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white teeth, she had an impression of darkness. She thought perhaps he was a delivery man, because he wore a scuffed brown leather satchel across his chest.
    ‘You are looking for this?’ he asked in good English. He was younger than she, but only by a year or two, perhaps twenty-eight. Mediterranean colouring, black cropped hair, black eyebrows almost touching green eyes, curiously baby-faced. He was slender, dressed in jeans, a navy blue bomber jacket and pristine white sneakers, entirely unthreatening, yet there was something studied in the way he regarded her.
    ‘Thank you, I thought I’d lost it.’ She took back the bag and instinctively drew Ryan to her side. The park had emptied now, and the evening felt suddenly cooler.
    ‘It looks very nice here, very safe, but you must still be careful,’ he told her. ‘Thieves come over the border from Italy, and there are Gypsies. They will take anything, especially during a saint’s parade.’
    ‘I’ll remember that—’
    ‘Johann. My name is Johann Bellocq.’ His smile faded, and he turned, walking away as abruptly as he had appeared.
    ‘Let’s go and eat.’ She patted Ryan on the head, but looked back at Johann Bellocq as they crossed the deserted main road.

6

    LAST DAY TOGETHER
    The sky above the unit glowed with an eerie sulphurous light. Behind the cardinal tiles of Mornington Crescent station, the detectives had arrived for the start of a dark, miserable week.
    ‘We’re a public service; you can’t just shut us down willy-nilly,’ complained Bryant, cracking his briar pipe down on the mantelpiece in an effort to unbung it.
    ‘I’m not doing this out of caprice,’ Land told him. ‘Your IT chap, Mr Banbury, wants to upgrade the PCU’s computer system and link it to the Met’s area-investigation files. Apparently it’s not going to cost anything because he’s downloading some dubious piece of software to do so.’ He eyed the mountainous stacks of books bending Bryant’s shelves. ‘It all sounds very dodgy, but I harbour a fantasy about you running a paper-free office.’
    Bryant blew hard into his pipe bowl, scattering bits of burnt tobacco onto Land’s head. ‘Come off it, Raymondo, you know there’s no such thing. Be honest, you just fancy a few days off with your feet up. I need another decent case for my biography. Just think how disappointed my readers would be to find an entry saying February nineteenth, all murder investigations stopped due to Acting Head Raymond Land’s need for a lie-down.’
    ‘That’s another thing I’ve been meaning to speak to you about,’ said Land. ‘Your biography. I read your account of the business you’ve chosen to call
Seventy-Seven Clocks
—’
    ‘What were you doing reading my notes?’ asked Bryant, appalled. ‘That’s a work in progress.’
    ‘Too right it is. Murderous barbers and starving tigers? You’ve made most of it up. You can’t go around doing that.’
    ‘I may have ameliorated some parts for dramatic effect,’ Bryant admitted, ‘a bit of creative licence. It would have been a rather boring case history otherwise.’
    ‘But you’re passing it off as fact, man! All right, it’s true that a painting at the National Gallery was vandalised, and that an upper-class family was ultimately to blame, but the whole thing reads like some cod-Victorian potboiler, and to paint yourself as the hero of the hour is an outrageous falsification. We’ll become a laughingstock if anyone reads about this. What were you thinking of?’
    ‘The royalties, obviously. You really shouldn’t take these things so seriously. The public likes a good story.’
    ‘That’s all very well, but such fevered imaginings could destroy the credibility of the unit,’ snapped Land. ‘You’d be lost without the PCU. You’ve nowhere else to go.’
    ‘I say, that’s a bit below the belt. Actually, I have got somewhere to go, and I’m thinking of taking John with me.’ Removing a packet from his pocket, he