"It's just the difference between a great house and a small house, Mr. Thorn. I get the feeling here that no one's in charge."

Turning on her heel, she left him alone; Thorn wondered what she meant. As far as the household was concerned, Katherine was in charge. But then again, he was away every day. Perhaps Mrs. Baylock was trying to tell him that things were not as they appeared. That Katherine was, in fact, not in control.

In his cramped six-flight walk-up in Chelsea, Haber Jennings was awake, gazing at the growing gallery of Thorn portraits that adorned his darkroom wall. There were the funeral pictures, dark and moody, the close-up of the dog among the headstones, the close-up of the boy. And then there were the pictures of the birthday party: Katherine watching the nanny, the nanny in clown costume, all alone. It was the latter photograph that most interested him, for above the nanny's head there was a kind of blemish, a photographic imperfection that somehow added to the portent of the scene. It was a fleck of faulty emulsion, a vague haze that hung over the nanny, forming a halo around her head and neck. Though normally a flawed photo would have been discarded, this one was worth keeping. The knowledge of what happened immediately after it was taken gave the blemish a symbolic quality—the shapeless form like a shadow of doom. The final photograph was of her dead body suspended by a rope; a jarring reality to complete the montage. Altogether the Thorn gallery was a photographic study in the macabre. And it delighted Jennings. He had taken the same subjects that adorned the pages of Good Housekeeping and found something extraordinary in them, something different that no one had found before. He had also begun to research, using a contact in America to check into the Thorns' backgrounds for more information on them.

He found that Katherine had come from Russian immigrant parentage and that her natural father had died by his own hand. According to a back issue of the Minneapolis Times, he had leaped from the roof of a downtown Minneapolis office building. Katherine was born a month later and her mother remarried within a year, moving to New Hampshire with her new husband who gave the child his name. In a few interviews that Katherine had given out over the years there was never any mention of the stepfather, and Jennings speculated that she herself might not know the truth. It wasn't important, but somehow it gave Jennings an edge. Just one more delightful morsel, adding to the illusion that he was on the inside.

The only shot missing was that of the Ambassador himself, and Jennings hoped that tomorrow might be the day. There was an important wedding at All Saints Church which the Thorn family would be likely to attend. It wasn't Jennings' kind of setup, but he'd been lucky so far and perhaps would be again.