“Now. Yes, yes, yes?” he sang out happily once his customer went on her way with her cigarillos. “How may I help? Cigars? Cigarillos? Tobacco? Snuff? What will it be?”

“Conversation,” Isabelle told him. “Police,” she added and showed her ID. Lynley did likewise.

“I’m all agog,” the young man said. He gave his name as J-a-y-s-o-n Druther. His father, he revealed, was the owner of the shop. As had been his grandfather and his grandfather’s father before him. “What we don’t know about tobacco isn’t worth knowing.” He himself was just beginning in the business, having insisted on taking a degree in marketing before he “joined the ranks of those who labour.” He wished to expand, but his father disagreed. “Heaven forbid that we should invest in something not an absolute certainty,” he added with a dramatic shudder. “Now…” He spread his hands-they were white and smooth, Isabelle noted, very likely the objects of weekly manicures-and he indicated he was ready for whatever they asked of him. Lynley stood slightly behind her, which allowed her to do the honours. She liked this.

“Jemima Hastings,” she began. “I expect you know her, don’t you?”

“Rather.” J-a-y-s-o-n extended the word into raw and thur, and he gave emphasis to the second syllable. He said he wouldn’t mind having a word with dear Jemima, as she was the reason he was having to work “all sorts of mad hours just now. Where is the wretched minx, by the way?”

The wretched minx was dead, Isabelle told him.

His jaw dropped open. His jaw snapped shut. “Good God,” he said. “Not a road accident? She wasn’t hit by a car? Heavens, there’s not been another terrorist attack, has there?”

“She’s been murdered, Mr. Druther,” Lynley said quietly. Jayson clocked his highbrow accent and fingered an earlobe in response.

“In Abney Park Cemetery,” Isabelle added. “The papers have indicated a murder there. Do you read the papers, Mr. Druther?”

“God no,” he said. “No tabloids, no broadsheets, and definitely no television or radio news. I vastly prefer to live in my own cloud cuckoo land. Anything else sends me into such depression that I can’t get out of bed in the morning and the only thing that cheers me up is Mum’s ginger biscuits. But if I eat them, I’m prone to weight gain, my clothes cease to fit, I must purchase anew, and…Surely, you get the idea, yes? Abney Park Cemetery? Where’s Abney Park Cemetery?”

“North London.”

“North London?” He made it sound like Pluto. “My God. What was she doing there? Was she mugged? Kidnapped? She wasn’t…She wasn’t interfered with, was she?”

Isabelle thought that having her jugular vein ripped open was fairly well interfered with, although she knew that wasn’t what Jayson meant. She said, “We’ll leave it at murdered for the present. How well did you know Jemima?”

Not particularly well, as things developed. It seemed that Jayson had spoken to Jemima by phone but had actually only seen her twice since they shared no work hours and, truth to tell, nothing else either. He knew her more from these than from her actual person, he said. These turned out to be a small stack of postcards. Jayson drew them from a cubbyhole near the till, perhaps eight of them in all. They comprised the image that Deborah St. James had taken of Jemima Hastings, undoubtedly sold like other images from the collection at the National Portrait Gallery’s gift shop. Someone had printed “Have You Seen This Woman” in black marker pen on the front of each card. On the reverse side was a telephone number with “Please Phone” scrawled above it.

Paolo had brought them in for Jemima, Jayson revealed. He knew that much because on the days that he worked and Jemima did not, Paolo di Fazio stopped at the shop anyway if he’d found more cards. This particular set Paolo had delivered several days ago, although Jemima hadn’t been there to receive them. Jayson reckoned she had been destroying them as they’d been delivered, since more than once he’d found their shredded remains in the rubbish on the days when he himself worked.

“I think it was some sort of ritual for her,” he said.

Paolo di Fazio. He was one of the lodgers. Isabelle recalled the name from Barbara Havers’ report of her conversation with Jemima Hastings’ landlady. She said, “Does Mr. di Fazio work nearby?”

“He does. He’s the mask man.”

“The masked man?” Isabelle asked. “What on earth-”

“No, no. Not masked. Mask. He creates masks. He’s got a stall over in the market hall. He’s very good. He’s done one of me, actually. They’re a bit of a souvenir of…well, more than a souvenir, really. I think he has a bit of a thing for Jemima, if you ask me. I mean, why else would he be scurrying in and out of the shop with postcards he’s collected for her?”

“Anyone else come looking for her? On her days off when you were here, that is?” Isabelle asked.

He shook his head. “Nary a soul,” he told them. “Only Paolo.”

“What about people she associated with, here at the market?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know them, dear heart, if there are any. There may be, of course, but as I’ve said, we worked on different days, so…?” He shrugged. “Paolo could tell you. If he will, that is.”

“Why wouldn’t he? Is there something about Paolo we ought to know before we speak to him?”

“Gracious, no. I didn’t mean to imply…Well, I did get the impression he watched her rather closely, if you know what I mean. He did ask about her, much like you. Did anyone stop in to the shop looking for her, asking about her, meeting her, waiting for her, that sort of thing…”

“How did she come to be working here?” Lynley asked the question, turning from an examination of the Cuban cigars in the large display case.

“Job Centre,” Jayson said. “And I can’t tell you which one because they’re all computerised now, aren’t they, so she could have come to us from Blackpool, for all I know. We advertised the job with the centre and in she came. Dad interviewed her and hired her on the spot.”

“We’ll want to speak to him.”

“With Dad? Why? Heavens, you’re not thinking…” Jayson laughed, then whoopsed and covered his mouth. He arranged his features into a suitably lugubrious expression. “Sorry. I was just picturing Dad as a murderer. I expect that’s why you want to speak with him, isn’t it? To get his alibi? Isn’t that what you do?”

“We do indeed. We’ll need yours as well.”

“My alibi?” A hand pressed to his chest. “I have no idea where Ashley Park is. And anyway, if Jemima was there and it was during shop hours that she was done in, then I would have been here.”

“It’s Abney Park,” Isabelle informed him. “North London. Stoke Newington, to be precise, Mr. Druther.”

“Wherever. I would have been here. From half-past nine until half-past six. Until eight if we’re talking about a Wednesday. Are we? Because as I told you in the beginning, I don’t read the papers and I’ve no idea-”

“Start,” Isabelle instructed.

“What?”

“The papers. Start reading the papers, Mr. Druther. You’ll be amazed by what you can find inside them. Now tell us again where Paolo di Fazio might be found.”

HE WONDERED IF they were seraphim. There was something about them that marked them as different. They were not mortal. He could see that. The real question, then, was what type were they? Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities? Good, bad, warrior, guardian? Archangels, even, like Raphael, Michael, or Gabriel? Archangels that scholars and theologians as yet knew nothing of? Angels of the highest order, perhaps, come to make war with forces so evil that only a sword held in the hand of a creature of light could possibly defeat it?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell.

He’d assumed guardian about himself, but he’d been wrong. He saw that he was meant to be Michael’s warrior, but when he saw it, it was far too late.

But watching over has power…