THERE WERE FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS in all: the single shot that Gabriel had taken of the woman sitting alone at the restaurant and three more he had snapped as she stood on Quinn’s rusted balcony. He arranged them on the countertop, where he had once laid the photographs of the stolen Rembrandt for Chiara, and felt a tug of guilt as Madeline bent at the waist to scrutinize them.

“Who took these?”

“It’s not important.”

“You have a good eye.”

“Almost as good as Giovanni Rossi.”

She picked up the first photograph, a woman in dark sunglasses alone at a streetside table, seated in a direction that afforded her an inferior view of the city.

“She didn’t zip up her handbag.”

“You noticed that, too.”

“A normal tourist would zip up her bag because of thieves and pickpockets.”

“She would.”

She returned the photograph to its place on the counter and lifted another. It showed a woman standing alone at the balustrade of a balcony, a flowering vine spilling from her feet. The woman was holding a cigarette to her lips in a manner that exposed the underside of her right arm. Madeline leaned closer and knitted her brow thoughtfully.

“Do you see that?” she asked.

“What?”

She held up the photograph. “She has a scar.”

“It could be a flaw in the image.”

“It could be, but it isn’t. It’s a flaw in the girl.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because,” said Madeline, “I was there when it happened.”

“Do you know her?”

“No,” she said, staring at the photograph. “But I know the girl she used to be.”

35

GUNWALLOE COVE, CORNWALL

GABRIEL HAD HEARD THE STORY the first time on the shore of a frozen Russian lake, from the mouth of a man called Pavel Zhirov. Now, in a cottage by the sea, he heard it again from the woman who had become Madeline Hart. She did not know her real name; of her biological parents she knew little. Her father had been a senior general in the KGB, perhaps the head of the all-powerful First Chief Directorate. Her mother, a KGB typist of no more than twenty, had not survived long after the birth. An overdose of sleeping pills and vodka had taken her life, or so Madeline had been told.