‘What do you mean, he brings food?’
‘You know, pizzas. He has a big bike.’
‘What exactly happened?’ asked Waters. ‘I mean from when you saw the lady?’
‘She was sitting eating a sandwich and she was reading a book about how to eat babies.’
There was a sudden movement across the road. Mansfield’s Ray-Bans flared in the sunlight. He was running down the steps, taking them in pairs, watching the traffic, seeing when he could cross the road to the park.
‘Shit,’ said Waters under his breath, rising.
‘You mustn’t say that,’ said Lucy.
‘I have to go. You mustn’t mention this to anyone, do you understand? It has to be our secret. Like your game.’
Lucy remembered the rules of Witch Hunter and smiled. ‘All right.’
He turned and checked the park for cover. It was a bright, clear afternoon, but there was deep green shade beneath the immense plane trees and oaks that lined the path to the petting zoo.
‘That’s him,’ said Lucy softly, ‘he’s here.’ But Waters didn’t hear her.
A young man in a black motorcycle jacket and black jeans was shifting out of the shadows, moving swiftly towards Waters. Judging by the bulk of his chest he’d either been in jail or spent his life on a bench press.
Waters was still checking Mansfield’s progress across the road. He stepped back from the little girl and waved her away. ‘Lucy, I can see your daddy, he’s coming to get you right now, and it’s very important you don’t say anything about us being—’
He didn’t finish the sentence.
The motorcycle rider was up close and turning Waters to him. A slender blade found an entry point between the photographer’s ribs, slicing directly into the chambers of his heart. Waters tried to finish his warning but hot coppery blood filled his throat and he was frightened of spitting it on to her, so he dropped as quietly as he could to his knees, trying not to fall on his injured side. It was important to him that the girl didn’t see there was something wrong. She was safe; she had her back to him now.
The knife was smoothly extracted and reinserted. The searing heat appeared further up, then again to the right, and all he could think was She didn’t see, she got away, because he could hear the girl running back to her father, back into the sunlight where she belonged.
14
CONNECTIONS
THE MOCK-GOTHIC WINDOWS of the St Pancras Mortuary and Coroner’s Office peered out on to a Victorian graveyard gilded with scrolled gates. The Regent’s Canal wound around it, sparkling in the milky evening sunlight. Beyond was an Edwardian crescent of terraced houses, a third-century church, giant blue cement tanks preparing to create a new town square and several six-floor blocks of council flats, crammed into a messy collage so typical of the capital city that Londoners never noticed its strangeness.
Inside the coroner’s office, Giles Kershaw was thinking about knife wounds. ‘There’s a mandatory minimum four-month prison sentence for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds found guilty of aggravated knife offences now,’ he said, checking over his new arrival. ‘Every Tory government returns to the old “lock ’em up” policy eventually, just as every Labour one tries to introduce a more liberal penal attitude to stabilize the prison population.’
‘Will either of them stop kids from tooling up?’ asked John May.
‘Unlikely. The anti-knife campaigns are endless and well meaning but they don’t make it any easier for a kid to walk down a street at night, staying out because his mum’s got a new boyfriend.’
On the steel tray before Kershaw was the stripped body of Jeffrey Martin Waters, a grey plastic mesh sheet arranged above his hips. He was lying face down, so his wounds were not visible from this side. It looked as if he was waiting to have a massage.
‘We were about to bring Waters back in,’ said May. ‘We interviewed him yesterday but didn’t get very far. He knew more than he was willing to tell us.’
‘So he knew his attacker?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Before we get into the question of how you managed to pre-empt a murder victim, John, let me quickly outline what happened,’ said Kershaw. ‘I can turn him over – do you want to see?’
‘Not unless the killer signed his work,’ said May.
‘Good. He’s a big lad and I put my back out last week playing squash. There are five narrow but very deep puncture wounds over and around the heart, no serrations on the blade. At first I thought the weapon had penetrated so deeply because it had been incredibly well sharpened, but then I found traces of oil inside the wound. The blade had been sprayed with WD40 and all the cuts were pointing towards the heart itself. Waters was wearing a baggy T-shirt and a jacket with lots of pockets, so stabbing should have been a hit-and-miss affair. This was someone attacking with a decent knowledge of anatomy and an intent to kill, not wound. That’s pretty rare. Knives are kept to be brandished, to ward off, to mark territory. This one was … well, you remember that business with Mr Fox and his sharpened skewer? I don’t suppose he’s out on the streets again.’