The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Harley Jane Kozak The Walk-In

from For the Sake of the Game

It’s not every day that you walk into your apartment and find that your cat has turned into a dog.

Okay, it was London, so it wasn’t an apartment but a flat; and neither the flat nor the cat was mine, they were my brother Robbie’s. But the dog was unequivocally a dog.

It was my second day in town, and because my brother’s flat was new, and lacking pretty much everything — including my brother — I’d been out buying random moving-in things: toilet paper, dish drainer, red wine. I was in the hallway juggling these and trying to get his door open when I heard a clickety-clack on the wood floors on the other side of the door. Inside the flat.

Clickety-clack?

I glanced at the gilt number near the keyhole: 2B. Right flat, wrong sound. Touie, Robbie’s annoying cat, padded around on silent paws. So who was this? Setting down my packages — parcels, as the Brits would say — I worked to get the door unlocked. At which point I was assaulted by the dog. A twenty-pound bulbous-bellied dog.

He — the gender was glaringly obvious — was corpulent, gunmetal gray, and so hair-free he appeared to have been skinned. His legs were stubby but his ears were large, and sticking straight up, rabbitlike. His face was all frowns and folds, a canine Winston Churchill digesting bad news. But he greeted me like I was a giant dog biscuit: when I bent to rescue my stuff from the floor, he launched himself at my chest, tangled himself in my crossbody bag, and slathered me with saliva. For a small dog, he had a lot of saliva.

I pushed the dog back into the flat and got the door closed behind us. “Robbie?” I called out, but my voice echoed through the bare rooms. No surprise. Robbie was my twin; I could feel his absence like a tangible thing.

I pushed aside thoughts of Where’s Robbie? and made a grab for the dog’s tag. “So who are you?” I asked him.

His collar looked just like the one Touie, the cat, wore: scarlet leather, the perimeter dotted with faux gems. One of Robbie’s extravagances. Strange.

“Sit still, Dog. Let me read this.” But when he did and I had, strange turned to bizarre.

The tag said “Touie” and the number on the tag was Robbie’s cell phone.

My first thought was WTF? followed by Where’s Touie? I wasn’t her biggest fan, and she was definitely not mine, but I’d just spent five days relocating that cat from New York to London, a feat, on the misery meter, right up there with digging graves in winter. It just wasn’t possible that she’d disappeared. I went through the flat, checking under the comforter where I’d last seen her, inside closets, and even the microwave, which Touie was too fat to fit into. There were limited hiding places. The only things Robbie had brought in, before disappearing, were five boxes of books and a bed, its toxic new-mattress smell wafting through the flat like bad air freshener.

The real Touie, like Robbie, was gone.

“Now what?” I asked, and the dog responded by sniffing around in a distinctive manner, suggesting a bladder situation. I unclipped the shoulder strap from my pink carry-on bag, fashioning a leash, and let the dog lead me outside. He had strong opinions about our route, one block to Baker Street and then a left, and another left, until I lost track of where we were.

The October day was murky with fog. And cold. I was wearing Robbie’s red rain slicker, but it wasn’t enough. How’d I gotten roped into doing this favor-turned-into-an-enigma-wrapped-in-a — Twilight Zone episode? Robbie had a lifetime of practice getting me to do stuff he didn’t like doing — pet immigration in this case — but I’d had the same lifetime of practice saying no. Yet here I was, and minus the pet in question. How had it happened? What had happened? And why? And where was my damned brother? Seriously, what was I supposed to do? Call 911? Was the number even 911 in England? And then what? I wasn’t one to chalk things up to supernatural forces, but it was a stretch to assume a criminal act. What self-respecting thief would want a plump, elderly cat? And why leave in her place this wheezing dog, straining at his makeshift leash, pulling me through London?

I’d been wrong about the dog’s bladder: he was on a mission, and hardly paused to sniff, let alone pee. Oblivious to other pedestrians, he pushed onward like a horse heading for the barn at the end of a long day. Perhaps he lived around here? The thought gave me a glimmer of hope.

Oops. The dog came to a sudden squat and was now doing the unmentionable alongside an iron gate guarding a storefront. As I hadn’t thought to bring along a plastic bag, I looked around guiltily, but no concerned citizens materialized to scold me. The storefront bore an ornate sign: THE RENOWNED MIRKO: PSYCHIC AND CARD READER. This was followed by a phone number, and then, in smaller font, WALK-INS — BOTH SORTS! — WELCOME. I was pondering that when I heard the tinkling of bells and looked up to see a man standing in the shop doorway.

We stared at each other. He frowned at me, his lips set in a horizontal line. He was tall and thin, the kind of thin that makes you think, for just a second, stage four cancer, but there was a kinetic energy about him, something in his gray eyes that nixed that impression. A high forehead, made higher by a receding hairline, made him look aristocratic, and strangely attractive, as did a three-piece suit more suited to a wedding than a psychic reading. I felt very American, and not in a good way.

“Unbelievable,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. — ” I glanced again at the sign. “Mirko. I didn’t bring a plastic bag — satchel — whatever you call them here — okay, never mind. If you have a paper towel or something, I’ll happily clean this up for you.”

“No.”

“Okay, ‘happily’ might be overstating it,” I admitted. “But I’m willing to — hey! Dog! Stop.” The dog was greeting the Renowned Mirko like a long-lost lover and attempting to mate with his dress pants. I tugged on the leash.

“Go. Just go. Take yourself off,” Mirko snapped, and then, to the dog, “Not now.”

“Whoa. Hold up,” I said. “Do you know this dog?”

“No.”

“You do. You know this dog. This dog knows you.”

“Nonsense,” he said.

“It’s not nonsense. He dragged me right to you.”

“Leave.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I’m walking in. A walk-in. Like the sign says. Both sorts!”

He gave me a curious look, but then glanced past me and said, “Bloody hell. Too late. Go in.”

“What?” I looked over my shoulder.

“In, in, go inside, are you deaf? Quickly.” The man took my arm and yanked me — he and the dog — through the open door.

The shop was warm, and musty with the odor of antiques and incense, the signature scents of psychics the world over. The decor was Victorian clutter. I got a fast impression of chintz, wallpaper, and books, books, books as Mirko herded me across the room to a kitchenette.

“Sit,” Mirko said, and I thought he was talking to the dog until he pushed me into an armchair and scooped the dog into my lap. He then hauled over a rococo screen and arranged it in front of me, blocking my view of the room. He leaned in so close I could smell the damp wool of his suit. “Do not make a sound,” he said. “Do not let the dog make a sound. This is critically important.”

Before I could argue the point, the tinkling bell sounded again, signaling someone entering the shop. “If you value your brother’s life, stay quiet,” Mirko said, and walked away.

That shut me up.

The dog and I listened as Mirko said hello to someone. Actually, he said zdravstvujtye. A man responded in kind. In Russian. I knew a few words of Russian, but after the pleasantries, the newcomer told Mirko to wait. A second later came the sound of Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” a ballad Robbie once said made him want to cut off his ears. The music source was a cell phone, was my guess, and I wondered why we were listening to it, until I realized it masked conversation. I could pick out only random words now, during the song’s lugubrious pauses, of which there were many. Then came the sound of a zipper zipping. The urge to peek around the screen was strong, but the dog began to struggle, wanting out of my arms and onto a small, narrow refrigerator next to us, on top of which sat a large frozen turkey, thawing, and a large ceramic Blessed Virgin Mary. As I thwarted his efforts to investigate the bird, the tinkling bell sounded again, and Streisand, Diamond, and Russian left the building.

“You may come out,” Mirko said.

I came around the screen to find Mirko taking off his jacket and kicking off his shoes. Alongside him was a wheelie suitcase, fully zipped.

“So how do you know my brother?” I asked, and promptly took off my own jacket, the room being hellishly hot.

“I haven’t time for this,” he said.

“But you know where he is?”

“I do not.” Now he had his vest off and was unbuttoning his dress shirt, as adroit as a stage actor doing a quick change. “I suggest you return to your flat, with the dog-who-is-not-your-dog, and sleep off the jet lag that you’re trying to ignore. It’s four in the morning Los Angeles time, and that red-eye you took did you no favors even with an exit row and a window seat. Nor does sleeping on floors agree with you.”

My eyes must’ve widened. He smiled, before whipping off his shirt and giving me a view of his naked chest. Not a bad chest, if you don’t mind skinny, which I don’t, but I wasn’t about to be distracted. “I don’t know how you know the things you know,” I said, “but all I care about is Robbie.” The dog, perhaps reacting to my tone of voice, produced a sound that was less a bark and more the yowl of a human infant. “You tell him, Churchill,” I said.

“Churchill? I’d have said Gladstone.” Mirko walked to a bureau covered with tarot cards, opened a drawer, and took out a some clothes and a pair of Converse high-tops.

“Whoever that is.”

“Victoria’s prime minister, who more closely resembled a French bulldog.” He pulled a T-shirt over his head, followed by a hoodie, a purple Grateful Dead relic from some bygone decade.

I stooped to let Gladstone wiggle out of my arms and over to Mirko, who was pulling on his sneakers, though not bothering to lace them up. “Fine,” I said. “But you’re pretty much the only person I know in London, not counting Pet Immigration, and I’m not leaving until—”

“Suit yourself.” He stood up, ruffled his hair, and put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses. The transformation from aristocrat to geek was not just fast, it was total. From his pants pocket he withdrew a remote, which he aimed at the wall behind me.

A creaking sound like the opening of Dracula’s coffin made me turn and see a wall-sized bookcase move.

Slowly, squeakily, so disorientingly I thought, Earthquake? the bookcase kept advancing into the room, as freaky as the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I fixed my eyes at random on one frayed book called The Coming of the Fairies, willing it to stay put, but nope. It moved. When I turned my attention back to Mirko, he stepped over his pile of clothes, grabbed the handle of the wheelie suitcase, and moved to a now-palpable gap between bookcase and wall.

Behind the gap was a door. Mirko opened the door and went through it.

I grabbed the dog and followed.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he called out.

“Following you!” I called back. “What’s it look like?”

It couldn’t have looked like anything, because it was pitch-black except for the glow of Mirko’s cell, bouncing along ahead of me. What it smelled like was a dank cellar, the scent intensifying as I followed Mirko down wooden stairs. When we reached the bottom, a light popped on.

We were in a long and narrow passageway, low-ceilinged, brick-floored, and lined with storage shelves. The kind of place that makes you think bomb shelter except that it was stuffed with... stuff. Furniture, art, armaments, and god knows what else, bubble-wrapped, crated up, or just scattered about. Mirko pushed aside a Roman helmet and heaved his wheelie suitcase onto a high shelf, showing an impressive set of muscles. He gave me a quick look, then took off down the passageway.

“Keep up,” he called over his shoulder. “Unless you fancy being locked in.”

I jogged after him, clutching the dog, until some three hundred feet later the tunnel ended in a second staircase. The lights went off behind me and in darkness I followed Mirko up the stairs, bumping into him at the top. “‘S’cuse me,” I mumbled, unsettled by his proximity, and his aftershave. Bay rum. Which I liked.

“This is where we go our separate ways,” he said, working to unlock yet another door. A moment later we were out of the tunnel and in the back room of a supermarket.

It was a Tesco Metro, a British 7-Eleven. I followed Mirko through swinging doors onto the selling floor and the mundane world of Whiskas catfood and Wotsits Cheese Snacks.

Mirko marched through the Tesco with all the confidence of a store manager. I tried to match his gait and attitude, never mind that I was carrying an unattractive dog the size of a watermelon.

Once outside, he picked up the pace, his long legs at full stride, weaving his way through lunch-hour London, jammed with people. I caught up with him on the center island of some major intersection, waiting for the pedestrian signal. Before the light could turn green, Mirko stepped into the street, narrowly avoiding a speeding Volvo, and took off at a run. I said a prayer — a necessity, since the traffic was of course going the wrong way — and took off too, wincing at the horns honking at me. I followed him onto an escalator and down into London’s Underground.

It was luck that I had a metro card — no, Oyster card, as they whimsically call it. I raced after him, dog squirming in my arms, through the turnstiles, over to some tube line or other, onto a platform, into a subway car, and out again at Liverpool Street, where we made our way to the train station. He made a beeline for a self-serve ticket machine and I found one too, as close as I could get to his. We bought tickets, me juggling credit card, dog, and purse. He then race-walked to a platform, and I hurried after, boarding a train labeled NORWICH. I walked the length of several cars, ignoring the stares of the presumably dog-averse until I found Mirko, at a table for four. As I approached, the train gave a lurch and I lost my balance for a moment, grabbing Mirko’s shoulder to steady myself and ending up with a handful of shirt, at which point Gladstone scrambled out of my arms and into his lap.

Mirko accepted the dog but raised an eyebrow at me. “Took your time, didn’t you?”

I plopped into the seat across from him, still panting. “Okay, where’s Robbie? Also, who do you work for and what do you do, and also, what do I call you, because you’re obviously not Mirko, and while we’re at it, how do you know all those things about me, things not even Robbie knows? And don’t say you’re psychic, because you’re as clairvoyant as a bagel.”

He held my look. “One, that’s what I intend to learn, but lower your voice, please, because I’m following someone and while he is three cars ahead of us, I imagine the entire train can hear you. Two, a small agency within the British government. Three, call me Kingsley. Four, observation. You’re an American because of your accent. Someplace hot, because it’s winter, yet you have a tan line near your clavicle from a sports bra, and another at your ankle, from your trainers, so not a vacation tan but a resident’s. Your diction has no tinge of the American South, so not Florida, and the freckles on your left forearm suggest an inordinate amount of time spent on motorways with your arm resting on the window side, more likely in the ungodly traffic of California, than in Hawaii, and from the shade of your hair, Los Angeles. The lead on the dog is fashioned from a luggage strap and still bears the knot of elastic from an airline identification tag.” He picked up the slack leash and proceeded to unknot the elastic. “Your neck is stiff,” he continued, “suggesting someone who slept with her head against the window on the left side of an airplane. Front row, coach, standby, so last to board. With no seat in front of you to stow your bag, and by the time you boarded, there was no overhead space left, so the flight attendant checked your carry-on, which explains the tag.” He set the leash down and Gladstone looked up at him. “You dozed — fitfully — on a floor last night, as evidenced by the bits of shag carpet in your hair.”

“Is that supposed to impress me?” I asked.

“It does impress you,” he said. “Your turn. How did you know which ticket to buy? You couldn’t possibly see my touch screen.”

“No,” I said. “But I had a clear view of your forearm. I calculated the length of that, plus your fingers, factored in the fifty-five-degree angle your elbow was bent at, which told me where your fingers would land on the touch-screen keyboard, given the destination list from the drop-down menu.”

That shut him up.

The train conductor approached. “Tickets, please,” he said.

In unison, Kingsley pulled his out of his hoodie pocket and I pulled mine out of my jeans. We handed them over.

The conductor punched a hole in mine but frowned at Kingsley’s. “Stansted Mountfitchet Station? You’re on the wrong train, sir.”

Kingsley blinked.

I gave the conductor my most charming smile. “I’m so sorry. My cousin is legally blind but refuses to ask for help. May I pay the difference for him?”

With a shake of the head, the conductor accepted the twenty-pound note I offered him, made change, and issued Kingsley a new ticket. “An assistance dog, is it?” he asked, directing the question at me.

“Gladstone? Yes,” I said. “Years of training.”

Once the conductor was out of earshot, Mirko said, “You nicked my ticket. Nicely done.”

“I traded tickets,” I corrected him. “Which is harder. Robbie and I played pickpocket as children.”

“Not so good, though, at buying the proper ticket. You disappoint me.”

“Same. Where’d I go wrong?”

“You assumed I used my index finger on the touch screen. I type with my thumb. A three-inch difference. Classic schoolgirl error,” he said, but I could tell he was warming up to me. “When did you last talk to Robbie?”

“Five days ago,” I said. “He texted me, saying would I please fly to New York, pick up his cat, Touie, and get her to London because his subtenant was threatening to drown her and he was stuck in England on a job. So I did. It was hell. Whatever lies ahead, let me tell you I survived Live Animal Border Inspection at Heathrow, which can make grown men cry, so your Russian mafia doesn’t scare me.”

His long fingers, on Gladstone’s tall ears, stopped mid-pet. “Russian mafia?”

“The Streisand fan. At the shop. Some low-level operative, right? A smurf?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Oh, please,” I said. “You’re obviously laundering money, you’ve got a tunnel filled with black market goods, a wheelie suitcase full of rubles—”

“What makes you think rubles?”

“Your Russian friend, during a sappy pause in ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,’ said eight hundred million. If that was pounds or dollars, you’d need a U-Haul to transport them. Rubles, on the other hand, come in denominations of five thousand, and yeah, you could stuff fifteen thousand of them into a suitcase. Which is around a million pounds, a million three in dollars.” I wondered if, behind those gray eyes, he was checking my math. “Anyhow,” I said. “My brother was part of this adventure. Whatever it is, it’s got ‘Robbie’ written all over it, him being a Russian interpreter, as you of course know.”

He studied me. “Have you told the police he’s missing?”

“Yeah, they’re gonna care that some random American won’t answer his sister’s texts. Or that his cat’s been kidnapped and a dog has stolen her collar.” The thief in question was now dozing, emitting fitful dog snores. “Nope. I’m gonna throw in my lot with you, Kingsley-if-that’s-even-your-name.”

“Not entirely your call,” he said.

“I can be persuasive.”

“Persuade me.”

“I’ve got a gun in my purse,” I said. “Once you catch up to your Russian friend, the one we’re following to Norwich, it could come in handy.”

An eyebrow went up. “Nicked that too, did you? From the tunnel?”

“Yeah. Which wasn’t easy, given that I was in the dark, in a hurry, and hauling a dog.”

“Is that it, then?”

“I’ve also got your wallet. You’re flat broke.”

The other eyebrow went up. “Pinch any bullets?” he asked, and held out his hand.

“You didn’t give me much time.” I passed him the wallet and our fingers touched.

He smiled. “Fair enough. Even a nonloaded weapon is a weapon.”

The countryside out the train window raced by, deeply green, with hills so rolling they looked fake, accessorized by contented-looking sheep. To someone used to the parched fields of Southern California, it was downright exotic. Kingsley, in the seat opposite, had a view of coming attractions, while I watched what we were leaving behind.

Kingsley and I had steaming cups before us, thanks to the Greater Anglia Railway dining coach. Kingsley was a far cry from “Mirko” — unrecognizable, even — but even so, it took confidence to risk running into the guy he was tailing just for a cup of tea. Not that I was complaining; he’d brought me back a black coffee. I didn’t ask how he knew my beverage preferences. Perhaps I had a speck of ground espresso on my earlobe.

“I’m a consultant,” Kingsley said, stirring his milky tea. “I was hired to investigate the clandestine dealings going on at the shop of Mirko Rudenko. Having tapped his phone, I heard Mirko converse with a woman named Sarah Byrne, in a dialect called Surzhyk, a hybrid of the Russian and Ukrainian languages in which I am conversant but not fluent. So when Sarah Byrne made an appointment with Mirko, I rang up your brother to come eavesdrop with me.”

I blinked. “Robbie’s a spy? You guys are spies?”

“No, a consultant,” he repeated. “Robbie, of course, knows Eastern European dialects the way a sommelier knows wine. I needed his expertise.”

“Okay, whatever. Go on.”

“We met outside the shop — ’round the back — and listened through the flap of a dog door as Sarah Byrne and the Renowned Mirko had cream tea and a tarot card reading. All nonsense, of course, the tarot business, but then talk turned to gemstones.” Kingsley’s eyes lit up. “Mirko told Sarah he’d recently acquired a red diamond for a client. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’ But when she stood, she was suddenly unwell. Mirko expressed concern. We heard the sound of creaking wood, people moving about, and then — silence.”

“They’d gone into the tunnel.”

“They had. If Mirko suspected foul play, he’d certainly avoid the front door. Robbie and I let ourselves in and found no one in the shop but a French bulldog. He was clawing at the bookcase so near the point of entry they may as well have posted a sign saying, PRESS HERE FOR SECRET PASSAGEWAY.”

I glanced down at the snoring Gladstone.

“Although it did take me seven minutes to find my way in,” he went on. “Embarrassingly slow. I left Robbie in the shop, as a safety measure. I’ve been locked in cellars once or twice and wasn’t keen to do it again.”

“And did you find Mirko and Sarah Byrne?” I asked.

“No, but I could hear them, at the far end. The woman was growing hysterical. I listened for their exit and then moved fast. Do you recall the tunnel’s final meters, where the brick floor ended and the last bit was dirt?”

“No.”

“Try to be more observant,” Kingsley said crisply. “Fresh footprints, one of them a lady’s spike heel, size four — six to you Americans — told me she was short, plump, vain, and increasingly unsteady on her feet. Mirko half carried, half dragged her those last meters and up the stairs, through Tesco’s and onto the street. Which is where I found them. I helped them into a taxi, and in the process managed to acquire Mirko’s mobile and the remote that opened the tunnel door. You’re not alone in your pickpocketing skills. By this point Mirko was also feeling seriously ill, so I accompanied them to London City Hospital.”

“Didn’t they think that was odd?” I asked.

“Not once I saw who Sarah Byrne was. She wore an absurd black wig that fell off as we bundled her into the taxi, revealing her to be as blond as you are. I recognized her at once as Yaroslava Barinova. I had only to profess myself her greatest fan and beg the privilege of helping her. Frankly, they were both too sick to care.”

Poison, I thought. “And who is, uh, Yaroslava—?”

Kingsley sighed. “The greatest mezzo-soprano since Frederica von Stade. I saw them to the hospital, got them admitted, and texted your brother with an update.”

“And?”

He looked at me steadily. “I’ve heard nothing from Robbie since that day.”

I stared at him.

“Breathe,” Kingsley said, and I realized I’d stopped. “I found his mobile on Mirko’s bookshelf, its battery dead. Not in itself a sign of trouble; your brother’s careless about such things. I returned it to his flat, by the way.” He frowned at me. “Stop leaping to dire conclusions. We haven’t sufficient data, and you’ll be no use to me in Norwich if your amygdala hijacks your cerebral cortex.”

“That’s an oversimplification of cognitive processes,” I snapped.

“Don’t quibble with me; I wrote a monograph on the subject.”

I said, as casually as I could, “So what happened to Mirko and the mezzo-soprano?”

The pause scared me as much as the words that followed. “They were poisoned, of course,” Kingsley said at last. “They’ll be dead by the weekend.”

Norwich, the end of the line, had an actual train station, old and stately. Kingsley and I strolled through it side by side, with Gladstone waddling between us. “Look relaxed,” Kingsley said, “but prepare to move quickly. We’ll soon need a taxi.”

Our quarry was Igor, the Russian who’d come to the shop.

Igor had been the first call on Mirko’s cell phone, after it was in Kingsley’s pocket and Mirko off to the hospital. Kingsley could tell, from Igor’s Russian and his use of the formal pronouns, that the man hadn’t met Mirko. This gave Kingsley the confidence to impersonate the psychic when Igor offered to come round and collect a red diamond and hand off a suitcase of rubles.

“He had one moment of doubt,” Kingsley said, “but I’m extraordinarily convincing as a gemologist.”

“Old-school money laundering,” I said.

“A refreshing change from offshore banking,” Kingsley said.

“Delightful,” I said. “But what’s Igor got to do with my brother?”

“With luck, nothing. But we must eliminate the impossible.”

While Gladstone and I had hidden behind the screen, Kingsley, in a feat of deduction involving Igor’s footwear and clods of dirt — he’d apparently written a monograph on that too — had determined that Igor was bound for Norwich, and on either the 11:52 train or the 12:04. So here we were in a town with the kind of bucolic vibe I’d come to expect from watching Masterpiece Theatre. I had no trouble spotting Igor as the train crowd dispersed outside the station. He was a hulking figure, mostly bald but with a patch of red hair. Wearing a bright green windbreaker, he lumbered through the cobblestone streets with a bearlike gait.

We followed him to the town center, thick with boutiques and cafés. A large after-school crowd, noisy kids in plaid uniforms and their attendant adults mixing in with gen pop, meant that Kingsley and I didn’t worry about being spotted. But Igor never looked back. He headed to an open-air marketplace, an Anglo-Saxon sort of souk in the shadow of a Gothic cathedral, with row upon row of vendors under striped awnings. We kept our distance now, and when Igor stopped at a kiosk we stopped too, twenty yards back, and Kingsley bought French fries served in newspaper. We then made our way up terraced stone steps overlooking the plaza.

“I assume Igor’s getting his red diamond appraised,” I said, nodding at a blue awning marked POPOV FINE JEWELRY, BOUGHT AND SOLD. WALK-INS WELCOME.

“Chips?” Kingsley pushed the French fries toward me, but as they were covered in vinegar, I passed. Gladstone, however, helped himself. “And what will the appraiser tell him?” Kingsley asked me.

“He’ll say, ‘Igor, I hope you didn’t pay more than thirty bucks for this because it’s a third-rate garnet plucked from some dog or cat collar with a Swiss Army knife.”

“Very good,” Kinglsey said. “Not a garnet, though. Swarovski crystal.”

I scratched Gladstone’s neck, my fingers finding the empty setting where the crystal had been. “Where’s the real diamond?”

He shrugged. “The tunnel, I imagine. Some government functionary will be months getting that place sorted.”

“Wasn’t it a risk, giving him a fake rock?”

“It shouldn’t have been. But I fear I’ve miscalculated,” Kingsley admitted. “I expected he’d go straight to his boss, at Finchlingly Manor, six kilometers down the road. Where government agents are waiting to take Igor into custody. That’s where I planned to question him.”

“But why wouldn’t he authenticate the diamond?”

“Because Mirko was well trusted. The Cartier of money launderers. The De Beers of Marylebone. You don’t survive in his trade by ripping off customers.”

“Mirko isn’t going to survive,” I reminded him.

“And Igor has just reached the same conclusion regarding himself.” Kingsley stood abruptly. “Off we go.”

Igor lumbered along at a good clip now, leading us across a pedestrian overpass into a working-class neighborhood.

“Where’s he off to then?” Kingsley asked. “If not to his employer, or the train station, or the airport—”

“Church,” I said. “To pray for his immortal soul.”

“Nonsense. If he were the churchy sort, Norwich Cathedral was right in front of him.”

“But that’s Anglican, right?” I asked. “He made the sign of the cross as he left the marketplace.”

“That wasn’t the sign of the cross, it was psoriasis. He’s been scratching regularly. And in any case, Anglicans also cross themselves.”

“But Anglicans cross left to right for the Holy Ghost part,” I said. “Igor went right to left. What do you bet he goes to a Russian Orthodox church?”

“I’m not going to bet with you. Wouldn’t be sporting. I’ve failed only four times in my entire career, and — now what’s he doing?”

What Igor was doing was staring at his phone as he walked, twice doing a one-eighty, the sign of a man at the mercy of Google maps. Seven minutes later he reached a one-story brick building with all the charm and spaciousness of a vacuum cleaner store. A sign near the door read RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH. But the door was locked. Igor rattled it twice, then gave up and checked his phone.

“Let’s go question him right now,” I said.

“Have you never done a proper ambush?” Kingsley asked. “We need privacy. Pity that church is closed.”

“Yes, pity that Russian Orthodox church is closed.”

“Don’t gloat,” he said. “It’s unattractive.”

Minutes later Igor got his bearings and took off, with us following, until Gothic spires came into view, rising out of the drab suburbs.

“Cathedral of John the Baptist,” Kingsley said. “Roman Catholic. He must’ve converted. And unless there’s a mass in progress, that’s where we’ll make our move.”

St. John’s was what a cathedral should be, all white marble and stained glass resplendent in the dying light of late afternoon. A dramatic Pietà dominated the left half of the church, just past the transept, and that’s where Igor stopped. He genuflected, crossed himself, and knelt.

Kingsley and I found a pew near the back. “It’s weird to be in a church with a dog,” I whispered. “And a gun. Why ambush him here?”

“We won’t ambush,” Kingsley answered. “We’ll converse. Note his body language: he’s dying to confess.”

As if he heard us, Igor straightened his spine, turned, spotted us, and bolted.

Kingsley was after him in a flash, leaving me to grab Gladstone and follow, down the nave toward the altar, a left at the Pietà, around the back, and out the side door. Igor was faster than he looked, sprinting across a parking lot and into someone’s backyard.

But it wasn’t a backyard, it was an entrance to a park. We sped down a walkway, past a sign saying PAY HERE pointing to an “Honesty Box,” through a vine-enclosed path and around a bend, into a glorious sunken garden.

The garden was rectangular, ending in a beautiful stone facade. Igor headed that way, then peeled off to the right, scrambling with difficulty up a terraced wall and disappearing into a thick copse.

“Go left,” Kingsley called over his shoulder. “The understory! I’ll take the right!”

Having no idea what an understory was, I nevertheless scurried up a side stairway and into a thicket so dense that day became night. I set Gladstone down onto the forest floor and unclipped his leash so he wouldn’t strangle himself, and made my way blindly forward, thinking I may as well have been back in the tunnel. I imagined Kingsley doing the same on the opposite side of the garden while our quarry waltzed back out and onto the street.

And then there he was, on the path in front of me.

Igor looked more startled than threatening. He stared at my hand, and I looked down too, to discover I’d drawn the gun from my purse.

Our eyes met. He was pale, and from the ears up bald. From the ears down he sported a fuzzy glob of red hair, a clown wig cut in half. It gave him a hapless air, Larry of the Three Stooges.

I tried to say “Stop” in Russian, but what came out was zdravstvujtye, which of course meant “good day,” which was equally useless. Because Igor had already stopped and neither of us was having a good day.

“Where’s my brother?” I blurted out, and then “Gde moy brat?” before realizing that this man would have no idea who I was, let alone my brother, in any language.

“You can shoot me,” he responded, in very good English. “Please.”

Maybe it was the influence of the Honesty Box at the entrance, but I said, “I’m sorry. My gun isn’t loaded.”

At that point Kingsley came crashing through the thicket behind Igor. He looked at my gun and between gasps of breath said, “Let’s go down to the garden and find a nice bench, shall we?”

Kingsley was right about one thing: Igor was dying to unburden himself. Mopping his sweaty brow with his windbreaker sleeve, he said, “I was hired by—”

“Spartak Volkov,” Kingsley said. “We know all that.”

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t know all that. Who is Spartak Volkov?”

“Russian émigré,” Kingsley said. “Tons of money, ties to both your government and mine. He hired Igor to assassinate—”

“Sarah Byrne,” said Igor, nodding. “A simple job.”

“For one with your skill set, yes. You’re a poisoner by vocation and a baker by avocation. Your passion is pastry,” Kingsley said, and then, noting Igor’s surprise, “I saw it immediately.”

“But how? You are not psychic!” Igor said.

“There are bits of calcified dough on your collar,” Kingsley said. “Your fingers are stained from food coloring. Red Dye No. 3, which you must’ve brought from Moscow, as it’s banned in England. Only an aficionado travels with his own food coloring.”

“I use but a drop,” Igor said, a tad defensive. “For my icings. Okay, and my jellies. Because Sarah Byrne, she loves to eat the English desserts. This I learn from Spartak Volkov. He makes my job easy. Sarah Byrne has been a long time from England, he tells me, and she visits now and wants her cakes. She will die for her cakes.”

“Victoria sponge: arguable,” Kingsley said. “But spotted dick?”

“Banoffee!” Igor said. “Figgy duff!”

“What on earth are you people talking about?” I asked.

“The remains of their cream tea,” Kingsley said. “Masterfully done, Igor.”

“I paid the chauffeur,” Igor explained. “He tells me she goes on Thursday to a psychic. I set up my cart outside the shop. I wear my apron. My hat. She comes. She buys. Two of everything! She goes into the shop. I hear through the window: Mirko makes tea, they eat her cakes.”

Little hairs on the back of my neck sprang to life, but I couldn’t yet account for them.

“But when I report to Volkov, he grows mad! The woman, yes, the woman should die, he says. But Mirko? No. Because Mirko the Psychic, he tells me, is also Mirko the— the—” He waved his hands.

“Money launderer?” I offered.

“Fence?” Kingsley suggested. “Procurer? Black marketeer?”

“Yes! The whole world trades with Mirko! Everybody loves Mirko! Russian, Ukrainian, Bosnian, Herzogovinian—”

“Yes, yes,” Kingsley said impatiently. “We get the drift. So you’re in trouble. You call the number on the sign in front of the shop. I answer. You’re relieved: Mirko is alive, you think. And Mr. Volkov is particularly relieved, as he has given Mirko a very large down payment on a very small rock. And now Mr. Volkov sends you with the balance, to collect his diamond. Like a common courier, but what choice do you have? Come, no need to look amazed, Igor. I happen to be a genius. But tell me: something made you suspect I was not Mirko. What was it? My accent?”

Igor shook his head. “It was the sign. ‘Walk-ins welcome. Both kinds.’ Do you remember? I say to you, ‘I myself would like to be a walk-in. How does this work?’ But you did not answer. At first I thought you don’t know the answer. But then I thought...” He shrugged. “We were there for business. For diamonds, not for spirits. We did not have all day.”

“I don’t have all day either,” I said. “Can we get back on topic? So the two poisonees, Mirko and Sarah Byrne, went into the tunnel, thinking to get away from you, Igor, because they suspected what you’d done.” I turned to Kingsley. “And you went into the tunnel after them. And my brother Robbie stayed behind in the shop. Not thinking ‘poison,’ just thinking ‘hungry,’ as he always is anytime he goes an hour without food.” I turned back to Igor. “It’s not just possible he’d be tempted by your sweets, Igor; it’s virtually certain. But my brother’s a picky eater. So what I need to know is, did you put polonium in every single thing you baked?”

A silence settled on us, so that I could hear the birds in the garden singing their twilight songs.

“How do you know my poison is polonium?” Igor asked quietly.

“Totally obvious,” I said.

“You are a psychic!” he said, with awe.

“Nobody’s a psychic!” I said. “You take pride in your work, and you like a challenge, and polonium takes talent,” I said. “And experience. You probably trained in Moscow. Lab X. And also,” I went on, “because everyone in this crazy story either is Russian or knows Russian, so everyone, upon feeling sick, thinks ‘poison’ and then they think about Alexander Litvinenko and his teapot of polonium and they’re off to the ER, screaming ‘radiation poisoning.’ Including Robbie. Which is why he disappeared. So while I feel sorry for the psychic and the opera singer, I need to think about my brother now, so you need to tell me, Chef Boyardee, did you bake polonium into everything?”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “The flies’ graveyard, yes, and the Garibaldi biscuit. But not the — wait!” He stared at me. “What opera singer?”

“Sarah Byrne,” Kingsley told him, “was the alias used by Yaroslava Barinova whenever she was in London. She liked to go incognito. She also wore wigs.”

If Igor had been pale before, he was now the color of toothpaste. The white kind. “Yaroslava Barinova?” he gasped. “I have killed Yaroslava Barinova? The greatest mezzo since Anne Sofie von Otter?” He clutched at his heart, scrunching his windbreaker in his big baker’s hands.

I patted him on the back, but he was beyond comfort. “I deserve to die!” He pointed to Kingsley. “I give you rubles, you give me junk. Yes, I am stupid. I kill Mirko, the fence. Yes, I am sloppy. But now, now—” His voice rose to a scream. “Yaroslava — Barinova! — the pride of Perm!” His screams turned to coughing, and he reached into his windbreaker to pull out a tiny aspirin tin, from which he took a pill. He stuck it in his mouth, swallowing with a grimace. Then he began to cry. And cough. And cry.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and handed him my bottle of water. He knocked it back, drinking half, and wailed anew.

“Igor!” I yelled. “Toughen up. I’m sorry about your opera singer, but what about my brother?”

But Igor was done talking. A strangled sound emanated from him, an unearthly noise, like someone screaming with a closed mouth, or the braying of a donkey — his head reared back and then he fell forward. Kingsley and I, on either side of him, reached for him, but he dropped from the bench to his knees and into a kind of seizure, his mouth foaming. A dark calm settled over me as I held onto one arm and felt Kingsley holding onto his other, and Gladstone, one paw on the man’s knee, howled. The four of us stayed like that for some moments, arms and legs entwined in a group hug there in the Plantation Garden, until the life drained out of one of us, and we were only three.

“Polonium for the customers,” I said, “but old-school cyanide pill for himself. Poor Igor.”

“Before you get all sentimental,” Kingsley said, “consider this: Spartak Volkov had Yaroslava Barinova killed because she jilted him. A slow death, so she could think on her sins. That’s what our Igor did. His life’s work. Just eat your trail mix and try not to romanticize assassins.” We were on the train back to London, side by side, now with Gladstone between us like a snoring armrest. Our adrenaline levels were returning to normal and our fingers and toes thawing.

If Igor’s death was operatic, its aftermath was not. Kingsley had me help him remove Igor’s green windbreaker, from which prints could be lifted.

“Theoretically,” I said. “But practically speaking, unlikely.”

“Don’t argue. Leaving fingerprints scattered about is unprofessional.”

It seemed to me that Igor looked lonely, lying there in a brown polo shirt that didn’t cover his belly, and when Kingsley made a phone call to his mysterious government agency, I found Igor’s iPhone in the grass, clicked on his iTunes, and set it on repeat so that “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” would accompany him to the afterlife.

But Kingsley plucked it from the grass on our way out. “Leave it here? Are you mad? A mobile is a font of information.”

Once on the train, Kingston kept up a steady stream of conversation, clearly for my benefit. We tacitly avoided the subject of Robbie. “Shall I tell you what became of the cat?” he said suddenly.

“Touie,” I replied, “is stuffed into Mirko’s freezer. You had to remove a twenty-pound turkey to make room for her. I hope she was dead when you did it.”

“She was. I stopped by Robbie’s flat this morning to drop off the dog — my landlady, an excellent woman, claims she’s grown allergic to him. I must’ve just missed you. You, on the other hand, did not even see a dead cat on your brother’s bed.”

“I saw her. It didn’t occur to me to check her for signs of life.”

“Ah. You see, but you do not observe.”

“Why’d you give her collar to Gladstone?” I asked.

He looked at me, surprised. “Dogs need tags. She had no use for it anymore.”

“Well, anyway,” I said. “It was kind of you to spare me the ordeal of a dead cat.”

“It was curiosity, not kindness. I’m interested in cause of death; I plan to test her for butane and benzene, for a monograph on mattress toxicity.” He was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What is the other definition of a walk-in? Other than a client without an appointment?”

“It’s a New Age term,” I said. “It’s someone who’s tired of living, whose soul vacates their body so a more... evolved soul can move in. A spiritual celebrity.”

“What nonsense.”

I shrugged. “Some souls don’t want to waste time with birth and childhood. They’ve been here before, and they’ve got work to do. But after the trade happens, the new souls generally forget they’re walk-ins. Which means you — or I — could be some kind of historical figure and not even realize it. Da Vinci. Michelangelo. A dead Beatle.”

“Right,” he said. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all day. And it’s been a long day.”

“Whatever,” I said. “But next time you impersonate a psychic, you might want to notice the sign outside your shop.”

“I saw the sign. All my senses are excellent. Evolved, even.”

“You saw, but you did not observe,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “I observe that you are picking out the sultanas in that trail mix I bought you. So you dislike sultanas. Does your twin share this aversion?”

I looked down at the small pile of dark, withered rejects, swept aside on the table in front of us. “What’s a sultana?”

“A dried grape. Ingredient in sultana cakes, scones, Garibaldi biscuits, and the like.”

“Ah — squashed flies?”

“Precisely.”

“Oh, yeah. Robbie hates them. Raisins, currants, all dried fruit.”

Kingsley blinked. And a slow smile spread across his face.

As the train neared Liverpool station the ping! of an incoming text woke me. I’d dozed off, my head against Kingsley’s shoulder. I looked at my phone.

“What does that mean,” Kingsley said, reading over my shoulder, “when you Americans sign xox? I understand x, but what’s the o?”

I smiled at him. “I think I’ll just show you.”