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to visit him. He’s rich.”
    Jury’s heart sank. But that was no concern of Elsie’s, who kept on handing out the bad news. “He’s to give her heaps of money to buy the pub and a lot more to run it.” Ostentatiously, she consulted her round-faced watch. Jury thought he saw the black ears of Mickey Mouse. “I don’t know why she’s not back. . . . ”
    Feeling suddenly weary, Jury did rise this time. Elsie did not want him to leave and looked crestfallen. “But I expect she’d want to see you.”
    He smiled. “Tell her I stopped for a moment. Tell her I’ll ring her.”
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    YEARS BEFORE , he had taken this same walk and felt much this same disappointment. He’d left Jenny Kennington’s house after they’d shared a cigarette, sitting on packing cases before she’d gone off on that voyage. He’d taken this walk along the banks of the Avon between the theatre and the church where Shakespeare was buried. It had been dark then; today it was a late afternoon and everything looked varnished with light. Colors were so muted and pale they seemed almost transparent, the sky with the sheen of an opal, the Avon flowing like smoke. Then the sun broke through its cloud cover, and as if this were a signal, ducks rowed over to the bank where Jury stood, loitered there expecting food. Farther out, a swan was moving along the sun-drenched surface of the river, as if it were gliding through handfuls of sequins.
    He stood there watching the swan, thinking how he had almost been inclined to pump Elsie for information about Mr. Someone. (“Are they very good friends?”) He had resisted because he mightlearn what he didn’t want to know. (“Oh, yes, really , the best of friends.”) Or else he’d have to suffer the consequences of Elsie’s imagination and watch this chap emerge from the shadows rich, handsome, smart, and a connoisseur of cockle vines and shadow children. He sighed and told himself he was being ridiculous.
    He knew Jenny Kennington to be a very serious person, nothing arch about her, nothing glib or manipulative. If the man were someone important to her, she’d have mentioned him. Surely. And just as surely, Jury should have told her he was coming.
    A ray of sunlight smote the river. That archaic word was the only one that properly described it, for he saw it as a violent strike, a sword on armor, light so strong it turned the swan an incandescent white. Watching the swan on the fiery water, he thought of an old poem about a girl walking through a fair, and the narrator watching her move about, and watching her make her way home—
    . . . with one star awake,
    As the swan in the evening glides over the lake.
    Jury found this inexpressibly sad, though he did not know why.
    From his wallet he drew a snapshot. It showed a girl of eleven or twelve, whose name was Jip and who lived in Baltimore with an aunt. What was her real name? Not just her last, but her first. All he knew was “Jip.”
    Like the orphan lines of poetry, she was a girl without a context. In this photo she stood in a sober, unsmiling pose, squinting into the light that cast her and everything around her in deep shadow. A shadow child.

FOUR
    He was as parched for a cup of tea as ever Sergeant Wiggins would be.
    Jury stopped in the little restaurant directly across from the cathedral and sat down at a table in the window where he could drink his tea and munch a Chelsea bun and gaze across the cathedral yard. There, blue-uniformed schoolchildren, probably students at the cathedral school, were all walking in procession along the pavement that encircled Exeter Cathedral. They were all dressed in navy blue blazers, white shirts, ties. A couple of dozen children of varying heights and ages.
    It was a sight Jury had seen often, and was often affected by. He could see them walking, skipping, turning,