“I’m an art student from the country,” said Susan. “I came to London to study, and find my father. Not . . . not be part of . . . whatever the hell is going on. It was bad enough with the weird shit, as Greene calls it, but with those thugs as well . . . I mean, why me?”
“Good question,” said Merlin. “I’d like to know, too.”
Susan glared at him, but didn’t say anything. No further conversation occurred until they were going past Broadcasting House on Portland Place.
“The BBC,” pointed out Merlin, with the air of a townsperson helping out a yokel.
“I know,” said Susan impatiently. “I told you I’ve been to London before. We used to come here every year for my birthday until quite recently.”
“Ah,” replied Merlin. “Just making conversation. You were very quiet—”
“Why did you stick Frank Thringley with a silver pin?” interrupted Susan. “You never did say.”
Merlin glanced over his shoulder at Audrey. The hatch in the glass partition between the passenger and driver compartment was open.
“Good question, luv,” said Audrey. “Why did you, Merlin?”
“He wouldn’t answer my questions,” said Merlin stiffly. “I asked him very nicely, too. And then he tried to razor me.”
“You’re lucky Thringley did have a go, and that he was up to no good,” said Audrey. “I mean, our-neck-of-the-woods no good, what with that giant louse and all. Otherwise, you’d be hoeing the cabbage rows out back of Thorn House.”
“I know,” replied Merlin testily.
“What are you talking about?” asked Susan crossly. “And you still haven’t properly answered my question. What were you trying to find out?”
“Thorn House is one of our places in the country,” said Merlin. “Dorset. They grow a lot of vegetables there. You’d probably be at home. Whereas I wouldn’t be, making it a suitable place to send me for a punishment.”
“Growing up in the country doesn’t make me a farmer,” said Susan. “What were you trying to find out?”
Merlin sighed.
“My mother was killed six years ago,” he said quietly, looking down at his hands, the bare right laid over the gloved left. “A shotgun blast. An accident, supposedly, one of those ‘wrong place, wrong time’ things. She interrupted a robbery in Sloane Street. Three armed men rushed out of a jeweler’s as she came out of her favorite florist’s, next door. She put the robbers down, but there was another one in a car on the street, with a sawn-off shotgun. She got both barrels in the back.
“When I turned eighteen and was fully inducted, I got the file from Scotland Yard. Call it morbid curiosity, I suppose. But once I’d read it, I thought it wasn’t an accident at all. I’m sure those four men were sent to kill my mother. The jewelry heist was cover for it. So, for the last year, off and on, I’ve followed things up.”
“Despite being told to leave it alone,” interjected Audrey. The traffic had seized up again at Oxford Circus, so she could turn around and talk through the hatch in the glass partition. A strong waft of beef kebab and onions came with her words. “There was no evidence of it being a planned murder.”
“Nothing except the unusual imbecility of the perpetrators,” snapped Merlin. “I interviewed them all in prison. Well, all except Craddock, the shooter—Mum lived long enough to stop his heart—and they were all near morons. I’m sure their minds had been tampered with. And they all had the same story to tell.”
“Maybe it was true,” suggested Audrey, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Lots of criminals ain’t too sharp. Hang on, we’re orf again.”
The cab clicked into gear and lurched forward, Audrey expertly exploiting the narrow gap that had opened between a white Ford transit and a bus before the van could close it up and deny any crossing of Oxford Street for another ten minutes.
“No criminals ever tell exactly the same story,” said Merlin. “Not over and over again, across years, word perfect. They get things wrong, or forget. This was burned into their minds, and a lot of other stuff burned out. So I had to dig around, look deeper into their records, their associates and so on. To find some common connection, something that put them together for this job.”
“And you found sod all,” said Audrey, swinging the wheel for the sharp right into Hanover Street. “And got told to leave it alone. Again.”
“Yes, I didn’t find anything conclusive,” admitted Merlin.
“What about your cousin?” asked Susan. She’d been thinking about him ever since Merlin had mentioned what he could do. “The ‘reverse oracle.’”
“The wot?” asked Audrey.
“A term I used to try to explain to Susan what Norman does,” said Merlin loftily. “As a matter of fact, Norman did have a look for me. But by then it was five years, and he’s really only good for a month or two back. But there are . . . entities . . . who can help unravel the past or look towards the future, give clues to help work out what went on. So I went to one of them.”
“Against regulations,” said Audrey.
“It’s a gray area,” said Merlin.
“Is that right?” commented Audrey dryly. She swore as she had to swerve to miss a man who stepped out into the road. One of a stream of pedestrians trying to get past a huddle of workmen who were eyeing a partly dug hole in the pavement as if it was something unfamiliar and might move if they didn’t watch it.
“Anyway, what . . . it . . . told me was as follows.”
Merlin took a breath, pushed himself back against the partition, and intoned in a strange, flat voice:
Seek the Sipper, blood-lapper
Purse-cutter, goods-taker
Chieftain of outcasts
in the north
in the north
of the city of the moon
He knows, he knows, he knows
But is silenced, held fast
By vows and oaths
And will not speak
“Bit of a clue, there,” said Audrey. “The ‘will not speak’ part, I mean.”
“Oracles being notoriously unreliable and deceptive,” said Merlin, “I chose to consider there was an unspoken ‘unless’ at the end of that little ditty, or—as may in fact be proven to be the case, finding the chap referred to would give me some other lead. ‘City of the moon’ means ‘Luan-Dun’ or London, by the way. So I looked around for North London Sippers who were also criminals, and talked to two—who were not exactly chieftains, I mean one is a bookie and the other a pickpocket, but they led me to Thringley, who definitely was a chieftain of outcasts. I talked to the first two Sippers perfectly peaceably, and I would have continued that way if Susan’s ‘uncle Frank’ hadn’t gone for the razor—”
He abruptly stopped talking and leaned forward to stare over Susan’s shoulder through the back window, and then twisted about to look out the front. The taxi was making very slow progress along Curzon Street, had passed Bolton Street, and there was not only a lot of traffic but many pedestrians, a high proportion of them obviously tourists.
“Audrey!” snapped Merlin. “Urchins!”