Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(50)
I moved lightly, trying to decide what I would do or say when I met the dowager. I could hardly play the society lady merely interested in the necklace, dressed as I was. I would need to be direct and trust that she would want to help solve the death of a Lani boy. It didn’t feel promising, and I hesitated on the stairs, catching the slightly fusty aroma of perfume in the stale air. Perhaps it would be better, less intrusive, if I didn’t corner her in the bathroom itself…?I dithered. Everything about the place and the people in it crowded in on me, made me feel like a rat in an elegant kitchen, or a siltroach frozen in the light of a lamp.
You do not belong here. You cannot do this.
I balled my fists and tried to think, and in that instant, I heard something from the restroom below, a kind of strangled gasp that was almost a cry.
My body took over. In three vaulting strides, I had reached the foot of the stairs and was bursting into the well-appointed sitting area, which gave on to the bathroom itself. There was no sign of anybody here, and I kept moving, slamming through the swinging door into a bright, white-tiled room of sinks and toilet stalls. One of the doors was wobbling on its hinges. On the floor beside it, purple-faced and wheezing, was the dowager, sprawled on her belly like a stricken rhino, panting, her eyes wide with shock and terror.
I grabbed hold of her and tried to roll her onto her back, but she was too heavy. I took her right arm and pulled till she shook off some of her paralysis and pushed herself over and up on one elbow. The pendant was gone, and the spot where it had hung at her throat was pink and inflamed.
“Came from above,” she managed, her eyes flashing back to the toilet stall with something like horror.
I looked, but there was no one there.
She shook her head violently and gasped, one hand at the wattle of her throat. “That way!”
At the far end of the row of stalls a panel was missing from the ceiling: a ventilation shaft. I bounded over and looked up. There was a broad corrugated duct that turned in on itself. I couldn’t see round the bend, but it was certainly wide enough for a man to climb through, and now that I was directly beneath it, I could hear the unmistakable sounds of effort.
He was still in there.
As the dowager coughed and sobbed, I stepped onto the toilet seat, cursing my voluminous skirts and the absurd bonnet, and tried boosting myself into the ceiling opening, but it was impossible. I tore off the bonnet and shrugged my way roughly out of the dress, leaving it where it fell. The action had cost me valuable seconds, but it felt good to feel the air on my arms. Clad only in my chemise, drawers, stockings, and those infernal high-heeled shoes, I hoisted myself into the vent.
It smelled faintly of rust, and as I pulled myself inside, it shook, scattering black-and-orange flakes of old metal and dried insect parts. I spat, clawed my way around the corner, and crawled till the tube opened into a dark shaft, which went straight up. There were ladder rungs set into the wall, so I began to climb. I don’t believe I had had an actual thought since I heard the dowager’s strangled cry from the stairwell.
I could see him above me. A man in close-fitting dark gray clothes with a bag slung across his chest. I could not see his face, and my sense that it was a man came solely from the speed and strength of his ascent.
Though my heart was pounding, this was the first moment since arriving at the opera house that I did not feel alien and inadequate. The shaft was brick, not sooty like chimneys, but scarred, dusty, and irregular: my environment, even if these weren’t my clothes. I didn’t know what I would do if I caught up with him, but I felt no fear, no uncertainty as I snatched rung after rung, pulling myself up.
When you are used to ladders, they provide a kind of rhythm, your body becoming a machine swinging from side to side like a swimmer. I felt rather than saw my quarry pause for a fraction of a second, looking down at me, and I could almost smell his surprise. I was gaining on him.
The shaft went far higher than I had expected, and it occurred to me as I powered on that we must be moving up through the concert hall’s external walls. The higher I climbed, the more I became aware of music, distant at first, but swelling strangely as I neared the top. Another twenty or thirty feet and I was out, standing on a narrow metal gantry, the music from the opera stage below, all around me. I peered into the gloom, my hair falling in my face. There was no sign of the thief, but there were lots of places he could have hid. Ropes and pulleys and great wood-framed canvas flats were suspended in front of me. I was in the rigging for the scenery. Below the gantry I could see nothing but the front lip of the stage and the first rows of orchestra seating, fifty feet below. I took a steadying breath and grabbed hold of a cool brass pipe.
The action saved my life because I didn’t see the kick arcing out of the darkness till it made contact with my jaw.
My legs gave, and I sagged, head spinning, but somehow my right hand remembered to hold on as I began to fall. For a moment, the world swam, the darkness above the stage switching places with the brightness and color below. My attacker moved toward me, but all I could do, hanging by one hand, was watch with horror as he turned and looked down into my face.
He wore slim-fitting gloves and was—I was chilled to see—masked. His head was wrapped with dark fabric, but the centerpiece was rigid, shaped out of what looked like gray leather and molded so closely to the face that I could see nothing of its features. The eyes looked hard and dark, but I could not be sure of their color, and my head was full of what he might do as he reached me.