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illicit material into the house and he’d threatened the security of the only things she cared for, home and family. How could he have put everything at risk? She didn’t doubt he loved her after his fashion, and she never questioned his love of the children. But the marriage had turned cold.
    Flora. My flower . Flower of ice, she thought. Petals dipped in frost.
    I gave you my heart, Jackie Mallon. And you dropped it.
    Three weeks after The Raid, weeks of arguments followed by fragile truces and promises of future good behaviour, weeks of madness and acrimony, she and Eddie had flown to America.
    Without Joyce.
    Flora had made a deal with the devil and she’d never stopped regretting it. Not in all the years since she’d left Scotland.
    She wandered through the greenhouse with the half-drunk shot of Absolut in her hand. She wondered what Christopher Caskie looked like now. They’d corresponded a dozen or more times through the years. His letters were usually in response to her inquiries about Joyce: was she doing all right? In his last letter Caskie had written that his wife had died of cancer.
    A blackbird flew over the greenhouse and was briefly reflected in sunlit glass. From inside the house the radio played Artie Shaw’s rendition of ‘There’s A Small Hotel’.

6
    Captain Zeke ‘Marvel’ Stock, Eddie’s superior, was so big and wide that some of the men in his command referred to him as the Eclipse. He weighed an imposing three hundred pounds plus, much of it solid muscle. Eddie sometimes thought of the captain as an African tribal chief, a man you expected to arrive at a crime scene held aloft by a congregation of bearers.
    Presently, Marvel was motionless under a traffic signal, and the red stop light gave the impression that his face was smeared with the bloody innards of a goat sacrificed in his honour moments before.
    Eddie gazed at the dead man in an expensive overcoat who lay face-down in the middle of the street.
    Marvel twisted his huge neck and scanned the grey edifice of a twelve-storey office building. ‘A jumper,’ he said.
    â€˜He’s sidewalk salsa all right,’ Bobby Figaro said. Figaro was Marvel’s right-hand, yes-man and all-round gofer.
    â€˜Anyone got his name?’ Marvel asked.
    Figaro had it, of course. Figaro always had the scoop. ‘John Boscoe Bentley, an address on East 32nd. According to what was in his wallet, he worked down on Wall Street for a brokerage firm called Something Somebody and Something Else Incorporated. I gather from a preliminary inquiry – to wit, a phone call to the company CEO – he was something of a player. How he came to be on the ledge of this particular building,’ and Figaro shrugged.
    â€˜Coulda been pushed,’ Marvel said.
    â€˜All possibilities will be explored, Captain,’ said Figaro, with his ever-ready halogen-bright smile.
    Detectives and uniforms were already inside the building, knocking on doors, asking questions; because it was only seven a.m., the building was largely unoccupied save for custodians and a cleaning crew, also a few lonesome workaholics, some of them demented guys who’d been in the place all night trying to balance ledgers or make sense out of spreadsheets.
    Mallon stared at the corpse and wondered about a life terminated this way – whether he jumped or was pushed, it was a hell of a place for a guy to die; the hard pavement of a city street. He thought of his father and realized how few details he had about the old man’s death. Was he gunned down in the street? At home? Were there witnesses? What calibre weapon? The questions buzzed him like gnats.
    He watched Marvel yawn. It was an awesome sight; the mouth opened like a giant oyster about to yield a pearl. Gold fillings flashed in his mouth, which became one vast maw. ‘I need coffee,’ Marvel said. ‘Somebody be good enough to get the captain a shot of strong java,