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Islington's main police station was at Tolpuddle Street, just a hundred yards from Sainsbury's.
Four wary police officers kept a close eye on Danny as he was un-cuffed and his personal possessions were taken from his pockets. The duty sergeant, a round and unfit man in his thirties, logged them: a wallet, mobile phone, keys, belt.
"One Sawn-of shotgun, one Remington automatic," he added, but didn't put these imaginary items on his list. The watching officers seemed to find it funny.
This was the first time Danny had been arrested and brought to a police station, really the first time he'd had anything much to do with the police. He would have preferred his first experience to be more trivial. Maybe Mandy whatever-her-name-was, the woman he was supposed to have murdered, was a Moorhen employee, accidentally killed in the fire. But that didn't fit with the way these nervous policemen watched him. And they'd taken no interest at all in Bradlee and Ronnie, hadn't even arrested them, despite Danny's protests.
Before the duty sergeant had finished logging the contents of Danny's pockets, Detective Inspector Lewis arrived, wearing a Macintosh, out of breath and red in the face.
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"Oh, shit!" he said, taking a melodramatic step back when he saw Danny. He pointed and asked the duty sergeant, "You're not arresting this man for the Danny Mathews charges, are you?"
The duty sergeant confirmed that he was.
Lewis shook his head. "Wrong Danny Mathews."
A long discussion followed, with the arresting officer and the duty sergeant pointing out a number of Danny's features that matched the description on the warrant. Finally, Lewis asked, "Mr Mathews, how many times have I called to see you this week?"
"Twice."
"I'm very sorry about this. I hope you don't think we're trying to harass you. We're not.
It's a genuine mistake."
Danny decided it might be best for him to not respond, implying that he did feel harassed, which was the truth.
The uniformed officers seemed convinced that if Lewis had visited the suspect twice without arresting him, then this had to be the wrong man. They visibly relaxed and began to talk amongst themselves. The duty-sergeant handed Danny's belongings back to him and repeated a few lines of the description - height,
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build, eye colour - but now as explanations for an error rather than as compelling evidence.
"Come on," said Lewis, "I'll run you home. I really am very sorry about this."
Lewis walked remarkably quickly considering how out of condition he'd appeared before. He rushed Danny through the rear of the police station and out into the car park, where he unlocked a dark blue Volvo estate.
Danny got in. The car was a tip. It couldn't have been cleaned since it left the factory. There was litter and newspaper everywhere, and large bits of black plastic that looked like they were part of the internal trim, except there was no internal trim missing. If this car had a name it would be something like Dunroamin or Rose Cottage, something residential. On the back seat was a full crate of peaches and a red velvet dressing gown.
"Don't ask," said Lewis.
Of more interest to Danny was a 24-pack of Carbonell half-litre bottles of extra virgin olive oil. His lips moved around. He could do with one of those right now, but Sharon had trained him not to ask. It wasn't polite, apparently.
"Lots of olive oil," he said, fishing for an invitation.
"Ah, that's the girlfriend," replied Lewis.
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Danny knew plenty about olive-oil, including how difficult it was to find multi-packs of medium-sized bottles - wholesale outlets only
- and how serious cooks generally opted for five litre cans instead. Not quite the same thing. A partially-used can missed the esters of a freshly-opened bottle.
"Mediterranean, is she?"
Lewis shook his head. He fiddled around inside his tweed jacket and handed over a snapshot.
Wow! The woman in the picture was only a few years older than Sharon, 35 at the most, and Lewis had to be 60. She was clearly Anglo-Saxon, also very attractive. And there was something else.
"I think I've met her."
"I doubt it." Lewis held out his hand to take the photo back.
They drove out of the police station car park, turned left then left again on to White Lion Street, towards the centre of Angel.
"What did they arrest you for?" asked Lewis.
"Murder. I can't remember the name.
Mandy?"
"Steward?"
"That was it."
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"It's a specimen charge."
"A what?"
"A holding charge."
"You mean there were more?"
"Armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, and two more charges of murder. It's a good job I turned up in time."
"Yes, isn't it?"
Lewis reached inside his Macintosh for his glasses and perched them on the end of his nose where he could look over them. They misted up slightly from the moisture of his body, perhaps from those nearby eyebrows, the two rainforests canopies.
"It's you they were looking for," he said.
This was a difficult statement for Danny to comprehend, and for a while he failed to do so.
"I'm sorry?"
"You are the Danny Mathews on the arrest warrant. Everything I said back there was bullshit."
"But I haven't done any of those things!"
"And I called around to see you twice this week, but somehow neglected to arrest you."
Lewis lifted a hand from the steering wheel to slap himself gently on the wrist. "Very lax of me.
Stranger still, before I called round the first time, I checked your record. Nothing. Blank. Yet I
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checked again today and you've got ten years'
previous, including multiple firearms offences.
You're now the country's fourth most wanted man. That's some promotion. Have you ever seen the film Brazil?"
"The what?"
At least Lewis had explained Bradlee's nervousness and the reference to a shooter, even if he now beginning to add confusion rather than clarity.
"Brazil, Terry Gilliam, man called Tuttle gets arrested through a spelling mistake. One of my favourites."
"I don't think I've seen it, no."
"Not into films?"
"I prefer poetry."
"Yes, we get a lot of poetry-lovers at the nick, carving up strangers with Stanley knives, raping children, dealing crack."
Once again, Danny was slow on the uptake. He smiled, weakly.
Lewis turned right on to Islington High Street.
"What's going on?" asked Danny.
"What do you mean, what's going on?"
"Why are you looking after me, getting me un-arrested, calling round to persuade me that Frank is real?"
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"Nothing."
Not true, decided Danny, but what could he say?
"If you don't tell me, I'll make a point of getting myself arrested again, just to wreck your plans."
Lewis looked askance at Danny, turned his eyes back to the road, repeated the look, then burst out laughing. "Thirty years on the force, and that's the most original threat I've ever heard." He glanced at Danny with admiration, but said nothing more.
"Who's pulling your strings?" prompted Danny. "Who's behind all this?"
They stopped at the lights where he'd stood at the kerbside with Sharon and talked about the past and the future. Pedestrians crossed in front.
"Twenty-fifth of December, Christmas Day," said Lewis. "That's an unusual day for a birthday, quite memorable. And then I thought about it a little more - the interests in sailboat racing, bridge, chess."
All these items, Danny remembered, had been mentioned on Lewis's second visit. "You're talking about… Frank?"
"I'm talking about Humphrey Bogart, born Christmas Day 1899, a fine chess player and
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sailor, not bad at bridge, spent one year in the navy, got in a fight before he was famous, picked up a cut lip and a very slight lisp. Remind you of anyone? In The Big Sleep, Sam Spade uses a false name - Doghouse, Doghouse Riley."
"Frank Riley?"
"Snap."
This had Danny fazed for a moment.
Then he recalled Frank's manipulation of the film Casablanca, the new ending he'd given it, where Bogart got the girl. From time to time he liked to use quotes from Bogart films. It wasn't such a surprise that he'd modelled himself on the famous old actor. But why not do it visually, too? That was strange. Frank's avatar didn't look much like Bogart, except maybe the eyes and nose. The lips and chin were definitely wrong.
"All those charges and my criminal record were created by Frank, right?"
Lewis tilted his head to one side, like the answer was so obvious he didn't need to state it.
The lights changed and they set off down Upper Street.
"I need your help," said Danny. "I can't battle Frank on my own."
"You're not supposed to be battling him.
He needs to be controlled, that's all."
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Danny didn't agree, but decided not to say so. "Who else thinks that?"
Lewis abruptly did an illegal turn across the oncoming traffic. A truck blew its deep horn, but there was no accident. They continued smoothly down Duncan Street and Danny lowered his hands from the dashboard.
"Ever read any Jorge Luis Borges?"
Here we go again, thought Danny.
"Narrator sits at a camp fire," continued Lewis, "thinking about ghosts and men. They look the same, except ghosts can walk through fire. At the end of the story, he wonders if he can walk through fire himself, and finds that he can."
They turned left on to Devonia Road and were now just two hundred yards from Danny's house. Close to the end of the road, Lewis steered across to the opposite kerb, next to the converted church, and stopped.
"Inspector, you still haven't told me a thing about what's going on. I'm not going home until I find out."
"I haven't brought you home."
That was an odd statement. Danny was now just twenty yards from his own front door.
"It's not safe for you to go home," added Lewis. "Bradlee and Ronnie will be back when
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Frank tells them you've been released. They're probably heading here right now."
"Then what are we doing here?"
"I'm going to introduce you to God."
Lewis pointed. "She lives in that converted church, just there."
"God?"
"Angela Maybury."
That was an easy name for Danny to remember. It was the name on the Moorhen desk where he'd taken the gp338 program, the name of the CEO of Moorhen.
They got out of the car and Lewis motioned for Danny to follow him to the tall church door. He pressed an intercom button. "It's Lewis. I've got Danny with me."
Danny wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to meet the woman whose computer he'd hacked into and whose office he'd burned down - or at least watched burn down. But he needed answers, and it didn't sound like he was going to get them from Lewis.
The door unlocked remotely. Lewis led the way up the narrow steps to one side of a cramped communal foyer. At the top of the stairs, on the new level in the middle of the church, the one added by the property developers, a corridor ran the length of the building. There was a door
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on their left, where the corridor started, and it was open. Lewis stepped inside.
The lounge was spacious, as wide as the church. Four small arched windows along the wall opposite, and a single huge one in its centre, let in daylight, partially obscured by a rowan tree.
The other three walls were covered in books, so many that the room felt like a library just as much as it felt like a lounge. Next to the book-lined walls was a raised gangway, protected by a banister, with steps every few yards down to the lounge area, which looked sunken as a result.
There was a comfortable-looking sofa in this lower area, a TV and a couple of easy chairs.
"Danny, meet Angela Maybury."
In the middle of the room stood a woman in brown stretch pants, brown lace-up boots, a fawn roll-neck top, and a long dark cardigan that reached the floor and flowed behind her when she moved. She was in her early forties, with shoulder-length brown hair, and smiled a genuinely charming smile.
"Hi Danny." She sounded American, a light accent.
"I'd better get back and face the music,"
said Lewis, to Angela rather than to Danny.
"We'll do just fine," she said. "How much did you tell him?"
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"Very little."
Danny had heard her voice before, but couldn't place it. It belonged to some other era, some other circumstance. And there was something else, something that he thought he should point out to Lewis, but he discovered the man had already left, quietly closing the door behind him.
Considering the alternatives, this was a puzzling situation but not a terrible one. He was just a few yards from home with a strange American woman who looked harmless enough, even if he didn't have a clue who she was.
The tension at Moorhen had imprinted the evening well enough on his memory. He could remember the desk, the name-board, the photo on the wall, the photo of the real Angela Maybury, and this wasn't her.