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’

‘Juliet?’

‘Obviously.’

‘You’re rolling over on Juliet?’

‘I wish. Look, I don’t think there’s anyone in that place with the balls or the tradecraft to exorcise her. I just want them to keep her out. Otherwise – well, a shitty situation gets one degree shittier.’

Nicky considered. ‘I can drop him an email through a blind proxy. That good enough?’

‘That’s perfect, Nicky. Thanks.’

‘You’re very welcome. Where I’m going, even she won’t find me, so what the fuck do I care?’

‘Hey,’ I called to the cabbie, ‘can you fork a left at Nags Head Road?’

‘I was going to anyway,’ he grunted.

‘Great. You can drop me on the other side of the reservoir. That’s Chingford Hatch, right?’

‘Chingford Green. Chingford Hatch is a bit further down.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Who do you know all the way out here?’ Nicky demanded, genuinely curious. He’s curious about everything, because he knows, deep down, that the huge global consp³ge alliracy of which we’re all a part takes in every tiny detail.

I think he even believes that one of the tiny details may turn out to be the clue that unlocks everything else.

‘A guy who runs a crematorium,’ I said.

19

The cab rolled away into the night, leaving me standing on a rain-slick pavement in the middle of a strangely lopsided street. In front of me was an unremarkable row of white-fronted semis: at my back was the Lea Valley reservoir, a broad slash of night-black nothingness barely contained behind a chain-link fence.

King’s Head Hill lay to the north of me, most of the rest of Chingford to the south. Taking advantage of a street light, I fished out my wallet and rummaged through it until I found what I was looking for: the calling card that Peter Covington had given to Carla on the day her husband got cremated, and that Carla had passed on to me because she had nowhere to put it in her funereal glad-rags. The address was off New Road, in Chingford Hatch, and it had a name instead of a number: ‘The Maltings’.

Less than a mile away, anyway, even if it was at the further end of New Road, up by the golf course. I made a start.

As I walked I mulled over what I knew and didn’t know. The crematorium was the centre of some reincarnation racket whose implications I couldn’t get my head around just yet. John Gittings had been investigating it when he died, and he’d known what was going down long before he knew where.