“Majendie’s,” he said aloud. “Let me look at that line. Thanks. Why write an English address in Russian script?”

“Habit, perhaps.”

“I thought she might want to keep it from anyone not knowing Russian. It seems at a glance to correspond with the hymn, but we’ll get them to find out whether the two lots were written at about the same time. The pencil’s pressed off on the inside cover from the hymn, the single line isn’t. But that may be due to a variation in the paper, or something.”

“Ivan could speak Russian.”

“But had she taught him to read it? If he came to England with her, after the Revolution, he’ll have been here since he was a small boy, even a baby. And if she was a recluse, she won’t have exerted herself to launch him in the Russian colony. I don’t see any books. Where would he have learnt to read it?”

“He did come with her,” said Beddoes, “according to Mrs. Minelli—not that she knew from experience, but so he told her, and there’s no reason to doubt that. Also, Mrs. M. says this was their first and only home. Certainly this was Ivan’s address when he started at St. Pancras. No relations, to Mrs. M.’s knowledge. No friends, for that matter.”

“I see,” said Nightingale. “Would you go and ask Mrs. Minelli whether she ever posted letters for Mrs. Karukhin.” Nightingale took considerable pains with his pronunciation of the name. “If so, to whom, if she can remember.”

Beddoes went off in silence. Nightingale put the book on the table, removed his gloves, and leaned his arms on the mantelpiece, withdrawing them hastily as they encountered a scurf of matches, shoelaces, sugar cubes, coppers and other small dusty objects. He examined the shelf warily. Under the dust he could see innumerable sticky rings and some recent ones less thickly coated. Beside an alarm clock stood a half-used tin of condensed milk and a packet of cocoa, ingredients of the morning drink, which plainly was always made in the cups as they stood on the mantelpiece, handy to the kettle resting on the double gas ring at the side of the hearth. He supposed that the ring represented the Karukhins’ sole cooking facilities, unless they chose to trudge up and down stairs with dishes from Mrs. Minelli’s kitchen. And that dilapidated wash-stand, with its chipped enamel basin and jug, was where they washed. A cake of soap lying on the marble slab was dry and flaky, suggesting infrequent use. As he looked round the room he saw confirmation of his guess about the cooking, in that Cobb was carefully turning out of a corner cupboard an assortment of foodstuffs, mostly in paper bags. It was an advantage of his present rank, Nightingale reflected, that the investigation of crumby, mousy cupboards and dingy beds by him, personally, was a matter not of necessity but of choice. By being selfish enough to seize that advantage he was denied the satisfaction of discovering some factual clue. He had merely to supervise the people who might find the hair, the pin, the print, which could make or break. But he was the one who, later, was supposed to make sense of the collected facts. He wondered why he had ever wanted the responsibility of drawing conclusions that could so easily be wrong.