“I just wanted to know if you could sew his other leg back on. I’ve saved it, look.” He produced a carefully-folded piece of Kleenex.
Josh bent down and gently prodded the cricket with the tip of his finger. It tried to hop but it succeeded only in falling on to its side. “I’m sorry, kid,” Josh told him. “Some things are just beyond saving.”
He called the number that the deputy had given him. He was told that Detective Sergeant Paul had left for the evening, but that he could call in the morning, around eight. That meant midnight, Pacific time.
He sorted through his scruffy, higgledy-piggledy phone book, and found the last number that Julia had given him in London, the Golden Rose Employment Agency, in Earl’s Court. He called it, but all he got was a nasal answerphone message. There was nothing else he could do until tonight, when the sun came up over London and everybody went back to work.
Nancy came in. “How about some coffee?” she asked him, putting her arm around his shoulders and kissing him.
“I think a Jack Daniel’s would go down better. You know what I have to do now, don’t you? I have to phone the folks.”
“OK. One Jack Daniel’s coming up.”
She held on to him for a moment, and he was glad of it, because right now he really needed her strength. She had always been strong, which was one of the things that had attracted him so much. Her late father had been a Norwegian-born merchant seaman and her mother was an artist, a full-blooded Modoc, which had given Nancy a startling combination of high cheekbones and dark skin and ice-blue eyes. It had also given her an inner toughness, a very sinewy sense of herself, and even though that often led them to argue, Josh was glad of it. When he lay in bed at night, he knew who was lying next to him.
Nancy was very silent at night, he could never hear her breathing, and he used to wake her up to make sure that she wasn’t dead. This had annoyed her, of course, because Josh snored like a riot in a zoo, and she could never get back to sleep again. But Josh had always been noisy and messy and untidy, ever since he was a small boy. He tried his best to be neat. He tried to be organized. But he was always too interested in moving on to the next thing before he had cleared up the thing before.
Josh was tall, like his father Jack. In fact he looked so much like his father that his mother always called him “Jack” – 6ft 2½ins in his long bare feet, and very lean, with chopped brown hair that looked as if Edward Scissorhands had been at it. He had a long, handsome face and very large brown eyes, but he was the only one in his family to have inherited his great-grandfather’s large triangular nose. He had also inherited his great-grandfather’s extraordinary empathy with animals. The old man had worked with Barnum & Bailey for years before he eventually came to San Francisco and opened up a pet store on Folsom Street, Winward’s World of Waggers.
Josh had spent his childhood nursing crushed snails and feeding abandoned fledglings with eyedroppers, and he had always wanted to be a veterinarian. But his approach to animal medicine had been so unorthodox that he and the California State Veterinary College had parted company by mutual agreement. At college he had set up a pulsed electromagnetic field in order to improve the general health and intelligence of cats; and he had taught dogs to meditate.
He swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and then he punched out his parents’ number in Santa Barbara. It rang and rang and he could imagine his father saying, “Who the hell is thatV and at last climbing testily out of his deckchair and making his way into the house. He could imagine him shuffling down the pale blue-painted hallway and picking up the phone. And right on cue he heard, “Winward residence … what do you want now?”
“Dad, it’s Josh.”
“Josh? Well, how about that? I thought you were dead.”
“Dad, listen. Something terrible’s happened.”
Josh called Detective Sergeant Paul dead on midnight. Common sense told him that he would need a few minutes to get to his desk, but he couldn’t wait any longer. As it was, it was picked up instantly, and a woman’s voice snapped, “Incident room.”
“Hallo? I’m calling from the United States. I’m trying to get in touch with Detective Sergeant Paul.”
“That’s me.”
“Oh, I see. I’m real sorry, I expected—”
“I know. You expected a man. Quite understandable. You must be calling about Julia Winward.”
“That’s right. My name’s Josh Winward, I’m her brother.”
“Well, I hope you’ll accept our condolences, Mr Winward. This is obviously a most distressing time for you.”
“It came as a shock, for sure. Do you have any idea how it happened? I mean, Julia went to England to get over a messy romance, but she wasn’t the suicidal kind. Not unless something’s happened to her that none of her family know about.”
“This wasn’t a suicide, Mr Winward.”
“What does that mean? That somebody else pushed her in?”
“Somebody else dropped her in, sir. We haven’t had a complete post-mortem, but there’s no question at all, she was dead before she went into the river.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Absolutely, sir. Yes.”
“You mean there was no water in her lungs or anything? I’m sorry – maybe I’ve been watching too much Murder, She Wrote.”
“There was no water in her lungs, sir.” Pause. “Not as far as we know.”
There was something about the way she paused that aroused Josh’s suspicion. “You mean you don’t definitely know whether there was water in her lungs or not?”
“Not at this stage, sir. I’m afraid there was some degree of tampering with your sister’s body.”
“Tampering?”
Another pause, and then the word that Josh had been dreading. “Mutilation, I suppose you’d have to call it. I really can’t say any more over the phone. But we’ve initiated a full-scale murder inquiry and I’d like to reassure you that everything possible is being done to find the person or persons responsible for your sister’s death.”
Josh had to take three deep breaths. He felt as if a huge weight were pressing on his chest.
Detective Sergeant Paul said, “Are you still there, Mr Winward?”
“Yes, I’m still here. I was just a little … overwhelmed, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, sir. But I can’t pretend that it was anything other than a very brutal murder. Whoever did it is an extremely dangerous individual, and your sister’s case has absolute top priority. Do you have e-mail?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
“In that case, I can send you copies of some of the newspaper reports. But only if you don’t think you’ll find them too upsetting.”
“No, no, please. I wish you would. Right now … well, I’m still finding it difficult to get my head around it.”
“I do need to ask you some questions, too. Quite a lot of questions.”
“Fire away. Anything I can do to help. Anything.”
“Well, let me send you the newspaper reports first. I’ve got one or two things on my plate at the moment. Supposing I call you back in a couple of hours?”
“Sure, please do.”
Josh quickly left his number and then let the phone drop. Nancy appeared, bundled up in a white feather comforter. It had been hot during the day, but it was one of those foggy coastal nights when the temperature suddenly drops, and the windows look as if long-drowned mariners have been breathing on them.
“You need some sleep,” Nancy told him.
“Not tonight,” said Josh. “Not until I know what happened to Julia.”
They read the newspaper reports two and three times over. Julia’s death had been the lead story in the London Evening Standard: RIPPER VICTIM FOUND IN THAMES. Most of the national dailies had carried it as a second lead, and all of them reported that this was the seventh such murder in less than three years.