sound and flung a sheet over her. As Hannah said afterward to Wexford, she was more affronted by a male, even though a doctor, seeing her little daughter without clothes than she was by the rite that the circumciser had been on the point of performing.
Totally covered, face and all, by the sheet, Shamis began to scream and struggle. She fought her way out and threw herself into her mother's arms. Mrs. Imran once more grabbed the sheet and swathed her in it. Hannah walked up to the table and eyed the circumciser's other tools that lay there, a knife and a pair of scissors. There was no sterilization equipment to be seen, no medication of any kind. A length from the reel of sewing thread would be used, she supposed, to stitch the raw edges of the wound together, a length from the ball of garden twine to bind Shamis's legs together once the deed had been done. The circumciser, a woman of perhaps no more than fifty, though she looked seventy, her face brown and wrinkled, most of her front teeth missing, fixed on Hannah a stare of absolute impassivity. She laid the razor on the table and said something to Mrs. Imran in Somali.
I ought to arrest her, Hannah thought. Or Reeta, or both of them. But charge them with what? They've done nothing and I can't wish they'd begun what they were going to do for the sake of charging them. But I can't leave them here with the child either. All she could think of was that this woman had been in possession of an offensive weapon-could she arrest them on suspicion of intending to perform an illegal act? Hardly knowing what she was doing or the consequences, she snatched Shamis out of her mother's arms and pulled off the sheet. There was blood on it. And a long streak of blood across Shamis's left thigh where the razor had just touched her. They had got there just in time.
“You do not have to say anything in answer to the charge,” she began, and glancing at Sylvia, saw tears running down her face.
26
Wexford went back to the hospice in the morning, feeling he had had a lucky escape. If he had gone ahead and Amara Ali and Reeta Imran had appeared in court, the case would have been dismissed and contumely heaped upon him for racism, sexism, and jumping to unjustifiable conclusions. Anger against Hannah had been strong at first. Karen wouldn't have done it, but Karen hadn't been there. Hadn't it occurred to Hannah that the women would say Shamis was sitting on the table after a shampoo and prior to having the hair on the nape of her neck shaved? The trace of blood? The shock of three people bursting into the flat had made Amara Ali's hand slip. Halfway home on the previous evening, he had answered his phone to be told that the two women were in custody and he had turned around and gone back, letting them both go with scarcely a word.
Now as he waited to be admitted to Tredown's room, he thought of things that had hardly occurred to him before. Naively, he had supposed he could prevent the mutilation of girls and so perhaps he could, but only after a number of them had already been mutilated, for in order for a prosecution to succeed a circumciser would have to be caught either in the act or when it was in the recent past and the poor little child crippled, her legs bound together. Later he would read through the Act of Parliament and see if there was provision for a charge of intention to commit mutilation, though, without going any further, he could see all the problems and pitfalls this would entail.
Tredown had had his shower, been shaved, and was propped up in his bed this time. A drip had been inserted in the back of his hand. Surely pointless at this stage? But no, perhaps it was a painkiller that traveled down that tube to make his last days more bearable. Tredown's greenish pallor was even more marked today and his sad smile more revealing of the skull beneath the skin. This time he noticed the cast on Wexford's arm and remarked on it.
So no one had told him. The last thing Wexford wanted was to tell him that his wife had been charged with attempted murder. “A fall,” he said. “It's just a simple fracture.”
This satisfied him. “I was telling you about the letter,” he began. “I told you it said I could have the manuscript to do what I liked with. I took that to mean I could-well, make it mine.”
“But he'd taken the copy away with him, hadn't he? If he meant to give it to you why would he do that?”
“He took it out of my-the room where I work. That was where we'd talked. That evening my wife brought it to me. He'd given it to her before he left.”
“Mr. Tredown, do you mean he'd given it to her, or she said he'd given it to her?”
Tredown frowned. “It's the same thing.”
“Not always,” Wexford said.
“I hear what you're saying. And, yes, I'll tell you now that I did have doubts. Oh, more than that, more than that.” The agonized note in his voice came from mental, not physical, pain. “I did write to him-that is, I got Maeve to write to him, saying it was too enormous a gift and telling him again how good it was and how very likely it was to be published and perhaps make a lot of money.”
“You never saw him again?”
“Not in the flesh.” The words and the way in which they were spoken brought Wexford an unpleasant feeling that someone or something was watching them. Tredown shivered. “It was just my fancy,” he said. “In the evenings-when I was alone upstairs-if there was a heavy rainfall-but this is pointless, I mustn't go on like this.”
Indeed you must not, Wexford thought, or I shall begin to think you not quite sane. “So you went to work on the manuscript?”
Tredown nodded. “Yes, I did. I cut it. I gave some scenes more weight and others less. I took out a lot of technical stuff about the prehistoric creatures and early men. There were episodes in it I thought weren't consistent with Homer and Ovid, I… But why go on? I made it mine, as you say. Maeve was enthusiastic and so was Claudia. Maeve spent hours typing for me-I'm not much of a typist. She transcribed my handwriting and the changes I made to the original manuscript.”
Wexford was anxious not to sound judgmental. The man was at death's door. He was a wreck of what he had been and, in spite of the palliative drip, he was no doubt in pain. But, if he wasn't precisely shocked by what he had heard, he was astonished at what he saw as villainy. Tredown had been so set on money, urged on by wife and ex-wife, so desperate for fame that it meant nothing to him that the celebrity he achieved would not be his own but stolen from another. “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise…” but it wasn't only the clear spirit that was raised by that prospect but sometimes greed and theft. For, of course, Tredown had known there had been theft and perhaps worse than theft, but it hadn't stopped him making The First Heaven his own work. Wexford heard his own voice cold and condemning.
“Didn't you wonder when you never heard from him again?”
“Maeve told me he'd said he wanted to put the whole thing behind him. Maybe he'd read the book when it came out, but he had no wish for it to be acclaimed as his own.”
“Perhaps we can leave Samuel Miller for the time being and talk about the man you found to be your researcher. I take his job was to deal with the passages that weren't consistent with Homer and Ovid and with the prehistoric detail.”
Tredown's frown was back. “What do you mean? I did my own research and I don't know any Samuel Miller. I think we're at cross purposes here.”
“I think so too.” Wexford got up, stiff and aching. He stumbled, clutched the back of the chair with his left hand. “Thank you for your help,” he said. “I won't take up any more of your time.”
The death's-head smile came again. “No, it isn't as if I've much of it left.”
“That was when things fell into place,” Wexford said. He had already passed his discoveries on to the assistant chief constable and was talking to Burden in his office; Hannah and Barry had been sent for. “As in most cases when the truth becomes clear you wonder how you could ever have seen things differently.”
“But for matching the rings,” said Burden, “would we ever have known it?”
“Maybe not.”
Wexford moved behind his desk as Hannah came into the room. It was the first time she had seen the plaster and the sling. “Please may I write something on your cast, guv?”
“I'm afraid not. It's strictly for persons under twelve.”
