“Mr May? There’s a corner over here where we can talk.” Nicolau led the way to a pair of red sofas screened off from the central part of the library. “I have trouble working down here because there’s no natural light. I have a melatonin imbalance, and get extremely claustrophobic, but it’s necessary for me to be here because they have good pharmacological reference tools, and that’s my study area.” He spoke with the clipped North London accent of a transported Greek, but sounded as if he had trouble with his sinuses.
“I appreciate your making the time to see me.” May seated himself and extracted a notebook. “Cassie Field gave me your details. She works for the Karma Bar just behind here?”
“Oh, the babe.” Nikos gave a snort of delight and was forced to wipe his nose. “She knows who I am?”
“Well, she must, because she gave me your number.”
“I give out my number all the time but people don’t usually – especially – ” He could see how that was starting to sound, and killed the rest of the sentence. “How can I help you?”
May produced the sticker in its clear plastic slip case. “Seen one of these before?”
“Yeah. They’re from the bar.”
“Were you aware that it’s an early Victorian symbol denoting lunacy?” He had promised Bryant he would ask.
“No, I had no idea. Interesting.”
“This one’s hand-coloured. Like the one on your bag.” May pointed at the satchel between Nicolau’s boots.
“Yeah, I coloured it in.”
“Any others like that?”
“A few of us have them, I guess.”
“Are you some kind of a group – a club?”
“Just friends. Some of us started on the same day. The guys are doing urban planning, I’m in biochemical engineering, ah – ” he scrunched his eyes shut, thinking, “ – and we have a girl doing computational statistics. There are six of us altogether, sharing the same house.”
“I can’t imagine you would have that much in common, doing different courses.”
“The bar. We have the Karma Bar in common. It’s a good place to meet girls and just hang out. There are a few pubs nearby but they get too crowded with suits in the evening, and they all have TVs tuned to sports channels. None of us is very interested in football.”
“So – what? Miss Field gave each of you a sticker? Or did one of you hand them out to the others?”
“I don’t remember, but I can tell you why we put them on our stuff. Nearly everyone who goes in there is carrying a laptop bag. They get piled in a heap by the bar, and many of them look the same, so one evening we coloured the stickers, so that we’d be able to find our gear when we were leaving.”
“And the girl? Does she come with you?”
“Sure. She’s Matt’s girlfriend. He’s one of the housemates, too. I don’t really know Ruby well; she kind of keeps to herself. I think it may have been her idea to colour the stickers.” Nicolau settled his glasses further back on the bridge of his nose. He was sweating heavily. “Can I ask why you’re so interested?”
“This one was found on a dead body.” May waited for the idea to sink in. “In an investigation of this kind, you check anything that’s unusual, or even just a little bit different.”
“If I can give you a suggestion? People often chuck their coats on top of the bags – maybe it got transferred?”
“You’re probably right.” There didn’t seem to be anything more May could glean that might be of use. “Well, it was a point worth covering. Thanks for your time.” He rose to leave. “Tell you what, though. In case I need to check any further I don’t want to disturb you. Perhaps you’d give me contact details for this girl – Ruby?”
“Sure.” Nicolau seemed relieved. He scribbled something on a scrap of paper. “Ruby Cates. Here’s her email address.”
May left, but somewhere an alarm had been triggered. The harder he tried to focus on what was wrong, the less sure he became. Leave the thought, he told himself, it will surface when it’s ready. The uneasy feeling stayed with him all the way back to the Unit.
Then he remembered. It was something Cassie Field had said. Too intense. Nicolau had been trying hard to convince. The look of relief on his face when May had switched his attention to the girl had been palpable.
∨ Off the Rails ∧
20
Falling Idol
Panic was setting in now. What if it was too late? But there was no point in thinking about what might already have happened, and anyway, here was Matt in his crazy old rainbow-striped coat and brown woolly hat, raising a hand in greeting from the other side of the bar.
“I’m really sorry I’m so late; I don’t know where the time went.”
“That’s okay.”
“I bumped into an old pal from Nottingham, and we had some catching up to do. Hit a few bars together – I’d forgotten how much he could drink. Then I spent ages on the phone, and you know how that goes, right? It’s like I can’t do anything to please her. I’m like, ‘If you don’t want to come out with me, just say so’, right? Can I get you a drink?”
“No, let me get you one.” The smile must have looked painfully forced. The barman was summoned and a drink was poured. “Did you have a lecture this afternoon?”
“Yeah, the architect from Bartlett, the one with the stoop. The lecture was meant to be about traffic restructuring in the late 1960s, but it was so data-driven that he lost most of us about halfway through. And I still have a hangover from last night. Then I got the nagging phone call and wasn’t allowed off the hook until she’d described everything that’s wrong with me in huge detail.”
“Did you tell her you were coming to meet me?” The obviousness of the question caused an inward cringe.
“No, you know I didn’t; you told me not to. Anyway, if she thought I was meeting up with you she’d accuse us of conspiring against her. A toast to my good fortune.”
“To winners.”
“Damn right. We’ve got the skills that pay the bills. Just in time, because I’m seriously broke. Here’s to money, the root of all evil.” Matt downed his vodka cocktail in one. He was drinking something that was a spin on a Smith & Wesson, vodka and coffee liqueur with a dash of soda. His version added an oily Sambuca to the mix. Matt looked even messier than usual. His tumbleweed hair needed a wash and there were violet crescents beneath his eyes. Everybody knew he was on his way to becoming a serious alcoholic, but tonight it was important that Matt drank at least another two or three doubles, otherwise the plan wouldn’t work.
“You’re always good with advice. I don’t know what I’m going to do about her. I just think I’m a little too wild for her. Right? She always wants to do the kind of things her parents do, go to Suffolk and see the rest of her family, go hiking, stuff like that. I don’t know what she’s going to do with a degree in urban planning. I don’t think she knows, either. She says she wants to become a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute like her old man, but she’s doing it for his sake.”
“You have to stop worrying about it so much, Matt. Take things as they come.”
“I can’t this week, you know that. There’s too much at stake now. Look at me, I’m shaking.”
“Let me get you another cocktail.”
They drank until the bar became too noisy and crowded. When Matt slithered down from his stool to weave his way toward the restroom, it was obvious that he was trashed. The rising temperature and the accelerating beats had conspired to increase the pace of their drinking.