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almost hidden beneath free papers, free offers, handouts from Chinese restaurants and taxi firms. A succession of tenants had etched numbers on to the wallpaper in a rising arc, some of them scored heavily through.
    “Mind the fourth step,” Karen warned, following Lynn closely.
    There was a poster stuck to the door of Karen’s room, two lovers kissing in a city street.
    “Go on in,” Karen said.
    It had originally been a back bedroom, a view from the square of window down over a succession of back yards, old outhouses, an alley pushing narrowly in between. Cats and rusted prams and washing lines.
    The interior was a mixture of arranged and untidy: neatly stacked books alongside music cassettes, each labeled in a clear, strong hand; earrings hanging from cotton threads, red, yellow, blue; on the bed a duvet bundled to one side, as though Karen had been lying beneath it when Lynn had rung the bell: tights in many colors dangling down from the mantelpiece and the top of the opened wardrobe door, drying.
    “Sit down.”
    The choice was between the bed and a black canvas chair with pale wooden arms and Lynn took the latter.
    The room smelled of cigarette smoke and good perfume.
    “Would you like some coffee?”
    There were five used mugs, one on the scarred table, three close together on the floor beside the bed, the last standing on the chest of drawers, in front of a mirror with photographs jutting at all angles from its frame. “No, thanks,” Lynn said with a quick smile. She was wondering which of the men in the photos was Fletcher.
    “What d’you want to know?” Karen said.
    They went through the worst first, the discovery of the houseman on the bridge, the fears that he might die, be already dead; then their arrangements for that evening, the phone call which might have been from Fletcher yet might as easily not.
    “You haven’t known him all that long then?”
    Karen shook her head. “Two months.” She lifted her head to see that Lynn was still looking at her, encouraging her to continue. “I went to this Medics Ball, I don’t know.” She gestured vaguely with her hand, the one not holding a cigarette. “I’d been going around with these medical students, I don’t know how that started really, except most of the people on my course are a bunch of deadheads. Either that or posers of the first order.”
    “Your course?”
    “English. Drama subsid. If he didn’t die before the Second World War, he didn’t exist. That’s English anyway. Drama’s not so bad.”
    “Are they all men, then, the people you study?”
    “Sorry?”
    “Writers. You said, he.”
    Karen stared at her. What the fuck? A feminist policewoman? “Figure of speech,” she said.
    Lynn Kellogg nodded. “The medical students you mentioned, were they male?”
    “Mostly. To be honest, I think women are pretty boring, don’t you?”
    “No,” said Lynn. “No, I don’t.”
    She could see the shifting look in Karen Archer’s distressed eyes, the word forming silently behind them—dyke!
    “Anyway,” asked Karen, “what does it matter?”
    Lynn sidestepped the question. “Before you began going out with Dr. Fletcher, you did have another boyfriend?”
    “Yes.”
    “One or several?”
    “What’s that got to do with you?”
    “I mean, this relationship, the earlier one, was it serious?”
    Karen dropped the end of her cigarette into a quarter-inch of cold coffee. “I suppose so.”
    “And the man?”
    “What about him?”
    “Was he serious?”
    “Ian?” Karen laughed. “Only things he gets serious about are anatomy and Blackadder .”
    “Is he over here?” Lynn went to the mirror, Karen almost grudgingly following. “One of these?”
    “There.”
    Karen pointed to a figure in a skimpy swimming costume, lots of body hair, posing at the edge of a pool with a champagne bottle in one hand and a pint glass in the other. There were three other pictures: Ian in a formal dinner jacket but wearing a red nose; Ian