Full Dark House(56)

He was on his way to meet Janice Longbright. He had found a yellowed picture of her mother in the archive at the Palace Theatre. It had been taken by PC Atherton in 1940, clowning around in the cell at Bow Street, just before she had supposedly gone off to marry Harris. Their wedding had finally taken place at the end of the war, in disastrous circumstances—but that was another story. He wanted to be with Longbright, even if there was nothing to say. She was his only remaining connection to the past.

He had to find out who was stalking them, and why Bryant’s dental records had been stolen. Could someone have wanted a souvenir of the dead detective? It was the first thing he asked her when they met.

Longbright was sitting in the corner of a black-and-white-tiled fish restaurant in Covent Garden, tearing the claws from the sockets of a crab shell. She had a cigarette sticking from the corner of her mouth, and was squinting through the smoke at the eviscerated crustacean. ‘I’m sorry, John, I was starving and started without you,’ she apologized. ‘You’ve lost a bit of weight.’

‘They say bereavement does that to you.’

‘Well, don’t lose any more. You’re half an hour late.’

‘Am I? I didn’t mean to be.’ May slid onto the bench seat opposite and poured himself a glass of wine from her carafe.

‘I suppose you were standing in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, staring into the filthy water and thinking bad thoughts.’

‘You know me too well.’

‘You can’t bring him back that way.’ She wielded a vicious-looking pair of pliers, cracked open a claw and dug out its flesh.

‘I realize that. I was wondering if someone else is trying to bring him back.’

‘By nicking his dental records? I hardly think so. I called the dentist, by the way, but it’s a new bloke. Bryant’s regular man has gone on holiday, nobody seems to know where. They’re going to call me back. Did it cross your mind that the bomber might have been trying to get the both of you?’

‘I don’t think so. If he’d figured out how to get into the unit, and knew about Arthur’s habit of working on a Sunday night, he must also have known that I rarely stay late at the weekends.’

‘I’ve got people checking the station CCTVs, but there’s a lot of coming and going around that place because of the club next door, and they’re nearly all wearing hooded jackets. You can’t see a bloody thing.’

May watched Longbright disembowel the crab. ‘My neighbour told me someone tried to break into my apartment. She said something about teeth. The man had huge fangs.’

He studied the former detective sergeant. Her make-up looked thick in the pale morning light. She reminded him of her mother, not least because she styled herself on the forgotten film star Ava Gardner.

Janice dropped the crab claw and stabbed her cigarette into a tin ashtray. ‘God, I miss him, don’t you? Stupid question. I’ve been trying to find out too, you know. One hundred and forty-two major cases between nineteen forty and two thousand and three, not counting the thousands of small unsolved dramas the pair of you waded through. It could have been anyone.’

‘But it wasn’t,’ said May. ‘I’m sure it’s connected with the Palace.’

‘You can’t know that. There’s no one left. Stone, Whittaker, Wynter, Noriac, Parole, that poor creature who committed the murders, even Mouse, the stage door boy, they’re all dead. I’ve checked all the records and made all the calls.’

‘Then we’ve overlooked someone,’ said May simply. ‘Just as Arthur did all those years ago. Here, this is for you.’ He took out the photograph and handed it to her.

‘My God.’ Janice touched the edges of the faded monochrome picture. ‘I could be her.’

‘You are.’ May touched her hand. It was hard to believe that Gladys Forthright’s daughter was in her fifties. Looking at her he felt the present shift into the past. He was forced to shut his eyes and wipe them clear. ‘Tell me, do you think we wasted our lives?’

Janice looked shocked. ‘What do you mean? Of course not. All the people you helped, all the—’

‘I’m not talking about work, I know what we did. I mean us, Arthur and me. He loved Nathalie and lost her. He was infatuated with your mother, but she didn’t want him. He waited years for Gladys. I married the wrong woman, lost her and my baby girl. My son has a daughter who can’t even leave her house any more. What was it all for? Sometimes I think Arthur and I worked so hard because there was nothing else for us to do.’

Longbright picked up the photograph and dropped it into her shoulder bag with an air of finality. ‘Well, there’s something for you to do now,’ she said, taking up the crab once more and splintering its legs into pieces. ‘If you want to save the future, you have to repair the past.’