“Do they know?” Fros asked when they got into the car and she started the engine. Tom had given her an address in Waltham Forest. What he and his team had found there was something Fros did not want to think about right now. She feared spontaneous transformation and Bobby and she weren’t close enough yet for that.
“Yes, they do,” Bobby said. “It was a bit awkward at first but we’re all good now. Marty knows about Peter, too. We don’t keep secrets from each other.” Bobby managed to suggest with intonation only they’d tried to keep secrets from each other and failed. She also managed to suggest keeping secrets was not a good thing.
Fros nodded. Bobby sounded sincere and she would have probably smelled sincere if she could. Incidentally, she would not be able to keep secrets from her husband if Peter had induced her to tell him. That’s what he had called it – inducing. Peter could induce vampires to think that it was night when it was day and that a forest clearing in Abinger was unoccupied when in fact two – loosely defined – people had spent two hours there under the watchful eye of a guard sent by Mikkel Nørgaard, president and CEO of a non-governmental organisation called “Gentle Planet”, to make sure Peter stayed true to the mission.
“Good for you,” Fros said, wondering if it would work on her and cursing herself for even briefly believing Peter would try inducing her.
Bobby snorted laughter.
“It’s not Peter doing it,” she said as if she’d acquired the gift of thought-reading by means of becoming a living dead woman. “We’ve always been like that. It makes life easier, you know? Getting things out in the open.”
“I just told Peter I slept with someone else,” Fros blurted out and almost braked in the middle of the road from the shock. It only lasted a fraction of a second. Then it was replaced by weird relief. The mental equivalent of a fart, she thought grimly. “I can’t say it made me feel better but it had to be done.”
“Oh, it is better, believe me,” Bobby said as if this was not the first but the thousandth intimate conversation they were having. “It would’ve eaten you alive if you hadn’t told him. So, was it serious?” she asked after a brief pause. “With the other guy?”
Fros took her time although she knew the answer. She knew it and hated it.
“It could’ve been,” she said. “If he wasn’t the most likely suspect in a double murder and a kidnapping.”
Bobby turned in her seat.
“The Damani case? You slept with someone from the Damani case? You really know how to pick them, don’t you?”
A smile tugged at one corner of Fros’s mouth without the intervention of her will.
“It wasn’t intentional, it just happened.”
And then it had happened again and now she was going to a place that would reveal the final piece of the Damani puzzle. After that, she was going to set a trap for the man she had for a split second thought might turn into something more than a casual partner. She had thought he could become a means for her to – as characters said in the few soppy movies she had watched – move on.
“Yeah,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “It happens.”
“Did it happen to you, too?” Fros said and masked the hope in her voice with some throat-clearing. The danger of spontaneous transformation had shrivelled and died under the onslaught of other emotions.
“Kind of,” Bobby said. “I didn’t act on it, though. Had a crush, stopped having a crush, the end. And that’s the one thing I never told Marty.”
“Well, if nothing happened there was nothing to tell,” Fros said supportively and feeling good about it. Feeling normal.
“Yeah. Nothing happened. So, what are you going to do with that guy? The suspect?” Bobby asked a little too cheerfully. Fros couldn’t help wondering who the crush had been. Peter maybe. Peter was very crush-worthy. She stifled a smile.
“Well, Tom suggested we set a trap for him but they found the girl, so I think he’ll talk without a trap.”
“They found the girl?”
Spontaneous transformation was suddenly back in the game and Fros had to make an effort to keep the heat at bay.
“Yes. Tom’s team.”
And now Fros had to deal with Jasper. It would be unpleasant but it had to be done and she was the right one to do it. The sooner Fros ended the whole story the better and this didn’t only mean the budding relationship part. This case had to be closed so she could focus on the bigger fish that was waiting to be fried and getting stinker by the day.
“How did Peter take it?” Bobby said out of the blue. “When you told him?” She had that thoughtful tone again, the cheer taking a break.
Fros’s hands tightened around the wheel.
“Surprisingly well,” she said. “He was annoyingly understanding.”
“Well, he’s had a lot of time to live and accept stuff,” Bobby said. “That usually makes people more understanding of some things. Some people,” she added after a pause. “And when you really love someone you forgive them. I know it’s trite. But it’s true.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Fros said through gritted teeth. “He was gone. No calls. No sign of life. I could probably sit around and wait for him forever but I decided not to.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it as a criticism,” Bobby said and tapped her fingers on her thigh, looking out of the window.
“How do you know he loves me?” Fros said after a while. It was silly. It was unavoidable. “Are you best friends who share everything?”
“It’s in his eyes.” The childish sarcasm hadn’t worked. “When he talks about you, his eyes light up. And they harden at the same time. It’s a bit weird but you two are not what I’d call your average couple so it works.”
“Yeah, it works,” Fros said. “Too bad it never seems to last. First he got his head cut off and stayed in bed for a year, then he got taken by a cult.”
“He got his head what?” Bobby asked slowly.
The story comfortably filled the time until they arrived without having to delve deeper into anyone’s emotions and without Fros having to think what she would find at the house that Tom had called from.
It was a nice little house, more of a cottage, really, with a rustic feel about it, probably because of all the flower and vegetable beds in the garden. There were plants in them, lots of plants. Food.
As Fros strolled across the garden to the back door where Tom was waiting for her, smells bombarded her from all sides – onions, garlic, carrots, young lettuce, beans, just sprouted. Upon closer inspection she saw there was really only one flower bed, right next to the house, below the windows that currently showed an empty kitchen. This was the garden of a self-sufficiency fan.
“Is he inside?” she asked Tom and didn’t need to wait for the answer. She put her hand on the doorhandle. “Stay here.”
“Wait.” Tom put his own hand on her shoulder. “Maybe we should go in together. Confront him.”
Fros shook her head, once.
“I’ll deal with it. If Meena is in there and if she’s alive, we need to make sure she stays alive,” she said and realised she was a bit short on conviction. It was the garden – a vegetable garden was not what one normally associated with a mentally unstable killer. Unless there were bodies under the onions. But it didn’t smell like there were.
“Bobby’s at the front door with David,” she said again and pushed the handle down. “If she senses Jasper’s trying to escape she’ll go in.”
Tom’s nostrils flared, his eyes lit up and his personal aroma reading went from anxious and excited to all-curiosity.
“Is she…”
“Yes, but she manages it well. See you.”
The kitchen Fros found herself in when she stepped through the door was, as before, empty, with the same rustic feel like the outside of the house. A big, thick wooden table sat in the middle, within a distance from the stove that any cook would call comfortably short. A line of copper pots and pans hung from the ceiling over the table. There was a pot on the stove and it smelled of lentils and spinach. Fros made a face.
She continued on tiptoe to the door that connected the kitchen to the rest of the house but before she reached it the door opened and a wave of fabric softener and the consequences of a plant-based diet rushed in, followed by its source.
“I told you I heard something,” Coochie called over her shoulder. “What are you doing here?” she asked Fros and crossed her arms. “Do you have a warrant? You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t need a warrant,” Fros said, breathing through her mouth. “I’m not the police. I need to talk to Jasper.”
On cue, Jasper appeared in the corridor behind Coochie. He walked slowly because he wasn’t alone. Next to him, holding fast to his hand, was a small girl with huge eyes and long hair tied into a neat braid. The sweet smell of innocence, which wasn’t literally sweet but rather spicy, filled all available space displacing Coochie’s odour cocktail. What was lacking was fear. There was some confusion, sadness, but no fear.
“Hello,” Fros said and squatted so her face was level with Meena’s. “My name is Fros. What’s yours?”
“Meena,” the girl said quietly and her hand tightened around Jasper’s. “My mummy and daddy are gone.”
Fros managed to nod.
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
“How did you know?” Jasper said.
“Jasper, what the hell…”
“Shut up, Camilla.”
Fros smiled at Meena and straightened up.
“You never mentioned a sister,” she said. The smell didn’t lie. The choices people made about food and lifestyle mattered but the genes mattered, too. And they smelled. “How old were you when your brother died?”
“Thirteen,” Coochie said and shot Jasper a look of alarm and confusion to which he did not respond. He didn’t even notice it, too busy staring at Fros.
“The knife,” he said. “You saw something on the knife, didn’t you?”
“You could say that. The blood never really goes away entirely.”
Meena looked up with an unspoken question in her eyes.
“Take her,” Jasper told his sister and let go of the child. Coochie took Meena by the hand and with one last look, which would probably speak volumes to the right receiver but said nothing besides fear and anger to Fros, left the kitchen.
“Please, sit down,” Jasper said, once again the gracious host. “Did you come alone?”
Fros found it in her to smile, even though her stomach was squeezed into a tiny little ball of tension and her skin was prickly, which did not bode well.
“Of course not,” Jasper answered himself. “You had me followed.”
Fros tilted her head to the side. Jasper was good at self-interrogation.
“How many?”
That almost got a laugh, despite the circumstances, which featured a marked change in Jasper’s olfactory makeup. The usual peanuts and whiskey of hedonism were almost completely gone, crushed under the combined weight of acrid embarrassment and fresh seaweed – the scent of hope.
“Enough for you to drop any plans for escaping,” Fros said. “It’s over and the only question is whether we’re going to do all this the easy way or the hard way.”
A smile rippled Jasper’s face.
“It suits you, talking like a spaghetti western sheriff.”
Fros got a sharp sense that if there was another basilisk in the room he or she would suddenly smell the pungent notes of embarrassment on Fros. Not because she was talking like a spaghetti western sheriff but because that smile and that voice lit up a small fire in the pit of her stomach. It was ridiculous and yet true, and it needed taking care of. The easy way or the hard way.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“What’s the easy way?” Jasper said.
“You wait quietly until the police comes and you get arrested to await trial while they free Stewart Martin. You paid him to confess, didn’t you? I thought so,” she said when the smell once again betrayed Jasper. “Then we’ll take Meena to her grandfather and they can try and build some kind of new life for her.”
“And the hard way?” Jasper prompted when Fros didn’t continue.
She raised her eyes from where she’d been resting them on a crack in the wood of the table and pointed them at him.
“You die,” she said. There was really nothing more to say, yet one last question was nagging at her and it would nag at her forever if she didn’t voice it. Curiosity killed the cat and embarrassed the basilisk but there it was.
“Why?” she said.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jasper said. “Before, I thought you would. I was going to tell you about Meena when the time was right. We could’ve raised her together. But I see you wouldn’t understand.”
Fros narrowed her eyes at him.
“It’s all about your brother,” she said, taking the bait readily. “He killed himself because people didn’t care enough about the planet. Were the Damanis like that, too? They didn’t care so they had to die but Meena was young enough to deserve a chance to learn under your highly qualified supervision? Do you have the remotest sense of how insane this is?”
Jasper didn’t even look down. He took the barrage of words unwavering.
“I can’t have children,” he said. “That’s why Asha and I split. But I’ve always wanted to have them. I wanted to help raise a new generation that will be more responsible to our planet than we are. What’s so bad about this?” he said, innocence oozing from him, almost choking Fros.
It wasn’t the scent of innocence that children had, that Meena had. It was the mouldy-bread smell of someone who was well aware they had done something wrong but had put so much effort into justifying it to themselves they had ended up believing it wholeheartedly.
“You could’ve adopted,” Fros said. She could have already ended this, taken him outside and handed him over to Tom while she came back for Coochie and Meena. But she didn’t seem to be able to help herself.
“I liked Meena,” Jasper said with a smile. “She’s so bright and so sweet, and she really cares about nature, you know? She loves to play with animals and bugs. She loves to be outside.”
“Most children do.” There was not a trace left of that small fire and that was a great relief but Fros was starting to suspect she had unleashed the gates of confession and that could take a while. If she wasn’t out in fifteen minutes, Tom was instructed to switch to Plan B, which was to call the police and forego the satisfaction of delivering the criminal to them.
“That’s exactly the thing,” Jasper said with a sudden burst of energy. “Most children are born with a respect for nature and a love for it. But their parents raise them to become selfish earners and to forget about nature. That’s how we’ve become the destructive force we are, Fros. That, and breeding uncontrollably.”
“Right. So you’re single-handedly working for population control. And to think you were so good at playing the role of a selfish earner.” Fros was beginning to lose whatever patience remained in stock. “Very noble. Now, will you wait quietly until the police arrive or will I need to restrain you?”
For a moment, Jasper went quiet. Then he stood, slowly, and walked around the table to stand over her. Fros tensed, ready to fight, but when Jasper did reach out to touch her it was to stroke her cheek with the tips of his fingers. Fros jerked away from the touch.
“I am a selfish earner,” he murmured. “But I pay my dues. I’ve got an all-green investment portfolio and a stake in a carbon offset company. Do you know what it does? It pays people to keep their forests alive. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“And worth two slit throats and an orphan, apparently,” Fros said dryly and took her phone out of her pocket. “I suggest you sit back down. The police might take a while.”
She should have watched him. She should have smelled the desperation on him because there could be no other explanation for Jasper’s next move, which was a lunge at her that ended with his fingers around Fros’s throat. They squeezed. She dropped the phone on the table and tried to kick him between the legs only to learn this was tricky when you were sitting down, your attacker was leaning over you, and there was a chair in the way.
For a fraction of a second Fros had an urge to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. Here was a plain human, with zero special powers, who was trying to kill her and even stood a chance of success, however temporary, because he had taken her by surprise. And the reason he had taken her by surprise was of her own making. She’d grown impatient. She’d stopped paying attention. All she’d wanted was to wrap him for the police and get out of there.
Her attention may have been deficient but the venom never disappointed. It flooded her head the moment Jasper’s hands squeezed her neck and flowed down to her eyes. Fros shut them. This made for an even more ridiculous situation because she couldn’t see her attacker and pick the best way to neutralise him but she wanted him alive, not dead on the floor from a sudden and very difficult to explain heart attack.
“I really wished you’d understand,” Jasper whispered as he strangled her. “We could have been happy if you did. We really could’ve. You could’ve been the one.”
Fros groped for his face following the direction of his voice. It wasn’t that hard to find, after all. It was attached to the body with the arms that ended in the hands that were cutting off her air supply. The fingers of her right hand scratched flesh.
Jasper hissed with pain and redoubled his grip on her neck. He was probably in the process of realising strangulation was not as easy as it seemed on screen. Fros, for her part, was realising that it was exactly as unpleasant and painful as it seemed on screen. And it drained your strength fast.
She groped in the direction of Jasper’s face again, hit air and opened her eyes a sliver to try and catch a glimpse of its location without looking directly into it. Said face was above and slightly to the left of her own. Once that was established, Fros gathered whatever strength remained in her body, which had turned into a giant pulsing burning head. She dug the nails of her right hand into Jasper’s left wrist and in the second of shock that followed, she used her left hand to get to his eyes or rather, his right eye.
It was enough. The moment her fingers dug into the soft skin of the eyelid, Jasper jerked back, loosening his grip on Fros’s throat. She rose from her chair like a bad meal and tackled Jasper to the ground. Gulping air through her burning throat, Fros willed the venom to go back, pushed against it until it yielded. She opened her eyes.
“It was worth a try,” Jasper said, panting. And then he smiled, which sealed his fate.
Fros punched him in the solar plexus like McKinley had taught her, heard the gasp, saw the wince and got off him to call Tom while Jasper writhed on the floor trying to get his breath back.
Ten seconds later, Tom, Bobby and Tom’s partner in this task, a younger detective by the name of David Something, were in the house. Coochie was yelling at them and Meena was crying. One look from Fros was enough for Bobby to take the child to another room while Fros called Vikram Mehta with the good news. Once that was taken care of, she called the police.