23

Park Road runs northward on the western side of the park from the top of Baker Street to the junction of St. John’s Wood Road and Prince Albert Road and communicates with the Outer Circle by means of the Hanover Gate and Kent Passage. The London Mosque is in Park Road. So are the Rudolph Steiner House, a defunct pub called the Windsor Castle, Dillon’s Business Bookshop, and a number of Indian restaurants. There are sandwich bars and a wine bar and a fur shop where no one ever seems to buy anything.

The bookshop is so situated for its proximity to the London School of Business Studies, a graduate school housed in Decimus Burton’s most spectacular of all the park terraces, at Sussex Place. This is on the Outer Circle, an amazing range of Corinthian columns, polygonal bays, and cuboid domes, so light and airy that they might be tents of silk rather than towers of stone. Graduate students in need of books need not walk all the way down to Baker Street and up Park Road to reach the shop but may turn left out of the terrace and find the opening to an alley called Kent Passage.

The passage is narrow and long and absolutely straight, tree-shaded and confined by high hedges behind chain-link fencing, not railings. On the southern side it is overshadowed by the pale brick walls of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The trees and shrubs that grow along its length are planes and sumacs, snowberries and the rose of Sharon. Near the Park Road end the passage opens out into an oval shape, closes again, and the pavement of the wider thoroughfare is reached. The bookshop is a few paces to the left while on the right lies the Kent Terrace.

This is the only terrace not to face onto the Outer Circle, a plain range of buildings with Ionic columns. Anthony Maddox once told Bean that the terrace had been built in 1827 and named for George IV’s brother, the Duke of Kent, but the duke, as well as being the parent of the heir presumptive to the throne, was long dead by then, so there was no need for too much grandeur or originality. Bean thought this was said spitefully, for his resemblance to the duke’s statue had already been pointed out, but he never passed the terrace without thinking of what had been said and wondering if malice was intended.

Kent Terrace, however, has one peculiarity. As well as the usual black iron railings, a feature of the place is the spikes adorning the top of the pillars in its grounds.

A pair of these pillars flanks the gate that leads into Kent Passage and the steps down into Kent Passage. These are man-height, cuboid and very solid, and from the tops of both sprout five iron branches in a cluster, each one terminating in five spikes. They look rather like bunches of thorn twigs, but ugly and menacing too, and it would be hard to say what purpose they were intended for or what was in the designer’s mind.

A man’s body was impaled on these iron thorns.

It was so arranged as to be invisible from Kent Passage unless you happened to be looking at the sky, and visible from the terrace only if you peered behind the pillar. Besides, a heavy mist had hung over the park and its environs since dawn, obscuring even those objects that were near at hand in swathes of white vapor.

The body was supported in its position by the splayed spikes penetrating its chest, head lolling forward, arms dangling, legs hanging. Barefoot, dressed in jeans with ragged hems and missing knees, torn gray T-shirt with washed-out black logo and a dark red cardigan that was stiff with foodstains and blood, it had once been a smallish man. The legs and arms were thin, the white feet pathetic. No doubt its total weight amounted to no more than 130 pounds. Even so, to lift it up so high must have taken considerable strength.

A great many people passed it during the morning. None of them looked up to the height of the pillar. Even after the mist had gone and the sun came out, the body was not discovered until noon. A police officer on the beat entered the passage from the Outer Circle. First he had walked round the pond where the pleasure boats were moored, crossed the yellowing balding grass, and had left the park by the Hanover Gate. His eye had been on a dosser in camouflage pants and gray vest who was fumbling in a litter bin suspiciously close to a parked car whose windows had been left open.

The policeman lingered, watching until the dosser, having found the remains of a take-away in the bin, shambled off northward toward the Macclesfield Bridge. Then he stepped into the passage and strolled slowly along it. Someone shook a duster out of one of the high windows in the building on the left. The passage was in deep shade for three-quarters of its length and there the sun came through the leaves, making a dappled pattern, before there were no more leaves but only a sunlit space.

Onto this space fell a shadow.

It was like a crab or part of a crab or perhaps it was like a paw, the extended limb of a frog. He looked up. The body hung like a sack in clothes or a guy, limp and slack, and its hanging hand had a trail of blood dried between the fingers.