Three days later, Isla’s house was burgled again. This time, it was Banacharski’s letters to her that went. It happened during the day, while she was at the library preparing a lecture. No glass was broken. Nothing of value was taken. Nobody was spotted at the scene.
Chapter 14
Isla Holderness never saw Ana’s ring again. Her laptop, having been sold in a grimy pub on the outskirts of town, was eventually recovered by the police.
Its thief was seventeen-year-old Ben Collings, who was picked up not two weeks later while attempting to prise open the back door of the Co-op at 4 a.m., in the mindset of exuberant criminal incompetence that a gram and a half of his brother’s home-made amphetamine sulphate and a litre of white cider could be relied upon to produce. His fingerprints matched the ones he had left on the door of Isla’s fridge, and his teeth – as the Cambridgeshire Constabulary’s equivalent of the CSI lab was proud to report – precisely matched the profile of the two-thirds of a miniature Melton Mowbray pork pie that he had not stolen from inside it.
Mr Collings, as the PC who returned Isla’s laptop to her explained, was ‘a worthless little toerag’ of precisely the sort who formed the cop shop’s most loyal client base.
Collings had offloaded most of Isla’s possessions onto his big brother – a toerag of some seniority – who had in turn dispersed them among the pawn shops and market stalls of the town. Ana’s ring had ended up in an antique shop the quality of whose merchandise was belied by the tweeness of its name. Herbert Owse’s Antiquarian Omnium Gatherum stood on Burleigh Street, and was manned by a rubicund numismatist with a wild beard and a liking for checked shirts and moleskin waistcoats. His socks, though this is of scant relevance here, were held up with suspenders. His name was not Herbert Owse.
It was into this shop, however, that Alex Smart ducked while cutting down Burleigh Street one afternoon on his way from the cinema – where he had been spending the afternoon not working on his PhD and not thinking about the fact that he wasn’t working on his PhD – to the pub where he was meeting a friend in order to continue doing same.
Alex, who was not in the habit of browsing in antique shops and would not have been able to afford antiques even if he had, had gone in to escape a sudden shower of rain. The shower of rain proving unusually persistent, he was obliged to make a furious pretence at interest in the shop’s contents. Away he browsed, under the jovial eye of the proprietor, occasionally asking questions.
‘This piece,’ he said. ‘Eighteenth century, is it?’
‘Art deco,’ the proprietor replied.
‘Hm,’ said Alex, opening and closing a cabinet door. ‘Very good… hinges, it’s got. Are they original?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very good. I was thinking of something like that for my mum. Likes hinges, she does. How much is it?’
‘Eight hundred and seventy-five pounds.’
‘Oh. Oh my. Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – bit more, you know. Embarrassing, but a bit more than I was actually thinking of, you know. Spending.’
The supposed Owse made brisk play of returning his attention to the notes he was making in a ledger with a stubby pencil. Alex walked the shop’s narrow aisles, keeping one eye on the rain through the bow window. The shop exuded a considerable aura of brownness: wooden floorboards, patches of curly-cornered carpet, brown cabinets and brown bookshelves and brown leather books.
Alex inspected an umbrella stand in which a number of pawky specimens shuffled their spokes. He read the spines of some of the old books, most of which were the sorts of things you might expect to be bought and sold by the yard rather than for their titles – volumes 4 to 8 of something called The Cyclopedia of Practical Agronomy; the second volume of a Victorian translation of Don Quixote, with illustrated plates.
Then, peering into a glass display cabinet at a selection of silver-black necklaces and brooches with topaz and coral in dented settings, he saw the ring. As he looked at it he thought – in a way that felt light and easy – that perhaps he would ask Carey to marry him, and that this was the ring that he would present to her.
It was sitting upright in a cheap jewellery box. He liked the design, the antique look, the silvery sheen. The ring set his chain of thought in motion, there, while he waited for the rain to stop. But once he had thought it, it seemed right and natural. It was a thought that had been waiting for a thought-shaped slot in his head to occupy, and there it was. They would get married. He would get a cheap flight to the States, and he would go to San Francisco and surprise her with a ring.
The ring was two hundred pounds. Alex could find that. Just. He’d be eating pasta with butter for a bit, but he could find it. He asked the supposed Owse to put the ring aside for him. Wrote his name and mobile phone number, promised to come back the following day. And by the time he stepped out of the shop into the lane, the bell above the door dinging sweetly, shaking a few drops of rain onto Alex’s head, the sun was just breaking through the clouds.
And so to Jones, and to Bree – our two supernatural detectives – hot on the heels of this fugitive device. Jones was driving, and Bree was eating.
Bree had worried about Jones driving. The worry started not long after they had gone over a large and tricky interchange through a just-red light that Bree wouldn’t have risked. She had read the cross traffic – three lanes of impatient metal, a terminal moraine of shining chrome, pregnant with the intention of surging over their carriageway at the first click of their light to green. They had seemed to heave. Jones had piloted their car serenely through.
‘Jones,’ she had said, her thigh cramping with the effort of pumping an imaginary brake, ‘with your condition…’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jones had said.
‘How good are you at anticipating things?’
‘Not very,’ Jones had said. The speedo had been nudging eighty.
‘Things like cars pulling out suddenly, or appearing from dips in the road while you’re overtaking…’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jones had said. He had appeared to have no idea of the drift that the conversation was taking.
‘Are you good at anticipating those?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jones had said. ‘I don’t think so. Which cars are you talking about?’ He had looked around, scanning the road, meerkatted into the rear-view mirror, peered ahead down the road, as if to see what Bree was referring to.
‘Not actual cars here,’ Bree had said. ‘I mean, any cars. Cars you might anticipate. Cars that might pull out or appear from nowhere.’
‘Cars that don’t exist?’
Bree had realised the problem, and fallen silent. Jones’s relationship with time was not, she remembered, the easiest thing to navigate. Nor his relationship with notional cars.
‘Jones, your head is a strange thing.’
‘It is the only head I have,’ Jones had said. ‘I have nothing to compare it with.’
Bree had thought of a better way of putting it. She had asked: ‘Have you ever crashed a car?’
‘I have fast reactions,’ Jones had said.
‘That’s not answering the question,’ Bree had said.
‘Yes,’ Jones had said.
Bree had shrugged. She had let it go. Someone believed Jones could drive. Someone had given him a licence. They hadn’t crashed. And Bree hated to drive.
So here they were. Jones driving – slowly, at Bree’s insistence – and Bree eating an egg-salad sandwich and a big bag of Doritos. It was a beautiful morning. Everything felt light and good. It was one of those mornings when Bree felt a lightness. The weird thing with the crying had shifted Jones in the way she thought about him. She had thought, at first, that he was handsome. But Bree reckoned she thought everyone was handsome. She hadn’t been with anyone for a long time. Then she had thought he was freaky, which he was. But now she felt maternal towards him – and she was surprised to find that feeling warmed her.