“I wasn’t planning on ordering that this time.”

“Sure you were.” Jury sipped tea from the thimble of a cup.

Wiggins was silent, put down the menu with a martyred sigh. “I’ll have the crispy fish, I think.”

The woman’s nod was closer to a bow. She padded off.

It was a little like their own private cabaret, for the next person to show up was Danny Wu, the owner. Today he was wearing Hugo Boss, more constructed than Armani, another designer Danny favored. He was as good as any model. With his dove gray suit he wore a shirt the shade of a blue iris, a tie several shades darker. The only person Jury knew of with such sartorial elegance was Marshall Trueblood. Trueblood, though, sometimes tipped the scales into flamboyance, which Danny didn’t. Both of them made Jury think that perhaps he should revisit his own wardrobe, until he thought, What wardrobe?

“Are you here professionally?”

“No, we’re here amateurishly. We seem to have caved completely in discovering who left the dead man on your doorstep.” That investigation had been going on for months now, booted over to the drug squad, then back to CID, given the Met’s conviction that Danny was a serious contender for London ’s drug king-a conviction Jury had found dubious at least and ridiculous at best. Danny was too smart for that crown (which would rest extremely uneasily on one’s head); he was also too fastidious to shoot a man in his own restaurant. Jury went on: “No one’s sussed it, Danny, why he was killed here.”

“This is Soho, remember? You’ll find bodies on a lot of doorsteps. Soho is no stranger to murder.”

“Thanks for that lesson in social dynamics. I hadn’t heard.”

Danny sported a smile.

Jury started to say something, then stopped when he saw Phyllis Nancy shoving past the queue and coming toward them. “Phyllis!”

She looked worn. It would take a lot of wearing to make her look that way.

“Ah, the beautiful medical examiner,” said Danny, who immediately pulled a chair round from another table.

Phyllis thanked him, and Danny bowed out gracefully. It would have been clear to him that Phyllis had something to report.

“I thought you’d be here,” she said. “I’ve just come from hospital. I’m sorry, Richard, but Lu Aguilar has sunk into a coma. It happened this morning.”

Jury looked at Phyllis, shocked, but the shock was not only for Lu’s condition; some was for his own response to it. In that brutally honest moment when one first hears of someone’s misfortune and before one can throw up defenses against one’s own selfishness and insensitivity-feelings that constitute a person’s image of himself as a good and caring person-in that single swift moment, what he felt was relief. That moment had to be drowned, sunk from consciousness. He was on his feet.

Phyllis clamped her hand around his wrist. “There’s nothing you can do; she won’t know you’re there.”

No, he thought in a cold assessment of this new picture of himself, but I’ll know.

Then the old Jury slipped back in place; he reconstructed his old self, his self of ten seconds ago, a caring man who deeply wanted Lu Aguilar to recover and take up her old life, or at least manage the new life in another country.

He left Ruiya and the car to Wiggins and flagged down a taxi.

At the nurses’ station, the doctor had told him that the prospects of Lu’s coming out of the coma were not especially good. “Still, don’t lose hope; people do come out. Usually within two or three weeks. If not by then, well, it’s a safe bet they won’t at all. It can be less or more devastating.”

Less or more. For God’s sake, that about covered it, didn’t it?

And the doctor told him something else: “She did not want heroic measures taken.”

“What do you mean?” Jury knew exactly what the doctor meant. But he wanted to distance himself from the meaning. He literally stepped back.

The doctor was kind-eyed and rather young. He had slid a paper from a folder and passed it to Jury. “She doesn’t want to be kept alive by machines.”

Everything in him rebelled against this. “Heroic measures.” What a stunning euphemism.

White. That was all he could see, as if he had stumbled into some polar country: the corridors, the walls, the sheets, her face.

The silence in her room was all there was. Except for the steady ping or hiccup of the monitors and machines, there was nothing.

He took her hand and found it marble cold. He thought for a panicky moment she must be dead and leaned close to her face and felt her frail breath. Cordelia. The broken Lear and Cordelia. “Come on, Lu. Come out of it. Come on.” He shook her hand in a way he remembered someone doing to him when he was a kid; some adult, seeing his attention wavering, shook it back again.

Jury sat for a few minutes watching her before he rose and walked round the room, back and forth, stopping to look at her. An effigy was what she reminded him of. The incomparable, commanding, relentless detective inspector Lu Aguilar, still as stone and helpless. What he felt now was that he would never be able to understand his feelings for her, what they had been. Or hers for him. That part of his mind would be still as stone and helpless, too.

Jury turned to look out the window, seeing shadowed grass in the distance, thinking, It should be covered with snow; there should be the blankness of snow to render shapes null and void, the way the sheet did her own shape, the way it was drawn up to her shoulders.

Nurses in white entered from time to time to adjust tubes and check fluid levels and look at the machine. They smiled and left. One-but they might all have been the same one-said something about visiting hours. Jury nodded, although he hadn’t really heard her, and stayed. He didn’t know how long.

Finally, he got up from a chair, bent, and kissed her forehead. He was surprised to find it was not marble cold, but warm.

“Wake up, Lu.”

He meant it, too.

22

He left St. Bart’s, near Smithfield, and after that didn’t look up, walking down one narrow street then another, all snaking into some center and making him feel pleasantly claustrophobic. He felt as if he’d wound himself into the center of a ball of string. Tired, he’d been walking for hours. It was dark now.

When “Three Blind Mice” started up, he yanked out the bloody mobile (what Orpheus should have had instead of string). “What?”

“I’m in Bidwell Street. Near St. Bride. There’s been a woman shot.”

Jury frowned. “St. Bride. That’s not us, Wiggins; that’s City police. Right near Snow Hill station, isn’t it?”

“I know. They’re here.”

Jury could hear the background noise. “All right. But why are you there?”

“I was trawling for information about the Mariah Cox murder. I’ve a friend at Snow Hill, and I was there when he caught this one and came along. Thing is-this woman, put her in her early thirties, very good-looking, and dressed to kill, you might say-well, I’m probably wrong, but it seems similar to the Chesham murder.”

“Okay. I’m in…” Where? He looked up to see the very familiar area in Clerkenwell in which he and Lu Aguilar had spent so much time. He could see the Zetter hotel down there at St. John’s Square. Why was he here? As if he didn’t know. “Clerkenwell. I’ll find a cab and be there in five minutes.”

There were a couple of cabs moving along the Clerkenwell Road directly in front of him. He flagged one down, shoved the mobile back in his pocket, and opened the door. “You know Bidwell Street? It’s near-”

The driver smiled. “I know it.”

Jury pulled the door shut and fell back against the seat. Or gravity pushed him back. Yes, they knew all of them, these drivers, every last inch of street, road, alley, courtyard-all of it. Plus every shortcut.