He climbed in the Cairngorms that weekend, in ideal weather and dangerous snow conditions, and he climbed alone. Once or twice, tempted, he took unjustifiable risks; he felt a defiant and bitter amusement when nothing untoward occurred.

He returned to London, to his house with its view of Hawksmoor’s spire. He worked—this, too, had proved effective in the past—twice as hard. With the assistance of his DEA contact, Sandra Lucas, he knew that he would be able to tie up the last loose ends of his Amsterdam drug story: the Dutch chemist and his American partner were about to be raided; they would not be making the fortune they had so blithely anticipated; they would not be pushing White Doves much longer.

“It’s tonight,” Sandra Lucas said one morning in March, calling from a safe phone in Amsterdam.

“And then?” Rowland replied.

“And then they both go down, Rowland. We have Mina Landis’s evidence. We have the toxicology reports on Cassandra Morley. Manslaughter is the best they can hope for, even in Holland. They’ll both go down—and for a very long time.” There was a silence. She gave a sigh. “I know it’s not enough, Rowland. It’s never enough. But the American has shifted quite a lot of heroin in his time. He’ll certainly talk. He may give us some links in that chain…” An awkwardness came into her voice. “I wanted to ask you something—this crusade of yours…”

“It isn’t a crusade. It’s news.”

“—Are you still doing it for Esther?”

Rowland did not reply.

“Okay. If you won’t answer that, then just tell me this—you still think of her?”

“Sometimes. Not so much recently.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Her voice became brisker. “She’d never have wanted this, you know. She was a realist. She’d have wanted you to let her go.”

Was that what the dead required of the living—to be forgotten, to be relegated? Rowland doubted it. Nevertheless, the comment affected him, and perhaps chimed with feelings of his own. At the end of March he finally decided, late at night, and alone in his house, that it was now time to acknowledge that he had changed, that he had already begun the process of letting the past go.

He gathered together all the reminders of Esther that he had kept so carefully all these years. They were few: some letters she had written him when she, or he, had been working away; letters friends had written to him after her death; photographs taken by him, of her, in the Washington apartment they had shared, and finally, photographs of them together, taken by Esther’s lawyer brother, on one of their visits to New Orleans. Quietly, Rowland reread the letters for the last time, then consigned them to the fire in his living room. He watched them blaze up, then slowly added the photographs one by one. He looked for a long time at the last of these pictures, himself and Esther, caught in a shaft of sunlight, walking along hand in hand. The street, he thought, was Canal; it was midafternoon; Esther was laughing; she had just been presented by Rowland with a flower, and she had tucked it into her hair. The flower was white, a white carnation: its crisp curled petals bloomed against the blackness of her skin. Rowland hesitated, then consigned this photograph, too, to the fire. He had intended to complete this ritual with one last item—Gini’s brief and negative telegram.