'When deaths occur outside pubs, the victims are never middle-aged career women who've been drinking alone,' Longbright replied.'They're teenaged and in groups, drunk or stoned, and have been in fights with their peers over girls and loyalty and the mysteriously coded world of respect and humiliation. Come on, Jack, you know that.'

'I ask because I'm trying to understand how this place works. You've got that girl April, who has no qualifications, trawling through cold cases looking for links to these dead women, and that's not logical. Procedure requiresa"'

'This unit doesn't operate according to the laws of logic,' said Longbright.'Colin and Meera are searching for witnesses and conducting interviews as procedure requires, leaving us free to detect larger trends.'

'You mean there's no proper system at work here. It's like you've forgotten that you're working against the clock. Lives are at stake. Don't your bosses understand that others will die if they don't stop f.a.n.n.ying around?'

'The system doesn't work within the normal structure of criminal investigation departments.'

'So what happens when a case comes in?'

'Raymond Land has to approve our involvement, but he gets overruled by Mr Bryant, who chooses the cases he thinks we're best suited to. John usually backs him up. Then Land has to go cap in hand to the Home Office.'

'So what interests Bryant?'

'He's concerned with deaths that occur in circ.u.mstances too troubling for the Met to deal with. The detectives write up their notesa"more themes and ideas, really. Then we spend the next few days hiding what we've discovered from anyone who might stop us.' Longbright was enjoying the look of creeping unease on Renfield's face.

'And where is everybody else this morning? I ask because I have to keep notes on you lot.'

'John and Mr Bryant are in a pub somewhere in Holborn consulting an expert in London mythology. April is calling the surviving relatives of Joanne Kellerman, and after work I'm getting my roots touched up before attending a society for conspiracy theorists. Raymond Land is probably in the Nun and Broken Compa.s.s playing darts with former officers from Bow Street station and slagging you off something rotten. Giles Kershaw will be running more tests on Jocelyn Roquesby, and Dan Banbury is probably going over the crime scenes of the earlier victims. Happy?'

And out of this farrago you expect to find a murderer?' Renfield was staggered. He had expected an element of disorganisation, but nothing on this scale. It would have been easier to predict the movement of cats.

'I don't know about that,' Longbright told him. 'Things have to get stranger first, or else Mr Bryant will lose interest.'

'And when do you suppose that might happen?' asked Renfield, fighting to keep his natural temperament under control.

'Oh, right around now,' replied Longbright with a malignant smile. 'Come on, Jack, lighten up on us a bit. Our clearance rate is more than double that of any other specialist unit. Find something positive to say.'

Renfield eyed her thoughtfully.'You've got some lovely legs on you, Janice,' he said at last.

Jazmina Sherwin checked her watch again. She had been waiting for her so-called boyfriend to turn up for nearly half an hour, but his cell phone was turned off. She pulled her sheep-skin coat more tightly around her, and looked out at the empty roadway. It was already starting to get dark. The trunks of the plane trees opposite were lost in shadows. Their uppermost leaves stood out black against the dying sky. n.o.body else was sitting on the benches in the front garden of the Albion, but Jazmina hated overheated rooms, and the saloon bar was un-bearably warm.

The Barnsbury pub appeared to have been dropped down in the heart of the English countryside. Graceful Edwardian houses filled the backstreets between Liverpool Road and the Caledonia Road. It was hard to imagine that the chaos of King's Cross was just a fifteen-minute walk from this spot.

A pair of crows sniped in the branches above her. A breeze rose, the shiver rippling along the street in a wave that caused the tops of the branches to gossip.

She knew she should never have agreed to meet him again, not after he had let her down the week before. What, she wondered, was the attraction of careless men? A car drifted past al-most in silence, the driver insolently staring at her.

She looked over her shoulder, through the window of the pub. The barman had gone somewhere. The bar appeared to be deserted now, except for a small group of noisy fat men playing darts in the rear saloon, but she was sure someone had been standing close by her when she ordered her orange juice. She had seen him from the corner of her eye, just a dark shape really, but she'd had the sense of a heavy overcoat, a pale eye turned in her direction. Normally she was entirely at ease in pubs, but this one didn't feel as if it was even in the city.

Shiny dark birds cawing in the trees, the evening so quiet you could hear the greenery. Something was not right. Something...

He made her start, moving in to sit beside her without disturbing the air, so that she was sure he had not been there the moment before. She was strong, but he had the element of surprise. His grip was practised and complete. She felt the hot lance of the needle enter her neck, and knew at once that the time for escape had already pa.s.sed. The freezing numbness flooded her body, like dental anaesthetic but much faster, more totally invasive, and she felt herself falling down into his awaiting arms.

She heard his voice from far above, even though he could only be speaking in a whisper. 'Stay with me,' he told her. She tried to remain awake, sensing that if consciousness failed it would not return. She was young and mistrustful of men, so how could this be happening?

So unfair, she thought, so stupid. In that brief moment she felt as if all the evils in the world were there to be understood. Men were starving wolves who searched for weaknesses, and she had dropped her guard for the firsta"and onlya"time in her short life.

The Nun & Broken Compa.s.s had been shut for refurbishment, so Raymond Land's pals from the Met had suggested going a little further afield today, seeing as they were on short shifts, and Land could basically do as he pleased now that the Home Office called the shots for his unit. Land was still laughing at the superintendent's disgusting joke as they pocketed their dart sets and left the Albion. He didn't like Barnsbury, too many stuck-up North London politicians living here, but the Albion was a bit of a find, bucolic and becalmed, hidden behind an artful undergrowth.

While they were discussing what would be the quickest way back, the superintendent noticed the girl. She was seated upright on the bench, her head hanging over her drink, and Land had been about to make a remark about birds not being able to hold their booze when one of the others realised that something was wrong with her.

In the deepening shadows beneath the leaves of mulberry trees, a young black girl had fallen asleep so soundly that she had died, her soul departing on respectful tiptoe, as quietly as the fading breeze.

18.

PUB CRAWL.

Thursday morning at the PCU dawned in a tangle of disbelief and recriminations.

'You were actually on the premises,' May accused his superior, pacing the latter's threadbare office carpet. 'How could you not have seen what happened to this young woman?'

'Do you know the Albion?' asked Land angrily. 'It's a series of rooms, and we were out at the back having a game of arrows. How was I to know she'd been attacked?'

'Didn't you hear or see anything unusual at all?'

'No, I was playing for money and concentrating on my form. I don't think I saw another person in the pub apart from the barman, and he hardly speaks any English. This girl had apparently been stood up by her boyfrienda"who is in the clear, by the way, because he was actually at a job interview in the Finchley Road Mercedes showroom and had forgotten he was meeting her. Besides, she had been sitting outside the whole time, so how was I supposed to see her?'

'Has Giles had a chance to conduct a full examination of the body yet?'

'No, he had to wait for the family to come in and ID her last night, but he says there's a piercing on the side of her neck consistent with the MO on the first twoa"or rather four, if we count the uninvestigated cases.'

'Our perpetrator is becoming angrier.' Giles Kershaw was unfurled in Land's doorway. 'Very nearly snapped the needle off in her neck, left a circular bruise where he pushed the syringe base right up against the skin, and it looks like such a high dosage that I imagine she died in seconds. I'm heading back to Bayham Street. Jazmina Sherwin's father is probably going berserk.'

Kershaw flicked back his blond hair in the habitual gesture he had acquired from bending his tall frame over tissue samples.'Something's out of whack. This one is differenta"the age, the ethnicity, the social background. I'd have said it was an entirely separate incident except that she was found in a pub and killed in the same fashion. Premeditation, obviously. But a fundamental paradox: The killer wants them to die so quietly that no-one notices, and yet he chooses to kill them in public, often crowded, places. It goes against all of our received wisdom.'

'Why has he switched to a young black girl after singling out middle-aged white women?' asked Land.

'His lacunaea"the calm gaps between his acts of violencea" are closing. It's only a few hours since he last took a life. Perhaps the need has now become so urgent that in this case it drove him into the nearest pub, and Sherwin was unlucky enough to be the only female there. The rest of the locations are grouped in roughly the same area. Does anyone mind if I take Renfield with me?'

'What for?' asked May.

Kershaw looked embarra.s.sed. 'I think Mr Sherwin might come back and try to thump someone, probably me as I'm the weediest. We've never had anyone at the unit who could handle trouble, and I've heard Renfield is pretty good in difficult situations.'

'He gets very stroppy and shouty, if that's what you mean,' said May.

'It may be what's needed in this case,' said Kershaw. 'I'll return him, don't worry.'

'So what happens now?' asked Land, for whom events were clearly moving too fast.

'The press is making sure that this story will be all over London like a cheap suit. It's the fault of that woman from Hard News whose life we saved, Janet Ramsey.' The journalist had nearly come a cropper in her pursuit of a story, luring a killer to her apartment, only to be bailed out by the PCU. 'She agreed to get off our backs for a while but clearly has no grat.i.tude, because she's already rung me about reports of a young girl's death in a London pub, says she's going to run something tonight.'

'It's the scorpion and the frog,' said Land despondently. 'Janet Ramsey can't resist stinging because it's in her nature. The last thing we need right now is more negative publicity. What are you going to do about it?'

'What happened to we?' asked May in surprise. 'I thought you were on our side.'

'I've had enough c.r.a.p fall on me in the last few months to drown a cow,' answered Land. 'I'm going to make sure I stay dry and sweet-smelling this time.'

'Oh, I see,' said May, 'when the going gets tough, the tough run for cover.'

'I never said I was tough,' answered Land. All I ever wanted was a quiet life.'

'Well, you'll get it if this goes wrong, won't you? Renfield will take great joy in filing a report to Faraday and Kasavian. In addition to pointing out that we were sitting on cold files connected to an on-going investigation which he thinks we can't crack, he'll probably mention that Arthur's memory is so bad he managed to lose the ashes of his coroner on the same night he somehow hallucinated himself back into Victorian times. So you'll finally get your wish, to sit out your remaining working years in a police station the size of a cabdrivers' hut in a depopulated village on the Orkney Islands that's so quiet you'll be able to hear a duck fart four miles away.'

'I don't know why you have to be so incredibly rude,' said Land indignantly.

'Because you might have saved a young woman's life if you'd been concentrating on your b.l.o.o.d.y job instead of drinking with your cronies. If you're so keen to have Renfield write out reports, tell him to put that detail in them.'

'We are going to get a lead in this case today, and we will stop anyone else from dying,' Bryant announced as he strolled into the office and tossed his walking stick into its stand, a sooty old chimney pot he had rescued from the demolition of the York Way Jam Factory in 1982.

'Did I miss a meeting?' asked May. 'I love the way you just decide to announce these things. How are we going to accomplish this feat? We're still trying to sort out links between the victims.'

'We'll get the break. It may not seem to you like we're closing in, but we are. Perhaps it's someone who worked with them all.'

'Unlikely. Only Curtis and Wynley were at the Swedenborg Society. And we have no proof that they really knew each othera"only that one woman was friendly enough with the next to put her number into her cell phone.'

'Then perhaps you're approaching the investigation from the wrong end. Ask yourself, what do we know about the killer?' Bryant dropped into his chair and swung it around. 'He feels at home in pubs, to the point where he can commit murder in them with total confidence. Unfortunately, due to high staff turnover, the barmaids and barmen rarely take note of regular customers. Also, his field of operation is in an area of the city which doesn't have local custom, and that allows him to slip unseen among strangers. Perhaps he's visited these pubs many times when he has not been moved to kill. Perhaps these women mean something special to him, have some magic that can only be captured by taking a life.'

'You know I'm going to say I don't agree with you,' warned May.

'Yes, and therefore to prove a point, tonight the PCU is going on a pub crawl. I've worked the whole thing out. There have been five deaths in all, but there are only four public houses involved, as the fifth appears to have vanished some decades ago. However, all five women have connections with other pubs, so we need to check those as well, which in my book makes a total of nine places to visit, and means we need to put every member of the PCU to work undercover this evening. Here's the roster.'

Bryant flipped open a neat black leather Mont Blanc notepad, the one gift from his landlady Alma that he had managed not to lose. 'Longbright is going to head for the Conspirators' Club at the Sutton Arms, where Jocelyn Roquesby was a regular, and Renfield will stake out the Old Bell tavern, where she died.

'Meera will visit The Apple Tree in Clerkenwell, where Carol Wynley used to socialise after work. Colin has requested to join the speed-dating night at the Museum Tavern, Bloomsbury, where our most recent victim, Jazmina Sherwin, worked as a barmaid.

'John, you'll be going to the quiz night at the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon, which Joanne Kellerman had been known to frequent. Giles Kershaw has offered to spend the evening in The Old Dr Butler's Head, where she was found murdered.

April will attend the Phobia Society upstairs at the Ship and Shovell off the Strand, which Naomi Curtis told her partner she visited because she suffered from claustrophobia, while Dan Banbury will check out the Seven Stars, Carey Street, where she was killed.

'Raymond Land can go back to the Albion, Barnsbury, to see if he can find out anything more about Jazmina Sherwin's death. And I shall be joining a historical society, the Grand Order of London Immortals, which Dr Masters has recommended to me on previous occasions, because they know all there is to know about sociopathic behaviour in urban society. They've moved to the back bar of the Yorkshire Grey in Langham Place because their old haunt, The Plough in Museum Street, installed a plasma screen for the World Cup, an act for which they have never been forgiven.'

'And what good do you think all this is going to do?' asked May.

'As I believe I mentioned, I have an idea that the murderer is motivated as much by the locations as the victims. If that's the case, we need to spend more time in the kind of places he finds comfortable enough to commit acts of violence in. I want everyone to be sensitive to their surroundings, and to make copious notes. Talk to people, be honest about what you're looking for. We meet back here after closing time and pool any information we consider relevant, or possibly irrelevant.'

'You think Renfield's going to go along with something like this?'

'We have Raymond's backing, so I don't see how he can stop us. Besides, we're covering all the official routes of enquiry. This is extra-curricular. It's going to be a long night, so no drinking alcohol. I don't want Renfield trying to throw out evidence because our intelligence sources were one over the limit.'

'That includes you,' said May.

'Bitter isn't alcohol, it's beer,' said Bryant. 'We will start to find a way of catching this man by the end of tonight, I promise you.' He checked his watch, more from habit than any useful purpose, as the little hand had fallen off in the blast that destroyed the PCU's old offices, and he had not got around to having it mended.

'You don't suppose you're still suffering the aftereffects from losing your memory last time around, do you?' asked May. 'Remember when you blew up the unit and banged your head?'

'That was ages ago,' said Bryant. 'I've never suffered any recurrence since then. Besides, Mrs Mandeville says I'll start remembering all sorts of things any day now, if my internal organs can withstand the vigour of her root vegetable diet. Right, I must be off. Call me later.'

'Do you have your cell phone on you?'

Actually I do. This is one of the first things Mrs Mandeville taught me to remember.'

'Good. Is it on?'

'We haven't got that far yet. I shall put it on now.' Bryant made an unnecessary pantomime of operating the device before setting off.

From his window, May watched his partner negotiating the shuffling drunks of Camden High Street. It was difficult not to worry about Arthur's safety these days, but Bryant seemed quite unconcerned. He waved his walking stick at a pa.s.sing taxi, and glanced up briefly at the unit's windows as he climbed in.

Two minutes later, May received a text that read:

Stop Fretting I'm Fine Have Fully Mastered Predictive Tghx Will Call If I Need Ghzb

If he didn't keep finding ways of saving lives, he'd be the death of me, thought May.

19.

CONSPIRATORS.

Bryant's idea seemed sound enough, until you considered that n.o.body knew who this man was or what he looked like. Sergeant Janice Longbright studied the sc.r.a.p of paper she had been handed, then searched the street. The great shuttered block of Smithfield meat market dominated an area now replenished with upscale eateries and thumping nightclubs, but here was a pub like an ancient lithograph, with a grand lead-gla.s.s bay window, polished oak doors and sienna paint-work, the sign of the Sutton Arms spelled out in gold gla.s.s on an umber background.