Proust said, ‘I can’t do without you, you know.’
‘You might have to.’
‘Well, I can’t!’ She’d made him angry.
A young blonde waitress with a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder approached their table. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. ‘Tea, coffee, sandwich?’
‘Do you have green tea?’ asked Proust. When the answer was no, he produced a paper-wrapped tea bag from his jacket pocket.
Charlie couldn’t help smiling as the waitress walked away, carrying the little packet at a distance from her body as if it were a tiny, ticking bomb. ‘You brought one with you?’
‘You insisted on meeting here and I feared the worst. She’ll put milk and sugar in it, no doubt.’ Proust turned his attention back to Charlie. ‘Why did you ask me to bring this?’ He patted the book on the table.
‘I want you to look up a date for me: The ninth of August. When we were talking about Gibbs’ wedding present, you said something about the date line on a sundial: that it represents two days of every year, not just one. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Proust’s eyes shot towards the large slab of stone and metal that was propped against the wall. He looked at it for a few seconds, then looked back at Charlie. ‘Yes. Each date has a twin, as it were, at some other time of the year. On those two days, the declination of the sun is exactly the same.’
‘If one of those dates is the ninth of August, what’s the other? What’s the twin?’
Proust picked up his book and consulted the index. He turned to the relevant page. Stared at it for a long time. ‘The fourth of May.’
Charlie’s heart flipped over in her chest. She’d been right. Her crazy idea hadn’t been crazy at all.
‘The day Robert Haworth died,’ said Proust, his tone matter-of-fact. ‘What’s the significance of the ninth of August?’
‘Robert Haworth’s birthday,’ Charlie told him. What had Naomi said? Because that’s when it began.
It’s not over yet. She’d said that as well. But now it was. Robert Haworth was dead. His birthday was twinned with the date of his death, joined forever, on the date line of this sundial in front of Charlie.
Docet umbra: the shadow informs.
‘Naomi made this before Robert died,’ said Charlie.
‘Naturally, of respiratory failure,’ Proust reminded her. ‘That was the verdict at the inquest.’
His green tea arrived. Without milk or sugar.
‘I think it’ll look very handsome on the wall of our nick.’ The Snowman sniffed his drink cautiously, then took a sip. ‘And, given my colossal workload, I might well be too busy to notice, on the fourth of May next year, if the shadow of the nodus is on the date line. And even if I’m not too busy and I do remember to look, the day might be overcast. If there’s no sun, there are no shadows.’
Does that mean, Charlie wondered, that if there are plenty of shadows, there must be a source of light somewhere?
‘There’s precious little man-made justice in this world,’ said Proust. ‘I like to think of Robert Haworth’s death as a piece of natural justice. His body gave up the struggle, Sergeant. Mother Nature corrected one of her mistakes, that’s all.’
Charlie bit her lip. ‘With a little help,’ she mumbled.
‘True enough. Juliet Haworth almost certainly contributed to the outcome.’
‘And she’s going to go down because of that. Is that fair, sir?’
‘She attacked Haworth in the heat of the moment. She’ll be treated sympathetically.’ Proust sighed. ‘Come back to your team, Charlie. You won’t change my mind about anything to do with work in a crowded, noisy café. I can’t think properly with La Traviata screeching in the background.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
The inspector nodded. ‘That’ll do for now.’ He leaned over and ran his fingers across the sundial’s smooth stone surface. ‘I’d chosen my motto, you know, for the sundial I wanted. Before Superintendent Barrow put his foot down. Depresso resurgo.’
‘Sounds a bit depressing,’ said Charlie.
‘It isn’t. You don’t know what it means.’
How could she not ask, with him sitting there like a schoolboy who’d done his homework, so evidently eager to tell her? ‘Well?’
Proust gulped down the remains of his tea. ‘I set, then rise again, Sergeant,’ he said, keeping his eyes on Charlie as he lifted the wet bag out of the cup with his spoon. He held it up, a gesture of triumph. ‘I set, then rise again.’
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to the following people, all of whom helped a great deal: Peter Straus, Rowan Routh, Carolyn Mays, Kate Howard, Karen Geary, Ariane Galy, the whole team at Hodder, Lisanne Radice, Mark and Cal Pannone, Jenny Geras, Adèle Geras, Norman Geras, Chris Gribble, Tom Palmer, James Nash, Ray French, Guy Martland, Harriet James, John Davis, Wendy Wootton, Tony Faulkner, Suzie Crookes, Susan Richardson and Dan Jones.
The Truth-Teller's Lie Page 37