“Wait, that can’t be right,” said Banbury. “Renfield insists he didn’t destroy the report, so Mills must have, but Mills arrived first, when Finch could only have just started working on it. So why would he have ripped it out?”
“You have a point, old chap. You don’t think someone else was here?”
Banbury looked up. “Who?”
“There is only one other person left: our missing man, the former lover-Samuel, the man with no surname.”
“Blimey, it seems like the morgue was busier than Camden Market on Tuesday morning.”
“An appropriate blasphemy,” said Kershaw excitedly. “Blimey is supposedly short for God blind me, something that’s been happening to all of us in this investigation. We’ve been blinded from the outset. Think, what else did you find here?”
“I’ve got Finch’s handprints, Mills’s trainers and Renfield’s boot marks, but no fingerprints on your supposed weapon, the fan blade. Exactly where am I supposed to look for this invisible man?”
Meanwhile, Longbright had found Owen Mills in the very first place she looked-Lilith Starr’s claustrophobic flat on the Crowndale Estate. The front door was ajar, and Lilith’s belongings stood stacked in cardboard boxes in the hall. Mills was sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, sorting through a pile of drawings and photographs.
“Owen?” Longbright took a further step into the shadowed room. When he turned to her, she could see he had been crying, but he hastily wiped away the evidence with the tips of his fingers. “I’m not going to go away, you know,” she told him, “not until I’ve heard the truth. You see, I’ve been wondering about your last night together.”
“That’s nothing to do with you.”
“How was she? You spent the evening here, right? How did she seem to you?”
Mills thought for a moment, caught by the question.
“Owen, I’ll help you, I promise. I have the power to do that. If you care about her, you have to tell me how she was.”
“All right, she was kind of weird. Vague, you know? Not all there. She kept saying she had a chest pain. But she’d said that before. I don’t want to talk about her.”
“I’m not here to disrespect your relationship with Lilith,” Longbright insisted. T think you’ve been through enough in the last two days. I know how much you cared for her, but I want to rule out your involvement in the death at Bayham Street.“
“Then talk to me about something else.” Part of him seemed anxious to tell her more.
“All right, let’s talk about you. How are you coping?”
“Okay, I suppose.”
“What’s your family arrangement?”
“I got three other brothers, two sisters. I’m the oldest.”
The detective sergeant seated herself on the floor beside him. “Get on okay with your parents?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“Did they meet Lilith? What did they think of her? I mean, you were serious about her, right?”
“She wanted me to marry her, I guess that’s serious.”
“Did you introduce her to your mum and dad?”
“Yeah. Yeah, they met her once. They thought she was nice.”
“And to your brothers and sisters?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They respect me. They look up to me.”
“What, you didn’t think Lilith was respectable enough for them?”
“Not that.” The wall of evasion Mills used as protection had suddenly reappeared.
“Owen, I’m going to need two answers from you about Lilith, then I’m out of your way. Can we make that a deal?”
“I don’t have to answer anything.”
“I know, but you must be as anxious as I am to put the subject to rest. I’m convinced you took Finch’s notes. Just tell me what you did with them.”
“I told you, I didn’t take anything.”
“They were there before you turned up, and gone immediately after. He didn’t tear them out himself, or we would have found them. If you’re only prepared to tell me one thing, make it this. I won’t ask anything more of you.”
“I didn’t take them; he burned them. It was like, one page, okay? He did it for her.” His voice was toneless.
“You mean Oswald Finch burned his own notes? Why would he do that?”
“You don’t need to know. It has nothing to do with your investigation.”
“I understand why you asked him, to protect her,” said Longbright. “I know that. You didn’t want her drug use to come out on the report that would be sent to her parents.”
“She hated her parents, but she felt like she’d hurt them enough. She said there was no point in kicking them beyond the grave, asked me to clean up behind her if anything bad ever happened, like she was expecting it.”
“Where can I find her former boyfriend?”
“Why do you need to know?” asked Owen wearily.
“I have to eliminate him from the investigation.”
“Well, you can do that, all right. He’s dead and buried, in-nit. Gone forever.”
“When did it happen?”
“Eight months ago. That’s why she took his name off her arm.”
“What happened? How did he die?”
Owen gave her a crooked smile. “It was a knife wound.”
“Who did it?”
“Nobody you know.”
Getting answers from the boy was like pulling teeth once more. In the peculiar manner of most of the kids living around this estate, he had answered her questions without explaining a single thing. Longbright checked her watch and saw that it was three-fifteen p.m., which left just one and three quarter hours before the slow-motion car crash of the unit’s destruction concluded. More frustrated than angry, she rose and left Mills to his grief and his photographs.
Crossing the sleet-slick paths of the estate, she tried to shake the feeling that she had been tricked. Somehow, Mills had told her everything she needed to know while simultaneously hiding the truth in plain sight.
44
A grey veil of rain descended over the grime-crusted gas lamps of Old Montague Street, where the ‘light of heaven’ brought safety to the pavements Saucy Jack had walked only fifty years earlier.
The rolling amber fogs that dripped down walls and slicked the cobbles were pierced with fiery mantles that burned until the break of dawn, when daylight dissipated the miasma. Another fifty years passed, and now the wrecking balls swung into row after row of mean terraced houses with a chink and clatter of brick and mortar, tearing down Durward Street, Buck’s Row, Hanbury Street, blasting so much brightness into the dark canyons that no shred of London’s shape-shifting history remained. Now there was only the roar and glare of the approaching future…
Arthur Bryant awoke with a start, wondering where he was.
In 1930, his father had photographed the spot where ‘Polly’ Nichols had fallen with her throat slit open from ear to ear. He had kept the little sepia print of the dingy kerbstone in his trouser pocket, using it to frighten young Arthur whenever he was bad. Reeking sourly of stout, his father had staggered from The Ten Bells in Commercial Street, the public house where Mary Kelly had ordered her final drink, and collapsed into the road, where he was found dead by his terrified son…
Why had Bryant dreamed of such a thing now? Nothing in the past could truly be repaired. Remembrance of his father only came when the cold hand of his own mortality pressed upon him. Disoriented, he shivered and tightened the collar of his coat.