Birdman

The usual babble of people crossed the road, dark suits, women in heels and flesh-coloured tights, the occasional white jacket of an intern hurrying out of Guy's to catch the post. On Harteveld's left Guy's hospital tower, studded with satellite dishes, seemed to spy him out amongst the other cars. He shuddered. He should find somewhere to park but to stop, get out and walk the few yards to the York Clinic: it seemed easier to tow the earth across the galaxy on his shoulders.

His plan was vague and desperate. After days of wishing that his heart would spontaneously burst, stop him having to make the decision, now he knew he needed to throw himself at the feet of the psychiatric community. To do this in the York Clinic, in the grounds of his Alma Mater where the seed had been sown, seemed symbolic and right. Cathartic, if there was a catharsis available for this.

But as he imagined it, as he imagined unbuckling the load and passing it across a discreetly decorated room, tears sprang to his eyes. Even a professional couldn't forgive him what he'd done. Even a professional recoils at the stink of shit. He was trapped. Nowhere to turn.

He sat there, hands clamped on the wheel. The lights changed once. Twice. The traffic didn't move. Harteveld leaned slightly to his side and from the white flash of sun on a metallic badge realized that he was two car lengths away from a police roadblock.

Very quietly, very discreetly, he started to cry.

* * *

Diamond caught up with North outside the building. 'What the fuck do you think you're doing here?'

North folded his hands over his abdomen and continued walking.

'I said what the fuck are you doing here?'

'I had to tell the truth.'

'What did you tell them?'

'That I never saw no-one outside the yard.'

'Shit.'

'I'm sorry, mate.'

'Sorry ain't fucking good enough. I took that and ran with it. Made a good case on the basis of what you told me.'

North stopped, sun glinting on the gold around his neck, and looked at Diamond. 'Now you knew I was lying.'

'Bullshit.'

'Course you knew. You couldn'ta been happier when I said I'd seen a spade hanging around.'

Diamond put his hands in his pockets and shook his head. 'That's not how I remember it, my friend. That's not how I remember it.'

* * *

PC Smallbright of Vine Street station was in a great mood. He was good-looking and in love. It was a pretty, blue day, and the sergeant had let them wear short sleeves under the fluorescent traffic police vests. The ten of them stood at the top of London Bridge with their white shirts flapping in the warm breeze. It was good to be alive, he thought, as he bent over to look through the driver's window of the green Cobra.

'Morning, sir.' The cadaverous expression on the driver's face didn't stop Smallbright's smile. He tapped politely on the window. 'Could you—' The window rolled down and the rush of stale cold air and the yellow face made him pause. He bit his lip. 'Sorry to stop you, sir, but we're doing a vehicle check. Completely routine, just having a little look around at things, OK?'

Taking the silence as assent he went to the back of the Cobra, glancing back, a new unease clouding his thoughts. The driver, oddly, looked exactly as if he was crying.

* * *

Maddox leaned his forehead against the window pane and sighed.

'I'm asking myself what I've done to deserve this. It's my balls are going to be on the butcher's block for this. Not Diamond's.'

'You think he invented the door-to-door interviews?'

'What do you think?'

'I think we should have a look. If Gemini's been rotting in that cell all this time on the strength of a false statement—'

'Don't say it, Jack. Just don't say it.'

* * *

Harteveld sat cold as rock as the PC checked the rear of the Cobra, ran his fingers along the bumper, around the tail lights. The sweating had stopped now. The hard glitter of sunlight on water reflected in the glass buildings. On the north of the river he could see a tiny wisp of cloud spiralling up into the sky over the bluish dome of St Paul's cathedral, as if a spirit were leaving a body. Vapour which would reform in a different strata of the atmosphere, co-mingle with other vapour, crystallize, liquefy, and one day drop again onto the earth. Purer. Diamond clean.

* * *

'Who's one hundred and sixty?' Caffery shouted over the heads of the receivers and officers milling around the room. He was in shirtsleeves, one hand on the desk, looking at an indexer's monitor. A flashing cursor at the top of the screen highlighted the message:

Record locked port 160.

Someone else in the room had opened the house-to-house file, denying him access.

'I said WHO IS ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY?'

Over the piles of blue duty sheets and the buffcoloured actions dockets a dozen sets of unblinking eyes stared at him. In the corner, by the exhibits room, only one person wasn't looking up. Diamond's head gleamed, bent under the grey ellipse of a VDU. The strip of blue Dynotape stuck on the monitor read 160.

Caffery and Maddox crossed the room.

'What the fuck are you doing?'

Diamond looked up with mild blue eyes. 'Just entering some actions.'

'That's Marilyn's job.'

'Oooops,' he said simply, pushing the keyboard away. 'Sorry. Hope I haven't cocked anything up.'

'I don't feel like spending the day' — Maddox said — 'reading up on falsehood and prevarication discipline.'

'Of course you don't. Sir.'

But later, when Kryotos checked HOLMES, she found the street numbers in the house-to-house entries had been deleted or never entered in the first place.

'Inspector Diamond?' Maddox found him with his feet up on the desk in the property room.

'Sir?'

'A word.'

Caffery stood in the corridor watching as Maddox opened the door of F team's office and placed his hand on DI Diamond's back, gently propelling him inside, closing the door behind them with a soft click.

* * *

When PC Smallbright came back he was shocked at the change in the driver's expression. It was as if a hand had been there and smoothed all the lines down, like sand raked free of prints. Peaceful. The eyes were fixed on a point on the other side of the river.

'Did you know you've got a smashed brake light, sir?'

'Is that so?' Harteveld opened the car door and stepped outside, unravelling his long, cadaverous body into the sun. He stood quite still, his eyes closed, his face turned skyward, as if he had never before felt the sun on his skin. His suit hung on him, and his hands dangled out of the sleeves like the clappers of ancient bells.

'Sir?'

'Yes.'

'It's just a smashed brake light. Nothing serious. You've got a smashed brake light.'

'Of course. And please take into account the dead girls.'

'Sir?'

'Tell them what I've done, if you'd be so kind.'

PC Smallbright glanced nervously at his sergeant, who was leaning into the driver's window of a Mazda. He turned to Harteveld. 'Do you want to talk about something, sir?'

'No, kind of you, but I think I'll be off now.'

PC Smallbright had never seen anything like what happened next. 'The river had never looked better, never bluer or more sparkly,' he told people later. 'But the guy, he looked like a corpse, looked just like a dead thing, grey yellow, like milk gone off.'

And in that sphere of humans, as Harteveld pinpointed the co-ordinates of his place of death, five cars back, two men, not much younger than he was, sensed simultaneously what only Harteveld knew. It was outside their remit, but DC Betts understood the emergency.