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bed.’
    â€˜Lovely idea. Only by way of the Market Place, if you please.’
    The city centre, as always, once the workers and shoppers were gone for the day, was empty, with the air of a civilization suddenly deserted for some awful, unfathomable cause, an urban Marie Celeste . Not all that long ago, Jurnet remembered, feeling unaccountably bereft, people had actually lived on those upper floors above the shops; so that, long after closing time, squares of light had spilled out into the dark, people passed to and fro behind window panes. On warm nights, when the windows were open, you could hear music as you walked along the street, or the ten o’clock news, voices raised in anger or love. Now, there was nothing but the shop-window dummies, their mindless eyes giving back the orange of the street-lights.
    Scarcely a car either, since the Council had belatedly awakened to the treasure it possessed in the medieval city and promptly put it into pickle in the middle of a one-way system based, so the natives swore, on the maze at Hampton Court. Even Police Headquarters, that ever-open eye, presented a dark face to the Market Place, all its nocturnal business – after-hours entrance, car park, garage and all – concentrated round the corner in Almoners Hill. On the Market Place itself, cats with amorous intent stalked the skeletal stalls, sliding like shadows across the cobblestones.
    Everywhere, that is to say, that bilious dinginess which, in the city, passes for dark: – everywhere save in the strip of garden at the top of the market slope, where floodlighting threw into terrible chiaroscuro the three figures hanging on their crosses. In that theatrical projection of white light and black shadow their situation no longer seemed cause for pity. Scornful and irreverent, they confronted their surroundings with a massive contempt. An air of violence seemed to have gathered about them like winter fog. A promise of resurrection? More a threat.
    Solicitous of the long-suffering greenstuff, Jurnet parked his car further along the road where, earlier in the day, the bandy-legged man had parked his van, and ushered Miriam through an official opening in the wall, flanked by some dwarf cupressus. Still fiercely at odds with the contradictions in his own nature revealed to him by Second Coming in concert, the detective kept his eyes resolutely away from the tableau which occupied his lover’s absorbed attention. What the hell was she doing, anyway – she, of all people – gazing up worshipfully at the primal cause of Jewish grief through the ages? Bruised by the night’s happening, he ached with longing to lie with his head between her breasts.
    More in anger than love he said, for the umpteenth time, ‘Let’s get married.’
    â€˜Oh, Ben!’ She did not deflect her gaze, her tone preoccupied rather than tetchy. ‘How many times do I have to say so we shall, just as soon as –’
    â€˜I’m a Jew – I know! As soon as! That’s a laugh! Rate things are moving, I’ll be lucky to make it before the Messiah comes.’ Taking Miriam by the shoulders, and twisting her about so that she was obliged to face him: ‘Look – it isn’t as if you’re a pillar of the synagogue. You drive on the sabbath, you don’t fast on Yom Kippur, and you’re crazy about snails – so what’s it all in aid of, this making of conditions? Some kind of fancy brush-off?’
    The other chose not to take offence; said simply, turning back towards the crosses and tilting her head the better to study the faces of the crucified, ‘In 1290, I think it was – anyway, not long before all the Jews in England were kicked out for good – they took a boatload of Angleby Jews, more than three hundred of them, saying they were going to deport them to the Low Countries. They sailed down the river to the estuary; and there, waiting for the tide to change, the