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really. If the police were lazy or stupid it was nothing at all. Their professional habit of seizing upon the most easily comprehensible explanation would make them overlook things that didn’t fit. They would assume a gang of thieves had murdered two wealthy citizens, then quarreled over whatever they had found on the bodies or in the Bentley. There would be no telling what that was, because somebody in the gang must have lived, and he would have carried it away with him. That part was inevitable: no matter how much they wanted to, the police would not be able to convince themselves that three men who had died of a broken skull, a knife up under the ribs and a bullet fired from five yards out had not required the services of at least one person who hadn’t been found on the scene. But even that much would take them a few more hours, because before they could commit themselves, they would have to go over everything with tape measures and cameras and sketch pads. And they would bring with them the assumptions that would make their efforts a waste of time. Because all the time they would be preparing to look for the missing man among the local street thieves, not among the acquaintances of the two wealthy victims in the Bentley.
    Just as he had at Brighton, he made Meg stay in the ladies’ restroom while he bought the tickets. He had to get her out of here without letting more than a few people see them together. He waited at the most crowded ticket window, then all he said was, “Bath. Two,” to hide his accent, and took the tickets without looking at the man inside.
    They met again and stood a few yards apart on the platform just before the train was to leave, and boarded separately as though they were unaware of each other. Later, if anyone remembered seeing a pretty young woman in a yellow dress, they wouldn’t remember seeing her with a man. As Margaret had walked across the huge nineteenth-century station, he had watched her. She came out of the ladies’ room with several other young women in bright, stylish dresses, and stayed within a few steps of them all the way to the platform. An observer might have said she was one of them, five girls who each merited a second glance, but who all drifted across the crowded place at once, a single vision of colors, stockinged legs, clashing scents, smooth white complexions, hair up, hair hanging long. Which one was blond and which dark? Who would remember? And the women themselves were laughing and talking with animation, too interested in themselves to pay attention to each other, let alone to someone who was simply walking in the same direction. He didn’t know if she had done this instinctively to fade into the herd of people who could hide her best, or had merely let the fear guide her, the terror of being alone attracting her to people as much like her friends as possible. It didn’t matter; they were going to get through this.
    On the train he found her again, but when he sat down beside her, he realized that she’d had time to think. “We’ll stop at your place and close the house,” she said. “Then you’ll stay with me.”
    When she conducted him into the library, he was envious. She had grown up here, in huge rooms with twenty-foot walls in two tiers, all of them lined with paintings and books. It didn’t matter what the books were about or who had written them. To him they were a symbol of privilege: the more ancient and eccentric they were, the greater the advantage. The room represented how many generations of people who had titles and money and manners and tutors and parents—ten?
    “Do you have to go? You could stay here and call for help. Or we could drive up to Yorkshire. Even if they’d been watching you, nobody could know about that, and lots of people must have been hidden there over the years. My forebears in the time of Henry the Eighth didn’t feel comfortable with the forced conversion and may have hidden a monk or two—lots of people did.