Lies Sleeping (Peter Grant, #7)(83)

I reckoned that when I got out there were going to prove to be some serious gaps in some famous collections.

If I got out.

I told Foxglove, truthfully, that her painting was beautiful and she beamed.

Then her head cocked to one side – as if she were listening.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

Foxglove snatched her work from my hands and, springing over to her bed, stuffed them and the art case under her mattress. She turned to glare at me and put her hand across her mouth.

‘Not a word,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

‘Foxglove,’ called a voice from above – Chorley. ‘Where are you?’ He sounded like an adult trying to restrain their impatience with a child. ‘Chop-chop. All hands on deck.’

Foxglove jumped up. And for the first time I got a sense of how she was doing it – the ripple in the fabric of the bubble that propelled her upwards as if it were coughing her up.

‘Don’t get too comfortable with him,’ I heard Chorley say. ‘He eats your kind for breakfast.’

I heard footsteps moving away and waited in silence – listening.

There was the occasional echo of a door slamming in the distance, Somebody, I think it might have been Lesley, very clearly shouted – ‘Fuck shit bugger!’

Followed by a metallic crash and a deep resonant chime whose harmonics actually caused the fairy bubble to resonate around me.

It was the bell. Something was happening, and it was happening soon.



Or maybe not, because Foxglove was on time with supper, which was a set of disappointing ham sandwiches of the type you bought from garage shops. I ate them wistfully, thinking of Molly and daydreaming of coffee while Foxglove hopped impatiently from foot to foot. She was obviously dying to show me something but wanted my full attention.

I forwent the final sandwich – it wasn’t much of a sacrifice.

From her art case Foxglove drew an A4 sized ring-bound sketchpad. It had seen some use – one of the corners had been blunted by a hard impact, and the cover was smudged with fingerprints where Foxglove had handled it while drawing.

The first picture was of a young woman with eyes slotted like a cat’s and ears that rose to a tufted point. The style was what they call in posh art circles hyperrealism – Foxglove had lovingly captured the luxurious fur that covered face, head and shoulders. She looked like really good cosplay but I didn’t think she was somebody having fun on the weekend. And Foxglove had captured a haunted look in her eyes.

I must have grunted something suitably encouraging, because Foxglove cheerfully flipped the pad to reveal another young woman drawn in the same hyperrealistic style. A pale, high-cheekboned face with a cascade of long black hair, and the disturbing turn of the mouth as if hiding too many teeth. Somebody I recognised, although I hadn’t known her long. And most of the time I had known her she’d been trying to kill me. It was the Pale Lady that I’d chased into the Trocadero Centre, who’d hit me so hard I thought I’d felt my ribs creak. Who I’d knocked over a balcony five storeys up and who’d fallen to her death in complete silence.

‘Very fine,’ I said. ‘Who is she?’

Foxglove touched the sketch with two fingers and then transferred them to her chest about where everyone thinks the heart is located. My own heart hurt. There’s no other word for it. And suddenly I felt sick.

‘Your friend,’ I said, and Foxglove nodded.

She flipped the pad to show me another familiar face. Also someone I’d met quite briefly while, coincidentally, they were trying to kill me. It was the nanny from Richard Williams’s house. Again Foxglove touched first the picture and then her heart.

When me and Lesley were doing our probation at Charing Cross nick our duty inspector was Francis Neblett. He was a proper old-fashioned copper, not like what the public thinks is old-fashioned, which is all TV bollocks, but so upright and steeped in the Peelian Principles that if you sliced him in half you’d have found BOBBY running all the way through him like a stick of rock.

He once told me that the problem was not that criminals were evil but that most of them were pathetic – in the proper sense of the word. Arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness. Recently I’d learnt the Greek root: pathetos – liable to suffer.

‘You’ve got to feel sorry for them,’ he said.

And you didn’t have to be in the job long to see what he meant. The addicts, the runaways, the men who were fine unless they had a couple of drinks. The ex-squaddies who’d seen too much. The sad fuckers who just didn’t have a clue how to make the world work for them, or had started so beaten down they barely learnt to walk upright. The people who shoplifted toilet paper or food or treats for their kids.

‘This is a trap,’ he’d said. ‘You’re not a social worker or a doctor. If people really wanted these problems solved there’d be more social workers and doctors.’

I’d asked what we were supposed to do.

‘You can’t fix their problems, Peter,’ he’d said. ‘Most of the time you can’t even steer them in the right direction. But you can do the job without making things worse.’

I looked at the sketches and back at Foxglove’s expectant face.

What would Lesley do? I wondered.

She’d lie, or at least mislead – imply that she knew exactly where Foxglove’s sisters were and if only Foxglove helped her escape they could be reunited.