After spending the past month as a cheerful amnesiac, drinking gin and making jokes while his world disintegrated, Jack Cade finally has his memories back. That means he knows exactly who Ellini Syal is, and how he feels about her. Unfortunately, he...
After all that work to capture him, nobody seemed to want him very much.
Manda tied Jack's hands and feet securely, and left him in the cellar to frighten Alice Darwin when she came round. She then paced around the deserted mortuary, finding the occasional, crumpled heap in a blue policeman's coat. It looked as though Jack had crept up behind each one in turn and chloroformed them. She had expected to find corpses, but every officer was alive – even breathing peacefully, as though they were thankful to be asleep rather than awake on a night like tonight.
She found Dr Petrescu standing at the front door, watching a figure disappear up the street. His eyes were over-bright – anxious but excited. It was more animation than she'd seen from him in days. And, when she asked him what she should do with Jack, he raked a distracted hand through his hair and said, "Who?"
Sam was nowhere to be found. And the officers, when they came round, had their hands full rounding up the escaped prisoners. Nobody wanted to deal with Jack. He was like a bad dream that they were determined to put out of their minds as soon as the sun rose.
Manda tried in vain to interest them in her predicament. She had a trained killer tied up and unconscious on the floor. She wasn't scared of him – in fact, she was furious with him – but he would probably not be in the best of moods when he woke up, and his irritation was most likely to be directed at the woman who'd knocked him out in the first place.
But nobody was really sure what Jack's crimes had been. The riots and the prison-break might well have happened anyway. And, with Sam gone, nobody wanted to risk the mayor's displeasure by taking him into custody.
It was as though the whole, complex mechanism of justice had ground to a halt – at any rate, where Jack was concerned – leaving Manda to be the sole arbitress of his fate.
She hadn't trusted much to female solidarity, but she'd had some hope that, when Alice came round, there would be a good, strong dose of advice. But Alice, now sporting the beginnings of a black eye, covered her ears and packed up her things and went stomping up the road to the Faculty, muttering darkly about leaving this demented town for Cambridge – which, apparently, was much more distinguished for the sciences in any case.
By the time the sun had risen, Manda and the unconscious Jack were the only people left in the mortuary.
Well, she wasn't afraid. She had frequently wished she was the only one in charge of deciding a prisoner's fate. Besides, she had a use for him.
She paid a porter to load his still-unconscious body into the back of a cart – "No need to be too gentle" – and drove him across Magdalen Bridge and down the Iffley Road, where the mourners had found temporary accommodation in the Carmelite nunnery.
When she reached the convent, she asked the nuns, and a few of the younger mourners, to help carry Jack up to her cell. They shared his weight between them, shuffling awkwardly through the corridors, and giggling at the strangeness of holding a man in their arms.
Then she tied him to the bed and took up station on the stool beside him, waiting for him to wake up. But she was in no great hurry. From the dark circles under his eyes, it looked as though he could do with the sleep. And she could use the time to compose herself, because this was the first time she had seen him since he'd killed Ellini, and hitting him over the head with a bottle hadn't even begun to relieve her feelings about that.
News trickled back to her as the day wore on. At lunchtime, Mrs Hope knocked on her door – Manda didn't open it too widely in case she revealed the unconscious man chained to the headboard – and told her that Sam had resigned from the police force.
"He...what?" said Manda, trying to fit this new behaviour into the Sam-shaped space in her brain. It was all wrong. Sam wouldn't give up his job. He didn't trust anyone else to do it properly.
"Just what I said," Mrs Hope insisted. "He didn't even look angry. I was expecting a face like thunder, but he had a face like set cement. He was pale, though. He kept toying with an envelope in his hand. If it hadn't been unopened, I would have thought it contained news of the death of his mother, or some other catastrophe."
"His mother died when he was sixteen," Manda said vaguely. She was glad she had the door to lean against. The floor seemed to be tilting underneath her. What would Sam do without crimes to solve and incompetent Constables to shout at?
"Well, uh...thank you for telling me," she managed to say. "I'll talk to him. I know you and Emma have more than enough on your plate."
Mrs Hope's eyes narrowed, and her impressive bosom swelled. "Emma said you might have a solution to our troubles..?" She left the sentence hanging, as if she personally doubted it.
"I will," said Manda, straightening up. "I have. It's in my bedroom. It's just...not ready yet."
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