An open book and an empty teacup sat on a table beside the other chair, and beside it, a basket of sewing. A worn rug that had once been of good quality covered most of the bare floorboards, glass-fronted cases on either side of the fireplace held books, and the mantel top held a collection of colorful and eccentrically carved wooden animals. He knew instinctively that they were Erika's.
'From Bavaria,' she said, having come back into the room and seen his gaze. 'My mother brought them to me when I was a child. One of the few things I managed to save when I went back to Berlin after the war, as they weren't considered of any value by the Nazis or the looters.'
'And that?' he asked, nodding at the small grand piano that took up most of the remainder of the sitting room.
Erika handed him a small crystal glass, and as he took it he felt ham-fisted, clumsy. But the sherry was dry and gold and, when he sipped it, tasted like distilled sunlight.
'The piano?' She sat in the chair beside the open book, crossing her ankles beneath the bell made by the skirt of her pale blue shirtwaist dress. 'I worked the neighborhood watch during the war. When a house was bombed, we tried to find relatives to take any undamaged possessions. Sometimes the owners had been killed, or sometimes families had left London and we had no way to contact them. The piano was the only thing left standing in a house on Ladbroke Road. No one wanted it, and so some of the men made a sort of pallet with wheels and rolled it here for me.
'We became very ingenious at making things to do what we needed-cobbling together, I think you would call it, although I can't imagine why.'
'Something to do with shoes,' said Gavin. 'Do you play?' he added, not distracted from the piano.
She smiled. 'My mother made me take lessons as a child. But I was always better at listening than playing.' She took a small sip of her sherry, not, he thought, out of abstention, but because she wanted to savor it. Erika was a person who savored things…a book, a sip of wine, an abandoned piano, the faded colors in a rug. How had she lived in compromise with David Rosenthal, whom Gavin had come to believe had occupied only the blind tunnel of obsession?
'I can't imagine your husband here,' he said, astounded by his rudeness even as he spoke his thoughts aloud.
'Oh, but he wasn't here very much,' Erika answered, with no hint of offense. 'He was working or he was at the Reading Room, and often he did other things that he did not choose to share with me.'
'You didn't mind?'
'It would have made no difference whether I minded or not.' She set her glass on the table, the crystal making the faintest chink against the wood, and met his eyes directly. 'Inspector Hoxley, what have you come to tell me?'
'It's Gavin,' he said, knowing he had introduced himself to her when they first met, and feeling a fool.
'Gavin. Yes, I know.' She regarded him with the same gravity that had so fascinated him during that first interview.
The words came out in a rush. 'I've been warned off the case. Told I'd lose my job if I didn't leave it alone.' He lifted his glass, saw to his surprise that he had finished the sherry, and to his further astonishment, added, 'And my wife left me.'
'Because of this? Because of David?' For the first time that night he heard distress in her voice.
'No. Or if so, it was just the last little piece.'
She nodded slowly. 'I know about last little pieces. They are the ones that cause the edifice to topple.'
He had stopped noticing her accent until she said a word like edifice, and then it made him want to smile. 'Yes.'
Erika rose and took his glass. 'I will find us something else to drink. Tea, if all else fails. I became very English, during the war.'
Finding he couldn't sit, Gavin followed her into the kitchen. Had she meant her husband, when she said she knew about last little pieces? Had her marriage failed before her husband's death?
She stood with her back to him, reaching up into the cupboard for cups and saucers. Gavin felt a return of the light-headedness that had brought him to her door, although surely it couldn't be the sherry.
Erika paused with the cups in midair, as if she sensed his nearness. Then she very carefully lowered the china to the worktop and rested her hands on its edge. She stood so still that she might have been waiting for a clock to tick or the world to turn on its axis.
He cupped his hands round her shoulders and felt the heat from her skin through the thin cotton of her dress. A quiver ran through her body, but she neither turned nor pulled away. 'Erika,' he whispered, 'I shouldn't-your husband-this is wrong-'
In answer, she placed her hands on his and slipped them down until they covered her breasts, and he gasped with a desire so intense it left him shaking.
She said, 'My husband never touched me after the night we left Berlin.' Then she turned in his arms and tilted her head until she could meet his eyes. 'And this-this is whatever we make it, my love.'
Even though the Allies were fighting a war against Nazi Germany, whose anti-Semitism was a central plank of its public policy, anti-Semitism did not suddenly disappear from Britain during the war, but persisted and even increased.
– Pamela Shatzkes, Holocaust and Rescue: Impotent or Indifferent? Anglo-Jewry, 1938-1945
Shadow had fallen in the courtyard at St. Barts by the time Gemma reached the main gates. She ducked inside and pulled her mobile from her bag, checking for messages now that she was out of the bright afternoon sun and could actually see the display. Nothing yet from Kincaid, and nothing from her sister. Closing the phone, she glanced up and caught sight of her father emerging from the temporary corridor that led round to the back of the complex.
She had seen him before he saw her, and in that instant took in his slumped shoulders and bleak expression. 'Dad,' she called out, and hurried towards him. 'Is Mum all right?' Glancing at her watch, she added, 'I haven't missed visiting-' The words died on her lips. At the sound of her voice, he had looked up, his face hardening, his chin coming up with the familiar bulldog pugnaciousness.
'You've missed seeing her, if that worries you at all,' he said as he came up to her. 'She's sleeping. It was a bad day, but then you'll know that, won't you? With all the time you've been taking from work to spend with your mum.'
'Dad-I was-I am-but-'
'You have something better to do with your time? Is that what you're telling me?'
'No, Dad, of course not. But someone was killed last night-'
'And that's more important than your mother dying?'
Gemma stared at him, feeling as if she'd been punched. 'What are you talking about? Mum's not dying. They've said it's treatable-'
'That's doctor talk for when they don't want to tell you the truth. She's bad. I've never seen her like this.'
To Gemma's horror, she saw that he was close to tears. 'Dad, she's going to be all right.' She reached out,
