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seeker.
    “You know what that means?”
    I nodded. My work takes me around. It means the bottom of the heap.
    So there was Kristina Lazic, about to become an official refugee, and there were Sarah and Bob Nash, just the two of them in a smart house in Wimbledon, and even a room in it recently knocked together with another to make a “guest suite,” after the son had left to go and work in the States.
    “He’s in Seattle. Computers. He makes a mint. He doesn’t know about any of this. I mean, about Bob and her. I hope he never will.”
    She turned for a moment and looked me straight in the eye.
    My eyes might have flicked away.
    Charity: okay if you’ve got the money, if you’ve got the room. Okay for some. A luxury item. And was it such a fine piece of charity anyway, if what you got out of it was unpaid help around the home and the bonus of feeling good? Look, we have everything—including our very own orphaned Croatian maid. Look at the good life we lead.
    But for pity’s sake. Have a heart. Can’t a good deed be a good deed? And who can say when the urge to commit one won’t suddenly steal over you? You never know. Someone walks into your life and you want to care for them specially, you want to protect them. You know you’ll put yourself out for them, never mind all the other cases, the thousands of other cases. This is your case.
    And that poor girl. Have a heart.
    Kristina. A name like fragile glass.
    Girl? She was almost twenty-two—a woman, even if she’d lost a chunk of her life. Poor? She’d landed on her feet. A damaged soul, a convalescent, a stunted flower. But, put down in new soil—I hadn’t seen the photos yet—she’d bloomed.

10
    I come out onto Parkside. Opposite: the Common, a sea of glittering yellow leaves.
    And what about him, the husband, Robert—Bob? Why does it still seem (to my crude, ignorant, private-investigator mind) like some bad kind of joke? Do gynaecologists marry? Can they have affairs? Can a woman love a gynaecologist? But she did, she did. And he wasn’t a gynaecologist when they met—of course not. Just a student, like her, who said he’d drive her, one summer, in a purple Mini-Cooper, to the South of France.
    “I had the French, he had the car . . .”
    And either a trip like that turns out to be a disaster—a disaster trapped in a purple bubble on wheels—or a lasting success. It was a success.
    Wouldn’t gynaecologists be, like diplomats, immune— protected? And how does it work for women: “I’m a gynaecologist”—chill or thrill?
    I’m a private investigator.
    Clearly, he wasn’t immune. A girl under his own roof. Though it was the first and only time, Sarah swore, she
knew.
So, when it happened, however it happened, it must have hit him like a train. Under his own roof, with a
refugee
for pity’s sake. Surely, for that very reason . . .
    And him a gynaecologist too.
    It must have knocked him clean off his feet.
    She would have moved in one Saturday, in September, three years ago. Become part of the household at number fourteen. Of course, she’d come before—to look, to be introduced. She’d have met Mr. Nash. “
Bob
—please.”
    How do they deal with it—the professional tag that comes with them—as they hold out a hand? Do they learn a special kind of smile—a bit apologetic, a bit boyish? Or do they go for the breezy and frank?
    I’m a private eye. Call me Dick . . .
    “He works at Charing Cross Hospital, in Fulham—and privately of course. He does a day at the Parkside. Just up the hill. It’s handy.”
    It looks out on Wimbledon Common.
    All of it, anyway, on a trial basis. And maybe it wouldn’t be for long—till things “sorted themselves out.” She wasn’t allowed to work, to take paid employment, but receiving charity wasn’t against the law. And, yes, if it bothered her, then she could think of herself as their unpaid au pair. A sort of joke, of course, but, as it turned out, it was just how it was, in the beginning.