bows of cheerily sinking ships. The store smelled of mint and cloves and honey.
The pleasantly fragrant air was broken by a silvery crash of tin hitting tiles in the storeroom behind the counter, followed by the ticking skitter of tiny spheres skimming across the floor.
‘Shit!’ A woman’s voice, followed by a stream of breathy words that could only be swearing.
‘Hello?’ called Nicholas.
Silence. Then a head poked out through the storeroom door. Her hair was light brown and her eyes were dark brown. Her eyes and mouth were rounded in three embarrassed Os.
‘Oh, bum,’ she whispered, and disappeared again from sight.
Nicholas set down his bags and picked up a few of the tiny objects that had rolled under the counter. They were wooden beads, not unlike those on the necklace Suzette had given him.
The woman stepped from behind the counter, tucking her hair behind one ear. ‘Such a klutz,’ she said.
Nicholas tried to guess her age. Twenty-five? Thirty? Her skin was milk pale and clear, lips red and pursed as she stooped to collect the errant beads.
‘I fall down stairs,’ he said.
She scooted about energetically, in and out of Nicholas’s sight, picking up beads. ‘Ah, but then you’re only hurting yourself. These, now. .’ She stood and poured them from her hands into the tin. ‘These can trip people very well.’
‘What are they?’
She affected a wise expression as she slyly turned the tin’s label towards herself to read furtively: ‘“Willow- wood beads — for Dreameing, Inspiration and Fertility”. “Dreaming” spelt with an extra “e” for Olde English Effecte.’
Nicholas nodded.
The young woman smiled. It was a pretty smile. She shrugged. ‘People buy them.’
‘I have some myself.’
‘Willow beads?’
‘I think they’re elder wood.’
She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, then shook her head and shrugged again. Nicholas found it an attractive gesture. He was sure men shopped here just to look at her.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Since I can’t trip you, can I help you?’
He thought about it. ‘I don’t think so. No.’
‘Okay,’ she said, frowning. A small, sweet line appeared between her eyes.
‘There’s a mark on your door,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
He nodded at it.
She stepped out from behind the counter. She was slim and nearly his height. Her dress was of an old cut, but snugly fitted. Simple, but flattering to her figure. She kept herself a few steps distant from him as she went to the door. He told her to open it, and pointed to the rune.
She frowned again as she peered at it. ‘You know, I’ve never noticed that. Did you put it there?’ She levelled both eyes at him with startling frankness.
He blinked, off guard. ‘No. There used to be a seamstress here, when I was a kid. She was a bit creepy.’
‘I’ve been here a year,’ the young woman said. ‘Before me was a pool supply guy. The place reeked of chlorine.’ She shrugged again, and cocked her head as if to ask where this was going.
Nicholas realised it was going nowhere. ‘I have a cold,’ he said suddenly, and instantly wondered where the words had come from.
She looked at him for a moment. The frank gaze was strangely erotic — as if she were imagining him undressing, and finding the thought pleasing. Then she nodded to herself and ducked from sight. He could hear the sounds of tins opening and the crunching of slender fingers in dried leaves. She returned with a paper bag, which she sealed with a sticker from beside the till. ‘Sage, ginger, echinacea, garlic. Make a tea with it.’
Nicholas took the bag doubtfully. ‘How will it taste?’
She smiled. ‘Dreadful. Eight dollars fifty.’
As she handed him change for his ten, she asked, ‘Are you a local?’
Nicholas looked at her. This close, he could smell her hair. It smelled like vanilla, clean and good. He thought for a moment. ‘Yes. Home again.’
She nodded approvingly. ‘Next time, I’ll try something much more treacherous than beads.’
‘I look forward to it,’ he said. ‘Sorry about the mark thing. I just thought. . You know.’
‘Strange marks,’ she said.
It was Nicholas’s turn to shrug.
‘Do you think it could be Chinese?’ she asked. ‘They used to have market gardens somewhere around here, I heard. It could be for luck.’
‘Could be. I’m Nicholas.’ He extended his hand.
She looked at it, and took it, and shook it firmly.
‘Rowena.’ She smiled. ‘We’re well met.’
‘We are,’ he agreed.
He found himself thinking about Rowena’s smile on his way home, and so guiltily buried the memory of it.
He was emptying the letterbox when a man stepped through him. Nicholas jumped, his heart suddenly kicked into a sprint.
Gavin Boye kept walking up to the front porch of the house, silently carrying his gun in a black, glossy garbage bag. He stopped, then knocked silently on the door. No one answered.
Nicholas felt a greasy knot in the pit of his stomach. This was too much like the dead boy with his screwdriver outside his flat in Ealing. And that memory led back to Cate’s death.
He dropped the mail back in the letterbox and stepped out onto the footpath, closing the gate behind him.
It was just after lunch when a balding, constantly smiling real estate agent handed Nicholas keys to a furnished flat on Bymar Street. Nicholas had signed the lease, payed two months rent in advance, and been allowed to use the agency’s telephone to connect power and gas.
He carried the keys and his bag of herbal tea up the concrete stairs to the first-floor flat, unlocked the door and stepped inside. The furniture was cheap and badly worn. The fridge had an asthmatic rattle. The carpet smelled faintly of cannabis and wet dog. The white curtains of the front room hung as listless as dressed game fowl. He pulled one aside, repulsed by the greasy feel of the fabric, and looked down the street.
At the end of Bymar Street was Carmichael Road, and beyond it, the heavy darkness of the woods.
In the sagging kitchen, Nicholas found a ceramic kettle with a wire element, and boiled water. How could the woods still be there? How did they survive the housing boom of the fifties, the licentious building rackets of the seventies, the fiscal orgy of the ’03 spike?
It wasn’t a loved park. No one went in there. In fact, people hurried past them. People
No. Not yet. First, he would go to Gavin Boye’s funeral. He would see Gavin’s widow, and Mrs Boye.
He chewed listlessly, staring, but the woods were a sea of shadow.
