anything I can do for you, detective?’ Lorimer asked gently.
Rappaport removed his notebook from his jacket pocket, and flicked through it. ‘This is a very nice flat, you’ve got here, sir.’
‘Thank you.’ Back to business, Lorimer thought. Rappaport frowned at something he had written.
‘How many visits did you make to Mr Dupree?’
‘Just the one.’
‘He had you booked in for two hours.’
‘Quite normal.’
‘Why so long?’
‘It was to do with the nature of our business. It’s time-consuming.’
‘You’re in insurance, I take it.’
‘No. Yes. In a manner of speaking. I work for a firm of loss adjusters.’
‘You’re a loss adjuster, then.’
And you are a credit to the force, Lorimer thought, but he said merely, ‘Yes. I’m a loss adjuster. Mr Dupree had made an insurance claim as a result of the fire. His insurance company –’
‘Which is?’
‘Fortress Sure.’
‘Fortress Sure. I’m with Sun Alliance. And Scottish Widows.’
‘Both excellent firms. Fortress Sure felt – and this happens all the time, it’s almost routine – that Mr Dupree’s claim was on the high side. They employ us to investigate it to see if the loss is in fact as great as it is claimed, and, if not, then to adjust it, downwards.’
‘Hence the name “loss adjuster”.’
‘Exactly.’
And your firm – GGH Ltd – is independent from Fortress Sure.’
‘Not independent but impartial.’ This was written in letters of stone. ‘Fortress Sure does pay us a fee, after all.’
‘Fascinating line of work. Thank you very much, Mr Black. That is most useful. I won’t trouble you no further.’
Rappaport is either very clever or very stupid, Lorimer thought, standing hidden at the side of his bay window looking down at the detective’s blond head as he descended the front steps, and I cannot decide which. Lorimer watched Rappaport pause in the street and light a cigarette. Then he stared frowning at the house as if its façade might hold some clue to Mr Dupree’s suicide.
Lady Haigh clambered up from her basement with two gleaming empty milk bottles and as she set them down by the dustbin at the top of the basement steps Lorimer saw Rappaport engage her in conversation. He knew, from the way Lady Haigh nodded her head in vigorous assent, that they were talking about him. And, although he also knew that his character would receive nothing but the staunchest backing from her, the discussion – it had moved on, Lady Haigh was now pointing crossly at a gigantic motorbike parked opposite – for some reason made him strangely uneasy. He turned away and went to wash out Rappaport’s coffee mug in the kitchen.
37. Gérard de Nerval. On my first visit to the Institute of Lucid Dreams Alan asked me what I was currently reading and I told him it was a biography of Gérard de Nerval Alan then instructed me that, as a conscious sleep-inducing device, I should either concentrate on the life of de Nerval or else indulge in sexual fantasies – one or the other. These were to be my choice of ‘sleep triggers’ and I should not deviate from them during my treatment at the Institute – it was to be de Nerval or sex.
Gérard de Nerval, Guillaume Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars. Any one of them would have been apt. I am unnaturally interested in these French writers for one simple reason – they had all changed their names and reinvented themselves under new ones. They started out their lives, respectively, as Gérard Labrunie, Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, and Frédéric-Louis Sauser. Gérard de Nerval was closest to my heart, however: he had serious problems with sleep.
The Book of Transfiguration
Lorimer bought a hefty leg of lamb for his mother and then threw in two dozen pork sausages as well. In his family a gift of meat was prized above all others. Coming out of the butcher’s, he hesitated in front of Marlobe’s flower stall – just enough time, as it turned out, for Marlobe to catch his eye. Marlobe was talking to two of his cronies and smoking his horrible pipe with the stainless steel stem. As he spotted Lorimer he broke off his conversation in mid-sentence and, holding out a flower, called over, ‘You won’t find a sweeter-smelling lily in the country’
Lorimer sniffed, nodded in agreement and resignedly offered to buy three stems, and Marlobe set about wrapping them up. His flower stall was a small, complicated wheeled contraption of folding doors and panels which, when opened, revealed several rows of stepped shelves filled with flower-crammed zinc buckets. Marlobe loudly claimed to believe in