Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green Page B

he continued to look vague and shifty even when doing nothing at all. He gave the impression that he was only there under sufferance and couldn’t wait to get back to whatever it was he’d been doing. And that he didn’t care who knew it. I don’t think he looked directly at me once. He was handsome enough, in a weak and unfinished sort of way and, like Gloria, remained silent because he’d been told to.
    I looked from Walker to Eleanor and back again, letting the tension build. I was in no hurry.
    I knew all about the Griffin children and their many marriages. Everyone in the Nightside did. The gossip magazines couldn’t get enough of them and their various doings. I have been known to read the tabloids, on occasion, because they make the perfect light reading on long stakeouts. Because they don’t take up too much of my attention, and you can hide behind them when necessary. Which means I end up knowing a hell of a lot about people who otherwise wouldn’t interest me in the slightest. I knew, for example, that Gloria was William’s seventh wife, and that Marcel was Eleanor’s fourth husband. And that all Griffin spouses were immortal, too, but only as long as they remained married to a Griffin.
    In fairness, Gloria and Marcel had lasted longer than most.
    “I know you,” William said to me finally, trying to sound tough and aggressive but not quite pulling it off. (Though it was probably good enough for most of the people he had to deal with.) “John Taylor, the Nightside’s premiere private eye…Just another damned snoop, searching through the garbage of other people’s lives. Muckraker and troublemaker. Don’t tell him anything, Eleanor.”
    “I wasn’t going to, you idiot.” Eleanor shot a glare at her brother that reduced him immediately to sulky silence again, then she turned the full force of her cold glare on me. I did my best to bear up under it. “You’re not welcome here, Mr. Taylor. None of us have anything to say to you.”
    “Your father thinks otherwise,” I said calmly. “In fact, he’s paying me a hell of a lot of money to be here, and I have his personal authority to ask you any damned thing I feel like. And what Daddy wants, Daddy gets. Am I right?”
    They both stared back at me defiantly. Any answers I got out of these two would not come easily or directly.
    “Why are you both here?” I said, because you have to start somewhere. “I mean, in residence at the Hall as opposed to your own houses, out in the Nightside? That’s…unusual, isn’t it?”
    More silence. I sighed heavily. “Am I going to have to send Hobbes off to bring your father here to spank the pair of you?”
    “We’re here because of this nonsense about a new will,” said Eleanor. That was all she meant to say, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave it at that, not when she had so much spleen to vent and a ready listener at hand. “I can’t believe he’s prepared to disinherit us all, after all this time! He just can’t! And certainly not in favour of that holier-than-thou little cow, Melissa! She’s only gone missing because she knows what I’ll do to her when I get my hands on her! She’s poisoned our father’s mind against us.”
    William snorted loudly. “Changing his will at this late stage? The old man’s finally going senile.”
    “If only it were that simple,” said Eleanor, inhaling half her cigarette in one go. “No, he’s up to something. He’s always up to something…”
    “What was Melissa’s state of mind, before she…went missing?” I said. “What did she have to say about the provisions of the new will?”
    “Wouldn’t know,” William said shortly. “She wasn’t talking to me. Or Gloria. Locked herself away in her room and wouldn’t come out. Just like Paul.”
    “You leave my Paul out of this!” Eleanor said immediately. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just…sensitive.”
    “Yeah,” William growled. “He’s sensitive, all right…”
    “And