And then Gary began to cry again.

  Scott Brown looked at the artist’s impression Jordan Whittington had got from Jago Sullivan and said, ‘Who smokes a pipe these days?’

  Melina Pinker, the only other officer keeping late vigil with her boss, said, ‘Puff-heads?’

  Brown shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Or rather yes, but look at what he’s smoking. That’s no stoner’s pipe. Look at the size of it!’

  The pipe, once identified, had turned out to be large. The bowl was carved into an unintelligible shape which appeared as a sort of off-white smudge.

  Melina peered at the image. ‘Could be a meerschaum pipe, guv.’

  Brown narrowed his eyes. ‘Blimey, that’s a word from the past,’ he said. ‘But now you come to say it, that light colour … My granddad had some meerschaum pipes, think he might have nicked them when he went to Germany to fight the Nazis.’

  ‘It’s a kind of clay,’ Melina said. ‘You see a lot of meerschaum pipes in Turkey. But I think they’re mainly for tourists. Souvenirs, you know. Jago reckons he can make out smoke though. So this bloke’s smoking …’

  ‘Fucking weird,’ Brown said. ‘I mean like, where do you even buy pipe tobacco these days?’

  Melina, who always felt that Brown rather overdid the fitness fanatic schtick, said, ‘Er, from a newsagents, at a garage, in the supermarket …’

  ‘Yeah, but …’

  ‘I did look up actual tobacconists in the City,’ Melina said. ‘Ones that sell cigars, pipes and snuff. They’re few and far between but there are a couple of newsagents. SOCO picked up the usual bunch of dog-ends at the scene …’

  ‘But no loose tobacco.’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Guv, the image is going to press.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s not brilliant is it?’

  Then she said, ‘Guv, what about these old tunnels that Wilko talks about?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, not you an’ all!’ Brown said. ‘So where’d you suggest I start looking for them then, Detective Sergeant? Underneath the local Pret? Or maybe I should go into a nearby dry-cleaner’s mob-handed and see what’s in their cellar?’

  Melina looked down at the floor. ‘I just thought …’

  ‘You just thought that you’d like to have a bloody exorcism.’

  ‘Well what else do we have, guv?’ Melina said. ‘Some dodgy image of a pipe smoker and, so far, some possible sources of DNA. But if that doesn’t match anyone on the system …’

  ‘I’ve said for donkey’s years that everyone in this country should be in the system so we don’t have situations like this,’ Brown said.

  Melina stayed quiet. She could see the value of a national comprehensive DNA database, but it still gave her the shudders. Wasn’t that something that dodgy regimes run by dictators wanted to do?

  Habib was round at Loz’s flat. His little brothers were watching telly in their bedroom while Loz’s mum was pulling the living room and kitchen apart looking for her lost money.

  In Loz’s room, Habib was trying to make his mate give the money back.

  ‘Kym’s not pregnant,’ he’d told a miserable Loz once the two of them were alone.

  Loz said, ‘She told you?’

  She sort of had, and anyway Habib had decided that she wasn’t. It was what he truly believed. And it was what he told himself.

  Now, however, they were in the arena of Loz’s bottomless paranoia.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said after he’d had some time to think about it. ‘I mean, what if she is?’

  ‘She isn’t,’ Habib said.

  Kym had told him that Loz couldn’t get an erection. But he couldn’t say that to him. You only accused blokes of not ‘getting wood’ if you really hated them. Anyway, she’d been coming on to that Imran at the time. She wasn’t going to tell him she’d shagged Loz, even if she had.

  ‘You can’t get all this money,’ Habib continued. ‘Thousands and thousands. She’s taking the piss.’

  ‘You never said that at first,’ Loz said, ‘not when we started making the cream.’

  ‘No …’

  Habib hadn’t known what he’d believed back then. All he’d focussed on was the problem – and the amateur chemistry. Loz’s situation had given him the opportunity to make actual medical stuff and he’d loved it. That he’d been helping Loz, and possibly some old people in pain too, had been quite secondary to playing Marie Curie in his mum’s kitchen.

  ‘Loz, you have to get that money back to your mum,’ Habib said. ‘She’s crying and everything.’

  Loz’s mum was not a woman who cried easily and so both the boys knew that it was serious.

  ‘Yeah, but if I do that then I’ve got nothing to give Kym!’ Loz said.

  Habib lost it. ‘She’s taking you for a mug!’

  ‘You say that, but what if she ain’t?’

  And then they were back to where they’d started again.

  A couple of boys sat outside the kebab shop on the pavement. Lee ignored them. They weren’t drinking, weren’t loud, even if they were stoned off their nuts and grease from their doners had solidified round their mouths.

  Inside a middle-aged man was getting chips while a large white woman with very fat arms stood miserably in a corner clutching her purse.

  Lee went up to the counter and spoke to Haluk the Turkish Cypriot proprietor. A disappointed-looking man in his fifties, Haluk said, ‘Evening Lee, what can I get you?’

  He could have had something like a chicken shish for a change, but Lee had been lusting after a large doner ever since he’d been in the pub with Gary. He said, ‘Large doner, all the trimmings please, mate.’

  Haluk nodded and Lee stood to one side to let a young black girl behind him make her order. Then he took his phone out and tried to ring Mumtaz again. But her phone was still dead. Not just unavailable, stone bloody dead. Had she perhaps broken it? If she had, then that was more bloody expense. But then he knew that by even thinking that he was indulging in what she would call a ‘displacement activity’ – something designed to push his fears for her to one side.

  But then how much trouble could she get into scoping out some old house in EC4? Then he remembered the dead baby and, while he was paying Haluk for his kebab, he tried to call Mumtaz again. Still he got nothing.

  He brought another number up on his phone and called it.

  ‘That bloke walked into the churchyard,’ Wilko said as he ladled a helping of chicken casserole ‘thing’ into Jordan’s bowl.

  ‘He didn’t go into any local shops or bars,’ Jordan said.

  ‘Maybe he was already pissed,’ Wilko said. ‘He get picked up by cameras further west?’

  ‘We think he came down High Holborn. If that is him. But before that …’ Jordan shrugged. ‘Like he just sort of appeared and then disappeared …’

  ‘Maybe he did.’

  Jordan pulled a face. ‘Wilko …’

  ‘Oh it’s been known!’ the older man said. ‘You won’t remember it but a girl called Genette Tate disappeared in Devon in 1978. One minute she was seen riding her bike, next minute her bike was in the middle of a road and she was gone. Never been seen or heard of since. There’s places under the earth, behind buildings we don’t pay no attention to, places to hide, to sometimes come and go and sometimes to die. You can use every camera in the world, but you’ll never find them because you have to know where to look and that can be difficult.’

  ‘You back on the tunnels?’

  ‘Not just me, boy,’ Wilko said. ‘You know St Paul’s has always been right at the heart of the City. Everything has passed through that patch of ground: Paganism, Catholicism, Protestantism – witches, traitors, magicians, royalty …’

  ‘Wilko, yeah, I know this, but even if some sort of ritual has taken place it’s probably just deluded people …’

  ‘There? In that place?’ Wilko shook his head. ‘No, boy, it’s ramping up again. Look at the Dark Web. That’s where the poison spreads the most, but look at people around you too, at politicians. Hate’s gaining ground, just like it did in the nineties in the former Yugoslavia. And same as there, the roots are old. Even houses of God can go bad and that place has.’

  ‘St Paul’s?’

  ‘Years ago, people were tried in there, put to death in the churchyard. It’s my belief unholy ceremonies took place there. It’s my belief they still do.’

  Jordan frowned.

  ‘Me and Father George been watching the development of nationalism and the dark arts for many years …’

  ‘Centred on St Paul’s?’

  Wilko took a laptop computer down from a shelf and switched it on.

  Mumtaz’s flat was dark so Lee went to their office on Green Street. But she wasn’t there either. He tried her phone again, to no avail, thought about calling Shazia, rejected the idea on account of the fact he didn’t want to alarm her, and then began searching Mumtaz’s computer for any information about this Danielle she’d met in EC4. But he couldn’t find anything.

  He hadn’t spoken properly to Mumtaz since he’d had that odd conversation with Wilko and Father George the previous night. They both seemed to be convinced there was some connection between the house with the blue door and the death of that baby in St Paul’s Churchyard. Typical of them both, there had been talk of mysterious tunnels leading to and from the cathedral. And because it was a beloved and, in its different incarnations, a truly powerful national symbol, this had been tagged to nationalism. Wilko and George claimed it was rising and both believed it was being assisted by occult forces.

  Five years ago, Lee would have just dismissed this as bullshit. But these days he wasn’t so sure. A kind of nationalism based purely on emotion and belief was certainly gaining traction, and conspiracy theories involving deeply magical thinking were almost mainstream. Figures from the past were revered to the point of madness in some quarters – Churchill, King Arthur, even monsters like Henry VIII and Mosley. All of this was boosted by the Internet, mainly on social media platforms, and, more worryingly, by the so-called Dark Web where those who didn’t want to be found resided.

  Lee lit a cigarette and then went to the tiny galley kitchen at the back of the office to pick up an old saucer to use as an ashtray. He never usually smoked in his office – it was illegal – but his inability to get in touch with Mumtaz was worrying him. Idly he began sorting through bits of paper on her desk. Though she was by nature a tidy person, he’d noticed her become more messy as she attempted to balance her work, her home life and her relationships with her stepdaughter Shazia and with Lee. In reality the two of them got very little time together. It made him feel sad even though Lee knew that, at the present time, there was no way around it.

  Eventually he found an envelope covered in all sorts of words, including ‘Danielle’ and beside it the word ‘Saint’. Was that her surname? Was that even a surname? Lee sat back in Mumtaz’s chair. She’d told him she was going to EC4. She knew he didn’t really approve but she’d done it anyway; she’d been light on details.

  The police, as far as Lee knew, had interviewed the few local people in the area plus the clergy in the cathedral about the dead baby. Not that Mumtaz had gone to the cathedral but … He brought up the cathedral website. In reality he did it to give himself something to do. But then he saw something that made him draw in breath. Now how had the police missed that?

  For a man still in his twenties, Jordan didn’t have a great deal of interest in tech. Like everyone he had a mobile phone and a computer, he even had a Twitter account, but it wasn’t something that he thought about often. In terms of online crime, there were other officers who dealt with that. And while he’d seen the odd off-colour website online, particularly when he’d been a teenager, he’d never seen anything like this.

  He looked away from the screen, up at Wilko and said, ‘This is nuts.’

  ‘Think that’s bad, you should see some of the US sites,’ Wilko said.

  Jordan looked back at the screen. ‘This is incitement to racial hatred,’ he said. ‘Reminds me of those Al Qaeda sites.’

  ‘No different,’ Wilko said. ‘Islamic fundamentalism, white nationalism, it’s all a racist, misogynistic pack of lies. Laughable to you and me but deadly serious to those who believe it, as well as those in the political establishment who want these arse’oles to vote for them. They cosy up and it’s all going on under our noses, while certain elements in our governments say we have to listen to this bollocks because it’s “freedom of speech”. It’s bullshit.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about St Paul’s?’

  Wilko sat down beside his guest. ‘Ah, well that’s a bit more difficult to define,’ he said. ‘There you have to trust me to a certain extent. Or rather you have to trust Father George. He’s a nose for the bad shit and if he tells me that somewhere’s not good, tainted like, then …’

  His phone rang and Wilko picked it up. As Jordan watched him listen to the person on the other end, he was struck by how grave his face became.

  TEN

  Lee was woken up by the sound of his phone pinging. He had a text.

  Raising his head up from Mumtaz’s desk was painful and he was horrified by how strongly the office smelt of kebab and fags. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but after he’d called Wilko at nearly midnight it had just sort of happened.

  He picked up his phone and brought up his texts. He felt a huge rush of relief when he saw that the new text had come from Mumtaz. It said, Sorry been out of communication. My husband’s mother is sick and so I’ve gone to be with her. Back as soon as I can.

  Mumtaz’s husband, Ahmet, was dead. His mother, he thought, lived in Bangladesh. Shazia, Mumtaz’s stepdaughter, had told him that her grandmother hated Mumtaz. She blamed Mumtaz for her son’s death, with some cause as it happened, and had never thought her good enough for her son.

  He called Shazia. It took her a while to pick up. Having finished her degree in criminology at Manchester, Shazia was now living back in London with her boyfriend, Krishnan. A uniformed police officer, Krishnan had recently taken his detective exams and was waiting to hear whether he had been successful. Shazia was due to go to Hendon Police College in 2020. They were young, in love and they rented a tiny, if homely flat in Rotherhithe. Whenever Mumtaz or anyone called them, the couple seemed to have just got up or were still in bed.

  ‘Shaz?’

  ‘Lee?’ She sounded sleep-sodden. Lee looked at his watch. But then it was only 7 a.m.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t realise it was so early. Did I get you up?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Krish has just literally left for work and I was about to get myself some breakfast.’

  ‘Shaz,’ he said and then he wondered what he should say. He didn’t want to alarm her.

  ‘Lee, is everything alright? Is Amma OK?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah … Look Shaz, I don’t want to pry or nothing …’

  ‘Lee, Krish is as lovely as he seems,’ she said.

  Her father, Ahmet, had been a desperate and brutal man: a gambling addict, he’d been deeply in debt to a criminal gang who eventually exacted part of said debt by killing him. Mumtaz, his second wife, had watched him bleed out after being attacked on Wanstead Flats. Both she and Shazia had suffered sexual abuse at Ahmet’s hands. Lee had over the years become very protective of both of them.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Lee said. He liked the young man a lot. ‘No, Shaz, it’s about your dadi …’

  Dadi was her father’s mother.

  Shazia’s voice became cold. Her father’s mother had all but rejected her, especially now that she was living in ‘sin’ with a Hindu. ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s ill, or …?’

  ‘She’s never been well in her life,’ Shazia said. ‘Been dying ever since I can remember. She never does it though. If she is ill, it’s just situation normal. Why?’

  ‘I heard she might be unwell.’

  ‘From Amma?’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  ‘You sound unsure.’

  One day she was going to make a good detective.

  ‘You know what your amma can be like,’ Lee said. ‘She’s …’

  ‘Is everything alright, Lee?’

  As far as he knew, it was and he said so. Shazia said, ‘What’s this about Dadi? Not that I give a shit, you understand.’

  He told her. Not about Mumtaz going missing, just about how she had told him she’d gone to see her mother-in-law.

  ‘I can’t see why,’ Shazia said when he’d finished. ‘Even with Dadi living in Birmingham now, Amma wouldn’t go to see her and Dadi wouldn’t want that. Anyway, Auntie Shamima wouldn’t let Amma in even if Dadi wanted to see her.’

  ‘She your dad’s sister?’

  ‘Yes. Right bitch,’ Shazia said. ‘If she’s moved Dadi over here from Bangladesh you can be sure she’s only done it for one reason, and that’s to get her hands on Dadi’s house in Dhaka, or the money she got for it when she sold up. But I don’t know, Lee. Amma knows I don’t give a shit about any of Dad’s family. Ring her on her mobile.’

  But he didn’t. Maybe Shazia would, but he doubted it. She took no risks when it came to contacting her father’s family and would disapprove of Mumtaz having anything to do with them. Lee just hoped he hadn’t made Shazia feel uneasy about Mumtaz. He would hate to think he’d alarmed her over nothing. But to just go off in the middle of a job was uncharacteristic and he felt uneasy. His phone call to Wilko had been disturbing too. What he’d told the older man had upset him. Wilko had promptly gone off into his bonkers theories about St Paul’s.

  DI Scott Brown sat on the corner of Jordan’s desk and said, ‘Hate to say it, but you’re right.’

  Jordan looked up.

  ‘About churchyard closing times,’ Brown said.

  ‘Oh.’

  The previous evening Wilko had taken a call from that Newham PI, Lee Arnold, telling him that the gates into and out of St Paul’s Churchyard closed at 4 p.m. during the winter months. So why had they been open the night the baby died, and had the police asked St Paul’s staff about this?