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The initial feedback from colleagues was good. During two separate flybys, experts from Sotheby’s and Christie’s estimated that once restored, the piece could fetch between $350,000 and $550,000 at auction.

Maskell’s client was asking only $200,000 in return for a quick deal. Bartos stood to make a handsome profit. Sensing that Maskell was open to negotiation, he offered $175,000, and she accepted without hesitation.

When the work came back from the restorer several months later, it looked stunning. Bartos hung it up in the studio and decided to hold on to it until the right buyer came along. There was no hurry.

“It’s a great piece that has fallen through the cracks,” he told a friend. “It’s what every dealer dreams of.”

It was exactly what Myatt had dreamed of when, determined to make up for his failure with the Footless Woman, he stood before the easel and painted his perfect ten.

19

THE POND MAN

On the night of January 17, 1995, as a belt of cold rain moved eastward across England, Horoko Tominaga chose to stay in and watch television. The young Japanese student had rented a basement room in a run-down Victorian boardinghouse on the edge of Hampstead, a subway stop away from Drewe’s neighborhood. Even though she had to share a bathroom and kitchen with several other foreign students, the rent was cheap and the Heath was close enough that she could always go out for a stroll whenever she felt cramped or homesick. Tonight the BBC was showing Pride and Prejudice and Sounds of the Eighties.

Tominaga flipped through the channels.

In Japan, a massive earthquake had shaken the city of Kobe.

In Texas, a retarded man convicted of murder was executed after the newly inaugurated governor, George Bush, turned down his appeal for clemency.

A little after nine Tominaga heard one of her housemates, Gina, coming downstairs to use the bathroom. An hour later Sandor and his girlfriend, Gyongyver, both Hungarian students, stumbled in from an evening on the town. Tominaga could hear them chatting and laughing upstairs. Around midnight she decided to turn in. She snapped the hall light on and walked to the bathroom. A man was standing inside, in the shadows. She couldn’t see his face.

“Who are you?” she asked, alarmed.

The stranger said he had a meeting with the landlord, David Konigsberg, and was looking for his room. Tominaga led him up the darkened stairway to Konigsberg’s room on the first floor and knocked on the door. There was no answer. The man asked to borrow Tominaga’s cell phone to call the landlord, but again there was no answer. Then he asked if he could wait in the hallway until Konigsberg returned. Tominaga felt uncomfortable leaving him there, but this was a boardinghouse, after all; strangers came and went.

She returned to her room in the basement, locked the door, and turned out the light. About thirty minutes later she heard footsteps moving quickly down the stairs, across the basement floor, and out the back door.

Tominaga had finally fallen asleep when a faint smell of smoke followed by a tumble of footsteps and shouts from upstairs jolted her out of bed. Wide awake, she opened her door and saw another of her housemates racing down the stairs toward the kitchen, shouting, “David’s room’s on fire!”

Tominaga helped him fill a saucepan with water and ran back up to the landlord’s room with him. A wastebasket filled with paper was ablaze, and the flames were already licking at the ceiling. Tominaga and her housemate ran downstairs screaming. As the smoke detectors went off, they fled out the back door.

Outside, Tominaga looked up at the house through the rain and saw one of the other students crawling out of her bedroom window on the second floor, then shimmying down a drainpipe to safety. The young Hungarians, Sandor and Gyongyver, were still trapped inside. Their only way out was through the window and onto the roof.

Sandor went first so he could pull Gyongyver up to safety. He climbed out and reached down for her, but she was frozen with fear, unable to move a muscle. Sandor