“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.”

Annie, who had heard of these books but had read only the Eliot and a few of Joyce’s short stories at school, was impressed. So the books she had seen in Luke’s room weren’t just for show; he really did read and probably even understand them. At fifteen, she’d been reading historical sagas and sword and sorcery series, not literature with a capital L. That was reserved for school and was tedious in the extreme, thanks to Mr. Bolton, the English teacher, who made the stuff sound about as exciting as a wet Sunday in Cleethorpes.

“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 Annie, showing crooked teeth. “I suppose there must have been something he liked about the place.”

“Must be the service,” Annie said.

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. Annie thought she glimpsed a tabby cat slinking away into the deeper shadows.

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.”

Annie took her copy of the artist’s impression out and set it on the table in front of him. “What about her?”

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,” Annie said, feeling a tingle of excitement rise up her spine.

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.”

Before he cut into Luke Armitage’s flesh, Dr. Glendenning made a thorough examination of the body’s exterior. Banks watched as the doctor examined and measured the head wound. Luke’s skin was white and showed some wrinkling from exposure to the water, and there was a slight discoloration around the neck.

“Back of the skull splintered into the cerebellum,” the doctor said.

“Enough to kill him?”

“At a guess.” Glendenning bent over and squinted at the wound. “And it would have bled quite a bit, if that’s any use.”

“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. Glendenning’s assistant had shaved and cleaned. There was no blood. A few days in the water would see to that. He could see the indentation clearly enough, about the right size for a poker, but the wound was oblique, almost horizontal.

“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. Glendenning said. “But this was inflicted from sideways on, not from in front or behind, by someone a little shorter than the victim, if the angle’s to be believed. That means whoever did it was probably standing beside him. Unusual angle, as I said.” He lit a cigarette, strictly forbidden in the hospital, but usually overlooked in Glendenning’s case. Everyone knew that when you were dealing with the smells of a postmortem, a ciggie now and then was a great distraction. And Glendenning was more careful these days; he rarely dropped ash in open incisions.

“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 Glendenning. “We’ll know more when I get a look at the brain tissue.”

“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. Glendenning’s assistant made the customary Y-shaped incision and peeled back the skin and muscle from the chest wall with a scalpel. The smell of human muscle, rather like raw lamb, Banks had always thought, emanated from the body. Next, the assistant pulled the chest flap up over Luke’s face and took a bone-cutter to the rib cage, finally peeling off the chest plate and exposing the inner organs. When he had removed these en bloc, he placed them on the dissecting table and reached for his electric saw. Bank knew what was coming next, that unforgettable sound and burned-bone smell of the skull, so he turned his attention to Dr. Glendenning, who was dissecting the organs, paying particular attention to the lungs.

“No water,” he announced. “Or minimal.”

“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. Glendenning had a quick look.