Rebus nodded. 'I hope there's a night porter.' Yes, he was feeling much better.
'It's a quarter to five,' said Flight. 'You'll probably catch the day shift coming on.' He laughed, but the laugh died quickly and he gave Rebus a serious nod of his head. 'You made your point tonight, John. Okay?'
Rebus nodded back. John. Another chip from the iceberg, or just good management?
'Thanks,' he said. They shook hands. 'Are we still on for a meeting at ten?'
'Let's make it eleven, eh? I'll have someone pick you up from your hotel.'
Rebus nodded and picked up his bags. Then bent down again towards the car's back window. 'Good night, teddy,' he said.
'Watch you don't get lost!' Flight called to him from the car. Then the car moved off, making a screeching u- turn before roaring back the way they had come. Rebus looked around him. Shaftesbury Avenue. The buildings seemed about to swamp him. Theatres. Shops. Litter: the debris from a Sunday night out. A dull roar preceded the arrival, from one of the misty side streets, of a dustcart. The men were dressed in orange overalls. They paid no attention to Rebus as he trudged past them. How long was this street? It seemed to follow a vast curve, longer than he had expected.
Bloody London. Then he spotted Eros atop his fountain, but there was something wrong. The Circus was no longer a Circus. Eros had been paved in, so that traffic had to sweep past it rather than around it. Why the hell, had anyone decided to do that? A car was slowing behind him, coming parallel with him. White car with an orange stripe: a police car. The officer in the passenger seat had wound down his window and now called out to him.
'Excuse me, sir, do you mind telling me where you're going?'
'What?' The question stunned Rebus, stopped him in his tracks. The car had stopped too and both driver and passenger were emerging.
'Are those your bags, sir?'
Rebus felt it rise within him, a shining hard steel pole of anger. Then he happened to catch sight of himself in the window of the patrol car. A quarter to five on the streets of London. A dishevelled, unshaven man, a-man obviously without sleep, carrying a suitcase, a bag and a briefcase. A briefcase? Who the hell would be carrying a briefcase around at this time of the morning? Rebus put down his luggage and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with one hand. And before he knew what was happening, his shoulders began moving, his body convulsing with laughter. The two uniformed officers were looking at one another. Rebus sniffed back the laughter and reached into his inside pocket. One of the officers stepped back a pace.
'Take it easy, son,' Rebus said. He produced his ID. 'I'm on your side.' The less cagey officer, the passenger, took the ID from Rebus, examined it, then handed it back.
'You're a long way off your, patch, sir.'
'You don't have to tell me that,' said Rebus. 'What's your name, son?'
The constable was wary now. 'Bennett, sir. Joey Bennett. I mean, Joseph Bennett'
'All right, Joey. Would you like to do me a favour?' The constable nodded, 'Do you know the Prince Royal Hotel?'
'Yes, sir.' Bennett began to point with his left hand 'It's about fifty yards
'All right,' Rebus interrupted, 'Just show me, will you?'
The young man said nothing. 'Will you do that, Constable Bennett?'
'Yes, sir.'
Rebus nodded. Yes, he could handle London. He could take it on and win. 'Right,' he said, moving off towards the Prince Royal. 'Oh,' he said, turning back and taking in both men with his glance, 'and bring my bags, will you?' Rebus had his back to them again, but he could almost hear the sound of two jaws dropping open. 'Or,' he called back, 'shall I just inform. Chief Inspector Laine that two of his officers harassed me on my first night as his guest in this fine city?'
Rebus kept on walking, hearing the two officers pick up his luggage and hurry after him. They were arguing as to whether or not they should leave the patrol car unlocked. He was smiling, despite everything. A small victory, a bit of a cheat, but what the hell. This was London, after all. This was Shaftesbury Avenue. And that was showbiz.
Home at last, she had a good wash, and after that she felt a little better. She had brought in a black bin-liner from the boot of her car. It contained the clothes she had been wearing, cheap flimsy things. Tomorrow evening she would tidy the back garden and light a bonfire.
She wasn't crying any more. She had calmed down. She always calmed down afterwards. From a polythene shopping bag she removed another polythene bag, from which she removed the bloodied knife. The kitchen sink was full of boiling, soapy water. The polythene bags went into the bin-liner with the clothes, the knife went into the sink. She washed it carefully, emptying and refilling the washing bowl, all the time humming to herself. It wasn't a recognisable song, nor even really a tune. But it calmed her, it soothed her, the way her mother's hummed lullabies always had.
There, all done. It was hard work, and she was pleased to be finished with it. Concentration was the key. A lapse in concentration, and you could make a slip, then fail to spot that slip. She rinsed the sink three times, sluicing away every last speckle of blood, and left the knife to dry on the draining-board. Then she walked out into the hallway and paused at one of the doors while she found the key.
This was her secret room, her picture gallery. Inside, one wall was all but covered by oil and watercolour paintings. Three of these paintings were damaged beyond repair. A pity, since all three had been favourites. Her favourite now was a small countryside stream. Simple, pale colours and a naive style. The stream was in the foreground and beside it sat, a man and a boy, or it could have been a man and a girl. It was hard to tell, that was the problem with the naive style. It was not as though she could even ask the artist, for the artist had been dead for years.
She tried not to look at the other wall, the wall directly opposite. It was a horrid wall. She didn't like what she could see there from the corner of one eye. She decided that what she liked about her favourite painting was its size. It was about ten inches by eight, excluding the rather Baroque gilt frame (which did not suit it at all her mother had never had much taste in frames). These petite dimensions, added to the washed colours, gave the whole a subtlety and a lack of vision, a humility, a gentleness, which pleased her. Of course, it depicted no great truth, this painting. In fact, it was a monstrous lie, the absolute opposite of the facts. There had been no stream, no touching scene of father and child. There had been, only horror. That was why Velazquez was her favourite painter: shadowplay, rich shades of black, skulls and suspicion … the dark, heart exposed.
'The dark heart.' She nodded to herself. She had seen things, felt things, which few were ever privileged to witness. This was her life. This was her existence. And the painting began to mock her, the stream turning into a cruel turquoise grin.
Calmly, humming to herself again she picked up a pair of scissors from a nearby chair and began to slash at the painting with regular vertical strokes, then horizontal strokes, then vertical again, tearing and tearing its heart out until the scene disappeared forever.
Underground
'And this,' said George Flight, 'is where the Wolfman was born.'
Rebus looked. It was a depressing location for a birth. A cobblestoned alley, a cul-de-sac, the buildings three storeys high, every window either boarded up or barred and grilled. The black bags of rubbish looked to have been languishing by the side of the road for weeks. A few had been impaled on the steel spiked fencing in front of the shut-up windows, and these bags leaked their rank contents the way a cracked sewage pipe would.
'Nice,' he said.
'The buildings are mainly disused. Local bands use the basement of one of them as a practice room, and make quite a racket while they're about it.' Flight pointed to a barred and grilled window. 'And I think that's a clothing manufacturer or distributor. Anyway, he hasn't been back since we started taking an interest in the street.'
'Oh?' Rebus sounded interested, but Flight shook his head.
'Nothing suspicious in that, believe me. These guys use slave labour, Bangladeshis, mostly illegal immigrants. The last thing they want is policemen sniffing around. They'll move the machines and set up again somewhere else.'
Rebus nodded. He was looking around the cul-de-sac, trying to remember, from the photographs he had been
