said nothing, distracted by imagining him going to his solitary bachelor apartment or maybe to a small brown cottage where he would do his own laundry and cook for himself with only a servant to come in and clean for him, not because he lacked wealth, though that might also be true, but because he liked his solitude. He would read poetry, I decided, while he waited for his eggs to cook. But how did such a man fit into the philosophies of Bernice, Magda and Friday? Or mine, come to that?
He put a fork into my hand and began to eat his own pancakes, lifting his brows at the taste of the cherries. I told him that the recipe for preserving them had been Mama’s and a secret she had guarded jealously, supervising the cook and undertaking the final part of the process herself.
‘Your mother had many secrets,’ he said.
I looked up into his grey eyes and thought that in a certain light they had the sheen of moonlit water. ‘I can find out nothing about her before she married your father. I wrote to the country where you were born but the authorities can find no records of her birth. She must have come from somewhere else.’
I thought of the occasional foreign words and sentences she had uttered, usually under stress, and of her saying that among her people a girl became a woman at twenty. ‘She never spoke of her past,’ I said.
The policeman said nothing, but his eyes were searching.
‘Mama loved Rose,’ I said, and heard the defiance in my voice.
He put down his fork, looking genuinely surprised. ‘How did you know I was wondering about that?’
I shrugged. ‘Mama used to say I could see things no one else saw. When I was small she called me The Girl Who Could See the Wind.’ I laughed sadly. ‘It was Rose, really, who saw things about people, but she didn’t see that Mama was afraid of the winter park . . .’ I stopped.
‘Did Rose see what you saw, in the park?’ he asked carefully, treading the tightrope between accusing me of delusion and wanting to understand.
I did not answer.
‘If your sister went into the park after something no one else could see, then it follows that a girl who can see the wind might be able to find clues hidden from the rest of us,’ he said. ‘Might even see what her sister saw.’
‘I promised Mama I would never go into the park. She made me prick my finger with a needle and draw blood to make the swear.’ I stopped, hearing how peculiar that sounded. But the policeman only carried his plate to the sink to rinse it.
‘It was just a thought,’ he said, and he bowed and thanked me for the pancakes before turning to the door.
‘Inspector Grey,’ I called. ‘My stepfather said you had a question.’
‘Ah,’ the policeman said. ‘As to that, you told me a while ago that your mother had sometimes seemed to fear for your safety, yet she did not exhibit the same fear for your sister. I merely wondered if you had any thoughts about what she feared.’
I shook my head and he nodded politely and let himself out.
After he had gone, I sat looking into my cherry-stained pancakes for a long time. Then I wept a few tears of confusion before pushing away my uneaten food and going back upstairs. Sitting in my window seat, I looked out at the park, now striped with sunlight. There was no sign of the woman in red.
Once I had heard the servants speak of the disappearance of Rose. One of the maids whispered that a gang of criminals had captured her, having struck Mama dead, but neither they nor the newspapers that later printed a similar story mentioned that there had been only two sets of footprints, both ending at my mother’s body, which made it impossible for Rose to have been taken by kidnappers. Inspector Grey told me it had been decided to keep the footprints secret as a means of disqualifying the few madmen and women ready to confess to any crime, for while the coroner found Mama had died by misadventure, Rose’s disappearance had given rise to a slew of lurid blackmail and kidnap theories that resulted in several confessional calls. I had asked if it would not be better to reveal the two sets of footprints ending at Mama’s body, making it clear Rose could not have