No Mark Upon Her

day.”
    Turning so that his back was to the desk sergeant, Doug lowered his voice. “If your super is out, how about I buy you a pint?”
    “Well . . .” Bisik glanced at the reception desk again. The sergeant was now on the phone. He lowered his voice. “Okay. Look, there’s a pub down at Brook Green. Just go back towards the tube station and you’ll see it. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. Wait for me outside. Pint of Foster’s.”
    D oug remembered the pub, a nice-looking establishment. When he reached the place, it was still early enough that the few sidewalk tables were unoccupied. He went in and bought two pints, and by the time he’d carried them outside and picked a table, Bisik appeared, walking fast.
    “Thanks, mate,” Bisik said, sitting heavily in one of the metal chairs and raising his glass to Doug. After one long draught, he put the beer down and pulled a packet of Silk Cuts from his jacket pocket. He shook a cigarette out and lit it with a sigh of relief. “God, I was gasping.”
    Then he frowned, took another drag, and ground the cigarette out in the metal ashtray. A plume of blue smoke rose straight up in the still air. He shook his head. “But the total pisser is that I can’t smoke now without feeling guilty. Becca was always on at Kelly and me about it. I think we smoked more just to annoy her. But now . . . Every time I light up, I hear her voice. Kelly, too.”
    “Where is Sergeant Patterson today?” Doug asked.
    “You don’t know?”
    Doug shook his head. “Know what?”
    “She got seconded to another division. As of yesterday. No warning.”
    “You’re having me on.” Doug stared at him, the pint in his hand forgotten.
    “I wish I was.” Bisik drank some more beer, shrugged. “I suspect I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
    “Did Sergeant Patterson tell you she spoke to us?”
    “No. But I saw her, outside the station. Looks like I wasn’t the only one who did.”
    Doug ran through the possibilities. Had Gaskill seen them? Or had it been the desk sergeant, reporting to Gaskill? Trying to remember who else might have walked by in those brief seconds, he felt suddenly uncomfortably exposed.
    When Bisik saw him glance up and down the street, he said, “Relax. We’re a good ways from the station. That’s why I chose this pub.” He lit another Silk Cut. “And besides, I don’t know anything. I don’t know what Kelly told you. If they want to send me to Siberia, at this point I’m not sure I care.”
    “So you don’t know anything about Angus Craig?”
    Bisik squinted at him, then pulled a pair of expensive-looking sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. The sun’s rays were dropping lower. “Who’s Angus Craig when he’s at home?”
    Doug shook his head. “If you don’t know, maybe it’s better you don’t ask. Where is Superintendent Gaskill this afternoon, by the way?” He wondered if even now Gaskill was planning to remove everyone who had been close to Rebecca Meredith.
    But that was ridiculous. Paranoid. He was definitely getting paranoid.
    “Golfing,” said Bisik. “Not my cup of tea, but he lives for golfing, our super. And I suppose it’s a good day for it, if you like that sort of thing. Me, I’d rather sit in a beer garden.” He took his sunglasses off again, fiddling with the earpiece. “The guv’nor—Becca—would have said it was a perfect day for rowing.”
    Doug saw his opening. “Last Friday was fine like this, wasn’t it? But she didn’t go home to Henley to train. Any idea why?”
    “Last Friday?” Frowning, Bisik twirled the sunglasses. Doug found himself hoping they were only Portobello Market knockoffs. “No. She left at the usual time.”
    Disappointed, Doug asked, “Anything else unusual about that day? She left her car in London and took the train back to Henley, which apparently she didn’t normally do.”
    Bisik drank some more of his pint with maddening deliberation. “We were working on that knifing case and getting nowhere,” he said slowly. “Kids saw their mate get stuck in the gut but none of them will testify. Can’t say I blame them, honestly. They’d just be asking for the same thing to happen to them. But Becca was seriously pissed off. Can’t think of—oh, wait.” He beamed at Doug. “This Vice copper came in from another division. She and Becca were chatting in Becca’s office.”
    “She?”
    “Yeah. Seems like they knew each other. Old girls’ palaver.”
    “Do you have any