“Shit,”Jackson said, staring at the entrance. There was no longer any sign saying FAVORS-IMPORT AND EXPORT, no sign saying anything at all. No buzzer, no camera. The door was still there, Jackson was relieved to see, so he hadn’t entered some parallel uni-verse, and when Louise Monroe gave it a push, it opened with the theatrical kind of creak that a sound-effects man would have been proud of. They made their way up the stairs, if they had been Americans they would have had their guns out by now, Jackson thought, but as it was, being Scottish and half-Scottish, they had nothing to defend themselves with but their wits.

“First floor,” Jackson whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Louise asked in a loud voice that echoed in the stairwell. “I thought you said they were a cleaning agency.”

“They are,” he said. “Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“No, they are, definitely,” Jackson said, “I mean I’ve seen them cleaning-scrubbing, hoovering, that sort of thing. They wear pink uniforms.” He had an image of Marijut’s buttocks moving rhythmically and immediately dismissed it. “It’s just there’s something… odd about them. I don’t know. A lot of industrial-cleaning firms take on ex-cons, you know, maybe there’s a link. The girls I saw on Morningside were definitely legit cleaners. I thought I saw the dead girl’s photograph on their database.”

The place was abandoned, no computer, no filing cabinet or desk, the Housekeeper and the receptionist had packed up and gone. The place felt as if it had never been occupied in the first place, the cheap contract carpeting, slightly tacky underfoot, the chipped paintwork and the unwashed windows, all bore no hint that a couple of hours previously there had been a business here. There was a smell of something stale and slightly rank.

“What database would that be, then?” Louise Monroe mur-mured, looking around the empty space. “The one on that invis-ible computer over there?”

“I don’t understand,” Jackson muttered. He spotted something on the carpet, a tiny painted wooden doll, no bigger than a peanut. He picked it up and peered at it, and Louise Monroe said, “You need spectacles, you shouldn’t be so vain.”

Jackson ignored the comment. “What is that?” he asked, holding the little doll up for her inspection.

“It’s from one of those Russian doll sets,” she said, “the ones that nest inside one another. Matri-something.”

“Matryoshka?”

“Yes.”

“This one doesn’t open,” Jackson said.

“That’s because it’s the last one. The baby.”

Jackson pocketed the doll. It was less than two hours since he was here, how could they have just packed up their tents and slipped away without leaving a trace behind? No, they had left something-he spotted something on a windowsill. A pink card. FAVORS-WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! He pounced on it and held it up for Louise Monroe’s inspection. “See,” he said triumphantly. “I didn’t make it up.”

“I know,” she said, producing an identical card from her pocket. “Snap.”

“Where did you get that?”

“From the body of a dead prostitute.”

“Dead? As in ‘murdered’ dead?”

“No, she OD’d. No foul play, apart from drug trafficking, prostitution, economic exploitation, illegal immigration, of course. It’s not my case,” she said with a shrug, as if she didn’t care. Jackson was pretty sure that wasn’t so.

“Two dead girls turning up within twenty-four hours of each other,” Jackson said, “both with these cards on their bodies? What does that say to you?”

“The cards are the only thing that links them.”

“But that’s enough,” Jackson persisted. “I’ll bet you the cleaning agency’s a front, maybe it’s a way of getting girls into the coun-try, maybe they pick out the more vulnerable ones, take their pass-ports, threaten people they’ve left behind. You know the kind of stuff that goes on, for Christ’s sake. There’s a connection between the two girls, there has to be. It leads back to this place.”

“Could just be a coincidence.”

“You’re playing devil’s advocate. And I don’t believe in coinci-dence,” Jackson said. “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.”

“So much wisdom from one so foolish, and I would just like to remind you once again that you are not a policeman and this is not your case.”

“No, it’s your case.” Frustration was beginning to get the better of him. He wished he’d slapped a pair of handcuffs on the “Housekeeper” and secured her to the nearest heavy object. Or if he could have only anchored his dead girl to a buoy or clamped the pink van this afternoon, taken Marijut into custody, anything that would have provided immovable evidence rather than this shifting mirage. He felt as if he were trying to hold on to water. “If you believed me it would help,” he said, sounding more pa-thetic than he’d intended.

He thought she might get stroppy with him (yet again), but she walked over to one of the filthy windows and gazed out at the view-a stone wall opposite. Then she sighed and said, “Well, the sun’s over the yardarm and I’m off the clock. And I want a drink.”

“You like country music?” Louise Monroe said doubtfully. “Good-hearted women and bad-living men and all that stuff?”

“Well, it’s not all like that.”

“And you live in France?”This was more like an interrogation than a conversation. He thought he preferred it when she was casting doubts on his “psychopathology” and calling him an idiot.

“I’ve never been to France,” Louise said.

“Not even Paris?”

“No, not even Paris.”

“Not even Disneyland?”

“Christ, I haven’t been to France. Okay?”

“Okay. Do you want another one?” he asked.

“No thanks, I’m driving. I shouldn’t be drinking at all.”

“And yet you are.” Their conversation had been restricted to an almost masculine neutrality, although Jackson admitted to a di-vorce and she shrugged and said, “Never married, never saw the point.” He had learned that she liked Saabs, she had fast-tracked to inspector, “climbing over the bodies on the way up,” she wore contacts (“You should try them”). But then she suddenly said, “Do you have someone?” and he said, “Julia. She’s an actress.” He could hear himself sounding apologetic, as if an actress were something to be embarrassed by (which it frequently was). If Louise hadn’t asked, would Jackson have owned up to Julia? The sad male answer was no. “She’s in a play at the Festival.”

“What’s Julia like?”

“She’s an actress.”

“You said that already.”

“I know, but it does kind of explain her. I don’t know, she’s short, she’s an optimist. Usually,” he added.

“You described a dead body to me better than that,” Louise said.

“Julia’s hard to explain,” he said, gazing at the dregs of his whiskey as if they held the key. Julia was impossible to describe, you had to know her to understand her. “She’s like… herself.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Louise said.

“Yes, I suppose it is,”he said. And yet it didn’t feel like that. That was the trouble, of course. You started off liking someone because of who she was and you ended up wanting her to be different.

He liked Louise because she was bolshie and cynical and sure of her-self, but give them a few months and those would be the things that would drive him crazy. Give them a few months-what was he thinking?

“Well, thanks for the drink,” Louise Monroe said abruptly, standing up and putting on her jacket. “I should go.”

He would have offered to help her with the jacket, but he didn’t know if she would like that. He did hold the door open for her, though. His mother had instilled manners into him, mostly by cuffing him about the head. “Always hold open a door, always offer your seat. No gentleman would let a lady walk on the outside of the pavement.” She had been brought up in a backward part of Ireland where they didn’t even have pavements, but she didn’t want her sons to grow up like their father. He’d never really understood about the outside of the pavement. (“So you can die first if a horse and carriage swerves out of control, of course,” Julia explained.)