drained his tea cup and stood up. While he and St Pierre were on their way out of the room Jake stared at the smudged red-crescent her lipstick had left on her own cup and wondered how Crawshaw would be getting on. This was going to be harder than she had imagined. Gleitmann and his people didn’t look like they were going to be much help. She already had troubles back at the Yard with her superior because of his having been removed from the case. Except for the ban on smoking in all office buildings she would have had a cigarette. Probably two. Then Gleitmann said something to her.
‘I’m sorry?’ she said.
‘I said, Let’s hope your man can sort this out.’
‘Yes, let’s,’ Jake agreed. She helped herself to more of the coffee. ‘We were discussing your counsellors,’ she said.
‘Yes. Doctor Cleobury is head of psychiatry here at the Institute. She’s responsible for all the counsellors. Would you like me to ask her to join us?’
Jake shook her head. ‘No that won’t be necessary at this stage. We’ll start here in London and then question the counsellors in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow.’
‘All of them?’
‘All of them. Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you could provide me with an office with a pictophone and a computer, from where I can conduct my enquiries.’
‘Of course. I’ll have my secretary arrange it. But please speak to the computer if you need anything else. This is an intelligent building, after all. Meanwhile I’ll have Doctor Cleobury make all the counsellors available to you.’
‘Thank you.’
She watched him make the call and then turned her attention to his library. Quite a few of the books were familiar to her from her days as a forensic psychologist with the European Bureau of Investigation; and quite a few had been written by Gleitmann himself, some of them collected in bulk as if he had been running a bookshop. On one shelf alone she counted fifty copies of The Social Implications of Human Sexual Dimorphism. He was proud of his work, that much was clear. She pulled a copy down and started to read.
‘I’d like to borrow this,’ she told him when he had finished on the pictophone.
Gleitmann smiled sheepishly. ‘Help yourself.’
When she returned home Jake ate the remains of a tuna salad she had made the night before. Then she sat down at her electronic piano. She selected a disc from the many she had collected and slid it into the piano’s software-port. It was the Schubert piano trio in B flat, or at least the recordings of the cello and violin parts, with the score for the piano appearing on the keyboard’s integrated LCD screen.
Jake, who had been an accomplished pianist as a teenager, played with precision, although she lacked the skill of the two string players on the recording to add the expression that made the piece such a masterpiece of youthful optimism. She particularly relished playing the scherzo with its extended staccato crotchets and quavers and its artful counterpoint. If there was one piece of music that was almost guaranteed to put her in a good humour it was this Opus 99 scherzo. And when the gypsy-like rondo of the fourth and last movement had brought her playing to its charging, bouncing climax, she collapsed into an armchair and sighed with pleasure.
The memory of the music lingered on her finger ends and in her invigorated senses for several minutes afterwards; and later on, she was even equal to the task of reading Gleitmann’s book.
It was, she considered, not a bad book at all. She liked it better than she had expected. It was true, a lot of it was guesswork, but it was intelligent plausible guesswork.
Jake was reminded of her own work in the field of male sexual psychology with the EBI, before a career at Scotland Yard had beckoned. Sometimes she was asked why she had joined such a male-dominated institution as the Yard, especially when men were so obnoxious to her. For Jake the answer was simple: with
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