherine?"

"I think you're going to make me answer every one of these."

"At 11:28, someone in leather-soled shoes walks up the stairs. Crane makes tea for this person. They drink it. At 11:36 there's a thud. At 11:40, Crane is dead. In the four minutes between the thud and the discovery, the killer washes, dries and racks their teacup, then leaves by a fire-escape window that a man who arranged his pills by the day would never have left unlatched." Iris held up one finger. "The only physical evidence against Vane is a tuning fork he openly admits leaving with Crane, alive, at 11:20." A second finger. "The only motive is seven years old, and if he'd wanted to kill Crane for it, he's had seven years to try." A third. "And tonight, the man Crane called four minutes after Vane left was arrested trying to board a plane to Zurich."

Bell set down her wine.

"You're saying charge Ashby."

"I'm saying Ashby couldn't have done it. He was forty minutes away. I'm saying there's a third person, and if you charge Elias Vane tomorrow morning, you'll be telling that third person they've got away with it." Iris paused. "And you'll be the DA who charged a grieving man on a tuning fork while the real witness was caught fleeing the country. The press will love that."

There was a long silence. The kitchen clock ticked.

"Seventy-two hours," Catherine Bell said at last. "Not a minute more. If you don't bring me your third person by Thursday morning, I charge Vane and you can explain the teacup to a jury."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Go home, Iris. You look like someone's been sleeping in your skin."

She did not go home. She went back to the precinct.

It was past midnight. The building had sunk into its nocturnal hum, and the corridor lights flickered in the way they always did after midnight, as if they too were wondering whether they could stop now.

She didn't know why she went. She told herself he deserved to hear it from her. She told herself a dozen sensible things on the walk from the car. None of them explained why her pulse picked up when the duty sergeant unlocked the door.

He was lying on the narrow bench in the holding cell with one arm across his eyes. He sat up the moment the door opened. Not startled. Just awake, as if he had been waiting.

"They're not charging you tomorrow," Iris said. "You have seventy-two hours."

For a moment he said nothing. Then he let out a long, slow breath, and she understood that he had been holding it, maybe for days.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. Seventy-two hours isn't a verdict." She leaned on the doorframe. She was suddenly so tired she could have slept standing up. "We picked up Victor Ashby at the airport."

Something in him sharpened. "Is he all right?"

It was an odd first question. Not did he talk. Not what did he say. Is he all right.

"He's frightened," Iris said. "Very frightened." She hesitated. "Of me."

Elias went still.

She had seen him go still before. When she'd said my father. When she'd said wet. But this was different. This was the stillness of a man standing on ice who has just heard it c***k.

"He took one look at me and dropped his coffee," she said. "He said, 'How dare you come here, after what you did.' He told Morrow to ask me what I'd done." She tried to laugh and didn't quite manage it. "I've never met the man in my life. I've never even been to the Ashby Centre. And he looked at me like I was a ghost."

Elias looked down at his hands. His left thumb moved slowly over the scar on the back of the right. Back and forth. Back and forth.

"Ashby is a frightened man," he said at last. "Frightened men say the cruellest thing they can find. It doesn't mean it's true."

It was a reasonable thing to say. A kind thing. Iris almost let it go.

But she had spent three days learning the shape of the way this man spoke. And somewhere in the back of her mind, the part of her that never stopped listening, never stopped asking, noticed what he hadn't said.

"You didn't say he was lying," she said slowly.

His thumb stopped.

"You always tell the truth. You told me that yourself, in a way. You never lie, you just stop talking." She stepped into the cell. "So when I tell you a man accused me of something terrible, a normal person would say, He's lying. You said, It doesn't mean it's true." She was close enough now to see the shadows under his eyes. "Those aren't the same thing, Elias."

It was the first time she had used his name. It came out without her deciding to say it, and it sat strangely in her mouth, like a word in a language she had once spoken and forgotten.

He looked up at her.

She had been ready for evasion. She had been ready for silence. She had not been ready for the expression on his face, as if she had reached into his chest without warning and touched something that had been bruised for a very long time.

"Go home, Iris," he said quietly.

He said her name the way you say a word you have said ten thousand times. Without thinking. As if it lived in his mouth.

They looked at each other in the flickering light. Neither of them moved.

Then he reached past her, slowly, so that she could see what he was doing, and picked up the folded grey blanket from the end of the bench. He held it out to her.

"It's cold outside," he said. "And you didn't bring a scarf."

She hadn't. She hadn't noticed until he said it. Her neck was bare, and the skin there was chilled from the walk across the car park.

She didn't take the blanket. She couldn't have explained why her eyes suddenly stung.

"Goodnight, Mr. Vane," she said, and left before he could see.

Her flat was dark and smelled of the radiator coming on. Iris dropped her keys in the bowl, kicked off her shoes, and stood in the kitchen in her stockinged feet without turning on the light, drinking a glass of water at the sink because she couldn't be bothered to find anything else.

1:52 a.m.

Thursday morning. Fifty-five hours.

She plugged her phone in to charge and, out of habit, thumbed through her calls to see if Morrow had rung while she was driving.

He hadn't.

But there was another call in the log. Outgoing. Made from her phone at 2:13 in the morning on Monday. Last night. Eleven minutes long.

Dad.

Iris stared at it.

She had gone home after Sunday dinner. She had gone straight to bed, because she had been awake for two days, and she had slept like a stone until her alarm went off at seven. She remembered lying down. She remembered nothing after that.

She did not remember calling her father at two in the morning.

She did not remember talking to him for eleven minutes.

You're tired, she told herself. You've barely slept. You probably woke up, called him half-asleep about the case, and forgot. It was the sort of thing that happened to people. It was perfectly reasonable.

She set the phone down. Her hand was not quite steady. She reached for a glass to pour more water, and in the faint blue light from the window, her eyes fell on the dish rack beside the sink.

There was a teacup in it.

Upside down. Washed. Dry.

Iris did not drink tea. She had never drunk tea. She disliked the smell of it, the bitterness, the way it clung to the back of her throat. She did not own a teapot. She had never in her life owned a cup and saucer like this one, white porcelain with a thin gold rim.

Slowly, very slowly, she opened the cupboard above the sink.