Tooth & Nail

So he tried to pretend he was wearing blinkers, pondered the essential difference between catholic and Catholic and finally reached the psychology section. It was a room joined onto other rooms as in a chain, but there was no sign of Lisa in any of the links. He did, however, find where some of her own library of books had no doubt originated. There was a shelf next to the cashier's desk, dedicated to crime and violence. One of the books she had loaned him was there. He picked it up and turned it over to look at the price. Then blinked twice in astonishment. So, much money! And it wasn't even a hardback! Still, academic books always did carry steep price tickets. Strange really, weren't students, the intended readership after all, least able to afford these titles? It might take a psychologist to explain that one, or perhaps a shrewd economist.

Next to the criminology section were books on the occult and witchcraft, along with various packs of Tarot cards and the like. Rebus smiled at this curious marriage: police work and hocus-pocus. He picked up a book on rituals and flipped through it. A young, slender woman, in billowing satin dress and with long fiery hair, paused beside him to lift a Tarot set, which she took to the cash desk. Well, it took all sorts, didn't it? She looked serious enough, but then these were serious times.

Ritual. He wondered if there was an element of ritual to the Wolfman's particular spree. So far he had been seeking an explanation from the killer's psyche: what if the whole thing were some kind of rite? Slaughter and defilement of the innocent, that sort of thing. Charlie Manson and his swastika-tattooed forehead. Some said there was a Masonic element to Jack the Ripper's methods. Madness and evil. Sometimes you found a cause, and sometimes you just didn't.

Slash the throat.

Gouge the anus.

Bite the stomach.

The two ends of the human trunk, and something like the mid-point. Could there be a clue in that particular pattern?

There are clues everywhere.

The monster from his past, rearing up out of the dark deep waters of memory. That case had tied him up all right, but not half as much as this. He had thought the Wolfman might be a woman. Now a woman had conven?iently appeared to tell him the Wolfman was a man. Very conveniently. George Flight was right to be wary. Perhaps Rebus could learn something from him. Flight did everything by the book, and in scrupulous detail. He didn't go running down the bloody hall with a pair of toy false teeth clutched in his sweaty hand. He was the type to sit down and think things through. That was what made him a good copper, better than Rebus, because he didn't snap at every red herring that came along. 'Better' because he was methodical, and methodical people never let anything escape them.

Rebus left Dillon's Bookshop with his own little thundercloud hanging above his head and a plastic carrier-bag full of newly purchased books swinging from his right hand. He walked down Gower Street and Bloomsbury Street, took a fortuitous left at a set of traffic lights and found himself outside the British Museum, inside which, he knew from memory, was to be found the British Library. Unless, that was, they'd already, moved it, as he'd read they were planning to.

But the British Library itself was off-limit to `non-readers'. Rebus tried to explain that he was a reader, but apparently what this meant was that he had to be in possession of a reader's card. With hindsight, he supposed he could have flashed his ID and said he was on the trail of a maniac, but he didn't. He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders and went instead for a walk around the museum.

The place seemed full almost to bursting with tourists and school parties. He wondered if the children, their imaginations still open, were as thunderstruck as he was by the Ancient Egyptian and Assyrian rooms. Vast stone carvings, huge wooden gates, countless exhibits. But the real throng was around the Rosetta Stone. Rebus had heard of it, of course, but didn't really know what it was. Now he found out. The stone contained writing in three languages and thus helped scholars to work out for the first time what Egyptian hieroglyphics actually meant.

He was willing to bet they hadn't solved it overnight, or even over a weekend. Slow painstaking graft, just like police work, toil as difficult as anything a bricklayer or miner could endure. And in the end it usually still came down to the Lucky Break. How many times had they interviewed the Yorkshire Ripper and let him go? That sort of thing happened more often than the public would ever be allowed to know.