Tyler lets the hot water pelt his face, massaging life back into his features. He imagines what it might be like to come home to something other than an empty flat, a quick shower, a microwaved meal. To have someone to confide in, to talk to about his fucked-up childhood. Someone he could go to about his concerns regarding Doggett. Why didn’t the man tell him that he knew Cartwright? And the fire at the house that he’s sure now, more than ever, is somehow connected to Gerald Cartwright’s tattered corpse. And the painting.

Not that he could share any of those things with Oscar even if he were here. Strangely, the image that forms in his head is of the broad frame of the fire officer wrapped in thin gray cotton. Tyler lathers his hands with shower gel and rubs them across his body, working the kinks out of his tired limbs.

As he turns off the shower he hears someone banging loudly on the front door. He grabs a towel and steps out of the bath, drips his way quickly into the corridor.

Another pounding threatens to take the hinges off. He looks through the fisheye lens and sees Doggett’s fun-house-hall-of-mirrors nose filling his vision. He can make out the sharp brown hairs in his nostrils. He opens the door.

Doggett looks him up and down, his fingers rapping out his theme tune on the doorframe. “Get your kecks on, son, the SOCO boys have dug something up.”

The water drips from Tyler’s body and gathers in cold pools around his feet. “What sort of something?” he asks.

Doggett’s fingers stop abruptly.

“Another body sort of something.”

day four

San Francisco, 1906

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San Francisco, 1906

You’ve always loved that Judy Garland song. It reminds you of your mother, her broken voice warbling in competition with Judy’s, not helped by the vodka and Coke in her hand. For years you thought San Francisco was some sort of magical place, like Narnia. When things got bad, near the end, you would lie staring at the wardrobe door, willing the doors to open and whisk you away to that fairy-tale land in your mother’s song.

San Franciscans talk about “The Big One,” the moment when their house-of-cards city will be swallowed by the San Andreas Fault. They wear their vulnerability like a badge of honor, partying hard, awaiting the inevitable end. You’d like to think of yourself as that sort of person.

Did they think it was the end back then? The morning of April 18, 1906. 5:15 a.m. The earthquake measured 8.25 on the Richter scale. It lasted for just one minute. That doesn’t sound long, does it?