The Short Forever (Stone Barrington 8)

Erica’s credit card statements revealed mostly purchases of clothing and small household items. Her deposits came from a New York bank and were more on the order of ten thousand dollars at a time, and less frequent than Lance’s. Stone returned everything carefully to the drawers, leaving them as he had found them. He looked around the study again. There were no filing cabinets, and a small closet held only some stationery and a fax machine.

Stone switched off the study light and went upstairs. There were two floors of bedrooms, and the ones on the top floor seemed unused. The second floor contained a large master suite only, with a king-sized bed, two baths, and two dressing rooms. Though Erica had accumulated a lot of clothes, Lance seemed to own no more than he could pack into two or three suitcases. He switched off the lights and went downstairs, disappointed.

He had expected to find something—he wasn’t sure what, but something that would tell him more about Lance’s business dealings. There was so little as to seem unnatural, not even a briefcase, and Lance had not been carrying one earlier in the day. Nobody could do any sort of business so lightly equipped, which made Stone think Lance must have an office somewhere else in London.

He checked the kitchen and had one final look around, preparing to leave. Then, looking at the keys Monica had given him, he found one labeled “wine cellar,” which she had mentioned. He looked around for a door and found one under the stairs. The light switch gave no joy, and he felt his way down the steps to the bottom, where he found another door. Feeling for the lock, he inserted the key and turned it. As he stepped into the cellar, something brushed against his cheek, and he grabbed it: a string. He pulled it, and a single light bulb came on. The wine cellar was about twelve by fifteen feet and quite full of bottles. He checked a few and found some lovely old clarets and burgundies; whoever owned the house had been laying them down for years; you couldn’t just walk into a shop and buy them anymore.

He stood in the middle of the cellar and looked at each of the four walls. Why was the cellar so small, when the house was so much larger? He examined the walls, which were covered by racking from floor to ceiling. Walking slowly around the room, he checked between each stack of racks, and finally he came to a pair that seemed somehow unlike the others. The racks were all fixed to the wall, except these two, which moved when he shook them. Pressing an eye to the crack between one rack and its immediate neighbor, he saw the dull glint of dim light on metal. A hinge, maybe?

He moved along one rack farther, peering into the small spaces between them, and he saw a flat piece of metal that seemed to connect two racks. It was recessed too far to reach with his fingers, and even his pen was too fat to fit between the racks. He looked around and saw a small table containing a decanter and a corkscrew.

He picked up the corkscrew, which was of the waiter’s type—small, flat, with a folded knife blade at one end. He opened the knife and poked it between the two racks, finding the strip of metal. It moved when poked, and he tried inserting the blade underneath the strip and pushing upward. Almost to his surprise, the metal strip moved easily. It had been holding the two racks together; now, with it out of the way, Stone pulled on the two racks and they quite easily swung into the cellar like double doors. He could now see that each rack had a solid wood back that was fixed to the wall by four heavy hinges.

Behind the two racks was another door that, surprisingly, seemed to have no lock. Stone turned the knob and pushed it open, revealing a small room of about eight by ten feet. He found a light switch, and a fluorescent fixture brightly illuminated the space. He had found Lance Cabot’s office. The room was equipped with everything a home office requires—office supplies, file cabinets, and a multipurpose printer/copier/fax machine, connected to a substantial-looking computer with a flat-screen monitor.

Stone tried the filing cabinets: locked. He switched on the computer and waited for it to boot up. Finally a screen appeared, demanding a password. Stone tried Lance, Cabot, Erica, Monica, Ali, Sheila—all the names he knew to be connected to Lance. None worked. Frustrating. He could do this all night and get nowhere. The steel desk on which the computer keyboard rested was locked, too, every drawer, and there was nothing visible or searchable in the office that could tell him anything. Indeed, except for the secret location of the room, it was like any other home office—well equipped, but utilitarian. Nothing exotic—no high-frequency radios, no mysterious equipment. Of course, with the Internet, who needed long-range radios these days?

Stone knew a little about picking locks, and he looked around for something he might use for a lock-pick. Nothing but a letter opener and some paper clips. He examined the desk lock and got a small surprise. He had expected standard office locks, the kind that anybody with some picking skills could open, but these were more substantial. Each was an inch or so in diameter, and when he examined the small space between each drawer and desk, the bolts were larger than usual. It would take a much greater expert than he to deal with these locks, which had no commercial names on them. It appeared that the old locks had been drilled out and replaced with the larger, more secure ones. The locks on the filing cabinets were identical.

As Stone sat staring at the desk, wondering what to do next, he heard a noise above his head. It occurred to him that he was sitting directly below the main foyer of the house, and what he had heard was a footstep, followed by the sound of the front door closing.

There was no way out of the cellar, except the way he had come, and that opened into the foyer. Quickly, Stone turned off the wine cellar light, then pulled the two rack/doors closed and secured the metal strip. Then he closed the office door, fearful that light might escape around the door, and switched off the lights. Nothing to do now but be quiet and wait.

33

STONE LISTENED AS AN OCCASIONAL footstep struck the wooden floor above, instead of a rug, and it became apparent that more than one person was in the house, and, from the sound of the heavy steps, they were men. They moved in and out of rooms on the floor above, and then they stopped. Either they were standing still or walking on rugs.

Then Stone heard a noise in the wine cellar, and dim light appeared around the edges of the door to the little office. He could hear voices now, though they were muffled, and the men appeared to be speaking a foreign language. He put an ear to the door, trying to hear better, but it didn’t help much. Then there was a louder voice and two sharp reports, which Stone knew could only be gunshots. They were not very loud, but not silenced, either—probably a small-caliber handgun. A moment later, there were two further shots, and he knew what that meant. The light disappeared from around the door, and then there was nothing but silence, until he heard footsteps in the foyer, and the sound of the front door opening and closing.

Stone checked his watch, the hands of which glowed in the dark, and waited a full five minutes. Then he switched on the office light. Something made him look down, and he did not like what he saw. Blood was seeping under the door. He pulled it open slightly and listened; not a sound. He opened the door, raised the latch holding the wine racks shut, and pushed. They moved a couple of inches, then stopped against something soft.

Stone got as low as he could, put his shoulder against the racks, and pushed hard. Slowly, whatever was blocking the racks moved, and he was able to open them wide enough to step through. Light from the office fell on a man’s back. Stone stepped between the racks and over the body and found the ceiling light. Not one, but two bodies lay on the floor of the wine cellar; they were the two men who had abducted him, and each of them had two new orifices in his head.

Stone inspected the wounds; small caliber, he thought, probably a .22 pistol, maybe a .25. He checked the coat pockets of the two corpses and came up with two Greek passports. Greek? What the hell did that mean? Nobody was mad at the Greeks, were they? Who would shoot two Greeks in a wine cellar in Mayfair? And why would a bunch of Greeks abduct and interrogate him?

His first impulse was to go upstairs and call the police, in the person of Detective Inspector Evelyn Throckmorton, but then he had second thoughts. How could he explain his own presence in the house? If he tried, he’d have to explain everything he’d done since he’d arrived in the United Kingdom, including the identity of his client. Also, his client had not asked him to search this house; he’d done it on his own. He would make a terrible witness, too, having seen nothing and having heard only footsteps and gunshots.

Discretion, in this case, was definitely the better part of valor. He stepped over a body, back into the office, and wiped anything he might have touched. Then he closed the office door, wiped the knob, and secured the two wine racks in place. He wiped the knob of the wine cellar door and went upstairs, wiping anything else he might have touched in the house. Finally, he put on his raincoat, retrieved his umbrella from the stand, opened the door a crack, and peered up and down the mews. It was dark now, and streetlights were on, but the mews was empty. He let himself out, wiped the doorknob, inside and out, closed the door behind him, and walked down Farm Street in the direction of Berkeley Square.

He had reached the square before he saw anyone else, and he kept the umbrella low to keep anyone from remembering his face. Deciding against a taxi, he walked across Berkeley Square and up the little hill into Dover Street. The gallery was closed and dark. He dropped the keys to the Farm Street house through the mail slot.

What now? He wanted to talk to Lance. He walked up to New Bond Street, then to Conduit Street, found a cab at the Westbury Hotel, and gave the driver the Chester Street address that he’d heard Sarah give Lance. As the cab made its way through the West End, he thought about the two dead men on the wine cellar floor at Lance’s house. How long would it be before anyone found them? Lance clearly didn’t intend to go back to the house anytime soon. Was there a housekeeper or a cleaning lady? If so, would she go down to the wine cellar? He retraced his own steps, thought about the time line from a

policeman’s perspective. He was without an alibi from the time he left the gallery until he got into the taxi at the Westbury. How long was that? An hour at the most. Where else could he have been for an hour? Monica and Sarah knew he had the keys to the house, including the wine cellar. But no one would have any reason to question them, would they?

He thought about the cases he had solved as a cop by interviewing people at the periphery of a case. Any thorough investigation would get to them soon enough. Should he get out of the country? No, that would be the worst thing he could do. The cab stopped in front of the Chester Street house; Stone paid the driver and rang the bell. Erica answered the door.

“Oh, Stone, come in,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Where have you been?”

Already, he needed an alibi. “I was at the gallery for a while, then I did some window-shopping.” In the pouring rain? That was weak; he’d have to do better than that if the police questioned him.

“Come on in; Lance is on the phone.” She showed him into the drawing room, which was empty. The place was handsome and spacious, but it looked as though it had been decorated by a bachelor with the help of a maiden aunt; the furniture was comfortable, but dowdy, and the curtains were too elaborate. “Awful, isn’t it?” Erica asked cheerfully.

“Fairly.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“Yes, please; bourbon, if there’s any in the house; Scotch, if there isn’t.”