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swaying like sea anemones in an underwater current. The beat of the house music was mesmerizing, vibrating nerve and bone, and she wanted to dance. A tall man with skin the color of espresso smiled at her across the floor. Before she lost her resolution, she eased into the flow of bodies and met him halfway.

CHAPTER 3
    Notting Hill Gate is a superstitious place because it seems to exceed rational prescriptions and explanations. On the Portobello Road, one feels oneself growing more insubstantial, less and less able to keep a sense of personal proportion in the crowd of people who all look so much poorer, or richer, or wilder, or more conventional than one is oneself.
    —Jonathan Raban,
Soft Cities
    “Mr. Walters?” Kincaid caught his slip as soon as the words left his mouth. “Ern?” he corrected himself. “Is everything all right?” He’d never got comfortable with calling Gemma’s dad by his first name.
    “Gemma here?” Ern Walters asked it so tersely that it might have been a statement. A small, wiry man, he was dressed in his usual outfit of tweed jacket and tie, with a weathered flat wool cap covering what remained of his thinning hair.
    “No, no, actually she’s not. But come in, please.” His sense of apprehension growing, Kincaid held the door wide and gestured him in. Gemma’s parents had visited them only once since they’d moved into the Notting Hill house, for Toby’s birthday party.
    Walters followed, but once in the hall, he planted his feet and, taking off his cap, crumpled it in his hands as he spoke. “Work, is it?” From the disapproval in his tone, Gemma might have been soliciting.
    Kincaid frowned but said merely, “No. She’s gone to see a friend who rang up. Some sort of problem.”
    “Always has time for her friends, does she?”
    Bewildered by the other man’s belligerent tone, Kincaid wondered if he had been drinking. But there was no smell of alcohol on Walters’s breath or any wavering in his stance, and Kincaid felt a greater prickling of alarm. “Come into the kitchen and sit down, Mr. Walters,” he said, reverting instinctively to the more formal address. “Let me fix you a drink or a cup of tea, and you can tell me what’s wrong.”
    “I’ll not be stopping.” Ern Walters set his chin in a stubborn line that suddenly reminded Kincaid of Gemma. “It’s just I thought she should know. Gemma. It’s her mum. She’s been taken ill. Collapsed.”
    “What?” Kincaid stared at him in shock. Whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been this. Vi Walters was one of the toughest women he’d ever met, an indomitable life force. “When? Where? Is she all right? Why didn’t you ring us?” The questions tumbled out, too fast, he knew, for coherent answers. He stopped himself, giving Ern Walters time to speak.
    “Right in the middle of Saturday-afternoon rush. Said she didn’t feel well. Then she went down like a felled tree. I couldn’t get her up.”
    Now Kincaid heard the terror beneath Ern Walters’s gruff manner. He clamped down his impatience, made himself wait until Walters went on.
    “The ambulance took her to Whipps Cross. They say she’s resting comfortably, whatever that means.”
    “You didn’t know she was ill?”
    Walters glared at him. “She’d complained of feeling a bit tired lately. Wanting to put her feet up and have a cuppa. I never thought—”
    “No, of course not.” Knowing Vi, Kincaid guessed she wouldn’t have taken kindly to a suggestion that she see a doctor. “What will they do now?”
    “Tests, they said. And more tests in the morning.”
    Kincaid pulled out his phone. “I’ll ring Gemma. She’ll want to go—”
    “No.” Ern Walters cut him off before his finger touched the first key. “There’s no need for her. Cyn’s there.”
     
    Harry Pevensey rubbed the crust from the rim of his cold cream jar, flicked it from his fingers, then took a very long swallow of his Bombay Sapphire on ice before switching his glass to