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page of the atlas, treading on unyielding pavements. He knew London’s streets by heart. He avoided high buildings and sprawling concourses where the wind whipped around pillars as they made him feel exposed and robbed him of intent. Instead he went out of his way – all ways were ‘his way’ – to use subways and tunnels where he felt at home. He had completed the journeys traced on the pages in the book last year, but he kept the book with him. It was his companion as he took routes not marked on his map and went where the signs pointed. Without the book he was lost. This person might as well possess his soul.
    The figure closed the book and began walking smartly across the road as if a decision had been made. Jack slipped behind a parked van and watched through the side windows. His heart thumped so loudly he had the crazy idea it would be heard.
    He had forgotten his shift! Horrified at this lapse he checked his watch. Thirty-nine minutes before he must pick up his train at Earls Court. He should go to the station.
    The woman had gone. Jack broke into a run, now heedless of being seen. There was no sign of her. No sign. He darted around a building on the pavement. It had been a public toilet – the words ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ were inscribed above the doors. It was now a café and was closed. She was not there.
    To his right were the wrought-iron gates of a mansion he had passed often, but ignored. They were secured with a chain. A notice was fixed to one of the gate pillars:

Mallingswood House
    Pre-Prep and Prep School for Boys

Five to Thirteen Years
    Through the curling design on the gate he saw a flicker in the forecourt beyond the gates and the figure detached from the shadows of a tree and trotted – a woman, he was now sure – around the gravel turning circle. She went up broad steps to a glassed-in porch and in the muted street he heard her key scratch in the lock and the door shut.
    Jack felt a jolt of foreboding. She was not a Host – his name for the killers who unwittingly had him as a guest in their homes – yet something disturbed him. She had too readily pocketed his street atlas.
    In front of the gates stood what would once have been a splendid circular stone drinking fountain with a lower trough for small animals. Jack hid behind it; mounting the plinth he edged around it to survey the school.
    A substantial square construction that had fallen victim to two extensions either side, the mansion had lost architectural balance. Once obviously a grand family home in parkland that would have stretched to the River Thames, it was stranded between two roads. The wall – bricks charcoaled by fumes – was spiked with broken glass weathered smooth but still vicious. A prefab structure with grilled windows and a scrubbed-out graffiti tag on one panel had been erected as an overspill classroom beside the porch. Despite the dilapidation, the school had pupils.
    Jack counted eleven windows on the three floors and seven more in the attics. All dark: the boys would be tucked up and asleep. The coping was chipped and a smattering of roof tiles was missing. A cast-iron gutter had snapped at the joint and beneath it the stucco was streaked with rust and in places had cracked or fallen away, exposing crumbling brick.
    There was a carriage mounting block to the left of the porch; it was identical to another block in a bleak quadrangle where plane tree leaves were ripped from branches by a searing wind. A seven-year-old Jack had climbed those steps, slippery with slimy moss: they led nowhere. The harsh weather had expressed a systematized unkindness that infected the boys. He felt his heart clench and straightened. If this was like his old school it should be easy to find his way in.
    Jack whispered another verse – to soothe himself, not from joy:
‘ The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.’
    He would have to decide on a room with care.