TWENTY-NINE
‘Apryl, please. Just take it easy. For your own sake. You’re starting to worry me. I mean, really worry me.’ Miles leant over his desk, his fingers wound tightly together, trying to look into Apryl’s wild and excitable eyes and to still them because they were flicking about and blinking as fast as the thoughts and ideas were streaming into her head.
‘I’m starting to worry myself. Jesus.’ She stood up again from the chair on the other side of Miles’s desk. Could not keep still, and walked across his office to the door. Then stopped, and clasped both hands on either side of her cheeks. ‘I have to, Miles. I have to do something. I can’t walk away from this. People are dying. Lillian tried to help them, but they wouldn’t listen.’
‘Have you any idea, any idea at all how preposterous this all is? I mean, you are suggesting that Hessen is still in that building in some . . . some . . . I don’t know, altered state and murdering those who wronged him back in the forties, one by one. Listen to yourself, woman. It’s nuts.’
Apryl was deep in thought and did nothing but shrug Miles off. She removed her hands from her cheeks and slapped them against her tight-skirted hips. ‘I need to go in there at night. That’s when it all happens. When people are in danger. And someone is helping him. That’s what Mr Shafer said. Before he was killed. Murdered. I’m sure of it now. Mrs Roth, then him. And I’m responsible.’ She turned to Miles, her eyes moistening with tears. ‘Don’t you see? I made them talk to me and now they’re dead.’
Miles sunk his head into his hands and slowly drew his long fingers down his face. ‘I cannot believe I am hearing any of this come out of your lovely mouth. You know, a gay friend of mine claims that all women are latently mad, and by degrees the lunacy gradually surfaces. Right now, you are a testament to his insight.’
Apryl sat down and sniffed, then dabbed her eyes with a tissue. ‘I’m not going to cry . . .’ By the time she was attempting to pronounce the last word a big bubble popped in her throat and she was crying. ‘F*cking eyeliner’s going to go everywhere,’ she said, sniffing again.
Miles came around the desk to her. ‘Hey. Hey. Go easy on yourself. You are putting yourself under a lot of strain. Just sell that bloody flat and put all of this behind you. Come on.’
She moved away from his embrace and shook her head. ‘I can’t. I just keep thinking of Lillian. All those years, Miles. On her own. That terrible . . . thing, frightening her. Night after night. That poor old lady. Who lost the love of her life. And then suffered for so long without him. And . . . I know what it’s like. Hessen, I mean . . . I saw him too.’
‘What?’
‘You’re not someone I can tell things like that to.’
‘Hey. Now that’s not fair.’
‘You’re not. But I did. It . . . he was in the mirror I brought up from the basement. And in the painting of Lillian and Reggie. And in other places. Whenever I’m in that building, Hessen is watching me. Trying to scare me away, I think. Because I’m getting closer to him. He follows me about, like he did the others, who just hid and waited for the end. Lillian never did. That brave, brave woman tried to escape every day for fifty years. Every day, Miles. After he killed her husband. Drove him out that f*cking window.’ Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the look of disbelief and pity on Miles’s face. ‘You’ve never seen him, Miles. And be glad you never have.’ She said this with such force she surprised herself, and Miles leant back, away from her.
‘Before I even met Betty Roth and Tom Shafer, I’d already seen the same thing. In mirrors, paintings. Hessen. The residents didn’t suggest it to me. I saw it independently. Because when I arrived he’d become more active again. Because someone is helping him. That’s what Tom Shafer said. Shafer was as sane as you and me. He said someone in that building is helping Hessen now. To kill, Miles. To kill those terrified old people. Hessen’s been able to keep Lillian and the others all stuck there, and has tormented them with his population of the Vortex, or whatever the f*ck he brought into that building, but he hasn’t been able to kill them. Not until now. Because now someone in that building, maybe someone who works there, is doing his bidding. Maybe all of them. Piotr, Jorge, Stephen. This morning, when Stephen told me about the Shafers, I pressed him about the coincidence of three elderly residents dying like this. Three people who knew Hessen. Tried to talk to him about what Betty Roth and Tom Shafer had insinuated about Hessen still being in the building. And he looked really uncomfortable. Cagey, you know? He’s avoided me ever since. And there’s another guy too I haven’t met. Who only works the night shifts. Or who knows? Maybe it’s a resident behind all this. They could all be in on it.’
‘Then go to the police.’
‘Don’t be f*cking ridiculous.’
‘Because that is how your story will sound. Because it is f*cking ridiculous. It’s wild and unsubstantiated. You can’t just go around accusing people of murder.’
Apryl turned to him, her face tight and fierce. Miles raised one hand, palm outward, in an appeal for silence. ‘Now hang on. Let me finish. Mrs Roth and this Shafer chap were in their nineties. Their nineties, Apryl. That is a fact. People in their nineties can keel over at any moment. That is also a fact. Your great-aunt had been ill for a long time, and she was in her eighties. There was no evidence of foul play in any one of these deaths. That is a fact. Heart failure, strokes, all natural causes. I’ve no doubt at all that they knew Hessen. Or that his antisocial behaviour and his paintings, which they destroyed I might add, affected them profoundly. They never forgot him or his work. And I’m also beginning to believe they may have killed him and burned the evidence. But as they got older, their minds . . . well, their memories became less effective. And now the trauma of the original crime and its lingering influence have warped into this . . . this ghost story.’
Apryl sat quietly and stared at the floor. ‘But why didn’t they ever leave Barrington House? Explain that.’
Miles shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. The rich often huddle together in a castle-keep mentality. Look at all of these gated communities springing up. Safety in numbers.’
‘That’s bullshit. None of them have gone more than a block from the building in fifty years. Fifty years, Miles.’
For a moment Miles looked at his lap in silence, his eyes half shut, his lips pursed. Then he said, ‘OK, OK. Let’s look at this from another perspective then. From within your current point of view. And I am only speaking hypothetically here. By no way is this an endorsement of your theory—’
Apryl waved a hand in the air with frustration. ‘Yes. Yes. Just tell me.’
‘Well let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Hessen did summon something into Barrington House. Something demoniac. From one of those rituals he learned from Crowley. And that the Vortex exists somewhere in that building. If this is truly the case, then what in hell are you going to be able to do about it?’
She had no idea. None at all. But she was going back to Barrington House. To stake it out. To harass Stephen, the rest of the staff, whoever she could suspect of an involvement. And she was going to get proof . . . somehow. She’d even break into apartment sixteen if she had to, to find out what the hell was still inside that place. There had to be something, inside there, allowing Hessen’s presence to remain. Something that her great-uncle and his friends overlooked so long ago. Betty had been hearing Hessen at night in there, right up until she died. She said it had become worse all over again. The noises, the voices. It was all coming out of there, that apartment. Where it began, so long ago.
Something was going down inside that place. Something very wrong that she had found impossible to accept, no matter how hard she thought about it. Until now. Until Betty and Tom died. That was no coincidence. So soon after Lillian. People were dying who had known things about Felix Hessen. Who had made him and his art disappear. And maybe there were others, still inside that dreadful building. Trapped. People in grave danger. Imprisoned and stalked and tormented like Lillian and her circle from way back, until the time was right to take revenge, if that’s what it was; something coming back from the dead to settle a score. And she couldn’t just leave them in such a situation. That crazy bastard had killed her great-aunt and uncle, her own flesh and blood. And maybe even now, after death, they were still trapped inside the building, like Hessen. Didn’t Lillian suggest as much? She couldn’t leave her there, in limbo, for ever. Inside those terrible places with those hideous things he painted.
But as she walked away from Miles’s office at the Tate, with the wind gusting and darkness coming down over every building and turning the stone a darker grey, she felt herself suddenly seize up inside, in a paralysis of fear, at the very thought of setting foot inside Barrington House again, at night. Could I, she asked herself, as she steadied her body against a bus stop with one hand, could I get trapped inside there too?