She says he can’t come back till Mr Carlyle fixes his last mess. Girl trouble, she says. Humphrey’s got a thing for little girls. And all this time, I thought her brother wanted to be a girl. But who is Mr Carlyle? Maybe he’s Humphrey’s therapist? ‘No, he’s only a toady,’ says Phoebe. One night a week, her house is full of toads, her mother’s pets. You can’t make this stuff up. —Ernest Nadler One day, years ago, while Mallory was being fitted for a cashmere blazer, Riker had wandered into the tailor shop – and the tailor had asked him to leave, concerned, and perhaps rightly so, that stains on the policeman’s crummy suit might be infectious to Mallory’s fine new threads. Her partner was not a stylish man. But she knew Riker held strong opinions on bowties – like this bright yellow one around the scrawny neck of Cedrick Carlyle, one of many assistant district attorneys, and perhaps the one with the smallest office. Prior to the last renovation, this cramped space might have been a storage room with a copy machine where the desk was now.
