Think.
Riggs will have confirmation now: Maiden knows. Maiden doesn’t like it. Maiden’s not up for a buy-off in regular instalments. Maiden’s not one of the lads. Maiden is well under the feet.
‘Bobby.’ Suzanne’s voice, very low. ‘Look. Go back in your flat and lock the door. You know what I’m saying?’
He could see her shape now, in the doorway.
‘Bobby?’ From outside. ‘I’m not kidding. I like you, OK? I like you, you stupid sod. Can’t you get a transfer or something? Jesus, what a fucking mess.’
Footsteps fading.
Aye, go on, nancy, lock yourself in … go back to your painting.
Not any more, Norman.
Maiden came out quickly in a crouch. Didn’t make for the steps, edged instead around the side of the building where a short passageway ended in an iron gate. Bad move if that was where they were waiting but unless they’d checked out the building by daylight they wouldn’t be.
Nobody grabbed him. His relief came out as a rough sob. He stayed in the passage, breathing in its acrid stale-piss air, until he heard her heels moving down the steps.
At which he moved out into the overgrown, iron-railed garden.
Because, God help him, he wanted to know who was waiting for her.
He crept down the steps.
Seeing Suzanne for the last time when she passed beneath a sodium streetlamp, he felt a confusing pang. How could he possibly …?
Without the Gothic make-up? In different circumstances? Just the two of them, somewhere damp and lonely?
The street was very still. Rundown Victorian villas turned into flats or boarded up. A derelict pub. No parked cars — double-yellow zone.
Maiden came quietly down to the pavement. The streetlamps shimmered in oily puddles, the tarmac still pitted from a laying of new drains. No sign of Suzanne. He stepped off the kerb to peer further up the street.
Out here his head was clearing. Pleasanter now. He began to stroll up the road, hands in his pockets, the essence of peat coming back to him. Damp and lonely. Funny thing, now Liz was gone, now he could go where he liked, he just hadn’t. He’d stayed in Elham, sorting out burglaries and domestic murders, occasionally going out with unsuitable women, building up the Tony Parker file on his home computer.
Waiting for a break. Waiting for something to give. Wondering how it could all have gone so wrong. Thinking that if he could just nail Parker and Riggs he’d walk away from it.
After fifteen wasted years.
He stopped. There she was again. Across the street, under a dodgy streetlamp which kept flickering on and off, and even when it was on it wasn’t fully on, so you could almost see the filament in the bulb, a worm of blue-white light. She was standing under the lamp and seemed to be going on and off like the light; you saw her and then you didn’t.
There was a roar. Two flat discs of greasy yellow spinning out of Telford Avenue. Turning to blinding white when they came round the corner.
Suzanne screamed, and it was strange; her voice, in extremis, sounded bizarrely refined.
‘Oh Christ, Vic, no, for fuck’s sake …’
The voice diverted him for a moment.
The wrong moment.
In the very next moment, his last conscious moment, two tail lights like dirty red pimples wobbled and blurred before a great and welcome silence came over him like a big, soft blanket.
At 2.37 a.m., Detective Inspector Bobby Maiden died in hospital.
II
Guardi’s Deli was just around the block from the New York Courier.
‘I mean, Jesus,’ Grayle said, making for the window table. ‘You look at this realistically, I’m the one should be missing. Like, Ersula was always the intense, academic sister, and I’m the crazy bitch with the crystals and the Tarot cards and the Eye of Horus earrings.’
Before Lyndon could even sit down, she was dumping her bag on the table.
‘Then she goes off to England.’ Pulling out the leaflet. ‘Then this.’
The University of the Earth
As we prepare to enter the Third Millennium, many of us feel the need for a deeper understanding of the land around us: how our distant ancestors related to their environment, and what that tells us about how we should respond to it.The countryside of Britain remains a great enigma. We are surrounded by the mysterious monuments of antiquity: megalithic remains, prehistoric burial mounds and chambers … the holy places of the past.In recent years, the study of such remains has appeared to become the preserve of a ‘New Age’ fringe, whose theories about ley lines and ‘earth-energies’ have been scorned by the archaeological establishment.The University of the Earth is the first serious attempt to bridge this gulf, by undertaking a formal but open-minded investigation of the mysteries in our landscape. The project is being steered by the eminent archaeologist and anthropologist Prof. Roger Falconer, presenter of the Channel Four programme Diggers.To help fund the University of the Earth project, and allow for the involvement of interested amateurs, a select series of summer schools has been scheduled, to be based at Prof. Falconer’s farm on the Welsh border, and involving lectures, practical work and expeditions to a number of key sites, including Stonehenge, Avebury, Silbury Hill and the Rollright Stones.Prof. Falconer says, ‘My twenty-five years of study have shown me that there are many lessons to be learned from our most remote ancestors. While I have little truck with nonsense about the Earth once being ruled by aliens or radiant beings from the lost continent of Atlantis, I do believe that the people of the Bronze Age in particular possessed certain skills, allied to a heightened perception of the natural world, of which most of us are no longer aware.‘It is one of the aims of the University of the Earth to study methods of working with the Earth and discover how effective they are in a scientific framework.‘Dowsing, for instance, not only for water but for archaeological remains, has been shown to be surprisingly successful, and we shall be putting its practitioners to the test under survey conditions, as well as giving our guests an opportunity to see if they themselves possess the ability.‘While I am personally convinced that some dowsers have an extraordinary ability, other schemes and theories I find considerably less convincing. However, the spirit of the University of the Earth is one of exploration and my younger colleagues, Magda Ring and Adrian Fraser-Hale, will be conducting experiments on what we might call the outer fringes … notably, the Dream Survey, in which volunteers will sleep at ancient sites and record their dreams in an attempt to discover whether human consciousness is influenced by the alleged electromagnetic properties of stone monuments.‘Although its aims are serious, those of us involved in the University of the Earth have had a great deal of fun. The inevitable arguments between the archaeological purists and the ‘earth-mysteries’ enthusiasts have been essentially good-natured and suggest that we share a common goaclass="underline" to uncover the deepest secrets of the distant past and use them to develop a more harmonious relationship between the human race and its native planet.’Early application for the University of the Earth summer schools is advisable, as places on the courses are strictly limited. Cost per head for one week is a basic …
Lyndon McAffrey, sitting stately as a Supreme Court judge, put down the leaflet and ordered up some doughnuts.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You gotta admire the guy’s technique. Like, how we gonna persuade gullible rich folk to hand over megabucks for a week spent shovelling shit out of a trench? Hey, let’s tell ‘em they’re helping a famous TV star unlock the secrets of the universe.’