The client, meanwhile, her mood still elevated, loitered a moment or  two  on  the  consulting-room  steps,  watching  the  tide  sidle upriver like a long brown dog; then, with the whole afternoon in front of her, made her way by two buses and a train to Carshalton. September, the greenhouse month,  wrapped discoloured, vaporous distances around Streatham Vale and Norbury, where silvery showers of rain – falling without warning out of a cloudless blue-brown haze – evaporated from the hot pavements as quickly as they fell. Nothing relieved the humidity. At the other end, Carshalton dreamed supine under its blanket of afternoon heat as Anna made her way cautiously back to the house on The Oaks, approaching this time from the direction of Banstead, crossing the Common on  foot – past the  prison  compounds  which lay as innocuous as gated housing in the woods – and entering the maze of long suburban streets at a point halfway between the hospital and the cemetery. 121, The Oaks remained empty, with no sign of the boy who had disturbed her on her previous visit. When she tried the back door it proved to be unfastened as well as unlocked, opening to a push. Inside, economics – as invisible as a poltergeist, a force without apparent  agency – was dividing the place up into single rooms. Evidence of its recent activity was easy to come by: stairs and hallways smelling of water-based emulsion  and new wood. Bare floors scabbed with spilt filler, power cables lying patiently in the broad fans of dust they had scraped across the parquet, ladders and paint cans that had changed places.