Hilltop

"Nobody goes up," I said.

I said it quietly. I said it to the whole smoking room, to the black-armored men hovering at the door and to Leo with his bleeding hand and to Ryder with the thermal scanner still raised like a charm against evil. The bell tolled once more overhead, dull and cracked and patient, and I felt every eye in the place turn toward me.

"Doctor?" said the commander of the tactical team, a thickset man with a gray mustache, whose name I had not caught.

"Nobody goes up that tower until this wall is photographed."

There was a short silence.

"There's a man on the stairs," said the commander, in the careful voice of a man who intends to be reasonable. "Or there might be. We have a body-temperature signature at forty feet. If he's armed—"

"He is not armed."

"Sir, with respect—"

"He is not armed," I said, "and he is not on the stairs, and if you run up that tower after him, you will find exactly what he wants you to find. I am not certain what that is. But I am certain that it is not him." I took a breath and found, to my own surprise, that my voice was perfectly steady. "He has left us a room full of paper. He has set it on fire. And he has put something warm in a cold place, and set a bell to ring, to make us go away from the paper. Gentlemen, I should like to look at the paper."

Nobody moved.

Then Leo took his bloody hand away from his coat, and wiped it down his trousers, and said in a voice like a rasp on wood, "You heard the man."

…

It took two hours.

I have never been so patient in my life. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, and I did it with my hands clasped behind my back, as one does in a museum. They photographed the wall. Every inch of it, from every angle, with three cameras and a ladder; first as a whole, in a single wide shot, and then in squares, row upon row, a little over a hundred frames. Every cutting. Every pin. Every strand of red wool. A woman from the crime lab with an enormous lens went along the baseboard on her knees. A man with a stopwatch timed the fire. A second team sprayed the smoldering racks with foam, and the foam sat on the machines in great gray lumps like snowdrifts on a graveyard.

Only then did they take the paper down.

They took it as one takes an archaeological site apart. Each sheet was lifted with a pair of tweezers, photographed again in the palm of a glove, laid in a numbered folder, and slid into a box. The string was cut, not pulled, so that the knots remained. The notebook went into a sealed bag. The forty ampoules in their crate were carried out by two men with breathing masks, as tenderly as eggs.

At twenty to eight, when the last box had been loaded into the van, the commander came and stood by my elbow.

"You want us to go up now?"

"Yes," I said. "With a camera. On a pole."

He stared.

"A long one," I said. "Don't go in. Don't touch anything. And, Commander, I would be obliged if you'd wear a mask."

…

They found it exactly as I had expected, and I took no pleasure in it.

The pole was an extending steel thing with a lens at the tip, of the sort that firemen use to look through holes in walls. They fed it up the stair, round and round the iron coil, with a boy in a respirator guiding it. The picture came up on a monitor in the van: a grainy green image of a hundred and forty steps, a stone landing, an open door. A belfry. A cracked bell. A small gray box bolted to the beam, with a thin arm tapping at the metal. A cheap electric heater, in a puddle of feathers, glowing. A timer.

And in the rafters, hung like fruit among the cobwebs, a cluster of tiny lamps.

And on the landing itself, half hidden behind the door, a squat black canister the size of a thermos, with a thin wire running from its neck up through a hole in the ceiling to a small plastic switch.

"It's a puppet," said Ryder, very softly. "It's all a puppet. There's no one in there. There's a timer on the heater. See? Forty minutes, then it cuts out. And that"—he pointed—"that's got a pressure plate. Under the third step from the top. You step on it, and the door—"

"Shuts," I said.

"It would've welded, probably. Look at the frame. There's a little coil in the lock. A cheap one, but it works." He swallowed. "Dr. Vaughn, if we'd gone up—"

"Yes."

"You'd have been in there for six hours. Maybe more. With whatever's in that can." He took off his glasses. His eyes were wet. "Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's just the lights. But the guys at the top, they'd've been—I don't know. I don't know what it would've done."

I did.

I stood at the open door of the van, in the rain, with a paper cup of the commander's coffee in my hand, and I thought of an iron staircase and a hundred and forty steps. I thought of two young men with their rifles on their backs, climbing in the dark. I thought of the flat rich courtesy of a voice that said, in my head, Good morning, Doctor.

He wants us to chase him, I thought.

"He wants us to chase," I said aloud.

Leo, standing beside me with his fist wrapped in a handkerchief, said nothing. But I saw his throat move.

"It's the oldest trick there is," I said. "He set a stage. He put a light in a window. And he waited for a hungry man to climb the stair." I drank. The coffee was cold. "I came very near to being that man."

"You didn't," said Leo.

"No." I looked at the tower, a black needle against a gray dawn. "But it was not wisdom. It was a tell. I saw the heat on the screen and I wanted him so badly that I could taste it. If you had not been standing at my shoulder—" I stopped.

He put his good hand on my arm and squeezed once, hard, and let go.

…

We went to Chestnut Hill at ten.

I will not describe the drive, since I did not conduct it. I sat in the back of an unmarked sedan with a blanket over my knees, my head against the cold glass, and watched the city peel away: the railyards, the warehouses, the long gray ranks of row houses; then, by degrees, trees, and lawns, and stone walls, and the moist green hush of the old rich suburbs. It had stopped raining. The morning was white and still. A thin mist lay in the hollows.

Hargrove Hall stood at the top of a rise, behind a wall, at the end of a long gravel drive.

It was a pale gray stone mansion with a slate roof and eleven chimneys, built in the last decade of the nineteenth century by a railroad baron and bought, thirty years ago, by the grandfather of its present owner. There were cypress trees along the drive and a fountain in the forecourt. A brace of men in dark suits stood at the foot of the front steps. They had the particular stillness of men who are paid to be still, and as our car drew up one of them, a tall flat-faced fellow with a wire in his ear, put his hand inside his jacket.

"It's all right, Mick," said a voice from the door.

He took his hand away.

…

The study was on the first floor, at the back.

It was a large square room, paneled in dark walnut to the ceiling, with a coffered plaster ceiling and a great stone fireplace in which a gas log burned. Bookshelves stood along two walls. They were full of leather-bound volumes that I thought, from the uniformity of their spines, had been bought by the yard. A Persian rug the size of a tennis court covered the floor. There was a billiard table in an alcove, a globe in a stand, a tall window that looked out over a terraced lawn and a line of misty elms.

In a leather armchair beside the fire, with his legs crossed, sat Dominic Hargrove.

He had not got up.

He did not need to. The chair was an enormous thing, the color of old port, with a high back and rolled arms and a cushion that had been shaped, over the years, to a single body. It was covered in a hide so thick and so heavily grained that I took it, at first, for buffalo. He sat in it as a king sits on a throne. He wore gray flannel trousers and a pale blue silk shirt open at the collar, and on his left wrist a watch with a plain white face and a case of pink gold, the sort that is made, in a village in the Jura, to a waiting list of three years. In his right hand he rolled a cigar, a long dark Cuban one, between finger and thumb. It was unlit. He turned it slowly, over and over, as a man turns a pencil in a meeting.

He was handsomer in life than in the photograph.

That was my first impression, and it annoyed me. I had walked into the room prepared to see the pallor of fear, the sweat, the tremor in the hand. What I saw was a man in his early thirties with a wide, open, golden, almost boyish face, a straight nose, and a smile that appeared to have been shaped by loving attention from birth. He had thick fair hair. He had white teeth. He smelled faintly of cedar and good soap.

"Captain Maddox," he said warmly. "It's been a long time. How's the leg?"

"Fine, thanks, Mr. Hargrove."

"And the boat? Did you ever get that engine fixed?"

Leo blinked. "You remember my boat?"

"I remember everything about the people who protect this city." He smiled. "Please. Sit. Who's your friend?"

…

I will not give the whole of the conversation. It lasted, I suppose, twenty minutes, and the greater part of it was an exercise in extreme courtesy on the one side and in deepening dismay on the other. Leo explained why we had come. He did it well. He explained that a serial offender was loose in the city; that four persons had been killed, in four unusual ways; that the persons were linked, in some manner as yet unclear, to a certain Mr. Hargrove; and that the department was anxious to offer him protection.

Dominic Hargrove listened to all of it with his head a little on one side, rolling the cigar.

Then he laughed.

It was a delightful laugh, a young man's laugh, rich and spontaneous and slightly breathless. He threw his head back. He slapped his thigh. "Captain, I'm sorry," he said. "I really am. But you've come all the way up here, at eleven o'clock on a weekday morning, to tell me that a lunatic on the internet has put me on a list?"

"It's not just—"

"I employ fourteen men." He held up a hand and began ticking them off on his fingers. "All of them ex-Rangers, ex-Delta, ex-SAS. I've got cameras on the wall. I've got motion sensors on the lawn. I've got a panic room, Captain, with its own air supply. I've got a direct line to the Commissioner." The smile did not waver. "I appreciate your concern. I truly do. But I think I can manage."

"Mr. Hargrove," said Leo, "four people are dead."

"Four scum."

It was a different voice. It came out low and hard and flat, like a knife drawn from a sheath, and the smile fell from his face as a mask falls. For an instant I saw what lay beneath it: something cold, small, and exceedingly angry.

"A loan shark. A pimp. A pervert. And a girl who made her living out of making women cry. I'm sorry for their families, Captain, I'm sure they had mothers. But you're not going to sit in my house and tell me that I'm in the same category as people like that."

…

I had been standing by the bookshelves.

I had been there the whole time, in my gray overcoat, with my hands in my pockets and my weight against the shelf, and nobody had said a word to me. I had not expected them to. In rooms of this kind the outsider is a species of furniture. He is introduced with a gesture, and ignored, and it is this very invisibility which allows him to see.

I had watched Dominic Hargrove for twenty minutes.

I had watched his breathing, which was easy and even when he talked about his men and his cameras, and which had snagged, perceptibly, at the word Kowalski. I had watched his left foot, which had been swinging in a lazy arc when we came in and which, at the word Mallory, had stopped dead. I had watched his mouth, his shoulders, the rise and fall of the silk at his breast. And I had watched his right hand.

The cigar was in it. The cigar turned. But on the fourth finger of that hand, on the index, there was a ring.

It was a plain band of old jade, a clouded gray-green, set in a thin gold rim. It sat a little loose. And every few moments, with the unconscious deliberation of long habit, his thumb would reach across and give the ring a half turn.

I had counted.

I counted the way I count everything, silently, in the cold part of my mind.

"Mr. Hargrove," I said.

He turned his head.

It was the first time he had looked at me. His eyes were blue. They were wide and clear and rather beautiful, with long fair lashes, and they went over me from head to foot in a single glance that took in my coat, my shoes, my spectacles, my accent, and filed me under irrelevant.

"And you are?"

"Atticus Vaughn. I'm the consultant."

"Ah." The smile came back. "The Englishman. I read about you in the Inquirer. The man who knows what you had for breakfast." He turned the cigar. "Well, Doctor? Do you have anything to add?"

"Only an observation."

"By all means."

I took my hands out of my pockets.

"Since Captain Maddox mentioned the four victims," I said, "your breathing has lost its rhythm. Before, it was steady, about fourteen to the minute. Now it is faster, and shallow, and it catches at the top, as if you were about to say something and thought better of it." I paused. "You have turned the jade ring on your right forefinger seven times in the last three minutes. You did not do it at all in the first fifteen. And your left hand, which you are keeping below the level of the table, is wet. You wiped it just now on your thigh. You thought no one saw."

…

The room was very quiet.

Dominic Hargrove did not move. The cigar had stopped in his fingers. The smile was still on his face, but it had frozen there, like a thing set in ice, and behind it I saw his eyes change. I saw them narrow, and slant, and go dark. It was a thing I have seen perhaps a dozen times in my life, and each time it has been the same: the brief, hot, naked flash of a man who has been seen. The fury of the burglar when the lamp is lit.

"You're quite observant," he said softly.

"It's what I'm paid for."

"I'm sure." His voice was very smooth. "And what do you suppose it means?"

"I should say it means," I replied, "that you recognize the method."

"The method."

"The manner of these deaths. The rooms. The terror." I held his eyes. "I think you know exactly what is happening to the four people who died. I think you know why. And I think you know, Mr. Hargrove, which debt is coming to find you."

Silence.

The gas fire hissed.

"Mick," said Dominic Hargrove.

The door opened. The flat-faced man in the dark suit appeared, with his hand at his lapel.

"Show these gentlemen out."

"Dominic—" said Leo.

"I said show them out."

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He rose from the chair in a single smooth movement, turned, and walked to the window, and stood with his back to us and his hands clasped behind him, looking out over the terraced lawns. His shoulders were rigid. In the glass I saw the reflection of his face, white and drawn and fixed, like a face on a coin.

His right hand, behind him, was turning the ring.

I counted.

Eight.

…

We stood in the drive, in the thin cold white of the morning, while Mick and his colleague watched us with folded arms from the steps. Leo took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. He stood for a while with his hands on his hips, looking up at the hundred windows of the house, and then at the sky. A pigeon crossed it, slowly, from left to right.

"Jesus Christ," he said at last. "Did you see him?"

"I did."

"The way he looked at you. I thought he was gonna have us shot." He let out a shuddering breath. "He knows something. He knows exactly what this is. He's connected to the whole damned thing, Doc, and he's not going to say one word about it."

"No."

"He turned down the protection. You get that? A guy on a list. A guy with a dead girl on a live feed in his own back yard, and he says no. No cops. No guard. No nothing." He shook his head. "You don't do that unless you're more scared of us than you are of him."

"I think," I said, "that he is afraid of what we might dig up."

"Yeah."

"And I think," I said slowly, "that he is right to be."

I looked up at the house. At the tall window of the study, with the pale shape of a man standing in it. As I watched, the curtain fell.