wrapped round my shoulder. The blood that came away on my fingertips was thin and red. I wiped it unconsciously on my trousers and breathed a little deeper the smell of the river.
Then, because Oda didn’t seem to want to talk to me, I stood up, walked to the edge of the embankment and climbed over the railing. A stair, practically frictionless with thin green slime clinging to it, led down to the soft almost-entirely-sand of the river’s edge. I climbed down, walked to where the Thames water slid over the bank, washed my hands in it, then walked back to the sand. Oda had come to the top of the stair. She looked . . . nothing. Folded arms and nothing in her face. Not speaking, not doing, just watching.
I prodded the sand with my toe, saw thin clear water ooze out from the surface, and very carefully with the end of my shoe wrote,GIVE ME BACK MY HAT
“Is that smart?” asked Oda from the top of the stairs.
I looked up at her. “Oda?”
“Yes.”
“I think I know what’s going on.”
“Do you.” Not a question, not wanting an answer. But I had one to give, and the novelty kept me talking.
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“I think I know how to kill Mr Pinner.”
Now, and for the first time, Oda started to look interested.
Legwork.
I loathe the Aldermen, but it is nice having someone else’s legs to do the working.
We went to Aldermanbury Square.
Earle said, “You’re still . . .!”
“Not dead, no. I noticed.”
Still behind that desk. Still in an immaculate suit, still unfluffed, still not rattled. Still drinking coffee. No wonder the man never seemed to sleep.
“Forgive me, I did not mean to sound so . . .”
“The good thing about my party trick, is that it is always surprising,” I replied, slumping down into the chair in front of his big desk. “Your ‘back-up’ is dead.”
His face darkened. “You found . . .”
“Dead. They’re dead. And the kid . . . and Mo . . . dead.”
Loren.
I hadn’t thought but
what would we say?
“But you appear to be . . .”
“Still not dead, yes, I know. Funny, isn’t it? I have a theory, Mr Earle. Actually, I have a whole fat bundle of plausible hypotheses which, taken together, may make one great whompha of a theory. Wanna hear it?”
He shrugged. “If it’s relevant to our current dilemma.”
“Mr Earle, does it worry you that, if I am the irreparable prat you seem to think I am, I’m still alive?”
“It is conceivable that you are a villain rather than a prat, Mr Swift.”
“You want to hear this theory or not?”
“Will it offer possible solutions to the deaths that seem to be occurring in ever-increasing quantity?”
“Quite possibly. And I’m just half an hour of medical attention away from divulging it.”
They had a small medical room in the offices of Harlun and Phelps.
Of course they did.
They also had a gym, two canteens, an ATM and a psychotherapist. Everything to make the running of orderly business more orderly.
They gave us painkillers.
We were beginning to understand why, in pre-anaesthetic days, the Bible had stipulated that suicide was a sin. Anything other than the prospect of eternal damnation, and the human race would probably have done away with itself at the first sign of the dentist.
Oda stood by the door, arms folded, eyebrows low over her brown eyes. Earle sat with his legs folded on the small chair of the medical room, looking displeased to be holding a meeting in a place without a PowerPoint projector. I sat on the paper-covered bed and ate. We hadn’t realised how hungry we were, until someone had offered us food. Now we scraped gravy off the plate with our fingers, and licked our fingertips, and wished I was not too inhibited to just run our tongue round the edge of the dish.
I said, “‘Give me back my hat’.”
Earle said, “This had better be good, Swift.”
“Didn’t it strike you that it was a strange thing to appear with the arrival of the death of cities? The ravens are killed and there it is; the Wall is defaced and the writing says ‘give me back my hat’. The London Stone is smashed and there it is, always, ‘give me back my hat’. I mean, I know that mystics tend to be obscure; it’s the only way they can stay in business in this litigious age. But surely this phrase, occurring endlessly across the city streets, is about as unlikely a harbinger of the end as Abba at