imbued with a
‘James Gallagher was a fan,’ I said. ‘I was just there to see if there’d been any contact. Which there wasn’t, I might add.’
‘Just that?’ she asked. ‘I’d say that was a strange use of your time during the early stages of an investigation.’
‘Agent Reynolds,’ I said. ‘I’m just a PC in plain clothes, I’m not even officially a detective yet and about as junior as it is possible to be in the Murder Team without still being at school.’
‘Just a lowly constable?’
‘That’s me,’ I said.
‘Sure you are,’ she said.
She knew something. That’s the trouble with detectives – they’re suspicious bastards. But she didn’t know the whys and wherefores, and she hadn’t even hinted that she knew about the weirder shores of policing.
‘Go get some sleep,’ I said. ‘But if I was you I’d call Kittredge first and put him out of his misery.’
‘And what do think I should tell him?’
‘Tell him you fell asleep in your car – jet lag.’
‘Hardly the image the bureau likes to project,’ she said.
‘What do you care what Kittredge thinks?’ I said. ‘Where’re you staying?’
‘Holiday Inn,’ said Reynolds and pulled a card out of her pocket and squinted at it. ‘Earls Court.’
‘Have you got your own transport?’
‘A rental,’ she said. Of course she had – how else had she followed me?
‘Will you be all right driving in this snow?’
She found that hilarious. ‘This isn’t snow,’ she said. ‘Where I’m from you know you have
I was tempted to drop Zach at the Turning Point shelter or even bang him up again at Belgravia, if only I could have trusted him to keep his mouth shut. But in the end I gave up and took him back to the Folly. Despite the cold I had to leave the window open to combat the tramp smell of Zach’s bag. At one point I seriously considered stopping and making him open it so I could check whether it was full of body parts.
‘Where the fuck are we?’ asked Zach as I pulled into the coach house and parked beside the Jag. ‘And whose is that?’
‘My governor’s,’ I said. ‘Don’t even look at it.’
‘That’s a Mark 2,’ he said.
‘You’re still looking at it,’ I said. ‘I told you not to.’
With a last lingering gaze at the Jag, Zach followed me out of the coach house and across the courtyard to the rear door of the Folly. I’d considered letting him crash in the coach house, but then I considered what was likely to happen if I left Zach alone with six grand’s worth of portable electronics – my personal six grand at that.
I opened the back door and ushered him in – watching him closely as he crossed the threshold, I’d been told once that the protections around the Folly were ‘inimical’ to certain people but Zach didn’t react at all. The back hallway is just a short corridor lined with brass hooks for the hanging of sou’westers, oilskins, capes and other archaic forms of outdoor apparel.
‘You know this is the weirdest nick I’ve ever been in,’ he said.
As we stepped into the main atrium Molly came gliding out to meet us in what would have been a much more sinister fashion had Toby not been dancing and yapping excitedly around her skirts at the same time.
Even so, Zach took one look at her and promptly hid behind me.
‘Who’s that?’ he hissed in my ear.
‘This is Molly,’ I said. ‘Molly – this is Zach who will be staying overnight. Can he use the room next to mine?’
Molly gave me a long stare and then inclined her head at me, exactly the way Ziggy the dog had, before gliding off towards the stairs. Possibly to put fresh linen on the guest bed or possibly to sharpen her meat cleavers – it’s hard to tell with Molly.
Toby had stopped yapping and instead snuffled at Zach’s heels as he made his way across the atrium towards the podium where we keep The Book, well not The Book exactly but a really good late eighteenth-century imprint of The Book open to the title page.
He read the title out loud: ‘
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ he said and turned to point an accusing finger. ‘You can’t be part of this, you’re … common. This is the Folly, this place is strictly toffs and monsters.’
‘What can I say,’ I said. ‘Standards have been falling lately.’
‘The bloody Isaacs,’ he said. ‘I should have taken my chances with the Nolan brothers.’
I wondered if Nightingale knew we had a nickname. I also wondered how come someone like Zachary Palmer knew what it was.
‘So what are you then?’ I asked – it had to be worth a try.
‘My dad was a fairy,’ said Zach. ‘And by that I don’t mean he dressed well and enjoyed musical theatre.’
Wednesday
10
Russell Square
It was the yelling that woke me up the next morning. I rolled out of my bed, grabbed my extendable baton and was out the door before I was fully awake. All those nights being terrorised by Molly had obviously paid off. It was still early enough to be dark, so the first thing I did was hit the hallway lights.
I stood there in my boxers chilling quickly in the winter air thinking that maybe it had been a nightmare, when the next door along slammed open and Zach ran out wearing nothing but a pair of purple Y-fronts and swearing at the top of his voice. He saw me and waved something in my face.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
It was his filthy gym bag, the one that had stunk up my car, only now it was marvellously clean, the frayed seams had been stitched and reinforced with leather and the Adidas logo touched up with blue thread. Angrily he yanked it open to display the clean and neatly folded clothes inside within a waft of lemon and wildflowers. Only one person I know folds clothes to that level of precision.
‘Molly must have cleaned it,’ I said.
‘No shit,’ he said. ‘She didn’t have no right. It’s my stuff.’
‘Smells nice though,’ I said.
He opened his mouth to say something but it snapped shut when Lesley came running around the corner carrying her baton in one hand and a heavy-duty torch in the other. She’d taken the time to fasten on her mask, but nothing else, and was dressed in a pair of skimpy red and white polka dot low-rise shorts and a sleeveless thermal vest under which her breasts bounced distractingly. Me and Zach both stared like a pair of teenagers, but I managed to drag my eyes back up to her mask before she could hit me with the baton.
‘Good morning,’ said Zach brightly.
I introduced Zach to Lesley and gave her the potted history. ‘I couldn’t leave him in the snow,’ I said. She told us to stop making so much noise and that she was going back to bed.
As she walked away I realised I’d forgotten just how shapely her thighs were and how beautiful the dimples
