"It has been a long time since company I've had," she said apologetically, clearing a piece of needlepoint from a chair that, Cash suspected, had been an antique before his birth. She brisked to another, woke a fat tomcat and shooed him. "Tea I will have in a minute."

"No thank you, ma'am," said Harald. "We've only got a minute. Sorry to bother you like this, but we've got to visit everybody on the block."

Cash chuckled. John was trying to be genteel. It was the contrasts. Harald's contemporaries had all the gentility of Huns in rut. But that house, and that woman, demanded it.

"Oh, fooey. What bother? Already the pot is hot. Just time to steep it needs. You Jungen are always in so big a hurry. Sit. Just sit. Be comfortable."

What could they do? The little lady rolled along like a train. They hadn't the heart to derail her.

She was tiny, under five feet tall, all smile and bounce. She reminded Cash of his wife's great-aunt Gertrude, who had come from England to visit the summer before. Auntie Gertie had been a hundred-fifty pounds of energy jammed into an eighty-pound package. Except in terms of spirit she was indescribable.

They exchanged shrugs and glances in her absence, but neither voiced his fear that they had been shanghaied by a lonely old woman who would use them as listening butts for slice-by-slice accounts of her seventy operations.

Cash studied his surroundings. Everything had to be older than Miss Groloch herself. It could have been a set for an 1880s drawing room, crowded as it was with garish period impedimenta. Most moderns would have found it distressingly nonfunctional and cluttered. Cash felt comfortable. Something in him barkened back to good old days he had never lived himself. But, then, as his sons had often told him, he was an anachronism himself. He was an idealistic cop.

There was no television, nor a radio, or a telephone.