Linnear 01 - The Ninja (15 page)

Would she say yes this time? He suspected that she would and his heart fairly danced.

‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back by nine, ten if Vincent gets stuck in Island traffic on the way in. But you have a key and some of your clothes are there. Come any time. But bring champagne. Dom Perignon. I’ll bring the caviar.’

It would have been easy for Eileen to ask what all this was for but she felt that it would spoil the moment. There was, after all, plenty of time to find out what she already knew in her heart.

‘All right,’ she said, her eyes very large now.

He turned, abruptly remembering. ‘I’d better get upstairs and prepare the bokken. Soon Hideoshi will be through with the others and I want to be ready.’

Justine’s eyes were completely dry. This was something new for her but it brought her no solace. Not when the anxiety had come again, a fierce knot in her stomach, a pressure on her chest, constricting her breaking, refusing to go away. There is nothing wrong, she repeated over and over to herself. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. She shivered, feeling cold. Her fingers were like ice.

She stood in the darkened living room of Nicholas’s house, staring out at the mist and rain on this dismal Sunday. Out ‘ there, somewhere, was the sea, curling endlessly, but the spiteful rain hid it from her as if it were withholding a bright toy on Christmas morning. She thought about going out there, piercing the mist, finding the ocean for herself, but she lacked, at this moment, the necessary fortitude to brave the weather.

Oh, my God I Oh, my God!

She whirled from the sleeted windowpane, running blindly through the house, groping for the bathroom, and there, at last, she collapsed in front of the toilet, retching.

Her body shook and sweat stood out on her forehead, rolling down into her eyes in tiny stinging rivulets.

After an endless time, when she could no longer stand the stink, she reached out a hand to flush the toilet. It seemed to take all the energy she possessed. But, after that, she somehow found the strength to stand up and bend over the basin.

The cold running water fell on her face like bullets from a gun. She shivered, opened her mouth to get the sour taste out. She could not swallow.

Sitting on the edge of the porcelain bath, feeling the cool bar of it striking across her buttocks, she curled over, putting her head in her arms, her arms on her knees.

She rocked back and forth, thinking, I can’t do it. I can’t.

It was her mind now that did the vomiting. The history of the betrayals unfurling like a hated flag above her head, blotting out all other signs of life. All her men. Timothy, who had been the first, the high-school basketball coach. I’ll be gentle, Justine, and thrusting savagely into her over and over, enjoying the expression of pain on her face, her crying out into the perfect sterile symmetry of the darkened gym; watching his eyes burn with her instant’s fear. Then Jodie, the Harvard man with the laughing eyes and the cruel soul. I want to be a surgeon, Justine - and already was. Eddie, who was seeing her and his wife on alternate nights; there was nothing he wanted but them both. And then, in San Francisco, there had been Chris. They had come together, igniting like a bonfire, insatiable, insensate to everything and everyone around them. Or was that only the way it had been with her? She could not bear that truth, even now. Dredging it up was like an act of cruel masochism, like opening the edges of a slowly healing wound and probing for the nerve.

She had used her father’s name then - and his money. God only knew how much; certainly she did not. Wasn’t it the money that had made her weak and lazy? So easy to pin down the blame, neatly and resolutely; coming back to her father. How she hated him for giving her - those things: his name (she always wrote the word out on the screen of her mind so that she could make the deliberate typo fame which was, as far as she was concerned, no error) and his money.

God, this thing makes me nasty and bitter, she thought. As if it’s a physical malady that manufactures bile as a by-product. She gagged again but, wrapping her arms around her stomach, she held herself together; there was nothing more to come up; she was empty yet the anxiety made her feel as if she had swallowed a two-by-four whole.

I can’t do it, she repeated to herself. I can’t.

She had taken his money - so much of it - not thoughtlessly but wilfully. Because she hated him. But she found that getting it was like having the goblet of wine that was always full no matter how much you drank. What had mattered so ^much to her was of absolutely no concern to him.

Of course it had mattered very much to Chris, who was the one, after all, who made use of most of the money. At least that was how it had all come down that day when her father had flown in, had come to her house with the battery of local detectives he had hired. It had all been there for her to read in the report. The thing had so shocked her that she had hardly been able to utter a word let alone protest as her father had his men gather up her clothes, all her possessions. He left them to it, hustling her outside and into the waiting limo. She had not said a word all through the flight back east. Her father, sitting across the’ aisle in the private Lear jet, was too engrossed in reports to notice. She found that she was not hungry, nor was she tired. She was nothing.

It seemed like a long time ago now. Years could be like lifetimes, never like days. This is what came to her on the plane ride back to New York: she saw their old country house, the one in Connecticut that she had loved so much, with the stone walls covered with green creeping ivy, the high leaded-glass windows, the flagstone patio and, across the emerald back lawn, beyond the unpaved avenue, the brick-red of the stables, smelling of hay and manure and horse sweat. How she loved that place; it reminded her of England, somehow. Not like the new place on Gin Lane out on the Island. Her father had sold the old house just after Justine’s mother had died, paying two and a half million for the estate on one of the most famous streets in all America.

It was Easter-time in Connecticut. She was eight. Gelda had some friends over, whom she did not like or just did not want to be with. Her mother was gone, having driven into town to do some shopping. She wandered through the enormous old place, the large bright friendly rooms filled, here and there, by the busy servants preparing for a formal party later that evening. Peering out of the window, she discovered that

there were a number of cars in the semicircular driveway and, as she went down the long curve of the main stairway to the ground floor, she could just make out voices coming from behind the closed doors of the library. Her hand on the knob, turning, and she pushed.

‘Daddy?’

Her father had indeed been inside. He was with a group of men, discussing matters that had no meaning for her.

‘Justine,’ he said with a frown, ‘you must see that I am busy at the moment.’ He made no move towards her.

‘I just wanted to talk to you.’ She felt utterly dwarfed by the circle of men. One of them shifted uncomfortably on the couch, the leather creaking under his weight.

“This is not the time. Shall I fetch Clifford.’ The latter had the form but not the inflection of a question.

She looked around mutely.

Her father reached up and pulled a cord. In just a moment, the manservant appeared.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Clifford,’ her father said. ‘See that she is kept occupied until Mrs Tomkin returns, will you? I can’t have any more interruptions. Doesn’t Gelda have some friends here?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, that’s the place for her then, eh?’

‘Very good, sir.’ He turned. ‘Come along, Miss Justine -‘

But she had already turned, running down the, long, high hallway, slamming out through the front door. She could hear Clifford clattering away behind her. She liked Clifford. She spent a lot of her time with him, just talking. But right now she did not feel like being with anyone.

She sped around the side of the house, headed for the stables, and was quite out of breath by the time she got there.

They had six horses. Arabians. Her favourite was King Said. He was her horse, to all intents and purposes. But of course the children, though already good riders, were not allowed on horseback or even in the stables without an adult to supervise. Justine did not really care about that now. She went down the straw-strewn centre aisle until she came to King Said’s stall. She called to him and apparently he heard, for there came

to her his slight snorting and stamping; he was eager for a canter. He poked his head out; it bobbed up and down. His powerful neck thrust far above her; his coat shone. She wished that she could reach up and stroke him but she was far too short.

That’s when she thought about opening the stall door. She was just lifting the iron latch when Clifford caught up with her.

‘Oh, Miss Justine, you must never, never do that -‘

But she had already whirled into his arms, clinging to him, crying inconsolably.

The return to New York had* presaged a low point in her life. Filled with an anxiety she could not control, she turned in desperation to a psychiatrist. At first it appeared to be no help at all. But that was an unfair assessment. It was, after all, a highly subjective one and she was perhaps so low that she could then perceive no change, however minute. It was like lying sleepless in her bed, staring out of the window at the east, night still clinging tenaciously, looking at her watch, knowing dawn was not far off but seeing no band of light. Not yet.

It was, in retrospect, really a time of retrenchment. She had no job, could not face that, but she began to sketch, returning to the craft she had once loved. Slowly she built up a current portfolio and at length she was ready to go out.

It was not nearly so bad as she had imagined - she had not slept for two nights before the interviews, terrified - and she had got a job at the second agency she went to. But doing a job that she liked, she soon found, was not nearly enough (did she know, then, that she was well again?). Of course she knew why. But the thought of becoming involved again was intolerable to her.

Thus is was that she discovered dance. She went to a class one night with a friend from the office and fell instantly in love. Now she channelled her excess energy into her body, adoring the concept of controlled rhythm, the duality of tension and relaxedness that dance afforded her.

Yet it was not only the dance but also its prelude which fascinated her. Her instructor believed in the discipline of t’ai

chi as a warm-up exercise. With this fundamental core assimilated, Justine found to her delight that she could move into virtually any area of dance she chose, from modern to ballet.

She had been at it for just over a year when her instructor said to her, ‘You know, Justine, if you had begun the dance when you were a child, you’d be a great dancer today. I say this to you only to give you an accurate idea of where you stand now. You are one of my best pupils because not only is your body responsive but your spirit is within the dance. The greatness is there, Justine, but one unfortunately cannot overcome the advance of time.’

She was filled with pride and happiness. But just as importantly, she knew why. For the first time in her life she felt that she had control of herself as a person; she no longer felt tossed to and fro by the whims of the world. Here, at last, was a control that she could feel directly, that had real meaning for her.

Within the month she had left her full-time job at the agency and had gone into business for herself. The agency still wanted her and she accommodated it. But she was free now to pick and choose the jobs she wanted. She found that within six months of setting up shop she was pulling down three times her old salary in independent billings.

And then she had decided on this house in West Bay Bridge.

And had met Nicholas.

7 can’t do it. I can’t.

She stood up and reeled drunkenly out of the bathroom, down the hallway, using her hands, palms outstretched like a blind person, to guide herself through the house. In the living-room she bumped into the bubbling fish tank. All the bright denizens of the deep swam there, tranquil as if anaesthetized - blind, deaf and dumb - as beautiful and as unthinking as the vegetation reaching towards the winking surface. She felt another wave of nausea hit her and she turned away, heading for the front door.

I can’t mat(e-the commitment. I can’t trust him. Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

She stumbled out into the rain, tripping down the wooden

steps, falling to her knees in the wet sand. It felt like dough, clinging to her jealously.

She crawled a few feet, then, regaining her balance, ran all the way home.

Not long afterwards, Nicholas returned from the beach area where they had found the second body. This time they had waited for him.

It was one cut. Do you understand? Vincent had said over the phone. He did indeed understand what that meant. The cut of a katana.

The white-skinned corpse was^slit from the right shoulder, obliquely down to just above the left hip. One swing, one cut from the finest blade ever known to man. It could easily slash through armour; flesh and bone were as paper to a katana wielded by a master swordsman. Ancient blades had been preserved for a thousand years by succeeding generations of warriors, losing not a bit of their original sharpness or effectiveness; and even today no arsenal in the world could claim such a magnificent weapon as the Japanese katana.

This was how the second man had died. He lay, as he had been found, cradled by the soft surf and sand. He had not been in the water very long. There was absolutely no question of his being drowned.

But now they had to revise their conclusions radically. Barry Braughm had obviously not been the ninja’s only target. But there seemed, on the surface, nothing to connect the two victims. This man was a worker for Lilco - the Long Island power company - blue-collar, lower-middle-class background. Nothing in common, nothing at all.

Yet the ninja was abroad, still killing.

Inside, Nicholas threw off the lightweight khaki slicker. His sneakers and his jeans up to the knees were soaked. But this was of only peripheral interest to him. He was thinking of Justine and the thing that had crashed through her kitchen window in the night. He did not dare to think of what it might be. Besides, it made no sense. Still, he had asked her to stay inside his house and not return home.