She walked to his bedside table, switched on the small lamp and sat down on the bed, her hand smoothing the chaos of creases on the sheet as she gazed vacantly at the light.

Hawk was dead. Killed on the night that Sam went for his walk around the block. Where was Sam now? Another walk?

Katie’s body slumped a little at the corruption of her thoughts and she dragged the hand that was stroking the sheet towards her. It touched damp cloth and her hand recoiled. Katie pulled back the comforter and looked at what she had touched.

Urine. Her husband had wet the bed.

As she stared at the oval yellow stain on the white sheet she heard Bart bark cheerfully outside, and a gust of wind sent snowflakes to rap gently on the window behind the closed curtains. Her hand returned to the sheet and clenched the wet linen into a ball in her fist as she closed her eyes as tightly as her fingers.

Esme Fielding was getting worried. She knew that was Katie Hunt’s husband out there, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She’d waved at him with a cool expression when he first slumped against the window of the gallery about ten long minutes ago, and had been annoyed on two accounts at his lack of response. Firstly it made her look a fool in front of the two customers she was serving that he didn’t acknowledge her wave, and secondly, he was smearing the plate-glass window with his big hands, and now his forehead.

The customers were American and unless she’d lost it, her sales sense told her they were going to buy the George Lanson brass buffalo sculpture for three thousand dollars. The American woman smelled sweetly expensive and had a face like a slapped ass, which looked like it only smiled at charity lunches. And her husband was the species Esme tried to lasso into the gallery every time she met one at a Silver summer cocktail party at the Chateau; trim, tanned, neat, and eager to give off the impression he knew about art. Easy meat. He’d already said the word cubist three times in connection with Lanson’s angular brass, and she’d nodded with eyebrows high in phoney surprise as if discovering a kindred spirit, while secretly sneering at how completely stupid he was. Lanson was no more a cubist than she was a virgin, but if it made the tanned man in his cashmere coat buy it, then she would talk all day about how astute he was to notice the obvious nod to cubism in the great squared-off flanks of the buffalo.