“Anything between her and Ivan?”

“You haven’t seen Mrs. M. I know tastes vary—”

“Taste counts for nothing. You have to forget your own standards in the exercise of our charming duties. It couldn’t have taken Ivan an hour to come home from St. Pancras, so I suppose he dropped in for a quick one on the way. All right, then. What have you done, besides chat with Mrs. Minelli?”

“First, sent out A.S. for Ivan—fortyish, about five foot eight, thin, fair, grey eyes, reddish face, blue chalk stripe suit, a cough, inclined to asthma, bad teeth—”

“And you expect him to cavil at Mrs. Minelli? Never mind. All stations? That’s rather drastic as yet. No, I suppose not, if he’s on the run. But it did sound as though he were taken by surprise.”

“Why hasn’t he called us, or a doctor, in that case?”

“True.”

“And I’ve said not to take him in but just to tag him, in case he leads—”

“Good, good. Anything else?”

“Telfer looked at the front door lock. Nothing. No wax, no scratches.”

“Anyone can get a copy of their own key cut, and pass it on. Even Mrs. Minelli. Well?”

“I thought you’d probably want that taken for analysis.”

Beddoes pointed to a table set by the wall. On an ancient green cover stood part of a wrapped loaf; the top edge of its rind was sticky where it had obviously been cut with the same knife as had delved into the tin of syrup and had scraped the last of the margarine from the crumpled paper which also lay there, together with a saucer of sugar cubes and two cups stained with dribbles of cocoa.

“Looking for dregs of a sleepy nature in the cups, I take it,” said Nightingale, “or in one cup, at least. What meal would this be?”

“Ivan’s breakfast, Mrs. M. says. Gran never took anything but the cocoa.”

“Come on, Beddoes, what’s the big surprise? I can see you swelling with it.”

“Just a trifle I happened on,” said Beddoes, becomingly. “Don’t raise your hopes. Look. On the table beside the bed, a book of devotions. On the fly leaf, here, you see, there’s some writing in pencil, done a good while ago, I should imagine.”

“Russian?”

“Yes. This top lot’s a hymn, as far as I can make out. Religious verses, anyway. Quite in order. But the line at the bottom—know what it says?”

“No, Beddoes, I don’t, but I should like to draw on the fund of talent at my disposal—”

“It says ‘A. K. Majendie, twenty-eight Fitch Street, London’.”

Nightingale was silent. The words dropped like stones into the tank of his memory, disturbing the reflections of his past, which rose, jostled and sank, undisciplined by chronology. A girl with a yellow coat and a yellow switch of hair, sitting on a bombed space beside a shop during a sunny lunch hour; a velvet trayful of glitter in a shop window, and a woman looking at it, her back turned to him, her black hair twisted in a coil, Christina, his wife, before she was his wife; the girl, with the yellow hair braided round her head, seen from across the street, leaning into that same window to remove some delicate object.