The call came at four a.m.

I groped for my phone. “Murdoch.”

The geothermal disturbance on the other end was Russian Pete. “Murdoch…is Peter.”

“Pete. It’s four a.m. What do you want?”

“I need speak with you.”

“Now?”

“Da. Now…”

* * * *

It was raining. It was always raining these days—damp and warm. I sat in the darkened car, listening to the liquid drumming and thinking of Maria, lying warm and soft in our bed. It would be first light in just over an hour. She wouldn’t be up for another two. I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark road. Wet light rippled on the tarmac. Holland Park was on my left. Across the road on my right a terrace of Georgian houses slept with blind eyes behind the amber streetlights.

I loped through the tepid rain toward the black bulk of the park gates. The momentary glow of a cigarette told me one of Pete’s men was waiting there for me. When I drew level, he dropped the butt in a puddle where it hissed and died. I said, “Where’s Pete? What’s this about?”

He jerked his head toward the interior of the park, among the black shadows of the trees. “Better Pete tell you.”

I followed him through the big iron gate, wondering how he came to have a key. Then he led the way into the shadows under the great horse chestnuts. Our feet made damp crunching noises on the gravel.

He said, in his Russian baritone, “Be gentle with Peter. He is weeping lot this morning.”

“Weeping?”

He just nodded silently and we went deeper into the woodland, where the rain was just a drizzle on the leaves above our heads.

They were at the statue of Lord Holland, over the wooden bridge by the pond—a small huddle of them—Russian Pete and two of his henchmen, three big black silhouettes surrounded by the glimmer of the rain and the puddles. And there was something on the ground. It looked like a bundle of saturated rags. Pete turned to face me as I approached. Even in the darkness, I could see his eyes were swollen and his face was wet. It wasn’t from the rain.

I pulled out my Camels and offered him one. He shook his head. I lit up and blew smoke into the spitting drizzle. The bundle of rags was a young woman, lying on her back in the mud, staring up into the trees. Her coat was rumpled and twisted. Her arms were laid symmetrically by her sides and her legs were straight. A red rose rested in her mouth. The black handle of a large kitchen knife protruded from her left breast and there was a gaping, bloody hole where her belly should have been. Whoever had killed her had taken the trouble to lay her out there with care. I stood smoking for a while.

Eventually, I flicked ash and said, “Who is she? She family?”

Nobody said anything for a long moment. The guys just stood looking at Pete with the rain on their faces.

Finally, Pete said what I had already guessed but didn’t want to believe, “She is my daughter, Eva.”

I nodded. I knew what this meant, why I was there, and I didn’t like it. “Who did it? Do you know?”

He shook his head. I looked again at the body, the way it was laid out—the rose, the knife in her heart, the savage wound in the abdomen. “Someone trying to scare you, move in on your patch…?”

He shook his head again. “Nobody.”

I dropped my butt into a puddle. It hissed and winked out. I crouched down by her side, pulled out my pen torch and played the beam over her face and neck. Under the raindrops, her skin was gray-blue. There were blotches of purple bruising on her throat, like she’d been choked, but her blouse was saturated with blood, so she hadn’t been strangled to death, just enough to make her unconscious and pliant.

I moved the beam down to her belly. I’ve seen some pretty nasty things in my time. I’ve even done a few of them myself when the occasion called for it. But this was about as horrific as it got. Her entire abdomen had been torn out. There had been no surgical precision here, just raw, brutal animal ferocity. I heard Pete choke and sob behind me and I switched off the torch.

I stood and said, “Who found her?”

Pete had turned away, his face hidden in his hands.

The guy who’d met me at the gate piped up, “Park policeman on his rounds. Half pass three. He recognize her because she come to park in mornings for coffee and see the paintings exhibition. She like this park.”

I said, “A cop? Why didn’t he—?”

He knew what I was going to ask and interrupted me, “Cops know Russian Pete, da? He pay their mortgages…” There was some stifled laughing. Pete turned to face me, wiping his face with the back of his sleeve. His voice was raw. “They know that anything of interest to me, they report to me. It is courtesy. Chief constable is good friend of mine. You know…”

I nodded. I knew. That explained the keys. Anyone who was anyone in this town was in Russian Pete’s pocket.

I said, “So, where are the cops now?”

“On their way. We have twenty minutes.”

I stared at him. “For what? What do you want from me?”

He held my eye a moment then jerked his head toward what was left of his daughter. “If police investigate, maybe it is years before killer is found. And when they find him, what?” He shrugged his huge shoulders and looked around at the dark woodlands. “Maybe he go to prison for twenty years, to secure wing with psychologists to help him.” He shook his head and spat on the ground. “No…you find him. You are smart, Murdoch. You not limited like police. You have no rules. I give you any help, any money—no matter. I get you what you want. I want man who did this. You find him.”

“And when I find him?”

“Better you don’t know.”

I nodded. “Okay, Pete. I’ll do what I can. When the cops are done, I want the forensics report. And I don’t want the cops to know I’m involved.”

His face began to crumple again and he pointed helplessly at Eva, at the gaping hole in her belly. “What is this, Murdoch? Why? Why he did this to my baby…?” His voice was weird, twisted with pain.

They led him away through the woodlands into the darkness beneath the trees, and I made my way back through the paling, gray light and the drizzle, toward my car, thinking that most times, what really hurts is not understanding why. Pain never hurts so much as when it’s meaningless.

I got deep like that sometimes.

* * * *

Maria was still in bed when I got back. I opened the door and looked in the room. The curtains were closed but the window was open and a cool, damp breeze made the drapes waft softly and brought in the splash and splatter of the rain. I stepped over and sat on the edge of the bed. Her hair was rumpled. Her face was pale with sleep and I could just make out the few freckles on her cheeks and nose. I stroked away a strand of hair from her forehead. Her eyelids fluttered and she opened her eyes. They were sleepy, but she smiled. I glanced at the clock. It was seven a.m. She stretched with her arms above her head and I had a sudden impulse to hold her and feel her body, small and supple, against mine.

She said, “Where were you?”

“Pete called. Four a.m. He had a problem.”

“Pete? Russian Pete?”

I nodded.

She frowned. “Didn’t you say you weren’t going to do jobs for him anymore?”

I bent and touched her lips with mine. She held my face with her small hands and the gentle peck grew into a long, lingering kiss. I felt the heat stirring inside me. She pulled away just enough to rub the end of my nose in an Eskimo kiss.

Her eyes were huge and dark. “Don’t change the subject, big guy. Didn’t you?”

I gave her my best lopsided smile and said, “It’s not that easy, Maria.”

She held my gaze for a long moment, smiling. Her eyes were warm, lids half closed. She whispered, “You want to make love?”

My belly was on fire and I could feel my heart pounding. I said, “You know I do.”

She patted my cheek with her hand. “Well, this is how easy it is, Liam. No. See? Easy.” She pushed me back and swung her legs out of the bed. “I’m going to have a shower. You want to put the coffee on?”

I went to make coffee. And, in just a few minutes, she came into the kitchen barefoot with wet hair, wearing a purple Japanese kimono with a golden dragon on it. She sat at the pine table and I poured her coffee. Black, no sugar, the way I took it.

“Pete is a very bad man, but he’s been a good friend to me.”

She was buttering toast but glanced up then back down and kept on buttering. I sighed. I meant what I was saying, but I couldn’t find a way for it not to sound lame.

“I can’t walk away from my whole life overnight, Maria. It’s going to take time.”

She bit into her toast and chewed, watching me. “How much time?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You made me a promise, Liam. You going back on your promise?”

“No.”

“So?”

I looked down into my coffee. It was real black. “His daughter was murdered last night. She was twenty-three. Eva. A nice kid.”

She put down her toast. Careful, like it might have consequences if she set it down the wrong way. “I’m sorry.”

I nodded. “Yeah. He’d taken care not to involve her in his life. She was a good student, just finishing a psychology degree at UCL. Like I said, a nice kid. Closest thing I ever had to a niece.”

She was silent a while, staring at her plate. “Was it gang related?”

“No…” I rubbed my face with my hands. “I can’t make much sense of it. It looked…” I shrugged, staring at the table but seeing Eva lying in the mud with her dead eyes staring at the trees above her, raindrops sitting on her pupils. “It looked ritualistic. He swears nobody is trying to move in on him. Nobody would be that crazy. He’s too powerful and too dangerous. Even the cops stay clear. It doesn’t make any sense. Unless…”

She was watching me carefully. She said, “Unless?”

“Unless whoever killed her didn’t know she was Russian Pete’s daughter.”

She sat back in her chair. “But, then what would the motive be?”

I drained my coffee and pulled a Camel from the pack. I tapped it three times on my Zippo and finally said, “No motive.”

“You’re talking about—”

“A serial killer.”

“That would account for the ritualistic elements.”

“Yeah…”

“Liam?”

I searched her eyes. I knew what she was going to say. “What does Pete want from you? Why did he call you this morning at four a.m?”

“He wants me to find who did it.”

Her face went rigid. She picked up her cup, stopped with it halfway to her mouth, then put it down again. “That’s what the cops are there for. You promised me. You promised me that you were not going to get involved in this kind of thing anymore. It was a condition of our living together, Liam.”

“I know.”

“So? What are you saying to me?”

“Maria, will you please stop talking and listen to me for a moment?”

She was staring at me. Her eyes appeared black.

“I’m doing it, okay? I’m changing. Between you, you and Russell are dragging me onto the straight and narrow.” I gave her my lopsided smile, but she just kept staring at me, waiting. I sighed. “I’m making it happen, baby. But you have to understand that you can’t just walk away from a guy like Pete.”

“So what are you saying? If I live with you, if I make a life together with you, I’m making a life with Russian Pete, too? Like some kind of mad Russian mother-in-law?”

“No…”

“That’s the word, Liam. Only instead of saying it to me, you should be saying it to Pete.”

“You don’t want me to do that.”

“Excuse me?”

“Stop provoking me, Maria, and simmer down. I’m going to do this my way and I’m going to do it right. That way it stays done. If I do what you’re asking me to do, all I get—all we get—is a lot of trouble and grief. I do it my way and it stays done and everybody’s happy. And besides… I want the bastard who killed Eva.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “So what are you going to do?”

“I won’t take payment for finding him. I’ll tell him my payment is that he doesn’t use me anymore.”

She nodded. “But it has to be for real, Liam. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with gangsters breathing down my neck.”

We didn’t say anything for a long while, just watched each other.

Then, I said, “Everything I do is for real. You know that. Now take that damned kimono off.”

* * * *

An hour later, I lay listening to the rain outside. It had slowed to a damp patter. Her head was on my shoulder and her breath gentle on my chest. Her breasts were cool on my skin, and where she had her leg over my thigh, I could feel the soft brush of her hair. I let my hand explore the curve of her back and her hip, but my mind was drifting. All I could see was Eva, staring with dead eyes into the rain.

My thoughts followed the beam of my pen torch. The red rose against the pale gray of her skin. The gray-purple of her parted lips and the stem of the rose with its cruel thorns inside her mouth. It was a strange echo of the kitchen knife plunged into her heart, the beautiful, rich red flower in her mouth. Maybe it symbolized the loving words the killer had never heard from a mouth that was full of thorns—sharp, cutting, cruel words.

And the knife. The big, cold-steel blade of a kitchen knife, plunged deeply into her heart. Again, that curious juxtaposition of symbols—the heart, the universal symbol of love. The kitchen, the hub of any loving family, the smell of baking, Mom’s apple pie, Mom smiling in her apron, giving food, giving love. All brutally killed with a single plunge of that large blade.

But the knife and the rose were almost surgical in their precision, as though the rage and hatred behind them were somehow controlled by grief, by a secret, enduring hope for love, as though somehow he didn’t really want to do what he was doing—as though he didn’t want to kill her. He only wanted to silence her and change her heart.

Maria stirred in her sleep, squeezed me and pressed her belly close against my side. Her belly. I reached for my Camels, fished one out single-handed and lit up, blowing smoke at the ceiling. The belly was all wrong. It was almost like it had been done by somebody else. There was no symbolism here, no surgical precision, no grief or restraint. Her entire abdomen had simply been ripped out, torn away from her body. And there was no trace of her organs—no gore, no blood, no spatter.

So maybe she had been killed somewhere else and taken to the park. The forensics team would establish that. But even if she’d been killed elsewhere, that didn’t explain the radical difference between the placing of the rose and the knife and the savage, bestial attack on her abdomen. I lay and smoked and wondered why it mattered.

I carefully removed Maria’s head from my shoulder, slipped my arm out and swung my legs off the bed. Then I made my way to the kitchen and brewed some coffee. As I sat naked, smoking and drinking, I thought that it mattered because it showed two completely different motivations. One was tortured but craving redemption. The other was uninhibited, bestial and destructive.

Like two different people.