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When I rang about Nina, the Police Sergeant asked if she was the lady with the miniatures. Nina was Russian, but there was no little dog.
“The lady who drinks miniature vodkas in the street?” That was the one. I'd seen my partner sweating on the phone, arranging her admission to a reluctant private clinic. When he retired he passed her on. “Every other Tuesday — she'll expect you next time. Left her husband and child for some bastard, then cut her wrists when he deserted her. They sewed her up and gave her ECT, but she has only been quiet since a modified leucotomy. Interesting woman — intelligent. Escaped from Moscow with her parents after the revolution. Just leave enough Mogadon and Tryptizol for two weeks. The housekeeper will let you know if there's trouble between visits.”
On the doorstep of the town house, near the park, the senior citizen in nylon housecoat cautioned me as if I was an apprentice lion-tamer. “The room's a tip. She won't get up for you.”
From the carpeted stairs I glimpsed the drawing room, temperately glowing with books, pictures and Persian rugs on polished parquet.
Nina Friedman, fifty-seven, reclined in the bedroom within disordered sheets, in her underslip. Mettlesome dark eyes glinted through a brunette fringe, slanting low over the smooth brow; an expansive mouth smiled in restrained welcome. “Forgive me for not coming down. As you see”, spreading her hands, “I'm not well. Depression is worse than any physical disease.” She showed her clawed fingers. “Not a good job, heh? But then, I cut the nerve — and the tendons. Missed the arteries though … now I can't even put on my own stockings.”
She was a Russian witch in a gingerbread town house. The housekeeper had followed into the room, but when invited to withdraw, skittered out and closed the door. “She's going tomorrow. She drinks. Well,” she discriminated, “so do I, but not as much as I did. But I pay her to look after me and she can't when she's drunk.”
Despondent, but demure in her underslip