He replaced the sheet, turned to look at Scobie, who was standing at the window. Foxworth lingered at the foot of the bed, tapping one shoe on the floor, as if he were anxious to be gone from this room. Pagan moved towards the bedside lamp, studied the shade, then wandered to the other side of the room where he propped himself against the wall, arms folded.
The message on the shade was legible; a finger-painting in blood. He listened to an odd throbbing pulse at the side of his forehead.
Scobie nodded toward the lamp and said, ‘You see what I mean.’
‘Clearly,’ Pagan remarked. He gazed at the shade, glanced at Foxie, who was making a humming sound of mystification through closed lips.
‘So,’ Foxie said. ‘What does it mean? Any ideas?’
Pagan walked back to the bed. On the surface of the bedside table were traces of powder left behind by the fingerprint people. The room had been dusted, photographed, a file opened, a computer entry made: murder created its own bureaucracy. Scobie had already said that the room was an illegible chart of prints – the girl’s, her flatmate’s, those of customers drifting in and out. Scores of people had left their marks here. Some were fragmentary, others complete, it was going to take time to run them all.
‘The writing on the shade was done by somebody wearing gloves,’ Scobie said. ‘We checked that immediately. Silk gloves, to be precise.’
The gloved hand writes, Pagan thought. But whose hand was in the damned thing? He stared at the shade. A message in blood, a greeting, a puzzle, whatever you wanted to call it: it was legible, undeniable. He touched the shade. Cheap, papery, the kind you could buy in any cut-price lighting supply shop. What surprised him about the writing was its neatness, the precision of the letters. Been a long while since Heathrow, Mr Pagan. Are you still smoking? He tried to imagine a gloved index finger going back time and again to the palette of the dead girl’s body for more blood, a sick dipping motion.
Foxie asked his question again. ‘What does it mean, Frank?’
Pagan let his thoughts drift a second to the encounter last night with Brennan Carberry as if, despite the damage to his car, that brief meeting was the only bright thing that had happened to him in months. He thought about the foolishness of expecting the girl to kiss him. A phantom touch of lips. Folly. A light-headedness. He shook his head and said, ‘I don’t know, Foxie.’
Scobie cleared his throat and looked glumly at Pagan. ‘One thing. The killer knows you.’
‘My name anyway,’ said Pagan. The atmosphere in the room was making him queasy. He longed to wrench the window open and gulp cold air into his lungs.
‘What’s the reference to Heathrow, Frank?’ Foxie asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ he replied.
‘And this stuff about smoking—’
‘I’m not sure about that either.’ Pagan heard an angry raw note in his voice, directed not at Foxie’s questions but at his own inability to make sense of the message. He was too tense; the room was too small, the walls drab, the proximity of the dead girl upsetting.
‘Somebody you met before,’ Foxie suggested quietly. He studied the handwriting and added, ‘Fastidious, I’d say. An orderly mind – at least on one level. Who do you know that might fit the bill, Frank?’
Pagan drew a hand across his face. His mind was unoccupied space. He heard Scobie move slightly, the rub of his overcoat against the wall.
‘Whoever killed the girl wanted you to know,’ Scobie said.
‘Apparently,’ Pagan remarked.
‘Odd sort of business,’ said Scobie.
Odd, Pagan thought. Odd wasn’t quite the word. Somebody commits a murder and leaves behind a calling card. Because because because … He walked around the room, shaking his head. Think, Frank. Sometimes when you rummaged your memories you came up with nothing, not even elusive little shadows. He went to the door, opened it, looked across a narrow landing to a staircase. A uniformed constable stood at the top of the stairs. The landing was cold.
Killers, alas, came in a bewildering variety of forms: mild-mannered, meek; awesomely deranged, wild-eyed, babbling; they could be ugly or beautiful, they could be cunning game-players, lovers of problems, writers of confessional letters, makers of anonymous phone calls – there was no distinct pattern. If they walked round with a tattoo in the centre of their foreheads, catching them would be altogether a simple proposition. But the world, unfortunately, hadn’t been arranged that way.
Are you still smoking?
He wished he had a cigarette just then, something to play with, nicotine to take into his system. He stepped back into the room, shut the door, stared at the message. Mr Pagan. He wondered about the form of this address – sarcastic? A jibe? Why not simple Pagan? Come to that, why not Frank? He loosened the shade from the lamp and held it between his hands as if it were the skull of some long-dead creature that defied identification.
Heathrow. The middle h was faint, because the writer had run out of writing material. He’d gone back for more blood at that point, because the rest of the word – row – was distinct. You could study this message all day, you could map the killer’s hand movements, but none of that would ferry you any closer to a solution.
‘I have one suggestion,’ Foxie said. ‘You might show the writing to Gunderson.’
Hans Gunderson was a handwriting analyst who had worked in the past for the Yard on a freelance basis. Pagan had very little faith in Gunderson’s expertise. Graphology seemed to him a quasi-science, quirky, speculative. Besides, he found Gunderson at times arrogant, assertive, too unquestioning of his craft. A person’s handwriting, Gunderson had once said with outrageous seriousness, is more of a true mirror to the soul than the eyes. You talked to Gunderson, you were obliged to listen to that kind of pomposity. Handwriting analysts, phrenologists, numerologists – Pagan considered them all quacks to one degree or another.
He said, ‘You know what I think of Gunderson.’
Foxie shrugged. ‘Worth a try.’
‘It’s a bit like going to your local chiropodist and asking him to operate on a brain tumour, Foxie.’
‘Perhaps. But you’ve got nothing to lose, Frank.’
‘Except time.’ Pagan sighed. He strolled to the window, looked down into the alley below. The thought occurred to him that this room was located less than a mile from the tunnel where the explosion had taken place – and for a moment he wondered if there might be a connection between the murder of the girl and the bomb in the Tube. A cop’s mind, he thought. Always looking for connections, always searching for the adhesive that would bind one event to another – as if in the middle of mayhem there might be logic.
‘You never know. Gunderson might shed some light, Frank. Can you come up with a better alternative?’
Pagan was stalled, his memory banks down. With a great show of reluctance he agreed to Foxie’s suggestion. They would take the writing to Gunderson and see what The Guru had to say. He gave the shade to Foxie, who held it tenuously.
‘If it’s a waste of time, Foxie, I know who to blame.’
‘Isn’t that why you keep me around, Frank?’ Foxie asked. ‘I’m somebody to kick.’
Pagan looked at his associate and wondered if he detected an edge in the younger man’s voice. It was true, he supposed, that Foxie often felt the sharp end of his frustrations. But it came with the territory. It was part of the job. And Foxie knew that. Maybe, in his own headstrong fashion, he sometimes underestimated Foxworth’s sensitivity. He reached out, touched Foxie on the shoulder a second. ‘I always thought my bark was worse than my bite,’ he said.
‘Sometimes it’s vice versa,’ Foxie replied.
‘You want me to say I’m sorry?’
‘It would be out of character, Frank.’ And Foxworth, with a serious expression on his face, laughed aloud.
They left Scobie in the flat and went down into the street, where the car was parked. Foxie placed the shade delicately on the back seat and switched on the engine and started to drive
in the direction of Regent’s Park. Pagan stared ahead numbly, urging his mind into activity. He was missing something, something submerged in the drifts of memory. He was also impatient, seeing this new complication as a diversion from the business of the bomb. Once, he turned to look at the lampshade and thought how absurd it seemed, like another passenger in the car. It was almost as if the killer had foreseen the fact that this stupid commonplace shade would have to be moved and transported and studied as carefully as if it were a Dead Sea Scroll; an enjoyable little joke, if your mind had that kind of black turn.
On Gloucester Place Foxie stopped at a traffic light and turned to Pagan. ‘Well? Anything new come to mind?’
Pagan tapped his fingers on his knees. ‘I’ll tell you what I feel, Foxie. I feel stupid carrying this bloody thing across London. Why wasn’t the message left on something less ridiculous? A scrap of paper would have been perfectly acceptable. A lampshade, for Christ’s sake.’
Foxie drove on up Baker Street towards Regent’s Park. When he reached the street where Gunderson lived in the basement flat of an old Regency house, he parked the car. He took the shade from the back seat and, following Pagan, made his way down the crumbling, slippery steps that led to Gunderson’s front door. Pagan rang the door bell, waited. Gunderson, a small bald man with an expression of perpetual grumpiness, appeared. He was dressed in an old fisherman’s sweater, elbows darned; baggy corduroy trousers, ancient slippers. He smelled, curiously, of marzipan.
‘I don’t remember ordering a new lampshade,’ he said.
‘Bloody funny.’ Pagan turned, grabbed the shade from Foxie, shoved it into Gunderson’s arms.
‘You better come in,’ Gunderson said, clutching the shade. He led them along a dark corridor to his study, a dim-lit room stacked with books – many of them Gunderson’s own, which he’d had published by a vanity press.
‘Still well stocked, I see,’ Pagan remarked.
‘My time will come around,’ Gunderson said in his high-pitched voice. ‘The wheel always turns, Pagan. Always turns. Today’s cranks are tomorrow’s scientific pioneers.’
Pagan glanced at a title: My Years in Handwriting Analysis by Hans Gunderson. Hot stuff. You could see the public gobbling it up. I’ll have three, terrific Christmas gifts.
Gunderson put on a pair of glasses and set the shade down on his desk, pushing aside coffee mugs, an open can of oxtail soup in which was stuck a spoon, and a bunch of unopened envelopes of the windowed variety. ‘Now. What have we here? What have we here?’
‘What does it look like?’ Pagan asked.
Foxie, anxious to defuse Pagan’s abruptness, deferred to Gunderson in a quiet voice. ‘We need some advice on the handwriting, Hans.’
‘Mmmmmmm.’ Gunderson peered at the letters.
Heathrow, Pagan thought. Smoking. Why the hell leave any kind of message unless you liked risky games? Was the idea to leave little arrows pointing to your identity? And if that was your goal, why? Pagan’s mind floated away, out of this room, back towards the tunnel. He was restless, disturbed.
‘Written in blood,’ Gunderson said.
‘That’s an expert observation,’ Pagan remarked.
Gunderson pushed his glasses up his forehead. ‘Look. You want my opinion or not, Pagan?’
Foxie said, ‘We want your opinion, Hans.’
‘I was asking Pagan, not you.’ Gunderson squinted at Pagan. ‘Well?’
Pagan nodded his head slowly.
Gunderson said, ‘I didn’t hear you, Pagan.’
‘Yes. Yes, we want your opinion, Hans.’
Gunderson, having scored a small victory, smiled. He had tiny chipped teeth, like those of an aged rodent. ‘I know you think I’m a crank, Pagan. But handwriting analysis is respectable. I wouldn’t expect you to believe that, of course. But consider: somebody writes something, they shape their letters in a certain way, they apply different pressures at times – all of which suggests some internal state of mind. Anxiety. Insecurity. Fear. There are those in your own Scotland Yard who consider me most reliable, Pagan. And insightful. But why should I waste my time justifying myself in front of you, for God’s sake?’
Pagan had it in mind to mention a case two years ago when Gunderson had blundered in a matter of forgery, attributing handwriting to quite the wrong person. But he said nothing: what was the point? He watched Gunderson shuffle round the shade, then reach inside a drawer for a magnifying glass. The old man peered through it, his face close to the handwriting. Every now and then he whistled snatches of something tuneless or issued his drawn-out characteristic mmmmmm sound.
‘Interesting loops,’ said Gunderson. ‘This was written with enormous care by somebody who felt no pressure. Somebody unhurried. Very neat.’
Expert analysis indeed, Pagan thought. He glanced at Foxie, who was listening to old Hans with a look of concern. Often Foxie’s manners were just a little too good. He belonged, Pagan thought, in the diplomatic service, taking tea with unpredictable warlords in dry tropical places and trying to explain, in plain reasonable English, the position of Her Majesty’s Government.
‘Notice the alignment,’ Gunderson said. ‘Notice how straight it is, despite the curvature of the writing surface. The writer has envisaged invisible lines, such as you see in a child’s exercise book. This is an imaginative person. Given the medium in which the letters have been written, this imagination is also capable of great cruelty.’
Pagan frowned, wandered the room, passing the stacks of books, looking at framed diplomas on the walls, each attesting to Gunderson’s proficiency. He’d never heard of any of the institutes named on these certificates. On the bookshelves were several glass jars containing old-fashioned sweets, which presumably explained the perfume of marzipan that hung around Gunderson.
Pagan listened to Gunderson whistle; sometimes the old fellow sighed or clucked, but it was impossible to tell what these sounds meant. Little discoveries? Insights? Pagan paused by the curtained window, turned, saw Hans’s bloodshot right eye enlarged by the lens of the magnifying glass.
‘Whoever wrote this has an ambivalent attitude toward you, Pagan,’ Gunderson said.
‘How do you figure that out?’ Pagan asked.
‘It would take too long to explain to a sceptic such as yourself,’ Gunderson said. ‘But sometimes letters – how shall I put this in a way you might grasp – emit sounds, tones. You can almost hear the words. You can hear the way in which they might have been spoken. It’s like reading a poem. You get a feel for the tone of the writer’s voice. The attitude behind the language. The person who wrote this, Pagan, appears on one level to respect you. But on another level the writer means mischief toward you.’
‘Mischief?’ Pagan asked.
‘The writer wants to stir you up, to goad you.’
‘And you can tell all that from a few words?’
‘That’s only the beginning,’ said Gunderson. ‘I’ve barely begun. Keep this in mind. I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years. I like to think I’ve learned a few things along the way.’
Pagan tried to ponder Gunderson’s statement without prejudice, which wasn’t easy. Somebody who respects me but who also means me mischief. It wasn’t exactly helpful in establishing the identity of the writer. Gunderson’s description could cover a number of people, criminals he’d caught, terrorists he’d outwitted. Pagan found an armchair, sat down, crossed his legs, closed his eyes: he felt the real solution lay in the recesses of his memory, not in Hans Gunderson’s speculations. Been a long while since Heathrow, Mr Pagan. He sensed an echo, a whisper from a faraway place, but it faded out on him before he could grasp it. He got out of the chair, walked to the desk, stood directly behind Gunderson.
‘I’d say the writer isn’t British,’ Gunderson said.
‘How do you arrive at that one?’ Pagan asked.
‘A British native would be more inclined to say time instead of while. While suggests an American.’
Pagan wasn’t sure he agr
eed with this judgement, but didn’t say so. He didn’t want to get involved in a prolonged discussion about American usage of the English language with Hans. He watched as Gunderson, in a hunched position, continued to scan the message.
‘The two ells in “still” are almost twins,’ the old man said in an enthusiastic manner. ‘Same height, same range. You don’t often see that kind of exactitude.’
‘Does it mean anything?’ Foxie asked.
‘Oh, it can mean a number of things,’ Gunderson answered. Pagan could have predicted this uninformative reply, but again chose to refrain from comment.
Gunderson said, ‘It could indicate a desire for emotional balance in the writer, for one thing. It could suggest that the writer likes to weigh opposing elements in the personality – a search for symmetry that may be lacking in the writer’s life. Careful writing isn’t necessarily the work of a balanced individual. It may be quite the opposite, in fact. I have personally seen the finest copperplate style produced by psychotic personalities.’
A pontifical note had come into Gunderson’s voice. He had the bearing of a man about to launch himself into a lecture. Pagan fretted around the desk, watching Gunderson lower his face once again to the writing. After a few minutes, the old man stepped back from the lampshade and put down his magnifying glass.
‘I’ll need to spend more time on it, of course,’ he said. ‘Give me a day, I’ll write you up a full analysis.’
Pagan, yielding to a fresh burst of impatience, reached for the lampshade, picked it up, held it against his side. ‘Sorry, Hans. I can’t leave police evidence lying around unsecured. This isn’t my case anyway.’
‘That’s your prerogative, Pagan.’
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