Mirror Games

Prologue

Helen Baxter

Meeks put the headlights on full beam to light up the curves along the serpentine lanes yet still passed the house hiding behind a row of Japanese Maple. Baxter fretted in the passenger seat, craning her head left and right in the deciduous gloom. She opened her phone and studied the location pin she had placed before they left the station.

‘Turn around.’

Meeks knew better than to argue and threw a tight three point at a suggestion of a passing point, anxious he might sink a wheel in the drainage culvert filled with leaves. A few hundred yards more, and she barked at him again.

‘Stop.’

Meeks saw the driveway.

He retrieved the magnetic base portable blue light all unmarked police carried from a compartment under the seat. He held it out for her to see.

She shook her head.

‘I just want a look,’ she said.

Meeks turned off the engine.

‘No warrant, no consent and not an emergency,’ he said.

‘Just a look,’ she said.

Meeks shrugged. They got out and walked towards the house, their boots crunching on the gravel. From the front it looked dark and empty, but a faint glow spilled across a fence from a light at the side of the property. Meeks went to the front door, flipped open the letterbox, and shone his torch into the hallway. Nothing.

He turned and shook his head, but Baxter had already marched up the side of the property towards the light. When he caught up to her, she was standing under a bar of light that poured from the eaves of a side structure. It wasn’t very high, and when he saw her rolling a large, hard plastic trash bin towards the wall, he knew what she was doing.

He admired her agility in hopping onto the bin and reaching up to the wooden sill to peer over it and into the house. He saw her freeze for several seconds and then jump down beside him.

‘It’s an emergency now.’

They scurried back to the front door again, and she pointed at the bar of glass to the side of the doorframe.

Meeks picked up a rock from the border of the drive and smashed the glass, which caved with a crack like a gunshot. He reached in and flipped the latch on the Yale security lock, and the door obliged. Baxter squeezed past him and ran down the hall to find access to any room on the left. She pushed at a door and stood back, suddenly still. Meeks caught up and peered over the top of her head. They both stood in silence.

In the middle of the room, with no furniture other than an upturned plain wood footstool, a body was hanging by the neck from a black tape attached to a beam.

Chapter One

Oscar

Heathrow. 10 March 2012.

Along the glass-roofed walkway to the car park, Leo felt the familiar prickle of awareness from the stolen glances, sly appraisals and one or two head turns that followed them whenever they were together. Oscar was blind to it from years of practice, but it still spooked Leo. He knew it wasn’t their bearing, their athletic fluid movement, or their striking good looks that drew the stares. It was that you couldn’t tell them apart.

When Leo waited for Oscar’s flight, he had eased himself away from the lineup of drivers holding name cards and found some space against the barriers. He didn’t want to have to peer through crowds to find him. He stared up at the arrivals board at the letters that tumbled like orange rain and then froze, confirming the Milan flight had landed. He scanned the flow of passengers arriving into the throng of Terminal 1.

When Oscar appeared from airside, he looked as if he was still dressed for a photo shoot in faded blue jeans, leather moccasins, and a T-shirt that Leo thought might be his. He felt an involuntary warmth ignite in his chest and spread across his shoulders, the relief and pleasure at seeing his brother. The feeling was familiar, had been with him since he could remember. It displaced a darker thread of thoughts that had preoccupied him while Oscar was away, and he was grateful for the respite.

Oscar was not alone but animated in conversation with a tall guy with cropped blond hair, wearing similar clothes. Likely another model. Maybe from the same shoot.

Leo rarely observed Oscar engaging with other people. He watched from a distance, hoping to prolong the moment, to blend into the background like a birdwatcher in a hide. He didn’t know the other guy. He barely knew any of the fashion crowd. He thought his brother looked happy.

As though he suddenly remembered Leo would be there, Oscar looked around and spotted him and waved, breaking into the smile that sold a thousand suits. The tall guy clasped Oscar by the arm, and they bumped chests before he broke away and veered right to the taxi rank.

Free from scrutiny in the amorphous concrete innards of the terminal car park, they retrieved the car and headed onto the M4 into London. Leo flicked the wipers to clear a burst of light rain, and Oscar surfed the audio channels, settling on Jazz FM. They felt each other’s mood with no need to talk. They could do that later.

Traffic doesn’t cross the Hammersmith flyover with much speed, especially at nine-fifteen on a Friday night. They were barely doing thirty when they ascended the ramp onto the city-bound lane. The articulated lorry coming the other way was even slower, laden with scaffolding poles and sheets of corrugated iron.

The driver, maybe squinting at the lights of an oncoming high beam, began shifting down the gears. Leo sensed before he knew that the lorries’ front offside wheel was drifting across the carriageway, already narrowed by the bridge. When he was sure, it was already too late, and anyway, it left him nowhere to go.

The impact with the Lexus bounced it straight over onto its side and pitched Oscar’s head against the passenger side window and onto the road below, which initiated a catastrophic bleed into his brain and shut down all functions except his ability to breathe.

The lorry driver, over-correcting the wheel to regain the lawful side of the road, caused the back of the trailer to lurch sideways and smash into the stricken Lexus. The impact uncoupled the load fastenings, and sheets of corrugated iron flew from the back of the lorry like a pack of cards in a magic trick. One sheet sang as it flew through the night air until it chopped through the glass of the driver’s side window and cleaved Leo’s face from his skull.

The adrenaline produced by the trauma and the cool sting of the night air were the only constraints to the hot flux of blood that poured from the pulp of torn muscle and bone. Leo survived only because his seat belt kept him strapped in upside down, and the blood poured down onto the overturned roof rather than down the back of his throat to drown him.

The first hour, the so-called ‘golden hour’, is the critical cut-off to receive medical care to improve the chances of survival after major trauma. The clock began to tick down for Leo, but for Oscar it really didn’t matter.

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