He nodded dumbly.

“I can see why you’d need help. It’s hardly the part of her anatomy you took most notice of.”

Joe flinched at the barbed comment, though Kingstone, in his numbed state, appeared not to notice the rudeness or the familiarity.

“But her toes—I’d know them. I’ve been bandaging and massaging them for her since we were eight years old. Not promising anything, mind, but if you two will shove over a bit and let me take a look …”

She bent over the grotesque offering displayed on the gold tray, thankfully emptied of its original contents. To Joe’s horror, without warning, Julia picked up the object between her thumb and forefinger and stared at it, turning it this way and that.

“I don’t know. I honestly can’t say. She doesn’t have her initials tattooed on it, you know. Have you smelled it? Formalin, would that be? You can just make it out over the turkish delight. My God! I’ll never eat chocolate again!” On the point of gagging, she recovered herself sufficiently to go on: “It’s been in a jar somewhere. This thing could have been amputated from anyone, any time ago. A hospital involved? They get rid of dozens of corpses every day. That looks like a very clean cut to me. It’s probably shrunk and it’s definitely started to decay. I wouldn’t recognise it if were my own. Impossible to identify it.” She turned to the senator. “I’d ignore it, Mr. Kingstone. Some loony’s having you on. Trying to give you the screaming willies. Who’ve you been annoying?”

“I’m afraid he can’t ignore it,” Joe said. “Look, the sender’s put a little note in underneath.” He took out a small greetings card bearing two lines of calligraphed writing in a dense black ink and looked towards Kingstone. “Arrogant toad!” he commented. “Where are the letters carefully cut from the Daily Mirror headlines? The disguised faux-left-handed scrawl? No attempt at a concealment here. I’m only surprised he didn’t sign it.”

“You’ll need to catch him before you can make a match,” Armitage confirmed. “He clearly expects not to be caught.”

The senator shuddered and waved a hand, indicating that Joe should read it out.

“ ‘This was the most unkindest cut of all.’

But not the last, senator?”

“That’s from ‘Julius Caesar.’ Mark Antony’s rabble-rousing speech about treachery,” Kingstone muttered, deep in thought.

“It seems we’re dealing with a joker with literary pretensions,” Joe said.

“An English joker,” Kingstone concluded. “An American would have corrected the Bard’s grammar.” He gave a barking laugh that unnerved the others. “And he goes on, in that speech, to say:

Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,

Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.”

Disturbed by his words and the haunted look in the senator’s eye, Joe picked up his thought and carried it further. “Treason. Ah, yes. He has much to say on the subject in that play. An old-fashioned word, treason.” He let the idea dangle between them.

“No. It’s never out of fashion. Just rarely used, thank God. But it’s ever present, lurking in the shadows, dagger in hand and apologia in mouth.”

Armitage was growing impatient. “Oh, come on! I wouldn’t read too much into this bit of mischief. Everyone knows that line and our bird couldn’t resist the idea of the ‘unkindest cut’—her being a dancer an’ all. But it’s more likely a case of ‘all sound and fury, signifying nothing’ if you ask me.”

Julia replaced the object in the box. “Well if you fellers are just going to stand about slapping each other in the chops with quotations, I’ll ask to be excused. I’ll just pop next door and do what ladies do when they’ve been handling a dead digitus.” They listened in silence while she went through to Natalia’s rooms and water pipes began to gurgle. Joe guessed that the duration and frequency of the gurgles betrayed a reaction more fundamental than a need to wash hands.

Before he divulged the whole of his knowledge of this sorry affair, Joe knew he had to exploit this moment of unbalance, to press the distressed but devious Kingstone as far as he could. “You are being threatened in some way, sir. Blackmailed? Coerced? The words: ‘But not the last?’ imply that further mutilation might occur—perhaps in an incremental manner? The question mark suggests that the decision to allow more unkind cuts may lie with you. I’m wondering what you have to do or say to stop the butchery. I don’t think you were aware of any threat to Natalia’s well-being this morning when we spoke. When I trailed the possibility of Natalia’s being treated as a missing person, you dismissed it. Rather emphatically. I concluded that you had a good idea where she was and were not concerned. That I had blundered, unwanted, into a lovers’ tiff. Do you now deny this?”

Kingstone shook his head.

“Then I must conclude that someone in the last ten hours has contacted you and transmitted a dire message to the contrary.”

“There are things you don’t need to know—shouldn’t know, Sandilands.” His expression was fleetingly apologetic. He turned aside. And then, aggressively: “This is your backyard she’s gone missing in. Why don’t you just take off and do your job? I want her found.”

“If you seriously want her found, you’ll give me the information you’re holding back. I’m not in the habit of sending good men off on a wild goose chase when the goose in question is known to be nesting a couple of yards away.”

“I’ve nothing more to say.” Kingstone’s face showed unflinching resolution.

“Then there’s little more I can do.”

The shutters had closed over Armitage’s lively features on hearing the stand-off and it was Joe’s eye he refused to meet. The two Americans exchanged a glance Joe could not interpret, a glance of collusion that reminded him that he was dealing with two of the players of Nine Men’s Morris. Two influential men who—Joe was convinced—were up to no good and operating on his patch.

Joe fought down a rush of anger as he remembered that this dubious pair had spent their afternoon banqueting, toasting themselves with champagne, drinking the best of claret and brandy, playing a child’s chequer game and plotting God knew what mischief while less than half a mile away, the body fluids of an unidentified young dancer had been flowing away down the channels of the pathologist’s marble slab. She was still calling out to Joe and now a connection with the senator was more than just the uneasy suspicion his copper’s mind had entertained from the moment he’d set eyes on her corpse. He held the physical connection in his hand and he was going to play it for all it was worth.

“Your obduracy is noted,” he said, coldly official. “I have to tell you something that will shock you even further. Miss Ivanova doesn’t have it quite right—there is one infallible way of identifying the toe. That is by matching it with the rest of the foot. The characteristics of the cut itself will establish ownership. We have the remainder of this young lady, thought to be a ballet dancer, and sadly dead these two or three days, in our keeping at the police laboratory at Scotland Yard. Her body was dug up on the north bank of the Thames this morning.”

“No! You’ve found her? Natalia? Dead? Why the hell didn’t you—”

“Stop right there! Earlier today I attended the autopsy of a young woman whose name is still unknown to us. The cause of death, likewise, has not been ascertained. She could be any one of about five hundred dark-haired dancers in London. My men are checking with ballet companies, dance schools, music halls and travelling circuses for missing women. What would you have had me do? Storm into and drag you out of your Pilgrims’ luncheon on the off-chance that the body was that of a lady-friend of yours who had chosen to avoid your company for a couple of days? In view of these later developments, I see now that I must ask you, sir, to come along to the Yard to view the body and attempt an identification.” Joe hated sounding like a bobby in a witness box but perhaps a touch of cooling formality was called for at this stage. He judged that Kingstone was coming to the boil and already under more pressure than they had knowledge of.