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fine.”
    James pulled himself up a step. Level with me now, he looked down at me. He was close enough that I could smell shaving soap. He was almost ridiculously attractive, his features even, his eyes calm and intelligent, his lips a firm line. I’d seen that handsome face up close once before, smelled that familiar shaving soap, under circumstances that were rather humiliating. I didn’t like to recall it, and I wondered whether he remembered it at all. With the luck I had with men—with James—he most likely remembered it perfectly.
Chin up, Ellie. He’s just a man.
    James nodded toward the building behind me, the movement emphasizing the line of his jaw. “Do you know where she is?”
    “How would I?” I replied.
    He gave me half a smile at that. He was different from the man he’d been three years before, though I couldn’t put my finger on how. A little sadder, perhaps. “Her real name is Joyce Gowther,” he said.“She’s from Norfolk, twenty-nine years old. Her father owns a small brewery, though she hasn’t seen him in years, since she came to London to take up acting.”
    I stared at him, openmouthed. He kept the smile, watching me, and didn’t move away.
    “Acting must not have worked out for her,” he continued, “because a few years later she surfaced as Ramona, spirit medium and fortune-teller. She’s never been married, doesn’t seem to have many clients. She was at the séance with Gloria, as you heard, though I don’t know why. The police questioned her until about eleven o’clock yesterday morning.”
    I bit my lip. “All right, that’s useful. Thank you.”
    He leaned closer and I tried not to jump away. “Admit it,” he said, his voice quiet. “We want the same thing, Ellie, and you could use a partner.”
    I hear he drinks too much, or he used to,
Davies had said. Perhaps he did. I’d never seen any evidence of it, and since I’d first met him in a bar on Gerrard Street in which all of us were drunk except him, I had reason to know. James Hawley, the mystery. I raised my eyes to his.
    “Why?” I asked him. “Gloria is gone. She’s been nothing to you for years, and I never was anything to you at all. Why are you here?”
    A frown crossed his forehead, but his expression gave nothing away. “Have luncheon with me,” he said.
    “Luncheon?”
    He shrugged. “It’s lunchtime. You’re hungry.”
    I glanced behind me at Ramona’s ramshackle building, its dirty stoop and blank windows. I
was
hungry; I hadn’t eaten since I’d left the house that morning. I could practically hear Gloria’s voice in my head.
Who gives a damn what happened three years ago? You can have luncheon with a man who melts your insides, or you can go off alone. Darling, sometimes you’re an idiot.
    “Very well,” I said finally. “Luncheon. You lead the way.”

CHAPTER NINE

    J ames found us a place on the Streatham High Road, a restaurant smelling of freshly baked bread and coffee and populated with small tables and booths. It was half empty, and we took a seat at a booth by the front windows, looking out onto the street, the cracked leather of the seat threatening to snag the backs of my stockings as I adjusted my skirt.
    “Be honest,” I said to him as the waiter brought tea. “Do you know where Ramona is?”
    “No,” said James. He took off his hat and dropped it onto the seat next to him, briefly running a hand through his hair. It was dark blond, just as I remembered, and he’d kept the length shorter than most men did. It sat soft and sleek against his head, the temples pressed from his hat, and if he wore any hair cream, I couldn’t detect it. “Though I’ll have an answer of some kind tomorrow night at nine o’clock.”
    “What happens tomorrow at nine o’clock?”
    He pulled a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his jacketand unfolded it. As he smoothed it over the table between us, he replied, “She either appears, or she doesn’t, for this.”
    It was a