‘It’s always the children,’ said Nightingale. ‘They’re never satisfied with the status quo.’
‘How did you save the blind man?’ I asked.
‘Apparently they’re not blind,’ said Nightingale. ‘They are in fact visually impaired. A very forceful young lady pointed this out to me at some length while we were waiting at the hospital.’
‘How did you save the visually impaired man then?’
‘I wish I could take the credit,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was his guide dog. As soon the sequestration began …’
‘Sequestration?’ I asked.
Apparently this was the term Dr Walid had invented to describe what happened when a normal human being was taken over by our revenant. It’s a legal term that refers to the process by which a person’s property is seized in order to pay off debts, or because it’s considered to be the proceeds of crime. In this case the property sequestrated was the person’s body.
‘As soon as sequestration commenced,’ said Nightingale, ‘the guide dog, who I believe is called Malcolm, went berserk and dragged the potential victim away. Inspector Seawoll already had his people covering charity collections in the area, and one of them intervened before our poor sequestrated Punch could follow the blind man.’
‘Another triumph for intelligence-led policing,’ I said.
‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘It was your friend Constable May who was on the scene first.’
‘Lesley? I bet she wasn’t happy about that,’ I said.
‘In her words: “Why does this shit always fucking happen to me?”’ said Nightingale.
‘So who was our sequestration victim when he was alive?’ I asked.
‘Who says he’s dead?’ said Nightingale.
He led me down the corridor, where they had a room kitted out as a mobile intensive care unit which is, when you think about it, a disturbing thing to find in a mortuary. Lesley was slumped in a chair in the corner of the room. She raised her hand in a hello when we entered. The bed was surrounded on both sides by machines huffing, going beep or just silently blinking. In the bed was Terrence Pottsley, aged twenty-seven, of Sedgefield, County Durham, a stock control manager for Tesco’s, next of kin most definitely not informed as yet. A thicket of stainless steel was growing out of his face – a medical scaffold they call it. Dr Walid hoped that would allow successful reconstructive surgery once the issue of Pottsley’s sequestration was resolved.
‘And I complained when I had my braces in,’ said Lesley.
‘Is he awake?’ I asked.
‘Apparently he’s being kept in what they call a “medical coma”，’ said Nightingale. ‘Did Oxley know who we’re dealing with?’
‘Isis did,’ I said. ‘She remembers Henry Pyke as a failed actor who may have been murdered by Charles Macklin – a much more successful actor.’
‘That would explain the resentment,’ said Nightingale.
‘Was he arrested?’ asked Lesley.
‘Records are sketchy,’ I said. ‘Pyke might have been arrested …’
‘Not Pyke,’ said Lesley. ‘Macklin. To get away with one murder is like an accident, but to get away with two seems a little bit fucking improbable. Not to mention unfair.’
‘Macklin lived on to a ripe old age,’ said Nightingale. ‘He was a fixture of Covent Garden life. I knew about the first murder, but I’d never heard of Henry Pyke.’
‘Can we have our discussion somewhere else?’ said Lesley. ‘This guy’s making me nervous.’
Since we were, mostly, coppers, that meant a pub or the canteen – the canteen was closer. I waited for Dr Walid to join us before outlining my strategy.
‘I have an idea,’ I said.
‘This better not be a cunning plan,’ said Lesley.
Nightingale looked blank, but at least it got a chuckle from Dr Walid.
‘It is, in fact,’ I said, ‘a cunning plan.’
Nightingale had been carrying around a hard copy of the Piccini script. I laid it out and drew attention to the scene that followed Punch’s disposal of the blind beggar. In it the constable arrives to arrest Punch for murdering his wife and baby.
‘I make myself the constable in the next scene.’
‘You’re volunteering to have your head beaten in?’ asked Dr Walid.
‘If you read the script you’ll see that the constable actually survives the encounter,’ I said. ‘As does the officer who arrives immediately after.’