Sky Garden Page 5

  She inhaled to steady her nerves, and regretted the action. She could smell his subtle cologne with notes of cedar and mint. “You’re welcome,” she lied politely.

  “Am I?” He shook his head. “Never mind. I’ll see you.”

  She listened to his rapid footsteps fade down the stairs. Her hands shook as she unlocked her office door. Thankfully, she closed it behind her, leaned against it.

  He was too disruptive, too demanding in his quiet way. He searched out her thoughts and compelled her attention.

  The quiet of her office closed around her, reassuringly ordered with her desk tidy, reference books neatly arranged on the shelves behind it, and the oil burner on the top of the filing cabinet cold but leaving a trace of rose and sandalwood in the air. She switched on the radio beside it.

  If she was to keep Nick away and prevent the roof garden, then she needed more information. She switched on the computer and got down to work, eating her lunch—homemade cheese sandwiches—abstractedly.

  Mentioned on several architectural and planning sites, Nick had his own company; its office in Dubai, as he’d said. There was a blog attached to its website, in which he shared his thoughts on landscape architecture.

  She slowed down her search then, taking time to read the articles, illustrated with photos from his various projects.

  He’d worked around the world, and he was a man of strong opinions.

  “Why am I not surprised?” she muttered. But she was fascinated.

  He wrote of the future of cities and how they had to be healthy and self-sustaining. Idealism lurked among the practicalities of his work. A man with a passion for his work was immensely attractive.

  She stared at a photo of him, a posed headshot where he looked both impatient and intelligent. He was so much more than handsome. She pushed back from the computer, staring at the Monet poster she’d framed and hung on the far wall. Somewhere in its cool greens and blues was peace.

  Nick Tawes could be a powerful distraction. Add to that the chaos and strangers who’d come in the train of his proposed roof garden, and it was impossible.

  They’d spoken of the museum as a fantasy constructed against the vagaries of the world. She didn’t need its promise of comfort and relaxation, but she did need its safety. Hidden here, she could pursue her quest.

  The Monet painting faded. In her mind, she saw an old cellar splashed with red. She felt its terror, but she felt something more, something stronger. Her determination had brought her out of its horrors. She needed to fight, and she would.

  She blinked, and the restrained elegance of the office returned. She shivered. Memories weren’t a safe place to dwell. Time to return downstairs. It was too bad of her to have left Rupa to cope alone with visitors.

  Although Rupa would cope, despite her shyness. The role of tour guide gave her a script within which to interact with people.

  Nick hadn’t quite understood. Fantasy wasn’t always about escape. Sometimes it was a path along which one could return to life.

  Lanie tugged down the hem of her fitted 1950s jacket and strode out to take charge of her world.

  Visiting Kew Gardens was simply something Nick did on the rare times he returned to England. He’d never call it a pilgrimage, although the scent of damp earth and spring growth that pushed aside the acrid, polluted stink of the city took him back to his childhood. His mum used to bring him here whenever they visited London. Kew was where he’d learned the importance of gardens in a city, how they became the green lungs of a metropolis, and provided refuge and peace for its inhabitants. However, as more and more people crammed into cities, land was at a premium. Gardens of the future would need to colonize new spaces—like rooftops.

  Lanie might fight the idea of it, but the museum’s roof garden would go ahead. Within the television program, it provided a feel-good element.

  He halted abruptly. He’d been walking too fast, as if racing through the garden was the point of his visit, rather than being in it. The Japanese Landscape that surrounded him required reflection and quiet. Carefully selected plantings, pruned and spaced with stones and sand, were like the notes of a wooden flute, each green and perfect, each distinct yet related. Bamboo shivered in the wind.

  This was the aspect of the garden, before cherry blossoms drew the crowds, that he preferred: an illusion of solitude.

  Illusion. Fantasy. He’d never considered his gardens as fantasies.

  Good gardens were an invitation to renew, better by far than a spa treatment or designer drug. Problems were less overwhelming in a green space.

  Or they should be.

  There was only so long he could ignore his own reality.

  He dropped onto a bench, flicking through emails on his phone to find the latest from his stepmother. He hadn’t told Chloe that he was in England. Over the years, he’d avoided “home” as much as possible. Establishing his career had given him a good reason to be busy, to be elsewhere—away from family.

  Chloe was a lovely woman, but she was married to his father.

  He hesitated over the email, then tapped in a noncommittal reply; adding a link to an article on crowdfunding that Chloe would be interested in. She took her charitable and fundraising obligations seriously.

  Just as Richard, his father, took his inherited and corporate responsibilities seriously.

  Nick never doubted that his father and stepmother would keep their commitments. He was the same himself, which was why he was so wary of making promises. But some ties were unavoidable, and those were the ones that he and Richard had the most trouble with. Emotional responsibilities froze them, particularly their emotional responsibilities to one another.

  Father and son.

  Patriarch and heir.

  They papered over their estrangement for Chloe’s sake. She had troubles to spare without fretting over the two of them.

  He sent the email and put his phone away, standing restlessly.

  The sand in the Japanese garden needed raking. Leaves had fallen onto it, illustrating the tension between design and use, between intent and reality fighting back. The Pagoda rose through the treetops, a reminder that what had been neglected could be restored—if one wanted to restore it.

  He turned his back and walked on, taking a path to the river.

  Time enough to announce his return to his family on another visit. The roof garden at the museum meant he’d be back in England several times through spring and summer until filming of the television program wrapped up.

  He’d be back often enough to become familiar with Lanie Briers. His pace eased as he smiled.

  She’d proven him spectacularly wrong. In the past, if he’d considered museum curators at all, he’d have dismissed them as dusty, dull and old. Wrong on every count. Lanie was younger than him, vibrant and gorgeous.

  Despite her resistance to the roof garden, he aimed to include her in the design process. Just in their encounter today, she’d sparked different ideas. She was intriguing. He hadn’t thought of how memories haunted places and objects until she’d challenged him.

  The garden path opened to the Thames and he stood to the side of it, frowning at the gray flow of the river. The afternoon was too cold and clouded. When he’d picnicked here with his mum, it had been summer and the Thames had reflected blue skies.

  He stuck his hands into the pockets of his jacket. His memory was probably telling lies. In

  England, it always rained.

  “The. End.” Lanie punctuated closing and locking the front door of the museum with a heartfelt good riddance to the day. A thin rain fell steadily, and the people hurrying past appeared hunched and miserable, eager to be going home.

  Not that Lanie’s day was over. Midway through the afternoon—in between guiding tours—she’d reached Mrs. Smith, and had a dinner invitation for that night. She was grateful to get the appointment, but it didn’t give her much time to assemble her arguments.

  Whining, “I don’t want it!”, had seldom convinced anyone
.

  She hated her creeping sense of helplessness. She didn’t even know why Mrs. Smith had agreed to the idea of a roof garden. Who had contacted her? Nick hadn’t seemed familiar with the museum. Then again, Mrs. Smith’s web of contacts was substantial—witness Lanie’s own unexpected employment here. Almost anyone could have put the idea in her head. Plus, television producers had their own pushy ways of searching out and securing opportunities.

  Lanie gave her shoulders a little shake. She could and would fight.

  More important than the question of who had put forward the Horry Museum as a potential site for a rooftop garden was to discover and refute whatever aspects of the project appealed to Mrs. Smith. However, that wasn’t possible till Lanie talked with her.

  Fortunately, Lanie was trained in reading people and thinking on her feet. What she needed was a hot bath to restore her spirits, and to fit that in, she’d have to get moving. Mrs. Smith ate dinner early.

  Lanie pulled the curtains closed in the dining and drawing rooms. The tourism brochures on the hall table had slid into one another, messed up from their tidy stacks. Automatically, she paused to sort, smooth and restore them to order, before crossing to the library, finding it dim and cool with its east-facing windows. It looked out at a laneway, providing an uninspiring view of the grimy bricks of the neighboring house and the litter that had blown against it.

  A man walked down the lane, swinging a briefcase and ignoring the rain.

  Lanie froze with one hand on the curtain cord, startled, at the sign of life. Her presence at the window must have caught his attention because his head turned suddenly. They stared a moment, in that way strangers do, shocked and offended to realize they weren’t as alone as they’d thought. Then he looked away, walking on.

  Her phone rang, and her hand strangled the curtain cord. Bad nerves. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, anticipating a pre-performance call from her mum who liked to chat before going onstage.

  “Ann.” Lanie breathed the one word in near despair as she read the caller ID. She didn’t believe in psychic intercepts. The feeling of trouble closing in was the upset of the proposed roof garden and nothing more.

  She yanked the curtains closed as she answered the phone. “Hi, Ann.” It was a casual way to address a detective-inspector. The fact that Lanie’s knees wobbled as she did so didn’t show in her cool voice. She solved the knee wobble by sinking into the nearest chair.

  In the darkness, she switched on a Tiffany lamp. The jewel colors of the glass tinted her skirt and the pale skin of her hand. “Hi, Ann.”

  Detective-Inspector Ann Khan sounded tired. “Lanie, I’ve been caught up with a couple of other cases, but I wanted to let you know you’re not forgotten. How are you?”

  “Good.” Unconvincing. Lanie strengthened her voice. “I’m good.”

  A pause. “Would you rather I didn’t phone you?”

  Lanie looked across the room at the seashells and scrimshaw in their cabinet, at the pretense that a brave sea captain had lived here. The paradoxical irony of her situation overwhelmed her, as did its bitter reality. She genuinely lived in the house, or above it, but only pretended to be as brave as a sea captain. Her hold on the phone tightened. “No, please, call. I like to know that I’m not alone. It’s…I haven’t told anyone else. Only Marshall.”

  “And Marshall’s one of us,” Ann completed Lanie’s thought. Even retired, Marshall remained a policeman.

  “Yes.” Her secret was too scary to share with civilians. Lanie had told only the police, and that isolated her with them. If they withdrew…she struggled to push that fear away. Hers was a lone, hidden quest, but she couldn’t bear to be completely locked away with it. “Nothing’s happened. I watch the news, and read the papers and political blogs…there’s never any hint. I can’t find him.”

  “He hides.” Ann sighed, impatient yet resigned. “That’s what the successful monsters do. And it is always possible, very possible, that he’s completely dismissed you from his mind. We can guess he’s powerful and successful in his life, and he must feel safe by now. In eight months, no one’s come after him, so he could think that Purvis never spoke of him to you, never left anything that points to him.”

  “And yet…”

  “Yes. It’s not something that you, we, should bank on.”

  It was the uncertainty that crippled Lanie. Fear was like fog, it eddied and swirled and could become suddenly thick, obscuring reality. Then it thinned and she could forget it was there…until the next time.

  She looked at her hand, forming a fist in her lap as it lay there, dappled in the jewel-toned light from the Tiffany lamp. A fist. She wasn’t just in hiding. Her life had a purpose. She had to remember that as unlikely and unconvincing as her quest was, she’d chosen it.

  Not initially, no. But if you defeat evil once, you’re committed. That was how she felt and that was why she needed a safe base in the museum. She needed to feel secure if she was to stalk evil.

  She unclenched her hand. Ann didn’t know that Lanie’s natural curiosity as to the monster’s identity had coalesced into a quest. Ann wouldn’t approve of it. She might even pity Lanie for thinking that she could detect a monster via photos and gossip. But Lanie had to believe she could. She had to believe that the metaphorical stench of evil could be detected. Her belief that she could be the hunter, not simply the hunted, had pulled her out of nightmares.

  “If you see anything that bothers you, anything at all,” Ann said. “Call me.”

  “I will.”

  The phone clicked off, and berating her cowardice the whole way, Lanie trekked back to the security system’s panel by the front door, double-checking that its green light blinked at her.

  Safe. She was safe in here.

  She leaned against the door. It wasn’t enough. She wanted her life back or the chance to build a new one. She wanted to be that optimist who’d always believed the best of everyone.

  The secret she shared with the police left a little smear of distrust and suspicion on everything.

  She stepped into the elevator and waited for its doors to rattle closed.

  If she were to tell her family…she shook her head. She couldn’t. They would worry and more than that, they’d act. They would stir up a hornets’ nest that would potentially make her less safe and put them in danger. She couldn’t tell them. Her brother, Selwyn, alone would leap into trouble.

  Somehow she had to resolve the problem.

  The elevator doors opened to the wet roof. She hunched her shoulders and unlocked the door to her flat, slamming it shut behind her. There was no time for a hot bath if she was to make her appointment with Mrs. Smith and convince her to disallow the roof garden project. A quick shower, a change of clothes, and all her courage were what she needed.

  People thought it was a dead serial killer who haunted her dreams.

  It wasn’t. It was his living audience whom she went in fear of.

  Chapter 4

  Mrs. Smith’s penthouse apartment in Canary Wharf had started out as a modernist dream in glass and steel with smooth minimalist design. The bare bones of it were still visible, just. It hadn’t stood a chance against its inhabitant.

  As Lanie walked in, she was struck again by the contrast of architectural intent and actual use, and by the quiet power of Mrs. Smith’s personality.

  In deference to her host’s appreciation of casual comfort in the evenings, Lanie hadn’t over-dressed for her appointment; that would have been rude. So she wore a yellow silk turtleneck, black cigarette trousers and ballet flats in a nod to the 1950s, and left her black raincoat, cut like a frockcoat, by the door.

  The wide open spaces of the penthouse were filled with the cozy clutter of a suburban house, albeit on a luxurious scale. Chintz-covered armchairs and lounges invited people to sit and chat. Knitting spilled from a bag on one, beside a purring ginger cat. The large television hanging on a wall had its sound muted, allowing the radio to be heard while the television showed a
n Australian soap opera. Paintings and cheap framed prints hung side by side, and family photos were arranged in a gigantic and intriguing collage on their own wall. Underfloor heating kept the enormous space on the toasty side of snug, and Mrs. Smith pattered around in a pink tracksuit with matching pink slippers. Her red hair was arranged in a soft perm.

  “Did Fatima remember the baklava?” She peered at the two plastic bags Lanie carried.

  “Yes.” Lanie had watched the staff at the expensive Middle Eastern restaurant pack Mrs. Smith’s phoned-in order. There were three different sorts of baklava, all mouth-wateringly appealing.

  When Lanie had phoned Mrs. Smith and requested a meeting, she’d been invited for dinner that night. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping in at that nice Turkish restaurant on the corner, dear? I’ll order us takeaway there.” Order and pay for. Lanie had only to collect it, as she’d done before.

  “We’ll eat in the kitchen, dear. So much friendlier.”

  Lanie followed Mrs. Smith’s jaunty figure through the apartment to the ultra-modern stainless steel kitchen.

  Not that the kitchen’s twenty first century pizzazz had survived Mrs. Smith’s touch. Humorous magnets covered the fridge doors, many pinning postcards, and unmatched but pretty tea cup and saucer sets lined up along the frosted glass shelving. Twee signs invited people to have a cuppa or keep calm and raid the chocolate stash.

  Lanie wished that the warmth and welcome would relax her, but she was too wound up, too conscious of her reason for being there and of her unsettled, nervous traversing of the city. She’d been hyper-vigilant throughout the journey, conscious of everyone who surrounded her. Ann’s well-meant phone call had brought terror back.

  In the cozy kitchen, Lanie concentrated on unpacking containers of assorted dips, stuffed vine leaves and hot food. The scent of grilled lamb and spices of cumin, coriander and cinnamon filled the air.

  “I am so hungry.” Eighty-eight-year-old Mrs. Smith spread out the banquet with every sign of eager greed. Two settings were set at the kitchen table, and she popped the kettle on. She might have embraced multicultural eating, but her beverage of choice remained tea with milk and two sugars.