The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,26

though seeing him for the first time. “If you are Sivart’s clerk, then you ought to know where he went. The sight of the gold tooth left him baffled. He needed information, the most reliable he could find.” He added quietly, “Whatever the price.”

Some of the places mentioned in Sivart’s reports were as foreign lands to Unwin—he came upon their names often enough to be convinced of their existence, but it was preposterous to think he could reach them by bicycle. For him there were two cities. One consisted of the seven blocks between his apartment and the Agency office building. The other was larger, vaguer, and more dangerous, and it intruded upon his imagination only by way of case reports and the occasional uneasy dream. In a shadowy corner of that other city was a certain taproom, an unofficial gathering place frequented by the enterprising, the scheming, and the desperate. Sivart went there only when every supposition had proved false, when every lead had dead-ended. And because the place rarely had any direct bearing on a case, Unwin usually excised its name from the files.

“The Forty Winks,” he said.

Moore nodded. “If you insist on tracking him down, Mr. Unwin, then I suggest you work quickly. I fear I’ve started the timer on an explosive, but I do not know when it will go off.” He rose suddenly from the chaise longue. He was light on his feet and seemed a little giddy.

“What about the woman you mentioned?” Unwin asked. “The one you said showed you the tooth?”

Moore grimaced and said, “I took you at your word when you said you aren’t trying to solve anything.”

Unwin clenched his jaw. Without thinking, he had started asking questions he did not want to ask. After this, he thought, he would have to put down The Manual of Detection for good.

“This way, then,” Moore said. “There is a back door—that will be the safest route.”

The exit was no taller than Unwin’s waist. It was blocked by empty crates, so they worked together to move them aside. The door opened onto the park. Here the trees grew thickly about the back of the museum, and the path was matted with oak leaves, orange and red. Unwin crouched to go through and opened his umbrella on the other side.

Moore bent down to look at him.

“Tell me one thing,” Unwin said. “Is it true, what you said? That you wrote The Manual of Detection?”

“Yes,” said Moore. “So take it from me—it is a bunch of rubbish. They should have asked a detective to write it. Instead they asked me, and what did I know?”

“You weren’t a detective?”

“I was a clerk,” Moore said, and he closed the door before Unwin could ask him anything else.

HE RODE SOUTH THROUGH the city, his umbrella open in front of him. He ignored the blare of horns and the shouts of drivers as he wove through the midday traffic, keeping his head tucked low.

He passed the narrow green door of his own apartment building, then the grime-blackened exterior of Central Terminal. There he caught sight of Neville, the boy from the breakfast cart, standing just out of the rain, smoking a cigarette.

At the next block, Unwin veered east to avoid the Agency offices. He did not want to risk seeing Detective Screed again, or even his own assistant, not yet. The noise of the traffic receded as the cast-iron facades of warehouses and mill buildings rose up around him, rain pouring in torrents from their corniced rooftops. Unwin’s arms and legs were shaking now, but not from the exertion or from the cold. It was that dead face he had seen behind the glass in the museum. He felt as though it were still mocking him with its awful gold-toothed grin. The thread, the one that connected mystery to solution, that shone like silver in the dark—Sivart had picked the wrong one, and Unwin had strung it up as truth. What did the false thread connect?

In the old port town, Unwin slowed to navigate the winding, crowded streets. Business carried on in spite of the rain, with deals being made under awnings and through the windows of food stalls. He felt he was being watched, not by one but by many. Was there something that marked him as an employee of the Agency? An invisible sign that the people here could read?

He pedaled on, easing his grip on his umbrella. The rain fell softly now. In the maze of old streets