Like in her photograph, Danny was strikingly dark and pale, but Jude recognized the look that shock gives. As a young doctor, she had seen it in people who had suffered heart attacks or a stroke. But you could also see it in those who had been told they had cancer. It was something in the eyes, a pallor in the skin, of someone whose whole world has changed. Danny had the face of a woman who had been crying and not sleeping. She was a beautiful mess, tall, strong, disheveled, tragic, gorgeous. Her clothes were layers of dark-colored fabric that could have been pulled on without thought or could have been carefully chosen.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d actually come,” she said in a voice that seemed blurred round the edges. “It’s good of you. Not everyone would do that.”

Jude held out the flowers. “They may be too bright,” she said. “But I couldn’t bear the idea of lilies.”

Danny took them and looked down at them indifferently. “They’re perfect.”

She hates them, thought Jude.

“I’ll get you some tea, love,” said Vin. He looked at Jude. “Is that all right?”

“Yes, just normal tea.”

“It’s all herbal here,” said Vin.

“I’ll have what Danny has.”

Nineteen

Danny led Jude through a door beyond the paintings, into a room that was halfway between a conservatory and a garage. It was very cold, very light. The far end was all glass, but some of the panes were cracked and one was covered up by a billowing tarpaulin. The ceiling was a work in progress, some of it stripped back to its beams. There was a trestle table against one wall, heaped with paint trays and brushes, saws, an electric drill, sandpaper, bottles of white spirit. Jude wondered about a toddler let loose in this room full of sharp-edged tools and toxic liquids. In the center of the room was an enormous wicker chair, round-backed and piled with bright cushions. Water dripped into a bucket near the door that led into the garden, which wasn’t really a garden at all, but a large dumping ground of miscellaneous objects: she made out a rusting bike, an old-fashioned commode, towers of chipped terra-cotta pots, a bathtub with clawed feet, a stone gryphon, a hammock stand, a clothes wringer, a bird cage, several ladder-backed chairs, two large speakers covered in see-through plastic and, in the middle of all of this, a small patch of garden with some straggly winter plants in it.

“Most of that stuff belongs to Irina,” said Danny, laying the flowers on the table.