‘It was the last straw. He stormed upstairs and attacked the baby. I kept looking at Janice’s chart, but for ages I couldn’t see the error because everyone was accounted for. Then I realised that it was impossible. Somebody had to have made a mistake. But it took more than one person to make a lie; it took the perpetrator and the witness, and I couldn’t work out which of the corroborators was lying. Of course, I should have seen it, because now it’s obvious. And there’s an ugly little sidebar to this. Robert Kramer happened to be Jewish, and Pryce attacked him with his own puppetry. The Mr Punch model conforms to the physiological concept of the cephalic index—the mockery of Jewish facial features. Ray Pryce has a prior conviction for an anti-Semitic attack dating back to his time in foster care. I enrolled him in the case to keep him close, just as Kramer had with his enemies.’
Bryant sat back and contentedly puffed away at his pipe. Everyone, including his partner, stared at him in amazement.
Colin turned to Meera. ‘You have to go on a date with me now,’ he said, grinning.
Raymond Land came in on the earliest train. He had woken to find there was no breakfast, because Leanne had gone to Wales and he didn’t know how to use the microwave, or where she kept the eggs, or where the saucepans lived, so he caught an earlier train and breakfasted at The Ladykillers. The little café was empty at eight A.M.—most shops and offices in the area opened at nine-thirty—so he had time to sit and reflect over his morning tea.
Perhaps, he thought, just perhaps I’ve been wrong all this time, waiting to be transferred to a place where life is easy and the sun always shines. Perhaps that’s not what life is all about. Perhaps you only get a sense of yourself when everything has to be fought for. It’s less pleasurable here but more exciting. Watching the two detectives the night before, battling their way to the end of the case, he felt he was seeing them at the top of their game. He could feel the gravitational pull of London life, the magnetic energy that raced around them, the essence of awareness that sparked everything into activity.
He had felt truly alive.
But he couldn’t let Leanne down. She dreamed of holidays to Barbados. She wanted to spend days by a pool beneath an azure sky. She didn’t want to have to take an umbrella and a scarf every time she left the house. She didn’t want to be married to a man who divided his time between paperwork, pubs and putrid corpses. She needed pampering. How could he deny her dreams?
With a heavy heart, he dug out his keys and let himself into 231 Caledonian Road. He absentmindedly stroked Crippen, who was waiting on the stairs. The glossy black cat rubbed its back against his legs and followed him along the labyrinthine corridors to his office. Land disconsolately noted the newly painted walls in an odd variety of mismatched colours—the nice plain white had turned out to be undercoat. He stepped over the lethally warped floorboards, and breathed the smell of beer and stale pipe smoke that hung in the air. Nobody else was in yet.
He went into the office that Bryant and May had commandeered. May’s desk was obsessively neat, the electronic gadgets arranged in rows, recharging, a few piles of paperwork squared off to the corners of his workspace.
Bryant’s half of the room was the opposite. A black candle had dripped rank wax over his chased-silver Tibetan skull, making it smell even worse. A piece of mouldering tannis root dangled from a carapace over his filthy, barely used computer. Wavering stacks of esoteric books threatened to fall. A stuffed weasel with only one eye leered from a bowed bookcase. Two dozen minor Indian gods carved from coloured chalks were randomly scattered over his ink-stained papers. The receiver of his telephone had somehow been burned and had become fused with its base. An odiferous lime and purple chemical compound was sprouting in a Tupperware dish. The power point under his desk had been held open with the blade of a kitchen knife so that he could leave a light burning over his hydroponic marijuana plant. A hardback book lay open by his keyboard. Land idly examined the chapter Bryant had been reading; Knife Wounds 6: Identifying Weapons from Entry Stabs Section B: Cuts to the Face & Eyes. He sighed wearily.
His eye fell upon Madame Blavatsky. She seemed to be perfectly at home in here. He wandered over to it, checked the coin slot and dug out an old penny. Dropping it in, he watched as the seer rummaged awkwardly for a card and dropped it into the delivery tray. He reached in and picked it up.
It read:
YOUR WIFE IS HAVING AFFAIRS BEHIND YOUR BACK
Startled, he shoved the card back in the tray.
He looked back at Madame Blavatsky. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ he said aloud.