“Tricia,” he said hoarsely. “God damn you. Bitch!”
Lynley's credit card was sufficient to slide the latch of the lock from its housing. The maisonette's door swung open. Inside, all was darkness. There was no sound save what drifted upwards from the drinks party going on in the ground floor flat.
“Miss Nevin?” Lynley called.
There was no response.
The light from the corridor provided a glowing parallelogram on the floor. In it, a large cushion lay, half in and half out of its yellow cover of fine brocade. Next to this, a pool of spilled liquid had soaked into the carpet in an alligator shape, while just beyond, the drinks trolley stood upended and surrounded by its bottles, its decanters—now upstoppered and emptied—its glasses, and its jugs.
Lynley reached for a switch on the wall to the right of the door. He flipped it on. Recessed lights sprang to Life in the ceiling, revealing the extent of the chaos beneath them.
From what he could see from the doorway, the maisonette was in ruins: sofa and love seat overturned with cushions torn from their covers, pictures off the walls and looking as if they'd been broken deliberately across someone's knee, stereo system and television flung to the floor and destroyed—the backings on everything from the speakers to the television hacked away—a portfolio ripped into two pieces with its photographs left scattered round the room. Not even the fitted carpet had escaped, jerked back from the wall with the sort of strength that spoke of a rage long anticipated and fully indulged.
The devastation in the kitchen was similar: crockery lying shattered on the white-tiled floor, shelves swept clean of every object which now lay where it had apparently fallen, either on work tops or broken beneath them. The refrigerator had been dealt with as well, if only in part: Everything from the freezer was dewing with moisture among the rest of the detritus while the contents of the crisping drawers were smashed like victims of runaway lorries, leaving smears of their juices on the tiles, in the grout, and against the cupboard doors.
From the ruins of a bottle of ketchup and ajar of mustard, footprints led from the kitchen towards the outer corridor. One of them was perfectly formed, as if brushed onto the tiles with dark orange paint.
Along the ascent of the stairs, pictures torn from the walls had met a fate similar to those in the sitting room, and as he climbed, Lynley felt the burning of a slow, hard anger begin in the middle of his chest. It mixed there, however, with the chill of fear. And he found himself praying that the condition of the maisonette meant Vi Nevin had been absent from the building when the intruder—so obviously bent upon harming her—had taken out his frustration on her possessions.
He called her name again. Again there was no reply. He flicked on the light in the first of the bedrooms. Illumination fell upon utter ruin. Not one stick of furniture had been left untouched.
He murmured, “Christ.” Which was when the pulsation from the music below ceased abruptly as, perhaps, a new selection of entertainment was made.
And then, in that sudden quiet, he heard it. A scrabbling, like rodents running on wood. It came from the bedroom in which he was standing, from behind the beds mattress which canted drunkenly against one of the walls. In three strides he was at it. He shoved it aside. He said, “Jesus God,” and bent to the battered form whose hair—so long, so Alice-in-Wonderland blonde where it wasn't blood-soaked—told him that Vi Nevin had indeed been at home when vengeance had come calling in Rostrevor Road.
The scrabbling had come from her fingernails, plucking spasmodically at the white baseboard which was splodged with her blood. And the blood itself came from her head, particularly from her face, which had been bashed repeatedly, destroying the little-girl prettiness that had been her hallmark and her stockin-trade.