sleep; number 43, where Longbright was now on guard with Tamsin and Oliver Wilton, their son impatiently roaming the upstairs rooms of the house, disturbed by the downpour; number 45, the medical students who slept through their days. The swamped waste ground where Elliot Copeland’s body had been found buried in city soil, where Tate had once watched from barricades of plywood and cardboard. The builders’ yard where Aaron had been tempted to betray his partner. So much energy and anger in one small street.
No sign of Bimsley or Mangeshkar, but he knew they couldn’t be far away. He crossed the road and was about to start back when he spotted their matching black baseball caps. They were rounding the corner toward the alley behind the houses, where the dipped gravel path had become a tributary once more.
‘Hey, where are you going?’ he called.
‘It’s where Tate normally hangs out, sir. Thought we’d check it.’
May shone his torch on to the dark tree-lined corridor. ‘There’s nothing you can do back there. I want you to call on every house in this street and check that nothing is wrong. Take a side each. I don’t know how, but he’s tricking us.’
The two officers separated. May turned off his torch, and dropped back against the dark wall of the alley. Let’s hope he heard that, he thought. I’m going to be here when he makes his move.
Kallie took a step forward and raised her candle, but the boy did not move. Locks of shining blond hair hung at either side of his face like shavings of varnished wood. She realized that she was looking back at a painting. She had been working too closely in artificial light to spot it earlier. What she had taken for water marks were muted colours.
From this distance she could clearly make out the top of the boy’s body, set against twists of drowned green branches. He was floating in water, his arms drifting away from his torso, the world submerged beneath him, the victim of some apocalyptic deluge.
As she drew nearer, she studied the wall more carefully. He was imprisoned behind the thick layer of emulsion with which the wall had been covered. Taking up the scraper, she pushed its tip into the soft ochre paintwork. Three distinct layers lifted off together, and there, staring at her with unnerving clarity, was a single large eye.
Now something else made sense for the first time. In the original layout of the house, the bathroom had been considerably larger than any other room. Walls had since been removed, ceilings altered, chimneys closed; the bathroom had been repainted and demoted in importance until it had been diminished. Six large hardboard panels covered the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. They had been painted over several times, so that the screws holding them had vanished.
In the toolbox beside the bath she found a screwdriver. Cracking the paint from the screwheads was a task of no more than a few seconds, but the threads were rusted and refused to turn. After tearing up the first two in frustrated haste, she switched to the chisel and worked at the join between boards and brick.
Tying a dishcloth around the head of a crowbar, she inserted it behind the first hardboard panel, bending back the board until it split. The mural behind it ran the entire length of the wall, presumably wrapping itself around the chimney breast. The section she could see was a view downward from a window depicting an extraordinary procession through the streets of London: sorrow, judgement, punishment, death, resurrection. An immense distortion of buildings and people that incorporated such details as gold braid and coat buttons, yet included the curvature of the earth. The top half of one winged figure disappeared behind the next panel.
Kallie began to realize that this panel would prove impossible to remove without damaging the artwork, so she followed it to the next wall, wondering if the frieze could possibly continue all the way around the room. Choosing a random spot, she gently peeled away the dampest patch of paintwork to reveal the screaming head of a young black woman.
Dragging the stepladder from the cupboard under the stairs, Kallie climbed up and shone her torch at the ceiling, scratching lightly at it to reveal what appeared to be a bursting storm cloud seen from directly underneath: fat, glistening drops of rain plunging in perspective toward the viewer. It’s the entire room, she thought. I have never