He took half a dozen steps from the door and then turned around to see if the woman with the grey eyes was following, but she was still standing in the hallway.

'Will you come on?' he yelled at her.

She opened her mouth to say something to him, but Shadwell was at the bottom of the stairs by now, and pushing her out of the way. He couldn't linger; there were only a few paces between him and the Salesman. He ran.

The man with the greased-back hair made no real attempt at pursuit once his quarry was out in the open. The young man was whippet-lean, and twice as fleet; the other was a bear in a Savile Row suit. Suzanna had disliked him from the moment she'd set eyes on him. Now he turned and said: 'Why'd you do that, woman?'

She didn't grace the demand with a reply. For one thing, she was still trying to make sense of what she'd just seen; for another, her attention was no longer on the bear but on his partner - or keeper - the woman who had now followed him down the stairs.

Her features were as blank as a dead child's, but Suzanna had never seen a face that exercised such fascination.

'Get out of my way,' the woman said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Suzanna's feet had already begun to move when she cancelled her acquiescence and instead stepped directly into the woman's path, blocking her route to the door. A flood of adrenalin surged through her system as she did so, as though she'd stepped in front of a speeding juggernaut. But the woman mopped in her tracks, and the hook of her gaze caught Suzanna and raised her face to be scrutinized. Meeting the woman's eyes Suzanna knew the adrenalln rush had been well timed: she had just skirted death. That gaze had killed, she'd swear to it: and would again. But not now: now the woman studied Suzanna with curiosity.

'A friend of yours, was he?' she finally said.

Suzanna heard the words spoken, but she couldn't have sworn that the woman's lips had moved to form them.

At the door behind her the bear said: 'Damn thief.'

Then he poked at Suzanna's shoulder, hard.

'Didn't you, hear me telling you?' he said.

Suzanna wanted to turn to the man and tell him to take his hands off her, but the woman hadn't done with her study, and held her with that gaze.

'She heard.' the woman said. This time her lips did move, and Suzanna felt the hold on her relax. But the mere proximity of the other woman made her body tremble. Her groin and breasts felt pricked by tiny thorns.

'Who are you?' the woman demanded.

'Leave it be,' said the bear.

'I warn to know who she is. Why she's here.'

The gaze, which had briefly flitted to the man, settled on Suzanna afresh, and the curiosity had murder in its shadow.

There's nothing here we need . . .' the man was saying.

The woman ignored him.

'Come on now . . . leave it be. . .'

There was something in the tone of his voice of one coaxing an hysteric from the brink of an attack, and Suzanna was glad of his intervention.

'. . . it's too public . . .' he said, '. . . especially here . . .'

After long, breathless moment the woman made the tiniest of nods, conceding the wit of this. She suddenly seemed to completely lose interest in Suzanna, and turned back towards the stairs. At the top of the flight, where Suzanna had once imagined terrors to be in wait for her the gloom, was not quite at rest. There were ragged forms moving up there, so insubstantial she could not be certain whether she saw them or merely sensed their presence. They were spilling down the stairs like poison smoke, losing what little solidity they might have owned as they approached the open door, until, by the time they reached the woman who awaited them at the bottom, their vapours were invisible.

She turned from the stairs and walked past Suzanna to the door, taking with her a cloud of cold and tainted air, as though the wraiths that had come to her were now wreathed about her neck, and clinging to the folds of her dress. Carried unseen into the sunlit human world, until they could congeal again.

The man was already out on the pavement, but before his companion stepped out to join him she turned back to Suzanna. She said nothing, either with her tips or without. Her eyes were quite expressive enough: their promises were all joyless.

Suzanna looked away. She heard the woman's heel on the step. When she looked up again the pair had gone. Drawing a deep breath, she went to the door. Though the afternoon was growing old, the sun was still warm and bright.

Not surprisingly the woman and the bear had crossed over, so as to walk on the shadowed side of the street.

3.

Twenty-four years was a third of a good span; time enough to form some opinions on how the world worked. Up until mere hours ago, Suzanna would have claimed she'd done just that.

Certainly there were sizeable gaps in her comprehension: mysteries, both inside her head and out, that remained unilluminated. But that had only made her the more determined not to succumb to any sentiment or self-delusion that would give those mysteries power over her - a zeal that touched both her private and professional lives. In her love affairs she had always tempered passion with practicality, avoiding the emotional extravagance she'd seen so often become cruelty and bitterness. In her friendships she'd pursued a similar balance: neither too cloying nor too detached. And no less in her craft. The very appeal of making bowls and pots was its pragmatism; the vagaries of art disciplined by the need to create a functional object.

The question she would ask, viewing the most exquisite jug on earth, would be: does it poor? And it was in a sense a quality she sought in every facet of her life.

But here was a problem which defied such simple distinctions: that threw her oft-balance; left her sick and bewildered.

First the memories. Then Mimi, more dead than alive but passing dreams through the air.

And now this meeting, with a woman whose glance had death in it, and yet had left her feeling more alive than perhaps she'd ever felt.

It was that last paradox that made her leave the house without finishing her search, slamming the door on whatever dramas it had waiting for her. Instinctively, she made for the river. There, sitting awhile in the sun, she might make some sense of the problem.

There were no ships on the Mersey, but the air was so clear she could see loud shadows moving over the hills of Clwyd. There was no such clarity within her, however. Only a chaos of feelings, all unsettlingly familiar, as though they'd been inside her for years, biding their time behind the screen of pragmatism she'd established to keep them from sight. Like echoes, waiting on a mountain-face for the shout they were born to answer.

She'd heard that shout today. Or rather, met it, face to face, on the very spot in the narrow hallway where as a six year-old she'd stood and trembled in fear of the dark. The two confrontations were inextricably linked, though she didn't know how. All she knew was that she was suddenly alive to a space inside herself where the haste and habit of her adult life had no dominion.

She sensed the passions that drifted in that space only vaguely, as her fingertips might sense fog. But she would come to know them better with time, those passions, and the acts that they'd engender: she was certain of that as she'd been certain of nothing in days. She'd know them - and, God help her - she'd love them as her own.

III.

SELLING HEAVEN.

Mr Mooney? Mr Brendan Mooney?'

'That's right.'

'Do you happen to have a son by the name of Calhoun?'

'What business is it of yours?'

Brendan wanted to know. Then, before the other could answer, said: 'Nothing's happened to him?'

The stranger shook his head, taking hold of Brendan's hand and pumping it vigorously.

'You're a very lucky man, Mr Mooney, if I may make so bold.'

That, Brendan knew, was a lie.