Riley sped along Commercial Road, up Houndsditch and into the City. He parked in a loading bay on Cheapside, near Wyecliffe and Co.
‘How very nice to see you,’ said the solicitor, stretching a moist hand over columns of paper. His face was dark and grey and hairy; his eyes glittered. It had been years since Riley had entered this room, but Mr Wyecliffe seemed to be expecting him. ‘Do take a seat. How can I help you?’ He was a silhouette against a jammed sash window Like the Four Lodges, nothing had changed. Not even the air. It was like a warm tomb, but Riley was shivering.
‘Someone’s after me,’ he blurted out.
‘I often have the very same sensation.’ He picked up a glass ball with a log cabin and some reindeer inside. He shook it and snow began to fall.
‘I’m serious,’ snapped Riley.
‘So am I,’ Wyecliffe intoned, leaning forward, his chin resting on stubby fingers. ‘Tell me what brought you back to this worrisome place.’
That was Wyecliffe. He referred to things but never said them. Riley had last come here when Cartwright was trying to pin the death of John Bradshaw on him. He’d been sick with fear.
A guy called Prosser keeps hanging round Nancy asking questions.’
‘First name?’
‘Guy.’
Mr Wyecliffe scraped his moustache along one finger. ‘So what?’
‘So what?’ breathed Riley ‘He wants to know where I get my stuff from, as if the business wasn’t clean.’
‘Is it?’
‘Completely.’
‘Well then,’ said Mr Wyecliffe reassuringly ‘there’s nothing to worry about.’ He paused. ‘Mr Riley we’ve known each other a very long time. Just hand over the other pieces, I’ll look after the larger picture.’
‘Someone’s trying to scare me,’ he whimpered.
‘In what way?’
‘I received a letter.’
‘Saying what?’
‘Nothing.’ Riley couldn’t say any more, but he needed help. ‘It was just a photograph.’
‘Of whom?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Riley his voice rising. ‘I thought it might have been Prosser, that’s all.’
‘Most unlikely’ observed Mr Wyecliffe confidently ‘Someone clever enough to let a photograph speak for itself doesn’t blow their cover by asking stupid questions.’
Pushed by fear, Riley almost let slip what he’d held back for most of his life. ‘I just want to know if you can stop someone digging around.’
‘That rather depends,’ said Mr Wyecliffe. One of his hands covered the glass ball. ‘Who else might be handling the shovel, so to speak?’
‘I don’t know,’ barked Riley He’d asked himself day and night. If it wasn’t Prosser, there was no one. John Bradshaw had come with a question and a promise, but he never got an answer. Riley said, ‘There’s no one alive that I can think of.’
‘Anyone dead?’ The lawyer shook the globe.
Riley held his breath, feeling heat descend like a crown.
‘Don’t play around with me, Wyecliffe.’
‘I’ve never been more serious.’
Riley’s temples began to throb. ‘The dead?’
‘Yes.’
Riley couldn’t think straight. Only the living could reach him. He jerked his head, as though to shake off some flies.
‘Very well,’ said Mr Wyecliffe, with a long sigh of disappointment. ‘If you don’t have any more names – likely or otherwise – I cannot act. You’ll have to wait and see what they do with what they know.’
‘They?’
A figure of speech,’ replied the lawyer. Hooking his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, he added, ‘That said, perhaps your correspondent has primed several people to act on his or her behalf.’ He examined Riley with something between pity and wonder. ‘You know, everything always comes down to facts.’
‘Facts?’ The change in subject threw Riley off balance.
‘Yes. Those known and those not known.’ Mr Wyecliffe waved his palms over the desk as if he were incanting a spell. ‘We lawyers assemble the known ones for the jury. You’d be surprised how many different pictures a clever hand can make out of the same pieces’ – he chuckled at the thought – ‘and if it were a game, I’d say that was value for money But after forty years in the courts, let me tell you something.’ He was no longer merry and the lights seemed to go dim. ‘No one can change the shape of a fact that makes sense on its own. It’s like a photograph.’
Riley tugged at his top button. Wyecliffe hadn’t changed subject at all.
‘Tell me the name of the man in the picture,’ said the lawyer soothingly.
‘I never said it was a man.’
‘Quite right.’ He nodded a compliment.
‘If I tell you, can you help?’
The scratching began again, high on his hairy cheek. He sighed and whispered, ‘That rather depends.’
Riley kicked back his chair and yanked at the door. Everything always ‘depended’. Wyecliffe had been like that last time, hinting and sighing and never looking surprised.
On Cheapside, Riley found his van clamped. In a frenzy he kicked the huge yellow bracket and tore the notice off the windscreen. He nearly cried. Someone was after him, and he couldn’t get away. Then, in a moment of sickening calm, the obvious hit Riley like a backhander: whoever it was already knew what John Bradshaw had wanted to know.