Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For Stephen, Amelia and Olivia,
with love

1

Marina

November 1991

The house is still, like a crypt. Only the maple tree moves, branches swaying in the night breeze, leaves trembling and then brightening as a light in the top window flicks on.

Marina parks opposite and switches off the engine. Heart thudding, she opens the door and steps into the street. The midnight air whips her face. Her breath is wispy, like the remnants of a ghost. In the distance, traffic speeds along Streatham High Road. A siren wails.

She has been in Tooting Bec visiting an author whose manuscript she’s editing. Agata is Polish and is writing her memoirs, focusing on the Second World War. Setting off for the drive home to Wiltshire, Marina has taken a detour, speeding through the network of suburban streets, along past the common and into Harrington Gardens.

It’s an ordinary street in a nondescript part of London, with the air of a place battened down for winter. Hedges are scruffy, tendrils trail from the tops of hanging baskets. Rubbish nudges the lids of dustbins. On one path, a rusty pram stands discarded along with a broken cot.

The houses are mostly semis but number 24 is different. Detached. It’s a double-fronted Victorian home with two gables topped with arrowed finials. Spiked iron railings, with gates either side, contain the front garden with its modest patch of earth, single maple tree and geometric path. Stone steps lead to a massive front door; metal stairs to the entrance to the basement. To the right, a public footpath separates it from the house next door. An estate agent’s fallen sign rests on the ground. Flat 2. To Let.

Automatically, Marina compares the reality before her to the photographs she’s seen in newspapers. But those grainy images were mere reproductions, while this building is solid and stamps its importance on the street.

Marina crosses the road. The house is in darkness save for the light on the second floor and a cobwebbed lantern above the front door, but it’s enough to notice the crumbling cornices and cracked stained glass. The bricks need repointing, the ledges need repainting and the maple tree needs cutting back.

Three floors and five windows and then the basement.

The light in the top window is turned off. Marina shivers and buttons her faux-fur coat. Her hair hangs abundantly around her face – rich and dark and warm. She wears thick clothes, boots and fingerless gloves, but still the chill of the night creeps inside her bones. Flexing her fingers, she moves beneath a street lamp as if it might give her heat.

Above her, the sky is heavy. Stray snowflakes are falling. She should go home. She should get into her Mini, turn the heating on full blast and speed away from London.

But she does not.