8

SHE WAS UP BEFORE ME. I lay there for a while, looking at the odd details caught in the grid of light from the blinds: a fake-rococo chair piled with clothes; a black-and-white photo of a smiling couple—parents? Grandparents?—from that far-off alien planet where the men wore suits and the women skirts as a matter of course. A glass-topped dressing-table, bare apart from a small basket of tubes and bottles. A stalagmite of books by the side of the bed.

All very odd. What was I going to say when I saw her? I had no idea. But she was already downstairs, slipping back into the routine of her own life. The longer I left it, the more anomalous my jack-in-the-box reappearance would be.

I took a quick shower, then dressed and packed. If a swift exit was in order, I didn’t want to have to stumble up to her room again to retrieve my things.

She was at the kitchen table, working at her laptop. In front of her were two mugs and a red enamel coffee jug.

“Good morning,” I said.

She looked up so abruptly that her reading glasses fell off. They were caught by the strip of ribbon connecting the arms, which left them dangling at her throat.

“Hi.”

No mistaking the tenderness of her smile—or the change in her voice, made softer and more resonant by the assumption of shared intimacy. She blushed. I blushed.

“Coffee?”

I plonked myself next to her. “Coffee would be great.”

She filled a mug. “Milk or sugar?”

“No, just like that.”

She slid it to me. “Did you sleep OK?”

“Yes. Although I did wake up at one point to find myself in bed with a strange woman.”

She put her head on one side and plucked at her hair. “Strange?”

I looked at my watch. “When did we meet? Fifteen hours ago?”

She stared at me for a moment, winding the hair round her finger.

“I don’t find you strange.” Her blush deepened. She dropped her gaze. “For what it’s worth, I never did that before in my life. I’m usually more . . . a lot more . . .”

“Yes. Me too.”

“But it was like a gift from—I don’t know, something. Anyway, seemed ungrateful not to take it. So—”

My eyes stung. I nodded.

“But I’m afraid your showing up here hasn’t gone unnoticed.” She tapped a key, then turned the computer screen towards me. “You’d better see this.”

This was a post from an organization called Whitrow Against Hate:

Professor Halassian: update.

Remember when we called Professor Halassian out for harassment and inappropriate language? And the good professor’s defense? “It has nothing to do with patriarchy or sexism, or any other -archy or -ism. The only thing it has to do with is the ability to think clearly, and to follow the logic of your own thoughts without fear of censorship.”

Really, Professor Halassian? So how come you’re keeping company like this?

Below was a blurred picture of a light-blinded me emerging from the professor’s house the night before.

Notice anything about him, WAH-ers? Yeah me too. This guy is straight out of the bottle, no ice. Professor Halassian will probably say he was just calling to discuss home insurance. Well, in that case, why was he seen talking on campus earlier with Richard Peake?

Exhibit B was a video clip of me and Peake, presumably taken from the Tavern’s CCTV. There was a commentary.

Watch the way their lips move. If you can’t figure out what they’re saying, let me help. Peake: “You wanted to speak to Professor Halassian? I may be able to help. Why do you want to see her?” Other guy: “That’s a personal matter.”

What do you have to say for yourself, Professor?

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head.

“Are you going to reply?”

“How?”

“‘It’s none of your business’?”

She mimicked the voice on the video: “We’ve struck a nerve. She’s obviously hiding something.”

“Tell them the truth, then.”

“It’s about her roommate at Stanford fifteen years ago? Nothing to do with her present situation at all? She seriously expects us to believe that?”

“OK. So—?”

She pulled an invisible zip across her mouth.

“But that’ll look like an admission of guilt.”

“Believe me, it’s the best way to deal with it. Say anything, and it just gives them more fuel, something else they can twist. If you let it go, eventually they run out of oxygen. It’s hard. But I know from bitter experience it’s the best policy.”

Something turned in some out-of-the-way part of my guts. I nodded.

“But . . .” She was quiet for a long time, studying my face, looking for clues. At last she said, “Was it just the wine talking last night?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Because if it wasn’t, I’d like to come with you. And help you to find Beth.”

No Andrew and Anjali on the return flight. But we engaged in a little doveing ourselves, in a shy, out-of-practice, middle-aged way. Then, even before the drink-and-snacks trolley had trundled into view, she fell asleep, her head on my shoulder.

I grabbed a tomato juice and a packet of pretzels, then settled back for a confabulation with Fate. What on earth did it think it was doing? When I’d arrived in Ohio, my personal life was in the doldrums, and the star I was following offered only the faintest glimmer of hope for my career. Now, twenty-four hours later, the star was as distant as ever—but, thanks to some strange magic trick, I was leaving with a lover at my side. And not only a lover: also—on the evidence so far—an accomplished partner in crime.

This is what she’d managed to establish, in a little under an hour:

1. Carmel Investigations still existed and was at the same address.

2. Leonard Drew no longer worked there.

3. He didn’t appear to have set up in business under his own name.

4. There was no entry for him in the San Francisco white pages.

5. There were no death announcements or news stories suggesting that he had died.

I could have spent a day blundering around the internet without discovering so much.

She also spared me from making the elementary mistake of calling Carmel Investigations and asking for Leonard Drew’s current address.

“Oh, come on! Any phone can be traced, you know that. Yours, mine, makes no difference. And it means we lose the element of surprise, give Drew advance notice that we want to speak to him.”

“Would that matter?”

“It might. We don’t know what we’re dealing with, do we?”

No: a confabulation is the wrong way of putting it. I did all the talking. Fate was silent. But I still ended up thinking that perhaps, after all, it knew what it was doing.

Bellamy Place is a sober redbrick terrace in the Financial District, built, presumably, during the reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. As phoenixes go, it seems pretty severe. Not a hint of belle époque European opulence to be seen. Frugality, discipline, hard work, it says: those are the qualities that carried this country from a fragile settlement of New England pilgrims to the Pacific shore.

Move on a century and a bit, and you see something else. The discipline and hard work are still in evidence—the glass doors doing a brisk trade in eager young software engineers, all clutching their laptops—but a parallel universe has grown up alongside them. Everywhere you look are homeless people, deranged people, people chemically modified into zombies. As we turned into the street, a shock-haired man in a tail-coat that had lost one of its sleeves started haranguing us. Moments later, a pig-eyed woman—her weathered cheeks an explosion of broken veins—swayed across our bows. The sea air was laced with the smell of piss and shit and souring alcohol.

“God, look at this place,” I said. “I’m sorry. If I’d realized—”

“What? You’d have told me not to come?”

“I could at least have warned you.”

She shook her head. “I’ve been to San Francisco before.” She stopped in front of a doorway, where a man sat half-covered in a filthy sleeping-bag, muttering Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. It took him a moment to register that Ruth was acknowledging his existence, rather than—like everyone else—pretending he wasn’t there. He stuck out a hand. She slipped him a five dollar bill, as if they were doing an illicit deal.

“OK,” she said, ignoring the question on my face. She scanned the numbers on the buildings. “218, 216, 214. Here we go.”

Carmel Investigations was on the second floor. The tiny reception area made a spirited attempt to seem grander than it was, with modish stripped-brick walls and a well-tended bamboo tree in a pot. The air-conditioning was ice-box cold, as if to cool the grief or rage—the usual state, you imagined—of the people who came through the door. As we entered, a plump middle-aged black woman looked up from her computer.

“Good morning.” She frowned at the screen again. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No,” said Ruth. “We were just hoping maybe you could give us some information.”

“Oh, OK.” The puzzlement melted from her face. She produced a leaflet from a drawer: Carmel Investigations. Proudly Serving the Bay Area since 1971. “This’ll tell you pretty much everything you need to know. If you have any questions, I’m sure Dean will be pleased to help.”

“We’ll keep this for future reference,” said Ruth, slipping it into her pocket. “Right now, we’re trying to find out something about an old case.”

“Oh, uh-huh.” She looked disappointed. Carmel Investigations obviously needed business. “What name?”

“Beth McGregor.”

“How do you spell that?”

Ruth told her. “I’m Jane McGregor. She’s my sister.”

“Your sister. OK.” She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, yeah, here she is. Went missing . . . in Canada, is that right?” She looked up at Ruth. “That must’ve been hard for you. And your folks.”

Ruth nodded. The woman craned forward to read what she’d found.

‘We don’t seem to have too much about her, I don’t know why. It was quite a few years ago now. And the operative wasn’t Dean. It was the guy he bought the company from.”

“Leonard Drew.”

She nodded. “And Lenny seems to have taken the case files with him.”

“Taken them where?”

“Or he could just have deleted them, I guess. To protect confidentiality.” She looked up from the computer. “I don’t know where he went. It was before I came here.”

“But did he retire? Or move to another company?”

“I’m sorry. We have an address for him. But—”

“Well, can you give us that?”

The woman wavered. “Do you have any ID?”

Ruth shook her head. “I should have thought. But I left my cards and stuff back at the hotel. It’s just I don’t like carrying them.” She gestured towards the street. “You know . . .”

“I do know. I have to walk through that circus every day. And you’re right, there’s a lot of crazy people out there.” She hesitated a moment, weighing something up. “OK, I better ask Dean. I don’t know what the policy is here. There’s so many rules nowadays. It’s kind of hard to keep up.”

She disappeared through a slit in the wall behind the desk.

I caught Ruth’s eye. “Her sister?”

She gave a quick toss of the head, like a horse refusing a bridle.

“Go stand over there,” she muttered. “Let me know if you see her coming.”

I moved to the window, from where I could see into the narrow corridor. Ruth went to the computer.

“Is this a good idea?” I said.

She took the leaflet from her pocket and scrabbled around for a pen. “Just keep watch.”

The office door was closed, but I could make out muffled voices. I remembered my grandmother telling me about German doodlebug bombs in the war: As long as you could hear them, you were all right. It was when the noise cut out that you knew you were in trouble.

“Come on, come on,” said Ruth under her breath.

I looked down into the street. The zombie with the one-sleeved coat was standing over the man with the blanket, yelling at him. Blanket-man was still huddled in the doorway, shaking his fist pitifully. I wondered if they were arguing about the money Ruth had given him.

The voices in the office had stopped.

“Now,” I said.

By the time the door opened, Ruth was at my side, watching the contretemps in Bellamy Place.

“Yes,” she said, as the woman reappeared. “This is obviously a tough area to work in. You must have nerves of steel.”

The woman flashed an embarrassed smile. “I’m sorry. Looks like I can’t give you anything more. That’s the law, evidently. If you want to come back with some ID—”

“OK,” said Ruth. “We’ll try to do that. Thanks for your help.”

On the way down I said, “Did you get it?”

She nodded. As we emerged on to the street, the pig-eyed woman lurched into our path, hand outstretched, as if she’d been waiting for us. Ruth gave her some change.

“Yes, I know,” she said, without meeting my gaze, “you’re not supposed to. But it’s just something I do.”

Two hours later we were in Milgrim, a small, not-much-of-anything community twenty miles south-east of San Francisco. Ruth drove. She’d picked the car, this time, too: a green VW Jetta, which I instantly recognized as an inspired choice, guaranteed to leave eyebrows unraised. We’d eschewed GPS again—“You might as well take out an ad, saying where you’re going,” said Ruth—so I navigated, road atlas on knee, Carmel Investigations leaflet in hand, with Leonard Drew’s address scribbled across the logo: 1190 Lomax Drive.

“Not a single wrong turn,” said Ruth, as we pulled up. She gave me a high-five, then leaned forward to look out of the window. “Hmm, not a bad place to live.”

The house was nothing remarkable: a modest piece of off-the-peg modernism, with clean geometric shapes and lots of glass. But Leonard Drew certainly had an eye for a site: it was built at the summit of a low hill, with a south-facing terrace and a distant view of the bay.

I started to get out.

“Maybe you should do this on your own,” said Ruth.

“Why?”

“What if the agency’s been in touch with him? Told him Beth’s sister’s looking for him? He’s probably met Beth’s sister. He’s certainly talked to her.”

“So what are you going to do, then?”

“I’ll just stay here. Can I borrow your phone?”

“Why?”

“I want to check in with my mom. Let her know I’m OK. Just in case she called and wondered where I was. She’s a frail old lady. And all this stuff with the college, it makes her frantic.”

“Why’s mine better than yours?”

“Makes it just that little bit harder for them to figure out what we’re doing. They’d expect a call to her from my number. But—”

I handed her the phone and turned towards the house. A low wall separated the garden from the road. Behind it, I saw, as I approached the short drive, was an outdoor model railway layout, running more or less the whole length of the plot. It seemed blithely impervious to geography, jumbling together windmills, waterfalls, factories, Alpine chalets and grain elevators in the same never-never landscape.

At the far end, crouched over a yellow locomotive the size of a large cat, was an elderly man. When he heard my footsteps, he looked up and squinted at me, visoring his eyes with his hand.

“Hi!” he called.

“Afternoon.”

I started towards him. He waved and shouted,

“No! Stay there!”

I stopped. He levered himself slowly to his feet, then fiddled with a control box and sent the train gliding in my direction. The engine, at least, was unmistakably American, with a candlestick funnel and a cowcatcher like a set of goofy cartoon teeth. As it slowed to a halt, I noticed a sign taped to the front of the boiler: Welcome!

“Just a little, you know, a little bit of fun,” he said, picking his way gingerly through the tangle of tracks. He was desperately thin, his skin yellow, his perfect dentures too big for his shrunken mouth. His dark blue leisurewear hung off him like laundry on a clotheshorse. If this was our man, it looked as if we’d found him just in time.

“Impressive set-up you’ve got here,” I said.

He nodded, casting an appraising gaze back the way he’d come. “Well, you know,” he wheezed, “it gives me something to do.” He held out his thumbs. “See any green there?” He laughed. “No, me neither. So this”—nodding at the railway—“is what I do in my yard instead. At least it keeps me from sitting in front of the TV all day.” He paused to get his breath back. “Anyways, what can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a Mr. Leonard Drew?”

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

“He doesn’t live here?”

“Not anymore.”

“Would you be able to give me his current address?”

He shook his head again. It made less demand on his lungs than speaking.

“When did he move?”

“When we bought the place. Must’ve been twelve, thirteen years back.” He was gasping now. He waved towards the terrace, where two garden chairs sat facing the view. “We’re going to talk, I need to sit down.”

He obviously did need to. But he wasn’t just ill: he was lonely. And from the way he eyed me, I could tell he was calculating how long he could spin this out, how much human company the information he had could be traded for.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

We moved at a snail’s pace to the front of the house. He collapsed in his chair like a marathon runner at the end of a race. He glanced at his watch. Then—his hand shaking—he turned the knob on the radio control box. The locomotive trundled into action, dragging behind it a long snake of coal trucks, oil containers, a wagon loaded with cars. The life-blood of the American Dream.

“Hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I try to keep to the schedule. Good to have one place where everything still works the way it should.”

He subsided again, panting. To fill the silence, I said,

“This is a lovely spot.”

For a few seconds he could only nod. Then—pushing the words out one at a time, like a performer filling balloons and releasing them—he said,

“What you’re looking at right now’s what sold it to us.” He paused to refuel. “My wife, she saw that, she said, I want to spend the rest of my life here with you. And she did. Two months after we moved, doctors told her she had cancer. Six months after that, she passed away.”

“I’m sorry. That’s really awful.”

He turned suddenly and held out a hand. “I’m Mitch, by the way.”

“Robert.”

He touched an ear, to indicate he was slightly deaf. “Bob, you say?”

I nodded.

“What kind of accent’s that?”

“English.”

“Oh, the old country. Thought so.” He gazed out at the bay, a grey sliver of rind on the horizon. Finally he said,

“Anyways, you don’t want to hear about that. You want to know about Drew. He a friend of yours?”

“No. I was hoping to ask him about a case he worked on.”

He shook his head. “Well, I have to tell you: he’s a funny guy. Lenny: that’s what the neighbors called him. Never Leonard or Mr. Drew: always Lenny. Oh, you’re the guy bought Lenny’s place, are you? And then they’d laugh. Evidently he was quite a character.”

“Didn’t you meet him yourself?”

“Only a couple times. I got the feeling he didn’t think much of us. Figured we weren’t really good enough to live in his house. But he liked our money OK. Never heard him complain about that.”

“Why did he move?”

Either he didn’t hear me, or the gush of self-justification was too powerful to be capped.

“Neighbors weren’t like that,” he said. “They were real friendly. Said he was just the same with them. Like he was doing them a favor by living here.” He leaned forward, eyes closed, giving his breathing time to catch up. “One of those fellows always has to be one up on the other guy. Drive a bigger car. Take fancier vacations. You know?”

I nodded. “Mr. Toad.”

“Excuse me?”

I shook my head. He said,

“But then he figured, a place like Milgrim was too small for him. He was going to go for the big time.”

“Where?”

He waved a hand, shooing Lenny somewhere off to the south. “Said he’d been offered a job. By some really rich guy. Personal security, he called it. ‘No more snooping on guys can’t keep their dicks in their pants,’ he said. I was surprised. I never heard him use words like that before. ‘Or looking for kids that ran off with their boyfriends,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be heading up a personal security operation.”

“Did he tell you who the rich guy was?”

“He did, but it was like—” With a shaky finger, he mimed In one ear and out the other.

A circuit suddenly closed in my brain. “Not Evan Bone, by any chance?”

“Who?”

“Evan Bone. The Global Village man?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “That doesn’t sound right. Fact is, he could have told me the President of the United States or the Queen of England, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wasn’t going to believe him whatever he said.” He stopped to take on another supply of oxygen. “It seemed to happen awful sudden. Real estate agent told me he was in a real hurry to move. What I figure was, a case he was working on went wrong, and he decided to sell up and get out, before he lost his license and ended up in court. All that stuff about going off to do personal security, that was just to make him look good.”

“Still, if you could remember . . .”

He made a sound like a clarinet with a broken reed. “I’ll try. But that’s why I’m thinking, he’s not going to want to talk to you. Not if it’s about something happened years ago. ’Cause his whole idea was, he was going to start over, leave all that behind.” He looked sideways at me, without turning his head. “You hire him to do something? And now you’re holding a grudge against him?”

“No. I’m just after some information. About, as it happens, a kid who ran off with her boyfriend.”

He managed a rictus smile. “Your kid?”

“No.”

“But someone you knew?”

“No.”

He stared at me for a few seconds. “OK, you don’t want to talk about it. Well, I’m sure sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

“You’ve told me a lot.”

He sort-of laughed. “Just not what you wanted to know.” He put his head on one side, like a dog waiting for you to throw the ball. “You care to come in for a minute? Have a coffee or something?”

“That’s very kind. But no, thank you. I should be on my way.”

“Sure?”

I nodded. He put his hands on his knees and started to push himself to his feet.

“Please,” I said. “Don’t get up.”

“No, I’ll come along. See you out.”

“You really don’t have to.”

“What else am I going to do?”

We snail’s-paced our way back towards the road, he concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, me trying to work out how to explain Ruth to him. After half a minute or so he stopped and said,

“Movie star. B-B-B-B-B.”

“Sorry?”

“The guy he said he was going to work for. Big movie star. Name starts with a B.”

“First or second name?”

He shook his head. “Don’t remember.”

I ran through all the actors I could think of. It wasn’t a long list. None of them was right. As we reached the entrance, I saw Ruth watching us through the windscreen, like a fish viewing the world beyond the tank.

“That your car?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say you had her with you? You could have both come in for a coffee.”

Ruth opened the door and got out, smiling. “Hi,” she said, then turned and gave me a questioning glance: Who am I talking to?

“This is Mitch,” I said.

She held a hand out, unfazed. “Hello, Mitch. I’m Ruth.”

“This fellow here, he’s been keeping you from me,” he said. “I don’t know why. A sight for sore eyes.”

She laughed.

“We been trying to think of a movie star,” he said. “Begins with a B.”

“Male or female?”

“A guy.”

She rattled off seven or eight names. He shook his head. She shut her eyes. After a moment she said,

“Birch Ogren.”

His eyes widened. “Yeah, that’s him. Birch Ogren.” He turned to me, supporting himself with one hand on the bonnet of the car. “You got a good one here, Bob. You be sure and treat her right. You got one like this, believe me, fella, you don’t want to let her go.”

As we got into the car, he relocated to his own driveway. When I glanced in the rear-view mirror he was still standing there, one hand raised in farewell, the yellow snout of the engine just visible between his legs.

“I didn’t know Birch Ogren was still alive,” said Ruth, when I’d relayed what Mitch had told me. “He must be goodness knows how old. Eighty maybe? At least seventy-five, anyway.”

I shrugged. “I’m not much of a film-goer, I’m afraid. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in anything.”

“Oh, you must have. All those existential-hippie-western movies, back in the sixties and seventies. Surely you caught some of them on TV?”

She reeled off a catalogue of titles, then glanced across at me. I shook my head.

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m not.”

“Didn’t you have an existential-hippie-western moment when you were younger?” She paused. “No, actually, looking at you,” she said, laughing, “I can see you probably didn’t.”

I waited for her merriment to subside. Then I said,

“How long ago did Beth’s mother die?”

“I don’t know. A while. Twelve, thirteen years, maybe?”

“Which is also when Drew stopped looking for Beth. And sold his business to go and work for Ogren. If that’s what he did.”

She nodded. “And what, that’s cause and effect?”

“I’ve no idea. Did her family have any Hollywood connections?”

“Not that I know of. Her dad was a banker. Her mom was a—I don’t know what she was. Just a very rich mom, I guess.”

“Beth never mentioned Ogren?”

She pulled a face, then shook her head. “I don’t remember ever talking to her about movies. I don’t think she was into them. You and she would probably have gotten along famously.”

“Perhaps we still will.”

“Not too famously, I hope.”

But first we have to find her. It hung between us, waiting for one of us to put it into words. Neither of us wanted to, to throw a shadow across the little patch of sunshine in which—thanks to the still-not-quite-believable exhilaration of each other’s company—we found ourselves.

We lapsed into silence. After a while I shut my eyes and—lulled by the dreamlike progression of the traffic on the freeway, stretching itself indolently across northern California like a single giant centipede—fell asleep.

Find Drew, and we’ll splurge on dinner at Le Petit Village—“Pacific Heights’ Premier French Dining Experience”—to celebrate. That was the deal I’d made with myself. But we hadn’t found Drew—at least, not yet—and some deep vein of lapsed-Protestant guilt made me stingy. It took Ruth ten minutes to persuade me that—rather than buying sandwiches and eating them in our room—we should go to a Mexican restaurant close to the hotel.

“We’re doing what we can,” she said. “Punishing ourselves isn’t going to improve the odds.”

The Guadalajara was a dark, crowded study in browns and golds, with a twangy guitar soundtrack. There were no free tables when we went in, so we stood at the bar, waiting for a couple in a booth at the back who had reached the canoodling stage of the meal. When they finally got up and left, we grabbed our mugs of Baja IPA and pounced. After we’d ordered, Ruth said,

“You know what I was doing a week ago?”

“No. What?”

She swirled a tortilla chip round the bowl of salsa, scooping up a lurid red gobbet. “Speaking to a lawyer. What kind of a case would I have if the Academic Standards Committee found against me and I lost my tenure? The answer, apparently, is: Forget it.”

I shook my head. “I wish—”

“We don’t need to talk about it. I just wanted to say, this is better. Thank you.”

We clinked glasses.

“I hope you’re enjoying it too?”

“Of course.”

“I sense a but in there somewhere, waiting for you to push the Fire button.”

It was so close to something I might have said that it startled me. She saw the effect she’d had and smiled.

“Not a but,” I said. “I’m just wondering what our next move should be. If anything.”

“Well, we have two options, don’t we?” She enumerated them on her fingers. “One is to take what Mitch, whatever his name was, told you at face value, and go find Ogren. Two is to throw in the towel. But I’m not ready to do that. This is the first time I’ve been able to breathe for months. So for me, anyway, two isn’t an option.”

I shrugged. “Problem is, it sounds as if Drew’s a complete fantasist. He’s probably never been anywhere near Birch Ogren. And even if it turned out that—by some bizarre fluke—the story’s true, there’d be no guarantee he’d talk to us. Or, if he did, that we’d learn anything useful.” I slid my credit card out of my wallet and flipped it on the table. “And this is starting to feel the strain.”

“Think of it as a vacation.”

A loud sizzle heralded the arrival of our fajitas. I held off until the waiter had gone.

“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t afford it. This is a job for me. I’ve got to get a good story out of it. If it leads nowhere, I’m done for. It’ll take me months of living on bread and water to pay it off.”

She took a mouthful of chicken and pepper and winced as it burned her lip.

“Bread and water?”

“You know what I mean.”

She licked her fingers. “OK, then how about the next week’s on me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not? I have the money. You don’t. I’m going on anyway, with or without you—but I’d rather it was with. And I’m happy to pay for the privilege.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

“Makes you feel like a kept man?”

I nodded.

“You should get together with Richard Peake. That’s his kind of talk.”

“Why, does that make me a fascist, in the new dispensation?”

She laughed softly, letting the air out through her nose. “Just kidding. I understand.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s not quite that. It’s not being kept. It’s being irrelevant. Realizing that I no longer have anything to offer that the world considers of value.”

She sighed. “Well, I’m getting to feel the same way, if that’s any consolation. And think of all those poor guys trying to survive in Brownville.”

“I do. That’s what so frustrating. I’m a journalist. My instinct is to write something about them. But if I did, thanks to Bone et al, I wouldn’t be able to sell it.”

She nodded.

“Would you accept? If it was the other way round, and I was the one with the money?”

She thought about it for a moment. “It isn’t the other way round. I can’t say.” She drew circles on the table with her finger. “No, actually, I would. This is the first time in years life’s paid me a visit. I’m not going to slam the door on it, just out of pride.”

I felt myself weakening. “Let me sleep on it.”

I slept on it. Or at least I tried to. But just after three in the morning—my biological clock disrupted by yet another time-zone change—I suddenly broke surface in the waking world and couldn’t trick myself back into unconsciousness. Instead I lay there, listening to the hum of traffic, the fussy clicking of the air conditioning, the regular ebb and flow of Ruth’s breathing. What on earth was I doing, in a city I’d never been to before, with a woman I barely knew, looking for a private detective with delusions of grandeur, in hope he’d set me on the path to discovering something that would destroy Evan Bone? I’d managed to persuade myself that I was working, but—in the starless desert of a strange motel room—that seemed ridiculous.

I’d accused Drew of being a fantasist. But God, look at me.

It was after nine when I woke finally. I turned over, reaching for Ruth. She’d gone. On her side of the bed—already cold—she’d left a note:

Back soon. Rx

I got up, had a shower, shaved. I stared at myself in the misty mirror, muttering, For God’s sake, Robert, pull yourself together. Then I rapid-fire-patted my cheeks until they ached and stung.

When I emerged into the bedroom again, she was sitting in the chair, sipping a takeaway coffee. One for me sat on the table, next to a bag of pastries.

She smiled. “Hi. You looked so peaceful, I didn’t like to disturb you.”

“Where did you go?”

“Library. I just wanted to check something. On a computer that couldn’t be traced to us.”

She paused, beaming, inviting me to say What?

“What?”

“About Birch Ogren. I have his address.”