He replaced the receiver and checked his calendar for the following day. Just three unpromising appointments, nothing that couldn’t be moved to another time. Isherwood drew a heavy line through each entry and at the top of the page scribbled a single biblical name. He stared at it for a moment, then, realizing his mistake, obliterated it with a few firm strokes of his pen. Pull yourself together, he thought. What were you thinking, Julie? What on earth were you thinking?

CHAPTER 3

3

THE LIZARD PENINSULA, CORNWALL

The stranger settled not in his old haunt along the Helford Passage but in a small cottage atop the cliffs on the western edge of the Lizard Peninsula. He had seen it for the first time from the deck of his ketch, a mile out to sea. It stood at the farthest end of Gunwalloe Cove, surrounded by purple thrift and red fescue. Behind it rose a sloping field crisscrossed by hedgerows; to the right stretched a crescent beach where an old shipwreck lay sleeping just beneath the treacherous surf. Far too dangerous for bathing, the cove attracted few visitors other than the occasional hiker or the local fishermen who came when the sea bass were running. The stranger remembered this. He also recalled that the beach and the cottage bore an uncanny resemblance to a pair of paintings executed by Monet in the French coastal town of Pourville, one of which had been stolen from a museum in Poland and was missing to this day.

The inhabitants of Gunwalloe were aware of none of this, of course. They knew only that the stranger had taken the cottage under highly unusual circumstances—a twelve-month lease, paid in full, no muss, no fuss, all details handled by a lawyer in Hamburg no one had ever heard of. Even more perplexing was the parade of strange cars that appeared in the village soon after the transaction. The flashy black sedans with diplomatic plates. The cruisers from the local constabulary. The anonymous Vauxhalls from London filled with gray men in matching gray suits. Duncan Reynolds, thirty years retired from the railroad and regarded as the most worldly of Gunwalloe’s citizenry, had observed the men giving the property a hasty final inspection the evening of the stranger’s arrival. “These lads weren’t your basic ready-to-wear security men,” he reported. “They were the real thing. Professionals, if you happen to get my meaning.”