The Danger Next Door (Anne Lambert Mysteries) Read online

  Anne turned onto one of the main thoroughfares of the City, a wide street called London Wall. Sections of a roman-built wall, two-thousand years old, lay scattered around the area, clashing with the shiny glass and steel of modern skyscrapers. Black cabs rushed by, nearly knocking down stock traders as they charged across the street, single-mindedly discussing deals while ignoring traffic.

  Anne dodged around a group of suits spilling out of the elaborate Victorian façade of the Rose and Crown pub and caught sight of a street marked Austin Friars. It was narrow, little more than an alleyway. Austin Friars House rose imposingly in front of her. The four-story building of gray stone had lifesize female figures carved above the windows, holding what looked like fruit baskets on their heads – Carmen Miranda as depicted by Michelangelo.

  Anne hesitated. Okay, she was here. Now what? Pedestrians pushed past her on the sidewalk. She stepped into a doorway to get out of shoving range and stood there for a few minutes, watching people go in and out of Austin Friars House. A UPS delivery man held the door open for a red-haired woman in an Armani suit. The woman paused on the steps of the building and turned to talk to the man who had followed her out. His grey suit was impeccably tailored, his white-blond hair incandescent in the February sunshine. Dr. Davidson.

  Anne watched the doctor shake hands with the woman and head off toward London Wall. It was now or never. She slipped out of the doorway and hurried after him.

  “Excuse me.”

  The doctor kept walking.

  She tried again. “Dr. Davidson.”

  He halted, a frown narrowing his transparent blue eyes. “Miss Lambert. This is unexpected.” He waited, his expression shifting to blandly unhelpful.

  Anne repressed the urge to kick him. “I have something I’d like to discuss with you,” she forced out through gritted teeth. “Not here,” she added as a passing pedestrian bumped her shoulder. “Could we go up to your office for a few minutes?”

  The pre-WWII lift clunked to a halt on the second floor. Anne followed the doctor down a carpeted hallway toward a dusty ficus tree. A bronze plaque on the wall announced that this was indeed the Austin Friars Psychiatric Clinic. The clinic’s door opened into a waiting room decorated in soothing tones of blue and mauve. No patients sat in the slip-covered armchairs. Anne wondered if this was just a lunchtime phenomenon, or if it indicated the state of the business. A reception desk to her left was empty. As the doctor paused at the desk and flipped through a pile of mail in the inbox a clink of dishes came from a room just off the waiting area. An elderly woman in a gray tweed suit and pearls emerged carrying a mug of coffee. The steam wafted over to Anne. Hazelnut Mocha.

  The woman smiled at Dr. Davidson. “Back so soon doctor?”

  “Yes Mrs. Reed. Dining out lost its appeal. Would you call The Gates of Siam and order me some Pad Thai?”

  “Certainly. Anything for the young lady?” asked the receptionist, gazing curiously at Anne.

  “No thanks,” Anne said politely.

  “We’ll be in my office,” said the doctor, putting one hand on the small of Anne’s back. Her back muscles went rigid at his touch and she jerked away from him.

  The doctor looked vaguely amused, but didn’t respond. The room he led Anne into was large and ornate, its high ceiling festooned with plaster rosettes. The walls were painted a delicate shade of yellow, the furniture a Scandinavian style in pale blond wood. The effect whispered of wealth and status. It didn’t seem like a room designed to inspire troubled patients to unburden themselves. Instead, it seemed designed to intimidate. Dr. Davidson put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her down into an armchair covered in a pale yellow silk jacquard. Anne ran a finger along the smooth fabric and did a quick mental survey of her jeans for evidence of the tomato sauce from last night’s spaghetti dinner. As far as she knew the chair was not in any danger.

  The doctor set his mail down on a sculpted pine desk, which looked more like art than furniture, and leaned against it. He folded his arms and stared down at Anne in a pose so reminiscent of a cartoon villain that she couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

  “Not many people find me amusing,” he said, not angrily, but as if he had met a new and strange personality type which didn’t exist in his psychiatry manuals. “Care to tell me what’s so funny?”

  “No,” coughed Anne, glancing around the room to distract herself. The curtains flowing down from the double-height windows were the same expensive silk she was sitting on. A Persian rug in an intricate pattern of pale rose lay under her feet. No office equipment anywhere. No computer on the desk, nothing at all on its varnished surface except for a blank pad of writing paper and a single ballpoint pen.

  “Does the room meet with your approval?” asked the doctor, a smug note in his voice.

  “It’s very elegant, though maybe a trifle feminine.”

  “I had a decorator do it,” said the doctor, not rising to the bait. “She’s one of the best in London. She did the recent renovation of the estate belonging to Princess Michael of Kent.” He paused so that Anne could make the requisite noises of awe. When she just stared at him he continued. “Jimmy used to come here for his weekly sessions. It seems strange that he’s not around anymore. I’ve been treating him for years. He was annoying, but I guess I’d gotten used to seeing him.”

  As well as used to being paid by him, Anne thought. Interior design by Princess Michael of Kent’s decorator didn’t come cheap.

  “Have you been following Jimmy’s murder in the papers?” asked the doctor. “The Times had a short article on it in the morning edition.”

  “Yes, I saw it,” replied Anne. She dug into her purse and pulled out the anonymous note. She nervously tapped it with her finger. “This . . . well, I’m not sure what this is, exactly. It might be relevant to the article. Anyway, I thought you should see it.” She handed over the note.

  The doctor frowned at her, then glanced at the address scrawled on the back of the note. He shrugged and turned the sheet over.

  Anne was watching him closely, and she could have sworn something flickered across his usually immobile face. The drawbridge had been raised, and the guards posted on the Keep. He recognized the handwriting. She was sure of it.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “It was left in my mailbox at the Barbican. It seems, well, it seems to refer to you. I felt you had a right to see it. It looks like you have an enemy.” Which was hardly surprising, Anne thought snippily. A person as unpleasant as the doctor undoubtedly had enough enemies to fill Hyde Park.

  The doctor didn’t respond.

  “Do you have any idea who it might be?” Anne prompted.

  “No”, snapped the doctor. “It mentions Wyndham Preparatory, a boys school in Kent I used to work at, many years ago. If I had to guess, I’d say this is from one of those obnoxious little boys, now an obnoxious little man. There were hundreds of the brats. Obviously, one of them has held onto a childish grudge against me. Something trivial happened to him twenty years ago, he blames me for it, and now he’s writing anonymous notes to make himself feel important. Undoubtedly someone with insecurity issues, since he’s writing notes rather than approaching me face to face.” He crumpled the note and dropped it in the wastebasket next to his desk. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to prepare for my next appointment.”

  Chapter Three

  It was pitch black inside her flat when Anne got home from work that evening. Heavy rain clouds were hovering over the city, blotting out the moon and giving the streetlights more work than they could handle. Anne turned on every light in her flat and closed the drapes. Once she had changed into her pink bathrobe and cranked up the radiator things felt downright cozy. Let the heavens open. She had macaroni and cheese in the cupboard and ‘Friends’ on TV.

  Before going to bed that night Anne wrote down, word for word, the contents of the anonymous note which now resided at the bottom of Dr. Davidson’s waste
basket. She had no trouble remembering its few short lines. She tucked this into an envelope, together with the mobile phone bill and the photo of Jimmy Soames she’d found in Rick Billingsley’s flat. She labeled the envelope ‘Jimmy’ and stuck it into an accordion file which held her tax forms. There. All neatly filed away, ready to be forgotten. She breathed a sigh of relief, content that she’d done her duty. She chucked the accordion file into the darkest corner of her bedroom closet.

  * * * *

  Anne hummed ‘The Anvil Song’ from Il Trovatore as she threaded her way through the Barbican’s concrete walkways. The morning rush hour was in full force as she emerged into the throng of pedestrians and black cabs pulsing down London Wall, but even the packed sidewalks and overcast sky couldn’t dent her mood. She felt as if a heavy knapsack had been lifted from her shoulders. The police knew about Rick Billingsley, and Dr. Davidson knew about the anonymous note. Jimmy’s murder was being investigated . . . everyone knew everything they were supposed to know, and she no longer felt the weight of responsibility which the anonymous note writer had tried to dump on her. Life was good, and, more importantly, back to normal.

  At the intersection of London Wall and Moorgate the light changed to red, backing pedestrian traffic up into a tight knot. Anne teetered on the curb, trying not to get pushed into the street by the mass of bodies behind her. When the light changed the green Walk signal registered in her mind, but the fact that the other pedestrians were leaping back onto the curb did not. She was halfway across the street when the midnight blue Mercedes hit her from the side.

  * * * *

  It was dark when she woke. Anne tried to raise her head, gasping when a stabbing pain shot through her left eye. She shut both eyes tightly and tried to breath through the pain, the way her track coach had taught her in college. It didn’t help much with the pain, but it calmed her a bit. She tried an exploratory sniff. Rubbing alcohol. It smelled like a doctor’s office. The room she was in was quiet. She could hear voices, but they were a long way off. She slowly opened her eyes and tried to focus, careful not to move her head. Two dark, rectangular objects hovered in front of her, high up on a white wall, near the ceiling. She squinted at them. Their edges were fuzzy. Suddenly one of them blinked out of existence for a moment, then reappeared. Anne realized what she was looking at. It was a television set, mounted up on the wall. But two televisions that close to each other made no sense. Of course. She had double vision. Weird. She’d never had a head injury before. It was unsettling.

  She tried glancing to the left and right without turning her head, but couldn’t see much. She was covered with a sheet and a lightweight plaid blanket. It was a hospital bed. She was in a hospital. Again weird. She’d never been in a hospital before, if you didn’t count the trips to the emergency room as a kid. Four broken bones in four years. It was a family record. She could now add a fifth bone to the list. Her left wrist was broken. She had broken her right wrist falling out of a tree when she was eleven. Now she had a matching set. The feeling was exactly the same. That strange ache, and an inability to move her fingers. The plaster cast on her arm reached from wrist to elbow. She cautiously wiggled other body parts. To her great relief her toes moved on command. She wasn’t paralyzed.

  Her right side was sore – she probably had some spectacular bruises – but on the whole she wasn’t in bad shape. She was tired and dizzy, but her thinking wasn’t clouded, so the head injury couldn’t be too severe. In fact, she could remember what had happened – a car had hit her. Odd. She thought accident victims generally couldn’t remember the accident. The idea that it might not be an accident tried to sneak into her thoughts, but she pushed it away. Her mind played hide and seek with the idea until she fell asleep again.

  When she woke there were voices in the room. She opened her eyes, and then shut them again, wincing at the glare. “I’ll turn off the lights,” someone said. She tried again, squinting warily. That was better. It was daytime. Sunlight slanted into the room from a window to her left, creating a little pool of warmth on her toes. She wriggled them and tried to focus on the TV in front of her. Much better. Its edges were still fuzzy, but only one TV appeared on the wall this time, not two. A woman’s face floated above her.

  “Hello Anne. I’m Dr. Millar. You’re in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. You look much improved today. I’m just going to do a few quick tests.” She shone a light into Anne’s eyes. “Look up please. Good. Now left. Right. Down. Good. How many fingers am I holding up? And now? Good. No double vision. You have a concussion, but it’s not serious.”

  “Things look fuzzy,” said Anne.

  “Yes. That will disappear in a day or two. You may have headaches for a while. If they persist for more than two weeks come see me. I’ve scheduled a follow-up appointment anyway, for next Tuesday.”

  “Are you sure my head’s okay?”

  “Yes. We did a full CAT scan, as well as x-rays of your skull and spinal column. You were lucky. It could have been a lot worse. You have a broken left wrist, as you’ve no doubt noticed. No other injuries except some bruising. Now, the police are here. They need to talk to you. I’m just going to raise you up a bit.”

  Anne heard a whirring noise and the top half of the bed slanted upward until she was in a half-sitting, half-lying down position. It was better than lying flat on her back while strangers hovered over her, but she still felt awkward. She pulled the blanket up to her neck and crossed her right arm over her chest. The doctor bustled out and two people stepped forward, a man and a woman. The woman had a short gray bob and wore a well-cut navy suit. The man was more casually dressed in a shirt and khakis.

  “Miss Lambert, I’m Inspector Beckett, and this is DC Singh.” The woman held up a small leather folder containing her ID. Anne squinted at it, but her eyesight was too fuzzy to make out the picture. She nodded anyway.

  “We need to ask you a few questions about the accident. Do you remember what happened?”

  “Yes. I was walking to work along London Wall and I got hit by a car.”

  “You were hit at the corner of London Wall and Moorgate. Is that the route you usually take to work?”

  “Yes.” Anne noticed that DC Singh had taken out a worn green notebook and was diligently writing in it.

  “Did you see the car that hit you?”

  “No, not really. All I remember is a brief flash of something large and dark coming at me from my right side.”

  “Has anyone threatened you recently?”

  Anne’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Both officers were watching her closely. Her grip on the hospital blanket tightened. “No,” she said finally. “Why?”

  “There are indications that this wasn’t an accident. We believe the driver of the car may have hit you deliberately.”

  Anne grew cold. She closed her eyes. The silence stretched as the officers waited for her to respond. A confusing storm of thoughts about Jimmy Soames, Dr. Davidson, Rick Billingsley, and the anonymous note whirled through her head. She didn’t know what to say or where to start, so she said nothing.

  “Do you know of anyone who would want to hurt or even kill you?” asked the inspector. “Husband, boyfriend, ex-boyfriends?”

  “I . . . No,” said Anne quietly.

  “There were plenty of witnesses to the accident. Pulling a stunt like this during rush hour – it was almost as if he wanted an audience. Several witnesses agreed that the car was a dark blue Mercedes four-door. The car had tinted windows, but two witnesses swear that the driver was a man, possibly with blond or light brown hair. And we were even more fortunate. One gentleman chased the car on foot, and when it was caught in traffic 50 yards down Moorgate he noted down the license number. The car belongs to a Mr. Daniel Soames. Do you know Mr. Soames?”

  “I know a Jimmy Soames. Well, I don’t really know him. I met him once when he came to visit my neighbor. He died a week ago. It was in the papers.”

  “Yes, we know. The case is still open. Quite a coincidence, don’t you
think. Jimmy Soames dies and a week later someone in his brother’s car runs you down.”

  Anne glanced up at her. “Then you don’t think it was Daniel Soames driving the car?”

  “We don’t know. We talked to him yesterday morning, a few hours after the accident. He claims he was at home at the time it happened, about 8:30 a.m. He says that as far as he knows his car was in the underground parking garage beneath his residence. He walks to work, so he doesn’t use the car on weekdays. He claims he didn’t use it at all yesterday. He took us down to his parking spot, and the car was there. We’ve impounded it. So, there are two conclusions we can make. Either Mr. Soames is lying, or someone borrowed his Mercedes, ran you down, and then returned the car to its parking place.”

  The Inspector paused and DC Singh looked up from his notebook. “This neighbor who Jimmy Soames visited, what is his name?” he asked.

  “Dr. Davidson. John Davidson. He lives next door to me in the Barbican. In Andrewes House.”

  The Inspector turned to DC Singh. “Davidson. That name sounds familiar.”

  “Yes. He was questioned about the Jimmy Soames death.” DC Singh flipped back through his notebook. “Not as a suspect, but because he was treating the deceased. He’s a psychiatrist.”

  The Inspector frowned, absentmindedly twisting the thin gold necklace which hung down over her jacket. “Strange that he would have patients visiting him at home. Unless his practice is located in his flat.” She looked questioningly at the constable.