Milgrim closed the door behind him.

“Are you okay?” Hollis asked. “Where have you been?”

“Southwark. With Fiona.” He sounded, she thought, like someone describing a spa weekend. An unaccustomed little smile.

“I’m sorry about Heidi,” she said.

He winced. “Is something wrong?”

“She’s fine. I meant I’m sorry that she hurt Foley, made more trouble for you.”

“I’m glad,” he said. “Otherwise, they would have gotten us. Gotten me, anyway.” And suddenly he was weirdly and entirely present, a single entity, the sharp looker-around-corners merged seamlessly with his spacey, dissociated self. “I wouldn’t have gotten to go to Southwark.” For those few seconds, he was someone she hadn’t met. But then he was Milgrim again. “That’s a scary shower,” he said.

“I like it.”

“I’ve never seen anything decorated this way.” He looked around at the contents of Number Four.

“Me neither.”

“Is it all real?”

“Yes, though there are some period reproductions. There’s a catalog for each room.”

“May I see that?”

Her iPhone rang. “Yes?”

“Meredith. I’m in the lobby. I need to see you.”

“I have guests-”

“Alone,” said Meredith. “Bring a jacket. She wants to meet you.”

“I-”

“Not my idea,” interrupted Meredith. “Hers. When I told her what you said.”

Hollis looked at Garreth, who was deep into it with Fiona.

The bathroom door opened. Ajay stood there, the sides of his head sparsely covered with some kind of synthetic nonhair, randomly directional. “Not very good, is it?”

“It’s like the pubic hair of some huge, anatomically correct toy animal,” said Garreth, delighted.

“It’s the wrong texture, but I have another that should do,” said Chandra. “And I’ll do a better job of application, next time.”

“I’ll be down in a minute,” said Hollis, to the iPhone. “Meredith,” she said to Garreth. “I’m going down to see her.”

“Don’t leave the hotel,” Garreth said, and went back to whatever he was explaining to Fiona.

Hollis opened her mouth, shut it, found Number Four’s leather-bound curiosity catalog for Milgrim, then collected the Hounds jacket, her purse, and left, closing the door behind her.

Avoiding the watercolors, she made her way through the green maze, and found the lift waiting, clicking softly to itself. As it descended the black cage, she tried to make sense of what Meredith had said. The logical “she” was the Hounds designer, but if that was the case, had Meredith been lying to her, yesterday?

Passing the ferret, she emerged into the sound of the lounge, evidently in full route now, that bounced so effectively down the marble stairs. Meredith was waiting near the door, where Robert ordinarily stood, though he was nowhere in sight. She wore a translucently ancient waxed cotton jacket over the tweed Hollis remembered from yesterday, more holes than fabric, the platonic opposite of Inchmale’s Japanese Gore-Tex.

“You told me you didn’t know how to contact her,” Hollis said. “And you certainly didn’t indicate that she was in London.”

“I didn’t know, either one,” Meredith said. “Inchmale. Clammy was giving me the gears, at the studio, because you’d promised to get him fresh kit if he helped you find her.”

Hollis had forgotten about that. “I did,” she said.

“Inchmale was working on one of those charts he makes, the ones around the bottom of a paper coffee cup, for each song. Is that simply more of his rubbish, or is it real?”

“Real.”

“And of course he was concentrating, or pretending to. And suddenly he said, ‘I know her husband.’ Said he was another producer, very good, based in Chicago. He’d worked with him. Said a name.”

“What name?”

Meredith looked her even more firmly in the eye. “I’d have to let her tell you that.”

“What else did Reg say?”

“Nothing. Not a word. Went back to his colored felts and his paper cup. But as soon as I got my hands on a computer, I Googled the name. There he was. Image search, three pages in, there she was, with him. That was only a few hours after I saw you, here.”

“That turned into quite an evening,” said Hollis.

“Did you quit?”

“I didn’t get a chance, but my position on quitting remains the same. Stronger, if anything. I’m right off Bigend, if you could say I was ever on him. A lot’s happened.”

“I’ve mostly been on the phone, myself. Trying to reach her, through her husband. Couldn’t reach him. Threw myself on Inchmale’s mercy. Had George put it to him, actually.”

“And?”

“She called me. She’s here. She’s been here for a few weeks. East Midlands, Northampton, looking at shoe factories. Doing a boot,” and suddenly Meredith was smiling, then not. “On her way back now.”

Hollis was about to ask where to, but didn’t.

“I can take you to her now,” Meredith said. “That’s what she wants.”

“Why would-”

“Better she tells you. Are you coming or not? She’s leaving tomorrow.”

“Is it far?”

“Soho. Clammy has a car.”

›››

Which was Japanese, minute, and appeared to have been fathered by a Citroen Deux Chevaux, its mother of less distinctive lineage but obviously having attended design school. It had virtually no rear seat, so Hollis was folded in sideways now, behind Meredith and Clammy, watching a determined little rear wiper squeegee rain. Nothing could have been less like the Hilux. A tiny retro-wagon, devoid of armor. Everything, in traffic, was larger than they were, including motorcycles. Clammy had bought it used, through a broker in Japan, and imported it, the only way to get one here. It was the dark glossy gray of an old-fashioned electric fan, a shade Inchmale liked to refer to as “a crushed mouse,” which meant a gray with some red in it. She hoped other drivers could see them. Though not if they were Foley’s crew, whom she’d started to worry about when Clammy was turning into Oxford Street. Garreth’s instruction to not leave the hotel had suddenly made a different sort of sense. She hadn’t been taking all that very seriously. She’d felt like an observer, a helper, or a woefully unskilled nurse. But now, she realized, in this new economy of kidnapping, she herself could probably be quite valuable. If they had her, they’d have Garreth. Though they didn’t, as far as she knew, know about Garreth. Though that depended, she imagined, on everyone in Bigend’s tiny immediate crew remaining loyal. Who was Fiona? She knew nothing about Fiona, really. Except that she kept an eye on Milgrim, an oddly personal one, Hollis thought. Actually, now that Hollis thought about it, as though she fancied him.

“Is it much further?” she asked.

Now it was Milgrim’s turn, on the Biedermeier vanity stool, the remains of Ajay’s luxuriant top-curls darkly littering the spread towels. Ajay himself was in Hollis’s huge scary shower, ridding himself of the aerosol product Chandra had applied to the sides of his head. Staunchly unwilling to see her cousin naked, she faced away from the shower as she used an electric clipper on Milgrim’s back and sides. Milgrim, seeing Ajay naked, thought he looked like a professional dancer. He was all muscles, but none of the bulgy kind.

The idea, now that Chandra had had a good look at Milgrim, and at his hair as it had been the day before, was to give him a different cut. He found himself imagining a Milgrim wig for Ajay, something he was sure he’d never imagined before.

It was getting steamy, but he heard Ajay crank the shower down, then off. Soon he appeared beside Milgrim in a white robe with corded trim, carefully knotting its belt. The top of his head was now Chandra’s initial approximation of Milgrim’s previous look, though it was black, and damp. Milgrim’s own indeterminately brownish hair was falling on the towels.