“That’s all right-I don’t mind.”

“The trouble is, you have to watch him. He can be a bit funny with strangers. And his bite’s worse than his bark.”

The dog sat down and scratched his ear with a hind leg. Lydia looked through the railings at the terraced street beyond. Though still respectable, the houses were clearly past their best. At the end was a chapel or small church. The line of its roof looked familiar.

“Is Bleeding Heart Square over there?” she asked. “On the other side of the church?”

“Yes, Miss. All part of my beat.”

“Your beat?”

He waved his hand at the cul-de-sac behind him. “I’m the Beadle for what they call the Rosington Liberty. Chief of police and head porter all rolled into one, at your service.”

A car pulled up at the lodge, and the man hurried to swing open one of the roadway gates. Lydia walked on toward a busy crossroads with Smithfield market on the far side. The dark, sour smell of blood and raw meat mingled with the fumes of the gasoline. That, she realized, was the source of the tang in the air as she had come out of the house that morning. Bleeding Heart Square smelled, quite literally, of blood.

Quickening her pace, she turned left into Farringdon Road. A little later she turned left again and discovered that she was back in Charleston Street. A few hundred yards ahead was the sign of the Crozier, the public house guarding the approach to Bleeding Heart Square.

Hugging herself against the cold, she walked back to number seven. The mechanics whistled at her again. As she was unlocking the front door, she heard footsteps behind her. She glanced back. An old woman in a gray overcoat was walking rapidly toward her. The key turned and Lydia opened the door. The woman was now on the steps behind her. Wispy hair escaped from under the brim of a hat like a squashed currant.

“Hello. Are you looking for somebody here?”

“I live here,” the woman mumbled. “What are you doing?”

“My name’s Lydia Langstone. My father’s Captain Ingleby-Lewis.”

“Didn’t know he had a daughter.”

Lydia had no reply to that so she went into the house. The smell in the hall was even worse. She swallowed, trying not to retch.

“Dead cat?” the woman said, making it sound like an accusation.

“I don’t know what it is.”

She pushed past Lydia and sniffed the air. “It’s over there.”

She nodded toward the back of the hall, where a table stood near the foot of the stairs. Lydia walked toward it. On the table was a dusty brass gong, in front of which was a tray holding what looked like circulars and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with string.

She bent down and sniffed in her turn. She pulled back sharply, putting her hand over her mouth and nose. “It’s foul. It-it couldn’t be something in the parcel that’s gone off?”

The woman came to stand beside her. She screwed up her face. “Looks like blood,” she said.

“What does?”

“On that parcel.”

Lydia stared at it. It was true that there were rusty stains on one side of the brown paper. But surely only a lurid imagination would identify it as blood? To her relief, she heard footsteps above them. Captain Ingleby-Lewis slowly descended the stairs, holding tightly but warily on to the banister rail as though grateful for its support but afraid that it might at any moment give him an electric shock. He was wearing his overcoat but neither collar nor tie. When he reached the safety of the hall, he stared at the two women and rubbed the stubble on his chin.

“Ah-Mrs. Renton. You’ve met my daughter, I see.”

“Is she having the attic?”

“No. What were you talking about? I heard somebody say something about blood.”

Mrs. Renton indicated the parcel. “There’s blood on it. See? And it stinks, too. It was smelling yesterday, but it’s much worse today.”

Ingleby-Lewis propped himself against the newel post and frowned. “Who’s it for? I haven’t got my glasses.”

“Mr. Serridge. Postman brought it on Friday.”

“Well, he’s not here, is he? Heaven knows when he’ll be back.”

“We can’t leave that parcel there,” Mrs. Renton pointed out.

“Then you’d better open it,” Ingleby-Lewis said.

“Mr. Serridge wouldn’t like it. He’s most particular about his post.”

“Nonsense, Mrs. Renton. I take full responsibility.” He glared at her. “Open that parcel.”

She shrugged. “If you say so.”

Mrs. Renton pulled the knot apart and coiled the string into a roll. She unwrapped the parcel gingerly. The smell grew steadily worse. Finally she drew back the last fold of brown paper, exposing an object like a misshapen egg about four inches long and two inches high. Most of it was a dark, mottled red, but there were streaks of a pale yellow embedded into its texture, and minute white specks milled about almost invisibly on its surface.

“Meat,” Mrs. Renton said.

“But it’s rotten,” Lydia said, shocked.

“I can see that,” Ingleby-Lewis barked. Holding his nose, he came nearer. “Damn it, those are maggots. What the blazes is it doing here?”

Mrs. Renton looked at Lydia. “Nothing to do with me.”

“What is it, anyway?” he asked in a quieter voice.

“It’s a heart, sir,” Mrs. Renton said. “A rotten heart.”

At half past eleven, Captain Ingleby-Lewis went out, saying that he had an appointment and that he would not be back for luncheon. Lydia wasn’t sure what lunch would have consisted of if he had come back because she had found nothing to eat except a small tin of sardines.

Not that it mattered. A trace of the decaying meat that she and Mrs. Renton had found lingered in the air, even here, upstairs and with the door closed. It wasn’t so much a smell as a pallid, un-lovely ghost that probably had more to do with memory or imagination than actuality. But it was enough to stifle hunger.

Why would somebody take the trouble to send a piece of offal in the post? She tried to think about it as an anthropologist might think about the practices of a primitive tribe. After all, she was in a strange place, among strangers, and no doubt they did things differently here.

She remembered, quite irrelevantly it seemed, how Marcus had shown her a dead rabbit at Monkshill Park when they were children. He had shot it in the head with his.22 rifle. She had known what the outside of a rabbit was like, the fur, the white tail, the long ears. Now, for the first time, she saw what lay beneath the fur: the blood and bone and sinew, and the gray matter of the brain. The discovery made her sick. “Just like a girl,” Marcus had said, and laughed.

She went into her room and unpacked her suitcase, marveling at the curious assortment of clothes that she had brought with her. Apart from the hooks on the back of the door, there was nowhere to hang them so she had to put most of them back in the case. She washed the bowls and saucepan in the little kitchen but could not find a tea towel to dry them with. She returned to the sitting room and tidied it as best she could. At least it was warmer here than elsewhere in the flat because she had fed the gas meter with a couple of shillings.

By the time she had finished, the room looked almost as bad as before. She sat close to the gas fire and tried to fill the emptiness by reading A Room of One’s Own. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” She wondered whether Mrs. Woolf had ever had to live somewhere like Bleeding Heart Square and lunch on thin air, with the prospect of dining on a small tin of sardines. Her attention strayed to her bookmark, the snapshot of her sister. The photograph had been taken on the Riviera that summer: Pamela looking mischievous in a bathing costume, with a cluster of young men around her. Looking at it made Lydia want to cry.

Her father returned a little after three o’clock. She heard his footsteps on the stairs and his coughing on the landing. He pushed open the door so violently that it banged against one of the chairs at the table. Lydia looked up, closing the book, shutting Pamela and Mrs. Woolf away.