“I’m grateful.”

“No need.” Martigny shivered, and drew his overcoat around him. “You want to join me for a meal later? My wife will cook us something.”

“I’d like that.” Rowland gave him a glance. “And then we could always share that brandy.”

Martigny laughed. He slapped Rowland on the shoulder, then made a gesture which was expressive and deeply French.

“They’re bringing them out now. I’ll leave you alone until they’ve gone.”

“Is it that damn obvious?” Rowland averted his face.

Martigny gave Rowland one last glance of quiet and half-amused sympathy, then moved away. An astute man, Rowland thought, and also a tactful one. The next instant, tensing, he forgot him. There was movement by the portico, shouts from reporters, a sudden blaze of TV lights.

A police car had drawn up at the foot of the steps. Gini and Pascal Lamartine were ushered out fast, flanked by police. Rowland caught a glimpse of a woman’s white face; Lamartine’s left arm was around her shoulders; her fair head was bent. Lamartine paused as she ducked into the waiting car first. For one brief instant Rowland could clearly see his face. Etched upon it was an expression of love and of concern that spoke to Rowland across the distance that separated them: it said married. It marked a boundary that Rowland was not prepared to cross.

Or so he told himself then, frowning into the fine rain, forcing himself to remain in the shadows, invisible; the honorable thing to do. Rowland watched the car pull away fast. Sirens curled through the damp air. His own decision—made then, made earlier?—angered him, but he accepted its ethics even as he felt the first cut of sharp and bitter regret.

It was then, as the car rounded a corner and disappeared, that he began to plan his own disengagement from Gini. It would have to be contrived, he told himself, so that it caused the least guilt, and the fewest repercussions—at least in her case. He would have to lie to her. In a distant way, he wondered whether, when the moment came, he would be able to do so effectively. Could he lie as well as he had claimed to her he could, he wondered. Could he lie so well that she would never suspect?

“Ready?” Martigny called to him.

Rowland nodded, and crossed to his side. They were bringing out the stretcher and body bag as he and Martigny reached the lobby. A glint of light on black plastic; some difficulty in maneuvering this load out of the elevator cage. Rowland thought: an ignominious departure. He averted his eyes.

Upstairs, confronted with that pink shrine of a bedroom, he paused. He had imagined this room, as it was described to him by Juliette de Nerval. He had imagined it again as he waited in that police van. Yet it was not as his mind’s eye had seen it. He had not foreseen this much blood, this much debris. He passed his hand across his eyes: this room, his own life—both seemed to him fantastically unreal.