and banning access to half a dozen cold, expressionless bystanders curiously looking on. Waiting for the body bag, Lorimer thought: charming. Detective Sergeant Rappaport carefully studied the business card and then performed a histrionic pouching mime.
‘May I, sir?’
‘By all means.’
From his leather jacket Rappaport produced a fat wallet and slipped Lorimer’s card inside.
‘Not your average beginning to your average sort of day, sir, I would imagine.’
‘No… Most distressing,’ Lorimer agreed, watchfully. Rappaport was a burly fellow, beefy and blond with cornflower-blue eyes, the sort of looks unsuitable in a detective, Lorimer thought, for some reason, thinking instead that Rappaport should have been a surfer or a tennis pro, or a waiter in a Los Angeles restaurant. Furthermore, Lorimer wasn’t sure if Rappaport’s deference was meant to unnerve, reassure or to be subversively ironic in some way. On balance he thought it was probably the last: Rappaport would have a chortle about its effect later in the mess or canteen or the pub or wherever it was the detectives gathered to natter and moan about their respective days.
‘Now we know where to find you, sir, we won’t trouble you any further. Thank you for your assistance, sir.’
More than ironic, the blatant overuse of ‘sir’, Lorimer thought, was clearly and deliberately patronizing, there was no doubt about that, but at the same time a conversational irritant, a covert sneer, impossible to protest against.
‘Can we run you back anywhere, sir?’
‘No thank you, Detective Rappaport, my car’s round the corner.’
‘The “t” is silent, sir. Rappapor. Old Norman name.’
Old Norman smug bastard, Lorimer thought, as he walked back to his Toyota in Bolton Place. But you wouldn’t be quite so pleased with yourself if you knew what I had in my briefcase, he reflected, cheering himself up somewhat as he turned into the square. The improved mood was transitory, however. As he unlocked his car door he felt a depression settle on him like a shawl, almost physically there, across his back and shoulders, as he considered Mr Dupree’s desperate, humble demise: what drove a man to tie a washing line to a water pipe, slip a noose around his neck and kick away the aluminium steps that supported him? It was the memory of his scuffed shoes hanging three feet off the ground that stayed with Lorimer rather than the grotesque loll of the head. That and the miserable January day – bleak and dull – and Bolton Place. Its naked plane trees with their Gulf War camouflage, the struggling, tarnished light, the cold – a wind had freshened – and the morning’s rain had left the sooty brick of the entirely acceptable Georgian houses almost charcoal-coloured. A child in a padded moss-green jacket tottered here and there on the central rectangle of lawn, vainly seeking distraction, first among the sodden cropped flowerbeds, then with a wily thrush, then scuffing up a few remaining dead leaves and flinging them aimlessly about. In a corner on a bench its nanny or child-minder or mother watched, smoking a cigarette and swigging something from a lurid can. City square, venerable buildings, a patch of tended green, an innocently happy toddler, a concerned supervising adult – in any other context these ingredients might have conspired to form a more joyous symbolism. But not today, Lorimer thought, not today.
He was pulling out of the square on to the main road when a taxi passed a little too close to the front of his car and he was forced to lurch abruptly to a stop. The wobbly diorama of Bolton Place slid along the taxi’s glossy black side and his oath caught in his throat as he saw the face framed in the rear window. This happened to him from time to time, occasionally several times in one week – he would see a face in a crowd, through a shop window, going down the escalator of the Underground as he went up, that was of such luminous, transfiguring beauty that it made him both want to shout in exultant surprise and weep with frustration. Who was it who said that ‘a face in the Tube can ruin an entire day’? It was the glance that did it, the glance with its swift, uncertain apprehension, its too hurried analysis of the optic phenomena available. His eyes rushed to judgement; they were too keen to see beauty. Whenever he had a chance for a second look the result was nearly always disappointing: the studied gaze was always a severer arbiter. And