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wake up piecemeal from a troubled sleep.
    The withdrawal pangs hit me again, harder than ever, prickling my skin and covering me in an instant with cold sweat. I hardly even noticed. That note, that elusive ostinato, remained wedged in the doorway of my mind like an overlarge piece of furniture that couldn’t be pulled or pushed. It wouldn’t come into clear focus and it wouldn’t leave me alone.
    I took out my whistle, put it to my mouth and blew a few random chords. A, C and then G took me by a sort of natural progression into ‘Henry Martin’, a wholesome little tune about murder, exploitation and the irreversible loss of innocence.
     
    There were three brothers in merry Scotland,
    In merry Scotland there were three,
    And they did cast lots as to which one should go
    To turn robber all on the salt sea.
    When Henry Martin was swinging from the gallows tree, I moved on to another equally pleasant ditty, and then another after that. The evening wore on into night as I played, and an unsettling feeling crept over me by degrees: a solid conviction based on the most fleeting and ephemeral of impressions.
    Imagine you woke up to find yourself a prisoner in an unfamiliar room, in total darkness, with your hands and feet tied. Unable to move, unable to see, you’d have no way of finding out what kind of place you were in. But when you shouted for help, the echoes of your own voice would come back to you, and give you some sense of the size of the room: the extent and maybe even the shape of the volume of air that surrounded you.
    That was kind of what I felt right then: playing the whistle woke up my death-sense, and my death-sense told me that the world had changed. The echoes of the simple, dolorous tune described a space that was subtly, infinitesimally altered from what I knew, what I’d expected. I wondered what in Hell that might mean.
    Disconcerted, I lowered the whistle. I was about to try another tune when I saw Pen standing in the doorway, staring in at me. There was a tension in her pose and in her expression. ‘You’re upsetting the birds,’ she said.
    I put the whistle down on the table beside my bed. ‘Everyone’s a critic,’ I deadpanned.
    She stared at the whistle for a moment, then shook her head, visibly giving it up. She turned away, towards the stairs, but an afterthought struck her and she stopped on the top step, looking back at me over her shoulder. ‘You had some calls,’ she said.
    ‘When I was . . . out?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘Anything I should know about?’
    ‘Some woman named Pax. She called lots of times. She said she had some news for you.’
    Trudie could keep on stewing. There was nothing she could tell me that I wanted to hear. Her heart belonged to Mother Church, and I wasn’t interested in the rest of her, shapely though it undoubtedly was.
    ‘What else?’
    ‘Someone from the Brent Library Service. A woman . . .’
    ‘Susan Book.’
    ‘Sounds about right.’
    That was more interesting. Susan is married to Juliet, and Juliet is always interesting, just by virtue of being Juliet.
    ‘And Gary Coldwood,’ Pen finished up. ‘He rang just now, but he couldn’t stay on.’
    ‘How come?’
    ‘He said he was on his way to a murder scene. And he wanted you to read it for him.’

3
    Which brings me back around to where I was, more or less: standing in Ginny Parris’s drying blood and swallowing the bitter pill of her true identity with a growing sense of dread.
    ‘Rafi’s girlfriend.’ I repeated the words.
    ‘Yeah,’ Coldwood confirmed with a laconic nod. ‘I note the pained emphasis, Castor. I know Pen Bruckner is the only woman who deserves that label in your book, but this is all ancient history now. Ginny Parris was named on the incident sheet when Ditko was first brought into the Stanger for psych evaluation. Her statement was still there in the paperwork, and that’s how she described herself. Relationship to patient: girlfriend.’
    He stared at me for a moment,