“I have some questions,” I said.
“Well of course you do…John. That is what you private investigators do, isn’t it? Interrogate your suspects? I don’t think I’ve ever met a real private eye before. So thrilling…”
“You don’t seem too upset over your grand-daughter’s disappearance,” I said, to get things started.
Mariah shrugged. “She’s simply being a nuisance, as always. Sanctimonious little dear. Never happy unless she’s interfering in the way I run my life, and upsetting all my plans…This is simply another plea for attention. Run away from home, get her grandfather’s undivided interest, then turn up safe and sound a few days later, happy and smiling and perfectly safe, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her arse, the little minx. And Jeremiah will take her back in as though nothing has happened. She always could twist him round her little finger.”
“You don’t believe she was kidnapped?”
“Of course not! The security built into this house has kept this family safe for centuries. No-one could have got in or out without setting off all kinds of hidden alarms, unless someone in the know had deactivated them in advance. It’s another of her attention-getting schemes, the stuck-up little bitch.”
“Am I to take it you two don’t get on?”
Mariah snorted loudly, a very unladylike sound. “My children have always been disappointments to me. My grand-children even more so. Jeremiah is the only person in the world who has ever mattered to me, the only one who ever really cared about me. You don’t know who I was, what I used to be, before he found me and made me his wife, and made me immortal. Of course you don’t know. No-one does, anymore. I’ve seen to it, believe you me. But I remember, and so does he, and I will always love him for that.” She realised her voice was getting a bit loud and made a deliberate effort to regain her composure. “Melissa’s current whereabouts are a matter of complete indifference to me, John.”
“Even though she stands to inherit the whole family fortune, while you and your children get nothing?”
She smiled at me with her bee-stung lips, red as blood, and studied me hungrily with her dark, hooded eyes. “You’re younger than I thought you’d be. Even handsome, in a hard-used sort of way. You think I’m beautiful, don’t you, John? Of course you do. Everyone does. They have for centuries…I will never grow old, John, never lose my looks or vitality. I shall live lifetimes, and always be lovely. That’s what he promised me…Say you think I’m beautiful, John. Come closer, and say it to my face. Touch me, John. You’ve never felt anything like my skin, young and fresh and vital for centuries…”
My mouth was dry and my hands were trembling. Sex beat on the air between us, raw and potent as an elemental force. I didn’t like her, but just then, at that moment, I wanted her…I made myself sit very still, and the madness quickly passed. Perhaps because Mariah was already losing her concentration. When I didn’t immediately weaken, her butterfly mind moved on to other matters.
“Fashions come and go, but I remain, John, forever lovely as a summer’s day…That’s the one thing I do miss, you know. Eternal night may be very glamorous, but anything can get tiring when it goes on and on without changing…It’s been so long since I felt the warmth of sunlight on my face and the caress of a passing breeze…”
She prattled on, and I listened carefully, but I didn’t learn anything useful. Mariah had been a shallow creature before Jeremiah made her immortal, and centuries of living, if not experience, had done little to change that. Perhaps she was incapable of change, frozen the way she was when Jeremiah took her out of Time, like an insect trapped in amber. She was Queen of Nightside Society, and that was all she cared about. Other queens might arise to challenge her grip, but in the end she would always win because she was immortal, and they were not.
She stopped talking abruptly and studied me thoughtfully, as though she’d only just remembered I was still there. “So you’re the famous John Taylor. One does hear such stories about you…Was your mother really a Biblical myth? Did you really save us all from extinction during the recent War? They say you could have been king of the Nightside, if you’d wanted…Tell me about your glamorous assistants, Razor Eddie, Dead Boy, Shotgun Suzie.”
“
Glamorous?
” I said, smiling despite myself. “Not quite the word I would have chosen.”
“I’ve read all about you, and them, in the tabloids,” said Mariah. “I live for gossip. Except when it’s about me. Some of those
reporters
can be very cruel…I’ve been trying to get Jeremiah to buy up the
Night Times
, and that terrible rag the
Unnatural Inquirer
, for years, but he’s always got some silly answer why he can’t. He doesn’t care what they write about him. He only ever reads the financial pages. Wouldn’t know who anyone was in Society if I wasn’t there to tell him…”
“Tell me about your children,” I said, when she made the mistake of pausing for breath. “Tell me about William and Eleanor.”
She pouted again, looking around her for more chocolates and her champagne glass, and I had to ask her twice more before she finally answered.
“I had the twins back in the nineteen twenties, because it was the fashion. Absolutely everyone in Society was having babies, and I just couldn’t bear to be left out. All my friends assured me childbirth was the most divine, transcendent experience…” She snorted loudly. “And afterwards, my lovely babies grew up to be such disappointments. I can’t think why. I saw to it that they had the very best nannies, the very best tutors, and every toy they ever wanted. And I made it a point to spend some time with them every weekend, no matter how full my social diary was.”
“And Jeremiah?”
“Oh, he was furious at the time. Absolutely livid. Actually raised his voice to me, a thing he never does. He never wanted children.”
“So what happened?” I said.
“He had me sterilized, so I couldn’t have any more.” Her voice was entirely unaffected, matter-of-fact. “I didn’t care. The fashion was past, and they weren’t what I’d expected…And I certainly wasn’t going to go through all
that
again…”
“Didn’t you have any friends, any close friends, who could have helped you stand up to Jeremiah?”
Mariah smiled briefly, and her eyes were suddenly very cold. “I don’t have friends, John. Ordinary people don’t matter to me. Or to any of us Griffins. Because you see, John, you’re all so short-lived…Like mayflies. You come and go so quickly, and you never seem to be around long enough to make any real impression, and it doesn’t do to get too fond of those who do. They all die…It’s the same with pets. I used to adore my cats, back in the old days. But I can’t bear them around me anymore. Or flowers…I had the gardens laid out around the Hall back in the seventeen fifties, when landscaped gardens were all the rage, but once I had them…I didn’t know what to do with them. You can only walk through them so many times…In the end I let them run riot, just to see what would happen. I find the jungle much more interesting—always changing, always producing something new…Jeremiah keeps it going as our last line of defence. Just in case the barbarians ever rise up and try to take it all away from us.” She laughed briefly. It was an ugly sound. “Let them try! Let them try…No-one takes anything that belongs to us!”
“Someone may have taken your grand-daughter,” I said.
She gave me a long look from under her heavy eyelashes, and tried her seductive smile again. “Tell me, John, how much did my husband offer you to find Melissa?”
“Ten million pounds,” I said, a little hoarsely. I was still getting used to the idea.
“How much more would it take, from me, for you to simply…go through the motions and not find her? I could be very generous…And, of course, it would be our little secret. Jeremiah would never have to know.”
“You don’t want her back?” I said. “Your own granddaughter?”
The smile disappeared, and her eyes were cold, so cold. “She should never have been born,” said Mariah Griffin.
THREE
All the Lost Children
I
explained to Mariah Griffin, carefully and very diplomatically, that I couldn’t accept her kind offer because I only ever work for one client at a time. That was when she started throwing things. Basically, anything that came to hand. I decided this would probably be a good time to leave and retreated rapidly to the door with assorted missiles flying past my head. I had to scramble behind me for the door handle, because I didn’t dare take my eyes off the increasingly heavy objects coming my way, but I finally got the door open and departed with haste, if not dignity. I slammed the door shut against the hail of missiles and nodded politely to the waiting Hobbes. (First rule of the successful private eye—grace under pressure.) We both stood for a while and listened to the sound of weighty objects slamming against the other side of the door, then I decided it was time I was somewhere else.
“I need to talk to the Griffin’s children,” I said to Hobbes, as we walked away. “William and Eleanor. Are they both still in residence?”
“Indeed, sir. The Griffin made it very clear that he wished them to remain, along with their respective spouses, on the assumption that you would wish to question them. I have taken the liberty of having them wait in the Library. I trust this is acceptable.”
“I’ve always wanted to question a whole bunch of subjects in a Library,” I said wistfully. “If only I’d brought my meerschaum and my funny hat…”
“This way, sir.”
So back down in the elevator we went, then along more corridors and hallways, to the Library. I was so turned around by now I couldn’t have pointed to the way out if you’d put a gun to my head. I was seriously considering leaving a trail of bread-crumbs behind me, or unreeling a long thread. Or carving directional arrows in the polished woodwork. But that would have been uncouth, and I hate running out of couth in the middle of a case. So I strolled along beside Hobbes, admiring the marvellous works of art to every side and quietly hoping he wouldn’t suddenly start asking me to identify them. There still weren’t many people about, apart from the occasional uniformed servant hurrying past with their head bowed. The corridors were so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart.
“Just how big is this Hall anyway?” I said to Hobbes, as we walked and walked.
“As big as it needs to be, sir. A great man must have a great house. It’s expected of him.”
“Who lived here before the Griffins?”
“I believe the Griffin had the Hall constructed to his own designs, sir, some centuries ago. It’s my understanding he wished to make an impression…”
We came at last to the Library, and Hobbes opened the door and ushered me in. I shut the door firmly behind me, keeping Hobbes on the other side. The Library was large and old-fashioned, almost defiantly so. All four walls were nothing but shelves, packed with heavy bound books that clearly hadn’t been published anywhen recent. Comfortable chairs were scattered across the deep carpeting, and there was a single long table in the middle of the room, complete with extra reading lamps. This had to be the Griffin’s room; he came from a time when everyone who was anyone read. Many of the books on the shelves looked old enough to be seriously rare and expensive. The Griffin probably had every notable text from the past several centuries, everything from a Gutenberg Bible to an unexpurgated Necronomicon. This last in the original Arabic, of course. Probably marked with dog-eared corners, doodles in the margins, and all the best bits heavily underlined.
William and Eleanor Griffin were waiting for me, standing stiffly together to present a united front in the face of a common enemy. They didn’t strike me as the kind of people who’d spend much time in a Library by choice. Their respective spouses stood together in a far corner, observing the situation watchfully. I took my time looking the four of them over. The longer I kept them waiting, the more likely it was someone would say something they hadn’t meant to, just to break the silence.
William Griffin was tall and muscular, in that self-absorbed body-building way. He wore a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt and jeans. All of which looked utterly immaculate. Probably because he threw them out as soon as they got creased and put on new ones. He wore his blond hair close-cropped, had cold blue eyes, his father’s prominent nose, and his mother’s pouting mouth. He was doing his best to stand tall and proud, as befitted a Griffin, but his face refused to look anything but sullen and sulky. After all, his comfortable existence had been turned suddenly upside down, first by the revealing of the new will, then by his daughter’s disappearance. People of his high station resent the unexpected. Their wealth and power are supposed to protect them from such things.
Eleanor gave every impression of being made of stronger stuff. Even though she was wearing an outfit that even Madonna would have turned down as too trashy. Hooker chic, with added gaudy. She wore her long blonde hair in what were obviously artificial waves, and used heavy makeup to disguise only average features. She glared openly at me, as much irritated as angry, and chain-smoked all through the interview. She stubbed out her butts on the polished surface of the long table and ground them under foot into the priceless Persian carpet. I’ll bet she didn’t do that when her father was around.
Over in the far corner, as far away as she could get and still be in the same room, William’s wife Gloria, the ex-supermodel, was tall, thin, and so black her skin had a bluish sheen. She studied me thoughtfully with dark hooded eyes, her high-boned face showing no expression at all under her glistening bald skull. She wore a long white satin dress, to contrast with her night-dark skin. She had that intense, hungry look all professional models cultivate, and she still looked as though she could saunter successfully down any catwalk that took her fancy. Although she was standing right beside Eleanor’s husband Marcel, her body language made it clear she was only standing there because she’d been told to. I don’t think she looked at him once.