Heathen/Nemesis Page 22

  Donna looked at her in bewilderment.

  ‘I thought you were stopping,’ she said.

  Julie didn’t answer, but drove on towards the traffic lights, glancing again in the rear-view mirror. They were amber as she swung the car round to the right and through them, heading down a side street, taking another right then another until they were back on the street where they’d started.

  ‘I appreciate the tour of the block,’ said Donna, smiling, ‘but what’s wrong?’

  ‘We’re being followed,’ Julie said flatly.

  Donna’s smile faded immediately. She sat forward so that she could see into the Fiesta’s wing mirror.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Because whoever’s driving went through a red light to keep up with us.’

  ‘Which car?’

  ‘The Granada,’ Julie said, and Donna saw the dark blue vehicle behind them.

  ‘What shall I do?’ Julie asked.

  ‘Pull in,’ Donna said unhesitatingly. ‘See what he does.’

  Julie nodded, indicated again and this time swung the car into a gap in front of the café.

  The Granada drove past, disappearing around a corner.

  ‘They spotted me,’ Brian Kellerman said into the two-way radio.

  ‘Where are they now?’ Farrell wanted to know.

  Kellerman told him.

  ‘All right, we’ll follow them from here. You keep out the way. I’ll let you know where we’re heading, but keep back. If they spot you again we might lose them.’ Farrell switched the two-way off and jammed it into the seat pocket beside him. He gave Ryker directions, then sat back in his seat.

  ‘Now we’ll see,’ he murmured.

  Seventy-Two

  They sat at a window table in the café looking out, watching every car that passed.

  Donna warmed her hands round her tea and glanced at her watch again.

  4.26 p.m.

  They’d been in the café for over thirty minutes now, with only the sound of a fruit machine and the loud chattering of a group of youngsters in their late teens for company. A couple were playing the fruit machine; every so often, a cacophony of bells and buzzers would go off. The place smelt of damp clothes and cigarette smoke. There were a few curled-up sandwiches in a glass-fronted cabinet beneath the counter and a cheese roll that looked like it had been hewn from granite rather than baked with dough. Bottles of Coke, Tizer and Pepsi were lined up, along with a few token bottles of Perrier and Evian. The Formica-topped tables were scarred with cigarette burns and discoloured by spilled coffee. A woman in her forties was busily scrubbing tables at the far end. Donna thought she would need more than hot, soapy water to remove the accumulated grime.

  Julie did not take her gaze from the window. Every vehicle that passed she scanned, every passer-by she scrutinised.

  The Granada hadn’t been past. But it could be lurking up ahead somewhere, Julie reasoned, waiting to continue its pursuit. Or worse.

  ‘We can’t sit here forever,’ Donna said finally. ‘Come on.’

  ‘They could be waiting,’ Julie said warily.

  ‘We’ll take that chance.’ As she opened her handbag to retrieve her purse, Julie saw the Pathfinder .22 nestling inside.

  Donna paid for the teas and the two women walked out to the Fiesta and got in.

  Julie’s hand was shaking as she pushed the key into the ignition but she sucked in a deep breath and started the car, checking her rear-view mirror both for approaching traffic and, more particularly, for that Granada.

  ‘How much further?’ she wanted to know.

  Donna consulted the directions on the sheet of paper and realized that they must be pretty close to their destination. She checked street names carefully, peering at a sign indicating an approaching roundabout. She pointed to the turn-off they should take.

  ‘We’re close now,’ Donna said.

  They were still on the outskirts of the city centre itself and Donna wondered what something as strange as a waxworks was doing so far from the city centre, even what it was doing in a place like Portsmouth. She could understand the existence of such an attraction at a seaside resort, but this traditionally nautical stronghold could hardly be classified as such. She wondered how Paxton made it pay.

  ‘There,’ Donna suddenly shouted, jabbing a finger against the glass.

  Julie looked to her left and caught a glimpse of what looked like a large terraced house fronted by a blue and white canvas awning. There was a small paved area in front of it and a low wall. The paved area had several figures on it. A ticket booth was guarded by two of these figures dressed as policemen.

  HOUSE OF WAX proclaimed the sign on the awning.

  The shutters were firmly closed at the ticket booth, the waxwork policemen staring with sightless eyes at passers-by. The street was more or less deserted.

  There were more shutters at the windows of the building, only one of which was open. Leaning out of it the figure of Charlie Chaplin waved to anyone who cared to look up, frozen forever in that pose.

  ‘Now what?’ Julie asked, seeing that the place was closed.

  ‘Let’s find a phone box,’ Donna said. ‘I’ll call Paxton.’

  They finally found one two streets away. Julie pulled in and her sister ran across to the two booths, pulling the piece of paper from her handbag, finding Paxton’s number. She touched the .22 Pathfinder for reassurance as she removed the sheet.

  The first phone was broken and the second took only phone cards. Donna rummaged in her purse and found hers. She pushed it into the slot and dialled, dismayed to see she only had six units left. She hoped he picked up the phone quickly. She hoped he was there. The phone continued to ring.

  ‘Come on,’ she muttered.

  Another unit was swallowed up.

  The phone was picked up.

  ‘Hello,’ the voice said.

  ‘Mr Paxton? George Paxton?’

  ‘Yes. Who’s this, please?’

  Another unit disappeared.

  ‘I’m in a call box, I can’t speak for long, just listen to me, please. My name is Donna Ward, Chris Ward’s wife. You knew my husband very well; he wrote a book about waxworks and you helped him with his research. He left something inside your waxworks. He hid something. A book.’

  Silence at the other end as another unit was consumed.

  ‘Mr Paxton, I need your help, please. It’s very important.’

  ‘Where are you?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘In a call box, I told you.’

  ‘Meet me outside my waxworks in an hour, Mrs Ward,’ he said.

  Donna hung up, left the phone card in the box and hurried back to the car.

  Julie drove off.

  ‘We’ve got them,’ said Peter Farrell into the two-way. He gave Kellerman the location. ‘Get here as quick as you can, but stay out of sight. We don’t want to fuck it up now.’ He looked at Ryker and nodded in the direction of the Fiesta. ‘Don’t lose them, but be careful.’

  Ryker guided the Orion into traffic, keeping well back from the Fiesta.

  Farrell watched as the smaller car parked across the street from the waxworks. He saw the two women sitting there as the Orion glided past and disappeared up a side street. Satisfied that they were staying put, he flicked on the two-way again.

  ‘It’s Farrell. We’ve got them under surveillance. They won’t get away this time.’

  ‘We’ll be there in about thirty minutes,’ the voice on the other end said, then there was a sharp hiss of static followed by silence.

  Farrell reached inside his jacket, his fingers touching the butt of the .45 in his shoulder holster.

  No escape, he thought, smiling. Not this time.

  Seventy-Three

  The office was small, less than fifteen feet square, dominated by a large antique desk piled high with correspondence. A glass paperweight in the shape of a tortoise held the letters down. Framed photos on the walls showed the front of the waxworks. Set
out in chronological order, the first picture had been taken in 1934, then, every ten years until the most recent one. The building itself had changed little, apart from a lick of paint here and there; it still reminded Donna of a huge terraced house.

  There were cabinets set against one wall, each filled with photos and biographical details from figures in history and the media, politics and sport - everyone from Clement Attlee to the Greek god Zeus.

  ‘My grandfather started the museum,’ said Paxton. ‘He saw a number of them in America when he visited during the Thirties. When he died it was passed on to my father and then to me. It doesn’t make much money now, just enough to keep it running, but we break even every year. I wouldn’t want to close it down.’ Paxton smiled affectionately and touched the picture of the Wax Museum taken in 1934.

  He was a tall, attractive man in his mid-forties, the grey hair at his temples giving him a distinguished look. More so than the bald patch at the back of his head. He wore an open-neck shirt and trousers that needed pressing, but he’d apologized for his ‘unkempt’ condition when he’d first greeted them, explaining that he’d been decorating at home and had pulled on the first things to hand in his haste to get to the waxworks.

  ‘We used to make all the figures here ourselves,’ he said. ‘There was a workshop in the basement. My father employed three people to create them. I don’t need them any more. I simply write to Madame Tussaud’s and put in a list of requests for figures.’ He smiled. ‘They send me the ones I need. They sometimes suggest figures I should have here. You know, the ‘Famous for fifteen minutes’ type. The pop stars, the TV celebrities or sportsmen. I put them in my Warhol Gallery. That’s what I call it.’ He smiled again. ‘Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes,’ he mused. ‘I usually replace them after a month or so.’

  ‘Mr Paxton, how well did you know my husband?’ Donna asked.

  ‘How well do any of us know someone else, Mrs Ward?’ he said philosophically. ‘I got on well with Chris while he was here doing his research. He spent about a week with me, learning about the running of the place, things like that.’

  ‘How much did you know about the book he hid here?’

  ‘Nothing at all. He rang me one day and asked if he could bring something down. He wouldn’t even tell me what it was over the phone.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  Paxton shrugged.

  ‘Six or seven weeks,’ he said. ‘All he told me was that the book was important to him and to some other people.’

  ‘He didn’t say which people?’ Donna interjected.

  ‘No. He just asked if he could hide it in the museum. I agreed. He said he’d pick it up in a month or so. Then, of course . . .’ He allowed the sentence to trail off.

  ‘Did you see the book? Do you know where he hid it?’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue. It could be anywhere in the museum.’ He paused for a moment, looking almost apologetically at Donna. ‘Would it be rude of me to ask who he was hiding it from?’

  ‘I’m not completely sure,’ Donna told him, ‘but I need to find it.’

  She felt it unneccessary to mention some of the incidents that had taken place over the last few days, least of all the confrontation at the cottage the previous night. She merely told him that the book bore a crest, an embossed crest of a hawk. It was very old, too, she said.

  ‘I know that’s vague,’ she said, ‘but it’s all I know.’

  ‘I’d like to help you look if I can,’ Paxton volunteered.

  Donna smiled.

  ‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you.’

  Paxton slid open a drawer in his desk and took out what looked like a floor-by-floor plan of the three-storey building. He laid the diagram out on the desk-top, weighting each corner down with a pile of papers.

  ‘The museum is divided into galleries,’ he said, jabbing the plan. ‘It makes it sound grand, doesn’t it? Museum.’ He chuckled. ‘My grandfather thought that wax museums should be places of learning, too. Three-dimensional temples of knowledge, he used to call them.’

  Donna and Julie were more interested in the layout of the building than in Paxton’s nostalgic musings.

  ‘Is this the ground floor?’ Donna asked, prodding one part of the map.

  ‘No, that’s the basement. It’s where we keep our Chamber of Horrors. No waxworks is complete without one. It’s always the most popular area, too. It brings out the morbid streak in all of us, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea where Chris could have hidden the book?’ Donna repeated.

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘We’ll have more chance of finding it if we search separately,’ Donna suggested. ‘Julie and I will start on the top floor, then work our way down.’

  ‘I’ll meet you on the second floor. If we miss each other we’ll meet back in this office in three hours.’

  ‘Miss each other? Is that likely?’ Julie wanted to know.

  ‘There are two sets of stairs into and out of every gallery,’ Paxton explained, ‘So that if we get too many visitors it doesn’t get too congested as people move around. It’s quite possible we could pass each other and not even realize it. It’s dark in the galleries, too, apart from the lights on the figures.’

  Julie felt her heart beating faster.

  ‘If one of us finds the Grimoire, we call out to let the others know, then bring it back here to this office,’ Donna suggested.

  Paxton nodded.

  He left the office first, waiting for the two women to follow him out before closing the door again.

  There was a flight of stairs directly to their right.

  ‘Follow the stairs straight up to the third floor,’ he said. ‘I’ll go that way.’ He nodded in the direction of an archway. Through it, Donna could see the first of many wax tableaux showing famous film stars. The atmosphere was thick and gloomy. She hugged her handbag tightly to her sides, comforted by the thought of the Pathfinder inside.

  Two or three feet away, standing by the entrance to the waxworks, were the figures of Laurel and Hardy. In the darkness they seemed not the amusing and loveable clowns they were meant to be but somehow menacing. Their glass eyes regarded the group blindly. Julie again felt a shiver run up her spine. She glanced up the stairs; the top of the flight almost disappeared into the dimness.

  ‘Back here in three hours,’ said Donna, her voice sounding loud in the unyielding silence. ‘Unless one of us finds the book.’

  Paxton nodded.

  They set off.

  The hunt began.

  Seventy-Four

  Marilyn Monroe gave him no clues. John Wayne offered no help. Neither did Marlon Brando or any other member of the Corleone family.

  Paxton stood in the middle of the tableau entitled:

  THE GODFATHER

  and moved between the figures of James Caan, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, all of them identified by name plates at their feet.

  In the display the Godfather’s desk had a number of books on it; the waxworks owner reached for them one by one. They were encyclopaedias or dictionaries with the dust jackets removed. Not wax but real books.

  The figure of Robert Duvall was holding a briefcase; he glanced inside but found nothing but a sheet of blank paper. He moved on, past Indiana Jones and Rambo until he came to a display of THE EXORCIST.

  It featured a bedroom and figures of Max Von Sydow, Jason Miller and Linda Blair in her possessed incarnation. The waxwork of Von Sydow held what was supposed to be a Bible but Paxton wondered if Ward might have substituted the Grimoire for the Holy Book. After all, he had no idea how big it was. He stepped in amongst the figures, moving around the bed until he reached the kneeling wax effigy.

  The book it held was indeed a Bible.

  Paxton moved on.

  It wasn’t just the silence Julie found overwhelming, it was the claustrophobic atmosphere of the place. The solitude and the almost palpable darkness combined to create the feeling that they’d been drapped in a blank
et. The carpeting of the floors served to enhance the illusion; they could not even hear their own footsteps as they moved around.

  Julie walked quickly, keeping within two or three feet of Donna. Even so, her sister was a barely glimpsed shadow most of the time.

  They passed through an archway into a display of great sporting figures. The waxworks were arranged in groups beyond a rope, which was supposed to separate them from their admirers. In a mock-up of a boxing ring stood Henry Cooper, Mohammed Ali and Mike Tyson. At the edge of the ring Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano glared glassily at her. Julie found herself drawn almost hypnotically to the blank stares. She could see herself reflected in the glass orbs, a distorted image.

  Ahead, Donna was standing beside Pelé and George Best. Kenny Dalglish and Eusebio looked on impassively. Johan Cruyff, one foot perched on a football, regarded her with the same emotionless expression as the rest.

  Further along there was a model of Sir Francis Chichester; on what was supposed to be the deck of his yacht lay a number of books. Donna climbed into the exhibit and began inspecting them. She found to her annoyance that they were all books about sailing.

  She pressed on.

  Julie followed, her passage unnoticed by Lester Piggot and Willie Carson.

  A flight of three steps led up into another gallery, this one depicting great artists.

  They moved on.

  Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton stood around Paxton as he searched through the drawers of M’s desk, but the James Bond tableau was no help to him either.

  So many places to look. So many places Ward could have hidden the book.

  As he walked among the figures Paxton wondered what could be so important about this missing book. What could be so vital to send him and two women trekking around the place?

  Opposite him a display showed Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers all dancing together, watched by a group of admiring figures. One of the figures was of a child; at its feet were a set of school books. He strode across to it, climbing into the little set-up. The child was Shirley Temple and the books were spilling from her satchel. He began sorting through them.