Another of Phythian’s so-called haunts was in N19, a good old-fashioned public house where you drank till you made yourself ill. None of that fannying around that was going on at Stodge. I imagined the most fannying that went on at the Lion was up against the wall outside, at chucking-out time. The excitement of the last hour had made me a bit jittery and I wanted a drink. Scratch that, I wanted several drinks. And I was going to offer a black little toast to Kara Geenan before each one.Part of what she’d told me the previous evening – hell, earlier that morning – kept rolling around in my mind like a pebble in the drum of a washing machine. Not the lunacy about her brother going missing mere hours after she was with him, but more the detail that she fed me regarding who he was. She hadn’t sounded to me like someone listing the aspects of someone she cared for. There were no little embellishments when it came to describing his face, for example. He was just: brown hair, blue eyes.
