never once felt fear as I do tonight. Can you imagine that? I stand here so near my children, and I feel fear as I have never experienced it in my adult life ever. I'm reduced to a child by this madman.”
“It's understandable, and quite frankly, I just finished up trying to imagine it. This maniac has hit quite close to home. Anyone would feel the same, Richard.”
“I'm going to go see them.”
“Now?” asked Copperwaite, exasperated with Richard. “Don't be a fool, Richard. That's all old Boulte will need to hear. He'll have your job f'sure.”
“My children, Stuart. This is about my children. You're the primary investigator on this one, Stuart. You've earned it. Tell him that, should he bother to show up.” With that he stepped away from the crime scene, resigned to whatever fate lie ahead.
Jessica watched him disappear into the gloom and fog that had-like a secret everyone but Jessica shared- come in over the area.
She cursed. “I need more light. I can't do any more out here without field lights, Stuart.”
“What more has to be done?”
“I guess you're right. I suppose we should get the body to the crime lab.”
“I'll call for the ambulance. They've learned to come only when they're called. Maybe, if we act fast enough, no one will have to know about Richard's having left the scene. It could go bad for him.”
“No one will hear it from me,” she promised.
“Nor I, if I can at all help it.”
Copperwaite took himself aside and made a call on his cellular phone for the police ambulance. He called back to her after several minutes to say, “Seems Schuller's wife fell ill and Boulte's been at some gala event for the city, some charity affair or other. They've neither one any knowledge of victim number four, our Miss Another. Perhaps Richard's got away with it after all.”
“Are you talking to Schuller's assistant, Dr. Raehael, or someone else on call?”
“It's the Egyptian's day off, I'm afraid. They're overtaxed tonight, and say since you're on hand to leave it at that.”
“We are fortunate, then, aren't we?”
“That we are.”
Jessica looked in the direction Sharpe had taken. Upward in the distance, she could still make out the blinking lights of several tall buildings along Hyde Park Gardens and Baywater Road. They were a far cry from the discovery sites in the three other murders, all of which had been along the Thames, one within striking distance of Lombard Street-the City, as it was called-the principal street for banking and international finance. “The Big Four,” Sharpe had told Jessica, “the major banks, National Westminster, Barclays, Lloyds, and Midland.”
“Giants,” he'd called them. Jessica imagined them now, all the icons of London, among them Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and Big Ben, now with murder lurking in the shadows cast by each.
Why?” she wondered aloud.
“Why what?” asked Copperwaite.
“Why bring the body so much further away this time?”
“From the Thames and Victoria Gardens Embankment, you mean?”
“From the more central locations the first three were found at, yes.”
Copperwaite considered this. It had been the reason Sharpe had believed it possible the fourth victim could be a copycat. It didn't fit the geography of the other crimes. “He knows we're watching the bridges about the Thames,” suggested Copperwaite. “He's no fool this one. Rather clever, actually, if you think about his movements. The way he's kept us all guessing and on our toes, wouldn't you say? Smart bugger, he is, this one…”
“Yes, he knows we're onto his MO, at least how he disposes of the bodies.”
“So he motors here with the body in his boot.”
Jessica said, “Yes again.”
“So our killer is quite capable of moving about the city, quite mobile.”
“It appears so.”
Copperwaite snatched out a breath mint and laid it neatly on the end of his tongue. “The bridgeman said he saw a car parked nearby but had thought nothing of it.”
“Exactly how long has he been divorced?” she asked.
Copperwaite, befuddled by the sudden shift in her questioning, at first replied, “The bridgeman?” But he immediately regrouped and said, “Richard? Oh, yes. Three, three and a half years now, I believe.”
“And has he someone he's seeing now? Has he moved on?”
“Dunno. He never speaks of anyone, no, but for a time he was seeing someone. Quite hush-hush, he is. I never knew her name. Puts his effort into his police work mostly. That and his children. Sees them fairly regularly. Gets on fairly well with the ex as well. She simply couldn't handle being a policeman's wife. Old story, really.”
“Very,” she agreed.
“He cut quite a dashing figure in his uniform. I've seen photos. Looks like your GI Joe, really. Made rank of colonel, you know, in the military, I mean.”
“Is that so?”
“Aye, it is.”
“He seems a remarkable man.”
“Remarkable, yes. James Bond we call him at the Yard.”
“When you're not calling him 'Sharpie,' you mean?”
“Sharpe he is. Lives up to his namesake. An ancestor who fought in the Napoleonic wars. His great- grandfather or some other fought ferociously for the Crown and won honors in battles in Spain and France, but he didn't come from nothing like royalty. It's partially why he and Boulte can never get along.”
“I see, I think.”
“Richard's just your ordinary British blood, bom of common stock as they say, which isn't bad, really. Richard himself was bom within the sound of Bow Bells.”
“Isn't that where the first victim was found?”
“Aye, true enough, Doctor.”
“Just coincidence, like this…”
“Beggin' your pardon, mum-Doctor?”
'Tonight… being so close to Sharpe's home, and-”
“Former home,” Copperwaite corrected Jessica as if defending his partner.
“-and that first killing being in the sound of Bow Bells, so close to home-Richard Sharpe's home, I mean.”
Copperwaite suddenly stared quizzically at her. “Whatever are you gettin' at. Doctor?”
Jessica shrugged. “Oh, nothing really. Just funny how coincidental things happen in life, and how small the world actually is, even in an enormous city like London.”
“Coincidence… occurrences. I could tell you scores of stories about my uncle Thomas that would curl your hair for the coincidence in that man's life.”
She smiled at this. Then the sound of a siren signaled an end to her crouching over the body in the cooling evening, in the now dense fog of Hyde Park.
Somewhere out over the Serpentine, a swan bellowed a mournful cry, like some forlorn mother in anguish over a lost child. Other swans answered the first to call out. Soon, like dogs roused in a neighborhood late at night, a cacophony of swan calls exploded like fireworks all across the lake. The noise it made created a poor mimicry of the ambulance wail as the little automobile screeched to a halt, kicking up dust. Its siren went silent only when the driver came to idle, the spiraling red lights creating a mosaic of shadows in all directions.
The huge-shouldered driver, his shiny bald head reflecting the emergency lights, displayed the forehead of a Neanderthal where he stood after climbing from the cab and striking a match to light a cigarette. In London, smokers enjoyed their cigarettes everywhere, regardless of the known health risks the habit posed. So here the man stood, leaning against his meat wagon like a New York longshoreman, daring anyone to tell him what to do. So he rested, obviously not anxious to lift the ponderous cargo he and his partner had come to collect. The partner, unlike him, his opposite in fact-a petite, long-haired, blond female-raced to the rear of the van to enthusiastically haul out the stretcher on her own. At the same time she frantically searched about for the direction of the corpse,