‘The tracer on her phone told us she was on her way here,’ Gane said. ‘And now it seems she’s not. The signal hasn’t moved for ten minutes. Look.’

A red dot pulsed steadily in the map’s spider web of streets.

‘Where is it?’ Mallory said. ‘That looks like somewhere near St Paul’s.’

‘East Poultry Avenue, EC1,’ Gane said. ‘It’s the Barbican.’

‘That’s not the Barbican,’ I said. ‘That’s the meat market.’

Mallory shook his head.

‘That stupid girl,’ he said. ‘Oh, that stupid girl.’

The hooks hung around the storage room like stainless steel bunting and our breath made steaming clouds in the freezing fog. Huge slabs of bloody meat hung everywhere in the sub-zero air. I could hear Wren and Whitestone calling her name.

‘Scarlet! Scarlet! Scarlet!’

Mallory pushed aside a great headless carcass of beef.

‘She’s not here, is she?’ he said.

Gane rubbed a hand over the misty screen of his laptop.

‘Well, the phone’s here,’ he said.

And then I saw the pig’s head sitting on a marble slab. The pig’s head with its giant, floppy Dumbo ears. Comical and tragic all at once. The albino skin, more white than pink, with just a few delicate smears of blood. The eyes shut as if overwhelmed with exhaustion. And the monstrous snout, squashed flat and rich with blood.

Figures moved in the mist of the cold room, cursing and bumping into each other. Unable to find the thing they sought. They kept calling her name.

My spine throbbed with pain as I reached under the snout and into the pig’s mouth and pulled out a phone, its screen smeared with milky blood.

‘Sir?’ I said.

Mallory took the phone from me. He looked across at Gane, who nodded and closed his laptop.

‘He has her,’ Mallory said.

My own phone began to vibrate. I took it out. SECOND FRONT CALLING it said, and I saw that the blood of the pig’s head was on my hands now, and on my phone, and on my clothes, getting on everything.

‘It’s Cage from the war memorabilia shop,’ a very distant voice said.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I sold a knife.’

Chapter 25

25

‘THIS BIG GUY walked into my shop,’ Nick Cage said. ‘Well, not big – pumped up. Weights. Maybe steroids. A little man but pumped up, you know?’

We had him in an interview room in West End Central. Mallory and Gane and me. Mallory didn’t like him.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ Cage said, looking at me.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘You sell knives,’ Mallory said. ‘You sell swords. Daggers.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you ever see what a knife can do to someone?’

‘I sell to collectors.’

‘Ever heard of the Offensive Weapons Act?’