‘Blimey,’ exclaimed Bimsley, ‘he’s cheered up all of a sudden.’
‘Of course he has,’ said May. ‘It’s more than one murder now. He’s got a conspiracy on his hands.’
‘Are you all right?’ May came back into the office and sat on the edge of Bryant’s desk.
‘No, I’m not all right. I’m very upset.’
‘Who with?’
‘With myself, obviously. I should have seen this coming. Waters went into St Bride’s. What was he looking for? Did Sabira Kasavian send him there? And why did Amy O’Connor have to die in a church, of all places, when we know Sabira is a Muslim?’
‘Why won’t Sabira talk to us?’ May wondered. ‘If she really believes she’s the subject of a witch-hunt, why won’t she try to convince us it’s true?’
‘You know, back on Monday, when we first heard about O’Connor, I thought I knew what had killed her.’
‘Go on, enlighten me.’
‘It looked like there was a wasps’ nest in the bottom of the Roman excavation, just under the tree in the corner of Salisbury Court. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be given the case, but I did a little checking anyway. After I saw Ben Fenchurch at St Bart’s, I talked to the admitting officer who emptied O’Connor’s pockets at the hospital. I thought she might have been carrying an epinephrine pen. If you’re allergic to wasps you’re supposed to keep one with you at all times, so you can give yourself an injection to stop an allergic reaction. Then I thought maybe she was stung and didn’t notice – it can happen if the sting occurs in an area where there are few nerve endings – or perhaps she didn’t know she was allergic. But Ben didn’t report any broken skin, and something would have showed up in the PM. So we’re back where we started. I kept thinking about St Bride’s being the reporters’ church, that her death was a message of some kind, but that can’t be it.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll find the little girl,’ May assured him. ‘We’re closing in.’
Just after 10.00 p.m. on Thursday night the fine weather broke, and the effulgent skies dropped across North London. The streets cleared and Hampstead Heath took on the sodden appearance of a beaten-down rainforest. At the Cedar Tree Clinic, water bent the trees, sluicing over the garden slopes.
Standing at her bedroom window, Sabira Kasavian looked out and watched golden needles passing through the spotlight over the back porch. Even though the room was overheated, she found herself shivering. She prayed that Jeff Waters had done what he had promised, and that she would be saved. She listened to her mobile and counted the rings, seven, eight, nine, and then voicemail.
‘Edona, please call me back when you get this. Please, it’s very important.’ She couldn’t remember if her old school friend had gone home to see her parents yet. It didn’t sound as if she had. She closed the phone and slipped it back in her jeans.
The clinic offered a safe harbour for now, but she also knew there was no way out. She was caught in a race between the forces of good and evil, darkness and light. It was hard being patient, not knowing what was going on in the outside world.
Not knowing what was going on inside her own head.
She could hear the rain drumming hard on the roof. The trees were moving beyond the window, and for a moment it seemed there was something dark inside them shifting back and forth. She came closer to the glass and tried to see what it was, but the light in the room was too bright, so she switched off the bedside table lamp.
Now she could see down into the garden. And there he was, standing in the rain looking up at her window, watching, daring her to call the nurse, knowing that by the time she did so he would have slipped away into the dark wet greenery, and she would look even more disturbed.
Perhaps I am mad, she thought. Perhaps this is their wish, to make me as mad as them. I’ll show you some real madness before you get to me!
17
DESTABILIZATION
AT 8.00 A.M. on Friday morning, Meera Mangeshkar sat on a rain-sodden bench in the courtyard of St Bride’s waiting for her partner to finish his second breakfast burger. In the branches of the tree above her head, people had tied coloured ribbons to commemorate the lives of journalists killed in the recent conflict in the Middle East.
‘It’s amazing how many of these little courtyards and alleys are still around,’ Colin Bimsley said, sucking bits of bacon from his teeth. ‘Mr Bryant lent me a book about them. You can still find old debtors’ jails and the channels of underground rivers round here; they take a bit more digging out but they’re there here all right. I walked past something called the Alienation Office on the way here; 1577 it said over the door, something to do with transferring feudal lands without a licence. And over in Fen Court there are loads of upright sugar canes covered in Old Testament quotes, something to do with the Stock Exchange and slavery. I was coming out of the Cock and Woolpack pub the other night and saw them. Amazing what you find when you get off the main roads.’