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their stomachs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then his reddened hand on the side of his boot, and dug in the rucksack lolling beside him for a pocket mirror, which he held in the palm of his hand and raised in front of his face.
    He'd have said that was an old man if he'd stepped out of its way in the street: shaggy faded hair, eyes cracked by seeing too much, caved-in cheeks dragged down by weeks of stubble. Only the mouth could do with being more collapsed. He dabbed at a last trickle of blood with the sleeve of his raincoat and ran his tongue over his aching gums, then he lifted his top lip and twitched the lower. No wonder the little girls hadn't been impressed: the glimpse of the remaining teeth in his lower right jaw spoiled the effect. He'd had enough of the rabbit—there were better things he could do with his face. He dropped the mirror in the rucksack and saw a woman watching him from the doorway of a souvenir shop.
    Weren't pavement artists supposed to use mirrors? She was looking at him as though wondering how much of a criminal he might be—as though she knew he'd stolen the chalk from a shop across town. As soon as she withdrew to deal with a customer, he grabbed the rucksack and the very few coins that had been dropped for him, and lurched painfully to his feet, treading on the telltale drop of blood that had fallen on the curly yellow hair of the child trying to sleep on the cloud. He pivoted his heel and felt the child vanish like dust—felt himself grinding the stone thin underfoot, thin enough to give way beneath him, revealing the secrets it hid.
    He wasn't really feeling that, he had too much control. He lifted his foot and saw that the child's face had become a pale blur smeared with dark red. He'd never seen anything like that elsewhere, and there was no reason why it should affect him. He shoved his meagre pickings into a trouser pocket and thrust his arms through the straps of the rucksack, and put some crowd between him and the erased child.
    Now that he was on the move he was better than unobtrusive. Nobody wanted to spare him more than half a glance, especially once he set about rooting in waste bins. He found himself three newspapers and clamped them under his arm while he searched for somewhere he wouldn't be overlooked while he read them. He was out of the bustling streets and on the far side of a ring road that smelled of several lanes of hot traffic when he chanced on a park.
    Several people as decrepit as he hoped he looked were asleep on the grass under a blue sky with a white sun carved out of it, others were drinking and even talking on benches. Eventually he located a bench with nobody on it or near, facing a lake that contained ducks and litter, and within earshot of a children's play area. He sat on someone's spray-painted initials and unfolded a newspaper, and sang to himself whenever he heard a child cry or scream. He was turning the pages of the second newspaper when a headline and a photograph turned off the sights and sounds of the park in his head.
    CONTROVERSY MOUNTS OVER SALE OF MURDER SITES. Of the five houses in the areas of London where the bodies of children murdered by builder Hector Woollie had been discovered, four were still for sale despite protests from the families of victims. Leslie Ames, owner of the site of Woollie's final crime, had now withdrawn the property from the market and was living there with her thirteen-year-old son. A photograph showed the house with a for sale sign outside. "Not for sale," the caption said.
    The words went away, and there was only the photograph that might have been the house itself, reduced to handy pocket size and stripped of everything—colour, surroundings, occupants—irrelevant to the memories it held. He caressed it with his fingertips and resumed singing the lullaby the cries from the play area had urged out of him.
    "Now I lay you down to sleep,
Close your eyes good night..."
    It had almost been perfect that