The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, стр. 51
“Yes,” said Vivien. She hesitated. “It may be her own father, of course.”
“What?” asked Una.
“Need to know,” said Merlin hurriedly, with a swift look at Vivien.
“Yeah, well, I think I do need to know,” said Una dangerously. She pointed at the jiggling pot Merlin had his foot on. “A Cauldron-Born, attacking a safe house we maintain with the Metropolitan Police? I’m the senior left-handed here. Tell.”
“It’s because there was a Cauldron-Born I want to keep this information very close,” said Merlin.
“What?”
Merlin took a deep breath.
“Who has a cauldron?” he asked, very softly, so Una had to lean in. “And who goes to Silvermere most often?”
“The Greats . . .” Una started to say, then stopped. “You don’t seriously think . . .”
“I don’t know,” replied Merlin uncomfortably. “But I want to focus on getting Susan back with as few people as possible knowing that’s what we’re doing, okay?”
Una was silent for a long three seconds.
“We have told Aunt Helen and Zoë,” said Vivien. “They don’t think Merlin’s suspicions are well founded, but they’re going to consult the Grail-Keeper, whether Thurston and Merrihew do or not.”
Una nodded slowly. She looked at Merlin, very intently.
“Vivien’s going with you?”
“Of course,” said Vivien swiftly.
“You’ll telephone from the road, at least once every two hours,” said Una. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” said Merlin.
Una raised her left hand and fluttered her fingers.
“Get going, then,” she said. “Be clever.”
Merlin lifted his foot, spun about, and stalked away. The pot rattled vigorously, Una put her foot on it, and when she looked up Merlin and Vivien had gone inside the house.
The older bookseller took a deep breath and looked over to one of her compatriots.
“Darren, give me your belt.”
“Why?”
“To tie around this bloody saucepan.”
“But my pants will fall down. You’ve got a belt.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want my pants to fall down. Oh, don’t make that face. Go and see if you can scrounge up some string or rope. Or some warning tape. The coppers will have tape. Get that.”
Merlin and Vivien hurried upstairs. Merlin picked up his glove and swapped it with the oven mitt, repacked his yak-hair bag with the Smython and other items, and got his suitcase, while Vivien looked at the hole in the ceiling. The two SOCOs—a man and a woman—who’d been looking at the body that had come down the hole turned their backs, and whispered to each other. One of them thought Vivien was cute and he didn’t even mind when the woman warned him off, describing the right-handed bookseller as “one of those really weird spooks.”
On the way back out, they first had to skirt Mister Nimbus, who was crouched in the hall, his fur up all along his back. He was watching the door with narrowed eyes where Mrs. London’s body had been carried out, and now Chief Superintendent Holly was trying to come in, with Inspector Greene intent on keeping him out.
Though it seemed unlikely he’d been out running at three o’clock in the morning, the superintendent was currently wearing runners and a dark blue tracksuit with a caricature of Bruce Lee on the left breast over the inscription “Enter the Copper,” and he had a black towel around his neck. He looked younger, less bulky, and more efficient than he had earlier, in his three-piece suit.
“You shouldn’t be here, sir,” said Greene, very firmly. “You know the procedure. No senior officers to be identifiably present at a LIBER MERCATOR SPECIAL incident. We’ve got a cordon around the square but there might be someone with a telephoto lens gets a photo, or one of the householders chances a snap to sell to the papers. You’re well known. You need to leave at once.”
“I’ll be off once I have a bit of a shufti around the place,” said Holly. “You’ve got some bodies, right? Tooled-up local lads? I can probably identify them, straight off, save a lot of time.”
“No, sir,” replied Greene. “I spoke to the deputy commissioner minutes ago. She has confirmed I have operational control. You must leave at once or I will have you removed.”
Greene looked past Holly to the two officers outside the door, whose steely expressions wilted slightly at the prospect of having to manhandle a senior officer.
“You need to leave, sir,” repeated Greene.
Holly chuckled and held up his hands. His tracksuit sleeve slid back enough to reveal part of the chunky silver watchband Merlin had noticed before, at least subconsciously.
“Okay, okay, you’re right. But as soon as you know who the dead intruders are, I want it called through. I need to find out what is causing the current gang fracas, and the sooner the—”
He caught sight of Merlin and Vivien, swiftly lowered his arms, and lumbered out the door, muttering “better.”
Greene watched him go.
“He’s up to something,” she said very quietly to Merlin and Vivien, her voice hard to hear with the background noise of people talking, radios squelching, the engines of the vehicles running in the street, and there was now even a helicopter clattering in slow rotation overhead. “I don’t know what.”
“He’s definitely more current in our business than I would have expected,” said Vivien, as quietly. She glanced at Merlin. “You see his watchband? Some sort of charm. I don’t know what for, though. Or where it’s from.”
“I noticed the watchband,” said Merlin. “I didn’t know what it was. It caught my attention, somehow.”
“Maybe he got it from us when he had your job,” said Vivien to Greene. “Probably some sort of defensive charm. He wasn’t in the job for long, though. Nineteen fifty-nine to sixty-four, and then he went to CID for a year as a DCI, moving over to gangs as a superintendent in 1965, promoted to chief 1979.”
“You looked him up,”