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quickly enough. Or simply because they were finished with him, and it amused them. The bitter truth was that Cathy Ash would have been better off if she’d died four years ago. She was never coming home.
    If Ash had asked Hazel what she honestly thought, she’d have told him. She’d have sat with him while he dealt with it; and maybe it would have taken all the strength he had left, but in the end whatever survived would be standing on rock, not quicksand. After the grieving was done he could think about moving forward.
    But he hadn’t asked her. He hadn’t wanted to know what she thought. If she’d tried to tell him anyway, he’d have refused to listen. That was why he didn’t want her around anymore: he didn’t want to hear that all he could do was make things worse. He was sticking his fingers in his ears like a frightened child.
    There’s only one way to help a frightened child: hold it until the monsters go away. But Ash didn’t want holding, at least not by her.
    Thinking thus brought a bitter taste to Hazel’s mouth, not because she thought Ash was behaving badly but because she suspected she was. She was angry with him, and that wasn’t reasonable. Three months ago the man had barely functioned as a human being, torn to shreds by his warring emotions. Now he found himself in a situation that would have challenged someone with no emotions. And she had the gall to resent the fact that some of his decisions were not the ones she would have made for him?
    “Grow up, Hazel Best,” she growled at herself, climbing the stairs to her rooms at the top of Mrs. Poliakov’s Villa Biala in Balfour Street.
    With her key in the door, she froze. It felt wrong. The lock turned, but reluctantly, as if something had happened to it while she’d been out. Something, possibly, involving little bits of bent metal and 22-’loid credit cards.
    She knew what she should do next. She knew what the sensible response was, and whatever her strengths and failings, she had always been irredeemably sensible. She should have backed quietly away and called Meadowvale from the bottom of the stairs.
    Instead she threw the door wide, hard enough to stun anyone standing behind it, and strode quickly inside.
    You have to say something when you might be surprising a burglar. She went with “All right, who’s playing silly buggers?”
    But there was no answer, and when she’d had time to take in her surroundings, for a moment Hazel felt rather foolish. There were no upended drawers in the middle of the floor, no drifts of books scattered across the rug. Crossing the sitting room to the bedroom beyond, she found no piles of clothes on the bed. There was no sign of any disturbance at all.
    She paused to catch her breath and take stock. At a much calmer pace she walked around the entire flatlet—two rooms and a tiny bathroom—and checked everywhere that anyone could possibly be hiding, after which she was content that she had the place to herself. And everything looked just as it had when she went out.
    It would have been easy to think she must have been mistaken. But Hazel knew what she’d felt when she put the key in the lock, and she knew where she’d felt that before—in basic training, when her tutors were preparing her for the various situations she’d be dealing with. She had no doubt that the lock had been tampered with, and it followed that someone had been in her rooms while she was out. Not Mrs. Poliakov, who had her own key, but someone with the knowledge and the tools to force an entry, and the skill and also the motive to conduct a search without leaving any sign of it. Upending drawers is the work of seconds. A search that is both thorough and undetectable takes much longer.
    But she’d been out for only some fifty minutes. So he’d known exactly what he was looking for and hadn’t bothered looking in places it couldn’t be. It was no leap of intuition to get from there to the laptop Saturday had left with her.
    But