Page 70 of Hang on St. Christopher

I did none of those things. Instead, I just smiled and nodded.

“No school today?” I asked.

“It’s July.”

“Oh. Yeah. The weather. Feels like bloody winter.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a part-time policeman.”

“Oh, really?”

“Aye.”

“I haven’t seen you about much,” she said.

“I’m only here six or seven days a month, normally. But I’ll be around for the next week or so because I’m on a case.”

“Where do you live the rest of the time?”

“Scotland.”

“Nice?”

“It is nice.”

“Well, lovely meeting you,” she said.

“Likewise.”

She took her letters and went inside.

Shame about the milkman. I would have left him a tip if I’d known it was his last day. That’s what they do to you. With the one hand, they build an integrated primary school almost in your own backyard, but the other hand stops delivering milk to your door. Progress.

Good-looking woman, though. Interesting that in our brief conversation I never mentioned the fact that I had a wife (sort of) and child in that house in Scotland.

I took a step back into the hall and looked at myself in the mirror.

“Got to watch that, Duffy. I know you of old.”

Mirror Duffy nodded back and said nothing. Mirror Duffy couldn’t resist bragging and muttered, “The silent vertebrate in brown/contracts and concentrates, withdraws/Rachel née Rabinovitch/Tears at the grapes with murderous paws.”

The really quite brilliant Anthony Julius had recently spilled a lot of ink in theTimes Literary Supplementtalking about those last two lines. Evidence, Julius suggested convincingly, of Eliot’s polite but insistent anti-Semitism.

My spidey senses told me that Rachel next door was a Catholic. I wondered if she was married or single. Another line bobbed to the surface of my postconcussion brain.

“The devious-cruisingRachel,” I said to myself. “The devious-cruisingRachelin her search after her missing children only found another orphan.”

I showered, got dressed in a white shirt, navy blue sweater, black jeans, shit-kicking Doc Marten boots.

I made myself fried eggs, potato bread, coffee.

Looked under the Beemer for bombs.

BMW to the cop shop.

No Crabbie, so I sifted the leads and FO drops myself. The Range Rover had vanished. The AK slugs were not a match with any used in previous crimes. There was no further information on Alan Locke. He didn’t have a residential address in either the Republic of Ireland or the UK.

---