He stood for a long moment, smoking. Watching the lane, the yards and streets beyond it. Waiting for movement or sound. Contemplating me, who I was, where I had gone, what I had seen. Weighing, perhaps, whether I would telephone someone, thinking where he might find me.
He did not rush through the gate, hot in pursuit. He did not search the back garden, thrashing me from my hiding place. He simply stood and smoked, and as the silence stretched on, my nerves frayed and I felt the wild impulse to jump up, to scream—anything. I became wildly convinced that he knew exactly where I was, that he was only playing with me. That I should give myself away and end it now. He did not rush after me—not because he was fooled, but because he would find me eventually. There was no need to hurry after someone who was already dead.
He smoked the entire cigarette while standing there at the back gate. I watched him finish and then I watched him lower the lit stub, watched him raise one elegant foot, watched him douse the embers of the cigarette on the sole of his shoe. He straightened again and dropped the stub into the pocket of his overcoat in a smooth, deliberate movement. As the last tendrils of smoke drifted away in the wet air, he turned and walked away, back the way he’d come.
I didn’t see his face in the darkness. I only heard his footsteps, easy and measured, as they retreated down the other alley. I swallowed, dropped my hand, leaned back against the wall again. I was more terrified now than I’d ever been, more even than when I had seen Ramona’s dead face outside the window of the elevator door.
He had pocketed the cigarette.
He had not thrown it away; he had not ground it out underfoot and left it. He had doused it out very carefully on the damp sole of his shoe, placed it in the pocket of his expensive overcoat. As if a cigarette stub were an object of great value.
Because it was.
I thought of myself standing in Gloria’s flat with Davies, running one of Gloria’s scarves through my hands. Psychometry, it was called. James had written about it in one of his papers. It wasn’t my specialty. But I could do it. There was a chance—though not a guarantee—that I could pick up the stub of a man’s cigarette and get a picture of him, images, thoughts, even a name. And somehow—God, I didn’t know how—he knew it. He knew who he was dealing with, and he knew what I could do.
He knew me.
Too afraid to move, I waited as the rain began to fall softly. What if I walked to the front of the building and the man was still there, waiting for me? In the abject darkness of my terror, it didn’t matter that I was in public, that he wasn’t likely to assault a woman screaming in the middle of the street. All that mattered was the blackness of the shadow over his face and that stub of cigarette, his unhurried assurance that I was already his.
And so I sat there, my feet numb in their heels, my thighs aching from squatting, as I inhaled the stink of the dustbins and growing damp, even after I heard someone enter the front door of the building, even after I heard someone—probably the same person—throw up the sash of a window on the third floor. The devil is coming, Ramona had said. He is coming for you. He is coming for me. He is coming for everyone.
When I finally got the courage to move, I didn’t take the alley to the front of the building. I pushed myself away from the wall and tottered into the back garden on cramping legs. I stood for a moment where the man had been. Then I forced myself through the gate and into the lane, nearly stumbling as I made my way back to the crowded streets of London.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I walked. I walked as the sky darkened, as the rain spattered the streets in fits, as the wind gusted against my damp skin with the first breaths of cold autumn. I walked through the sounds and smells of London, motorcars and shouts and clanging bells and laughter and the heavy, oily scent of wet pavement, the tang of cigar smoke, the smoggy London itch at the back of my throat. I walked in crowds, the larger the better, so I would not be alone. I walked without knowing where I was going, without looking around me, without seeing anything, my feet vaguely hurting in their heels, my hands in the pockets of my coat. A knot of young men in cloth caps catcalled at me—blond hair always being a magnet for catcalls, the sound of it as meaningless as a how-do-you-do?—and as I brushed past them, jolting one of them with my shoulder, I discovered that the abject terror I’d been under had dissipated, replaced with a hot, low-grade anger.
Without my realizing it, while I had walked, my terror-numbed mind had pondered the question of the man in the houndstooth jacket.
The man I had seen at Ramona’s flat was, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind, Gloria’s killer. I needed no evidence to know it, no psychic vision. I had been within twenty feet of him, watched him smoke a cigarette, and I had done it after finally dodging my unwanted pursuer, the houndstooth gentleman. What if things had gone differently? What if I had failed to dodge him, and he’d been there when I’d encountered the murderer? Would he have helped? Made an arrest? Would he have done anything at all, or were his orders simply to watch and report?
Report what? My movements? Or my death?
Suspicion, I discovered, works like a lens. Once you have looked through it, and seen everything you thought you knew in a different way, its version of the truth does not recede. Once you can see through that lens, you can no longer ignore it.