"But Kristin Cahill and Harry Pevensey died very nasty deaths," he went on, "and if what you've told us is true, you should certainly know that the job sometimes requires doing things one doesn't personally like.

"We'll need to talk to your wife, and your journalist colleague, and we'll need to check over your house and your car."

Khan met his eyes for a long moment, then nodded. "You can do whatever you like. But if I were you, I'd spend my time looking for the person who really killed Kristin Cahill. She was young and a bit shallow-like most of us at that age-and she didn't deserve what happened to her."

If Gavin had stopped to wonder why he hadn't rung first, he would have had to admit that he was afraid she would turn him away. He had walked from the empty flat in Tedworth Square, up Sydney Street and Onslow Street, then through Knightsbridge and across the park by the Broad Walk. He was sweating and his feet ached, but he hadn't been able to bear the thought of the tube or a bus in this heat. And choosing a destination, rather than letting his body do it for him, was, again, more of an admission than he was willing to make.

He had walked a beat as a constable, and the rhythm of his stride seemed somehow to connect him with that phantom Gavin who had walked the bombed-out streets after the war and seen potential in the destruction. When had he lost that gift?

When he reached Notting Hill Gate, he wavered, and at the last moment delayed again, taking the fork into Pembridge Road and turning down Portobello. He loved walking down the twisty hill as evening came on. The shops were closed, the street quiet, and the colors of the buildings always seemed most intense when the light was fading. It made him think of villages he had seen in France during the war, as if a small piece of a foreign country had been set down in the midst of staid London like the wrong piece in a puzzle.

But when he reached Westbourne Grove he turned left, without more debate, and from the open windows of the flats above the shops came the sound of voices in languages he didn't recognize, and the odors of strange foods cooking.

The assault of the unfamiliar on his senses seemed to galvanize him, and a wave of giddy recklessness carried him into Kensington Park Road and round the corner into Arundel Gardens. Finding the address, he rang Erika Rosenthal's bell with an only slightly trembling heart.

But Erika answered the door as naturally as if she had been expecting him. "Inspector. Please come in."

He shivered slightly as he followed her into the flat-the air had cooled suddenly as the darkness came on. But she saw it and said, "Here. Please sit down. I think there might be some sherry, if you'd like."

Taking the chair she had indicated, he looked round the lamp-lit room, exhaling in relief as a dread he only now acknowledged eased away. This room, this flat, felt as if it were Erika's alone, and he sensed no hovering shade of David Rosenthal.

An open book and an empty teacup sat on a table beside the other chair, and beside it, a basket of sewing. A worn rug that had once been of good quality covered most of the bare floorboards, glass-fronted cases on either side of the fireplace held books, and the mantel top held a collection of colorful and eccentrically carved wooden animals. He knew instinctively that they were Erika's.

"From Bavaria," she said, having come back into the room and seen his gaze. "My mother brought them to me when I was a child. One of the few things I managed to save when I went back to Berlin after the war, as they weren't considered of any value by the Nazis or the looters."

"And that?" he asked, nodding at the small grand piano that took up most of the remainder of the sitting room.

Erika handed him a small crystal glass, and as he took it he felt ham-fisted, clumsy. But the sherry was dry and gold and, when he sipped it, tasted like distilled sunlight.

"The piano?" She sat in the chair beside the open book, crossing her ankles beneath the bell made by the skirt of her pale blue shirtwaist dress. "I worked the neighborhood watch during the war. When a house was bombed, we tried to find relatives to take any undamaged possessions. Sometimes the owners had been killed, or sometimes families had left London and we had no way to contact them. The piano was the only thing left standing in a house on Ladbroke Road. No one wanted it, and so some of the men made a sort of pallet with wheels and rolled it here for me.

"We became very ingenious at making things to do what we needed-cobbling together, I think you would call it, although I can't imagine why."

"Something to do with shoes," said Gavin. "Do you play?" he added, not distracted from the piano.

She smiled. "My mother made me take lessons as a child. But I was always better at listening than playing." She took a small sip of her sherry, not, he thought, out of abstention, but because she wanted to savor it. Erika was a person who savored things…a book, a sip of wine, an abandoned piano, the faded colors in a rug. How had she lived in compromise with David Rosenthal, whom Gavin had come to believe had occupied only the blind tunnel of obsession?

"I can't imagine your husband here," he said, astounded by his rudeness even as he spoke his thoughts aloud.

"Oh, but he wasn't here very much," Erika answered, with no hint of offense. "He was working or he was at the Reading Room, and often he did other things that he did not choose to share with me."

"You didn't mind?"

"It would have made no difference whether I minded or not." She set her glass on the table, the crystal making the faintest chink against the wood, and met his eyes directly. "Inspector Hoxley, what have you come to tell me?"

"It's Gavin," he said, knowing he had introduced himself to her when they first met, and feeling a fool.

"Gavin. Yes, I know." She regarded him with the same gravity that had so fascinated him during that first interview.

The words came out in a rush. "I've been warned off the case. Told I'd lose my job if I didn't leave it alone." He lifted his glass, saw to his surprise that he had finished the sherry, and to his further astonishment, added, "And my wife left me."

"Because of this? Because of David?" For the first time that night he heard distress in her voice.

"No. Or if so, it was just the last little piece."

She nodded slowly. "I know about last little pieces. They are the ones that cause the edifice to topple."

He had stopped noticing her accent until she said a word like edifice, and then it made him want to smile. "Yes."

Erika rose and took his glass. "I will find us something else to drink. Tea, if all else fails. I became very English, during the war."

Finding he couldn't sit, Gavin followed her into the kitchen. Had she meant her husband, when she said she knew about last little pieces? Had her marriage failed before her husband's death?

She stood with her back to him, reaching up into the cupboard for cups and saucers. Gavin felt a return of the light-headedness that had brought him to her door, although surely it couldn't be the sherry.

Erika paused with the cups in midair, as if she sensed his nearness. Then she very carefully lowered the china to the worktop and rested her hands on its edge. She stood so still that she might have been waiting for a clock to tick or the world to turn on its axis.

He cupped his hands round her shoulders and felt the heat from her skin through the thin cotton of her dress. A quiver ran through her body, but she neither turned nor pulled away. "Erika," he whispered, "I shouldn't-your husband-this is wrong-"