Yes, murder is back on the table now. And this time it’s not for hurting me, it’s for hurting himself.
When I get to his Belgravia townhouse—a graceful rise of white Georgian architecture set against the frowning sky—the door is hanging open as a young man lugs photography equipment inside. A crisp-looking woman in perfectly hemmed wide-leg trousers is talking to someone else on the front steps.
“We should wait for a sunny day for the rooftop photos,” the person says back to her. They seem to be looking through the weather app on their phone, oblivious to the woman’s eye roll.
“In October?” she asks impatiently. “I think we’ll be waiting a while. And he wants the listing up tomorrow. We’re doing it today.”
The person on their phone sighs but accepts her decision. “I suppose if he’s listing it under market value anyway...”
The woman nods, like this is all something the person should have already put together.
Jesus Christ. He’s selling his house.
The woman—his estate agent, I presume—finally catches me hovering on the sidewalk, assessing in an instant that I am not a potential buyer for a multimillion-pound home and narrowing her eyes at me. “Can I help you?”
I’m too shocked and angry to put on the dimple-and-freckles act for her. “Yes. I’m looking for James Cason.”
If the agent is surprised a girl in a sweater dress and scuffed boots knows the owner of the house, she doesn’t show it. “He’s not here. We’re preparing the house for market, as you can see, and he told us he’d spend the day at his second home to give us space to work. And no—” she adds, seeing me open my mouth “—I don’t know when he’ll be back. Perhaps you could try calling him.”
“Perhaps I could,” I say, already walking away. I don’t need to call him, because I already know where he is. He doesn’t have a second home in the city, but he does have one place here that he loves above all others.
“Thank you,” I tell the agent over my shoulder, and then I retrace my steps all the way back to the Tube and back to Russell Square Station.
7
Church
There was a practice among the ancient Celts.
They would make swords inlaid with gold and precious stones. They would polish stone axe heads for thousands of hours until the stones gleamed like glass. They would make intricate necklaces and bracelets and rings. Anything could work really, so long as it was very difficult to make and too precious to lose.
And then they would break these things.
Swords were curled into circles, axes cracked in half. Jewelry was bent and scored and cut. The objects weren’t just marred, they weren’t just broken—they wereruined.They were killed until there was no question of them ever being useful again.
Then these beautiful, dead gifts were given to the waters, to the lakes and rivers and bogs where the gods lived. An offering. A sacrifice.
Sometimes, if I close my eyes and I still my breathing, I can imagine the flashing and glinting of the bent swords as they drop through the water to the depths below. I can see the last glimmer of the necklaces as they slip into the shadows.
The final gasp of things that were made only to be broken, things made only to be given up to dark and never seen again.
I wonder if this is Charlotte and me—except if it is, then who is the slayer and who is the offering?
Who did the making and who did the breaking?
***
The museum is quiet today,which suits me just fine. I drift through the European rooms and then the British rooms, looking at all the torcs and shields that long-dead priests gave to the waters, and I miss Charlotte. I stare at the Sutton Hoo exhibit and glance at the various belts and knives and cauldrons liberated from hoards and burials, and I miss Charlotte. I sit down on a bench and stare at my pointless hands, my empty hands—hands that should be cradling and petting and spanking—and I miss Charlotte.
We’re both the offerings, I think tiredly. I broke her, then she broke me.
No. She’d already broken me.From that very first day. From that very first moment right here in the museum. I saw her and then I was bent for her. Cracked and killed. All for Charlotte Tenpenny.
Everything else was just flashes and glimmers in the dark.
I’m not sure how much of the morning I pass in this fashion, haunting the exhibits and missing Charlotte as only a broken thing can, but when I wander over to the Mesopotamia room, I find it empty. The neighboring room is closed for a new case installation, and the exhibit two rooms down is roped off for something that involves a camera crew, and the cumulative effect is that it seems to deter traffic away from Mesopotamia.
I don’t mind. I rather like being alone with my agony. It feels fitting.