The car dropped us off at a busy intersection, along a steep incline that overlooked Hampstead Heath. Gryffin extricated his long legs from the cab and joined me on the sidewalk.
“So what about you?” he asked as we walked. “You still taking photos with that antique?”
“No. I’m thinking I might get a digital camera,” I lied.
Gryffin appeared amused. “Really? Well, good for you. Hell must have frozen over, huh?” He pointed at the building behind us. “That used to be a pub. Jack Straws Castle. Now it’s posh apartments and a gym. Every bit of real estate in London’s a link on some rich guy’s key chain.”
“Is that where your friend has his shop?”
“No. He’s in the Vale of Health. That way.” He pointed across the road, to gnarled and towering trees more suited to a national forest than a leafy part of London. “We’re early, so I thought we’d walk a bit, burn off some of that wine.”
Without a backward glance at me, he loped across the street, dodging a bus as it roared downhill. I followed, catching up with him at an entrance to the Heath. I’m tall, but each of his steps equaled two of mine. He turned and squinted through the trees.
“Does your end buyer live here, too?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.
“Nope. She’s in Brixton. Has a bunker with a climate-controlled room to house her collection of vintage video games.”
“You’ve been there?”
He shook his head. “Harold has. He says it’s like a museum for stuff like Super Mario and Donkey Kong. Ever hear of FlightRisk? That’s her—Tindra Bergstrand. She’s a software designer. Started out with games like FlightRisk, now she’s branching into VR apps. Made a ton of money, maybe not crazy rich, but crazy, from what Harold says. Only instead of collecting Birkin bags, she collects occult esoterica. Harold says she’s working on a new app that incorporates the weird stuff she’s into.”
“What kind of weird stuff?”
“I know nothing. I want to know nothing. So should you.”
“Why would I even be interested in a crazy software designer who collects books that the Taliban wants to blow up?”
“It was probably al-Qaeda. Anyway, she’s made a fortune.”
“Which she’s going to spend on your book. How convenient.”
“I’m starting to remember what a pain in the ass you can be.”
“That’s because you’re starting to sober up.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” He grasped my arm. “Look, if you can’t pretend to be a boring normal person for an hour, you better go. I cannot afford to lose this sale.” His voice rose as his hold on me tightened. “You owe me this, Cass.”
“I don’t owe you shit.”
I glared at him, and he touched my shoulder. I almost laughed. This guy had a thing for me—that, or a deeply buried urge to sabotage his own career. I shrugged, but made no effort to move away from him. After a moment, his hand dropped to touch my chin.
“You have the strangest eyes,” he said.
“Takes one to know one,” I retorted.
Despite my annoyance, I felt a flicker of desire for him. Not for the first time, either. For whatever reason, Gryffin Haselton had exerted a weird pull on me ever since we’d met in Maine the previous November. He was the anti-Quinn—a geeky straight arrow, with his glasses and rare books and untied shoelaces. But his weird mismatched eyes fascinated me, and so did his paternal heritage.
We continued walking. Around us, the early winter dusk deepened, a gray curtain falling across a stage dotted with twisted black trees and ghostly figures. Couples, nannies hurrying their charges home for dinner, kids entranced by whatever played on their earbuds or mobile screens. More dogs than I’d ever seen in one place, darting away from their owners to be recalled by a shouted command.
Also, more American voices than I’d heard anywhere else in London. It reminded me of Kamensic Village, where Quinn and I had grown up, sixty miles north of New York City. The flash of desire I’d felt moments ago dissolved into yearning for the pressure of Quinn’s mouth on mine; for the two of us in another world, before we broke it.
I started as Gryffin pointed. “Look,” he said.
Below us stretched a vast sloping field where lights burned against the darkening horizon—the Shard, the Gherkin, a black hair stroke of the Thames—the grimy city transformed by a complex algorithm of clouds, pollution, contrails, and scattered stars. My hand reached for the camera that was no longer there, and I swore softly.
Gryffin glanced at me. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Are we almost there?”
“Close.”
We skirted the field and followed a maze of trails through stands of oak and holly and thickets of gorse. Finally we hit a well-trodden path. I could track other people on the Heath by the fuzzy blue halos of their mobiles, the yip of dogs, and occasionally a child’s voice. After a minute, Gryffin announced, “This is it.”
A service road led into a parking area crammed with rusted caravans and panel trucks and carnival trailers. The light from an old-fashioned wrought-iron streetlamp made it resemble some bleak outer borough of Narnia. As we passed the streetlight, my gaze snagged on something on the ground.
I crouched to see what it was. A dead pigeon, but larger than a New York pigeon, its buff-colored feathers shaded to cream and ivory, rose and iridescent green. One wing was awry, pinions outspread like fingers. There was no other sign of an injury.
I prodded the wing with my finger. Maybe a rat had gotten it. Or poison. I started to straighten when I saw a glint beneath the streetlamp: like a syringe but with a wedge of red plastic at one end, like a dart.
“You coming?”
I turned to see Gryffin waiting impatiently. “Yeah. Sorry.”
At the edge of the parking lot, I paused again. Black feathers appeared to have exploded on the broken concrete, as though someone had dropped a balloon full of black ink.
I frowned. “Huh. An owl must’ve gotten it.”
“More likely rats,” said Gryffin. “Don’t touch it.”
We left the parking lot. Immediately it was as if we’d been transported to a tiny English village: winding streets so narrow it would have been difficult for two cars to pass at once, row houses of yellow London brick nestled alongside stone cottages still adorned with Christmas fairy lights. Cars were parked in front of some residences, late-model Priuses and Vauxhall hybrids, a vintage poison-green Karmann Ghia. Range Rovers dwarfed front gardens the size of a tablecloth. A single modest apartment building might have been an effort at council housing. You could live here and never know you were in London.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Gryffin stopped in front of a cobblestoned alley where another antique streetlamp glowed. “Harold’s just down that way.”
We walked along the passage, my boots clattering loudly on the cobblestones. I felt like I’d trespassed onto a movie set. Any second, studio security would appear to throw me out.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
“Very small people with pointy shoes and hats.” Gryffin snorted. “Who do you think? Normal boring people.”
I stopped to regard a stroller parked in front of an orange door. The stroller resembled something ILM might design for a near-future movie featuring Googleplex employees in distress. I bet the door’s paint color was called something like Misty Kumquat.
“You mean normal boring rich people,” I said.
“Artists live here, too. One woman just celebrated her ninety-eighth birthday—she’s still painting.”
“Yeah, and when she croaks, they’ll roll dice on her canvases for her studio space.”
“Remember what I said about pretending? Look, this is Harold’s house.”