‘I’ll make the call now.’

There was silence on the other end of the line, then:

‘I hear L’Espalier is very good.’

‘Yes.’ It took Pryor a second or two to realize that he had not told the Principal Backer where he was eating that night. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Perhaps you should inform your clients that you won’t be able to make it to dinner after all.’

The connection was cut off. Pryor looked at the phone. He’d only had it for two days. He removed the battery, wiped it with his gloves, and tossed it in the trash. As he walked on, he broke the SIM card and dropped the pieces down a drain. He crossed Boylston, heading for Newbury. He stepped into the shadows of Public Alley 440, put the phone on the ground, and began grinding it beneath his heel, harder and harder, until finally he was stamping furiously on fragments of plastic and circuitry, swearing as he did so. Two pedestrians glanced at him as they passed down Exeter, but they did not stop.

Pryor put his forehead against the wall of the nearest building and closed his eyes.

Consequences: that was an understatement. If someone had made an unauthorized hit on the detective, there was no limit to how bad things might get.

In an apartment in Brooklyn, the rabbi named Epstein sat before his computer screen, watching and listening.

It had been a long day of discussions, arguments and something resembling slow progress, assuming one took a tectonic view of such matters. Epstein, along with two of his fellow moderate rabbis, were trying to hammer out compromises between the borough of Brooklyn and the local Hasidim on a lengthy series of issues, including the separation of the sexes on city buses and religious objections to the use of bicycles, mostly with little success. Today, for his sins, Epstein had been forced to explain the concept of metzitzah b’peh – the practice of oral suction from a baby’s circumcision wound – to a disbelieving councilman.

‘But why would anyone want to do that?’ the councilman kept asking. ‘Why?’

And, to be honest, Epstein didn’t really have an answer or, at least, not one that would satisfy the councilman.

Meanwhile, some of the young Hasidim apparently regarded Epstein with little more affection than they did the goyim. He even heard one of them refer to him behind his back as an alter kocker – an ‘old fart’ – but he did not react. Their elders knew better, and at least acknowledged that Epstein was trying to help by acting as a go-between, attempting to find a compromise with which both the Hasidim and the borough could live. Still, if they had their way the Hasidim would wall off Williamsburg from the rest of Brooklyn, although they’d probably have to fight the hipsters for it. The situation wasn’t helped by certain city officials publicly comparing the Hasidim to the Mafa. At times, it was enough to make a reasonable man consider abandoning both his faith and his city. But there was a saying in Hebrew, ‘We survived Pharoah, we’ll survive this, too.’ In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, they failed, so let’s eat!

With that in mind, he was hungry when he arrived home, but all thoughts of food were gone now. Beside him stood a young woman dressed in black. Her name was Liat. She was deaf and mute, so she could not hear the news report, but she could read the anchorman’s lips when he appeared on screen. She took in the images of the police cars and the house, and the picture of the detective that was being used on all of the news reports. It was not a recent photograph. He looked older now. She recalled his face as they had made love, and the feel of his damaged body against hers.

So many scars, so many wounds, both visible and hidden.

Epstein touched her arm. She looked down at his face so she could watch his lips move.

‘Go up there,’ he said. ‘Find out what you can. I will start making inquiries here.’

She nodded and left.

Strange, thought Epstein: he had never seen her cry before.

40

It was Bryan Joblin who told them the news, just as he was running out the door. His departure at that moment, leaving them alone, seemed like a godsend. Harry and Erin had been growing increasingly fractious with Joblin as his perpetual presence in their lives began to tell on them, while he had settled happily into his role as their watcher, houseguest, and sometime accomplice in a crime yet to be committed. He still pressed Harry to find a girl, as if Harry needed to be reminded. Hayley Conyer herself had stopped by the house that morning while they were clearing up after breakfast, and she had made it very clear to the Dixons that they were running out of time.

‘Things are going to start moving fast around here pretty soon,’ Conyer said, as she stood at the front door, as though reluctant even to set foot once again in their crumbling home. ‘A lot of our problems are about to disappear, and we can start concentrating again on the tasks that matter.’

She leaned in close to the Dixons, and Harry could feel the warmth of her breath, and smell with it the sour stink that he always associated with his mother’s dying, the stench of the body’s internal workings beginning to atrophy.

‘You should know that there are folk in Prosperous who blame you for what happened to our young men in Afghanistan, and to Valerie Gillson and Ben Pearson too,’ she said. ‘They believe that, if you hadn’t let the girl go’ – Conyer allowed the different possible interpretations of that conditional clause to hang in the air for a moment – ‘then four of our people might still be alive. You have a lot of work to do to make up for your failings. I’m giving you three days. By then, you’d better produce a substitute girl for me.’

But Harry knew that they wouldn’t be around in three days or, if they were, then it would probably be the end of them. They were ready to run. Had Bryan Joblin not told them of what had occurred, then left them for a time to their own devices, they might have waited for another day, just to be sure that everything was in place for their escape. Now they took his news as a sign: it was time. They watched him drive away, his words still ringing in their ears.

‘We hit the detective,’ Joblin told them. ‘It’s all over the news. That fucker is gone. Gone.’

And within twenty minutes of Joblin’s departure, the Dixons had left Prosperous.

Harry made the call on the way to Medway. The auto dealership closed most evenings at six, but Harry had the dealer’s cell phone number and knew that he lived only a couple of blocks from the lot. He’d told the guy that, if it came down to the wire, he might have to leave the state at short notice. He had spun him a line about a sick mother, knowing that the dealer couldn’t have given a rat’s ass if Harry’s mother was Typhoid Mary, just as long as he paid cash alongside the trade-in. So it was that, thirty minutes after leaving Prosperous, the Dixons drove out of the lot in a GMC Savana Passenger Van with 100,000 miles on the clock, stopping only at the outskirts of Medway to call Magnus and Dianne and let them know that they were on their way. The van was ugly as a mudslide, but they could sleep in it if they had to, and who knew how long they might be on the road, or how far they might have to travel? They couldn’t stay with Harry’s in-laws for long. Even one night would be risky. In fact, the closer Harry got to the home of Magnus and Dianne, the more he started to feel that perhaps he and Erin shouldn’t stay with them at all. It might be wiser just to pick up their stuff, arrange some way of remaining in contact, and then find a motel for the night. The more distance they put between themselves and Prosperous, the better. He expressed his concerns to Erin, and was surprised when she concurred without argument. Her only regret, as far as he could tell, was that they hadn’t managed to kill Bryan Joblin before they left Prosperous. She might have been joking, but somehow Harry doubted it.