Had I seen this painting earlier, I should never have fallen asleep on the moonlit terrace.

“The Addler is known for his moons,” the Frenchwoman said.

“Lunacy,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Lunacy. From Luna, the moon. There's a long belief that madness is linked to the phases of the moon.”

“Most interesting,” she replied in a chill voice, “but The Addler is not mad.”

“Isn't he?”

“No more than any artist,” she protested, then gave an uncomfortable laugh, as if to acknowledge that we were both indulging in clever badinage.

“The madder the better, when it comes to art,” I agreed. “Have you met his wife?”

“But of course. And the child, such a winsome thing.”

I thought about that word: Either the woman didn't like children, or she didn't approve of this particular child.

While we spoke, I had been studying the two-moon painting, the shapes of the stones, the texture of the black-on-black hillside. The man had skill, no denying that, although producing an endless string of works that made the viewer uneasy might not guarantee commercial success.

I started to turn away, then stopped as a shape redefined itself in the corner of my eye.

What I had taken for a flat stone in the centre of the circle was not an even rectangle; under scrutiny, the faint reflections of moonlight off the myriad leaves of grass made the shape appear to have extremities. I removed my glasses; with lack of focus, it became clearer. The stone had the outline of a human, arms outstretched, as if bathing in the moonlight.

With my glasses on again, the suggestion of humanity faded, until I could not be certain it was there at all.

“How much is this one?” I asked.

She arched an eyebrow at my two-year-old skirt and unpolished shoes, and named a price approximately three times what I anticipated. Then she added, “I might be able to come down a little, since you are a friend of the artist.”

“I'll take it. And I'll think about the others.”

She frankly gaped at me, but I knew Holmes would like the piece-although I might ask him to hang it in one of the rooms I did not spend much time in.

I made the arrangements for shipping it to Sussex, and left, meditating on the idea of painting thought without reason and pure artistic impulse. If Damian had searched long and hard for a way to set himself in opposition to his rationalistic father, he could not have found a better style than that of Surrealism.

I rode the Piccadilly line down to South Kensington and walked towards Burton Place. After the prices the Frenchwoman had quoted me, Damian's home address became more understandable.

Bohemia was torn between a scorn for money and a basic human appreciation for comfort. Too much success in art was seen as a dubious achievement, if not outright treason to The Cause, proof that one had strayed onto the side of the bourgeois and middle-class. Money (be it earned or inherited) could be justified by sharing it with less fortunate members of the Bohemian fraternity, but from the image of Yolanda that I had begun to form, I rather doubted Damian's wife would be enthusiastic about hangers-on.

Number seven, Burton Place, proved to be on a quiet cul-de-sac, one street over from a park, in an area composed of similar neat, narrow, two-and three-storey houses. Indeed, as I strolled up and down the adjoining streets, I began to feel I was walking the human equivalent of honeycomb, identical compartments broken only by the occasional queen cell. Not the sort of neighbourhood one might expect to shelter a bearded painter of staring moons and bizarre city-scapes- Chelsea was for the well-heeled, unlike the more working-class Fitzrovia where the true artists nobly starved.

There was no sign of life within the Adler house, but much coming and going from those nearby: Any break-in at this time of day would not go unnoticed.

So I did what any investigator would do on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, and went to talk to the neighbours.

17

THE REACTIONS AT TWO HOUSES SUGGESTED, and the third confirmed, that I was not convincing for my rôle. A maid at the first and a man with a newspaper at the second both got as far as my first dozen words-“Good evening, I'm a friend of the Adlers at number seven and”-before their gaze strayed to my nondescript shirtwaist and unremarkable skirt and their faces shifted to polite disbelief.

The third time it happened, at number eleven, the person whose suspicions I raised was a child of perhaps eight or nine. She opened to my knock, and although I expected a parent to appear any moment, the child faced me with all the aplomb of a householder. So I told her who I was and what I wanted. She put her head to one side.

“You don't look like one.”

“One what?” I asked. How did one talk to a child, anyway? I hadn't much experience with it.

“Like a friend of the Adlers.”

“Why, what do they look like?”

“Not like you,” she said helpfully.

I looked down at my skirt, and pulled a face. “I know. I had to visit my parents today and this is how they like to see me.”

“You're too old to have to dress for your parents.”

“One never grows too old for that.”

Her shiny head tipped to the other side as she considered. “They give you an allowance, and you have to keep them happy?”

“Something like that.” My parents had been dead nearly a decade, but that did not mean I had not, at times, changed my appearance to satisfy other figures in authority.

“That's dreadful,” she stated, making it clear that I had just scotched her entire expectations for life as a free adult.

“True, but its merely on the surface. May I ask you-”

But our discussion on the merits of Bohemia was interrupted by the child's own figure of authority, as fingers wrapped around the door eighteen inches above hers and pulled it open. At last: the mother.

The girl craned her head upwards and said, “Mama, this lady is looking for 'Stella.”

“Actually,” I said, “I'm looking for Estelle's parents.”

“Why, what did they do?”

An interesting assumption. “Nothing, as far as I know. I'm a friend of Damian's, in Town unexpectedly, and I was hoping he and Yolanda would be here. But no-one answers, and I wonder if you have any idea where they might have gone?”

The eyes did their downward glance. “Frankly, you don't look like one of the Adlers' friends.”

I stifled a sigh, but the child cut in. “She's just come from visiting her parents and she's afraid of being cut off so she has to dress like that, just like us and Grandmama.”

There was humour in the woman's face at that, the sort of humour that indicates a degree of wit.

“I haven't worn the skirt since last year, and I didn't have time to adjust the hem,” I admitted. “But it's true, I've known Damian for years. I met him in France, just after the War.”

The claim either sounded real or contained a fact that she knew to be true, because she looked down at her daughter and said, “You run along and pour the tea for your dollies, Virginia. I'll be there in a moment.”

Reluctantly, the child withdrew to trudge, shoulders bent, for the stairway. When her feet were on the steps, her mother turned back to me.

“There was a gentleman here the other day, asking after Yolanda.”

I could hear the accusation in her tone, and scrambled hastily to assemble a harmless explanation. “Tall, older man?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“My father. Or rather, step-father. When I knew I'd be coming up, I asked him to call by and tell Damian and Yolanda. They weren't answering their telephone, and she's a terrible correspondent. When he didn't find them, I hoped perhaps he'd just missed them.”