Innocent Blood (24 page)

There were black leather couches for visitors, but there was nobody sitting on them except for two scruffy-looking designers with large art portfolios. The elevator bank was off to the left, but the only people waiting to go up were a UPS messenger and a plump secretary with a bag of doughnuts and a cup of Starbucks coffee.

Frank was immediately approached by two security guards in sky-blue uniforms. One was black and looked like Yaphet Kotto's fatter brother. The other was white and thin and blue-chinned, with close-together eyes.

‘Do you have an appointment, sir?'

‘Uh, yes, as a matter of fact. A friend of mine said that I was to meet her here.'

‘Would you like to give me your friend's name, sir?' said one of the guards, lifting up a clipboard.

‘Um, Polaski. Libby Polaski.'

The security guard ran his pen down the list. ‘Sorry, sir. No Polaski listed here. Can you tell which department she works in?'

‘News. She's an editorial assistant. She's only been working here a few weeks. That's what she told me, anyhow.'

The guard flipped over to another page and glared at it as if he were trying to set it on fire with X-ray vision. Eventually he announced, ‘No Polaski in the news department, sir.'

‘Oh. Well, it looks like I've been taken for a chump, doesn't it? She gave me this whole spiel about her glamorous new career in television news.'

The security guards were not amused. ‘I'm sorry, sir, we're going to have to ask you to leave the premises immediately.'

‘Sure. I understand. What with all these bombs going off.'

‘We'd appreciate if you didn't mention anything like that, sir.'

‘OK, sure. Sorry. Sorry to have caused you any trouble.'

Frank left the building and walked back to his car. A motorcycle cop was standing beside it, writing in his notebook.

‘This your vehicle, sir?'

‘Yes, it is. I'm sorry. I had to pick something up from Star-TV.'

‘You had to pick what up?'

‘Well, nothing, as it turns out. The person I was supposed to meet there didn't show.'

‘What was the name of this person?'

‘Polaski. Libby Polaski.'

‘And what were you supposed to pick up?'

‘A DVD. I met her at a bar yesterday evening and she promised to lend me a DVD of
Black Wednesday
, the director's cut. But she's not listed as working at Star-TV, so it looks like I've been taken for a mug.'

The cop tucked his notebook into his pocket. ‘I'm going to have to agree with you, sir.'

‘Oh, yes?'

‘'Fraid so. You never heard the name Libby Polaski before? Libby Polaski is that little blonde girl in
If Pigs Could Sing
.'

Frank smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Jesus! You're right! Do I feel stupid or do I feel stupid?'

Sixteen

F
rank was driving to see his sister, Carol, when his cellphone rang. It was Nevile.

‘I got your messages, Frank. I'm sorry, something came up and I had to go away for the weekend. How are you feeling now?'

‘I'm not sure. Baffled, I guess, more than anything else. Worried.'

‘Why don't you come and see me? There's some things that I need to tell you, before we go any further.'

‘OK. I'll see you in fifteen minutes.'

It must have been the maid's day off because the teenager in the splashy Hawaiian shirt opened the door for him with a grin like a cheap piano.

‘Sir, you are very, very welcome,
señor
.'

Nevile was waiting for him out on the deck, dressed in a charcoal-gray shirt and black pants, with black suspenders, like a priest. He looked pale and distracted and there were dark circles under his eyes.

‘Hello, Frank.' He lifted a large cut-crystal tumbler of whiskey. ‘Can I get you a drink?'

‘A little early for me, thanks.'

Nevile drew out a chair and sat down. ‘I owe you an apology – vanishing off the face of the earth without telling you. I didn't mean to leave you in the lurch. I had to go away for a couple of days and have a think, otherwise I wouldn't have been any use to anybody, myself included.'

Frank said nothing, but waited for Nevile to explain himself.

‘The thing is, this business with Danny is a lot more complicated than it first appeared. I think it might be a lot more dangerous, too. Quite honestly, we might be better off if we called it a day.'

‘Just a minute. On Friday you were telling me that it was absolutely critical that we found out what it was that Danny was trying to tell me.'

‘That was on Friday.'

‘So it's only Monday. What's different?'

‘Well . . . after you left, I decided to try picking up some more psychic resonance from that truck seat that Lieutenant Chessman had given me. You know – the one from the
Garry Sherman Show
.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘I was in the right mood for it, after that séance. How can I describe it? My psychic antennae were still tingling.'

‘So what happened?'

Nevile swallowed whiskey and grimaced. ‘To begin with I got nothing more than the same flashes that I had seen before. A man shouting, and then a walk between some cypress trees. They still didn't tell me anything coherent. Nothing that might account for a young man wanting to blow himself up.

‘But later that evening, when I was sitting in the library, writing up my notes, my PC started misbehaving. No matter what I typed on the keyboard, it insisted on writing something else. Here,' he said, and handed Frank a print-out. The text started off plainly enough.

Thursday, September 20
:

At this point, however, the text altered completely.

Frank read it and then he handed it back to him. ‘I don't understand.'

‘Automatic writing, twenty-first century style,' said Nevile.

‘What's automatic writing?'

‘It's when a spirit takes over your consciousness and writes messages from the other side. And this is what's happened here.'

‘Who is it, do you know?'

‘I think it's Richard Abbott. I can't be one hundred percent certain, but I spent the whole afternoon trying to contact him, through that truck seat, and he was the last person who ever sat in it.'

‘And he wrote to you?'

Nevile nodded. ‘Automatic writing is one of the most effective ways of contacting people who have passed over. You ask a question, you open your mind, and you allow a spirit to control your hand as you write. Some mediums use a Ouija board, but most of them simply use a pen and a notepad. Anybody can do it.
You
could do it, if you were prepared to sit calmly and quietly for twenty minutes and wait for the words to flow. I wouldn't guarantee that the words would make very much sense, or that you'd necessarily know which spirit was using you to communicate its thoughts, but the chances are that you'd get
something
from beyond. Some mediums even claim that Shakespeare has used them to write whole new plays, or that Beethoven has inspired them to finish off his symphonies.'

‘But this spirit wrote to you on your PC.'

‘Yes and I've heard more and more cases of that. When you think about it, a spirit would probably find a PC much easier to write with than a pen, because it's electrical, and all the spirit has to do is use its own electrical energy to take control of my keyboard mapping.'

‘So Richard Abbott is trying to tell you that he was abused by “pa an his frends an all of them utha Men”?'

‘It would appear so, yes.'

Frank thought about that. ‘That manifestation of Danny . . .
he
was being abused, too.'

‘Yes,' said Nevile, ‘and that's a very important clue. But I also think it's taking us somewhere very dark indeed. I may be wrong, but I don't think that the real Danny –
your
Danny – has anything to do with any of these phenomena. Danny's image is simply being used to draw you into this. I won't mince words, Frank. This could be very, very dangerous.'

‘Dangerous in what sense? I mean, what are we looking at here?'

‘Madness and death, Frank. That's what we're looking at.'

He was still talking to Nevile when Lieutenant Chessman arrived at the house, accompanied by Detective Booker. They came out on to the deck and Lieutenant Chessman stood by the rail and took two or three deep breaths.

‘Makes a change from carbon monoxide.'

Nevile said, ‘This is what I was telling you about on the phone,' and handed him the ‘automatic writing' from his PC. Lieutenant Chessman read it, moving his lips as he read, and then passed it to Detective Booker.

‘Weird. How reliable is this kind of message, in your experience?'

‘Unusually reliable, as far as spirit communications go. It's absolutely exhausting for a spirit to put anything down on paper, because it requires such intense concentration and a huge amount of natural energy – kinetic, when they're using pen and paper, but in this instance, electrical. Let me put it this way: very few spirits ever take the trouble to write anything stupid or mischievous. It's too much effort.'

‘So what do you make of this? You really think it was written by Richard Abbott?'

‘I'd put money on it. I'll make some further tests to confirm it, but remember that his mother said on TV that his father used to beat him.'

‘So what's Mr Abbott trying to say?'

‘If it
is
him, it's my belief that he's trying to explain to us that he wasn't just whipped, but seriously abused by his father and his father's friends and other men, and that this experience was one of the factors that led him to become a suicide bomber.'

Lieutenant Chessman took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his nose. ‘Pretty tenuous theory, wouldn't you say? What about the other bombers?'

‘I don't know yet. But I did some psychic communication for Mr Bell here, to see if he could contact his son, Danny. We had a spirit visitation – not, in my opinion, from Danny, but from another spirit who used Danny's image as a means of arousing Mr Bell's sympathy. Whoever that spirit was, it appeared as if he had suffered from serious childhood abuse.'

‘So where does this take us?'

‘I don't know with any certainty. But abused children commonly grow up to be abusers themselves, don't they, and to seek revenge on society in general for destroying their self-esteem. Maybe this is what's happening here.'

‘Your father belts you and so you blow up Disney Studios?'

‘It's conceivable. Do you have any other ideas?'

Before he left, Lieutenant Chessman turned back to Frank. ‘By the way, Mr Bell, about your mystery woman.'

‘What about her?'

‘I have another witness who saw her walking along Gardner Street soon after the explosion at The Cedars. She identified her as wearing jeans and a creamy-colored shirt dress and one sandal, so that she was walking with a limp. She even stopped her and asked her if she was OK.'

‘I see.'

‘The witness said the woman was aged about twenty-three or twenty-four, with short brown hair. Very pretty, she said, in spite of the fact that she had smudges all over her face. Reminded her of somebody she knew, she said, although she couldn't think who it was.'

‘Oh.'

‘Just thought that might help to jog your own memory, Mr Bell. Try to think of some TV actresses that she could have looked like.'

Frank thought about Astrid but he shook his head. ‘Sorry. I only write TV; I hardly ever watch it.'

While Nevile showed Lieutenant Chessman and Detective Booker to the door, Frank took a look around his library. On a side table he noticed a photograph in a silver frame – a slim, blonde woman, leaning on the parapet of a bridge someplace, wearing a straw hat. She had one hand lifted to prevent the hat from blowing away, and she was laughing.

‘Attractive lady,' Frank remarked as Nevile came back in.

Nevile took the photograph away from him and gave it a wistful smile. ‘Yes. That was taken on Albert Bridge, in London.' Pause. ‘We were supposed to be getting married.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Frank. ‘I didn't mean to pry.'

‘No, no. Don't worry about it. That was all a long time ago. Nine years and three months, to be precise. Her name was Alison. She was a very clever girl, great fun. She wanted to be a QC.'