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“They sound a bit advanced, even for him.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Wells protested. “If I hadn’t thought him ready I wouldn’t have sold him them. He’d already been through T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, most of Camus and Dubliners. I didn’t think he was quite ready for Ulysses or Pound’s Cantos, but he could handle the Portrait, no problem.”
A
“How often did Luke call by?” she asked.
“About once a month. Or whenever he was out of something to read.”
“He had the money. Why didn’t he go to Waterstone’s and buy them new?”
“Don’t ask me. We got chatting the first time he dropped in-”
“When was that?”
“Maybe eighteen months or so ago. Anyway, as I say, we got chatting and he came back.” He looked around at the stained ceilings, flaking plaster and tottering piles of books and smiled at A
“Must be the service,” A
Wells laughed. “I can tell you one thing. He liked those old Penguin Modern Classics. The old ones with the gray spines, not these modern pale-green things. Real paperbacks, not your trade size. And you can’t buy those at Waterstone’s. Same with the old Pan covers.”
Something moved in the back of the shop and a pile of books fell over. A
Wells sighed. “Familiar’s gone and done it again.”
“Familiar?”
“My cat. No bookshop’s complete without a cat. After witch’s familiar. See?”
“I suppose so. Did Luke ever come in here with anyone else?”
“No.”
A
Wells leaned forward, put his glasses on again and examined the sketch. “It looks like her,” he said. “I told you I never forget a face.”
“But you told me Luke never came in with anyone else,” A
Wells looked at her. “Who said she was with him? No, she came in with another bloke, same sort of clothing and body-piercing.”
“Who are they?”
“I don’t know. They must have been a bit short of money, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they came in with an armful of brand-new books to sell. Stolen, I thought. Plain as day. Stolen books. I don’t have any truck with that sort of thing, so I sent them packing.”
Chapter 11
Before he cut into Luke Armitage’s flesh, Dr. Glende
“Back of the skull splintered into the cerebellum,” the doctor said.
“Enough to kill him?”
“At a guess.” Glende
“Could be,” said Banks. “Blood’s a lot harder to clean up than most people think. What about the weapon?”
“Looks like some sort of round-edged object,” the doctor said. “Smooth-sided.”
“Like what?”
“Well, it’s not got a very large circumference, so I’d rule out something like a baseball bat. I can’t see any traces – wood splinters or anything – so it could have been metal or ceramic. Hard, anyway.”
“A poker, perhaps?”
“Possible. That would fit the dimensions. It’s the angle that puzzles me.”
“What about it?”
“See for yourself.”
Banks bent over the wound, which Dr. Glende
“You’d expect someone swinging a poker to swing downward from behind, or at least at a forty-five-degree angle, so we’d get a more vertical pattern,” Dr. Glende
“Maybe the victim was already bent double from a previous blow?” Banks suggested. “To the stomach, say. Or on his knees, head bent forward.”
“Praying?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Banks said, remembering that more than one executed villain had died on his knees praying for his life. But Luke Armitage wasn’t a villain, as far as Banks knew.
“Which side did the blow come from?” Banks asked.
“Right side. You can tell by the pattern of indentation.”
“So that would indicate a left-handed attacker?”
“Likely so. But I’m not happy with this, Banks.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, in the first place, it’s hardly a surefire way to kill somebody. Head blows are tricky. You can’t count on them, especially just one.”
Banks knew that well enough. On his last case a man had taken seven or eight blows from a side-handled baton and still survived a couple of days. In a coma, but alive. “So our killer’s an amateur who got lucky.”
“Could be,” said Glende
“But could this blow have been the cause of death?”
“Can’t say for certain. It could have killed him, but he might have been dead already. You’ll have to wait for the full toxicology report to know whether that might have been the case.”
“Not drowned?”
“I don’t think so, but let’s wait until we get to the lungs.”
Banks watched patiently, if rather queasily, as Dr. Glende
“No water,” he a
“Meaning Luke was dead when he went in the water?”
“I’ll send the tissues for diatomic analysis, but I don’t expect they’ll find much.”
The electric saw stopped, and seconds later Banks heard something rather like a combination grating and sucking sound, and he knew it was the top of the skull coming off. The assistant then cut the spinal cord and the tentorium and lifted the brain out. As he carried it to the jar of formalin, in which it would hang suspended for a couple of weeks, making it firmer and easier to handle, Dr. Glende