“You look terrific.”

“But older,” Winter said.

Norman was a survivor, his rustic establishment a mere half block from Cromwell Road. “All our worries will soon be over,” he said.

“You’re only ten years older than me.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about a bunch of crazy Scots who have started to clone sheep up in the Highlands.”

“Isn’t it against the law?”

“To clone sheep?”

“To clone at all.”

“I don’t think they bothered asking.”

“What does that have to do with old age?”

“They’re going to create an immortal race, and what bothers me is that every one of them will be a Scot. It’s bad enough they’re all going to look alike, which they already do, but now the world will be stuck with them forever.”

“So it would have been a different story if the experiments had been conducted in England?”

Norman eyed him with feigned incredulity. “You’re not implying I’m a chauvinist or something, are you?”

Winter smiled and got up. “Take me to my rooms.”

The suite was on the second floor, its windows overlooking a tranquil courtyard to the east. It consisted of a bedroom, a living room and a large kitchenette with a dining alcove. The bathroom actually worked, a rarity in England -you could turn on the faucets without attending a crash course in the aqueducts of ancient Rome.

He took off his jacket and shirt and was about to splash some water under his armpits but decided to shower instead. It could be a long day.

A towel around his waist, he lifted the wall phone off the hook and dialed, opening the drapes while he waited. It was one-thirty, and the sunlight that flooded the room was unlike anything he’d ever seen in this hotel. Maybe spring had arrived after all. A patch of blue sky framed the sooty buildings in the distance.

“Four Area Southeast, Major Investigation Pool, Detective Constable Barrow,” a woman answered.

“Chief Inspector Erik Winter from Sweden here. May I speak to Steve Macdonald?”

“Hold on, please,” she said flatly.

There was a murmur at the other end. The constable was talking to somebody seated nearby. Winter heard a shuffling sound.

“Macdonald.”

“It’s Erik Winter.”

“Ah, Winter. Delayed again?”

“I’m in London.”

“Good to hear it. Where exactly?”

“At my hotel on Earl’s Court Road.”

“I can send someone to pick you up, but it will take a while.”

“Isn’t British Rail just as fast?”

“Depends.”

“If you’re down in Thornton Heath, I know how to get there. My timetable says the train leaves from Victoria Station.”

“It takes twenty-five minutes, and you’ll see some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.”

“That clinches it.”

“Take the District Line from Earl’s Court to Victoria Station. It’s only a couple of stops.”

“I know.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Winter could tell Macdonald had already made up his mind: Mr. Scandi-know-it-all has arrived.

“You’re starting to figure me out.”

“Call when you get to Thornton Heath Station and I’ll send someone for you,” Macdonald said and hung up.

Victoria Station felt like the center of the world. If only I could get on the Orient Express right now, he thought. A quiet investigation onboard, all suspects assembled in the bar car.

The city never felt so close as at this station. Winter was standing by the southern exits, looking up at the information that flapped onto the departure board. The train to Tattenham Corner, which stopped at Thornton Heath, had just arrived.

There was hardly anyone else in his car as the train jolted its way out of the station. The sky was incandescent behind the chimney tops that hovered over the river. They crossed the water and stopped at Battersea Park Station: red brick, graffiti, but less than he would have imagined. People waiting on the benches. Not a sound to be heard. There’s a wall of silence around people who are traveling, Winter thought. They’re in a state of suspension, not at home and not somebody else’s guest either-a no-man’s-land whose chief occupation is waiting.

The purpose of the trip, even the altered slant of the sun at this latitude, saddened him. He had come to London, and to the south side of the river specifically, because death was his constant companion. The premonition plaguing him from the start of the investigation continued to nag-that they had seen only the beginning, that evil was preparing its next inscrutable assault. Whatever direction he took, menace was his journey and his destination. He was alone, and he had no faith in anything.

South London -never described in guidebooks, rarely visited by foreigners-stretched out to his right. He had been on this side of the river only a couple of times, and then no farther than the Putney and Barnes areas to take in some jazz.

Buildings of medieval brick composed an eternal city in which nothing rose above two stories as far as he could see. A man in shorts jogged across Wandsworth Common. When the train pulled out of the station again, he watched some schoolchildren playing soccer on a little gravel field. Their jackets were bright green like the buds of spring.

This part of the city was lusher than he’d expected, with more open fields than north of the river, as though the buildings had sprung up in total ignorance of the metropolis.

At Streatham Common he saw the tower of a mosque. Veiled women sat and waited on rough-hewn benches. Two black men, both wearing leather jackets and knit caps, entered the train, the music from their headphones an audible murmur.

He got off at the next station. Thornton Heath was immersed in shadow; the platform itself was below street level. As he climbed the stairs, a newspaper flapped by his ankle on its way down.

The station building was untended. Three black girls stood in a corner waiting for something to happen. Cars swished by outside the open entranceway, and when he came out on Brigstock Road, he felt as though he were in a faraway country, light-years from London. The passersby were Indian, Pakistani, Caribbean, Chinese, Korean and African.

He walked down a little hill, continued on High Street to an intersection and followed Whitehorse Lane for a block or two. He knew if he went another couple of blocks, he would come to Selhurst Park, a refuge for the ragged soccer fans in the poor sections of Croydon. He had seen a few matches in London, but only at the large stadiums on the north side.

He turned before the viaduct and passed Mame Amisha’s Foreign Foods, which advertised “new puna yams” on a handwritten cardboard sign. The yams lay in plaited baskets outside the store. Bananas hung on poles in the window. He walked by the Prince George pub and was back at the station. He took out his phone and called Macdonald, who answered on the first ring.

“I’m by the flower stand outside the station.”

“If you go down the hill and turn left again at Woolworth’s, you’ll find yourself on Parchmore Road. I feel like taking a stroll myself, so if you stay on the right side of the street, you’ll run into me in ten minutes or so.”

“Okay.”

It occurred to him that Macdonald hadn’t bothered to ask him what he looked like. He’ll know you’re a policeman by the way you walk, he thought.

He headed back toward the intersection and was just about to turn in front of Woolworth’s when he saw a white man grab a young black guy by the scruff of his neck outside the main entrance.

“The little shoplifter is back, I see,” the man said. Winter noticed a badge on his chest. Several black men stood in a circle around the security guard and his prey.

“I didn’t do anything,” the young guy said.