‘So why did Emily call us?’
‘She did some work for the Santa Claus who got murdered in Chinatown. He went to see her and she helped him with some stuff, trying to trace a child born out of wedlock a long time ago. Emily was good at that sort of thing – she understood about all these forensic techniques and things – but me, I never had the patience. She was into Kierkegaard as well – well, we all are of course – but Emily was nuts about the guy. The woman was called Etta Place and the baby born out of wedlock was christened Laura.’
‘Etta Place was the girlfriend of the Sundance Kid,’ said Calamity.
‘Who?’
‘You know, the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, the famous outlaws.’
‘No I’m not familiar . . .’
‘The movie – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’
Oh, we don’t watch movies. We have to study. Except Clip, of course. We all want to see that. Oh, but I’m forgetting my manners. You’ve come all this way, you must be waiting to see Emily.’
‘We thought she was dead.’
‘She is.’
We declined the opportunity to see the cadaver, and made our way back to the car.
Eleri held out a hand to shake and said, ‘You really mustn’t pay any attention to the bad things people say about the Soldiers for Jesus. It’s just the idle tittle-tattle of gossips. You see, Mr Knight, we do a lot of good work here: we give the girls a chance that normally they just wouldn’t get. For many of them Sunday School is the only way out of the ghetto.’
‘One other thing,’ I said before closing the car door. ‘If you qualify for a reward for the help you’ve given us, do you want the Lego?’
‘The what?’
‘The Lego. You know what that is, I take it.’
Eleri looked slightly hurt. ‘Don’t be silly. Of course I do. It’s Latin for “I build”, isn’t it?’
Chapter 11
THE OLD MAN Elijah was waiting in the office. He was sitting peacefully in the client’s chair with the serene air of a Buddhist monk or a man for whom waiting calmly is a skill honed during a lifetime’s practice. The Cambrian News was on the desk in front of him, folded to display the story covering Emily’s murder.
I took off my coat and slung it on the hatstand. I glanced at the newspaper and said, ‘You predicted it and you were right. Now what do you want? We’re fresh out of medals.’
‘You know what I want. You found it in that alley.’
‘Finders keepers.’
He smiled thinly. ‘Yes, but isn’t there also something in that ditty about weepers?’
‘Suppose you tell me who killed her?’
He took a slow deliberate breath. ‘You killed her.’
‘I’d never even met her.’
‘You need to be introduced first to kill a person?’
‘Spare me the wisdom.’
‘I see her name on your incident board, and yet you say you do not know her?’
‘I said I’d never met her, and it’s true. I could put up the name of the mayor of Gotham City, it wouldn’t mean we were acquainted.’
‘Then maybe he, too, would die.’
I sat in my chair and laced my fingers behind my head. ‘Talk plainly or get out.’
‘It is my belief that a parasite has taken up residence in your neighbourhood.’
‘You mean like rats in the attic?’
‘I do not refer to that, although I don’t deny the possibility that you have them, too.’
‘A parasite?’
‘It is known as a Pieman.’
‘A what?’
‘You have a Pieman.’
‘I have a Pieman?’
‘I am sorry.’
‘This comes as quite a shock.’
‘It normally does. Naturally, you will say you do not know what a Pieman is.’
‘Why bother to such a sharp guy like you? Feigning ignorance of a Pieman is a difficult stratagem to master.’
‘That’s for sure.’
‘We have a guy across the road who eats a lot of pies,’ said Calamity.
‘Ah yes, you joke. Of course you have a guy across the road who eats pies. He is the Pieman. Or one of them.’
‘You mean he’s killing these people?’
‘Not personally. He supplies the names of the victims, and those he gets from you, from your incident board. If I am not mistaken you will find the Pieman resides across the road in one of the top-floor flats—don’t look!’ His face flushed with fury. ‘Don’t look, you fools!’
Calamity and I both arrested the movements of our heads with a strange air of guilt.
‘Louie watched him being winched in,’ said Calamity, making a great pretence of not looking out of the window.
‘If you were to visit him you would find a lot of pies and a thirty-five-millimetre camera with a long-focus lens trained on this room. On his wall will be a replica of your incident board. The moment you put a lead on your board he takes a snap, develops it in a tray next to the camera, and twenty minutes later pins up the gleaming wet black-and-white photo. From this he harvests the names, which are smuggled out to the assassin in the empty pie boxes.’
‘That’s absurd.’
Elijah smiled. ‘On the contrary, it is a most wonderful development. For the first time in perhaps twenty years Hoffmann has made a mistake. He has exposed himself. I cannot tell you how excited this makes me.’
‘You mean Hoffmann is behind the Pieman?’
‘Who else? Who else would go to such lengths to protect himself? And yet, paradoxically, in choosing to protect himself in this manner he may have fatally compromised himself. It is a wonderful development.’
‘But why would anyone do such a crazy thing?’ said Calamity.
‘It is a venerable and ancient assassination technique, developed many years ago by Welsh Intelligence. The beauty of it – and this is partly why the Welsh thought it up, because their espionage budget has always been severely limited – the beauty of it is its cost-effectiveness. The Pieman, you see, is a crude although effective form of custodian, a keeper of secrets, a protector or gate-keeper, if you will. He is enlisted to eliminate people who pose a threat to whatever needs to be protected. And the great thing is, he is very cheap because he rides piggyback on someone else’s investigation – in this case, yours. You do the legwork while he sits on his arse all day and eats pies. Hence the Pieman. Ingenious, don’t you think?’
‘Yeah, we’re overwhelmed by his cleverness,’ I said.
‘That’s if we believe you,’ added Calamity.
‘Trust me, I have better things to do with my time than make up stories like this.’
‘So you say.’
‘I guess we’ll just have to go round and speak to the Pieman,’ I said.
‘That is what you must on no account do. Categorically not.’
‘Why?’ I sneered. ‘Because we’d find nothing there except a guy who likes to eat pies, and no camera?’
‘You really are very stupid, aren’t you?’
‘So you keep telling me. I’m getting quite tired of it, to tell the truth.’
‘Just suppose for the sake of argument that I am not lying. What will happen if you go up there? You will find the Pieman and he will close down his operation. And what will you have gained? You will have killed the parasite. But what of Hoffmann? What of him? He will be long gone, and perhaps it will be another twenty years before he is heard from again. Perhaps it will never happen again. This one occasion is all we are given, this one chance, this unique moment in the annals of espionage. And you threaten it with your intemperate curiosity.’
‘All right, I’ve supposed that. Now you suppose this. Just suppose for the sake of argument there is no such thing as the Pieman. We walk around all day taking ridiculous care not to look up at the window across the street and not putting things on the incident board, and all for what?’