The Dark Room(37)

“Fair enough,” Matt said. He picked up his tablet and used his thumb and forefinger to zoom in until the picture showed the girl’s right wrist. “I didn’t run the bracelet the first time through.”

She wore a silver bangle, the metal worked in a honeycomb pattern. It had no lettering, no symbols of any kind. Just the silver, hexagonal cells that circled her wrist.

“It stands out,” Matt was saying. “So I figured it was worth a shot. It’s an Imogene Bass piece.”

“A what?”

“Imogene Bass—she’s a jewelry designer, in London. She was just getting started in 1985, and her stuff wasn’t all that expensive. That bracelet would’ve gone for thirty pounds. Today it’d be worth a lot more.”

“Where would she have gotten it?”

“Back then, there was just the one shop—in London. But check this out,” Matt said. He scrolled down the zoomed-in photograph until they could see the girl’s feet. She wore a pair of heels, open at the toe with a leather strap that came across the front of her ankle. “The computer’s less sure about these—a lot of shoes look alike, and there’s nothing that sets these off. But the result I’m getting is seventy percent sure these are Struttons.”

“That’s a shoe company?” Cain asked. He looked at Lucy.

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have—they were a small name, and they never got out of the U.K.,” Matt said. “They did mostly discount stuff. Cheap shoes, knockoffs.”

“So she got the shoes and the bracelet in the U.K.?” Cain asked.

“Yeah. And look at this.”

Matt swiped his screen to close the photograph. He opened a map and zoomed in to London, Cain quickly getting lost as the perspective fell closer to the ground. All he knew was that they were somewhere west of the river. The Thames, he remembered. He’d only been out of the country once, to El Salvador, to talk to a witness who wouldn’t touch a phone.

“This is 71 Victoria Street,” Matt said. “When Imogene Bass opened her showroom, in 1984, it was here.”

“Okay.”

“And then go one block around, into this alley,” Matt said, tracing his finger above the screen. “This is Strutton Ground. Their first shoe store was here. What do you think about that?”

Cain considered it.

“She must’ve lived there. If she’d been an American and gone to London as a tourist, I can see her buying the bracelet. It’s pretty enough. But why would a tourist go to London and buy a pair of cheap high-heels she could get at home?”

“Makes sense.”

“But here’s another question,” Cain said. “If she’s wearing a sixteen-thousand-dollar dress, why’s she going to put on a pair of thirty-dollar shoes?”

Lucy reached to the middle of the table and took the first and third photographs, so that she had two views of the dress. She held one close to her eyes, then the other. Then she stood with both of them, went to the dimmer switch, and turned up the overhead light. When she came back, she put the photographs on the table in front of Cain.

“This isn’t a sixteen-thousand-dollar dress,” she said. “I don’t know where you’re getting that.”

“But it is,” Matt said. “We saw it. It’s going for that much used. It’s a Jean Patou.”

Lucy shook her head.

“It’s not a Jean Patou—it just looks like one. And she didn’t buy it. She made it. This is a homemade dress.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because I used to sew,” she said. She stood behind Cain, one hand on his shoulder and the other pointing to the photograph. “Look at the seams. Or here, the hem, where it turns out and you can see the inside. It’s top-stitched, with a machine. You can see the stitching from a mile away.”

Matt came around and stood on the other side of Cain so he could see.

“If this were really a couture dress, the hem would be pick-stitched—hand sewn so you couldn’t see anything,” Lucy said. “But it’s fit for her. See, here, going up her torso, the way it follows her, even when she’s putting her hands in the air? She didn’t get this off a rack. She measured herself, and then she made it. But she did it in a hurry.”

Cain put his hand on top of Lucy’s fingers. What a loss that she’d spent the last four years hiding in this house. Spending days at a time at the back of her closet, her chin on her knees and her arms crossed around her shins. He wondered, not for the first time, what would change in the next seven months.

“Then the shoes make sense,” Cain said.

“She wanted to look like a rich girl,” Lucy said. “She pulled it off, probably for less than a hundred dollars. Even the way she cut corners, it would’ve taken a long time.”

Cain thought about that. He let go of Lucy’s hand and stood up. In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water, not sure he wanted any more of Matt Redding’s wine. The girl in the photograph had wanted to look like something she wasn’t. Maybe she was also pretending to be someone she wasn’t. She’d come a long way to play that role. And it had gotten her killed.





14


HE WOKE AT four a.m., his phone vibrating on the bedside table, the screen lit up with Nagata’s name. He got his arm out from beneath Lucy’s neck, swung his legs onto the floor, and went for the door, phone in hand. Behind him, Lucy rolled over. He shut the door and answered the phone in the hallway, his voice barely a whisper.