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notes his own footprints: like George’s in the milk, but russet-coloured with day-old blood, the broken oval of the sole with the minute squares of rust inside it. He gasps, an emphysemic sound, through lungs long ruined by cigarette-smoke. He seems to want to run but resists the urge. He lifts his foot instead, grabs his ankle with his right hand, twists his shoe to stare at the sole. He replaces it carefully on the unbloodied portion of the glasshouse floor, steps carefully outside and does the unexpected. He wipes his feet on the frosted grass, an automatic cleansing. He feels either tainted, implicated, or simply repelled.
    Then he runs back up the pathway of frozen mud, through the low stone arch of the outhouses, jumps into the cabin of his oil-tanker which lumbers into life, spewing clouds of diesel as it performs a groaning turn and hauls itself out of sight, leaving a pale mist of fume, through which the fagade behind gradually defines itself.

6
    T HE HOUSE THAT Isobel Shawcross entered through the back, by the kitchen door, was a big house, a very big house. And Miss Shawcross’s first instinct was to make it smaller. She walked through it as though used to houses far bigger than this, infinitely more opulent, without the workaday scramble of its kitchen, the bicycle upturned outside the scullery door, without the irregular brass fittings of the ribbed stair-carpet that ascended towards those rectangular Georgian windows with their cubes of dusty light; as if she was used to houses infinitely more organised. And she sensed, though she can’t have known it then, that this was a house whose irregularities consumed things: trinkets, penknives, cutlery, haircombs of whalebone and ivory, odd socks and shoes, letters, laces and lapis lazuli rings. She would lose things in this house, she sensed, but she could never, then, have known how much. She could never have known that the losses would extend far beyond the contents of those stout leather valises that Dan Turnbull heaved in, one balanced precariously on his oily crown, one beneath his oxter and the third pushed by his hobnailed boot over the flagstoned floor.
    “Let me show you to your room, Ma’am. And Ma’am?”
    Miss Shawcross turned, in the scullery hallway.
    “Yes?”
    “I haven’t got three hands. Could you help me with that bag?”
    She hesitated for a moment, and her nostrils did a birdlike twitch which Nina, and Dan, would remember as particular only to her. She bent then, took the valise in both hands and stood aside while he made his angled way, up the stone stairway, into the carpeted hall, up the wooden staircase with the high windows bleached by the afternoon light, on to the upper floor. There were doors to either side, all of them half opened, revealing further evidence of that disorder she had already divined. But her room when she reached it was a miracle of neatness. A smooth coverlet over a plain oak bed, a writing table by a window with a charming gothic arch.
    “I’ll leave them here, Missus.”
    “Miss,” said Isobel Shawcross. “Miss Isobel Shawcross,” she added, gazing out of the window at the white bundle swinging from the chestnut tree far below.
    ~
    But now, in the present, in the time that moves at a constant measure, that neither speeds nor slows, at ten twenty-one on this sixteenth of January, a policeman passes through the sagging gates on a black bicycle. The white beard has all but vanished from the lawns, leaving such an even glisten of dew that it could be dawn again. It is Buttsy Flanagan from the station up the river beyond the docks and cement-works, the RIC barracks burned down in the Troubles and restored by the Civic Guards. He cycles slowly, as if unwilling to arrive. And having arrived at the circle of gravel behind the house scoured by the oil-tanker’s tyres, he examines the scene slowly, with a methodical, almost disinterested ease. He notes the crushed grass, the footprints, the pool of dried blood in