Chapter One — The November Night

It was on a damp and dark November night, when the rain had settled over Leeds with the persistence of something that had no intention of leaving and the whole city seemed to have sunk beneath a low ceiling of cloud, that Daniel Mercer came to the end of his life. There was nothing remarkable about the hour at first sight; it was after midnight, that strange and morally ambiguous portion of the night when the respectable inhabitants of the city are asleep behind their curtains and the less respectable ones have not yet decided whether the night is ending or beginning, when the railway station still receives the occasional train and the streets around Briggate retain a faint residue of laughter, cigarette smoke and alcohol, although the people who produced it have largely disappeared into taxis and doorways. The rain had polished the pavements until the lamps and illuminated shop signs appeared beneath one's feet as much as above one's head, and the old stone buildings, blackened by generations of smoke and weather, seemed to have withdrawn into their own shadows, their architectural grandeur becoming something almost threatening in the darkness.

Mercer walked alone.

He had spent the preceding two hours in the city centre, although afterwards nobody would be able to agree precisely where he had been. One man remembered seeing him in the vicinity of Leeds Station; another thought he had passed through City Square; a woman working behind a bar on Call Lane was certain that he had spoken to somebody, while a taxi driver would later insist, with considerable irritation, that Mercer had entered his cab and then changed his mind before the journey had begun. Each recollection contained something which appeared convincing, and yet when Frank Salters eventually placed them beside one another he discovered that they could not all be true.

That was the first problem.

The second was that Mercer was carrying an address in Seacroft.

The third was that he was already dead.

His body was discovered at twelve forty-seven, in a narrow passage beside the old market buildings, by a taxi driver who had turned into the passage merely to avoid a temporary road closure. The driver saw a dark shape lying against the wall and at first thought it was a bundle of discarded clothing, which was hardly unusual in that part of Leeds at that hour, but when he brought the taxi to a halt and stepped into the rain he saw the man's face and understood, with that peculiar delay which accompanies the recognition of death, that the figure was not sleeping.

By the time the police arrived, the rain had begun to wash away the ordinary evidence of the night.

There was blood.

There was very little of it.

Mercer's wallet remained in his pocket. His watch remained upon his wrist. His telephone remained inside his coat. Whoever had killed him had not come looking for money.

He had come looking for Daniel Mercer.

And somewhere in the darkness of Leeds, that distinction had already begun to matter.