“And a contact phone number?” Jackson reeled off a number. Martin wondered if it was genuine.

“Oh, by the way,” Jackson said casually to “Maggie,” “I’m an old acquaintance of Terry Smith’s from way back, you don’t know where I can get hold of him, do you? It would be great to catch up.”

A look of distaste passed across “Maggie’s” face. “I’ve no idea where Terry is today.” A mobile started to ring, and she dug into her handbag and said, “Excuse me a minute,”and went outside. To Martin’s surprise Jackson leaped like a cat burglar over to the filing cabinet and started raking through it.

“I think that’s illegal,” Martin said.

“I think you’re right.”

“I thought you used to be a policeman.”

“I did.”

These were the kinds of circumstances that made Martin feel nervous, and he stood anxiously in the doorway and watched “Maggie” pacing around as she talked into her phone. She was having to raise her voice, apparently because of a poor signal, and stopped every few seconds to say, “Are you still there?” He heard her say, “He’s in Thurso, apparently. I know, I don’t believe it ei-ther. I think he’s abandoned me, after all his promises.” Her face seemed to collapse as she talked. She finished the call and dabbed at her eyes.

“She’s coming back!” Martin hissed at Jackson.

By the time she walked back into the Portakabin, her mask firmly back in place, Jackson was engrossed in a brochure con-taining photographs of the various Hatter Homes on offer. “They’re all so lovely,” he said, “I don’t see how I could possibly choose.” He sighed and shook his head. He wasn’t the least bit convincing. “Anyway,” he said, turning to Martin, “back to the Batmobile, Robin.”

“Here, I think,” Martin said, drawing to a halt in front of a pair of electronic gates that stood wide-open. They were in the Grange, at an address that Jackson had apparently stolen from Maggie’s filing cabinet. PROVIDENCE, a sign said on the gate.

“Who lives here?” Martin asked.

“Graham Hatter. Owner of Hatter Homes. He employs Ter-ence Smith, so I’m thinking that he might know his where-abouts.”

“And who’s Terence Smith?”

“It’s a long story, Martin.”

I’ve got time, Martin thought, but he didn’t say it. Time was the only thing he did have, nanosecond after nanosecond ticking down. “I’ll just stay here while you go in.” He yawned. He won-dered if the Irn-Bru cocktail that the so-called Paul Bradley had given him had permanently affected his metabolism in some way. One minute he was so edgy he was twitching, the next he was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

“Won’t be long,” Jackson said.

Martin looked through his glove compartment for something to read. All he could find was a wad of flyers for Richard’s show- miniature versions of his COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND poster- that he must have left in there on Tuesday.

He closed his eyes and was just falling into a sickly doze when he suddenly heard a familiar, unmistakable tune. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up like bristles. The Robin Hood theme song wafted in through the open car window. His heart bumped against his chest wall. Richard Mott’s phone was ringing. In the street. Close by. Martin spun round looking for the source of the fugi-tive theme. A blue Honda had driven up and parked behind his own car. A blue Honda. A blue Honda? No, there were thousands of blue Hondas around, it wasn’t necessarily the one that belonged to the insane baseball-bat-wielding driver. The theme to Robin Hood started up again. Martin opened the door and stumbled out of his car. There was no sign of anyone. Then he spotted him, walking up the driveway of the Hatters’ house, the phone to his ear. It really was the Honda driver from Tuesday. The Honda driver had Richard Mott’s phone. How could that be, unless he had killed Richard Mott? And why would he kill Richard Mott- unless it was the Honda driver who had picked up his laptop, found his address, and come to Merchiston to kill Martin. Martin felt as if the blood had just left his body.

Martin was expecting him to ring the doorbell and announce himself in the usual way, but instead the Honda driver crossed the lawn and stood in front of the French windows. He finished his call and produced the baseball bat, again out of nowhere. He raised it high as if he were preparing to hit for the outfield, but instead he smashed it into the glass of the windows.

44

This was the deal. When Celine Dion had sung her lungs out, when Tatiana had eaten her way through the fruit bowl, she reached into her bra, conjured out a Memory Stick, and said, “Do you know what this is, Gloria?”

“A Memory Stick, I believe,” Gloria said.

“Whose Memory Stick, Gloria? Whose?”

“Yours?” Gloria hazarded, wondering if she was being subjected to some form of Slavic Socratic irony. “I know it’s not mine,” she added.

Tatiana handed her the Memory Stick and said, “No, it’s ours, Gloria. You share with me, fifty-fifty.”

“Share what?”

“Everything.”

The Magus’ book. Graham’s secret accounts, all contained on one tiny tablet of plastic that Tatiana had taken from the pocket of Graham’s summer-weight wool, as he lay flapping like a fish on his Apex bed.

“I thought you tried to resuscitate him,” Gloria said thought-fully. Tatiana made a sad clown face. “Don’t,” Gloria said with a shudder.

There had been something on the radio this morning about horses. Someone had left dozens of horses locked up in a stable and gone away and all the horses had starved to death. Gloria thought about the big brown eyes of horses, she thought about Black Beauty, the saddest book ever written. She thought about all the horses with sad brown eyes you could help if you had a lot of money. The headless kittens, the Sellotaped budgies, the mangled boys.

“Hm,” she said.

Gloria gazed thoughtfully at her screen saver of border collie puppies for a while and then tapped the space bar and brought her computer back to life. She typed in “Ozymandias” and, just like that, she entered into Graham’s occult books.

“How did you know the password?” she asked Tatiana.

“I know everything.” Gloria could think of a lot of things that Tatiana probably didn’t know (how to make scones, the whereabouts of the Scilly Isles, the terror of aging) but didn’t bother challenging her. She was oddly touched that Graham had used the title of the Shelley poem for his password. Perhaps he had, after all, appreciated the gift she had given him. Or perhaps he was just looking for the most obscure word he could find.

Graham’s Memory Stick contained a lot of the humdrum of commerce-feasibility studies, projected figures, tight margins. The world seemed full of so many vague concepts, but you had to wonder-were these actually important? (Were they even real?) Shouldn’t a person’s life be based on simple, more tangible things-a bed of sweet peas staked in a garden border, a child on a swing, a certain slant of winter light. A basket of kittens.

There was a dismayingly large cache of e-mails that Graham had saved from Maggie Louden, little electronic billet-doux of the “My darling, what we have is so wonderful” type. Tatiana read, in a drawling vampiric accent that rendered the sentiments ludicrous, “Have you talked about the divorce with Gloria yet? You promised you would talk to her this weekend.”

Attached to one of the e-mails was a folder of photographs, some of Graham and Maggie, although mostly of Maggie alone, taken by Graham, presumably. Gloria couldn’t remember the last time that Graham had taken her photograph.

“Voddabitch,” Gloria said.

He had taken Maggie to York Races for Ladies Day, an outing that Gloria herself had suggested to Graham as something they might do together, “a day out.” Maggie and Graham had stayed at Middlethorpe Hall (“Really lovely, darling.You are a god”). He had bought her a pink diamond-“Gorgeous,gorgeous,gorgeous.It’s huge! (Like you!) Someone’s going to get a treat tonight!”