She took it with thanks, wiping her hands briefly on her apron. Her eyes searched his, waiting for him to explain himself.

“I have a difficult case,” he answered. “Have you time to listen? It won't take more than ten or fifteen minutes. You have to rest sometime. Come and sit down while you eat the pie.”

“Have you one for Kristian?” she asked, still having taken only a bite from the one he had given her. “And Hester? And Enid? And Mary, of course?” “I don't know Enid or Mary,” he answered. “But I gave one to a young woman with straight hair who expected me to have buckets.”

“Mary. Good. The poor soul has worked herself to dropping. Have you any more? If not, I'll share this one.”

“Yes, I have.” He proffered the rolled-up newspaper. “There are another four in there.”

Callandra took them with a quick smile and carried them back up the dim room to pass them to figures Monk could recognize only with difficulty. The thin, very upright one with the square shoulders and uplifted chin was Hester. He would have known her outline anywhere. No one else held her head at quite that angle. The masculine one had to be Kristian Beck, barely average height, slim-shouldered and strong. The third looked reminiscent of someone he had seen only lately, but in the poor light and the smoke from the stoves and the smell stinging his eyes, he did not know whom.

Callandra returned, eating her own pie before it got cold. She led him into a small room to the side which presumably had once been an office when the building was used for its original purpose. Now it boasted a table piled with blankets, four bottles of gin, three unopened and one half empty, several casks of vinegar, a flagon of Hungarian wine and a candle. Two very rickety chairs were also piled with blankets. Callandra cleared them off and offered him a seat.

“What's the gin for?” he asked. “Desperation?”

“It wouldn't be sitting there unopened if it were,” she replied grimly.

“Tell me about your case.”

He hesitated, uncertain how much to say about Genevieve. Perhaps he should give Callandra only facts and omit his own impressions.

“To clean things with,” she answered his question. “Alcohol is better than water, especially from the wells around here. Not the floors, of course.

The vinegar's for that. I mean plates and spoons.”

He acknowledged the explanation.

“The case . . .” she prompted, sitting heavily on one of the chairs, which rocked, tilted and righted itself at an angle.

He sat on the other gingerly, but it supported his weight, albeit with an alarming creak.

“A man has disappeared, a businessman, comfortably off and eminently respectable,” he began. “He seems happily married, with five children. It was his wife who came to me.”

Callandra was watching him, so far without interest.