Her eyes were hard when she turned. ‘A girl always remembers her first time,’ she said. I realized why she didn’t wear the lenses any more. She didn’t need them.
I looked at the floor. ‘The loans your dad gave out …’
‘Cancelled,’ she said. ‘But some of those girls’ll be back anyway. Even when you give people the choice, they get it wrong half the time. Enough to keep the roof over my head, anyway.’
‘Are you going to be OK, Alicia?’
She closed her eyes and nodded. Somehow I thought she would be. ‘If this is our last conversation, then look after yourself, Detective Constable Waits.’
‘You too,’ I said, making to leave.
‘What happened to you, by the way?’
I paused in the doorway, touched my face. ‘I was in a fight.’
She smiled, but genuinely this time. ‘I meant before that.’
4
‘Yeurgh,’ said Sutty, mopping his brow. ‘It’s a drought, all right.’ He was talking to Dispatch as we drove because he couldn’t get a word out of me. ‘I’m just hoping the black cloud over Aidan’s head starts raining soon …’
I’d collected the pool car for our shift early.
Sutty despised the sound of music and had something close to a panic attack if the dial ever turned to it. He preferred talk radio and phone-in shows. Cabbies complaining about asylum seekers. He murmured to himself and nodded along, like it was the latest hit. I’d performed my daily routine of changing all the pre-sets to hip-hop and R’n’B stations, something I’d been doing for so long that he thought there was a ghost in the machine. Then I’d gone to collect him and waited until he turned on the radio.
I thought he might throw himself from the car.
Sutty’s appearance in my cell two days before had been perfectly in character but somehow I’d expected more of him. Some kind of gesture towards our partnership. For his part he acted as though nothing had happened, and continued to drawl into the handset about me like I wasn’t there.
I was driving, on autopilot, when I looked up at the Palace. Sutty’s elegant solution had solved one murder with another. He said the smiling man had killed Blick and vice-versa, for all the sense it made. One body with no name, and one name with no body. Between the two of them we almost had a real person. It was another victory for Sutty’s clearance stats.
‘Yeurgh,’ he said, still talking to Dispatch. ‘If he keeps giving me side-eye I’ll go in looking for his cataracts …’
I looked up at the Palace. Squinted. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the road, ripped off my seat belt and climbed out.
I could hear Sutty shouting after me, cars braking and blowing their horns. I crossed through traffic, straight to the main entrance and tried the door. It was locked. I started to bang on it, kicking and shaking it as hard as I could. Finally I heard some movement, the lock opening.
‘Yes?’ said Ali, looking out at me. I was surprised to see him back at work.
‘I need access to this building now.’
‘Sir?’
‘Detective Constable Aidan Waits. We spoke in the hospital after you were assaulted.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said, taking a step back.
‘Is there anyone besides you in the building, Mr Nasser?’
I thought I saw a shadow cross his face. ‘No, sir …’
‘Then can you explain why the light’s on in room 413?’
‘Impossible,’ he said, but I’d already pushed past him and started across the lobby towards the stairs. I could hear him locking the door behind us and following. Shouting after me. There were two enormous flights between each floor, and I was pulling myself up by the bannister. When I looked down the centre of the staircase, I saw Ali, in pursuit one floor behind me. I reached the fourth floor breathing hard, wiping sweat out of my eyes, and went cautiously towards the room.
The door was open.
The light was off.
I looked about me, trying to see something, anything, that was out of place. I heard footsteps coming down the corridor, Ali, breathing hard. Because the light was on in the hallway he was just a silhouette.
‘Sir …’ he said, trying to get his breath back. ‘I told you, no light. No one else is here. I must ask you to leave …’
We stood like that for a moment, looking, but unable to see each other. Then I dragged a chair to the centre of the room, watching his enormous shadow filling the doorway as I did. I stood on the chair and reached up to the lightbulb.
It was hot.
The boy was running through the trees, his legs were wet from the stream and the strap of the bag was biting into his shoulder. His ears were ringing and there were sunspots roaring past his eyes. He started to lift up. At first his feet were still skimming the ground, then he rose above it, up and up, until he was soaring over the woods.
I woke up panting for breath.
The phone was ringing in the next room.
‘Hello,’ I said, picking it up. It was early. Seven or eight in the morning, I thought.
‘You’re out?’
I gripped the receiver. ‘Bateman, this has got to stop.’
He breathed in and out for a few seconds. ‘Can’t stop, Wally. Can’t stop.’
‘My name’s Aidan, and there’s nothing I can do for you.’
‘Drive,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Drive with me.’
‘There’s nothing out there.’
‘Hurt sister,’ he said. ‘Love sister, kiss sister, fuck sister—’
I closed my eyes and hung up the phone. When it started to ring again I ripped the cord out of the wall.
X
Demon in Profile
1
I was waiting outside Stromer’s office. She looked up from a clipboard when she saw me and opened the door.
‘You know, it’s unlocked …’ she said.
I followed her in. ‘It’s you I needed to talk to.’
‘I’m very busy, Detective Constable. Perhaps you could adhere to procedure and arrange a meeting through your senior officer.’
I shook my head and sat down. ‘Sutty couldn’t arrange his own funeral.’
‘Pity,’ she said, perching on the desk and looking at me. ‘Yours looks more likely from where I’m sitting. You’ve been in the wars again …’
‘Tell me about the poison that killed the man from the Palace Hotel.’
She was staring at me like I’d risen from the dead. ‘Smiley Face, you mean?’
‘Sutty’s nickname, not mine.’
‘A carbon atom triple-bonded to a nitrogen atom,’ she said. ‘Cyanide, a classic. I was under the impression that this case was closed?’
‘Do you know how it was administered?’
‘It was mixed into his drink.’
‘Which was?’
‘A blended whisky. Jameson’s, if I had to hazard a guess …’
‘You can tell that from the stomach contents?’
‘Nothing so advanced,’ she said, tapping her nose. ‘There was also an empty bottle found in the room …’
‘So someone could have easily spiked it without his knowledge?’
‘Of course. He’d have started to feel symptoms soon after.’
‘So he’d have known?’
‘That something was wrong, certainly. The ensuing muscle-paralysis probably accounts for the grimace on his face.’
‘Either that or he died happy. How long would he have had from ingestion to death?’
‘Perhaps twenty to thirty minutes. Why?’
‘What about Cherry,’ I said. ‘The sex worker from the canal …’
‘Real name Christopher Jordan. His larynx was crushed.’
‘Cherry chose to live as a woman, Doctor. Was it a professional killing?’
She bristled. ‘Quite the opposite. Someone trying to silence or strangle the poor thing, and doing a good deal more damage than was necessary.’
‘Could a woman have done it?’
‘With the proper motivation.’
‘Sutty wants to clear it as a random sex-crime.’
‘He has an enviable clearance rate.’
‘Were you able to tell if she’d had sex on the day she died?’
‘Was there something between you and this Cherry?’
‘Were you able to tell if she’d had sex on the day she died?’ I repeated.
‘No,’ she said. ‘There was no evidence of sexual activity from the day she died. Was there something between you and this girl?’
‘What about the blood from the Midland Hotel?’ I said.
She sighed. ‘Anthony Blick, yes.’
‘It’s definitely his?’
‘Ninety-eight per cent probability.’
‘How much blood was there?’