It was gloomy and airless in the house and the crack of the door was darker still. He wondered if she was still in bed after all, if she'd forgotten everything she would have forgotten how to sleep and when. No, her voice came back from the room, faint but not tired, asking him to be sent in.

The landlady still kept the door blocked. 'I'm making some tea, do you want some?'

Yes.She pulled back and tapped Lecha.s.seur roughly on the shoulder. 'Go in,' she said, 'she won't bite.' Then she turned and climbed back down the stairs, hobbling as though each step were painful, though she'd been quite sprightly on the way up. Typical eccentric Brit. Lec Typical eccentric Brit. Lecha.s.seur pushed on through into the dark.

The girl's room was unlit but there was just enough daylight filtering through to see the edges of her world. It was a small room, not much larger than his own, actually he realised as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom a little smaller and bristling with clutter. There was only the one door, one exit unless you counted the windows. The air tasted of must and mothb.a.l.l.s, as if the fresh air had been breathed-up weeks ago and never replenished. The walls were papered and patterned with wilting brown fleur-de-lis. There was a narrow mantelpiece to the right of the door, over a blocked-up fireplace, decorated with photographs framed sepia darknesses and a coronation mug, probably predating the room's current tenant. A fire would have been more use, as despite the lived-in scent of the room it was chilly.

Most of the far wall was window; it was a front room and should have commanded a view of the street outside. He'd a.s.sumed the curtains were closed but no, they were folded back to their edges. The light was locked out by raised blackout boards. The silhouette girl no longer in pink pyjamas but a plain blouse and skirt sat in the chair in the middle of the dark room, staring at her visitor, her eyes glistening. She was small, he must have seemed a giant shadow before her.

'This is cosy,' Lecha.s.seur said, hoping to break the mood. She said nothing.

'I'm called Honore Lecha.s.seur,' he added breezily but awkward. Honore was an Honore was an odd given name, he didn't like to use it with strangers. 'I'd like to ask you some questions. I don't know if you can help...' odd given name, he didn't like to use it with strangers. 'I'd like to ask you some questions. I don't know if you can help...'

'That's a good name,' she said. He heard her lips twitching, repeating it silently.

'Thank you.'

Her eyes slid sideways and down in the dark. 'You can ask me things. Lots of people come here to talk to me.' Her voice was becalmed. Her arms were stretched out on the rests either side of her, there was no energy in her body.

'Why do you think they do that?'She rippled. 'I'm a big mystery, they want to find out about me. Sometimes they think I can tell the future, but I don't know anything.' The way she said anything s anything sounded ominously complete. Lecha.s.seur couldn't hear an accent beyond British, her background had been wiped clean along with her memory. He thought of the precise voices of BBC radio, hers was honed just as smooth, though less mannered.

'Are you a detective?'

'What makes you ask that?'

'You're American. I can't be famous in America. They must've sent for you specially.' She sighed. 'I'm sure no one in America can have heard of me'

'I've been here for a long time. I'm not a detective.' He paused, wondering how best to phrase his next sentence. 'I came to warn you, you're in danger.'

She was looking at him again but he couldn't tell if she believed him. The room trembled, then shook, the walls vibrating violently and the photographs dancing on the mantelpiece. The silence was drowned by the clatter of coaches, a train pa.s.sing close by. It rose and fell in the s.p.a.ce of a minute and the girl didn't say a word.

'This house backs onto the railroad?'

'Yes.'

'That might be your best bet. If someone tries to grab you from the house they'll probably come through the front. If that happens get out the back along the rails, if you can.'

The girl laughed faintly, in silhouette. 'You're serious, aren't you?''A man called Eric Walken is planning to kidnap you. I don't know when but soon he's already postponed it once. Does that name mean anything to you?' Silence in the darkness. 'The Inferno Club? Covent Garden?' Club? Covent Garden?'

Her head was shaking. 'No. Not a thing.'The landlady returned bearing tea on a tray. She shuffled past Lecha.s.seur to lay it on the table between them, two half-full mugs and a plate of grey biscuits. There was an electric lamp on the table and she turned it on. The little light struggled in the gloom but Lecha.s.seur got a clearer view of the girl and her face. It was an odd shape, stuck undecided between narrow and chubby. She had pale skin, dark shadows round her eyes. Green irises, watery and stubborn. She didn't wear make-up, or hadn't recently.

'Thank you, Mrs Beardsley,' she said. The landlady looked stocky in her tan coat and headscarf.

'I'm going out shopping,' she said pointedly. 'I won't be long.'She pulled the door to after her. The girl reached hungrily for her tea and biscuits and nodded for Lecha.s.seur to do the same. He touched the mug to his lips, it was lukewarm and filmed-over, he didn't drink but put it away on the mantelpiece.

'She's very good to me, Mrs Beardsley.' She smiled wistfully, the first he'd seen from her. 'No one else would put me up.'

He grinned back at her. 'That's not true. You're a celebrity. People in this town would have been fighting to put a roof over your head.'

'If you say so, but there's the rent...'

'I thought the papers were paying!'

She shrugged again, it was a pretty gesture. The tea, the biscuits and the landlady's departure seemed to have relaxed her. 'I hadn't heard that. Do you really think I'm in trouble?'

'I know Walken is having you watched. There's a spy hanging around the other side of the street. He's keeping an eye on you. Do you go out much?' She shook her head. 'Next time you do, there'll be someone on your tail.'

She giggled and leant back, out of the light. 'You're pulling my leg.'

'I'm serious.'

'There are lots of people outside. This is a busy street. He could be anyone.'

'He's standing guard. Trust me, I was a soldier. I know a sentry when I see one.' She still looked sceptical. 'Look, if we take one of these boards down you'll be able to see for yourself.'

She looked reluctant, but her face creased as if to say why not?That was good, he felt he was getting through to her. They went to the window together. She didn't have the stature or the strength to be much help taking the board down, she was a lot smaller than him and as he struggled with the blackout they b.u.mped into each other, her narrow chin banging against his shoulder.

A soft rectangle of winter light opened into the room, picking out the dust flecks on the air and the face of the woman he'd come to see. In the dark he could have believed that she was a girl, but she looked older in the natural light, maybe mid-twenties. She had a child's smooth skin and her long brown hair was worn loose like a schoolgirl's, but there was a flaw of experience running down her face. He'd seen cracks like that on the faces of men who'd been broken at Omaha. The abyss opened in their eyes and gradually the rest of their self was sucked in. It was a wound.

From this height he could see that the empty lot opposite wasn't a true bombsite. The building had been torn down deliberately and neatly, probably unsafe after a raid. He saw it as it would be in the future, a nothing between the houses, they'd make it a yard but there'd be no new building there for decades. It would stay there, an absent war memorial.

There was no one there. Walken's spy had gone, or was hiding.

The girl laughed and went back to her seat.

'It took us a while to get the blackout down,' Lecha.s.seur protested. 'He had plenty of warning.'

'You really are a detective, Mr Lecha.s.seur.'

He eased round to face her again. He must have looked tired from standing so the girl indicated he should sit on the bed. He lowered himself wearily onto it, all the while studying her face for clues. She still looked nervous and expectant but had relaxed in the light. It fell across one half of her face, she was very pretty.

As a boy he'd been friends with a girl called Cecile, a blue-eyed Cajun. He was nine, she was five years older, but she'd been taken with his sullen isolated sensitivity. He'd saved enough money to buy her ice cream, one day in the poor depressed American summer, and they sat together on a baking sidewalk, while behind them old prune-skinned men argued on their benches, while in front a funeral parade went by. Cecile sweated under her blouse and cotton skirt, a heady scent, and they shared that moment totally without speaking.

He still couldn't speak. Cecile was here in front of him. Ice cream would have burned his mouth in Britain, but he wanted to taste it. Comradeship. T Comradeship. The girl looked uncomfortable but stayed polite through the silence.

He said: 'I'm not a detective. I'm a fixer.''Yes? You mean you're someone who mends things? Can you fix people?'

He shook his head. 'It means I'm a spiv. Black marketeer. I can fix you up with whatever you need, whatever you want, if the price is right.'

'Black marketeer?' She laughed and he was relieved to find he wasn't offended.

'So,' she said, reaching for something solid after her fit of giggles. She was still tiny and vulnerable in her chair. 'What can I do for you?'

'I'll be honest, I never paid much attention to those newspaper stories about you. I came here because I found out about Walken. I'm looking for someone who's disappeared and he and maybe you are mixed up in that.'

She nodded. 'This sounds good. One person disappears, another mysteriously appears, maybe there's a balance.'

'I don't think it works that way, unless you're a man who's been magically transformed into a woman.' He nearly said girl. 'Read a girl. 'Read any Kafka?'

She shook her head playfully. 'I don't remember.'

'Have you ever met anyone who calls himself the Doctor?'

'I've met loads of doctors. None of them knows what's wrong with me.'

'Not anyone who's the Doctor?''No.' She smiled through her wounded face, leaning forward. 'What's wrong?'

He felt winded. He'd been so sure that she was connected to the Doctor. Her sincere hollow reply left him with nothing. She was still leant forward, scared in her eyes that she'd said the wrong thing. 'You've dead-ended me,' he stammered. 'I think I've wasted your time...'

He tried to rise, but the girl leapt up and grabbed his shoulders firmly.'Don't go yet,' she told him. 'Stay, please. I have to go to the other room for a moment but please, I won't be long. You're not taking up my time at all.'

Reluctantly he sank back onto the bed, from here the girl seemed to tower.

'There's a sc.r.a.pbook under my pillow. It's got a lot of my clippings. Take a look through,' she suggested. 'There might be something in there that isn't in here.' Her hand went to the side of her head, fleetingly as if she were scared of damaging it. She scurried away.

Lecha.s.seur found the book and began to flip through it. It wasn't much different from the file he'd found in Walken's office, though here and now he had time to browse. There wasn't much. The story of how the girl walked out of the night with amnesia was familiar and the papers added nothing but speculation. There had been blasts in the East End that night and the more sober papers speculated, proofless, that she was a sh.e.l.l-shocked victim of a leftover bomb. Of course, that left the mystery of why no one had come forward to identify her.

The yellow press thought she'd been dropped off by a flying disc. Typical.

The later clippings were from puff pieces, describing the girl's celebrity. She was receiving visitors from all over the capital: wellwishers and admirers bringing her presents; amateur sleuths trying to solve the mystery; advertisers looking for endors.e.m.e.nts. Lecha.s.seur felt guiltily selfish. He turned a page and found himself staring at The Girl in the Pink Bikini, a yellow The Girl in the Pink Bikini, a yellow press piece with a full-length photograph of just that. She looked ashamed of herself in the picture. press piece with a full-length photograph of just that. She looked ashamed of herself in the picture. London's favourite mystery girl takes clothes rationing seriously! WE know it's on the way out but don't jog HER memory just yet! London's favourite mystery girl takes clothes rationing seriously! WE know it's on the way out but don't jog HER memory just yet!

He heard her step back into the room. 'You were talking about light when they found you. Do you remember anything about that?'

'Just a flash of light, I remember. It was coming out of a door not a house, a wardrobe or a cabinet. They say I was caught in a blast but I couldn't tell you for certain.'

He looked up at her. She'd changed out of her clothes and was standing in the frame of the door in her pink pyjamas.

He must have looked shocked. 'What's the matter?' she said, hurt. 'Most of the men who come here want to see this. Don't you?'

'I don't mind. I wasn't expecting it.'

'Do you want me to take them off?'

'Yes. No. I'm happy if you want to wear them.' He raised his hands in happy if you want to wear them.' He raised his hands in surrender.

The girl stumbled into the room, he tried to imagine her wandering out of the fog like that but here she was too self-conscious. She stayed clear of the exposed windowpane. Modesty? Or had she really believed his warning about Walken's spy?

She didn't sit back in her chair but perched eagerly on the bed beside him, taking the sc.r.a.pbook from his lap and closing it up. She was a strange creature, scrubbed clean of her ident.i.ty. She leaned forward, trying to kiss him, but he resisted and she planted it on his dry, unmoving lips. When he didn't respond she turned bashful, stiffening and sliding back on the bed.

'Did you think of anything more to ask?' she said, drably.'There's something I'd like to try.' She nodded. 'When you were a kid, did you ever play the game '

'I don't remember being a kid but go on.'

'Okay, have you ever played that game where you have two people and one person says a word and the second has to say the first thing that comes into their head?'

'I've tried that, it doesn't work.'

'I've tried it too. I was in hospital, screwed up, they put a doctor onto me to sort me out.'

'The Doctor?'

He hummed. 'I wouldn't think so. Try it,' he said. 'Cat ' '

She drew a silent finger across her lips then lay back on her bed, between him and the wall. The front of her pyjama jacket rode up slightly, revealing a tight skinny stomach. He could hear her breathe.

'Abraxas ' '

'Ice cream cream ' '

'Doctor ' '

'Light ' '

He could hear the rain dribbling on the window, the dust shimmering on the air, the uncomfortable shift of the girl's body on the rustling bedclothes. Her eyes were glazed over, not with boredom, with fascination. It was the crack in her face, sucking him in, she'd recognised the same wound on him.

'It hasn't done anything for me. They've tried it. I don't seem to be able to make the connections. A cat is just a cat to me. Did this do you any good?'

'I'm here aren't I?''Good point. What did the doctor say about the game, what it revealed about you?'

'He thought I was being hostile, reacting negatively to everything he said. He said cat, I said dog. He said black, I said white. War/peace. Man/ woman. Little/big. I turned his words inside out. Then he said, there's nothing wrong with that, it's good for a soldier to think that way.'

'So?''That was when I understood I didn't want to be a soldier. He was a good guy, that doctor. He was a little Scotsman, one of those royal eccentrics you have over here. Only doctor I've ever seen with a beard.'