Max disappeared. He had reappeared, several times, while Lindsay was reading to his sons, but had shown no inclination to question her further. Lindsay, nursing her discovery, was disappointed. Max was not interested in anything she had to say, she thought glumly. Rowland probably would not be interested either. She beat a tattoo on the kitchen table. Twenty minutes after hearing the Land Rover, she heard footsteps on the terrace at last.

Rowland and Gini entered on a blast of cold night air. Lindsay looked at them circumspectly. Rowland was helping Gini off with her coat; he made some remark Lindsay could not catch, and Gini smiled.

“Did you see Mitchell?” Lindsay began, determined not to be invisible.

“What?” Rowland was now removing his own overcoat. “Oh, yes, we did. And very useful it proved. Where’s Max?”

“So what do you think, Rowland?” Gini was saying. “One day here? One day should do it. Then I could go on to Amsterdam.”

“One day should certainly be enough. I doubt the school friends will have much to contribute—but they might. They could have heard about Star—it’s possible that either Cassandra or Mina had met him before.”

He stopped. Max had just entered the room, waving a piece of paper. Insofar as Max could ever look excited, he looked excited now.

“Breakthrough,” he said. “They’ve found the car. The police just called.”

“The BMW? Where?”

“Somewhere interesting.” Max’s glance intersected with Rowland’s. “In Paris, would you believe?”

“Paris? They’re sure?”

“It’s confirmed. It had been abandoned in the Pantin district, close to the periphérique. A humble policier found it around three hours ago.”

Max broke off; a telephone had begun ringing. Hearing Charlotte answer it upstairs, he turned back to Rowland.

“Yes, Paris,” he continued. “And given your previous information, Rowland, that’s an interesting choice of destination, wouldn’t you say?”

Lindsay, resigned to invisibility again, had been watching Rowland. He was slow to reply. The reason, she realized, was that his attention was on Gini. She was standing very still, her hands frozen in the act of removing her green scarf. She was listening to the murmur of Charlotte’s voice in the distance; her eyes were unnaturally bright, her face was tense and pale. She began to move as she heard Charlotte’s footsteps above. She was already running toward Max’s office as Charlotte shouted down the stairs: “Gini,” she called. “Quickly—he’s been trying to get through for hours. The line’s awful, but you can just hear him. Gini, quickly—it’s Pascal.”

Part Two
Europe

Chapter 9

THE CHURCH BELLS WOKE Mina. They made their way into the dream she was having. At first, still inside the dream, she thought they were cowbells, and she was high in the mountains somewhere. Then they became sleigh bells, and she was flying across the snow under a fur rug, with Star by her side. Then the dream began to slip away, and she understood they were church bells, somewhere outside this Paris room. She stirred, opened her eyes, and began to remember. She remembered the room, the mattress on which she was lying, and the clean patchwork quilt that covered her, a quilt covered with navy-blue stars and scarlet hexagons.