“Very well.” He moved a little farther away, and Gini, watching him do so, and watching a guarded expression come upon his face, thought: he’s distancing himself.

“I worked after you left.” He was staring past her, along the road. “Since you forbade me to stay with you, or come with you…”

“Rowland. Don’t.”

“I had no choice. So I worked. After a fashion. I spoke to the French police. I made some other calls. I realized something that we missed last night, which was actually very obvious—but still.” He glanced down at his watch. “So, I’d say we have a choice. We have two possible leads. We can either try to interview that maid whom Cazarès was visiting yesterday—though I’m pretty sure that Lazare will have her well protected from the press, under virtual guard. Or”—he turned back to look at her—“or we can talk to that girl Chantal. She’s with the police now, or should be, if we hurry.”

Gini stared at him. “You arranged for them to pick her up? When? This morning?”

“Yes.” He gave her one of his cool, unreadable green glances. “I can work quite well in adverse circumstances.”

“So I see. I’ll have to learn from you…” For a moment her face clouded; then she made a brisk gesture. “You’re right. It’s the next stage. Let’s talk to Chantal.”

Chantal was a small, thin, angry woman with brown urchin-cut hair and brown street-urchin eyes. Rowland and Gini first glimpsed her through the glass panels of a police interview-room door. The French plainclothes inspector who led them there was called Martigny. He was a short, dark-haired man with sharp eyes and a quiet manner. Outside the interview room, he continued to complete the rundown on Chantal which he had begun in his office a short while before. It was succinct, and in many respects, Rowland thought, predictable.

She was twenty-two years old, the daughter of a French-Canadian mother and an American father she had never known. Her mother had two other illegitimate children from whom Chantal had been separated at the age of eight, when she was first taken into foster care.

Her childhood, insofar as she ever had a childhood, had been spent in a succession of foster homes, from which she had a history of absconding. At fourteen she had served her first sentence, in a juvenile detention center in Quebec, for shoplifting. At sixteen, in Detroit, she had been arrested for car theft, and at seventeen, in New York, for prostitution and possession. She was virtually uneducated and semiliterate, and for the past three years she had been based in France. She was a registered heroin user, a dropout from a methadone program. In the past year, two charges of prostitution and drug trafficking had been brought, and subsequently dropped for lack of evidence. She was in danger of deportation, since none of her papers was in order, and she was not a woman—unsurprisingly—who was cooperative with the police.

For the past two hours, Martigny said, two of his best officers, a man and a woman, had been questioning her. Since there was no possible charge, she was about to be released. Her story, prized out of her by the use of threats, was that she knew no one by the name of Star, and never had. She couldn’t explain how her name and address came to be in the possession of some dead Dutch girl. Yes, she met lots of foreigners around Paris, and yes, she or one of her friends might hand out her address—she was generous that way: she had a room, a nice room, and sometimes people needed somewhere to crash. She couldn’t remember this Anneke, whoever she was; it was an offense now, was it, to hand another girl her address?