Kent’s hatchet features sharpened further. His eyes narrowed in understanding and disdain. “Aw! I get it! What’s your price? It’s the upper ranks running the protection rings now is it? Don’t you know the Fuzz have tried already? The Bow Street Boys? My boss saw them off right sharp. What the hell are you after?”

“Cooperation. First of all, a little information. Describe your business to me will you?”

They listened to a deliberately dull account of the world of pharmacological supplying, its successes and pitfalls, delivered in a high-pitched voice trying for a classy accent. An effort to impress? No. Joe decided: to belittle and annoy.

“And when I send a crew in to the rear part of these very large premises, they’ll find no substances I couldn’t with safety prescribe to my aunty?” Joe asked with mock innocence.

“Oh! That’s it! Now we’ve got there! That’s drug squad business. They turned us over last month. Don’t you talk to each other? Clean as a whistle. The kind of people we work with have no truck with that sort of nonsense.”

Joe improvised. “It’s the other sort of nonsense I’m interested in.”

“Not that again! The animals are perfectly happy. Until their moment comes, of course. But it’s in a good cause, I reckon. People see that.”

“What kind of animals?”

“Rabbits mainly. Used to be rats. No shortage of those round here.” He grinned. “But our clients are very picky—they require something more delicate, fluffier, less … rodent-like.” Into the astonished silence that greeted this, he went on, enjoying his moment: “The kind of ladies we deal with would run a mile at the thought that Thames rats were involved in the process. Though with supplies the way they are, when push comes to shove …”

“What is the time lag these days?” Joe broke in feeling his way through to the light that was dawning for him.

“That’s the thing! Everybody wants it instant. Used to be four, five days to develop an A-Z sample but these German blokes at St. Catherine’s have got it down to two days. They know their stuff! It’s all in the ears—the veins in the ears. Much easier to process. Our staff were never keen on doing the entrails. You ever looked inside a rat?”

“More times than you’ve had hot dinners, mate!” Joe tapped the ugly scar on his forehead, his memento of the trenches. “Sometimes they were our hot dinners. Now then—if you had a request for such a procedure on, say, this last Friday evening …?”

“Results Sunday night. We’re open all hours.”

“The request from St. Catherine’s last Friday. The one you picked’ up at nine o’clock. Do you have the results?”

“ ’Course. We phoned it through as instructed last night.”

“Result?”

Kent looked at him with truculence and suspicion. “Oh, no! Sorry. No can do. Can’t risk it. More than my job’s worth.”

Joe pushed a pile of papers from the desk onto the floor and dumped his briefcase in the space he’d created. He began to unbuckle the fastenings. “Then I must ask you to sign a few papers for the Mayor’s office and prepare to close down by … tomorrow. That’ll give you time to make arrangements for the livestock and we’ll be round with the blue and white tapes at midday. Pen, please, Superintendent?”

Bacchus offered his Mont Blanc with a flourish and began to dust down a square foot of desk top with his sleeve.

“Oh, bugger you! Positive. It was positive!” Struck by a sudden thought, Kent leered. “ ’Ere—are you the father? Is that what this is all about? It’s personal, innit? Well, sod you—you’ve no right coming down here bothering us. We never do personal. We’d get shut down. I’m going to report this to your superior!”

“Oh, yes?”

Kent at last began to count Joe’s stripes. He took a long assessing look at his gold braid, his war wound and his barely contained amusement, and shrugged. “Gawn! I’ll see you out, Guv.” And with an evil grin: “If I had a bleedin’ cigar, I’d treat you.”

“WELL, ARE YOU …?” Bacchus asked as they climbed back into the car.

“The father? Lord no!”

“Glad to hear it. I was going to say: are you ever going to tell me what the hell’s going on? What do the veins in the ears of some rabbit in the hands of that ghastly little tick have to do with affairs of state?”

“I begin to think—less and less. I wonder if there’s a personal aspect to all this that we’re missing, so blinded are we by the limelight of international conspiracy. Julia pregnant? That’s a thought to conjure with! But, according to Mr. Kent, the nine o’clock sample collected on Friday night gave a positive result thanks to their advanced testing procedures and that result has been duly reported. She knows.”

“I don’t believe it! That sweet little thing?” Bacchus was stunned.

“Have we been watching the same girl?”

THE TELEPHONE ON Joe’s desk rang at exactly eleven o’clock. Professor Reginald Stone declared himself and gave Joe five minutes to say his piece. He was not pleased to be caught between lectures. He listened to Joe’s request to recall once again the sequence of events between the finding of the gold coin and the stowing away in the colonel’s handkerchief, sighed and tutted in irritation.

“Thank you, sir. Commendably succinct,” Joe said, when he’d finished.

“Brevis esse laboro,” came the predictable reply.

“Indeed. I will try to be equally brief. I’ve got two minutes left,” Joe said. “To set your mind at rest—I’m sure you’ve been worrying—the coin in the girl’s mouth was, as you warned us it might be, a copy. A very good one and one with a high gold content but—a facsimile. So convincing a specimen must have been moulded from an original, according to our expert with a microscope. I’d like you to give me the names of the London owners of such a coin. Including such as have sold them on or reported them stolen.”

The professor listed five names.

“Thank you for that. You’ve been a considerable help, Professor.”

Five names. One recurring.

He’d got him.

The man he’d begun to think of as the mad choreographer. The identity of the person behind these unpleasant crimes: the mistreatment of a body, the murder of a seaman, the terrorising and threat to the life of a good-hearted American senator for reasons Joe did not yet understand, was clear. Joe’s only problem was that he simply did not accept it. All he could do was arrange an interview and see how far he could push the evidence. He picked up the telephone again and made a careful call.

A knock on the door announced Inspector Orford.

“Orford! Come in and have a cup of coffee. You look as though you need one. Tell me how it went.”

Joe listened to the no-frills, professional account, guessing only from the occasional pause and use of a telling adjective that the announcement of death had been its usual gruelling experience.

“Well done. Good decision to let the story finish at the hospital. No need to burden the old girl with all those muddy riverbank theatricals and the disfigurement. That generation has a certain reverence for the dead which we are losing. We’re not in the business of piling pain on pain. Speaking of which … Orford, I know now who is responsible for that pain. The toe-chopping, the neck-breaking, the alarming notes and all the rest of the terrors. I’m not clear as to the motive that’s behind all the brutality and the madness and I doubt I ever shall be. But I have the identity. I’ve traced it back to a directorship of that clinic you charmed your way into: St. Catherine’s Clinic.”

Orford opened his eyes wide and whistled. “No! Sir, you’ll never get near! Untouchable, I’d say.”

“On the contrary,” Joe said with more cheerfulness than he felt. “I’ve issued an invitation to come up and see us. We have an appointment here in my office in half an hour. In preparation for which—pass me that envelope of prints from the lab, will you? I must study it again. And remind me … how many matches do we require these days to establish an absolute identity? Is it still twelve?”