‘Like what?’ asked May.
Kershaw sucked his teeth pensively. ‘Not entirely sure yet. Gut feeling. People don’t usually keel over like fallen trees, with their arms at their sides. Not very scientific, I know, but there’s something else. Midazolam – it’s a fast-acting benzodiazepine with a short elimination half-life. A pretty potent water-soluble sedative, but the imbiber doesn’t actually lose consciousness unless it’s taken in overdose. I found a tiny trace of it inside her mouth. If you were to inject it between the gums and the inside of the cheek, it could enter the bloodstream immediately. She would have dropped like a log.’
Bryant wrinkled his face, thinking. He looked like a tortoise chewing a nettle. ‘This is making less sense by the second,’ he said. ‘A woman walks into a pub – which, by the way, hasn’t existed for the best part of a hundred years – gets injected in the face and leaves without complaint. She falls down outside, bashes her head, and is left for dead by everyone else who leaves the pub, including the staff. I don’t suppose we have any suspects, either.’
‘Her partner was just a couple of miles away, home alone watching TV – no witnesses, says he had several phone calls, but all on his mobile, none to their flat.’
‘So they’re traceable but don’t prove he was there. Then we should bring him in,’ said May.
‘There’s a problem with that,’ April told her grandfather. ‘He’s in a wheelchair after suffering a stroke some while back, can’t do much for himself at all.’
‘She was a legal PA,’ said Bryant, looking up from one of the books Renfield had tried to throw out, Religious Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century. ‘At the Swedenborg Society, no less. Swedenborg was a Swedish philosopher famed throughout Europe for his contributions to science, technology and religion. When he got older, he supposedly experienced visions of the spirit world. Reckoned he visited both heaven and hell, where he held conversations with angels and devils. Upon his return, he wrote something called the Apocalypsis Revelata, or Apocalypse Revealed. He claimed he’d been directed by Christ himself to reveal the details of the second coming. Understandably, everyone thought he’d gone round the twist. Died in Clerkenwell in 1772. His home in Bloomsbury still houses the Swedenborg Society.’
‘Your point being?’ May wondered.
‘What? Oh, nothing . . . it’s just odd, that’s all.’ Bryant poked about in his jacket and produced the walnut bowl of his pipe. He peered into it wistfully. ‘I don’t suppose I might be allowed to—’
‘No,’ said May and his granddaughter in unison.
‘It’s just that the Swedenborg Society lost another of their legal secretaries at the beginning of the month,’ he explained, screwing the pieces of his pipe together. ‘I believe she was found dead in a London pub, the Seven Stars, just behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’
‘Why on earth would you remember that?’ asked May, intrigued.
‘Because it reminded me of the nun found unconscious in the Scots Flyer,’ said Bryant, not really managing to answer the question.
‘Wait, explain the part about the nun first,’ April demanded.
‘The Scots Flyer is one of the most disgustingly awful pubs in London,’ said Bryant, ‘a grubby little sewer of a King’s Cross strip-joint, crammed for many years with the most unsavoury characters imaginable. But the lady in the wimple who passed out inside it was no ecdysiast, disrobing for a handful of coins collected in a beer mug. When I saw the incident report, I naturally wondered what she was doing in such a place.’
‘Ecdysiast?’ April raised an eyebrow.
‘She wasn’t a stripper,’ Bryant explained. ‘I followed the case and made notes on it. I have them somewhere.’
He withdrew a drawer from his desk, removing a handful of pipe-cleaners, a Chairman Mao alarm clock, a collection of plastic snowstorms and a bottle of absinthe, before finally unearthing a small black book.
‘Here, in my Letts Schoolboy Diary.’ He held open a page filled with tiny drawings of flags. ‘A full report of the case. Well, by the look of it I appear to have written up the salient facts in a code of Edwardian Naval signals, but you get the idea. Sister Geraldine Flannery from Our Lady of Eternal Suffering said she was in the pub to collect for charity and was overcome by the pressure of the crowd, but it turned out her robes had been specially constructed to hold wallets and handbags. She wasn’t a nun at all but a dip, and not a very good one, obviously, otherwise she wouldn’t have chosen to pickpocket some of the poorest punters in London. The point is – ’ Bryant’s raised index finger wavered in the air. ‘I’ve forgotten the point.’