‘In fact, if you want to get up the nose of the cop who was sitting at that table, talking to us might be a grand idea.’
The girl stopped clearing and stared at us. Calamity smiled at her.
‘We’ve nothing to say.’
‘Mind if we look in your alley?’
‘It leads to the street, it’s not ours.’
‘We’re polite people, we always ask first.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not our alley.’
The alley led nowhere unless you considered a yard full of bins a place worth going to. It smelled of stagnant drains, hot laundry water, soy sauce and barbecued pork. There didn’t seem much reason to go down there and you wondered why the Father Christmas had. Maybe he was dragged there. It wasn’t a great place to die; or to spend much time while alive. I waited patiently in the entrance while Calamity held the newspaper in front of her and tried to match the image with the layout of the alley.
Finally she found it, nodded, put the newspaper down and followed the direction of the wrong-ways-round leg. She turned to face a wall. There were drainpipes, and a bricked-up window. She started scrabbling around the window ledge and I walked over.
‘Are you going to do the ballistics thing with the knitting needles as well?’
‘I thought I’d wait until after dark.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be much here, just litter.’
Maybe the litter is what we’re looking for.’
She ran her finger along the ledge, pushing through a wedge of dirty, rain-sodden paper. Sweet wrappers, a scrap of something, coloured chits . . . it didn’t seem like much. The sort of detritus that gathered on ledges in alleys everywhere.
‘You have to look for the
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m not sure, I think it’s something about looking at something but not seeing it. Like not seeing the wood for the trees.’ She picked up a red chit of paper with a number on it.
‘You think that’s it?’
She looked at me with a glint of excitement in her eyes. ‘It’s a receipt from the Pier cloakroom.’
I was about to say that didn’t prove anything. It could have just blown there. No reason to suppose the dead man hid it here and did the phoney leg routine to point it out. I was about to say that but then I noticed a man standing at the end of the alley watching us. He wore a black hat with a wide brim, and a long black coat. His beard was long and grey and wispy like candy-floss spun from cobwebs. Calamity put the chit in her pocket and we walked back along the alley towards the man, feeling strangely guilty. When we reached the street we avoided his gaze and walked to Pier Street and then right towards the sea front. The man in the black coat followed. We walked some more and I glanced over my shoulder.
‘Is he still following us?’ asked Calamity.
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe we should go to the hat-check office a bit later.’
I agreed. At the Prom we stopped and stood by the sea railings, watching the nothing that was going on out at sea. The man took a few hurried steps and put a hand gently on my shoulder. I turned to face him.
Seen close up, he was strangely indistinct, wrapped in layers of smeared greyness like a wet sky, or watercolour washes on wet paper. Only the thin darker line of the brim of his hat against the knobbled cloudscape had a discernible edge. There were holes in his coat.
‘My name is Elijah,’ he said. ‘I represent the government and people of Israel. I can arrange to provide bona fides if you require it.’
‘How can we help you?’
‘Your little girl has an item belonging to the people of Israel. I must insist you surrender it to my safekeeping.’
I looked at Calamity, who feigned surprise.
‘Do you have an item belonging to the people of Israel?’ I asked.
‘Not me, boss.’
‘She says she doesn’t have it. She’s an honest kid.’
A weary look passed across his face, which seemed already deeply lined with the imprint of a life spent upon a thankless quest.
‘Of course she says that.’ He removed his hat and then replaced it. He seemed to be perspiring in the cold morning. ‘She says that, even though she knows I stood in the alley and watched her take it.’
‘Supposing she did find something in this alley you mention, what was it doing there if it belonged to you?’
‘Did I say it belonged to me? I recall saying it belonged to the nation of Israel. I have the honour to represent them, I do not aggrandise to myself the notion that I embody them.’
‘That’s a fair point, but it’s still hard to understand how a nation can lose something in an alley.’
‘To you, perhaps, but my people have lost many things in their sad history . . .’
‘Not in alleys.’
‘Did I say it was lost? I do not recall saying it was lost.’
‘You implied it.’
‘We didn’t find it,’ said Calamity.
‘No, how could you find that which was not lost? You stole it. That much is clear.’
‘Tell us what you are looking for and maybe we can help you look for it.’
‘I have been working in the shadows of this world and with the spectres who inhabit it for over forty years. Do you not think I might by now have tired of people feigning ignorance?’
‘Maybe I’m not feigning.’
‘Feigning ignorance is a difficult stratagem to employ, perhaps the most difficult of all. There are very few people who can do it convincingly. You are not one of them. Time is running out. Mr Knight, please surrender the item and go in peace.’
‘What item?’
He sighed. It was a phoney sigh. Feigning a sigh is a difficult stratagem.
‘Tell us how an item belonging to the people of Israel happened to be in an alley belonging to the Corporation of Aberystwyth.’
‘As if you didn’t already know.’
‘Humour me.’
‘A man was recently cruelly slain in the alley and mutilated in a fashion which shocks even a people whose name has become a byword for suffering.’
‘A man called Absalom.’
‘Perhaps. He has had many names, as indeed I suspect have you.’
‘My name has always been Louie.’
‘It is inevitable that you say that. But have you always been a private detective? My information is that you have not. Your current occupation is a tactic, a brilliant one, to cover your investigation into this man you call Absalom.’
‘How come you know him?’
‘He was my brother. The item he hid in the alley was meant for me. He placed it on the window ledge and with the last of his dying strength wrote “Hoffmann”, confident that the shocking manner of his death would be reported in the world press and that the word “Hoffmann” would agitate an elaborate and sophisticated series of tripwires which would cause a bell to ring in the offices of the organisation for which I work. He knew as surely as if he had sent it by registered mail that his message scrawled in blood would reach the awareness of me, his brother. And to help his brother in his search he inserted a rudimentary signal of incoherence in the arrangement of his scene of death such that a policeman would overlook it but one with trained eyes, one who knew there was something there to look for, would not.’
He made a summing-up gesture with his hands. ‘And thus we arrive at the scene in the alley, where your
