City of Shadows by Ariana Franklin

off. Then he turned. “Nick says to give her a good send-off but don’t overdo it.”
    The sun was turning even this devastation into a vista; she could see the cathedral in the distance. Buddleia had colonized areas of rubble, and butterflies were hovering on its purple spikes. Sparrows made a kerfuffle taking baths in the dust. The clatter from the open windows of the printing works sounded like not unfriendly, automated gossip.
    She dallied, wondered what was it like when the butterflies and the sparrows and the compositors had all gone home and darkness turned the piles of bricks into gravestones.
    Just get up those stairs, Esther.
    The wooden balustrade was warm under her hand as she climbed. A net curtain covered the glass in the upper half of Olga’s front door. Es ther fitted the key into the lock, turned it, and went in.
    Heat slammed into her. Heat and the smell of corruption. She stood for a moment, then forced herself inside, leaving the door open behind her.
    It was a bed-sitter and must have been a nice one—a large, wooden-floored space with metal-framed windows that now presented spacious views. And neat.
    Or would have been neat, if it hadn’t been for a wooden chair that lay on its side with ropes still attached to it. Dark brown splashes on the floorboards around it. There were scattered tufts of black hair....
    She walked briskly past it to get to the windows, trying to be furious. The police, Boris, somebody should have cleaned the place. There was something indecent in having left evidence of the woman’s agony ex posed.
    It wasn’t rope on the chair—stockings. He’d tied Olga up with her own black woolen stockings.
    Esther pushed open the window with the cathedral view and leaned out, taking in summer air. This was more than the poor battening on the poor. He, they—perhaps there’d been more than one—had tor tured at leisure. A woman had screamed for her life, and nobody’d heard her.
    Esther jerked more windows open, then set about doing her job.
    Olga had made it easy for her. A nonhoarder, Olga. The suitcase on top of the wardrobe was empty. The wardrobe itself contained few clothes, all smelling of the mothballs that lay scattered around them. On a rail with legs next to the wardrobe hung some of the Green Hat’s costumes.
    Here and there was gray dust with which, she supposed, the police had tried to find fingerprints; there seemed to be very few—a regular polisher, was Olga—and all of them small enough to be a woman’s.
    A stout pine table, also dusted, held a sewing machine with a swath of white linen still on the needle plate—Olga had been making herself a new nightdress. Esther pulled the material aside to reveal a drawer. Pins, needles, cotton, silk, some paper patterns, and, on one side, two stapled bundles, one of bills, the other of wage slips. Jesus, Olga, was that all Nick paid you?
    In the kitchen area, a larder contained a small piece of cheese and half a rye loaf. Small wonder she’d spent every hour she could at the Green Hat; staff could eat free.
    Everything tidy and neat, everything spotless. The bath in the tiny bathroom lacked patches of enamel but was scrubbed clean. A cupboard above the washbasin contained basic toiletries and a bottle of black hair dye. Esther shut the door on it quickly—Olga would have hated her knowing that. Olga would have hated her being here at all.
    No photographs, no letters, no mementos of children—probably didn’t have any—no war medals belonging to the dead husband, no ad dress book.
    She looked around. Come on, woman, there must have been more to your life than this.
    She drew back the curtain separating the alcove containing Olga’s bed from the rest of the room—and found Olga’s life.
    Prince Nick’s face looked back at her. And looked back at her. And back at her. Dozens—perhaps a hundred—of photos and press clip pings had been pinned up on the alcove ceiling and walls, all of Nick. Around and about the