‘Think you’ll come out of it with your faith intact?’
‘I’m not too sure about that.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Very possibly not.’
‘Interesting. A war to shake the faith of the Church. Combat is supposed to strengthen one’s resolve. Well, we’d better be getting back. There’s not much on at the moment, but I’m expecting Sidney Biddle after luncheon. Davenport wants me to make him feel welcome.’
‘I’ve got some sandwiches,’ said May, pulling a square of greaseproof paper from his jacket pocket. ‘Egg and mustard cress, do you want one?’
‘I’ve got ham and beetroot, we can have half each. Let’s eat them here. We might see a plane come down.’
‘It’s a deal.’
The two young men stood in the middle of the bridge exchanging sandwiches as the first of the Luftwaffe’s bombers appeared low over the Thames estuary.
6
ACTS OF VIOLENCE
May closed the transcribed files on the laptop and shut its lid. Beyond the bedroom window above the pub, a car stereo was playing hip-hop at a deafening volume, the bass notes shaking the glass in its casement. The elderly detective rose and watched the vehicle fishtail rubber streaks on tarmac. His partner Bryant had always liked noise, thriving in the dirt and chaos of the city streets.
May’s instinct, when away from Bryant but thinking of him, was to pick up the telephone and call for a chat. The day before the funeral he had absently done just that, and had been disconcerted to hear Bryant speaking—in that confused tone he adopted with all technological devices—on his office voicemail line.
Now he rang the unit and asked to be put through to Liberty DuCaine.
‘We’ve got no incendiary evidence matching the blast pattern yet,’ Liberty told him. ‘It’s hard to say what sort of device caused it. There was a piece of shell casing found in the next street, but it’s still being analysed.’ He sounded harassed and distracted. There was a lot of noise in the background.
‘But you have a team on the case, don’t you?’ asked May.
‘Sort of. There’s a lot going on here at the moment.’
‘This was a bomb attack that killed a senior police officer, for God’s sake. It should receive the highest priority.’
‘I’m aware of that, Mr May.’ Liberty’s voice was filled with patience. ‘But right now we have a full-scale drug war on our hands. Two gangs of fifteen-year-old wannabe Yardies running around the streets of Lambeth armed with AR-15 laser-sighted armour-piercing rifles that fire nine hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Damned things are accurate to six hundred yards, not that any of them can shoot straight. The little bastards are buying them from American websites. We’ve got two civilians dead and one of our men down. You must have seen the newspapers.’
‘Forgive me, no, I haven’t picked up a copy. The unit’s not supposed to get involved with stuff like that.’
‘Under these conditions everyone has to help out. I’m sorry, Mr May, I understand how upset you are, but things are bad here. I promise we’ll have someone call you as soon as there’s any news.’
May thanked him and hung up. He felt obsolete. The new crimes infecting the crowded city streets were almost beyond his comprehension. People were being shot—shot!—for the most trivial reasons: a jumped traffic light, an altercation in McDonald’s, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When had it started to go so wrong?
May thought back to the war, and his first meeting with Arthur, and that led him to the murder. The first one, his first sight of a dead body. That had changed everything. A fall from innocence, and the start of a lifelong fascination with violent crime.
7
FINAL STEPS
The lights. The wings. The devil’s face. She saw them again and again, until she was dizzy, until she felt sick. The slender woman, her arms raised tightly above her head, spun on the empty stage until she began to fall.
Tanya realized how tired she was when her pirouette nearly toppled her into the orchestra pit. It was Sunday, 10 November 1940, and she had been rehearsing the whole of the afternoon. Angry with the failure of her limbs, she continued to work on her solo long after the rest of the company had grown tired of competing with her. Now the cast had gone across to the Spice of Life pub, hoping that an air raid would force them all down to the cellar, where they could stay, hurricane-lit and vintage-fed, for the remainder of the evening. They had left her alone with her restless energy, a solitary figure marking out her steps in the penumbral auditorium.
This time she had only just managed to stop at the edge of the stage. As she walked off into the wings to collect her towel, the muscles in her calves trembled with exertion. Stan Lowe, the stage doorkeeper, was supposed to wait for her to leave, but even he had gone off to the Spice. Her stomach was unsettled. She found a foil-wrapped chunk of marzipan chocolate in her bag, and chewed it. London theatres were beautiful but claustrophobic, designed to present the tableaux of traditional plays, and although the stage of the Palace was deep, it was not wide enough to be occupied by a cast of their size. Choreography had to be reined in, grand gestures expunged from Tanya’s repertoire of movement.