Harry blew a perfect smoke ring. “It’s getting tiresome. Any woman murdered within thirty miles of London you think is down to me.”

Jury pulled over the bottle of Burgundy, looked hard at the label (as if he’d know). “Are there any witnesses to place you at any stop on your journey back to Belgravia?”

“No stops. I got home before eleven. That’s it.”

“You didn’t stop in at the Black Cat?”

Harry frowned. “In Chesham? No, of course not.”

“You’ve never been there?”

Harry sighed. “To save you the trouble of taking my picture so as to show it around-or stealing one from my house-I have been to the Black Cat. Back in… March, or early April. I’ll say this-” His smile was gleeful. “The motive is going to be bloody hard to pin down-I don’t mean my motive, as I didn’t kill her, and consequently had no motive. No, you’ve got not one, but two victims, haven’t you? The glamour girl escort and the plain Jane librarian.”

“How do you know about the librarian?”

“Well, it just so happens I can read.” Neatly, Harry folded the tabloid at his elbow and slid it in front of Jury.

Who, irritated again, ignored it. Instead, he spoke to Trevor, who had come down the bar from the crowded far end. “Couple of fingers of something incredibly strong, Trev.”

“Right.” Trevor moved away.

Harry said, “This young woman-and this is all according to the Daily News, whose rigorous journalistic practices leave no doubt as to the truth of their reporting-”

“Shut up, Harry. Thanks,” he said to Trevor, who placed a glass of tar-dark whiskey before Jury.

Harry did not shut up; he smiled at the idea of it. “The paper showed pictures of her-beautiful woman, wouldn’t you say? And then today, of a picture of that lovely girl looking much plainer. But she was clearly not working as a librarian in that dress she was wearing.”

“You didn’t know her, then?”

“I didn’t know either of them.”

“Then who was your date?”

Harry looked puzzled. “My ‘date’? I didn’t have one.”

“I believe the Rexroths think you did,” Jury lied.

Harry studied the very devil out of his cigarette. “Am I to be responsible for everybody’s errant thinking? If they thought it, they were wrong.” He paused and blew another smoke ring.

Their perfection annoyed Jury no end.

Then Harry said, “We always think of disguise as elaboration, for some reason.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“No. I suppose you don’t, as you’ve been hopeless sorting my own case.”

“I can’t imagine why, given you’re a pathological liar. It’s hard to put two and two together when in your case they make three.”

“Trevor…” Harry raised his voice but kept it under a shout. “Give me a bottle of the Musigny. You know the one.”

“I’ve a nice half-bottle of that,” said Trevor, coming nearer.

“Not a whole one?”

“Well, yes, I could dust one off if you want to spend the extra hundred quid.”

Harry swiped ash from his cigarette off the counter. “Nothing is too good for my friend here. So bring it on.”

Harry was heavily invested in wine.

“Don’t do it for me,” said Jury, raising his glass of whiskey, of which only a shadow remained.

Harry was busy with another smoke ring. “It’s all about you, isn’t it?”

“You bet.”

“So, tell me. Have you sorted it?”

“What?”

“My God, but you have the attention span of a flea. Mungo would have worked it out by now.”

Jury looked around. “I know. Where is Mungo?”

“Home, being extremely busy about something. He gets like that.”

“Tell me, do you keep Mungo around because he’s so independent? Or is he independent because he’s stuck with you?”

“Both.”

“Do you have to hedge every bet? Can’t you just pick one or the other?”

“And you a detective superintendent. You can’t go much higher. What’s above you?”

“Chief superintendent.”

“What’s above him?”

“Divisional commander. London ’s divided into areas. But you know that.”

“I don’t know nuffin’, mate. I do know the City of London has its own police force.”

“A friend of mine, Mickey Haggerty-” Jury stopped. He had no idea why he’d brought Mickey up. Jury had returned to that dock many times in dreams. In dreams he and Mickey would walk back from the dock, toward the lights of the City, arms flung around each other’s shoulders.

“Something wrong?”

“Sad end of a friendship. One of us died.”

“You sure it wasn’t both of you?”

Jury flinched. Harry could be nerve-racking at times in his prescience. He wondered if it was true, that part of him had really died on that dock on the Thames.

Trevor was back with the wine and the glasses. He poured a mite into Harry’s glass, and Harry raised, sniffed, and tasted. “It’s worth every penny, Trevor.” Trevor filled both glasses.

“Now, let’s get back to it. You’ve got a story-”

Everything was a story to Harry. It wasn’t a case Jury was dealing with, but a story.

“-about a young woman found murdered in the grounds of the Black Cat in Chesham, dressed in a gown by Yves Saint Laurent and shoes by Jimmy Choo-”

“And the shoe designer was not in the paper, either. There was a picture of the dress and the shoes, but Mr. Choo was not mentioned.”

Harry’s sigh was dramatically Harry’s. “I live on the fringes of Upper Sloane Street. I’ve often walked by Jimmy Choo and stared at his shoes enough to think I’d recognize them. Like you, I found the way she was dressed fascinating. All I had to do was go online-it’s called the Internet-and there were the shoes. Six, seven hundred quid, I think. Okay, now, we’ve got the resplendently dressed young woman, who is also the quite unsplendid little librarian. That’s the backstory-”

“I’m aware of the backstory.” Jury signaled Trevor.

“Good. The question, your question: why would a plain little librarian keep going off to London to work for an escort service, trick herself out in expensive finery, and go to a lot of trouble to keep her London life a secret?”

Jury twisted the stem of his glass around in the accumulated condensation on the bar. “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? The thing is, you’re not looking at this problem the other way round.”

“What other way?”

“It’s as I said before: we always seem to look at disguise as elaboration-the fright wig, the chalk white face, the painted face. Makeup. Remember what Hamlet said to Ophelia?”

“I’m trying my level best.”

“‘God gave you one face and you paint yourself another.’ We speak of making ourselves up, not down-simple librarian turns into gorgeous call girl. How do you know it wasn’t the other way round? That it wasn’t the librarian hiding herself in the hooker, but the hooker hiding herself in the librarian? The librarian was the disguise.”

Jury looked at him. “If that’s the case-”

“The librarian wasn’t keeping the escort secret; the escort was keeping the librarian a secret. The face that was kept plain and unadorned-that was the life to be kept secret.” He turned in his chair and looked at Jury. “So you’d better get your skates on, pal. You could have a long way to go.”