Lost

Weatherall Walk

there was no milk in the fridge, no ice in the tiny freezer unit, little to plan a meal around but tinned pears and a jar of Tesco's mild curry. The better furniture was hung over with drop cloths, the leather-bound books evacuated from their shelves. The museum-quality nineteenth-century prints of bugs and wild boars and roses leaned against one another in a corner of the parlor. The kitchen was being torn up, and plaster dust had settled uniformly in any room without a door. Unconnected wiring threaded from walls, and a smell of lazy drains, something rotting, unfurled from the sewer all the way up to this flat. Winnie wrenched open a window. But no sign of John? How come?

She swept up empty lager cans and the remains of the triangular packaging of ready-made sandwiches—tuna and sweet corn, chicken tikka, egg mayonnaise—proof of workers on-site, as recently as today, probably.

The answerphone was unplugged, she saw. But John had known she was coming, he'd known for weeks.

She flipped through piles of mail hunting for a note. Nothing. The postmarks went back eight, ten days. Could he have been called away with such urgency that there was no time for a note? John Comestor was in shipping insurance, specializing in the approval of policies to the aging merchant fleets that served the Baltic. He assessed the dredging of harbors, the temperament of the labor market, any pending legislation that bore on trade. He converted into cost analyses and risk thresholds the slim anecdotal information he could glean over glasses of vodka in dockside shacks. He hated working up the final reports, but he liked the vodka in dockside shacks, liked the smell of diesel, fish, and intrigue.

He avoided the main office in the City whenever possible. If he had to be home in England, he booked himself comatose with Latin American film festivals or lecture series at the ICA. Sometimes when Winnie was expected they'd schedule a motoring trip on the Continent, conducting haphazard investigations of the remains of Cistercian abbeys, or the Bavarian follies of mad King Ludwig, or, one wonderful time, vineyards in the Loire. John would read the guidebooks aloud while Winnie drove.

They made a comfortably unromantic team, their tempers strained only by Winnie's preference for settling on a daily destination every morning and booking rooms ahead. Winnie knew that John enjoyed romantic enthusiasms elsewhere, and by long custom the discussion of it was avoided. It didn't impinge. Winnie's relationship with John wasn't a relationship. It was cousinhood, and stepcousinhood at that.

It was a relief to see that John's clocks weren't going 00:00 00:00 at her. But the hour was late, too late for Winnie to hope to get Gillian, John's office staffer, on the line. Unless, of course, there was a crisis in the Baltic, in which case Gill might be working late. But the phone there just rang its double pulse, over and over, unanswered.

John had friends, and Winnie knew them, but generally she preferred to keep her distance. How much easier for stepcousins to maintain a quiet truce about the nature of things, keeping everything informal and vague. How much easier not having to negotiate debts and favors, lies and silences, the rates of emotional exchange that would occur at the consolidation of two social systems into one.

A gentleman, John honored her feelings about this by forgoing invitations to soirées and drinks parties when she touched down. Obliquely, Winnie knew about Allegra Lowe, the lead so-called girlfriend, who did arts therapy of some sort, and about various university roommates now in places like Barnes and Wimbledon and Motspur Park. Their numbers were written in pencil in the back of John's directory. But she liked standing apart from all that. So, for her own comfort tonight, she decided to forgo approaching anyone in her age bracket and instead to phone John's friend and financial adviser, a divorced man nearing retirement. Malcolm Rice lived in St. John's Wood, enjoying the chilly splendor of a big semidetached stucco house that sported too many French windows for the central heating to cope with.

She recognized the voice that answered the phone as that of Rice himself, since he spoke the digits of the phone number she had dialed, a phone habit probably dating from the days when local operators connected every call. She found herself slipping into a complementary formality whether she wanted to or not. “Mr. Rice, please.”

“Malcolm Rice speaking.”

“Good evening—Malcolm. It's John Comestor's friend Winifred here.” A latent Englishness—she heard it—came up in her voice, unbidden. It was an involuntary echo of her grandfather Rudge's speech, not the American party game of attempting the superior spoken English of the English. “Sorry to bother you at home, Malcolm. I hope you're well. I've just arrived this evening on a day flight from Boston, and I'd thought that John was expecting me, but he seems to be away and the place is torn up by the builders.”

“I see,” said Malcolm Rice, as if sniffing a request to crash at his place. Stalling, preparing a line of defense. “I see.”

She added, “I'm perfectly comfortable here, but I'm surprised that John changed his plans without telling me. Do you know where he is, or when he'll be back?”

“I couldn't say. Do you need to come round for a drink?”

“No, no, I'm fine. But I'll hope to see you sometime.” She hoped not to see him at all, and she hung up. As she unpacked her toiletries, she thought: Was Malcolm Rice's I couldn't say intended to mean that he didn't know where John was, or that he wasn't about to reveal it? Could John actually be off on a love adventure in Majorca or Tunis? Or had Winnie underestimated him, and had he and the deadly Allegra Lowe decided finally to elope?

Uninterested in Tesco's mild curry over pears, she took herself out to the street to hunt down what supper she could. She checked out various bistros in the steep glary center of Hampstead. She settled on the only restaurant with a couple of free tables and went in. Filled with chattery diners trying to be heard above the mood music, the place reeked of cigarette smoke and a fennely saucisson .

Winnie was tired and unsettled about John's absence. But she was here to work, and work she would. She tried to think not of herself but of Wendy Pritzke, and of how London might seem to a Wendy just passing through on her way to the haunted Carpathians. She didn't yet know who Wendy Pritzke would turn out to be, but whoever she was, she was agreeably lustier than Winnie. Wendy Pritzke would have lavishly thick, spiritually profound hair, not Winnie's lackluster fringe. What would Wendy order? Everything bloody and garlicky, that foul sausage in its ditch water juices. A beer. Whereas Winnie told the Italian waiter with the drooping eyelids to bring her a salad and a wine. The salad arrived, frills of green doused with vinaigrette and arranged around a single withered olive, accompanied by a sad little Chardonnay. It seemed ridiculous and fitting, and she wolfed it down, wishing she'd brought a book to read, or a newspaper.

Over the years Winnie had earned a name for writing short novels about kids with limited access to magic. Her books were early chapter books, designed to help third-graders develop confidence in reading. The circumscription of children's lives had suited her. She could avoid the dreadful and the absurd, she could be funny, she could poke a moral at her readers when they weren't looking. Problems could be solved in sixty-four pages. Pushing herself—maybe prematurely, she realized—she wanted to find in the character of Wendy Pritzke some more tension. Give her a task more Herculean than domestic, and see how she'd make out. Winnie also wanted to see, of herself, how she'd fare at starting a book whose end she couldn't predict.

What was Wendy Pritzke doing in London, with her vague, sentimental morbidity? She was a novelist obsessed with the story of Jack the Ripper. Winnie didn't know if Jack the Ripper would end up being a character or a red herring in some domestic trial of Wendy's. The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.

“Looking bleary. You're ready for another glass of wine.”

Britt, what was his name, Chervis or Chendon or Chimms, something out of Noël Coward. Another pal of John's, from the same staircase at Oxford or the same club or posting.

“No, I'm ready for the check,” she said, striving to be civil. “Sit down for a minute, though, if you want.”

“I thought I'd ask you to join my party.”

Winnie didn't glance over—did his party include Allegra Lowe?—as not to know somehow preserved her own American right to occupy this worn red plush English chair. “Just arrived, and the time differences,” she said inconclusively, then brightly, “but, Britt, I haven't seen John yet.”

“No more have I. Is he expected?”

“He's always expected. That's part of his public relations profile, isn't it?”

“Ah,” said Britt, “you have me there. At the end of the day, though, what's the difference between public relations and private identity?”

She had no idea of the answer in general, let alone what he meant about John. She rose to leave so as not to appear to have been stood up. She kept her shoulder turned against the corner of the room from which Britt had emerged. Insincerely she promised to phone him, and made her way out with a deliberate lack of speed, feeling bovine. La Pritzke under the same circumstance would have bounced, she decided. But too bad.

She went up and down Hampstead High Street, stained a savage yellow by the street lamps. In English winds no brisker than usual for the season, Winnie dallied before the windows of the shops. Though it was only the day after Hallowe'en—only November first, for the love of God!—the candle shop was pushing beeswax candles striped to resemble candy canes.

She bought a Wispa before she could talk herself out of it and ate it with an air of defiance. When she got back to Rudge House and climbed the two flights of steps to John's place, which occupied the whole top floor, she threw the wrapper in the pile of rubbish the contractors had left. Then she felt abusive of John's hospitality, especially since something was, if not wrong, certainly out of the ordinary, so she hustled all the trash into a white plastic garbage bag. A bin liner, that is. A pipe began to knock, someone in a flat downstairs using a protesting shower, and she was startled momentarily. The phone rang once, but stopped before she could get it. Not yet 11P.M . here, which meant her body was remembering it was not yet six in Boston. Far too early for bed.

In his bedroom John kept a small television set, which with grave propriety they always shifted to the sitting room while she was visiting. She opened the door to his room, suddenly thinking she might find his corpse swinging from a beam, naked but for black net stockings, one of those accidental hangings resulting from a mismanaged exercise in autoeroticism. No corpse was there. No TV either. The room was orderly, no sign of panic or haste. Well, John was the type who would stop to straighten the bedclothes before leaping out of a burning building.

She remembered the other morning arriving at Forever Families, and the wreck of furniture in the community room there. As if something had flown up at the darkened windows, terrifying the families away.

She turned to leave his bedroom. This room had never meant anything to her, of course, but in general the bedrooms of single men had a certain seedy danger even when kept orderly, and appointed with good eighteenth-century furniture. Her eye was caught by the mid-Victorian portrait of a gentleman in his declining years. She knew the piece well; John liked to display it above his chest of drawers. The plate screwed into the oak frame, which was overwrought with gilded acanthus leaves and pears, read SCROOGE. But she knew from being shown it by John that someone had once scribbled on the painting's back NOT Scrooge but O. R . Meaning Ozias Rudge.

Being familiar with the painting, she rarely gave it notice, but tonight she was jumpy and obeyed her instincts to focus on what came to mind. So she looked at it again, its occluded figure hardly more than silhouetted against patches of icy blues and pale browns.

The man stood in a curiously modern pose, anticipating the drama of Pre-Raphaelite compositions. Or perhaps this painting did date from the era of Holman Hunt, and the features of the figure had been cribbed from some older, more conventional portrait. The effect was more illustrative than biographic. Seen from below, the figure faced the viewer at a looming slant, one hand out to steady himself on the doorsill of the threshold he was crossing. In the room behind him, an unseen fire in a grate cast up a dramatic blue backlight. On the right, a scrape the color of bone seemed to imply a bed-curtain, but it was torn from its rings in two places and the fabric had the gloomy effect of an apparition raising its arms over a headless neck. The piece had no special merit except in its sensationalism. If this was indeed Scrooge, those must be the bed-curtains that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come said would be stolen from around his sorry corpse. Or were they a mediocre painter's failed attempt at the limning of a ghost? Whatever. The old man staggered toward the viewer, but his eyes were unfocused and his knees about to unhinge. A lovely tortured Scrooge, if such it really was; if, improbably, it really was the portrait of a relative, it was an insult. Most likely the annotation on the back had been done by some wag disappointed to have inherited so little from the old miser. Scrooge, or Rudge? It didn't matter. Whoever it was, he didn't know where John Comestor was, either. Or if he had seen anything, he wasn't telling; his eyes were trained inward, at some abomination in his own mental universe.

Enough of this. She was working herself up into a good case of the jitters. She located the TV eventually in the kitchen, underneath a drop cloth. The workers had been keeping an eye on something while they worked, or ate their sandwiches. She dragged it into the lounge and propped it on the massive Iberian credenza that probably had housed the salvers and spoons of some order of nuns now extinct. But before she could find the remote, she dialed her number at home to check her messages, in case John had called while she was in the air.

The voice of the recording told Winnie that she had seven new messages. The first five were hang-ups, worrying in their own right, as most callers who didn't want to leave a message slammed down the receiver quickly once they realized it was a recording. Not to do so was in itself a message: This is a hang-up: I know you're not there, and you know I know, but you don't know who I am.

Maybe computerized telemarketing calls, she asked herself, or Ironcorp, responding at last?

The sixth call was from Winnie's agent, asking how long was she going to be away, and when could they expect the new manuscript; her editor would love to begin to breathe word of a second Ophelia Marley book in the pipeline even if it was a year upstream yet. “This is the novel?” said the agent with dubious enthusiasm, having pressed for a Dark Side of the Zodiac II in one form or another. “Your Romanian book, isn't it?” He sounded defeated already. A month in Romania is hardly A Year in Provence, he meant. Winnie deleted the message. Whether it would be a second book by Ophelia Marley or a first-ever Winifred Rudge adult novel, she wasn't sure. She still couldn't know if she would be able to write the story of Wendy Pritzke. Nor if there was any story there to be written.

The seventh voice was familiar but newly so, and she couldn't place it at first. Male. “You mentioned you've suffered a breach of security; what is that all about? Are you cowering behind a potted palm with nothing to defend yourself but a plastic spatula from Williams-Sonoma? If so, come out, come out, wherever you are. We're going to have a meal at Legal Seafoods over near M.I.T., and we'd love you to join us. We'll tell you what you missed during the second half of the indoctrination session. And by the way, I'm cute but I'm real dumb. Only in my fourth-grade classroom this morning did I put you together with the W. Rudge who wrote Crazy Hassan's End-of-Season Flying Carpet Sale . My students die over that one.” He left a number. It was that Adrian Moscou of the Forever Families meeting. He was feeling guilty over having blown her cover. And well he might. Still, it was decent of him to call.

The juddery pipe slammed again, deep in the walls, so loud that it startled her. She dialed the Massachusetts number, her finger readying to break the connection if one of them answered in person. Mercifully a machine picked up. “Winnie Rudge returning your call. I'm away for a while, in Europe. Back, oh—whenever. But do keep in touch. And beware going ahead with that adoption group, they're all charlatans and hucksters.” She stuttered the sentence to a stop, and then added, “I don't mean that, of course, I'm trying to be witty and it doesn't work at this distance. Here's my number, but don't call me.” She left John's number. The shallow good wishes of an Adrian Moscou were probably the more welcome, since John Comestor seemed to have abandoned her without a moment's thought.

The TV was unusually banal for Britain. Channel Four seemed to be importing more and more American sitcoms and the standard was dropping. She turned it off. The room known as “her” room, a half-bedroom forced into a space created because the staircase didn't continue to the roof, was dingily comfortable, warm at least, and she pawed through some paperbacks on the windowsill. Edmund Crispin, Hilary Mantel, several Ishiguros. Then an old Iris Murdoch, its orange Penguin spine bleached citron by sunlight. She settled under the duvet and opened the book at random, and read.

“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . .”

She put the book down. The pipes in the back of the house continued to bang, intermittently, well into the first stages of sleep, when her body could only remember flying, pitching through nothingness at all those hundreds of miles an hour, and then she was sleeping faster than the speed of sound, so the clanging pipes were left behind.

She lay in bed. Through the gauze she could see the sun, an imprecise disk in a sky the color of weak tea. The bells of St. John-at-Hampstead tolled the hour of nine, and a few minutes later she was in the bathroom when she heard a key in the lock. She called out, “Hi, you!” in case he'd be alarmed, though she knew if he was coming home from an escapade he'd be as embarrassed as startled by her presence.

She finished her teeth and came out. It wasn't John, but a couple of workers in sweatshirts and jeans.

“Well,” she said. “Good morning. I'm the house guest.”

She could sense them holding back from glancing at each other. An uneasiness to it. “Come in, come in, I'm presentable, aren't I?” Her terry-cloth robe was snugly wrapped up to her clavicle. “I won't be in your way, will I?”

“Sorry, we weren't expecting you,” said the slighter one, an Irish slip of a kid, barely in his twenties. “Or not exactly you.” The older man shrugged off his wet jacket and just looked over the top of his glasses at her. Winnie took a step back and decided not to speak again until she was dressed.

She emerged fifteen minutes later. The guys had set themselves up in the kitchen. The fellows moved with a feminine deliberateness, laying out tools precisely, like nurses arranging the sterilized implements for a surgery. “I'm Winnie, a friend of John's,” she said, with relish smashing around an old percolator as she prepared her coffee.

“I'm Jenkins,” said the older man, “and this is Mac.” Mac grinned in a snaggle-toothed way, looking both innocent and weaselly.

“Didn't John tell you I was coming? Do you know where he is or when he'll be back?”

“We were hoping you'd be able to tell us where Mr. C is,” said Jenkins.

“I thought he'd be here, but he's been cleared out a little while now, to judge by the mail,” said Winnie. “When did you last see him?”

“Monday,” said the older man. “Mr. C called us here and gave us our instructions. Some kitchen reconstruction. He drew out his plans for us well enough, and gave us a key, but he led us to believe he'd be in and out all week. And he's just vanished.”

“How much work have you managed to get done since Monday?” asked Winnie, trying not to sound schoolmarmish. It didn't look like much.

“We've been here eight hours a day, nearly, for four days,” said Jenkins, looking at Winnie in the eye, which seemed to suggest defensiveness.

Mac sunk his hands into the pockets of his loose workman's trousers and rubbed his upper thighs in a slow motion. His voice went ominous even despite the late-adolescent squeak of it. “A bad job, this, but we've been at work .” Winnie felt a chill—she didn't know these guys from Adam. And where was John? She looked up from the sack of ground coffee. “I'm not sure there's milk,” she said as casually as she could, beginning to sidle away from them.

“Oh, there's milk,” said Mac, “milk there is. We brought a carton.”

“I take two percent. I'll just run out—” Was the security chain attached and the bolt drawn, or had they just let the door close behind them? “Why don't you fellows find the plans and let me see them when I get back? Anything else you want while I'm out?” She held up the percolator and tried not to break into nervous giggles: hers was an interrogative gesture that could be read two ways: Coffee, anyone? or Would you care to be scalded into first-degree burns?

They didn't answer, which froze her in her pose for an extra few seconds, and then she was interrupted in her campaign to flee by the sound of knocking. It originated behind the pantry wall, much like the rap of human knuckles on wood. Three, four, five times.

“Well, hello, SOS in the baseboards,” she said, and to conceal her unfounded sense of vulnerability, “so what have you done with John? Walled him up?”

“No, ma'am, we didn't do it,” said young Mac, tensing and relaxing in an epileptic movement, a sort of shimmy.

“Ah, but it's not her from in there, then,” said Jenkins, reaching out to touch Mac. “Steady, lad. She's not the one.”

“What have you done with John?” she said. She couldn't look toward the pantry as the raps began again, a sequence of five hollow ominous penetrating thumps.

“Oh, not a thing,” said Jenkins.

Mac blew out through his nostrils, a colt shying. “Give us a turn, will you? Showing up without notice? We thought it was you done that knocking. Coulda been so. But there it goes again.”

“You're mad,” said Winnie in a voice she hoped sounded reasonable and disarming. There was some hesitant light in the greasy sky, some wind kicking grit and desultory rain against windows. It was London in November, neither more nor less. “How long has this been going on?”

“The week.”

“What are you talking about?” A knocking pipe, surely. A stone rolling in the backwash from a flushed toilet, echoing from the drain below. A bad board up on the roof, something telegraphing its Morse code into this space. “Tell me what John assigned you to do.” She was exasperated suddenly; why couldn't her stepcousin oversee his own redecoration?

From an inside pocket, Jenkins took a sketch drawn in John's meticulous hand. Winnie could read it easily. The elimination of the pantry door, the crowbarring of the doorframe. The removal of the pantry shelves, the removal of the plaster from the back and side pantry walls. All to gain fourteen inches. By exposing the brick of the fireplace stack, some turnaround room would be freed up. For what? “Oh, I see,” she said, “roof access here. A staircase more ladder than anything else, and the roof garden he's been dreaming about ever since he inherited this place.”

She looked up. She hadn't looked closely before. The old pantry doorframe had indeed been crowbarred out and the pantry shelves removed, and a few spot lamps shone brightly on the wall beyond. Half the plaster was already gone, revealing behind it not bricks but dingy white boards, vertically laid. On the plaster that remained she could see some faint dried brown streaks that suggested roofing problems. “So it's not such a huge job, is it? It took you four days to get this far? What's kept you? Bad weather for punching through to the roof?”

“It's that thumping,” said Mac. “It's dangerous news.”

“Well, you're out of your minds,” said Winnie, but less unkindly. “Have you gone downstairs to talk to the other residents in the building?”

“The flat below is for sale, represented by Bromley Channing,” said Jenkins. “I don't think it's occupied. Nor did we go to the pensioner on the ground floor. Mr. Comestor didn't want us to let anyone know we were interfering with the original structure. There are regulations about this kind of job. He's doing this without planning permission from Camden Council.”

“I know the downstairs lodger. Well, I've met her anyway, in the vestibule,” said Winnie. “I'll go see if she's having secret renovations of her own done. That's the eerie noise, no doubt. You're held up all week long by the sound of rapping?” She began to laugh. They looked affronted, and she didn't blame them, but she couldn't help it.

“Don't be daft,” said Mac. “It's not just that.”

Jenkins put his hand out. “Let her investigate, and if we get thrown out, it's a job we're well rid of. You'd choose to take it on your own shoulders, miss, we shouldn't say no to you.”

They stood there momentarily. The rapping was silent now. As if something inside the wall were holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do. “Boggarts?” she said. “Goblins? Nice.”

“Nothing so mild,” said Mac. His eyes slid away, his lower lip tightened.

She was amazed she'd been alarmed at them, even for a moment. They were out of a pantomime, Good Gaffer Jenkins and his grandson, Dull Jack. Still she mustn't laugh at them. “Rudge House backs up on a property over on that other street, what is it, something Gardens. Rowancroft Gardens? Rudge House shares a party wall with one of those late-nineteenth-century redbrick homes around the way.” She pointed at the step down into the two-room nook he used as an office and a library space. “John's flat walks through right there, and borrows some space from that newer building. Anyone in that house could be buttering toast and you'd know it up here.”

She went and slapped on some makeup to take care of the bags under her eyes, and thudded down the stairs with a will. Still stinging with the unexpected absence of her host, she felt brighter of spirit, at having something to do.

The tenant on the ground floor of Rudge House was home. She opened the door timorously and peered through the crack. Winnie revved her volume up in respect for old-age deafness. “I'm Winifred, a friend of John Comestor from upstairs. May I come in?”

“I'm hardly respectable on a Friday morning,” said the woman, “but enter at your own risk.” Winnie was let into a small, cramped front parlor with impressive molding and a fruity smell of flowers left in greening water. The tenant was a Mrs. Maddingly, and she behaved as if she were scared her name might come true. The front room was shingled with Post-it notes lecturing on household management. CLEAN THELINTTRAPsaid the TV. ISTHEREPOSTTODAY? asked the bookcase, which sported a shelf of Hummel figurines with their faces turned to the wall. MESSY! suggested a doorpost, apparently referring to a pile of newspapers on the floor. PILLS ATMIDDAYPILLSPILLSsaid a sheet of paper taped to a sofa cushion, and several other items of home decoration chimed in PILLS,PILLS. “How may I help you?” said Mrs. Maddingly, interrupting the published opinions of her furniture.

Winnie perched on an ottoman without being asked, and said, “Forgive me for barging in like this. I'm staying upstairs while John is away, and I'm curious about the noises in the building.”

“Oh, do you hear them too?” said Mrs. Maddingly. She was a tiny woman, and when she lifted one hand to steady herself on the mantelpiece she gave the impression of a commuter hanging on to a strap on the Tube. “I can't understand the language of it, can you?”

“We hear a rapping noise upstairs, in the pantry wall I think, something that backs into the chimney stack,” said Winnie. “We thought you might be having some renovations done here.”

“Nonsense, stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “I haven't lit a fire since the last time. I don't care for nosy neighbors, I'll tell you that, and how they alert the emergency services at a moment's notice. All their questions. Don't be forward, I told him.”

“Are you alone here?” said Winnie. “Have workers been in?”

“Well, there's the little ones,” said Mrs. Maddingly, “but I'd hardly call them workers. Slackers, more, skiving off whenever I'm not looking.”

Winnie raised an eyebrow, feeling as if she hadn't actually woken up yet. This seemed a half-dream corrupted by jet-lag weariness. “Workers? On the premises?”

Mrs. Maddingly nodded to the figurines but put her finger to her lips, as if she didn't want to say anything that would cause them to turn around.

“Oh,” said Winnie. “But has anyone else been in your flat this week?”

“Chutney sunlight, chamomile nightshade,” said Mrs. Maddingly. Winnie was prepared to write the old woman off as being, as the English so mercilessly say, completely gaga, when a straw-colored cat passed a doorway. Mrs. Maddingly remarked, “There's Chamomile now.” So the figurines were pressed against the wall to keep the cats from knocking them off the shelves, probably.

“Mrs. Maddingly,” Winnie tried again, “there's a funny noise upstairs and I don't know what it is, and John isn't around to tell us. When did you last see him?”

“Who?”

“John Comestor.”

The woman gave a wry smile that seemed to be detachable, like a Cheshire Cat smile, and said, “Days ago, or weeks, or was he down the stairs this morning?” She looked at a sign on the mantelpiece. “I must remember not to forget my pills, you know.”

“What language do you think it was?” said Winnie.

“I'm not following you,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “The young are so imprecise in their speech. It's not their fault, but there you are.”

“You said you'd heard noises and didn't know the language.”

“Oh, I can't hear a thing except the cats,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “If you hadn't come to call they'd be yowling up a storm. Now as a rule I'm deafer than a stone wall. But all week they've been speaking very urgently indeed, as if they have something to tell me, only of course, who can speak the language of cats? Chutney is quite impossible, doesn't enunciate for one thing, and what vocabulary he has ever had is sorely dwindled to a few well-chosen syllables. The word for ghost is lost, for instance. But the cats are going on about something, although who can tell what it is?”

Oh, John, thought Winnie, why aren't you sitting next to me to hear this? “You've been here a while, haven't you?” said Winnie, trying another approach.

“Indeed I have,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “My husband and I moved in after the war. We once had two floors, don't you know, and we'd have liked to buy the whole house, but then I'm not talented at climbing stairs any longer, so maybe it's for the best. Anyway, poor Alan is dead, and that's fine, that's all right. We don't need the space now, and a good thing too. At today's prices, too dear by half. I couldn't afford to purchase an envelope anymore, so it's good all my friends are dead and not expecting the annual letter.”

“You remember the upstairs. You lived there once,” deduced Winnie.

“Oh, I did. Rooms, you know, rooms and rooms.” She waved her hand vaguely, as if there might once have been half a city block's worth of spare bedrooms and salons annexed to the house. “They've all been invaded by others.”

“Do you know how old the house is?”

“Absolute ages. These front rooms are the showpieces you know, late Georgian. Not a very prepossessing Georgian, one might add, a bin-end variety. Hardly more than a cottage, really. But the rooms are low and cozy, and I have walnut coping about my boudoir. It's gone wormy they tell me but so will I before long, so I don't mind. The back bit goes into the new building; I have some steps to a useless box room that I can't get to. The floors don't agree with each other and the steps don't agree with my knees. Do you want to see?”

“No.” Winnie studied Mrs. Maddingly. Despite herself Winnie was looking at life as if for her book. She was double-living through a day with genuine concerns because the needs of her fictions were as strong as those of her life, or stronger. Domestically, while John Comestor was AWOL, there was a conundrum rapping its fingers on his walls, but narratively it was also knocking on her forehead, pretending to be a ghost or a specter of some sort, and she couldn't concentrate.

Winnie sensed herself looking at this house not as John Comestor's house, but as a place where brash capable Wendy Pritzke could come across the ghost of Jack the Ripper. Winnie was channeling Wendy Pritzke, dialing her up. She couldn't help it.

Jack the Ripper was late 1800s. So this house would have been standing when he disappeared without a trace, to leave the most famous unsolved murder mystery of his day, and ours.

What if Jack the Ripper had gotten boarded up behind a reconstructed wall? What if that was why he had never been found? What if he had followed some toothsome filly home to her Georgian house in the village of Hampstead, only to meet a filthy end there at the hands of some vengeful husband or father or brother, and had his body bricked into a chimney stack?

Only to be exhumed more than a century later?

It was a worrisome habit she had, of vacating the premises mentally and transposing herself into the same premises, organized otherwise, fictionally. Like Alice and the mirror over the mantel, where the world looks the same but different: not just backward, but uncannily precise, and precisely strange. Or as Lewis Carroll had otherwise put it:

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk

Descending from the bus:

He looked again, and found it was

A hippopotamus.

“I must have my pills,” said Mrs. Maddingly, as if Winnie had been lobbying for their removal.

“It's not noon, and your signs say MIDDAY,” said Winnie.

“If I don't have them now I might forget. I should take them while I remember.” She teetered toward a sideboard and with a crash she let the drop front of an antique desk fall open. Within were three small crystal glasses on a shelf lined with old newspaper, a grimy decanter of amber liquid, and an empty bottle of prescription drugs.

“What are you doing?” said Winnie as Mrs. Maddingly poured herself a healthy portion of whatever it was.

“I am afraid of dropping the damn things and having them roll under the hearth rug, so I dissolve them in sherry and drink my obligations down. So sorry I can't offer you any.”

“It's not even ten o'clock in the morning,” said Winnie, not so much scandalized as disbelieving. “I wouldn't touch sherry at this hour if you paid me.”

“It's terrible to be old and sick,” said the woman agreeably, smacking her lips. “In praise of modern medicine, though, which keeps us alive enough to criticize ourselves and others.” She lifted her glass in a toast, and downed the contents. “Now then, where's Chutney? It's time for his little tot too.”

Winnie left the cats, the flat, the dotty old dame, and the clutches of the Wendy Pritzke story, or at least as much of it as she could.

Maybe Chutney was trapped behind some baseboard, and scratching, and Mrs. Maddingly just hadn't noticed.

Oh, but it could be anything, anything but what it seemed to be: a figure trying to communicate through the wall at them, trying to say something, something. What was it? Beware your childhood reading, Winnie said to herself: There is no Narnia in the wardrobe, there is no monkey's paw with a third and damning wish to grant. You live in a world with starving Eritrean refugees and escaping smallpox viruses and third-world trade imbalances and the escalating of urban violence into an art form. You don't need the magic world to be really real; that would be a distraction.

And the world—she stood in the hall outside John's doorway, afraid for a moment to go in—the world was already upside down or inside out; it was already Alice's mad Wonderland. That was the secret of Alice, Winnie remembered, she'd spoken about it once at a conference of fantasy writers. Even if Tenniel had drawn her with an encephalitic head, little Alice in the stories had been the correct junior citizen, sober and sane. It was the world around Alice, the Wonderland, that had gone mad. From the authority of the podium Winnie had theorized about it jocularly. Back in Winnie's great-great-grandfather's day, England had been soldered together with trust in the eternal verities of God's divine plan as worked out in Crown, Empire, the class system, and the family. And then mild unlikely insurrectionist Lewis Carroll had written the first Alice in the late 1860s, 1871 for Looking-Glass . Absurdity, sedition, planted at almost the very epicenter of the Victorian epoch.

A reading child back in those early days, corseted, even straitjacketed by Victorian certainties, could delight in a story stuffed with nonsense. Time was malleable during a mad tea party in which there could be jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. Creatures could shift shapes, a sheep into an old lady, a baby into a pig. Fury could win out over reason. In the nineteenth century, reading Alice was refreshing because it was an escape from strict convictions about reality.

But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty-first century hated the Alice books, couldn't read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex = death. Children murder each other. Parents lie, leaders lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benetton ads.

And faces of missing children staring out from milk cartons—imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full-time. We need a break from it.

“You,” said Winnie to the boot scraper hedgehog, “might as well make a statement. I'm standing here lecturing myself because I don't want to go in there and find I've wandered into a madhouse. Life is mad enough already. For one thing, John is gone. Where is he?”

The hedgehog neither answered nor waddled away in search of greater privacy.

“Well, that's proof of nothing,” said Winnie. “I like to keep my own counsel too.” She threw back her shoulders to appear proprietary, and entered John's flat with what she hoped was convincing briskness. “ That'sa stink you've raised, then,” she called out. “Ooh, Lordy. Something die in here?” She picked up the morning post and riffled through it to make sure there was no letter from John for her, then fanned the air away from her nose and went into the kitchen.

Mac and Jenkins had managed to remove most of the plaster. “Aha, progress,” she said. “Is this halitosis common to old houses?”

“It's the stink of the devil,” said Mac.

“The devil is going to have a hard time getting a date, then.”

Mac poked out his lips at her; was it a grin or a sneer? “I have a bad worry, there's things with dark wings hovering over this whole place. I don't give a toss what she found out, Jenkins. We should get ourselves out of here and take the sacrament of absolution.”

“You're as spooked as an old bog woman,” said Jenkins. “If you can be no help, at least keep your shite to yourself.” He was perspiring around the ears and forehead, and the collar of his sweatshirt was damp.

“What's the matter?” said Winnie. She didn't like the look of Jenkins, clammy as a cold boiled ham. “What are you yammering about?”

Jenkins picked up a hammer. He reached out his arm and held the hammer toward the newly exposed wall boards at the back of the pantry. When he was still two feet away, the hollow banging sound began. It was rhythmic and steady. As Jenkins moved the hammer nearer, the banging picked up in speed and volume.

“Well, that's clever.” Winnie kept her voice flat, even steely. “A sound-and-light show without the light. Now do you mind telling me where John is? I'm beginning to be tired of this.”

“I make no representation, for how do I know?” said Jenkins.

“He's in there; he's dead,” said Mac. “We didn't do it, but what could be the reason for the thumping of the bohrain? It's a death drum, and his body is hammering to get out.”

“And so that's the smell of his corpse, I suppose,” she said. “Well, he always was a man of tidy personal habits. He'd be mortified to know he was so aromatic.” She wrenched open a window and let some remnant of Hurricane Gretl, making its English landfall, sweep cold rainy air in across them.

“Look, look,” she said, and hustled for some paper, partly to turn her back on the pantry boards, to show them she wasn't scared of noise or smells. “I had no luck with the downstairs neighbor, a sweet old thing named Mrs. Maddingly, who's half loony herself. Probably her cat has gotten caught in some crawl space and, by the smell of it, has spectacularly died.”

“So it's a dead cat, is it, striking its claws against the back of these bricks?” said Jenkins, but gently and mockingly, for Mac's benefit, to tease him and console him both. Mac spit.

“Not a dead cat. Dead cats have no sense of rhythm. Listen to me. I told you how this old Georgian house sits next to a place on Rowancroft Gardens. For one thing, the houses share these party walls—like any abutting houses. But for another, when the Victorian house behind us went up, the developers put some back rooms onto this existing house, to enlarge it. Look.” She sketched a map of John's flat, the older three front Georgian rooms in a lumpy square and a newer extension behind, running only half the width of the original house. John's two workrooms took a chunk out of the footprint of the adjacent building. “You see, the equivalent flat in the Rowancroft Gardens building must be roughly a mirror shape to this one, only longer and with larger rooms. Its puzzle piece probably fills in over here, on the other side of our noisy chimney stack, assuming that these pantry boards do back onto a chimney stack.”

“That's something Mr. C never mentioned,” said Jenkins.

“So maybe I should go over to that building. I know someone who lives there I can ask.”

“You'll not go alone. Yourself'd never know where a sound might be coming from,” said Mac, as if eager not to be left in the flat anymore, even with Jenkins to protect him. “I'll join ye.”

“No, sir,” said Winnie. “I'll get further on my own.”

She went to the bathroom and changed her blouse and freshened her face. The someone she knew who lived there was, damn it, Allegra Lowe. Through such mere proximity had Allegra Lowe and John Comestor originally met. They fought briefly over a coven of pigeons living under the eaves of her building and fouling the windowsills of his. They'd solved the problem with wire meshing, and good fences had made them better neighbors, and more than that. Winnie had not been to Allegra's flat before, nor did she want to go now. But, face it, if John was holed up in connubial bliss there, well, better that she should know it.

She looked at herself in the mirror. “You ready to face the Queen of Hearts?” she asked herself. “Hello in there.” Her reflection did not reply. She saw the crow's-feet, the jet lag drawing down the corners of her eyelids. The pursed mouth of mirror-Winnie displayed a clumsy application of lipstick. She did a touch-up.

Back in the kitchen to show herself off, she said, “Mind the fort, I'll be back.” Jenkins shrugged, a noncommittal blur of gesture. Mac didn't turn to look at her, busy thumping open a painted window frame, to create more of a draft. “Air out this stink,” he said. Winnie chose not to think he was referring to her cologne. (Had she overdone it again?) A draft swept through, and the paper on which she'd sketched the floor plans of the adjoining buildings skittered across the windowsill and disappeared outside.

He followed her down the stairwell, with the aim, he said, of finding the paper. She didn't want his company but said to herself, Age, experience, confidence . Well, two out of three. At the front door, as Winnie worked the bolt, Mac murmured, “What do you think it is, really?”

“I really do think it's something embarrassingly ordinary,” she said, in a regretful tone.

“It's penance time for him, that's what it is,” he said, jerking his chin upward. “It means fuck-all to me, though, and I ought to be released from this contract.”

“Here you go, then,” she said, flinging open the door, and then with dignity and fake nonchalance she fled.

She tried to compose her thoughts as she made her way around to Rowancroft Gardens. Though the houses shared a wall, the invasion of nineteenth-century villa architecture into Hampstead's close-shouldered eighteenth-century village housing stock meant that she had a good five- or six-minute walk, including a desolate stretch of some few yards on a muddy public right-of-way. Over a weathered fence the branches of a hedge disturbed her mousy but carefully brushed hair. She tugged at her collar and felt like a cow in an alley, skidding in the mud, mooing curses. Emerging into Rowancroft Gardens, she saw that the rain had been replaced by an aeration of fog, the kind you get in the country during a winter thaw. The street ran down the Frognal side of Holly Bush Hill, disappearing around a curve in the mist, its redbrick Queen Anne–eries receding into nothing but pink Conté crayon suggestions, nearly rubbed out by a cloudy editorial thumb.

Rowancroft Gardens was lower down the slope of Holly Bush Hill than Weatherall Walk, but, laid out in a more prosperous era, the semidetached middle-class homes boasted higher ceilings. Consequently the roofs lined up with those shorter Georgian houses higher on the hill behind them. Number sixty-two was just about central in the stand of ten or a dozen structures apparently put up by the same developer. She knew where it was. She'd walked past it before, looking and not looking.

John had told Winnie that Allegra Lowe lived on dividends from investments. Winnie assumed that was how Allegra could afford two whole floors of number sixty-two: the garden flat with its muslined windows and winter pansies in window pots, and the first floor with the building's best plastered ceilings and tallest windows. And—Winnie knew to expect it—the kitchen, below street level, was lit. Midmorning, and Allegra Lowe was at home.

“Oh, hullo,” she said, to Winnie's knock. Without the curse of an accompanying cough, Allegra had the sort of deep smoker's alto through which you could really hear hullo instead of hello, like someone horsey and capable, straight out of Enid Blyton or Jilly Cooper, maybe. She was drying her hands on a tea towel and looking immediate and blowsy. Winnie framed a remark intended to be admiring—“I couldn't manage a look like that without a support group and a month's advance notice”—but suppressed it and smiled in what she hoped was an irritatingly direct American way.

“I was sure you were my client,” said Allegra tersely.

“Do you remember me—Winifred Rudge,” she said. What a clunky name she had. Winifred Rudge. Allegra Lowe . Winnie. Allegra .

“Of course I remember you, but I was hardly expecting you. Do come in.”

She didn't move aside, exactly. Winnie didn't exactly push by, either. But she gained the threshold. “I won't be a minute, or I can come back later after your appointment.”

Allegra flapped the towel. “They're late, they're always late, they think a miracle is going to happen and a parking space will appear automatically. Then they come in annoyed as if it's my fault. I keep my car in Chipping Norton like any sensible soul and use a minicab when in London. Daft otherwise. You may as well dry off—still raining, is it?”

“No, just bushes being wet.” She followed Allegra into a grand front hall, its lower walls sheathed in golden oak and its floor tiled in a pattern that looked copied from a kaleidoscope, trapezoids of chalky vermilion, peacock, sand, white. The imposing staircase rose up to other flats, and Allegra ushered Winnie through a pair of tall doors into her private space. In the gloom of a deeper hallway, Winnie saw other doors, slightly ajar, revealing high rectangles of Sargent-like interiors slicing through the gloom, tantalizing bits of museum-quality furniture, glints of ormolu. But Allegra led her down a set of stairs to the capacious Victorian kitchen. “No, thank you, no tea, I'm not staying,” Winnie said.

“Tea for me, then. I get cold down here, but this is where I work.”

On the far wall the kitchen boasted the usual appliances, looking expensive, unused. Le Creuset cookware from a wrought-iron chandelier, Henckels knives gleaming on their magnetized rack. Not a single crumb of bread or smear of butter. But the center of the room was the site of some sort of activity having to do with modeling clay or plaster of Paris. A table crammed with spatulas crusted with pink gunk, bits of molding clamped and weighted down. An adjacent tea trolley was jammed with bottles of turpentine and plastic tubs of paint, and brushes standing up in a chipped earthenware jar.

Allegra said, “I'll die of poison from whatever carcinogen they discover in my supplies. The tea gets dusty but there you have it, occupational hazard. Sure I can't tempt you?” It was something of a joke, acknowledging and trying to defuse the tension between them, and Winnie was caught between being grateful and being affronted at the gesture.

“I'm here on an investigative errand,” said Winnie, “with apologies for not calling you ahead to ask. I arrived from Boston last night and John doesn't seem to be in residence. Do you know where he is?”

With her back to Winnie, Allegra studied the kettle. She held her hands over the beginning steam and rubbed them, warming herself, before answering, “Well, no, Winnie, I don't know where he is.”

“It's not like him to take off just like that,” said Winnie.

“Is it not?” said Allegra. “I wouldn't know.”

“Well, I don't think so. Not when he knew I was coming.” Winnie didn't want to focus attention on her own relationship with John, but it couldn't be avoided entirely. “I'm here doing some research for a book; of course I coordinated my flights and my schedule to accommodate his. If he'd been called away suddenly he'd have phoned me, or left a note.”

“I suppose,” said Allegra.

“When did you last see him?”

“This is a theatrical inquisition; are you writing a scene like this?” She busied herself with a cup and saucer and spoon, moving with lazy deliberation. “I'm not at all alarmed at John's comings and goings and they are no concern of mine. I don't make notes in my daybook. I haven't seen him recently, though. We had a meal earlier in the month, and we bumped into each other at the Hampstead Food Hall I should think, or in the road. Beyond that, Winnie, I have nothing to add.” A well-calibrated performance, remarks that led nowhere, said nothing, and therefore seemed full of portent. Winnie, admiring verbal dexterity, tried not to take umbrage.

“It's rude of me to barge in like this, and I didn't even ring up,” she said, hearing ring up slide into place and eclipse the call or phone she'd have said in Boston. By the smallest of substitutions could you change yourself from a you to a one . It was safer, in this big chilly shiny room, to be a one, especially with blush-cheeked Allegra getting prettier as her pale pomegranate hair began to curl in the rising steam. Why couldn't she and her befouling pigeons have bought a flat in some conveniently more distant place, like Highgate or Golders Green?

Winnie felt as if she had a learning disability. She sat down on a painted wicker settee and said, “I'm jet-lagged and cross, but to be honest, I'm concerned as well. Otherwise I wouldn't have come round here, Allegra. I'm not a glutton for punishment, whatever John says.”

“I'm sure John doesn't mention you at all,” said Allegra, balancing that knife of a remark on the tip of her tongue, daring it to fall.

“There's construction work going on in John's flat. Two fellows showed up this morning with a key and some supplies. They're redoing the kitchen and the place is draped in drop cloths.”

“It's green tea. Do have a cup.”

“No, thank you. Did John mention he was having renovations done?”

“I know he has designs on an illegal roof garden, if that's what you mean. I knew he was going to have builders in. But I do try to look the other way. The less he says to me about it the better, so I won't have to tell bold lies to the other freeholders in this building.” Her expression was priceless. “I make a good effort never to lie, Winnie.”

“I don't really like the workers. They're shady in some way, I don't get it. They're dallying, and there's a problem with pipes that they're not addressing.”

“I shall be sure never to hire them.” Tea made and left to steep, Allegra went back to her workstation and began to measure out some dry compound in a mixing bowl. She took some pigment, a bright puce color like some garish Indian spice, and spooned it in.

“I'm here also about the pipes, Allegra. There's a strange knocking in the walls, and it's freaking the workers out. It even has me jumpy, John being absent and all. I believe John told me once that your building and ours shares a party wall—” But she hadn't meant to say ours, that would be perceived as a gauntlet dashed down. “I mean the old place, Rudge House. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, of course,” said Allegra, flexing her largesse. “The estate agents told me all about it when I bought this place. Apparently the existence of the party wall dates from the 1810s or so, a device of economy. We share a more intimate domestic arrangement than most adjoining houses of different periods.”

“And when does this house date to?”

“Built in 1889. It's not the high Arts and Crafts. The pocketbook for this street wouldn't allow it. But these houses derive from standard pattern books of the period.”

“Do you have problems with your plumbing? Any knocking sounds lately?”

“Only at the door when the doorbell is out. Because I'm on the higher end of the slope, I have little trouble with drains or with rising damp on this level, unlike a lot of garden flats in Hampstead. I don't recall John mentioning any problem such as that, but as I say—” This time she left it unsaid.

“Perhaps there's something going on in one of the flats upstairs from you? Some reconstruction? Whatever it is, it's spooking the workers.”

“Irish lads?”

“Well, yes, though ‘lads' is a bit of a stretch. The foreman's quite grandfatherly.”

Me mither and father are Irish,

We live upon Irish stew,

We bought a fiddle fer ninepence,

And that was Irish, too. . . .

“No building work in this place, that I know of,” said Allegra, cutting through Winnie's unspoken rehearsal of the nursery rhyme. “But if it's causing you worry, please walk upstairs and ask the tenants yourself. Not that you'll find anyone at the very top. That's a flat owned by a business in the City—MaxxiNet computer payroll systems—for the putting up of Japanese and Korean colleagues when they come for training. But the company's in receivership and no one has been in residence for months. I know because MaxxiNet requires that temporary residents stop and introduce themselves to me, and the obedient Japanese and Koreans do everything they're told. For several months I haven't heard anyone in the hall other than the family that lives immediately above me.”

“Who are they?”

“A widow, Rasia McIntyre, and her three urchins. She might be there now, though she does her big weekly Sainsbury's shopping on Friday mornings. You want to hurry upstairs and catch her before she goes. I can tell you very little more, Winnie.” She finished mixing the dusty porridge and poured out her thin green tea. “You're welcome to something hot, but I don't know about renovations nor the whereabouts of your cousin, and. So.” She shrugged and grimaced. Then she looked down at her work and pinched a bit of the mixture between her fingers and frowned.

“What are you making up?”

“Dental compound.”

“What for?”

“I do hands, impressions of hands,” said Allegra. “Child hands mostly, presents for grandparents, that sort of thing.” She walked to a broad table in the corner and flung off a gummy blanket. The surface of the table was tiled with pink squares and rectangles, some framed, some loose, some inscribed with names, some not. Each tile showed the imprint of one or two little hands, like instant fossils, blunt starfish impressions. “It started out being therapy for learning-handicapped adults and developed into a lucrative little cottage industry for me. Of course, a piece in the Sunday Times color supplement several years ago didn't hurt my business.”

Winnie found it grotesque, but didn't say so. “What's the strangest impression you ever made?” she said.

“I went to a Hallowe'en theme party last week. It was Vicars and Whores, and I went as a Vicar. Maybe that wasn't so strange, though, as most of the men went in drag as Whores.”

“I mean,” said Winnie, “the handprints; what's the oddest experience—”

But Allegra said, “Look, I was joking, right? Anyway, there's the knock. I've got my morning client at last. I'll see you out as I go to let them in. If you don't mind? There's nothing else?”

“Nothing else, there's nothing at all,” said Winnie. Vicars and Whores. The sight of adults in costume, unless it was on the stage, always unnerved her. Even the thought of it. She hustled herself up the stairs in front of Allegra, trying to focus. “What did you say the neighbor's name was? Rose, Rosie? McIntosh?”

“Rasia. It's a Muslim name. Rasia McIntyre. She married a Glaswegian who fell into an unexpected coma and just, just died, no fanfare or fare-thee-well. You'll like her. Tell her I would make the introductions if I could, but duty calls.”

She flung open the door and scowled at a frantic-looking mother restraining a squirming bundle of toddler. “I want you to submerge his whole body in the cast and keep it there,” the mother rattled at Allegra, “and when he's dead and rotted we'll crack open the mold and make a better-behaved plaster version that does. Not. Squirm. So .” Winnie nodded her thanks to Allegra and headed up the stairs.

She could hear the fuss of Rasia McIntyre's household spilling down the stairwell. The sound of quarter-tone sitar music accompanying midmorning toddler meltdown almost stopped her in her tracks. But the more time she took up, the likelier that before she got back, Mac and Jenkins might have cleared out, and anything else objectionable too. So she rapped on the door.

“Yes, who is it,” said the Rasia woman, throwing open the door and continuing to yak into the portable phone, two tiny children clinging to her trouser legs. To Winnie: “I'm absolutely strapped, can't manage a quid.” To the phone: “Look, there's a do-gooder at the door, will you be in? I'll ring back when they go down for naps. Very good very good, ciao.” She slapped the phone on a hall surface and said, “I couldn't get her off the phone so I'm glad you knocked, but I don't give to those who knock at the door, and you ought not to have been let in.”

“I'm not collecting for charities,” said Winnie, “I'm a friend of one of your neighbors next door. I'm here to ask about some strange noises in the building—”

“Navida, I'm telling you, no more sweeties until teatime, you'll just have to cry,” said Rasia, detaching Navida's arm from her thigh. “Yes, I tap the kids on their bottoms sometimes, but they're my kids and I do what I want. They don't cry more than other children their age. You can't be from the Council. Not with your accent.”

“I'd hit them too,” said Winnie, looking at them, “and I'll take turns with you if you like. They're very noisy.” She didn't mean it but it worked. Rasia laughed.

“They're high-spirited and they miss their daddums, and I can't blame them. Is this a formal complaint?”

“No,” said Winnie. “May I come in just for a moment?”

“If you must.” She looked more pleased than she sounded. “Though I've more than enough to do without preparing the house for unexpected callers.”

Rasia McIntyre had a full face with strong bones and high brow. It was like looking at one of the Picassos and seeing front and profile simultaneously. Rasia had hips and shoulders, she had depth and round breadth, nothing whittled away through a diet of mere lettuce. Winnie felt bleached and parched next to the Asian woman's vigor, but she didn't mind. Rasia was realer than a missing stepcousin or a confounding knock in the walls.

The room into which Rasia led her was a kerfuffle of scarves and candles, throw pillows and expensive Turkish carpets. The floor was covered over with children's games in ten thousand pieces. On a workstation in the corner teetered several television sets, two computer screens, a stack, a printer, and a VCR. Winnie half expected the abundance of Post-it notes to read PILLSPILLS. “I'm trying to get back into film editing, but I'm not sure I can upgrade my skills,” said Rasia. “Everything's computerized now and I have so little patience for the manipulation of tiny bits of information.”

Nor for the tiny bits of Lego and Duplo and dollhouse furniture that crunched and splintered underfoot. “Shit. You guys . Are you going to collect any of this or do you want me to ruin all your playthings?” she said. “Navida. Tariq. We have to go out and do our errands, and this looks like the Rubble of Dresden.”

The children disappeared, shrieking down the hallway. “If you wake the baby I'll boil all your bones,” called Rasia, but without conviction. To Winnie, “Sorry. This place is such a tip. If you're not here to complain about the noise of the children, then what?” She sat down in her workchair and began to lace her boots, looking up at Winnie from beneath a curly abundance of anthracite hair.

“No. I don't care about the noise kids make. I'm only visiting next door anyway.” Winnie took a breath and described the layout of the intersecting houses. Then she told Rasia about the sound of knocking from the chimney stack. “Your downstairs neighbor, Allegra Lowe, said she thought you might have some ideas, or maybe you were doing some building yourself in here.”

“Would that I were,” said Rasia. “The children thump and play, and sometimes the baby hits her head against the wall when she wants uppies and I'm in the loo, but not this morning. I wouldn't think it loud enough to be heard in another building, anyway. We can look if you like. Excuse the housekeeping. I have a Brazilian girl named Zuli who disappeared a few weeks ago and hasn't rung to tell me when she's coming back. Did you ask everyone in your building?”

“There are only three flats in Rudge House, and the middle one is on the market.”

“Well, that'll be it, then, don't you think? The owner of that flat must be tarting up the kitchen to get a better sale price. Have you gone round to ask at the estate agent's?”

Winnie hadn't thought of that, and indeed, it was the most logical conclusion. Though wouldn't she have seen sign of other workers moving in and out in the stairwell of Rudge House?

The children had settled themselves in front of a television in a side room, and were shooting suction-rubber-tipped darts at Trevor MacDonald doing a newsbreak. “Baby,” said Rasia, “nappy time. I can smell it three rooms away.”

At the rear of the flat, in a corner of the main bedroom, the baby lay in a crib with pink plastic bars. She was breathing heavily, but not crying. Rasia stood and looked at her. Winnie didn't; she studied the proportions of the room, the molding. “Could I be really pushy and peer in your closet? Put my ear to the wall? I think the chimney stack from Rudge House might be on the other side of your closet wall, and the sound would be muffled by your clothes; maybe that's why you haven't heard it here.”

“But it's a mess, I haven't cleaned out a thing,” said Rasia irritably. “I can't, you see, I can't.”

“Oh, that won't bother me, I'm a slob too.” She laid her hand on the cupboard door. “I mean—”

“What do you mean? And why are you here?”

Winnie turned at the changed tone. Rasia's eyes had become plums, and she covered them with the heels of her fists. The baby stopped breathing as if she felt responsible for her mother's tears, and then started up again, ever more shallowly, tentatively. “It's Quent's clothes in there, how can you walk in here and go straight to his clothes?”

“I never,” said Winnie, horrified, “I never meant, how could I know? I'll just go. I'm very sorry. Stupid of me. Please. You'll scare the baby. Please.” Rasia was bawling now. “Please, you don't have to do this. I'll go. I'll let myself out. Are you all right? Let me get you a tissue.”

They had tea for an hour. Winnie felt hijacked, but she deserved it. She pretended an interest in seeing pictures of Quentin McIntyre and Rasia Kamedaly at their wedding, on vacation in Madagascar, or visiting the old Kamedaly family home in Kampala following the repatriation of Asian properties seized during Idi Amin's reign. Quentin looked like a well-used shaving brush, his blond hair bristling in all directions. Quentin at home in Loch Dunwoodie. Quentin at Keble College. Quentin and Rasia with the kids. In the end, Fiona whimpering on her shoulder, Rasia led Winnie to the bedroom again and drew back the heavy drapes. “Open the wardrobe, pull out his things,” she said, “it's been nine months now, I've got to think about Oxfam sooner or later.”

Winnie was beyond resisting. She'd unlocked this Pandora's box and clearly there was no stuffing the vermin back within. She pulled out suits and sports coats, tailored trousers and boxes of laundered shirts. When she opened the topmost drawer she saw a heap of men's briefs, white, blue, and tiger skin. She closed the drawer on all that.

“Here's the wall, then,” she said, reclaiming some briskness at last, and she put her ear to it. “Look, it is plastered unevenly; this probably is the early-nineteenth-century chimney stack, just as I guessed. Might this have been a fireplace once, boarded over when central heating came in?”

Rasia, playing with Fiona, didn't answer.

Winnie leaned into the shadows vacated by Quentin's clothes.

There was a sound in the stone, or so she thought, but it could just be the sound of a vacuum, like the seashell magnifying back to the ear the sound of the ear's own echo chamber. In one ear Winnie heard the aeons creak, the sound of stone speaking its lone word; she heard it translated, today, as the moment-by-moment evaporation of the McIntyre-Kamedaly marriage, only a ghost of itself and dissolving by a few more molecules every hour or so.

Then she pulled herself together, stood up, said, Stuff and nonsense, but to herself, and aloud, “I can hear nothing, really. I feel a fool to have barged in like this,” and helped Rasia McIntyre carry the heaps of old clothes out to the landing.

But Rasia seemed better, and Fiona was gurgling at her sippie, and the older children began to grin at Winnie and flirt with her despite her ignoring them. As the women pummeled clothes into Marks and Spencer shopping bags for carrying to one of the charity shops, Rasia said, “Your friend Allegra holds a duplicate key to the upstairs flat. For emergencies. Didn't she tell you?”

“She didn't. But never mind. She must know nobody's there, so it didn't occur to her.”

“If you want to be thorough, ask her for it.”

“I'm not such good friends with her—”

“You're not such good friends with me, and you've helped me clear out Quent's clothes,” said Rasia, “something my sisters have been begging me to do for months. They offer to come up from Poole every weekend and I have said No, no, I'm not ready. Then you barge in and rip the place to shreds without a flinch of shame. Surely you can go ask your friend for the key.”

“Oh, I could if I wanted,” said Winnie, “but really.”

“Really what?” It was Rasia's turn to be nosy, and Winnie had no intention of satisfying her curiosity, no matter what Rasia was owed.

Pulling on her jacket, Winnie said, “Do you know my cousin? A friend of Allegra's? John Comestor?”

“She has plenty of people come and go and I don't make it my business to supervise,” said Rasia with an attempt at primness that she spoiled by continuing, “but I see what I see. What does he look like?”

“Average height. Trim. My age, a bit younger. Cocoa brown hair, I guess, longer than is the convention for men his age, but kept trimmed in back. Dresses casually, jackets and jeans mostly. Boyish, you'd say. A John Cusack type.”

“Sounds like most men in Hampstead. American?”

“English.”

“I'll keep the curtains twitching.”

“Oh,” said Winnie, “it's nothing to me whether they're seeing each other or not. I know they're an item. Out of respect for my feelings they both play it down, but I don't care. He's gone missing, or anyway he's out of town without notifying me. That's all, and that's the end of it.”

“Well, he's not staying upstairs, hiding out from you,” said Rasia, “though since Allegra has the key to the flat upstairs he could easily do it. But I'd hear the coming and going on the stairs, and the shower running and the loo flushing. There's been none of that.”

“Can I repay you by hauling one of these sacks down to one of the charity shops on West End Lane?”

“Thank you, no.” Rasia McIntyre crossed her arms around Fiona and kissed the scraps of baby fuzz on her scalp. “You can help me by coming back to see me sometime, if you want. You know something of what it's like to miss your man, I can tell.”

“How very kind,” said Winnie. She saw Rasia flinch at the sudden formality. But Winnie couldn't help it. She descended the stairs with no attempt at grace or silence.

She chose not to go back to Rudge House through the muddy right-of-way. Then, as she headed around toward the cross street, she changed her mind entirely. John had just abandoned her to his mess of redecorating problems and North London neighbors. Why was she taking this campaign on her own shoulders? Why get involved in it at all? She'd go find a bite of lunch first.

She looked at the pedestrians on the high street quickly, with interest, as if they might, coincidentally, be John. They weren't.

She stopped—a pain in her side, a twinge, a premonition, something—and steadied herself, one hand on a blue lighted Metropolitan Police display case. Or maybe she'd been drawn to the posters? Two pages, side by side. The first, printed both in English and in some exotic fringed script, appeared to publish the news of the disappearance of a soft-faced Southeast Asian boy whose photo showed him with streaked blond hair. The text said he had gone missing from the Imperial Karaoke Club in New Road, Dagenham. The second page, fully in English, pleaded for information about a man murdered at the August Notting Hill Carnival. He'd been attacked and killed at Westbourne Park Road. “Did you see the attack? Have you heard anything about the attack? Do you know those involved?” Both announcements printed an 0800 number for any leads. Anything at all.

And all these people on their way to lunch, walking by.

She found one of her usual haunts and used the facilities and ordered a beaker of cabernet. The place was filling up. She took a sip and thought of John, his theatrical exits and entrances. Despite herself—her condition and her therapy the same—her mind sidestepped toward the story of Wendy Pritzke. Would anyone like John be making an appearance in her story? Should he?

She took out the stenographer's notebook and flipped it open. There were the pages of scrawl from the Forever Families debacle. It seemed weeks ago already. She turned to the next white page and picked up her pen. She sat there and did not write.

There was wind, and more of it than she'd expected. Hilly North London, its thoroughfares made canyonlike by the facades of mansion blocks, was a maze of wind tunnels. Embattled, she headed back up the slippery paving stones to look at the redbrick house again. There was something about the mix of English rain and the effluvium of English petrol that made London pavements more slippery than any others she'd pounded. Or maybe it was her American rubber soles refusing to travel well. She reached out to steady herself. “Oh, I'm a bundle of nerves; that's being in the presence of a good idea, it does it to me,” she said. He didn't answer nor complain.

The house--it was always about houses--was as far from grungily redeveloped Whitechapel as you could get.

If you savored Dickens for the muck of it all, you were disappointed in the contemporary environs of Aldgate and Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Most of Dickens-land had been destroyed in the Blitz.

You could buy booklets, and she had, of Jack the Ripper walks. Anyone could hunt down those few remaining sites that Jack the Ripper would have known: the White Hart Pub on the corner of Gunthorpe Street, the Artillery Passage, Ten Bells Pub, which the prostitutes who became his victims must have frequented to drum up trade. Turn left and sample Tubby Isaacs's East End cuisine of eels. Straight ahead, Durward Street, murder site of Mary Ann Nichols.

It was as if all that could never be known about the identity or the fate of Jack the Ripper was compensated for by loving devotion to whatever was left.

And, if you were interested, there was so much of the rest of London standing today that had stood in the winds of the late nineteenth century. It just wasn't in the City.

Could Jack the Ripper have fled Whitechapel eventually and disappeared into another neighborhood? Even, why not, to this street in bourgeois leafy Hampstead?

He (the great unknown he), the murderer of prostitutes, named the Ripper for his tendency to claw out their throats and prevent them from screaming, he could have struggled up this street as she was now doing. In his day it would have been sluiced with carriage ruts, a mess in this weather; filthy; horse manure softening and liquefying and running downhill in this rain as loads of red brick were trundled up from the kiln. The rise of a pink coral reef in the fog of coal-burning London . . . Had the exteriors of the buildings already been finished by the time Jack the Ripper appeared in the street? Were the final details of interior lath work, plasterwork, woodwork, the plumbing for gas lighting still being fussed over, when Jack the Ripper reached the house that would later be number sixty-two, and could, or would, go no farther?

“You're stuck on this,” he said, “I can see it on your face; you're drunk on it. The shame of it all! Can't you write something dim and domestic like Anita Brookner, some damp-browed seamstress too educated for her world? You'd like to wield bloody knives, but I tell you, you're not constitutionally suited for it.”

“Don't tell me what my constitution suits me for,” she said. “We all succumb to our contagion of choice. The question is, what if Jack the Ripper came to his senses and fled the scene of his crimes? What if he tried to set himself up as a laborer in outlying Hampstead Village? Or, of course, he could have taken a position as a butcher's assistant. Only he falls prey to the spell of some gamine young Hampstead woman? Perhaps an Irish maid, recently engaged to swell the staff of the new household? Maybe he makes a delivery here and catches sight of a pretty redheaded maid down there in that kitchen. Look how public the windows are! You can see three-quarters of the room, more if you stoop down and look. Maybe, having evacuated himself from the nightmare zone of Whitechapel, scene of his frenzies, maybe he doesn't even remember himself as Jack the Ripper. Maybe he reads about it in the used newspapers that he wraps meat in and he doesn't recognize himself. Split-personality type. But there's something about the pretty chin, the glimpse of stockinged ankle as a kitchen maid teeters to collect a basin from a high shelf. He slides the choice cut of lamb from side to side, and its blood gums through the paper and smears his apron.”

“We'll have some supper and we can rent Dressed to Kill or Psycho if you like,” he said. “I can tell you're way beyond reruns of Upstairs, Downstairs by now.”

She laughed. “Well, you know how much has been made out of the mystery of his disappearance. You know better than I. At one point they proposed that he was a syphilitic member of the royal family. He was a Mason, a surgeon, an insurrectionist. All this excites the fancy, as they say.”

“I can see your fancy is excited.”

“Don't go on yet. I want to look in that kitchen window and imagine what he might have seen.”

“You're looking for some leggy copper-tressed maid for a serial murderer to sink his meat cleaver into?”

She murmured, “Why, if a prostitute were unable to defend herself, would a kitchen maid in a middle-class house do better?”

“You've said the prostitutes were mostly drunk,” he answered. “Besides, kitchen maids work with cooks, and cooks know cleavers pretty well themselves. But I like your plot better when the man in the household comes home and finds some thug messing with his child bride or his nubile teenage daughter or his parlor maid. The good paterfamilias kills him and bricks his body up in the chimney still under construction. Up there in the maid's quarters. Pater hides the evidence of the murder, to avoid the scandal and shame. The delicate ladies, after all! What do you think? And that's why no one could ever find Jack the Ripper to arrest him. The son of a bitch was done in himself.”

“The story would go better, John,” she said, “if the intended victim could do the murder.”

“Too politically correct. Though your American readers would lap it up, no doubt.”

“Her father or beau could still dispose of the body to protect her honor and to shield her from prison.”

“You are incorrigible,” he said.

“I'm entirely corrigible,” she answered. “I think. Does that mean corruptible?”

“I know you're corruptible. Corrigible means correctable . Shall we get out of this vile weather and find a scotch and soda somewhere?”

They moved past the house, laughing, Gothic fancy serving as a rather hearty appetizer.

She felt herself in the muzzy grip of too much wine at lunch. As she approached the front door of Rudge House with her key in her hand, the door opened of its own accord. Or rather, she saw, of the accord of Mrs. Maddingly, who stood there dressed in a shapeless coat the color of beef gravy. “Ooh, a gale,” said the old woman appreciatively. “I'm off to the post office to get my pension. You haven't seen Nightshade I take it?”

“A cat? One of your cats? I have not.”

“She'll turn up, or he will; I forget which it is, not that it matters to me, I'm not a cat,” said Mrs. Maddingly. “In fact, it didn't matter to me as a human, either, except when dear Alan was interested, and he was the only one who ever was. You haven't seen him either?”

“Your dead husband?”

“The same.”

With some irritation Winnie said, “Was I expected to?”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Maddingly, passing her in disgust. “I meant to say did you ever see him? I can't remember if you and I were friends back then. How do you expect me to remember trivial matters like that?”

“I'm sorry,” said Winnie. “I'm just—no, I never had the pleasure.”

“And you never will now,” said Mrs. Maddingly in a smart tone. She glided past and hopped off the front step, and pattered down the pavement on unsure feet. Maybe she was drunk, thought Winnie; maybe that was what gave her the courage to venture out. She watched the old woman test the pavement, as if expecting it to give way. Her flyaway hair was a corona of white; she had the look of an old ewe too long unshorn.

Winnie pocketed the keys and went on up, pausing only to remove her muddy shoes and leave them on the drop cloths the fellows had laid out to collect their own boots and umbrellas. “Well?” she asked the hedgehog. “Any word from Interpol or Scotland Yard while I've been gone?” The hedgehog squatted on the plastic and again refused to comment. “Hello, hello,” said Winnie, entering the flat, willing John to have mercy and show up. “John?” she said in a voice of hopeful irritation.

Except that the smell had abated, the place was no different, unless it could be said that a stalemate can grow staler. She could feel rather than hear the presence of skeptical Jenkins and slight-minded Mac there, not working. She wasn't surprised to find them more or less as they'd been several hours earlier. “Good going, fellows. You've made no progress at all?” Her words came out tarter than she meant them.

“We were kept—” said Mac, and stopped.

“We're dying to learn what you've turned up in your walkabout,” said Jenkins. He made a gesture, as if to touch the brim of an imaginary cap. His deference was mocking. She regretted her temper, its small stings and seizures, and she amended herself in that room: drew a breath, crossed her hands on her waistline like a figure from an older generation. She tried to smile.

“You've been considering the matter still,” she said.

“The noise is louder,” said Mac, and crossed himself. “Mother of Christ.”

“The wind is picking up too,” said Winnie. “Maybe there's a break in the flue above, a chink in the plaster somewhere.” Bizarre, that it should be left to her to be the rationalist in the room. She who for several years had drawn sound five-figure royalty checks for The Dark Side of the Zodiac . John would have enjoyed that irony, were he around. “Have you considered that?” she said. “The chimney as a kind of huge pipe organ, coughing?”

“You've a daycent portion of comment,” said Mac, “for someone who just walks in without warning—”

“Don't, Mac, just stow it,” said the older man, “it does no good.” Something passed between them, but Winnie couldn't tell what it was. Dread, superstition, suspicion of some sort. Of her?

“A message come in on the answerphone,” said Jenkins, jerking a finger toward it.

“John,” she said with relief, “well, it's about time.”

“A man,” said Jenkins. “We heard the voice, but it wasn't for us.”

“We listened by to hear if it was you ringing us,” said Mac, as if put out that she hadn't called in with her findings.

She went to the machine and pressed Play.

She thought at first that it was John. No. Adrian Moscou again. “. . . you said don't call but you left your number so I thought I would. London's a long way to go to avoid our dinner invitation. But you've got a rain check. So give a call when you get back. I'm still wearing hairshirts for blowing the whistle about your being a writer—I may have to kill myself if I don't hear from you. Besides, Geoff wants to push ahead in our application, but I'm more Capricorn and skeptical, so we wanted to hear your impressions of the child merchants of Forever Families. We feel somewhat—uh—marginalized in that crowd. Anyway, we like your books, or my students do anyway, so there might be—” The tape cut off.

She was tired of not getting where she wanted, of not being able to flee what she'd rejected. “Give me the damn crowbar, the adze, whatever it is,” she said, pacing into the kitchen. “If you won't do the job John hired you for, I will.” She picked up an L-shaped lever with a wedged tip. She approached the boards of the newly exposed wall and ran one hand over them. The fellows must have been working this already; she could easily nudge the pronged edge around the nailhead she'd found. “Is this the idea?” she said, and put her weight on the implement.

The nail allowed itself to be worked out to a distance of two inches or so. “Hard work,” she said icily. She couldn't loosen it farther so she replaced her tool around a lower nail, in line, and did the same. Again it stopped at a certain distance. “These nails have clawed points or phalanges back there?” she asked. “Or bolted tips, somehow? Well, we ought to be able to work this board away with our fingers, if we all put our backs into it, and then yank it off, shouldn't we? Come on, something, anything.”

“She'd charm the Y-fronts off Jaysus himself,” said Mac. “The noise is stopped. What's she done?”

It was true, the pounding was gone, but the silence itself was eerie, like the running down of a clock timing something urgent.

“I probably just let a little air into the space,” she said, getting to work on the third nailhead. “Now that I've started, are you going to take over? I've got some business in the City. . . .”

But when Jenkins came forward to take the crowbar, the rapping began again. Fiercely, less mechanically, more like the scrabbling of a trapped beast. Mac said, “Bloody hell!” and Jenkins flinched and retreated.

“Ah, the blood pressure,” said Jenkins, “and me just run through the last of the tablets.”

They all backed up and Winnie laid the crowbar on the floor. She said, “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”

“What the fuck?” said Mac.

“Dr. Seuss,” she answered.

“We'll be needing some doctor or other,” said Mac. “Dr. Freud. Or maybe Dr. Kevorkian.”

Winnie's voice was softer than she'd have liked. “It's just annoying. How can we be spooked by redecorating? The kitchen that rejected new fixtures? What does it want?”

“Holy shite,” said Mac.

The nails, one by one, began to retract into the walls, like a cat sheathing its claws.

It was like trick photography, like watching a video in rewind. Cool and constant. Time in reverse, time broken. Winnie felt her grasp of things shudder, her thoughts wheel out, seeking for a scrabble hold elsewhere, in a world more obedient than the aberrations on display at this hobbled moment. Somewhere else, children on playgrounds were quietly ganging up on the unpopular isolate. Junior varsity teams were suiting up for a scrimmage. Middle-management types were plotting office putsches over the watercooler. Some bored child was tossing a book of Winnie's on the floor. Some mother frantic for a cup of Tension Tamer tea was hacking through the cellophane wrapping with a meat cleaver. Everywhere else, furnaces were firing up, trucks were backing up, computers were booting up, things were going forward, except here, where the nails were retreating.

In a moment there was no sign of Winnie's efforts, and the flat had gone silent again.

“A whole week of this?” she said.

“No,” said Jenkins, “we haven't been able to get as close as you just did. Nerves.”

She put her weight on her heels, her back against the kitchen cabinets. “You'd better tell me everything,” she said. “You'd better just start at the top. Where are you guys from? Have you done work for John before? What's the first thing you noticed that was strange?”

They didn't speak. “Why would you not trust me?” she said. “You just better,” she added.

“I'm from Raheny, in Dublin,” said Mac after a minute. “And here four years and some, staying with mates in Kilburn, off Mill Lane. Been at this sort of thing since weekend jobs with my da. Five, six years now. Never seen the likes of this.”

“Have you got a real name, Mac?”

“Mac's good enough for you if it's good enough for me,” he said. He had the look of a ferret with mumps, his narrow elegant nose blooming out of a face raw with the last of adolescent acne. “I've been with himself the past two years.” He nodded sullenly to his partner.

“Colum Jenkins,” said the older man, his hand on his left shoulder, rubbing it. “Building's been my trade the past dozen years, working now for myself, previously on a maintenance staff in a clinic in Birmingham. And I think my domestic arrangements are none of your concern. I did some work for a friend of Mr. Comestor's and was recommended; Mr. C rang me a month ago or so. I came out to look at the job, deliver an estimate, collect my deposit. The usual. Mr. C was a pleasant enough chap, a bit distracted, you might say—”

“Distracted? How?”

“Oh, Monday morning we arrived, lots of to-ing and fro-ing on the phone. Some buyers interested in the flat below came pounding on his door to ask him some questions about the neighborhood. That sort of thing, don't you know. He didn't look like a man who stayed in one place with a newspaper for very long, did he, Mac? So when we arrived back on Tuesday and he wasn't here, we weren't so very surprised. We thought he'd be back in a moment, or maybe I'd just misunderstood. That was the day the nasty weather began. I left a note asking his permission to do the bathroom first. I didn't care to risk breaking through to a chimney stack whose shaft could well have shifted over time, allowing in the rain, leaving us dealing with the elements. But Mr. C left no written reply on Wednesday morning to answer my proposal. He just disappeared. So we spread out the dust sheets, put our wet things to dry, and got to work, or thought we would.”

“So it's been rainy weather all week?”

“Had to set out the oilcloth in the hall the first morning he was gone, Tuesday, it was, to drop our wellies on. We've not had to pick it up yet. Very English weather.”

They were all skirting the imponderable: that some thing or other had pulled the nails back into the wood so efficiently that the nailheads were once again flush. It was too strange, like biting into an apple and tasting a mouthful of cauliflower.

“Why didn't you just say, ‘Oh, the hell with this,' and take off?” she asked.

Mac looked as if he'd made that very remark to Jenkins repeatedly over the past four days. “It's bad doings, and worse to come,” said Mac.

Jenkins sighed. “Mac is spooked if a mouse runs across his path, thinking it is the devil's agent. But though I don't fathom it and I don't like it, I'm ashamed to be scared of it. And I don't want to leave it till Mr. C comes home. I've a reputation, and a good one, the which I worked hard enough to get. And we don't know where Mr. C is.”

“There must be a missing persons bureau at the police station,” said Winnie. “Why not call?”

“ Youring, give your name, and tell some authority that you're scared of your assignment?” said Jenkins. “Go ahead, try it.”

“You're not telling it all,” said Mac. “He isn't,” he said to Winnie.

“What's he leaving out?”

“You mind your tongue,” began Jenkins, but Mac said stoutly, nearly in a shout, “This is a fecking waste of time. And there's naught to it anyway, so just belt up.” He turned to Winnie and continued. “Wednesday we just stood around some, joking about it, trying to show we weren't pissing ourselves with fright. Then yesterday even in the rain we thought we'd get up on the roof and look down, try to find a hole from above and block it. If it was a suction thing, a dark wind howling down the bones of this house, well, we'd clog its arteries and give it a stroke. Give the whole house a huge shake. A thrombosis.”

“Please,” said Jenkins, “my own heart is listening. Don't give it notions.”

“So we did,” said Mac. “There's no roof access from this flat right now; that's what your friend Mr. C wants to improve by this rehab. We had to get the ladder out the study window, up in what you call the new house part. We had to steady one end on the window ledge and drop the other onto the pitched roof of the house next door to that, across the yard below. Not to cross to that house but just to have someplace to stand and get our balance so we could turn and begin to scrabble up the slope of the roof over the study, and then cross to where it joins the valley gutter of the older house—Rudge House as you have it—at the chimney stack.”

“Not my favorite thing, heights,” said Jenkins, and closed his eyes. “But what else was to be done?”

"So we get out there in the filthy fecking weather, and the wind wobbles the ladder like a vengeance. But we get up onto the roof all right and walk around a bit.

“We're up there, poking about the rear chimney stack, the one that leads down here. It's nothing out of the ordinary. They capped it with an ironstone chimney pot shaped like a castle in a big chess game. The leads seemed snug enough. A little cracking in the mortar around the chimney pot. We think maybe this is it. We chip the chimney pot off its mount and set it to, on the parapet. It's a great monstrous thing, and heavy. And then the rapping begins up top, too, coming from inside the house, coming out. But it sounds different when you're outside.”

Winnie wanted to ask that they move into the front room, looking out over the staid, empty forecourt of Rudge House, farther away from the kitchen and the pantry wall still making Morse code at them. But she merely said, “Oh?”

“It sounded like a voice, is what he wants to say,” said Jenkins. His eyes were brimming. “Some sound pushed through a throat, that's all, but what throat, or whose, or when, we could not tell.”

“He had his little fit, he did,” said Mac, pointing at Jenkins. “He lost his brekkie and clawed at his clothes. I wanted to go get the priest and nuke that buggery wailer into kingdom come. But he wouldn't let me.”

“He's a moron,” said Jenkins, not unkindly, “he's that most superstitious sort of fellow; only bothers to believe in God and the blessed saints because he likes to believe in the devil and his army of familiars. In actual fact, of any given Sunday he'd just as soon run down a man of the cloth and rob the widow of her mite. He has no scruples, don't you know, no faith, only dim fears, which he populates out of The X-Files and The Twilight Zone .”

Mac said, “It's a case of house possession, isn't it? And Mister Colum Jenkins bawled like an infant at the sound of it.”

“What did it say?” Winnie only asked because the longer they talked, the more time passed since the nails retracted into the wall, and the easier it became to breathe.

“The consonants were vowels, the vowels were mud, the language was far away, possibly beastly,” said Jenkins.

“Like if you gave a dog electroshock and convinced him he could speak English,” said Mac, “only he couldn't, of course.”

“Why did you weep?” said Winnie.

“Everyone's got a grief,” said Jenkins, “mine is mine and none of your concern, but mine came up the chimney to remind me of itself.”

“You're as superstitious as he is, only you use a different grammar,” said Winnie. “How long did it go on? How loud was it? When did it stop? What did you do then?”

Mac said, “We couldn't knock up the compound—so many parts sand to so many parts cement—to mortar it into place. Not till the rain let up. So we headed back in. Then the ladder jumped—it just jumped, like a skipping rope—and tipped into the alley. I was already in the window and Jenkins following; he fell on top of me to avoid losing his balance into the alley. He had a seizure then. His pills.”

“Bad heart,” said Jenkins. “Been so for a while, but frights make it worse.”

“You went a bit snoozers on me. Browned your boxers too, didn't you. Talk about stink.”

“And the ladder . . . ?” said Winnie quickly.

“Still in the alley. Never got to it yet.” Jenkins avoided Mac's eye.

“And the chimney pot is up there uncemented?”

“It's forty, fifty pounds of fired clay. Short of a gale-force wind, nothing's going to budge it. We'll right it soon enough.”

“Tell her about your dream,” said Mac. His head was back and tilted, his eyes hooded, his lips on one side drawn up into a mean pucker. “When you were out cold. Go on, then.”

“You shut your mouth,” said Jenkins. “It's none of her concern, nor yours. I'm sorry I spoke of it.”

“Go on, tell her, Jenky-jenks.”

Jenkins took a breath. Winnie saw him halting in his thoughts. “Now you,” she said to Mac, “you just hold on.” To be funny, addressing the pantry wall: “You, I don't want to hear it.” She took Jenkins by the elbow. “Come on, then. Have a seat. There's nothing here that we can't all walk away from. I'm going to make a cup of tea.”

“Oh, you don't know,” said Jenkins, “we can walk all we want, but the good it does?”

“You stupid git. Tell her the dream or I will.”

“I told you to shut up,” said Winnie. “Why don't you just go. Please? Grab a sandwich or something. We're going to have some tea.”

“Wouldn't scarper off, leaving my mate here, not with dead Mr. C in the walls, no, darlin', no.”

She stopped talking to him then, made two cups of tea, and sat down near to Jenkins. “This is all going to seem so ridiculous when we get to the bottom of it,” she said. “Please. I don't care what you dreamed.”

“Tell her.”

“I don't hold by dreams,” said Jenkins, “it's not my way. But this was such a dream. I was so deep in it, not drowning but—bewildered—no word for it really. Everything hung in strands of gray, but it wasn't rain and it wasn't fog, it wasn't thread, it wasn't smoke, nor yet was it the scarring of stone with a chisel, nor the ripped seams of old plush curtains, but it was like all that.”

The house held its breath.

“Tell the part about your daughter. It's good, this,” said Mac. He looked ready to down a pint of Guinness and settle back to hear an old geezer retell the story of the Trojan horse. “Listen and you'll see.”

“I don't want to hear it,” said Winnie. “I'm not going to listen. The past has nothing to do with us, it's only what we make of the present that counts, the both of you.”

“She's a whore, works the Strand,” muttered Mac appreciatively. “You want to hear a dream that a dad can have about his daughter?”

“Piss off, I'll skewer you with my screwdriver, you,” said Jenkins, half rising, his face now gamboge.

“What's wanted is a fecking exorcism here before the devil in the pantry wall gets out to claim your soul. What he dreamed,” said Mac, “was a nightmare. Someone got his daughter, some fiend. His daughter. She's gone missing for several months. Or else she's gone swanning off somewhere, no forwarding address for old Da here. She doesn't come home to wash her smalls in the family sink anymore.”

She got between them before Jenkins attacked him, and there was just a little tussle then. She walloped Mac on the side of the head with a box of Weetabix, to score a point more than to hurt him. Mac retired to the front hall, snorting with laughter. He made a noisy show of taking a leak in the bathroom without closing the door. She stood and settled her hand on Jenkins as his shoulders heaved and he worked to regain some dignity. “Let it go, the pair of you,” she said in a low voice, as if he were four years old, “you're each as bad as the other.” She dragged out a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “I don't believe a word of it, anyway; you two are having too much fun beating each other up for me to pay attention.”

“Ah, but he's telling the truth about the girl, she's missing,” wheezed Jenkins. “And it was a harsh dream. It was my daughter and it was not, in that indecisive, maddening way of dreams. She was talking to me, but she was clawed and chewed—”

“I don't want—”

“It gets worse. There was a fiend; she's lashed—”

“I don't want, ” said Winnie firmly but picking her way as kindly as she could. “I have enough dreams of my own, and this is none of my business. I'm paying it no attention at all. It's John's being missing that's getting to you. To me too. Take some deep breaths now. It's okay.”

She waited for Jenkins to regain composure. Mac wandered back into the kitchen with a saucy expression. “Why does a whore stop having Sunday tea with her da?” said Mac. “He slags her off one time too many for having a job she can do lying down? His dream is all guilt, nothing but. What has he said to her that gets up her nose? It's his fault for being a silly preachy bugger. He's always telling me to make something of myself too. As if I need to hear his mind about it.”

She took a deep breath and said, “Look, fellows. This is your job and I don't care if you walk out or if you tear the wall down. I'm going to go to the police, and then I'm going to pack my bags and get out of here.”

She picked up her coat with as much dignity as she could and made her way down the stairs. Out the front door into the sentimental rain that colored the world in halftone shades, as in Jenkins's dream. How useless her mind was in this situation; it only knew how to work in stories. She couldn't think what could retract those nails into the wall that didn't have a supernatural origin.

She knew what Wendy Pritzke would make of this material, that was the curse: Wendy was with her, working on her own story even as Winnie went sliding and slopping down the hill, trying to remember where she might have seen a police station in Hampstead.

. . . that girl. Maybe one of those slim-hipped boy-girls, downright gaunt. Wearing clothes too big for her, all hanging on her like medieval rags—that coarse-woven stuff like burlap. She'd be out on the pavement where she usually did business, stalking the stalker. A modern-day Robo-prostitute, not to be trifled with, ready to wreak revenge at last on the ghost of Jack the Ripper. On behalf of all the women who'd died at his knife.

And what of this notion of Jack the Ripper, his ghost, howling up the chimney stack, ready to emerge when the time was right, ready to do battle again? He had been called the Ripper because of his tactics with the knife, his talent at bloody vivisection. Could some fille Jenkins or someone like her--some modern-day prostitute with an appetite for vengeance--take the life of a ghost? And how could you take the life of someone dead?

And how had he died? Who had ripped the Ripper a hundred-some years ago? The paterfamilias, or an intended victim getting the upper hand?

But this was nonsense, a distraction. She had to focus. Could she remember where the police station was? Down Rosslyn Hill, was it? And what would she say when she got there? How could she tell the officer at the desk about superstitious Mac and skeptical Jenkins, and the rapping sound, and the retracting nails? Would the Metropolitan Police come by and tear the place apart? What if they did, and John showed up, having been out on an extended work emergency, or even a tryst of some sort that he was hiding from Allegra Lowe as well as Winnie Rudge? The authorities would be onto him about his plans to put an illegal staircase and deck onto a protected building without the proper permission.

The police would just get on the phone and call John's office; why hadn't she done that? Because she was in the custom usually of staying out of his life, she knew, but it was time to break that old habit.

She stopped and bought a phone card, found his work number in her book, dialed. “Adjusting Services,” said the voice that answered, a woman's efficient voice in that faintly curdled South African accent.

“John Comestor, please.”

“Who is calling, please?”

“Winifred Rudge.”

She was put on hold a minute. The rain battered at her back. “Sorry,” said the voice, returning, “he's not here.”

“This is his cousin. Is he out of town, do you know?”

“I don't know his movements. Frightfully sorry.”

“But has he been in this week? I've just arrived from the States and I'm hoping to see him while I'm here.”

“I don't work this department usually; I'm filling in today for Gillian, who's out sick.”

Gillian and John, an item? No. Gillian was married and sixty besides.

“Look, can you please ask around? I really need to know where he is.”

“I'm afraid I can't do that, miss. It's company policy not to reveal the schedules or destinations of our adjustors. I'm sure you can understand. There's little else I can help you with. I do apologize.”

“You can tell me if you've seen him at least. Please.”

“There are other lines going. Dreadfully sorry.” She rang off.

He was traveling on work; he'd been called away suddenly; why couldn't they just say?

Unless—and this was her fiction spasm happening again—the office staff there had been coached to respond to her with no information at all about him. Why would John do that to her?

Turning back from the phone, blinking into the rain, Winnie thought that if Colum Jenkins called John's office, maybe he'd get a different answer than Winnie had gotten. Maybe the temp would think, “Not a woman, so not the cousin he's avoiding; I can answer differently.” It was worth a try. There was nothing else to do.

Except, as she passed it, to step into the overheated offices of Bromley Channing Estate Agents, just as the thought struck her, and stand there dripping on the sisal matting. The properties were posted between laminated sheets in the window, hanging chicly on fishing line. Photographs of facades and aren't-we-smart parlors with fresh flowers. Winnie was grateful that the alibi of middle age made all kinds of mild lies possible. “I was thinking of buying and I saw your sign,” she said to the receptionist, “on a building in Holly Bush Hill, a flat. Is it taken yet?”

“Oh, a flat,” said the receptionist, as if dealing with anything less than former mansions of Sting was not worth swiveling around in her chair to check on. “Not many of those this time of year. Spring is when they start to come on the market.”

“What's your range?” said an agent, bobbing forward between desks.

“I saw a sign,” said Winnie. She gave the address.

“That's in the three-to-five file,” said the agent. He meant three to five hundred thousand pounds. A hot market again.

“Oh, yes,” said the receptionist, finding the specs. “It happens we've got a broker over there at the moment. Aren't we lucky. Can you pop round?”

“I'm on foot,” said Winnie. “I don't pop anywhere, but I trudge pretty efficiently. Have him wait.”

“Let me get him on the mobile. He'll have to let you in. Hold on. Hello there Kendall Amanda here are you at the Weatherall Walk first-floor one-and-a-half bedrooms? Right. You just stepping out or will you be there a bit?” She aimed her pinky toward her mouth, ready to kill time by destroying her nails, then cocked her chin up toward Winnie to say, “You can get there in ten minutes, he'll still be there, your name is?—”

Winnie paused and then said, “Wendy. Wendy Pritzke.”

“She'll be right over, American lady. Miss Pritzke.” Amanda slammed the phone and withdrew a photocopied map of Hampstead Village from a drawer, but Winnie said, “I know where it is, I've told you. I'll just head over there.”

“He's Kendall Waugh,” called Amanda after Winnie.

Waugh was an overweight estate agent with a belt made of rattlesnake skin. He huffed and panted as he led Winnie toward the back of the flat, where a man and a woman were muttering to themselves in disagreement. “My clients are nearly through here but we have another place to see down on Honeybourne Road,” said Kendall Waugh. “Let me just answer their questions, Miss Prizzy, and then I'll show you round quickly.”

“I can have a look myself,” she said. She was looking as she spoke. The layout of the flat for sale was identical to John's flat above and, she assumed, to Mrs. Maddingly's flat below. Three small rooms in the older building, facing Weatherall Walk, two additional rooms snugly joined to the newer house behind. The flat had belonged to Mrs. Maddingly several decades ago, but there was no sign of her whimsical disarray. The place was empty of furniture and sorely in need of sprucing up. The coping was dingy. But Winnie wasn't in the market for a flat, she was supposed to be hunting for some natural cause of the unnatural disasters occurring in John's flat upstairs.

She could see nothing of interest. The chimney stack rose from below and continued above, exactly as geometry and architecture would have it. In the large room it had once heated and lit, the chimney breast was boarded over. “Could this fireplace be opened up and made to work?” she said to Kendall Waugh.

“I'll just finish here if I may have a moment, one moment,” he called, affecting patience, but unconvincingly. Winnie stood in the gloom, in a box of cold room, and heard the voices in the annex. In certain sorts of rain, when the clouds come down close as they were today, it was sometimes hard to keep the mind fixed to the current year.

She'd noticed the syndrome mostly on gray February days, back when she was living in the more expensive and so more thinly developed Boston suburbs. The wet tree trunks, the low sky the color of tarnished silver, the muted smoky green of yews and white pines and arborvitae, the retracting mounds of dirty snow, the skin of the world pulling in phlegmy puddles, the occasional stab of red in holly berries. In palette, at least, it was the same cold world of the Wampanoags, the Puritans, the colonists and revolutionaries, the Federalists and revivalists and Victorians and so on.

Similarly, in London, the wind bullied the windows in their casings as rattlingly as it must have done all through the past three hundred years and more. The gray skies drawn in over the mighty and inattentive Atlantic were the very same gray, corrected for reduction of pollution from coal fires, of course, thanks to the Clean Air Act.

She roused herself back to whatever of the here and now she could still trust, or care about. She heard Kendall Waugh answering a question. “That, I can tell you actually. We've got at the office a very fine pamphlet that talks about this street and actually mentions the structure. It was put up in the early nineteenth century, which makes it almost two hundred years old of course as you know, by a merchant named Rudge. Rudge House and all that. He was in imports, the tea trade.”

“He wasn't a merchant,” said Winnie, “he wasn't in tea. He started in Cornwall tin mining and became an expert in beam supports. Excuse me, and not to change the subject, but have you been showing people through here all day today?”

Kendall Waugh blinked as if she'd blasphemed against the Queen Mother. “There's quite a lot of interest in this property actually, I don't think it'll be on the market for long, everything is being snatched up, you won't see its like, its”—he glanced about the icy dusty cramped space—“period flavor.” Only of course it sounded like flavour the way he said it.

She said, “I'm very sorry but I have to ask. Have you seen or heard anything unusual in this flat while you've been here? Any poundings or noise? Anything out of the ordinary?” The prospective buyers looked sniffy, as if they suspected her of trying to scare them from making an offer. She gave up and closed the door as silently as she could on her way out.

Upstairs, Mac and Jenkins were pacing. “Mr. Jenkins. Please. Call John Comestor at work,” she said to them, slamming her satchel down on John's good eighteenth-century occasional table and the hell with it. “Ask for him. I'm at my wit's end.”

He did as he was told. “Put it on speakerphone,” she told him, and when he wouldn't, she leaned over him and pressed the button herself.

There was the snippy receptionist again.

“I'd like to speak to Mr. Comestor, please. Mr. Colum Jenkins calling.”

“I'm afraid Mr. Comestor is away for a while. May I put you in touch with one of his partners?”

“Do you know when he'll be back, or can you tell me where he went?”

“I'm afraid I don't know the answer to either. If you call again when his regular secretary is in you'll be able to find out, I'm sure. She'll be back tomorrow.”

“Well,” said Winnie when Jenkins had rung off, “you got more than I did. She wouldn't even admit to me that he was away. But if that's the line she's giving out, then at least the company knows he's gone somewhere, and that eliminates the likelihood of”—oh, but she couldn't say the overheated words foul play .

They walked back to the kitchen, where they found Mac looking wild-eyed. “Christ,” said Jenkins.

“You're fecking right,” said Mac in a throttled voice. “I just thought of this at last.” Among the crowbars and screwdrivers on the floor lay a butcher's knife and a piece of Ethiopian silver. “I found it in the study, on the wall.” She knew the piece; John had bought it in a market in Lamu, on the Kenyan coast. It was an elaborate cross, not all that finely finished, but beautiful in proportion and design, which probably derived from Byzantine-Coptic models. John was scarcely religious, but he'd liked the rectilinear turnings of its basket weave patterns. “A key as much as a cross,” John had said.

“I went up to the wall—” Mac was almost in seizures. “The thing shuddered, buckled; I mean the whole wall convulsed; the boards shook and waved; they went like this—” He undulated the air with his palms, waist to shoulder heights. “I was holding the cross and praying—”

“And well might the house protest; you're in no state of grace to be anywhere near a cross,” said Jenkins irritably. “Now you're only pathetic, Mac. Get off home. You don't even believe in Jesus, you fool; you might as well be holding a plastic statue of Princess Diana. Give over.”

“Ah but—” Mac said, and then said, “you bloody turncoat, denying me what my own eyes saw while you moon over your sorry dreams: look at that and call me pathetic.” He pointed. It seemed that the upright boards of the pantry wall were beginning to sweat.

“Rain coming in,” said Jenkins, “surely? We oughtn't have moved that chimney pot. The wood is swelling from moisture.”

“You're a bloody eejit. Look at it.”

About chest height, in the center of the paneled section, the old white paint was beginning to blister bluely, to fester in small pustules, making a rash. Something—an earlier application of paint, surely?—was showing through. It looked like a bruise, eggplant now, now yellow-blue. There was a gash forming, like the place a knife would drive if it were slicing the heart out of a body. As they watched, the gash bled a ragged ghost of a line twelve, fourteen inches long, perpendicular to the floor, as if following the line of a row of buttons on a vest. Other marks began to appear, some on either side, slowly dripping on diagonals toward one another.

“A tree? A key? A snowflake?” said Winnie. “A diagram of the Underground?”

“Jaysus mercy,” said Mac, “look what it is. It's a crucifix with a figure on it, struggling to get off. It's a cross with an X through it.”

“It's a bad problem with moisture in the walls is what it is,” said Winnie, “and if there's an older wall of plaster behind those boards, it's all crumbled? Something like that?”

“We'll sort it out Monday,” said Jenkins. He seemed better now.

“Sort it out Monday?” said Winnie. “I'm not averse to a little inconvenience during renovations, but really: the hall has begun to do involuntary . . . hieroglyphics at us? And now's the time you decide to clock off?”

Jenkins said, “Things in their own time, miss. Now, don't get riled up any more than you need. Mac's a good boy but he's barmy. Mac, get your things and let's go.”

“We can't leave now,” said Mac. “She's right: something's there. Have you no eyes?”

“I have my duties.” Jenkins was going stodgy on them all at once. “Obligation before hallucination, that's my order of business. I'm off, and I suggest you come with me.”

“God is talking to you and you're scarpering?” Mac was incredulous.

“God can get my ear anytime he wants, including on the Tube. Are you coming or are you waiting for another installment?”

“He's obsessed,” said Mac bitterly, kicking at the silver cross; Winnie scurried after it and picked it up. “Every Friday and Saturday night up and down the Strand, interviewing the workforce to see if they know where his daughter is. She's probably emigrated to Australia.”

“I'll thank you to mind your own affairs.” Jenkins burrowed into his coat and hunched himself into its raised collar. “He's a good boy, miss, but I'd turf him out, were I you.”

“I'll just pack up here and be out in a flash,” said Mac. “I'm keeping vigil for no ghost, not if you're leaving.”

Jenkins shrugged and nodded ambiguously, and left the kitchen without looking again at the wall. One only needed a mission, that was all, and Jenkins had his mission. It was how he got through: committing himself to something impossible.

She heard his feet tramp down the staircase, and the wind picked up.

The pantry stopped performing for them, but there was a thud overhead. The wind whistled almost with the sound of a pig's squeal, or a baby's, and it was underscored by a percussive roll—Winnie thought it might be thunder. They heard an interior wallop, something breaking through in this flat, and an exterior crash, as of smashing pottery. She knew what that outside noise was, and so did Mac.

They hurried to the front room and craned to peer out the window. Jenkins had been struck on the back of the head. The chimney pot was in shards around him.

Winnie said, “What is it, what is it in London, the number for emergency, I can't remember,” and she ran to the phone. “Mac,” she said crossly when he didn't answer; she turned so abruptly that as the phone came away the plastic housing of the tip of the jack split into plastic fragments. The dial tone dried up.

Mac had gone downstairs to tend Jenkins. She hoped he would pull him out of the forecourt anyway in case someone nosed a car in and tried to park on the sidewalk as Hampstead locals often did. Winnie descended one flight and thumped on the door of the flat, in case the estate agent was still in there collecting a deposit check, but as far as she could tell the flat was deserted again. She continued to the ground floor to find Mrs. Maddingly huddled in the doorway, several cats snaking around her ankles, and Mr. Kendall Waugh on his cell phone dialing for rescue services. At the edge of the forecourt the rain-cloaked figures of neighbors hovered. “Lost that sale,” Kendall Waugh was murmuring while he was on hold with emergency. “The whole place is collapsing, said the husband, and they fled. Hello? Yes, are you there?”

“It's a good thing the cats are house cats,” said Mrs. Maddingly in a carrying tone, as if addressing Jenkins's prone form reprovingly. “It might have been one of them took the blow.”

“He's alive, he's breathing,” said Mac, on his knees in the wet, “but they always say not to move the body in case of snapped spine.”

“Heard that before, and this one's no rag doll,” Winnie muttered. She came forward. Jenkins had a look of peace on his face, but his nose and mouth tilted too near the gushing gutter. She took off her sweater and folded it into a damp mound and elevated his head an inch or so, hoping she wasn't misaligning vertebrae in the neck column. Then Mrs. Maddingly in her house slippers was leaning over with a vinyl tablecloth. “Will keep the water off him, don't you know,” she said, and so it proved to do. He rested, comatose, under the red-and-white checks until the relief crew arrived and carried him away on a stretcher, with Mac in attendance—she could see it once he was in the ambulance—weeping.

Kendall Waugh departed for the office. Mrs. Maddingly repaired to her parlor for her pills. There was nothing for Winnie to do but go back inside and see whether the place was less creepy now that the workmen were gone. They had after all been on-site for most of the day, and their superstitions had been contagious. She'd felt claustrophobic. Now the blistered cross on the pantry wall looked more imprecise, less a message from the otherworld and more a problem of woodworm and rot. The room was silent.

Winnie made herself a fresh cup of tea and spread her sweater out on some towels to dry. She changed her stockings and lit a few candles and looked at John's CD collection. She selected a Shostakovich compilation that led off with the String Quartet no. 8. A bit unnerving when it came to the first iteration of the three staccato notes, the same notes played in succession like a fist hammering against a door. But then she laughed at her imagination, at last, and felt better, and entirely alone in the flat, for the first time. The problem of John's absence was still unresolved, but at least his office knew he was away. It seemed less worrisome now that she could be alone here with her own thoughts.

Then she remembered that there had been two noises, one of them inside. All of the flat was open to visual inspection from the front hall except John's room. She hesitated at the doorway and then she went in.

The painting of Scrooge or Rudge, whoever, had fallen off its picture hook. It had landed at an angle, wedged between floor and wall, face out. To her ignorant eye the thing seemed undamaged. The figure looked strange from this viewpoint, as if lurching up toward her from the depths of a pool, swimming lightward out of a menacing void of icy depths and pursuing spirits.

She slid the painting under the bed, so that she would have to look neither at the image nor its inscription.

She sat down at the table in the front room and peered out the windows again. No sign of the accident. No sign of much of anything, really; John's front window had a protected view. The house to one side was built forward by nine or ten feet; its tie-beamed wall facing Weatherall Walk was hung with ivy, since no windows looked out in this direction. The house on the other side, across the passage, had several windows; one was a medallion sort, clearly set high in a stairwell, and another had been bricked up. For all the intimacy of near buildings, there was no way to glimpse neighborly comings and goings. One might have been sitting in a Manhattan apartment looking into an unusually capacious air shaft, albeit one ornamented with vines and architectural niceties. In the gray rain-light, the privacy was intensified. Welcome too.

Rain on the rooftop

Rain on the tree

Rain on the green grass

But not on me.

She opened up her laptop and sat there thinking about the day and, inevitably, about Wendy Pritzke.

The row of new buildings in Rowancroft Gardens, erected in 1888, was among the first in Hampstead to be designed with electrification in mind. A household illuminated with clean safe light! The wattage was low at first, probably, only a half-step up from the murkiness of oil lamps or the dreary seepage of gaslight behind amber glass panels.

In the new modern shadows, a daughter of the paterfamilias, or a maid, might go upstairs, thinking herself alone in the house as she steps from room to room. Thinking the butcher's apprentice had left the premises when shown to the door, not knowing that he had cannily released the safety latch when she wasn't looking, so he'd be able to get back inside. Her shadow now preceding her, now following her, as she goes up the stairs to the top landing, along the passage, to the back of the house where the new house linked knuckles with the old one around the chimney stack. Her electrified shadow being met by the shadow of the intruder, and merging with it, so that the two shadows became one, and she doesn't notice until he flips the light off behind her, and the two shadows merge into the full darkness of the room, and she hears his breathing.

She jumped and cursed at the sound of the doorbell—then thought: John, wanting not to frighten me, as I had wanted not to frighten him. She ran to the buzzer and said, “Yes, yes?”

“Winifred, it's Allegra. May I come up, please.”

The tone of voice made it sound as if this were a rhetorical question. Allegra was there to prove she had the run of the place. “Oh, of course,” Winnie answered, and pressed the electric door release, but once she heard the street door close and the footsteps on the stairs, she couldn't help but add, to herself, “if you must.”

Winnie left the front door open and retreated—not as far as the kitchen, but to the more neutral arena of the sitting room, where she picked up the paperback copy of The Black Prince, as if she'd been interrupted. She wanted to be sitting. Allegra came in with a gymnastic lightness, shucking off her Burberry and draping it on a coat stand in the hall before Winnie looked up again and said, “You've picked bad weather to come calling.”

“Well, I tried to ring,” said Allegra, “but the phone seems to be out. The machine doesn't pick up and I got worried.”

“Oh, yes,” said Winnie, “we had a problem with the phone. I ripped the wiring out of the wall by mistake. I'll have to go down to Camden and get a replacement line. Is there still a Rumbelow's in Camden?”

“I wouldn't know,” said Allegra. “It's beastly and I'm soaked through after a mere five-minute walk. I'll make a cup of tea, if I might.” Before Winnie could approve or forbid it, Allegra slid into the kitchen and flipped on the light. “Oh, the mess of home repair,” she called; “how can you stand it? I'd take myself out to a hotel.”

“I'm at home in mess,” said Winnie. “It's my natural habitat.” She turned over the pages of the book without seeing them. “I don't suppose you've heard from John?”

“Right you are,” called Allegra. “Nor you?”

“No, and now the phone's gone out, so I won't, I guess,” said Winnie. As before, in the interest of finding out what had happened to John, she wanted some intimacy with Allegra, but she also wanted to preserve her distance. She threw the paperback down and followed Allegra at least as far as the door of the kitchen. Displaying her own familiarity of the terrain Allegra was complaining, “The workers have shifted everything; the tea is not here, and all the spoons are filthy. Don't they ever wash up?”

“Tea's on the window ledge there.”

“Foul smell. That's what you were over talking about? What about that sound?” said Allegra. “I became interested despite myself. I thought I should come round to see how things stood—”

“Things are as I said before,” said Winnie, shrugging, “except the sound seems to have stopped, I'm afraid. The way an ache inevitably does when you finally get to the dentist with your bad tooth.”

Allegra filled the electric kettle. “I really came round to see you, I suppose,” she admitted. “I wondered how you were getting on here.”

“I'm not moving,” said Winnie, dreading an invitation to stay at Allegra's.

“Oh, it's your choice, of course. I only thought you seemed on edge a bit, and when I ran into Rasia McIntyre in the hall she said you'd been up there visiting for an hour or so.”

“Rasia was the one on edge. She was in a mood to confide. I couldn't get away.”

“Well, she asked me if you were all right, and I got to thinking I might have been more—I mean, if John should be in touch and I chat with him before you do, I'd like to say that I had come round to make sure.”

“Oh, I'm fine here,” said Winnie. “If John calls you, tell him that I thank him for leaving me the house to myself for a change. I'm getting some good work done.” The notion that John might talk to Allegra before attempting to reach her. The very notion of it. “I wouldn't be as kind to you in the same circumstances,” she added. “That wind.”

“Oh, it is fierce, isn't it? My late-afternoon client from Hampstead Garden Suburb called to cancel because trees are down and the power's been cut. You should see the traffic coming up the high street. A river of lights rising out of Belsize Park, and the wipers going mad. The rain's just too heavy for them to do much good.” She dunked her tea bag a couple of times and then let it sink to the bottom. “Shall we sit in the front room? I'll dry off before it's time to get wet again.”

“Maybe it'll stop.”

“Not till tomorrow morning, if then, according to Radio Four.” Allegra executed a beautifully balanced maneuver, setting her teacup on the copy of The Black Prince while at the same time lifting and positioning an ankle, heronlike, under her rear end before she sat down. “You're reading Iris Murdoch, or is that John?”

“It's his copy,” said Winnie. She didn't want to talk about John or who was reading what. She went over to her computer and thought about turning it off. All its little electronic brains stewing about Wendy Pritzke in London, Wendy deluding herself over sensational Jack the Ripper nonsense while trying to avoid the more serious issues ahead in Romania. If late-nineteenth-century electrification brought a new grade of shadows into the world, computers ushered in a new category of ambiguity and untetheredness. All the possible lies and revelations that their million internal monkeys might type! “Did you know,” she said, “there was some notion at one point that a cousin of Virginia Woolf's was the Ripper? Someone who had delusions, a manic-depressive maybe, or a schizoid. She with her fine-grade madness was related to a cousin who I guess killed himself. Two versions of the family malady.”

“Are you writing about Virginia Woolf now?”

“I'm thinking about writing about a woman interested in Jack the Ripper.”

“I see.” Polite distaste.

And Wendy Pritzke sets her hooker revenge story in your house, Allegra, in your kitchen . A butcher boy delivers his merchandise right where you do your gluey handprints. Winnie didn't say this aloud. Instead, getting up to turn off the computer, she said, “You were going to tell me about your oddest experience doing those hand molds. Remember?”

“I do,” said Allegra. She laughed, but not prettily, not throatily. “You don't really want to hear it.”

“Oh, sure I do.”

“It was so silly. People can be perverse, when you come right down to it.”

“In their idiosyncrasies they reveal themselves, if they're lucky enough to have any.”

“A couple of parents had a premature baby who died, that's all,” said Allegra, looking away. “They were friends of a cousin of mine and I couldn't squirm out of it. I had to go to the morgue in the hospital and take the mold there.”

“Surely that's against the law?”

“People bend around laws when it comes to times like that. Who cares, really?”

“You should move to Massachusetts, the baby trade is very strong there. You'd have no end of work. What did it look like?”

After a while, Allegra said, “Well, in the twentieth week the thumb can oppose the other fingers.”

“I see,” said Winnie. “Handy. No pun intended,” she added.

“I should think not.”

“I went to school at Skidmore,” said Winnie. “We got the Albany papers sometimes. Once I read a historical feature about a baby dying back in the early twenties. Some dark-haired teenager walked into a post office to mail a package going to an address just around the corner. Later the postmistress remembered the customer, but she'd disappeared. The package turned out to be a naked, lifeless girl child born three days earlier. She'd been smothered, and mailed with a five-dollar bill to help defray funeral expenses. No one could track down her mother so she was buried at the city's expense under a headstone calling the infant Parcella Post.”

“Winnie,” said Allegra, “it takes an awful lot to put me off my appetite, but really .”

Was there something about Jack the Ripper and his prostitutes, something about the babies that came and didn't come? What was it? Later.

She reached toward the off switch, a little panel to be depressed into the side of the screen. As her hand hovered, the endless snow-falling screen saver suddenly froze. (Screen saver of “The Dead,” she called it, after Joyce's last line.) Every corner, every centimeter of grid filled up with random figures,

For an instant she thought the image had mirrored the marks on the pantry wall. But it was gone too quickly to be sure. Like most clues. “Oh, Christ,” she said.

The lights flickered and went out. “What are you trying to store in that thing, you're draining the power out of all of Ham and High,” said Allegra drolly, getting up behind her. “Not enough memory. You've power-surged North London.”

“I just got a start. It's nothing. You've seen computer paralysis before, I'm sure.”

The pounding began again. “Oh, is that the noise?” said Allegra calmly. The room was furred gray, darkening as they spoke. “Is that what you were complaining of? And well you should. Who could write stories while that row is thundering on?”

“But it's not in the kitchen,” said Winnie. “Before, it was in the kitchen.” Despite herself she reached out and gripped Allegra's elbow. “Now it's in the hall.”

“Calm down,” said Allegra. “I know you're excitable; just relax.”

They went into the dark foyer. The thudding was out in the stairwell, something hitting the door to the flat. “There's a back entrance, isn't there?” Allegra said conversationally.

“No, there isn't, how could there be? The back of the house rears up against the back of yours, as you yourself explained to me. This is the only way in.”

A voice, a human voice out there. “Damn.”

“Mac?” said Winnie with relief, and went to the door. “What are you up to now?” She turned the handle. The door was locked—from the outside. She twisted the knob.

“I'm driving nails,” said Mac from the other side of the door, “but the light's just gone out and I've bashed my fecking thumb.”

“What are you nailing?”

“The door shut,” said Mac thickly. “I'm locking it in there. I'm going for a priest or something.”

“Don't be a fool. Open this door,” said Winnie.

“Winnie, who is this? One of the builders?” said Allegra. “What do you mean by this?”

“Ah, it's got a voice now: and it is the voice of Jenkins's daughter,” cried Mac. He sounded bereft and beyond. A few moments later Allegra and Winnie were at the open window looking down into the forecourt, shouting at him, calling for help, but the wind was rising and their voices were lost. As Mac streaked away, he flung his hammer into the bushes. He didn't look back.