From the safety of the barrier fence, I looked at the view again. I tried to imagine what it must have been like: the air full of explosions and multicoloured rockets, the sound of music drifting across the water from party boats and dance clubs, the silver moon running ladders of light halfway to Greece. Underneath it, stumbling a little down the lawn, came a man on a four-day drug binge, maybe trying to wrench himself back to sobriety and calm the raging testosterone and whirling paranoia. But why, I asked myself again, why head for the gazebo?
My guess was that he had been looking for something, probably in the water out in the bay. The closer he got to it, the better the chance he had of seeing it. That’s why he had brought the binoculars and had either stood up on the railing or stepped over it. But what had he been looking for?
The records of his cellphone, included in the documents Detective Cumali had given to me, showed that he hadn’t received any calls for at least an hour either side of his death. The surveillance cameras also showed that, during that same period, nobody had left the guardhouse to speak to him.
Yet something or somebody had induced him to grab a pair of binoculars, leave his lovely friend tina, step out of the library, cross the formal terrace and head down the lawn to try to see something in the dark waters of the bay.
Say it was a person who – literally – had led him down the garden path to the gazebo. The most logical explanation was that they knew either how to beat the surveillance system or how to enter the estate inside the electronic moat. It had to be somebody Dodge knew or trusted, otherwise he would have raised the alarm. They could have then pushed him over the edge and left by the same route they had entered.
Almost immediately another thought followed: if it was murder, I had only seen one in recent memory anywhere near as good. That was half a world away, at the Eastside Inn. Any doubts I had about a connection between the two deaths were vanishing fast.
I turned, walked up the lawn, picked up my jacket and climbed the steps to the formal terrace. It was time to enter the dark and brooding house.
Chapter Twenty-one
I TRIED THE handles on two sets of french doors without success. The third one was unlocked, which meant that either the absent security people were very sloppy or there was somebody inside.
I took the small flashlight attached to my key ring, turned it on, stepped into the salon and closed the door. By the narrow beam of light I saw a beautiful room. Whoever decorated it had taste: Grace would have felt right at home, I thought. Most of the furniture was English antique – restrained, elegant and fabulously expensive. The mellow parquet floors were covered in large silk rugs and the ivory-coloured walls hung with half a dozen paintings by the biggest of the big-name Impressionists.
The thin beam of light swept past them and fell on a pair of tall doors that led into the library. In many ways it was a more beautiful room than the salon – it was smaller and that made the proportions better, and the rows of books gave it a warmer, more informal mood. I wasn’t surprised that Dodge had made it his headquarters.
A deep leather armchair had a side table next to it and, though the drugs had been removed, the paraphernalia was still there: the silver foils, a glass pipe, half a dozen bottles of Evian, cigarettes and an overflowing ashtray. Through a wall of French windows the chair commanded a panoramic view of the sea and sky – hell, if he had wanted to see the fireworks he wouldn’t have even needed to stand up. The effect in the room would have been even more remarkable thanks to two huge gilt mirrors on either side of the fireplace directly behind the chair.
They struck me as being incongruous in a library – I knew Grace would never have approved – but even the rich have their idiosyncrasies.
I stepped over the crime tape securing that side of the room – it didn’t matter, the Turks said the investigation was over – leaned on the back of the chair and looked out at the view. I tried to imagine what somebody could have said to him which would have made him leave the safety of his headquarters.
I reached down into my mind, holding my breath and trying to swim deeper. Once again, just like when I had stood in the room at the Eastside Inn and realized that it was a woman who was living there, I shut everything out … The answer was close … lying just the other side of knowing … if only I could touch it … a person he knew had come through the tall doors …
I didn’t hear it, but the concealed door behind me opened. It was one of those ones you find in a lot of old libraries – decorated with the spines of books to make it blend seamlessly into the rest of the shelves. Whoever stepped through it must have been wearing rubber-soled shoes, because I didn’t hear a footfall on the silk carpet. But there is a sound clothing makes when it moves – or maybe it’s not even a sound, more like a disturbance of the air – that is almost impossible to conceal. I felt it then.