The door flew open.
Revolver out, McKell crossed the minuscule lobby in a long stride. “Armed police! Stay still!”
Broad daylight outdoors, but the apartment’s lined curtains were closed and a single baby spot in the array of track lights was the sole illumination. The space, reeking of incense, was shadowy except for that pillar of radiance in the middle of the room, where it was mercilessly bright.
Shock froze him for a heartbeat. Bald, faceless, gleamingly naked, a creature was confronting him: a beast disturbed while savaging fallen prey. Inspector McKell’s mind shut down in much the manner of a camera shutter snapping; a refusal to acknowledge the nature of mutilated quarry being guarded by this apparition.
He might, Tom McKell confessed to me years later, have stayed frozen for a second or an hour. But Pete Peters, jammed with the sergeant back in the lobby, had shouted desperately.
McKell understood, in a strangely detached manner, that the creature wasn’t an animal after all. Humanoid, it had risen on two legs, it was advancing, and it brandished a kitchen knife, a narrow triangle of honed steel some seven inches long from tip to grip, and the silver was sweeping up, up—
Belatedly the spell broke. His brain snicked back into gear, and he perceived what he was dealing with. Being right-handed, with no time to switch the revolver to his left, Inspector McKell took his finger off the trigger, ducked under the descending blade, and clubbed his weighted fist against the side of the alien creature’s muzzle.
He even had enough presence of mind to catch Ivy Challis as she collapsed. While he was laying her down, a detached observer in his head noted that the floor wasn’t glistening from water, it was just that most of the carpet was covered by a sheet of clear plastic.
A cracked voice announced, “Panic over, chaps.” Holstering the revolver, he was disturbed to discover that he had been the speaker.
Pete Peters, Adam’s apple abruptly prominent, choked out, “Sweet Jesus, what is all this?” Shaken but professional, he bolted back to the corridor before throwing up; crime scenes must not be compromised.
“You had to be there,” McKell said, either shrugging or shivering. “Ivy didn’t want her clothes stained by the messy task she had taken on, so she stripped, put on a shower cap and a skintight, see-through PVC catsuit, part of her working wardrobe. With just that one light, and no makeup on, she scared seven kinds of spit out of me. And there were scores of those joss sticks you get at Chinese stores, smoldering away to cover the smell, so the flat was sort of foggy.
“She swore she hadn’t been trying to knife me, just making for the door in a panic to escape. Small consolation if she had skewered me, but I didn’t press charges. The lady was in enough trouble without my two-pennyworth.”
Seeing the question on my face, he said patiently, “Ivy had killed Ivor Grange about an hour before we turned up. She needed to smuggle the body out — dismemberment struck her as the best means. ‘I could have carried it a bit at a time,’ she told me, might have been talking about handling materials for a garden bonfire, ‘and Ivor was too big to get into the boot of my car. I had to make him fit.’ ”
He mimed another shudder. “Ice for a heart, that one. Then again, having been used and abused by men all her adult life, maybe she saw it as getting her own back. All the same, I’m afraid Ivy was defective when she came off the assembly line. Glamorous but not fully human.
“Try this: I asked how she could have done such a thing, meaning killing and mutilation — her late boyfriend was minus arms and legs when we broke in, she’d been taking a breather before tackling decapitation. Ivy being such a looker made it even more bizarre, that’s what I was driving at.
“But she got the wrong end of the stick, thought I was being sexist, surprised that all women aren’t squeamish. The, um, moral dimension was invisible to Ivy. ‘Oh,’ she said, quite proud of herself, ‘Dad was a butcher, I knew how to go about it. And I work out a lot, I’m stronger than I look.’ ”
“God, how awful.”
“I don’t believe God was anywhere near Apartment 3A, Rougemont Court, that particular day.” But his smile, sardonic, hardly perceptible, soon vanished. “You can drive yourself dotty over maybes and might-have-beens, so I try not to wonder exactly what part I played in Grange’s death.
“Until Tania Wark’s tipoff, I accepted that Ivy Challis had no idea where Grange might be. After my second visit, she could tell she was in the clear as far as I was concerned. I’ve a nasty feeling that was the green light. The law was ready to believe that Grange had been knocked off in a dispute with another crook; if his corpse was found, Tosh Fisher had to be the prime suspect. Granted, we picked Fisher up immediately after the fracas at The Waterman’s Arms, but he was granted bail the following day. For all we knew, he could have caught up with Grange and finished what had begun outside the pub.
“During the brawl, Ivor Grange escaped. If he’d gone to Ivy’s house, Fisher might trace him. Lord knows how, but Grange managed to get himself to her London flat. Likeliest explanation is that anonymous wheelman I mentioned, the getaway driver we never caught up with.
“In hindsight, I believe Grange went to that secluded pub to pay off the driver. No doubt the guy bottled out when Fisher turned up with his lynch mob but hung around at a safe distance, rescued Grange when he had the chance, and drove him to London. Grange had a key to Ivy’s crib there — which interested me because he wasn’t her pimp and it was a lousy potential hideout, considering Ivy’s trade. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
“He was in a bad way, front teeth splinters and pulp, broken jaw, but he was a tough nut, confident he’d recover providing he kept away from Tosh Fisher. Grange knew a dodgy doctor who would fix him up on the quiet, but the quack was out of town for a while. Grange phoned Ivy, told her the score, demanded her help, and settled down to wait for the doc.
“Fair play, Ivy Challis did her best at first. But she wasn’t much of a nurse, and he was a rotten patient, half crazy from pain. He whacked her a couple of times for clumsiness, and fairly soon — her version, this — he stopped talking and sulked on the bed, day and night.
“Ivy didn’t like being knocked about. After all, she was turning business away to give Grange a safe house, losing a fortune for his sake. Then rumors started about Tosh Fisher’s being mixed up in Grange’s disappearance, and the poison began working. The idea hit her that there’s no risk in murdering a man who is assumed to be dead already. Grange was weak but bound to get stronger as time passed, she’d never have a better chance.”
Digesting that, I could deduce no sane motive. “If she wanted revenge,” I objected, “she could have had it simply by telling you where to find him.”
Tom McKell was pitying. “Ivy wasn’t after revenge, no money in that. You haven’t listened, old son. Grange was canny, didn’t sling his gelt around. He stashed it away.
“We went over that flat — which is to say the Met’ did, they’re great at searching. Sure enough, a steel box was hidden under the lounge floor. It held most of the hundred thousand from the payroll job, still in the delivery bags, and other cash besides. He had the best part of a quarter-million quid on deposit at his mistress’s London address.
“She denied it, but Ivy must have known his stash was there. Whatever pretext Ivor Grange used to get time alone in her flat, keeping a spare key for further access, she’d spotted something, maybe sawdust on a rug or a certain section of floor not quite the same as before. Women in her trade don’t need many clues; what blood in the water is to sharks, the smell of money is to them.