Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Epilogue

Title Page VersoePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPress

Copyright © Keith McCarthy, 2014.

The right of Keith McCarthy as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First Published in 2014
by GWL Publishing
an imprint of Great War Literature Publishing LLP

Produced in United Kingdom

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication, with the exception of any obvious historical characters, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.

GWL Publishing
Forum House
Sterling Road
Chichester PO19 7DN

www.gwlpublishing.co.uk

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Biography

Keith McCarthy was born in South London, attended Dulwich College and then obtained a medical degree at St George’s Hospital Medical School. He then obtained a research doctorate in molecular biology at the Institute of Cancer Research before becoming a consultant histopathologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital. He has now lived on the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border with his wife for nearly twenty years in which time he has worked as a consultant pathologist at local hospitals, raised three wonderful daughters and watched the NHS change from a service to a machine. In that time he has helped in the treatment of tens of thousands of patients by providing essential diagnostic information to treating clinicians on biopsies and resections. He has also done over five thousand autopsies, which most people find far more interesting. In his small amount of spare time, he has published over a dozen novels and ten short stories, largely in the mystery, crime and thriller genre.

ePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressDedication and AcknowledgementsePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPressePub XHTML made using QuarkXPress

Dedication

This novel is dedicated to Judy, Issy, Laura and Beth.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the help and support of Eve Seymour and Laura Wilkins

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I pondered Buddha's teaching

a full four and eighty years.

The gates are all now

locked about me.

No one was ever here -

Who then is he about to die,

and why lament for nothing?

Farewell!

The night is clear,

the moon shines calmly,

the wind in the pines

is like a lyre's song.

With no I and no other

who hears the sound?

Zoso Royo (1276 CE)

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One

In Leo Guthlac Banneker’s opinion, the lyre that he has made from his wife’s backbone – with strings that he has fashioned from her jejunum – is beautiful, but Mese (he thinks it is Mese, although for some reason he is never sure which voice is hers) disagrees. “A lyre cannot be beautiful if it does not sing,” she tells Apollo.

The god replies, “No matter that it delights the eye, if it makes an ugly sound, it is a desecration.” His voice, as it sounds in Leo’s head, is riddled with contempt; it is a young man’s voice that carries with it the memories of ten thousand years, the certainty that all men fail. It tells of countless disappointments. It tells, too – although perhaps he would wish to hide this – of unbidden hopes for humanity that will not die, for he loves the race, although he’ll never admit it. In contrast, Mese and her sisters bear no such vain expectations of mortal man, and speak without interest.

Mese’s whisper, if anything, tells only of her own beauty. She says slyly, perhaps to goad Leo, more likely to goad her god, “He cannot do it; he has neither the wit nor the devotion.” Of all the voices, Mese has the most contempt for mankind.

Leo knows that she wants him to react and to do so in anger. That would please the muse; she delights in demonstrating his impotence. As desolate as he is – his exhaustion claws at his eyes, drags at his viscid muscles – he shows no reaction and merely stands, steps back from the table and takes in a deep breath, stretching his neck to look up at the circular window high up in the ceiling; he sees the darkening sky and the twigs and leaves that lie upon the panes, blown there from the Crowland Forest, as if cast upon it in an unfathomable, arboreal game of chance. It is beyond detail now, the low cloud that has threatened all day, too dark to be anything other than a threat of nothingness, a foreshadowing of the dissolution to come. It is a fitting sky under which to be taunted by gods. Doubt assails him. Perhaps Mese is right. He has been working many hours each day for many months now; sometimes, as now, for several days continuously, but he has all this time born the knowledge that there are still great problems to overcome, even in this small thing, let alone in the audacity of the entire project. Maybe he is inadequate for the task, and will thereby fail Penelope.

That is almost too much to bear. To betray Penelope would be an act beyond all others in terms of contemptibility. He cannot allow that. Either he must succeed, or he must die; only if he achieves both will he spend eternity in something near to contentment.

For a moment so brief that it’s gone before he is able to grasp it, he sees himself in the fracture of the prism that is his mind; once he had many such moments of insight, when he was more normal, and early on in his driven trek into insanity. Now they are few, and short; ever more distorted, and painfully intense. He sees that he is a man who believes that he hears the voices of a god and three muses, who is compelled to make his art by forces that he feels but cannot come near to understanding, who stands here in a disused operating theatre in the middle of a dense wood that is home to hundreds of murders of crows, at the wrong end of his life.

And then it is gone, the insight slaughtered by his madness.

Leo Bannister stands (when not stooped, and that is an increasingly frequent occurrence in his sixty-second year) at six feet and six inches, which is tall enough to see the shoddiness of a maid’s dusting, as his adoptive mother used to say, a smirk twisting her mouth, although not in a pleasant way. His beard has grown to the point where it seems no more to increase in size, merely in greyness and unkemptness. His nose is beaked, his frame thin; he walks as if powered by his joints, not his muscles, with a jerky motion that is accentuated by passion.

And he feels much passion.

His irises are dark brown and the artist in him, the one who looks at the world and sees it as shapes, textures and edges, as well as colours and shades (and there are so many shades in his world) is somewhere pleased that the yellowing of the whites does not clash with them. Yellowing of the whites, he muses. A good name for a work. I must remember that. On his thin, long fingers – he used to be proud of his fingers, even as he pondered his vanity in so doing – the nails are chewed short and there are calluses, with depigmented, indurated spots where acids and molten metals have splashed; in the bright light of the day (or at least, whenever it chooses to show itself), nicotine stains can be seen on the first two fingers of the right hand, although he doesn’t smoke now.

Even in his clothing – a lounge suit, a blue check shirt, open at the neck, navy blue deck shoes that are at least fifteen years old – there is about him something old and elemental and authoritative, like an Old Testament prophet; but he is no Elijah or Zephaniah, for if there is one thing that Leo does not do, it is preach. He has strong convictions on this. Very strong indeed, and not all of them arising from dialectical ethics on the subject.

It is cold in the room, although he is only just aware of this. It is always cold in the theatre, even when the sun shows her face and the clouds allow her a rare glimpse of the earth. He wonders what Apollo makes of this, but has never asked him; he has never directly spoken to either Apollo or Mese, or her sisters, although just why, he could not say. He suspects it may be partly from acquiescence, as they are supernatural, after all; partly from hauteur, since he is a man, after all; and partly from practicality, for he knows that they would not bother to respond. Does Apollo mind Gaia hiding her beauty from him? Does he look on it as a game, as flirting? Perhaps he does not think her beautiful and does not care if she hides from him.

Leo is too tired, though, to continue tonight. His back – old with bitter disappointments and angry at his demands upon it – growls at him as he straightens up from the stainless steel workbench. His eye is caught by the diffused, distorted reflection of the wall light’s carelessly cast illumination, as it reveals a hundred thousand linear scratches that he can only see and not feel. He gasps, turning immediately away, for he does not like reflections, and there seem so many of them. Upon the work table, the lyre shines in the same light, almost hysterically, as if desperate to grasp and then caress the eye’s attention, calling out to be noticed and, once noticed, admired. There is no suffusion of the light by the lyre’s silver and gold finery, by the tracery he has so painstakingly worked, by the instrument’s sinuous, organic curves; it is brash but incoherent light that it bounces about.

It is also mute, though.

He paces.

“He’s pacing.” Apollo sounds amused.

“You’ve upset him.” This time, he hears Nete’s low tones voicing the sarcasm.

Apollo’s reply is painfully mocking. “He’s lost his muse.”

Leo’s pacing leads him around the room as he attempts to analyse where he is going wrong. It took him many hours to extract the vertebral column, deciding to do so from the posterior of the body so that he could take all seven cervical vertebrae as well, which he has yet to use. The lyre before him is made of Penelope’s spine from the top of the thorax to the tip of the coccyx, a double sigmoid like a snake about to strike. Perhaps the flaw lies in the tensioning between the individual vertebral bodies. This is possible, but he is more worried by the strings. They are definitely at least part of the problem. The art of making them from gut – removing all the fat by repeated rinsing and scraping, cutting them to length, soaking them in lye and then alum and urine, stretching them, fermenting them – is near lost and, to him, never before found. Perhaps also the twists in each – giving tension and tone – are not right. Almost certainly, the problem is not so simple as to be easily solved by tweaking one or two attributes; it lies not in any individual component, but in the balance of all – the strain in each intervertebral tie and each string – so that the harmonics are slightly, although still fatally, imperfect. Gut makes celestial sounds but, fittingly, is devilish in many ways.

His musing takes him from the operating table in the centre of the room, now topped with heavy steel trays covered by green cloth. He wanders past an astonishing collection of items that he uses or has used in his task. A lathe stands in front of a large glass tank filled with pale yellow, clear fluid; at either end of this, there are metal plates, each connected to thick black, serpiginous electric cabling. These are only the most eye-catching amongst such as welding equipment, scuba gear and another stainless steel bench on which lie a bewildering array of electrical DIY tools. Almost completely encircling the room are eye-level metal cupboards above yet more bench tops, interrupted at three intervals by wide sinks. The room’s odour comforts him as he unconsciously dissects it into its individual components – dried blood, formaldehyde, bone dust, house dust, antiseptic and acetone; but a man with a sense of mission such as he, has neither time nor patience to interest himself too much in the finer grain of things that do not matter. He is old enough to comprehend that focus is all.

He makes his way back to the heavy central table with its attendant spotlights that hang down around it on articulated, skeletal limbs - giving them an air of expectant spectators – and stares intensely at the lyre in the table’s centre. Abruptly, he sneezes thrice.

“Perhaps he has a cold.” Mese sounds almost concerned, but he is not fooled.

Apollo does not even try. “He is so human.”

It is too late today to think of continuing; were he to do so, he fears he would make the situation worse. The instrument is truly unique; not even another human spine could replace it. He knows that he must rest; knows, too, that Apollo will look on him with excoriating contempt.

Before leaving this strange room, he passes through a doorway on his left; it allows him admittance to a small storeroom; ahead of him is a tall cupboard, another one that is made of dulled steel, on each side of which are chest freezers. He carefully opens the one on the right and allows the curling condensation to dissipate. “Good night.” He barely speaks as he looks into its deeps, but it does not matter since there is no-one listening.

His wife’s eyes stare back at him, her head resting on the plastic bags that contain her offal.

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Two

It had been a long, cold winter, although the spring would be little kinder. Tasha’s driving was, as ever, too instinctual for Tom’s taste; he didn’t overly mind that she reacted rather than anticipated, just that she did so too slowly and with too little interest. She had always, he thought, treated the world outwith the car as a different reality; other road-users were virtual combatants, passers-by were anonymous and perhaps just collateral damage waiting happen. Not that Tom believed her to be a bad driver, merely that he couldn’t stop himself imagining in a flight of persistent fancy that she was both a very competent driver and, at the same time, so very close to being a dangerous one. He was prone to such whimsies, which made him both good at his job and potentially disastrous at it.

He wondered as he covertly looked at her, do you love me? He thought that, perhaps, that he did love her, although he was aware that others might not consider her particularly attractive. Her face was quite rounded, there were a few too many freckles across the bridge of her nose, and her fringe of light brown hair above the dark brown of her eyes didn’t seem quite right. Somehow, though, in his head, it all worked. He could never have said how, just that he was attracted to her. Besotted, he supposed.

There was a problem though, because it was not a simple one-way transaction, because he knew that he could never truly love someone who didn’t love him, and so he asked himself again, did Tasha actually love him? Was she to be allowed to love him? He had a feeling that love was a commodity that was not hers to give freely; it had been loaned to her by her father, on condition that she used it ‘wisely’, and Emanuel Vogt, seemed to Tom to be at best equivocal regarding Tasha’s spending practices. Since he was her banker, both financial and emotional, he took much interest in his daughter’s life.

“I’m really grateful,” she said, her eyes fixed on the road; he still had the feeling, though, that she wasn’t actually considering too closely – as people do – what she saw, was merely watching it, taking occasional mental notes.

“No problem,” he replied, although he hadn’t really grasped what she was talking about.

The rain, previously diffident, became suddenly violent. The sky darkened, and the traffic on the road between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury slowed. Tasha, as if refusing to be browbeaten by either the elements or other cars, only braked at the last moment. Tom flinched and pressed a virtual pedal, trying not to show any reaction as he reflected that being driven by Tasha was more exhausting than driving himself. “What’s the hold up now?” she demanded.

“I think the lights are red.”

She didn’t answer, leaving him with a familiar sense of having somehow failed, and that annoyed him; he, at least, knew that he was bloody good at his job and at most aspects of his life. The failure was in the eyes of others. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead past sporadically running raindrops; the wipers mercilessly smeared them with lazy intermittency while their companions beat on the roof as if in protest at this slaughter. The windows began to steam as they waited but Tasha didn’t notice or perhaps didn’t care. He knew that she would be annoyed if he fiddled with the heater. She said, “It’s not that I’m scared.”

What did that mean, he wondered? Knowing Tasha, he was afraid that it meant precisely that she was scared; but scared of what? It was a curiously unsettling remark because he had no context in which to place it. The traffic began to move and, bringing him a measure of relief, she adjusted the car’s heater so that it angrily blasted the windscreen. She moved off so quickly that she harried the car in front. She was anxious, he realised. As keen as he was to know why she should protest her courage without prompting, he didn’t ask; he knew her too well. Into this refusal, she announced, “He thinks he’s a something of a thanatologist.”

These words were a paradigm of what Tasha was, and what she meant to Tom; seven months had taught him that it was Tasha’s habit to keep him off-kilter. Not for the first time in his relationship with her, he found himself musing precisely what had she meant by it. For a start, he wasn’t completely sure who she was talking about. Even were he to know that, he would still be confronted by questions. Clearly, Tasha didn’t think ‘he’ was right in ‘his’ belief. Tom suspected it would be clearer to him if he knew with more certainty what ‘thanatology’ was: something to do with death, and how it’s celebrated and commemorated, he thought, but it had little to do with pathology, the medical specialty which Tom practised. He wasn’t inclined to ask her, although he suspected that this was precisely what she wanted him to do. Tasha was a nurse with a PhD and Tom had learned that this was a potentially explosive cocktail, liable to detonate at any time and coat the environs in sickly superciliousness.

It was only because he hadn’t said much for a while that he asked for clarification, just as she sped through a red light and headed towards Tewkesbury Town Centre, refusing to acknowledge the angry gestures of the man who just been about to cross the road.

“Who does?”

He felt that this was a safe question, one that wouldn’t touch off Tasha’s inclination to patronise him.

“Great Uncle Martin.”

“And is he wrong?” This was a dangerous question.

She snorted. “You’ll see.”

“How far is it now?”

“About another forty-five minutes. He lives by the river. It’s quite a nice house, actually.”

There it was again. It was a leitmotif when conversing with Tasha. It’s quite nice, actually. The words had one sense when taken in a linear fashion, but there were also underlying subtextual ellipses, some almost hyperbolic in function, that suggested meanings that were outside normal space-time. Another of his problems was that, after seven months, Tom had yet to decide not only whether he really loved Tasha, but also whether he actually liked her as well; he was sure it was the latter that was more important if a relationship were to last. Tasha was petite but forceful; it was she who had first approached him; it was she who suggested a second date. He felt chosen then and he still felt chosen now, but wasn’t entirely happy with that sensation; there was within him a degree of uncertainty as to whether or not he was an entirely willing disciple. He enjoyed the sex, though.

His reaction to Tasha Vogt was not a little based on a vague sense of fear and awe – as if he were courting a tigress; Tasha was a very capable person, working in the legal department of the hospital, often representing the hospital trust in court, defending it when necessary, and this experience brought with it a sense of confidence before which he tended to wilt.

She was, moreover, bred from immediate family that was also tigrine. Emanuel Vogt practiced as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Bournemouth; he had the characteristic attitude of the breed and didn’t look on pathologists with anything that rose above ignorant contempt. Tasha’s mother was a nurse in the Intensive Therapy Unit in the same south coast hospital; such nurses never came into contact with pathologists and Tom was convinced she was swayed by negative propaganda about them from her spouse. On the few social occasions when he and they had come into contact, he had felt incapacitated by their disdain, skewered by pointed contempt. It made him angry, because there was no objective reason for it; he told himself that he was Emanuel Vogt’s professional equal. Fat lot of good it did him, though, when he fell under the surgeon’s imperious gaze.

As if that were not enough to discomfort him, there was the less immediate clan, the ones whom he hadn’t yet met – and some of whom he might never meet, he supposed – but who cast deep shadows in odd shapes across his consciousness. Uncle Martin was most definitely one such, and Tasha’s remarks as they travelled did nothing to reassure him; indeed, they only added to the mystery that had grown in his imagination. Neither Tasha nor her parents would ever have talked directly about any behaviour of their relatives that others might consider ‘inappropriate’, but oblique references and tangential inferences had intrigued him.

Mysteries surrounded Uncle Martin’s past, Tom had learned, but no one was inclined to go into fine detail. There was something about the man’s wife (apparently dead), something else about his daughter, her husband and their daughter. Without doubt, something of significance had happened, but no direct references were ever made; these were mysteries that the Vogts chose not to discuss, at least not with a Newman; perhaps among themselves – although he doubted that – but not most definitely not with an outsider, not with L’Etranger.

That wouldn’t have particularly hurt – it would merely have underlined his position in the social grouping – but Tasha continued her reticence on the subject even in private, and that did. He had sensed some sort of link with Simone, Uncle Martin’s granddaughter, but the fact that she hadn’t ever felt able to elucidate this, irked him. He had theorised, as he was wont to do, on the basis of the original link, concluding that, despite the age difference (Tasha would have been in her twenties, Simone still only a child), the connection had formed because they were both single girls and cousins. It was not implausible, but not entirely convincing. There was something more, he sensed; something, moreover, that he suspected Uncle Martin might know about. Perhaps he would get the chance to chat with him.

He couldn’t say that he was looking forward to meeting Uncle Martin, but he was fairly certain it wouldn’t be a trite experience.

*******

The doorbell rings, awakening Leo. He knows that it is day, although with no precision beyond that. Simone will answer it. She always does. He lies on the bed – he never gets in – listening for her, hearing nothing. The doorbell rings again.

Leo has never liked the sound of that doorbell, but he’s afraid to change it now; he’s afraid to change anything and, although much of him doesn’t know why, there is something within him that whispers to him the truth behind this stasis. He is in aspic, but it is aspic that has turned rancid. He opens his eyes, but there is no other sign that he has passed from dreamless sleep to dream-filled wakefulness; it is rancid aspic that is also viscous. His is a small bedroom in a small, damp house that has aged and does not care to hide it, does not care at all; it is an old man’s house and, although Leo Banneker is not chronologically old, he has – is – caducity. This scares him, but letting Penelope down scares him far, far more. The little that is done about the house is now done by Simone, but she cannot do a lot, even he recognises that. She is too young, despite the adult patina she wears, that he has painted on to her, not caring to listen to any protests that she might have whispered as he did so.

He is not a recluse, because to be such would be to excite comment, and he wishes only anonymity; it is the only state that will allow him to complete his monstrous act of homage. Thus, at Simone’s insistence, he participates in the world to an extent that serves a purpose, and no more; yet these times – in which he forces himself to attempt normality and therefore obscurity – grow rarer. He does not, most definitely, ask or expect the world to visit him and thus it is rare, but not unknown, for visitors to call, and they are always unbidden; the postman or delivery men sometimes request his attention, although, if possible, he prefers parcels to be left in the greenhouse at the right hand side of the house; ramblers or lost drivers may ring and ask for directions. This, though, is uncommon because they have to be exceedingly lost – indeed, almost damned – to find the dark green, peeling paint of his front door; at the time of some election or another, there have on occasion been one or two hopeful (although more likely hopeless) canvassers. No one else, though, and Simone usually deals with them, leaving him to his darkness. He is known in the village, when he is known at all, as eccentric, but that is alright with him, and it is alright with the villagers; ‘eccentricity’ they can understand and thus accept.

He waits. He does not know the time for he long ago threw out all the calendars, clocks and watches, all the sly cracks through which time seeps to work the pitch of its chthonian sorcery; it was a joyous act, one that he still recalls and looks on now as a blow against the empire, although he cannot quite say which empire.

The bell rings again.

He thinks that he could wait, here in this room behind the heavy, dusty curtains; there would be no sign of habitation at the front where the interloper waits. Indeed, the house appears to have been empty for some years, because he has done nothing to mark his possession, let alone his habitation. He has allowed it to decay, partly because of disinterest, but mostly because the process of dilapidation has served every bit as well as a calendar; it is a calendar, one in which the days and years are struck through by the great god Entropy. Leo is not an anarchist, but he recognises the potency of chaos.

Who is it? He cannot help wondering, wishing that he did not; his curiosity is a surrogate measure of residual connection to the world, indicating how short his journey has really been. Unless someone has broken down and walked the mile from the main road down an unmade lane that holds no sign that it ends in anything of human construction? Fear flutters briefly, making no outward sign. Apollo and his three muses are silent, but he senses their presence, knows that they watch with insuperable disdain, as they always do. They will not help him to decide whether to hide or react.

This person will surely go. He cannot recall the last time that someone called at the little house in the forest. The world should not bother him, because he does not seek to bother it; it is not a written contract, nor even a spoken one, but it is forged from steel for all that; even if it is only understood, only a virtual bargain between a man and the universe, it should still hold. He need only wait and, whilst he has always been good at tarriance, the last few months of working on his project have honed his skills to an even finer edge. Yes, there is no necessity to do anything else...

A thought occurs. Simone is not here, obviously; perhaps it is her. She has forgotten her key, having locked the doors to keep him safe from his enemies, and cannot get back in. She is outside now, patiently waiting for him to come to her rescue, take her into sanctuary. He cannot think where she would have been without him, but this strikes him immediately as most likely. He rises impulsively, without supratentorial input.

“Oh, dear.” The sudden sound of Apollo’s patronising voice makes him jump.

In response, there is a high pitched laugh, undoubtedly that of Hypate, who then says, “What a fool he is, my lord.”

“He’s a moron. Isn’t it obvious that his enemy has found him?” Apollo is derisory.

She giggles. “He’ll soon find out the truth of that...”

Perhaps they are right. He should be careful. He doesn’t want to leave Simone outside – is desperate to get her back into safety, in fact – but he should not be reckless. He doesn’t hurry; if he opens the door and no one is there, he won’t be sorry. As he descends the stairs, he is unable to remove his gaze from the bare wall opposite the lowest step, just to the right of the door. It is a blank space, but it holds dreadful fascination for him; why would that be? Much of the wall space in this drear place is unadorned, but this has always seemed to him threateningly blank, as if it holds the shape of a departed monstrosity. A slight movement captures his attention; there is a diffused, distorted shadow across the stained glass window at the end of the hall. It certainly isn’t Simone and he is at once convinced that he is in trouble, cornered, in terrible danger.

“We told him, the stupid man,” scolds Hypate, and Apollo sighs.

Leo scurries to the kitchen to find a weapon, choosing a wicked carving knife from the drawer, driven now by sudden, suffocating fear. His mind is fractured, skipping between myriad thoughts, beliefs, sensations and certainties, above all of which, the whispering of Apollo and Hypate is incessant and provocative. He is being whirled by an overwhelmingly loud current of emotion – of terror and elation, of self-loathing and yet intoxicating power – and the sound in his ears is a thudding, shuddering, wailing and hissing cacophonous chant, through which the voices continue to laugh at him. He walks purposefully down the hall, opens the door and catches his visitor unawares.

The man is small and old, with a red and rather fat face, a wispy beard of grey, anaemic hair; he is dressed in blue and yellow Lycra, disguised as a cyclist, it seems; it is laughable, Leo decides. He is side on to him at first, the man looking out across the gravelled areas at the front of the house, perhaps at the open garage. Leo sees immediately that he is snooping. The man turns and there is a polite smile on the face until Leo thrusts the carving knife up into the middle of his solar plexus, all the way to the hilt. The man grunts quite gently in surprise, but his face expresses a profounder shock. His mouth forms a silent circle through which Leo sees carious teeth; there ought to be a cry of agony, but the blade has taken away his breath as it takes his life.

The cackling, triumphant laughter of Apollo and his muse fills Leo’s head.

*******

“He’s not in.”

“He’s always in.”

Tom stood tall in falling rain – for the porch was too confined for two and even Tasha’s diminutive frame occupied most of it – and said nothing; it was a strategy that he had found worked well in life as well as in love. Tasha rang the bell once more, this time using greater finger pressure; indeed, so great that the edges of her fingertip, around the deep red nail polish, became blanched. The bell inside responded with increased vigour, but Tom could hear a note of frustration within the sound; it matched his mood. “Perhaps he’s gone shopping,” he suggested to the back of her waterproof jacket as she peered intently through the small circular window in the door.

“He has everything delivered. He never goes anywhere.”

It was a daunting place, set on a hill that overlooked the River Lugg, facing west towards Hereford. Coming just out of winter, the terrain was bleak. Uncle Martin’s home, too, was bleak; it was an old house – perhaps Georgian, thought Tom, who knew little of architecture – with walls of thick stone and windows that looked black in the cold, wet sunlight. He approached the window on the right and looked in; the room was dark and looked chilly; it was a library of some kind, he decided. The rain trickling down the uneven panes of the casement window made it difficult to see much.

He jumped, catching his breath slightly, suddenly aware of his heart working hard.

What he thought was a ghost lurking in the corner – a billowing white shape, seemingly hanging in the air as if worn by an invisible barrel-chested body – was in fact a long-cuffed, ornate shirt on a headless mannequin. There was, though, heavy dark brown staining on the collar.

He was startled a second time by Tasha, who said from close behind him, “Uncle Martin’s convinced that was one of the two shirts that Charles the First wore on the day of his execution.” She spoke sadly, as if of profound foolishness. Then, more brightly, “Come on, there’s a key safe at the back of the house.” She strode away, expecting him to follow, which, of course, he did. This was her territory, after all. She looked straight ahead, but Tom glanced into the next window along, changing his view of the room, stopping abruptly because shock had gripped him.

“Tash!” he called. He couldn’t stop himself from sounding slightly hysterical, and perhaps he didn’t want to.

She stopped and looked back at him, almost gone around the corner of the house. “What is it?” she asked irritably.

“Is that Uncle Martin?” he asked, indicating that she should look through the window.

When she did as he asked – and did so, it has to be said, demonstrating some impatience and not a little reluctance – she behaved uncharacteristically.

She screamed.

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Three

Simone finds Leo in the kitchen at the table. She has, of course, already found the cyclist.

“Daddy?” She asks this tentatively, gently.

He does not respond either in word or deed. She sits down opposite him; she had her own breakfast some hours ago, but the table is still laid for her father. Sometimes he remembers to have breakfast, often he does not. His forearms are stretched out before him on the stained pine, his hands clutched tightly together, whitening his knuckles; he is trembling and, beneath the greying, unkempt hair of his beard, she can see that his jaws are tightly clenched so that the masseter muscles (Grandpa Martin taught her human anatomy) stand out. She cannot imagine the abysm that he is seeing, the sounds that he is hearing and, most especially, the horror of what he is feeling. She knows, though – because he has told her and will tell her again in a few hours or days when this is over and he is consumed by tearful remorse – that it is bad. He will whisper of how his soul is being stretched and rubbed raw, and of how he is being tormented by his muses and their master. He is, he will say, condemned to be drowned continuously in drenching tides of terrible emotion.

She leaves him, knowing that, for some time, there will be nothing to be done for him. Her return along the hall to the still-open front door, to the body of the cyclist, is unhurried, because she knows that there will have been no passers-by. She finds the body surrounded by its undisturbed blood; it is too cold for flies. She has no problem confronting the scene. Squatting down beside the cyclist, she just looks at him for a long, long time. It begins to rain, although it is soft rain, nothing more than a mizzle, and of no concern to her.

“Who are you?” she asks gently, perhaps sadly. Certainly there is nothing sentimental about the resolution with which she reaches down and pulls out the knife that has been stuck into him up to the hilt; the blood that coats the blade is viscous and carmine, that on the wood of the handle dried to black. From the angle at which it protrudes from the solar plexus, she judges that it pierced the stomach, then the diaphragm and the aorta, perhaps just catching the right ventricle of the heart on the way. Death would have been agonised but quick, although perhaps not quick enough.

She does not know precisely why this death has come about, but she knows her father well enough to guess. This man is almost certainly a hapless victim of her father’s fears, just as she is, just as he himself is. He is – was – someone who called to ask for directions. Crowland Forest is, in places, thick and dense, filled with scattered escarpments that disorient the naive traveller. This is a superficially credible tale.

Yet she wonders. He is dressed as a cyclist, but where is his bicycle? There is a partly made lane to the house from the main road, but it’s long and tortuous and goes nowhere else; a long way to go looking for help with his location or perhaps after a puncture or mechanical failure. It would have been far more sensible for him to have used the old public phone box at the end of the lane, or continued along the sign-posted main road. Perhaps her father’s conclusion – although certainly not his reaction – was understandable, she thinks. Perhaps he has done them a favour.

There are many assumptions here, though. The phone box might well be out of order; she has never thought to examine it. She knows of it because, when her parents first brought her here, they pointed it out to her and told her that, should all else fail and Grandpa Martin’s efforts to find them succeed, she should run to it and summon help. There was an emergency phone card in one of the kitchen cupboards. They did not tell her whom she should contact, perhaps because they did not know themselves. Simone could only think of one person she would want to call in such circumstances – Natasha Vogt, her cousin – and the situation would have to be dire indeed before she did such a thing. She is aware, in the depths of her head, that she and her father have traversed too many boundaries, done too much that is dangerous and even heinous, ever to expect others to see them kindly.

She looks at this man’s face and sees an ugly scar in the centre of a forehead that is otherwise rather flabby and soft. Is it the face of an habitual cyclist? She isn’t sure. What do such beasts look like? How long ago did he die, she wonders? She was away for only a couple of hours, and the blood around him is still very sticky, so not long. He may, though, have been missed already, which means that she ought now to hurry. If he had a companion – perhaps a colleague – then she is lucky that this has not yet been discovered.

Or, perhaps, he has been discovered... She stands suddenly and looks around, instantly inside the certitude that she is being observed. The forest around the house and its environs do not give her a clue; there are only the sights of all that is immediately around her, and the sounds of nature (and, as much as she has tried, they form only a cacophony to her). Perhaps someone, perhaps more than someone, is watching, but she cannot know. Being practical, she bothers about this no more; she has learned to be pragmatic.

Intellectually, disposal of the corpse is relatively easy, although hard for her body because she is slim and slight. First, she grabs the hands, trying and failing to ignore the clamminess of the cooling flesh; then she pulls them up and over the head, working against the encroaching rigor. Having pulled the corpse around, she drags it away from the front of the house, around the side and towards the gate that opens into the Forest. She pulls it along the paved path that splits her vegetable garden into two, the beds already prepared for seeds, the trench on the left already dug for runner beans. It takes her thirty minutes and, by the time she is under cover of the beech, sweet chestnut, oak and plane trees, she is exhausted and, as her grandfather would have said in a strange voice, glowing. Only the presence in her mind of the absolute necessity of hiding the corpse gives her the strength to continue. She keeps going, though, pulling the interloper off the track that leads to the old Infirmary, finding eventually the narrow ditch, no more than a slight undulation. Only here and now does she stop to take practical steps to discover precisely who and what this man might have been. Searching his few pockets, she finds nothing and that, in itself, is odd. Too tired to do anything more, she leaves him to decomposition, covering his oncoming corruption with as many leaves and as much mulch as she can.

She knows that he will not be lonely in his grave, for she has buried him next to the first man that her father murdered.

Why, Daddy? The question is unanswerable by her, although it keeps recurring. She knows that he will tell her that his muses made him do it, but that is an explanation, not a reason. To him, it means nothing, other than the removal of an obstacle to his all-consuming aim; to her, though, it is deeply troubling. She is not so young that such a violent act does not shock her immensely. Only her mother’s dying wish – that she should help her father in his momentous act of dedication – keeps her from horror and allows her to continue to help him and care for him.

*******

Inspector George Beauchamp wasn’t in any way French and, until his move to Hereford, his unusual surname had not proved much of a problem. Throughout his entire life – until now, at least – people had accepted that it might sound French, that it might have French roots, but it had become (north-west of the English channel, at least), an English surname. It was one of a million sequelae of the Norman invasion, and nowhere near the most significant, but he had always considered it a good name to bear. It wasn’t run-of-the-mill, after all; it sounded slightly distinguished, although he hoped that, in his behaviour, he didn’t underscore this unspoken contention. The fact that it was pronounced in a completely different way to the one suggested by the spelling was sometimes tricky, when given over the phone, or when asked to spell it, but English was full of such words; it made the language interesting. Once the initial confusion was dissipated, things moved on.

More recently, this situation had changed. Now, his family name had become tricky for him. Now both he and his surname were greeted sometimes with amusement, sometimes with bemusement, oftentimes with derision. The people of Herefordshire hadn’t thought it to be particularly distinguished, it seemed; they thought it pretentious, more like. Anyone with a name like that, especially one who, in their opinion, aimed for sophistication, wasn’t to be taken seriously.

He had originally thought that it would be a smart move to spend the later part of his police career in a rural district but, for this main reason, admittedly amongst others, he hadn’t enjoyed the three months he’d so far spent in the county. He’d even taken to claiming to hate all things French, although he’d enjoyed quite a lot of Beaujolais in his time, and wasn’t averse to ripe Brie. He proclaimed proudly that he was of solid Anglo-Saxon heritage, although, unbeknownst to him, an eighth of him was Dutch and a quarter Italian, but – ironically – little more than five percent was Gallic. All this had been to no great avail.

Crime, too, seemed more peculiar than he’d been used to in Walsall.

The buried, half-decomposed corpse of a baby, for instance, that turned out to be a piglet dressed in a romper suit. Or the woman who jumped feet first, and stark naked, into a threshing machine, because she had been turned down for some sort of government support. Also, there had been the cock-fighting ring. Crime in Walsall was vicious or sordid, but it had had about it an air of what he now saw was normality. It was crime that was explicable, perpetrated by people he understood; there seemed around him now an insidious sense of lunacy, as though something prismatic refracted every single one of the senses.

As he drove, he tried to tell himself that a man run through with a Samurai sword was, therefore, nothing too bizarre, given what passed for ordinariness in the place in which he found himself. When he questioned the police dispatcher, asking was she sure that it was to be treated as likely suicide, he was reassured; yes, the officers at the scene thought there was no third party involvement, but requested the attendance of an inspector, as laid down in procedures. “Run through with a Samurai sword?” he repeated, for clarification.

“That’s what is reported.” She had been matter of fact about it.

The house didn’t give him the creeps at once. It was set at the top of a shallow hill, overlooking a river, just north of Fownhope; even in the cold spring, before much dared to wake from winter, it struck him that the view was eye-catching in its beauty. It was located some way off the main road that led from the village, reached by a flat, winding drive between dormant willows that bent down and brushed the car roof. It smugly proclaimed money – smart and relatively recently decorated, with perhaps seven or eight bedrooms. The lawn in front had been lately mown (perhaps for the first time that year), and the flower beds – sporting snowdrops that clung grimly on and yellow and mauve crocuses that were newborn – were free of weeds. A police car marked in the Mercia constabulary colours was parked outside, next to a red and white striped Mini that looked gaudy in this environment. He saw, as he expected, the dark green VW Golf on the other side of the Mini. He felt his constitution stiffen unconsciously, a man-of-war preparing for engagement, pulling in canvas, stowing loose objects, tidying ropes so that they weren’t trip hazards.

Barely five seconds passed after his knock on the door before it was pulled open abruptly and a fair-haired, crew cut, and uniformed police constable peered out suspiciously, first at Beauchamp, then around the garden. He looked slightly shocked, Beauchamp thought. “Yes?” the constable enquired in a voice that pretended to officiousness, yet could not hide a little tremulousness.

Beauchamp’s bona fides were examined carefully. The constable – collar number 191 – looked at him, somewhat dazedly for a second, and then back to the warrant card, as if he still couldn’t quite believe that all was in good order. There was a definitely vague air of something akin to jitteriness about the man, who appeared to Beauchamp to be little more than a tyro, and perhaps not an incandescent one. Only with a display of some reluctance did he stand back and to one side to allow Beauchamp entrance. “The body’s in the front living room, to your right, Inspector.”

But Beauchamp was momentarily distracted for, upon entering the hallway, he came face to face with a human head under a glass dome, the left eye replaced by some sort of pigmented growth that protruded cockily from the socket. It all looked disturbingly real, as if the poor wretch had been decapitated and his head placed under glass for public entertainment. He had to make a considerable effort to collect himself. Then, unsure why, he asked the constable, “What’s your name?”

“PC 191 Collinge, sir.”

“I see Sergeant Brierley’s arrived already. Where is he?”

“With the body, sir.”

He didn’t quite stutter and Beauchamp speculated on whether this not-quite-stutter was constitutional, or due to the presence of the head, or the body, or Brierley. It could so easily have been Brierley, but it was probably a confluence of all three. “Are you new?”

“I started two months ago, sir.”

Beauchamp thought about asking what had apparently disturbed him, but decided against this. He could see that the head was not for the faint of heart and he could guess that, death due to a Samurai sword, was not going to be easy on the eye, and as for interacting with Sergeant Jeremiah Brierley...

“Brierley’s a character,” he had been told by Richard Rekorde, the station superintendent, that first morning. “A good police officer, though.” Brierley was to be his sergeant, it transpired. He had wondered at the time what was being implied, thinking vaguely that he didn’t much like the sound of it all. “A lot of local knowledge. A good man to have on your side.” Which was a tad Jesuitical, he had subsequently discovered. Brierley was on no one’s side but his own. Whilst not actually hindering his superior, Jeremiah Brierley never seemed to have the same agenda; he was becoming afraid that the two of them not only didn’t sing from the same hymn book, they followed entirely different religious creeds.

Collinge asked, “What would you like me to do, sir?”

“What were you doing?”

“Sergeant Brierley told me to stay with the couple who found the body.”

“Do that, then.”

Collinge left him, happy that he was doing the right thing, and Beauchamp entered the room that had been indicated, trying to assume again an air of unruffled dignity, but he was to be thwarted in this. Yes, there was a slain man on the carpet, lying on his side in a foetal position – and Brierley was standing above it – but that wasn’t as out of context as a humble police inspector might have supposed, because the setting was arresting. Once ensnared by what was on display around the room, his gaze wouldn’t be satisfied and his eyes travelled again and again along the walls, darting hither and thither, from place to place. He tried to find something that wasn’t unsettling, and was all the time aware of Brierley looking at him as he came to take in Martin Waldeyer’s unique decorative scheme. When he snatched a glance directly at the sergeant, he saw only a man who was regarding him with grim interest.

The walls were covered in the most macabre selection of exhibits he had ever seen. The things that first caught his attention were the pictures of smoking skulls, of skeletons, of death and dying, of massacre and slow solitary death. An entire wall was covered in numerous weapons – swords, pistols, daggers and garrottes – arrayed around a central display of death masks, things made of white plaster or something; they stared at him with determined and horrible serenity. In the opposite corner was an ornate bloodied shirt on a tailor’s mannequin. To one side of the desk, there was a glass-topped display case in which were laid out what looked to him to be a complete but dismantled human skeleton; it was tiny, though; either a child or perhaps a pigmy. The bones were bleached and neatly labelled in faded blue ink on tiny cardboard labels. The skull was perched on the teeth of the upper jaw, as if it were biting the green baize, possibly in frustration that the mandible had been dislocated and sat beside it.

On high shelves were clear glass containers in which murky yellow fluid hid various exhibits. Beauchamp could see enough to know that, at least some of them were highly disquieting – a two-headed baby, an entire human leg, a penis and scrotum. He felt as though reality were peeling away layers in front of him. It was threatening to reveal something he would rather not have seen, as if someone were trying to prove that a man run through with a sword could be a usual means of suicide, because the world was a bizarre place...

PC 191 Collinge had shown nervous antagonism; Sergeant Brierley, as was his way, radiated a much more definite kind and did so in waves, as if glowing with inexplicable belligerence. “You took your time, sir,” he said by way of welcome, his accent coarsely rural. Beauchamp sometimes wondered if he affected it. The last word hinted at a degree of respect that was entirely missing from all other aspects of the sergeant’s speech and behaviour. Brierley, nearing retirement and flabby of face, of frame and of attitude, gave all the notion that he was a dangerous man to know. It was an impression that contradicted Superintendent Rekorde’s oft-hoisted assertion that Brierley was an archetype of the investigative trade, an example for all young detectives to follow. At first, Beauchamp had been puzzled by this continual exhortation; it was contrary to all available evidence, but scuttlebutt had reached his ears that Rekorde and Brierley were friends from way back. It made sense. Beauchamp had come across this type of thing many times before in his career. Loyalty born of friendship, stretched to cover all sorts of misdemeanours and negligence; rose-tinted spectacles so deeply coloured they blocked all light.

Beauchamp knew that he must not be affected by any of what was around him; not the macabre nature of the decoration nor that of the death. After all, Brierley didn’t seem to be; he resolved – not for the first time – to be unaffected by the torpid insubordination that oozed from every one of the sergeant’s prominent pores. He knew that Brierley was completely typical of a particular sort of local, people whose idea of normality seemed to be unknowable to him, so alien. He must not make rash conclusions in this case, he determined. He must follow procedure, as he had done so often before. He took a step closer to the body; Sergeant Brierley didn’t give ground, almost as if he considered the corpse to be his personal property. Beauchamp chose for the moment to ignore this; he crouched down by the body, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. In this position, he examined carefully the wickedly smooth, curved sword that ran through the man’s abdomen, running parallel with the worn floral pattern carpet. Even through dried blood, it gleamed almost happily, as if replete now that its single purpose (perhaps for the first time) had been served. There was a brown smear on the blade as it protruded from the back that looked faintly faecal. How could this conceivably not be murder?

The sergeant belched faintly above him.

*******

Simone sits opposite her father in the cold, plain kitchen. He is in exactly the same position as when she left him, even though she has used three hours to hide the body and clean down, as best she can, the place where it was slain. She is crushingly tired and still slightly breathless, her panting misting the air between them. Part of the time, she spent looking for a bicycle, finding it eventually just along the lane, propped against a horse chestnut tree. It, too, is anonymous, giving no clue as the identity of its owner.

She looks directly into her father’s deeply hazel eyes, at their terrified, dilated pupils that open into a black void. She knows that, were she to reach across to touch him, she would feel only inhuman rigidity under the cloth of his jacket and that, were she to shout at him, his expression would remain adamantine, resolutely and yet absently catatonic. She knows, too, that she will not do either.

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Four

Leo is confronted by howling bleakness, harpies who torment him, colours that blind him, a sense of complete loss; it is a place he knows well, where sounds ripple and the stench of decay flows from his eyes, where he hears Apollo booming at him from his own throat, articulating crushing and terrible scorn about him. In his belly writhe bloated spiders, and his eyes are become foetid pus; he is nothing to himself, nor to the world. He is in a place he knows well, and it will always terrify him. He endures only for his art and for his beloved, departed Penelope.

Simone can only wait and wonder. Wonder who the cyclist was and what the consequences of his loss will be; wonder if it is of significance that he had no identification on him, or even money. Was he some sort of agent? It smacks of deception, if only by omission of fact. Surely, an innocent cyclist getting lost in Crowland Forest – no matter how unlikely it might be that he would happen upon the house – would have had something on him – cash, a credit card, even keys? What will happen all depends, she knows, on whether he can be placed at the house by anyone taking an interest in his disappearance, because any sort of forensic examination will soon reveal his blood outside the front door; but only a forensic examination, because she worked hard to remove obvious traces. She wonders again why her father did such a thing, regretting her absence which allowed it. She usually only absents herself from the house when he is at work in his studio in the abandoned Infirmary. An attack can come at any time, but there his isolation is so complete that it doesn’t matter. The ravings, if there be such, are unheard, and no one sees the blazing light of madness in his eye.

She would not have left him had she not been convinced that he would sleep for several hours; he only came in from the Infirmary a short while before, not having slept for three days. She succumbed to a desire that returns again and again, and with greater and greater frequency – the desire to be away from the house and their cares. Acting on this impulse, she did nothing more complex than go for a walk in the woods, knowing that she would not be seen and hoping to escape her cares, but she now realises that she has been fooled yet again, by the madness. Her father’s diurnal rhythms are, like the rest of his mind, astonishingly abnormal, so that ‘day’ and ‘night’ now for him mean nothing more than an indication of whether the sun or the stars are in the sky. He can work as easily in one as in the other, sleeping only when he’s tired or, more often, when the voices in his head allow him some peace. She loves him deeply, but she fears him – or perhaps his voices – even more. It is a love that is laced liberally with gratitude, for he rescued her once.

He shudders and she begins to weep in the silence that continues between them.

*******

Brierley announced in a bored, almost theatrically constabular voice, “The deceased’s name is Martin Waldeyer, the house owner.” He wasn’t about to be put out by the sight of a man run through with a sword, it seemed. Indeed, he sounded as if such things had once been a daily occurrence in his working – perhaps also his personal – life.

“Have you touched anything?” asked Beauchamp, not looking at his subordinate. There was a look of sorrowful agony on the waxen face of the corpse, as well there might be, he supposed. The man’s hands were clutched around the hilt of the sword, which looked old and disturbingly beautiful to Beauchamp.

Brierley rumbled on, as if he were some sort of mechanical automaton, following orders supplied by frayed beige punch cards. “I have ascertained that life is extinct, as per protocol.” The last three words were uttered in what the inspector thought a somewhat insolent tone.

“Well done.” For this, he used retaliatory sarcasm.

Brierley perhaps didn’t recognise it. “Thank you.”

Beauchamp was still not convinced to any great degree that this wasn’t a suspicious death. He was himself being careful not to touch the body, trying to get a closer look at the face by stretching his neck and tilting his head. It was an elderly man with a totally bald head; he must, Beauchamp estimated, have been well over six feet tall. There were deep dark bags beneath the eyes, while the cheeks and nose were filigreed with fine blue veins. His clothes were a violet dressing gown – violently violet, yet somehow not too violet given the house –and black silk pyjama bottoms, both now ruined by blood, as was the rug on which he lay. “Who found him?”

There followed a pause as Brierley slowly consulted his notebook, leafing laboriously through the sheaves of recycled paper. “A young woman by the name of Natasha Vogt and a young man called Thomas Newman; she’s a niece of the deceased. They’re in the room next door.”

Beauchamp stood up and went quickly to the window, Brierley watching him sulkily. It proved to be solidly locked and pristine. The front door didn’t appear to have been damaged, either. “Have you checked all the potential ways into the house?”

“Yes.” This reply was insolently bored but Beauchamp couldn’t be bothered to notice it. When he had been new in the posting, he had found the attitude irksome, but now he was doing his best to become used to it. He was stuck with Brierley, just as he was stuck with the wart on his index finger; the doctor had once told him that it might suddenly vanish for no apparent reason, but he doubted the same held true for Jeremiah Brierley.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Is the house secure?”

“All the doors were locked and the windows closed. No sign of forced entry.” Brierley sounded, and undoubtedly was, contemptuous.

“Have you searched the house?”

“Yes.”

“Every room? It looks a big house.”

“Every room.” Brierley’s disdain was proving the perfect shield against Beauchamp’s disbelief.

“Even the attic? I should think a house this big would have quite a capacious attic.”

Apparently Brierley couldn’t summon the energy to respond and Beauchamp discovered that he was unable to pursue the point. “How did Natasha Vogt and Thomas Newman get in, then?”

“Key safe around the back. They knew the combination and let themselves in. They had seen the deceased through the window when they first called and could get no reply.”

“So they might have done it.”

“Done what?”

“This.” He indicated the body.

“It was suicide.”

Beauchamp eyed the body in consideration of this theory. He’d seen plenty of successful suicides in his life, but this was most definitely a first for him. Brierley, though, seemed more at home with the presence of the ghastly thing. No, really, is he from a different planet? The inspector didn’t risk scoffing openly, commenting only, “A bit extreme.”

The good sergeant turned down the corners of his mouth; if he intended to improve his physiognomy, it was Inspector Beauchamp’s opinion that he failed. He pointed out, “There’s no sign of a struggle, the house was secure, and there are numerous valuable items still present.”

“They got in using the key from the safe and caught him unawares. The motive might not be pecuniary – perhaps there’s a family feud...”

“He was run through from the front.” Brierley was imperious, implacable and, in his superior’s opinion, impossible.

“There’s no note.”

“There more often isn’t.”

Fighting frustration and finding that he was losing, the inspector desisted. Everything that Brierley said was correct and logical; maybe it was just because he was willing this surly subordinate to be wrong that he argued. Even so, it was a very macabre way to kill oneself. He pointed this out to Brierley.

“You didn’t know Martin Waldeyer.”

“Did you?”

“I’d had reason to talk to him now and then.”

“What about?”

“This and that.”

“On what occasions?”

“When it was necessary.”

Beauchamp discovered his head was starting to swim, doing so torpidly like a bloated and dying whale. He had to control his anger as he asked, “What was your impression of him?”

“He were a funny bugger.”

Beauchamp looked around him again. Although it was an eclectic mix, there was a vague, oriental theme in some of the objects, such as a painting of a sleeping eastern girl in bed with a skeleton, and what he fervently hoped was a faked photograph of a Geisha at the point of shooting herself through the roof of the mouth, the back of her head exploding while her face merely looked surprised. Choosing to ignore this, he walked over to look at another of the pictures; it portrayed a little girl with a skull for a head, standing beside a bizarre mask. It gave him the creeps. To its side was some sort of pink, iridescent collage that, on closer inspection, proved to be composed of overlapping finger nails. He was nauseated to discover that that they were whole human nails, lacquered in a variety of colours. Perturbation turned to outright consternation when he appreciated that standing to the left of the picture unleashed a faint but distinct outline of a large male member at the spectator, whilst moving to the right revealed a full-lipped vulva within its depths. He experienced dreadful fascination, wondering despite himself how this remarkable effect had been achieved, then deciding that he really didn’t want to know. He looked hurriedly away, his gaze falling upon the wall of weapons, and he spotted a space in its midst where a curved sword may once have lived. With a deep breath, he determined anew not to be intimidated. Sergeant Brierley belched gently, as might a man who didn’t care; Beauchamp chose not to chastise him, not because he was inured to it (Brierley did it continually and Beauchamp likewise reprimanded him) but because he had not the strength to fight that particular battle. He felt like a professional boxer in the middle of one fight too many.

“In what way?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“People talked about him.”

“What did they say?”

“You know.”

“I said that I didn’t.”

Brierley looked down at the corpse and the exchange was arrested; Beauchamp felt winded, as if assaulted and he realised, in a way, this burliest of country policemen had done just that. “They said he fiddled.” It appeared that suddenly, somehow, Brierley had become bashful.

“He was a paedophile?”

Brierley’s nod was oddly sorrowful. “So they say.”

“He was a paedophile and no one thought to do anything about it?”

“I didn’t say he were, just that people said he were.” Brierley looked around the room. “You can see why, can’t you?”

Disorientated, a sense of mal-de-mer hovering at the periphery of his perception, the inspector cast a metaphorical eye around the room, as requested, without anything that approached resolution. His attention was caught and held by the surface of the desk and he walked over to it. It was an ornate thing, perhaps antique, certainly imposing; the kind of desk that belonged in another, more self-confident century. The top was bare, except for a small desktop computer (switched off) and, in front of this, an open box that lay on a sheet of thick, brown paper that had once wrapped it; the lid was to one side. Inside the box were several layers of tissue that formed a bed for a musical instrument; Beauchamp was struck at once by the beauty of the thing. He didn’t yet dare pick it up, but he wanted to; it almost seemed to yearn to be handled and played. It was some sort of pipe or recorder but, at the same time, more exotic than either of these. Eastern, perhaps, he mused; it would be in keeping with some of the other exhibits.

His reverie was interrupted by an unbidden idea. He asked his sergeant, “How well did you know him?”

Brierley shrugged. “I’d come across him…”

A typical Brierley answer, saying one thing with the words, another with the implication. “And how did you ‘come across’ him?”

Brierley stared at him. “I’ve lived in this county for a long time, Inspector. I’ve come across a lot of people over the years.”

Beauchamp wondered what his sergeant was concealing; yet he wondered at the same time, if he were hiding anything at all, if it were all a sleight of hand, a feint, done as much for idle pleasure as deliberate misdirection, like an amateur magician trying to impress with a tawdry card trick, the cards rather frayed at the edges. Was it at all relevant? He couldn’t see how Brierley was involved, even if Martin Waldeyer had been murdered. .

His deliberation on this was barely broken by the sound of yet more quiet eructation from the estimable sergeant, following which the man aired a question: “Shall I get a forensics team?”

Beauchamp knew only too well that such specialist teams cost money. Indeed, he had been explicitly lectured about this by Superintendent Rekorde, and thus he hesitated. Sergeant Brierley looked at him; an expression of innocence sat uneasily on his face, possibly unaware that it was in hostile territory. Beauchamp suspected he saw also something of malice there too, although, as usual with the sergeant, it was hiding just out of sight, and peering around the corner of his eyes. “Not yet,” he declared. “I want to talk to the two who discovered the body first.”

“What about the FD’s?”

“FD’s?”

“Funeral directors… Undertakers, if you will. Shall I call some out? In anticipation, like.”

“Not yet,” he said resolutely. He then added warningly, “And no one’s to touch the body until I say so.”

“Of course, sir,” agreed the sergeant gravely.

*******

Simone is standing at the front door, looking out at the thick woodland around the house when she hears her father calling. “Simone? Simone?” He sounds agonised and perhaps terrified and she, at once, hurries back to the kitchen. He is contorted, crying, and rocking violently on the wooden chair; he repeatedly slams his arms down on the table surface making the crockery and cutlery leap ecstatically. He has been suddenly cast out of catatonia and into hysteria. “Simone? Simone? Simone? Sim...”

She rushes to the table to grasp his arms and stop their assault on the pinewood, but he is too strong. “Daddy!” she shouts, grasping again. “Daddy!”

It takes her many minutes to calm him, many attempts to hold his arms, to gain his attention. Even when he stills and subsides into silence, he is sobbing and gasping for breath. She says for perhaps the tenth time, although now not shouted but whispered gently, “It’s alright, Daddy. It’s over. It’s over.”

And when he doesn’t reply, she says it again, and then again, and then again. She has not had much of the company of other children, and has not had much comfort herself in her short life, but she knows instinctively how to soothe him. His sobbing and simpering slowly lessen into relative quiet, broken only by his heavy breathing. She is holding his wrists tightly. His chin on his chest, he says, “I killed him, didn’t I?”

She says in a low sad voice, as if confessing her own sin, “Yes.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know.”

He is crying again, but is no longer struggling against her. She gets up and fetches a box of tissues from a shelf above the electric cooker. She dabs his cheeks dry. He says, “They said he was a spy.” She doesn’t answer; she knows who he means by ‘they’. He adds, “Sent by your grandfather.”

She sighs. “Perhaps he was.”

“You think so?” She sees that this reassures him; in the war between her father and her grandfather, an innocent death distresses him, but the killing of an enemy combatant is excusable, perhaps even a cause for celebration. She knows that he feels always that he is losing the battle with Martin Waldeyer.

“Possibly.” He thinks about this; she realises too late the implications of what she has done. In trying to reassure him, she may have added to his delusion. “I don’t know for sure, though,” she goes on, but it is too late.

“My muses wouldn’t deceive me,” he says to himself.

“Daddy...”

“I’m doing wonderful things, Simone.”

“I know that...”

“For Penelope. It’s what she asked me to.”

She sighs. “I know.” She loves him so much and yet...

“It will be my greatest achievement, the greatest expression of love I can give her. They want me to succeed, Simone. They wouldn’t lead me astray, would they?”

She bites back tears herself. She feels so much love for him, and she is so grateful to him for rescuing her from Grandpa Martin, and yet she knows that the murder of the stranger was wrong. The confusion of the fight between her love and her abhorrence brings forth the tears. “Maybe they can make mistakes, too,” she suggests hopelessly.

Vehemently, he answers, “No. Not them.”

She backs away from arguing. Perhaps he is right, after all. “Don’t fret yourself about it.”

There is a long pause – one that she knows, but has never understood, one in which he is communing and she (and all else) is excluded – and then he asks, “Is he gone?”

She can only nod; to speak would be to collude in the monstrousness of the euphemism. Her taciturnity passes sentence on him, and even he can feel it. The silence that grows between them changes character as it matures, passing from a state of mutual affection – the one that has brought them to this place, this position – to a state of mutual incomprehension and wariness – the one that has been gradually enveloping the two of them since her mother’s sudden accident.

He says thoughtfully, “He’s getting close, Simone. Time is running out, I fear.”

She has felt time to be running out for much of her life. When she first came to an awareness of such things, she had not at first realised how different her father was; how might she? She had only her grandfather and mother for comparison. And perhaps he hadn’t been so very aberrant at the start, but his behaviour had slowly grown increasingly variant, even to her young sense. And when Grandpa Martin had started to change too, when he had started to look at her intently and with an odd smile behind his eyes, her father had seemed to become more agitated. He had looked more and more troubled, more and more as if he were bottling up something that was both powering him and corroding him. The look had presaged the madness, she was now sure but, at the time, she hadn’t known this. No one had. How could they?

It was a madness that had become only truly apparent after they had flown that darkly beautiful house. It was a madness that had possessed him completely when her mother had fallen down those hateful stairs; the act of possession had taken hold of him, and squeezed him, and yet it had fulfilled his overweening ambition to artistic greatness. His muses now commanded him, but to what magnificence had they led him in the act of memorialising all that was embodied in her impossibly beautiful and talented mother? She knew enough to know that others might not see it so.

He asks (and his tone is odd; almost, she thinks, sly), “Do you still love Grandpa Martin?”

It is not a question she has ever thought to ask herself. Her feelings towards her grandfather have flowed into and out of her unregarded and unanalysed; they mix affection and awe, and amusement… and dread. The solid grounding of unquestioning love has been eroded in places by fears of what he seemed to be, fears of what he seemed to want to do, yet bolstered in others by moments in which he led her through the knowledge and enthusiasms and wonders that he showed her. But she doesn’t fully understand these huge, drenching washes of feeling, as potent as they are.

She replies, “Yes,” because there is undoubtedly truth in the word, even if she feels a strong reluctance not to give such a simple, whole-hearted affirmation.

He smiles sheepishly before saying (and quickly, as if out of guilt), “I’ve sent Grandpa Martin a present.”

“What do you mean?” His words electrify her. They were said in such an innocent, guileless way, and yet she knows immediately that, in consequence, they might be explosive. There ought to be nothing wrong and everything right in such an act.

“He told me to.”

“Who did?”

“Apollo.”

Of course. She tries to reply, but can’t. He lulled her back into the innocence of childhood, only to spring this upon her. She is flung painfully back into the strain of adult responsibility. Her father clearly hasn’t thought through the ramifications of this act. She had assumed, until now, that he thought as she did, that like all hunted animals they had to insulate themselves from the environment, that communication was merely betrayal by one’s own hand; she saw that she had been mistaken, for her father’s thinking was being done for him. Yet how did he manage it? The house was well off any sort of road, but at the end of the lane there was a small post box from which the post was collected daily. It couldn’t have been a large parcel, though, to have been sent that way. “What was the gift?” she enquires with spurious calm in her voice.

“Just a small pipe.” It is as if its consequences are proportional to its size.

“But why?” she asks, trying to make it sound as if it is of no consequence.

“He said Martin would want to know how skilled I am, and how I have turned his daughter into art that will sound forever.”

She cannot stop herself from pointing out gently, “Perhaps it was the gift that brought that man.”

“No, no.” He is vehement. “I was very careful not to leave any clues.”

“Even so…”

“And it’s too soon. I only sent it a couple of days ago. He may not even have got it yet.”

She is not reassured. Time is indeed running out fast. She ought to be angry with him at this inexplicably stupid act that threatens disaster, but she cannot be. Once again, he has just been the instrument of a will that is no longer his.

She reaches to hug him, to hide her tears.

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Five

Tom, himself shocked by what they discovered, had tried to comfort Tasha, who cried continuously as they sat together on the old sofa in Uncle Martin’s back sitting room. The PC who sat with them – ‘Collinge’, Tom thought he called himself, although he found he couldn’t be sure – stood looking out of the window. Tom considered that the constable was nervous and jumpy, presuming the sight of Uncle Martin to be the cause; PC Collinge perspired a great deal and breathed rather heavily, giving the impression that he might explode at any moment, any provocation. Understandable, too; Tom was a pathologist and saw many dead, but never once like the one in the room next door. Poor Tasha. Even though she had trained as a nurse, to see a beloved relative in such a state had proved too much. Tom’s mind was too full of the shock, and of having to look after Tasha, to have thought much about the way such a thing might have come about.

He had taken it upon himself to telephone Tasha’s parents to inform them of the news. “Dead?” was Emanuel Vogt’s response.

Tom thought he sounded disbelieving, as though this might be a jolly jest in bad taste, exactly the kind of thing a pathologist would do. “Suicide, apparently. The police are here now.” Tom had always found consultant surgeons somewhat intimidating, and Tasha’s father definitely terrifying. Tom had thought hard about this. He was unsure whether it was because of his specialty – which involved removing large bones with brute force whilst making prodigious amounts of money – or because the man was extremely possessive of his only daughter.

“Is Natasha alright?”

“She’s shocked, of course. The circumstances are fairly horrible.”

“Bloody Uncle Martin,” said Mr Vogt. His voice was low. “He always was a weirdo. That whole side of the family are peculiar.”

Tom, who knew but a little of this, could only say, “Yes.”

“How did he do it?”

Tom told him and heard a long exhalation of breath through Emanuel Vogt’s imperious nose. “Of course,” he said bitterly. “Bloody loony,” he pronounced angrily at this point. Then, “Look after my daughter, Tom. I’m counting on you.” It might have been a speech from a war film, a commanding officer telling his troops what he expected of them in the coming carnage.

“I will.” Tom felt at once gladdened to have been thus entrusted, and yet terrified that he would prove inadequate. He still didn’t know what to call Tasha’s father; he felt he hadn’t known the family long enough to use his first name but also felt that, were he to get into the habit of calling him ‘Mr Vogt’, it would establish the nature of the relationship to his perpetual disadvantage. Assuming, of course, he had told himself on more than one occasion, it’s going to last.

“You’d better.” The connection was cut with this exhortation, one that Tom could only catalogue under the heading, ‘vaguely menacing’, giving him no time to respond. He would have assured Emanuel Vogt that he need have no concerns about his daughter, that Tom Newman had been finding himself increasingly keen in the recent past to take on the role of protector. His only concern was that Tasha might not have quite the same degree of commitment. He had been hurt too many times in too many apparently faithful liaisons to take things for granted.

The door now opened and a small, dapper man came in. Tom noticed that this man had a short beard of ginger hair that was giving way to grey, rather darker hair just off his collar and sad, kindly eyes. Collinge had turned and this man, Tom saw, was known to the constable, perhaps even superior to him. The man produced a plastic card holder and held it up for Tom to see, although he didn’t have time to read before it was withdrawn. “I’m Inspector Beauchamp,” the man said self-importantly.

Tasha looked up for the first time, offering a twitched smile, then dropped her head and Tom had to hold her again. The man dismissed Collinge before pulling a chair away from the wall to sit opposite them.

“What shall I do?” This question from the young constable was asked timidly.

“Go around the outside of the house again for signs of forced entry that may have been missed,” responded Beauchamp impatiently. “We have to be absolutely certain about that.” The police constable nodded, clearly relieved to have something to do, and left them. Then, in a considerably kinder tone, Beauchamp addressed Tom and Tasha. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course.”

Beauchamp noted that this room, at least, approximated typical domestic life, having no horrible pictures on the wall, or stomach-churning exhibits on stands, although it couldn’t be said to be an entirely normal room, for it was dominated by a huge harp, covered in flaking gold paint; it loomed out of a corner by the window, almost – but not quite – like the prow of a schooner that had intersected the house.

He confirmed their identities and then asked how they had come across the body. It was the boy, Tom, who did most of the talking for the two of them. Beauchamp automatically noted that he was tall with fair hair and faded blue eyes; a little gawky, he decided. The boy explained how, having seen the body through the window, they hurried around the back to the key safe that was bolted to the outside wall beside the door, partially hidden by ivy. “Who knew about the existence of the key safe?” Beauchamp enquired.

It was Tasha who answered. “Well... Me, of course. And my parents. We take it in turns to visit him every few months.”

Shorter but definitely the dominant one in the relationship, he decided at once. “He’s your uncle, right?”

“My great uncle. He’s my father’s uncle.”

“He lived here on his own?”

She nodded.

“Anyone else know about the key safe?”

She hesitated, which Beauchamp didn’t miss; indeed, he was intrigued. When he prompted her, she said, “I don’t think so.”

He thought that there was more behind her answer than the truth of a simple denial, but he was also aware that this wasn’t an interrogation and asked no more. Knowing that interviewing wasn’t just about asking questions, he looked at her; Tasha looked at the floor; Tom looked at Beauchamp. The inspector came to a decision after a short time, that for Tom and Tasha was a long while, and turned to Tom. “You’re Miss Vogt’s boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know about the key safe?”

He shook his head, perhaps too vehemently thought Beauchamp, perhaps guiltily. Possibly Tom Newman did too, for he stopped suddenly. Beauchamp abruptly turned back to Tasha. “What kind of man was Martin Waldeyer?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he have a history of depression? Had he ever threatened suicide?”

“No...” The evasiveness was back.

Beauchamp was becoming annoyed. “Miss Vogt, perhaps I could ask you to see matters from my point of view. I am being asked to believe that Martin Waldeyer killed himself for no apparent reason, by committing hara-kiri; this is somewhat unusual, even for Herefordshire, so any help you give me would be much appreciated.”

“Seppuku,” put in Tom, timidly.

“What?”

“The preferred term is ‘seppuku’. ‘Hara-kiri’ is regarded as a western vulgarism.”

“Regarded by whom?”

“Scholars.”

Beauchamp glared at him. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

Tom shrugged, almost apologetically. “Not really. It’s just one of those pieces of trivia that I’ve picked up and can’t put down.”

Tasha took over. “Tom’s a pathologist,” she announced, although Beauchamp couldn’t for the life of him see why this was germane. Her tone was undoubtedly proud, yet Beauchamp also heard just a hint of proprietariness. It told him a lot about the relationship.

He hoisted his eyebrows. “Are you? Where?”

“Not forensic...” Beauchamp noted how he was in a hurry to explain. “At Swindon.”

Beauchamp had a low opinion of pathologists – ‘overpaid, over-cautious twats’, he’d been known to call them – and thus this discovery didn’t lead him into a place of great elation. He decided to ignore this newfound fact. “I’ve seen a lot of suicides in my time, and this is odd.”

“Uncle Martin was odd,” pointed out Tasha.

“Odd enough to do that to himself?”

Beauchamp was shrewd enough to guess that she would find it an unanswerable question. Avoiding it, she responded, “Why don’t you ask my boyfriend? He’s seen a fair few suicides, too.”

There was a pause during which said boyfriend just looked slightly blank. Eventually, Beauchamp enquired as coldly as he could, “And?”

Tom began slowly, “Some – men especially – commit suicide not just to end their lives, but to make a statement. Just dying isn’t enough – that would be too brief and uninformative; there is a breed of suicides who want, in their dying, to make a statement, and to make it as loudly as they possibly can, so that the on-looking world not only cannot ignore it, but may be changed by it.”

Beauchamp was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Tom Newman was a prat. Clever, he suspected, but still a prat.

“A note, you mean?” asked the girl, Tasha.

Tom shook his head. “Words on paper aren’t powerful enough, not for these people. It’s the means of dying that is important. The more shocking the better.”

Beauchamp had heard the theory and had never been particularly interested in it. If he was supposed to look on the act of hara-kiri (or Sudoku, or whatever Newman had called it) as a statement, he wondered what had led to it. “It’s a bloody selfish thing to do, especially doing it like that. It causes a lot of trouble for a lot of people.”

“Really?” Tom asked, and Beauchamp couldn’t be sure at first if he were ingenuous or cynical. “Wasting your time?”

“Yes.”

Tom shrugged. “I’m sure he never appreciated the trouble he would cause. You’re right, of course. They’re selfish, but they don’t have the insight to know it. I’m sure Martin Waldeyer thought he had good reason to shout at the world one last time; perhaps for the first time, in fact.”

Beauchamp clamped down on the irritation that know-all pathologists tended to induce in him, and turned back to Tasha. He asked, “Did Martin Waldeyer have a good reason to ‘shout at the world’?”

Her hesitation told him that she wasn’t happy to go to the heart of things. “He’d had a lot of tragedy in his life.”

*******

Leo is back in his studio considering, once again, and just as deeply as before, the problem of the lyre’s strings.

“At last, he’s back at work.” Is that Mese? Or perhaps it is Nete.

Apollo yawns. “For all the good it will do. He’s worthless, not fit to do this wonderful thing. He’s a cretin, a moron.”

“He’s too unattractive. He always was an ugly little brute.” And, having said this, Nete (the voice is too high-pitched for Mese, Leo has decided) giggles.

Leo tells himself that he must work this out logically; he tries, as ever, not to acknowledge their words, knowing that the very thought mocks his effort. The part of his mind that he is now using doesn’t have knowledge of what he did just a few hours ago, of the place in which he found himself, of the terrible horror that drove him, and the howling despair that shredded him. That is in another place within him, present but unregarded; it is mute, as he was mute. Neither Apollo nor the muses mention it either; it is as though its happening was in a different world too long ago to recall.

On this day, the light from the windows in the roof is grey, the air damp; in some way, this invigorates him. The muffled sounds of winds that swirl around the building do not interest him, but they form a buffer against the world, the place from which he has fled, the place that contained his monstrous father-in-law, who mocked his talent and desecrated his wife, would have desecrated his precious daughter. The wind takes away, if only briefly, the taints of his past, allowing him the purity of amnesia, to create a world in which his art can grow, his love for a dead wife flower.

There are occasional early ants running across the floor where the silverfish darted a few hours before. He does not notice them; his mind has no room for anything except his immediate problem, his feeling of inadequacy before the task, his certainty that Apollo – as the god so often reminds him – has chosen the wrong man through which to work. Time means little to him now; it swirls around him, leaving him untouched, yet drags through his mind like dry fingernails on a cracked blackboard. His memories of the distant past are gone. Then, he was merely another artist, and one not only without purpose, but also talent. He cannot recall if he was happy then – when he was single, and had not yet met Penelope and her father – but he is sure that he did not have the feeling of determination that sustains him now. He cannot even conceive of an existence without dedication, and so his world must have begun at some point during his relationship with his exquisite wife, and stopped there.

But he feels that there could be so much more, if only he is equal to it; that with a little more effort, with greater commitment, some sort of state of ecstasy is his for the taking. He is, though, beset by problems. Time and again, his incompetence betrays him, and he is found wanting.

This particular problem spears him. It penetrates him and gnaws his bones, the internal skeleton of his reason for living. If he can but succeed, this will be the next stage, a progression, because all that has gone before – the whistles made with her finger bones, the flute crafted from her left radius, the pipe (now sent to her father) that was once her right radius, the drum that he spent many hours making by stretching her cured diaphragm over the bowl of her pelvis – has not had the significance that this lyre has. In this, he can sense that he is close to apotheosis.

Yet, once more, he is mired by his own ineptitude. The lyre does not sound as it should, and so will not celebrate dear Penelope, will not delight either Nete, or Mese, or Hypate, or give Apollo reason to withhold his disdain. The mechanics of the thing are proving to be beyond him. It could be one or more of so many things, though. It could well be that the tensioning in the vertebrae may be wrong, either individually or in combination, but he is becoming convinced that the strings have not been treated properly. Yet he does not know, and his space for experimentation is running small, for he has wasted the materials that Penelope had given to him. If he tries again and does not perfect his techniques, the unthinkable will happen, and he will fail because there is no more of his beloved wife.

What to do?

It is in this agony that he strides around the circular room, his scuffed, shapeless shoes crunching loudly on grit, his mind clutching at that which is around him; a vice, three hacksaws of different sizes, a large tin of silver polish, two long brain knives, and an electric engraving pen. As he passes, he picks up and puts down various items – a precision screwdriver, some used disposable rubber gloves, and his wife’s patellae (that he will soon turn into castanets). It is without great purpose that he arrives at the door to the side room, where Penelope’s head rests in the freezer and her gut lies stretching in the pickling tank. The acrid smell of formaldehyde seizes him as he opens it; the floor is wet, too.

She didn’t want to die…

Where did that thought come from? Not from Apollo or his acolytes. The thought of someone – something – else in his head, is shocking, and scares him profoundly. He sometimes feels that his head will burst with all the voices within it, and the idea of yet another appalls him.

Have you failed her again?

That same voice. It talks to him, not about him. Who would do that?

Haven’t you done enough to her?

“Stop it,” he whispers. He has never dared to speak like that to Apollo.

You killed her.

She fell down the stairs, didn’t she? She fell down the stairs in that dreadful, dark house, and their running from Martin Waldeyer was ended, and she died in his arms just before Simone came back in. She lay in his arms, still conscious, but slipping through his reality, her eyes roving and then twitching back, seeing things in her mind, not seeing his face, or feeling his hands as they cradled her head. He had always thought that she saw things that he could not, that she saw the music as a wondrous world that was hidden from him; perhaps she saw it with incandescent clarity as she lay in death at the bottom of the staircase on that horribly dirty carpet, lay with her head at an odd angle, drooling slightly, her lips quivering. Did she see Apollo? He has often wondered that.

You killed her and now you are failing her...

Before he realises it, he screams, “STOP IT!”

He didn’t kill her. It was an accident. She fell down the stairs and lay gasping for breath with her neck broken. He was just behind her, but it all happened before he could stop it, he is certain…

His memory has an oneiric air.

He steps now to the tank and lifts the hinged lid, to see three flies buzz away from the miasma of the rotting gut at its dry bottom.

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Six

Still in the study where Martin Waldeyer had died, Brierley was trying to stave off boredom; he was looking at one of the many books that packed the wooden shelves around the room. It was much as he remembered it from all those years ago. He had always been fascinated by some of the titles; amongst many others, his eye had been caught by How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture, and Rotting Erotica. There were many more such but to his way of thinking the most significant was titled, The Code of the Samurai. It was on a shelf, the entire contents of which were concerned with Japanese culture in all its exotic (and erotic, he was pleased to see) glory; this particular tome contained pictures of all sorts, many of them involving beheadings, amputations, disembowellings and such like. He belched contentedly. The only other sound he had made in the last ten minutes, other than stertorous respiration, was the snort of contempt he had uttered when he had caught sight of Collinge walking past the window, looking with rapt concentration at the outside of the house.

He knew the house quite well, although he saw no reason to inform anyone of this. Martin Waldeyer’s death was suicide, he was certain, and not therefore a police matter. Certainly he wasn’t about to blab about his history with the Waldeyers to Inspector Beauchamp or anyone else.

*******

Simone has never heard Apollo or any of the muses in her head, although she has tried desperately hard to get them to bless her with their words. She would feel so special were it to happen, but she can only guess how her father feels. They are hard, she knows; they torment him, and almost excruciate him sometimes, but the art he now produces is ethereal, almost magical, and she is so proud of him for going through such ecstatic agony to achieve it.

She wasn’t there when her mother died, although she came into the house soon after, when her mother was still at the bottom of the stairs, her father sitting on them just staring at the mirror that hung there then, apparently not aware of her; she knew only afterwards that he wasn’t looking at the reflection of the scene but at a screaming void. He hadn’t responded when she had shouted and rushed forward to crouch by her mother’s form, still warm, still perhaps so easily alive; yet she was unresponsive, her lips blue, her cheeks mottled; her eyes were still bright, but her face held no muscle tone. Her knees were bent and lay to one side quite demurely.

She had seemed to Simone to be declining since the first moment that they left – fled would be a more appropriate term – her grandfather’s house, and Simone was too young to grasp all the reasons, and the nuances of emotion, that had forced her parents into that action, but she’d had enough experience in that dark house full of its frightening art and abstracted emotion to know that bad things happened. They had happened to her mother, but differently bad things had happened to her father; and, yet again, her mother didn’t seem to think that it had all been terribly bad. Simone certainly didn’t understand that. Things were either bad, or they were good, weren’t they?

Her father certainly thought so. He seemed in no doubt that they should leave, and sink away from sight, as if weighted, pretending (it seemed to Simone) to be dead. They had moved a lot in the first few months, and never used their proper names, always used cash. He had become increasingly concerned that her grandfather should find them, and this had come to annoy her mother. They had argued more and more. Once, Simone had asked her father why he was so afraid of Grandpa Martin, and he had thought a long time before replying. They were alone, in the park by the flat that they were then inhabiting (was it the fourth, or the fifth, such flat?), and he was smoking, enjoying it, too. He had said eventually, “Because he wants us back.”

She was making a mess with an ice cream cornet, her fingers pale yellow and sticky. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

He thought again. “Do you remember he used to read bedtime stories to you? When Mummy and Daddy were busy, or too tired?”

She did.

The next thing he said took an even longer time to come out. “Did he ever frighten you?” She thought this a silly question. Uncle Martin was a frightening figure. He was as tall as her daddy, but bald and always dressed in black. He made horrible pictures and things, too. Before she could reply, he added, “Did he ever do anything that Mummy and Daddy never did?”

She didn’t understand, and he had let it go; she thought he was relieved to change the subject. “Well, let’s just say we don’t want to go back.”

But she had known even then that her mother had a slightly different opinion. Simone could understand that, she thought. Grandpa Martin was Mummy’s father and he had brought her up alone; she had always sensed tension between him and Daddy. She had, by then, begun to notice that Mummy was not taking the separation well. She did what Daddy told her, but Simone thought she missed her old life in the big, beautiful house, where she could play the beautiful golden harp that Simone loved so much. Simone’s recollections of her mother at that time all involve a sense of deep contentment; she remembers her playing the harp and singing with a dreamy, intense look on her face. Sometimes, in the late afternoon when Simone was doing her homework in the back sitting room so that she couldn’t make the harp sing, she coaxed something beautiful (either out of the world, or out of herself) with the flute. Her father was often with her, and in her memory his face bears an expression of rapt adoration. Oddly, she cannot recall Grandpa Martin ever being there.

*******

Collinge continued as ordered. He walked slowly around the house and saw nothing about the lower floor windows to suggest anything untoward; close inspection revealed that there were a few faint scratches around the lock on the front door, but he had similar on his own from the times he had returned home drunk and, accordingly, these were discounted. He then decided that he would be thorough; perhaps a ladder had been used to gain access to the upper floors, of which there were two. He began to search for one. This brought him back into the rear garden, the one he had been perusing when sitting with Tom Newman and Natasha Vogt.

The garden was surrounded on three sides by thick privet hedges. Most of it was laid to lawn, although there were four circular flower beds in which roses grew. The hedges on either side were featureless, but the one that ran across the bottom was shaped to form three alcoves. On the right was a neat shed and, behind that and partially hidden from view, was a ladder. He now approached this to look for signs of recent disturbance, and this brought him closer to the alcoves. He hadn’t been able before to see what they contained, because they were deep and shaded. Rain was falling quite heavily when his proximity to them allowed him to discern their contents. In the one on the right was a life-sized guillotine with a bloodied blade, whilst the middle one contained a similarly blood-stained wooden cross; in that on the left was a gibbet, replete with a chafed rope tied in a noose.

Collinge was starting to wonder if there was a portal to hell nearby.

“He was an artist. Most of the work around the house is his.”

“A very distinctive style.” Beauchamp thought that he did well to hide his disgust. His ex-wife had often told him that he was intolerant, and it was proved how perspicacious she was when he caught her in the bath with their next-door neighbour and he made his objections robustly known to both of them.

“Death fascinated him. His wife, Nancy, died not long after they were married – she’d just given birth to their only child, a daughter – and there were complications, apparently. Postpartum haemorrhage, I think. Anyway, it all happened in the middle of torrential rain; the river had burst its banks and the house was isolated. He watched her die, bleeding out.”

“Ah...”

“I think it changed him. At least, that’s what Mummy says. Daddy says it must have been unbelievably traumatic. It would have changed him psychologically forever.”

“I can see it might.”

“They were very much in love, you see.”

“How long ago was this?”

Tasha considered. She was over her tears now, or perhaps they had been dried by the heat of the proverbial spotlight. “I don’t know precisely. At least thirty years ago, maybe even a lot longer ago than that.”

“And he never remarried?”

“No.” The question had unsettled her. He could hear something that told him her replies weren’t designed to lead him along the path to the centre, rather to direct him to the by-pass; he didn’t mind too much, because he quite enjoyed wandering around such interesting places.

“He brought up his daughter up alone?” When she nodded confirmation of this assertion, he asked, “What’s her name?”

“Penelope Banneker.”

“Banneker?”

“She married Leo Banneker. They all lived here with Uncle Martin.”

“I thought you said he lived here alone.”

“He has done, for the past two years.”

“How long ago did Leo and Penelope marry?”

She did the thing with the lips. “Ooh… I would say about fifteen years ago.”

He assimilated this, thinking that he couldn’t have lived with his wife and her father for fifteen minutes, yet alone fifteen years, then enquired reasonably, “So where are they now? Have they been told?”

“Oh no, they can’t have been,” she hurried to explain. Good, he thought, because he knew that people who rushed to answer his questions made mistakes if they wandered away from open truth.

“Why not?”

“They left… quite suddenly. About two years ago, as I said.”

“Really? Why?”

“There was…” She paused.

The hesitation tweaked his interest yet again. His training and experience of thousands of long, tiring hours of interrogation meant that he heard the dislocation as if his name had just been called. It represented the collapse of the unequal equilibrium that deceit sits upon. Beauchamp enquired gently, “Was what?”

Tasha knew that she had to say something. “A falling out.”

That feeling that here was a story, perhaps one of significance, had returned as she had failed to answer immediately, and the news of a ‘falling out’, an argument, a row, an altercation, informed him he had been told of an event of some kind; maybe it would lead directly to a man being killed with a Samurai sword, maybe it wouldn’t, but it was something and he thought he ought to find out more about it. Such ‘disagreements’ (there were so many ways to describe them) were often the gestational events that led to death, even if it was years later. The inspector suspected the words that she used were merely the scar tissue that overlay some sort of major family trauma. He had started the interview with the aim of determining who might have had access to the house – either because they had their own key or because they knew the code of the key safe – and whether there might be bad blood in the family; now, quite abruptly, both boxes appeared to have been ticked.

“Did the Bannekers keep their keys, or did they know the combination of the key safe?”

“They wouldn’t know the combination of the safe because it wasn’t put in until after they left. As for their keys… I don’t know.”

“I’ll need to contact them. How can I get hold of them?”

This time the hesitation was more pronounced. He noted that Tom, too, appeared perplexed by this behaviour. She said, “I don’t know.”

“Who would? Your parents?”

She shook her head emphatically. “No-one. They disappeared completely and we haven’t heard from them since.”

*******

Her mother tripped at the top of the stairs, fell and broke her neck. She died just before Simone arrived back from a visit to the village to buy some milk and eggs from the strange woman in the shop, the one who owned their house. All had changed that day and her father was never the same again. True, he had been becoming increasingly strange, but it was that day that Apollo and the muses arrived, and he turned from being (as her grandfather had once put it in her hearing), ‘a mediocrity’ into someone touched by the spirit that is genius. Just as, in some way that was beyond her comprehension, he had become someone – or possibly some thing – else, so she too had mutated, had developed suddenly.

She remembers Grandpa Martin once lectured her on something called, ‘punctuated evolution’ and, although she didn’t fully understand what he was talking about, she looks on what happened then as somehow an example of it. As he became driven by something inside him that he couldn’t control so, in the shocking absence of her mother, she became his carer. From somewhere, he was given the skills to achieve an end that, at first, she thought horrible and bizarre, but she came to accept as worthy; something that was terrible, yet inexplicably, undeniably great. Even so, the cost had been high. He could not function in anything approaching a normal way and their relationship had inverted. Although he never once acknowledged it, he was totally dependent on his young daughter for survival.

Once, in conversation with the kind but disturbing woman at the shop, Simone had obliquely referred to what her father did; no details, because she had solemnly promised him she would tell no one precisely what he was trying to do, but in terms of doing something that wasn’t altogether nice in order to achieve something that was great and wonderful. The woman had smiled, exposing horrible, brown teeth, then nodded and said, “Like meat.” For a second, Simone was petrified that she had told her too much and inadvertently given her father’s noble and secret endeavours away, but the woman had continued, “It tastes wonderful, but you don’t want to think about how it gets on your plate.”

Yet, she is still afraid that there is something dark within him. He has killed twice, driven to those acts by the same muses, those spirits that guide his hand, that impel – perhaps compel – him towards his goal of making perfection. The first – over a year ago now – was a vagrant, calling at the house because the previous tenants (gone for five years) had once found him paltry work for paltry pay. Her father bludgeoned him to death. She was in the garden, digging out a small vegetable patch prior to planting spring seedlings, hoping to reduce their dependence on the dwindling inheritance her mother had transferred into cash before they escaped Grandpa Martin, and did not hear that they had a caller. Her father used a hammer – she had the day before been repairing a floorboard in the box room – and did so methodically and with mechanical diligence. Only the tramp’s hoarse, terrified scream alerted her; she ran to the front of the house to see her father robotically hammering down on what was clearly already a twitching, bloodied corpse, her father’s face frighteningly blank, and his movements spasmodic.

“Daddy!” she screamed.

She pulled frantically at his sleeve, not feeling the tacky blood spattered on it, only feeling her father’s impassive absence and hearing the liquid sound of each hammer blow on the torn flesh of the tramp. “Daddy! Stop!”

He only slowly obeyed, and even then, did not seem to acknowledge what he had done, or even that he had done anything at all. In a way, he hadn’t; it had been the work of something inside him. His movements were controlled, just as his actions in his studio were controlled, so that Leo Banneker – previously a little-regarded and ‘mediocre’, although earnest, sculptor – managed somehow (incredibly and apparently supernaturally) to produce the beautiful artefacts that now surround her in the display room at the back of the house.

Here, she can imagine that her mother is around her, at least partially. On tables that she has carefully arranged around the walls (as if this were a small and unregarded rural museum open only on Mondays, Thursdays and Friday mornings) are the small pipes and piccolos and whistles that he has fashioned from nine of her mother’s metacarpal bones and six of her metatarsals, there are the larger pipes made from a radius, and the xylophones – or perhaps ‘osteophones’ – that took him weeks to construct using all forty phalanges. They are all beautifully worked and intricately adorned, some in fine filigree, some in complex patterns ranging from arabesque to oriental; most of the coatings are of silver, or gold, or bronze, or dull pewter, a few have small jewels – of what types she does not know – embedded within them. It is an astonishing achievement. Even Simone at her young age can see that her father has become an astonishing man, though.

There has been plenty of space to occupy but, after work that has been long and hard, and often left him enervated, it has been nearly filled. Around her now is a wondrous spectacle, for arrayed in that small room, is her joyous, unparalleled, stunningly beautiful mother, rendered as music. Here are her mother’s tibias and fibulas, and the drum made from her pelvis, both femurs (as oboes) and each humerus (as clarinets), the ribs and the clavicles; even the scapulae, in combination with each other and with all of the tarsal and carpal bones inside to make a percussion instrument. She does not know the details of how they were fashioned, or what music will be made with them, or by whom, or at what time, but she does know that her father has done something uniquely glorious, perhaps never done before.

There are two spaces to fill and her father has sometimes talked of his plans and difficulties. One is for her mother’s head (I can’t destroy her face, Simone. You do understand, don’t you?), the other for the spine (She will be so pleased when she sees and hears it, Simone, and so will you). Now that she knows to look for it, though, she sees another gap, and it disturbs her greatly, for her father has made things of infinite musical and decorative beauty from both of her mother’s radial bones, and one is now missing. She does not understand why he sent it to Grandpa Martin – beyond compulsion by those who occupy his head – but she most certainly does fear that it’s yet something else that may well have unintended consequences.

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Seven

Sergeant Brierley had twenty-one years and three months of service behind him, nine months ahead of him; also behind him were a marriage, a divorce, two sons and a commendation for bravery. The commendation, though, was so far in the past that it was now without significance for him and for those with whom he worked, except in one important regard. In comparison with his former self, he was a changed man, made so partly by domestic problems, but mainly by a blow to the front of the head with a hot iron that he received whilst attempting to arrest a farmer’s wife who had fired off a shotgun at a party of elderly ramblers, slightly injuring one. This experience had left him less inhibited but – as he had always been a forthright (those with whom he worked called him ‘rude’) man – few noticed, and fewer still cared. He now had headaches, but they took their place with hangovers and hay fever and intestinal bloating in the growing list of ailments that he chose to ignore.

At this moment, he was no longer alone with the body of Martin Waldeyer because Collinge had returned from his reconnaissance of the house and grounds. He decided that Collinge looked even more perturbed than before. Brierley could guess what he might have seen at the bottom of the back garden, because he knew the house of old. He didn’t much like Collinge, perhaps because he saw his own youth

in that face, and he didn’t want to; or perhaps because he couldn’t find it within himself to like anybody.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Do you know what’s around the back?”

“Tell me.”

“A guillotine, a gibbet and a huge cross, the kind they used for crucifixion.” Brierley said nothing. “There’s blood on the cross and the guillotine blade,” he added.

Brierley shrugged, leaving Collinge to his discomfort as he stared out of the window at the front garden where, to his relief, he could see no ghoulish exhibits. Brierley said abruptly to his back, “This is art, this is.”

Collinge, who knew that Brierley didn’t like him, mumbled, “Yes.”

“Proper art.” He wandered over to the picture of the smoking skull and squinted at it. “Van Goff,” he said triumphantly. “Told you.” He thought further and sighed. “Don’t suppose it’s original, though.”

Collinge didn’t react; Brierley noted this with savage, unstated glee that flared brightly within him. He said, “This is clever.” He indicated the collage of human nails, with its intimations of sexuality. His voice was both admiring and lascivious and, for a moment, PC Collinge wondered whether Sergeant Brierley was even more wrong in the head than reputed, perhaps possessed by the spirit of the house. Brierley’s perambulations brought him to the desk and the pipe upon it. Uncaring, but not unheeding, of Inspector Beauchamp’s injunction, he bent down and rummaged around a bit.

“Should you be doing that, Sarge?”

Brierley’s hearing had been slightly damaged by his collision with the iron, but it was of sufficient acuity to hear what Collinge said. He asked meaningfully, “Who’s going to know?”

Collinge, mouth slightly open, shook his head slowly while not taking his eyes from Brierley. Satisfied, the sergeant picked up the pipe, looked at it, and then put it down unblown, as if abruptly thinking better of things. He discovered by this action, though, that there was a small card beneath the instrument. He picked it up to see that on this, written in black ink, in a hand that was old-fashioned and ornate, were the words, With no I and no other, who hears the sound?

As no neural connections were made, he put it back without comment or thought. To him, it was absolutely without meaning and his ability to ratiocinate was somewhat limited by both nature, nurture and a domestic appliance. He tended now to undertake his duties by whim or, as a last option, when he was in danger of being criticised for doing nothing useful at all. Having already decided that this was a suicide, most of the details were of no significance to him. Yet the pipe interested him, not for professional reasons, but because of something almost cabalistic. It beguiled him. Suddenly he asked loudly, “What do you think, PC Collinge?”

“Sarge?” the constable asked in wary response. He had watched Brierley intently, as if afraid of turning his back.

The body was indicated. “Do you think it was suicide, or do you think it was murder most foul?”

In truth, PC Collinge hadn’t thought much about it at all: he had been told on numerous occasions in his two months in the job that ‘you’re not paid to think, Collinge’, and he wasn’t about to start now, not in this weird house. “Don’t know.”

Brierley looked once more at the musical instrument that lay snugly in tissue paper in a neat box on the desk surface. He noticed but didn’t note that there was sticky tape at the edges of the paper. The instrument – some sort of recorder, he thought, recalling his own school instrument - was astonishingly beautiful and he was finding himself strongly tempted to play it. It seemed to call to him, although he didn’t formulate this as thought, merely as impulse. The detail was astonishing, the patterning intricate, the golden and silvern sinuous shapes almost mesmerising.

Not being fleet of foot, or agile of mind or body, he had had few talents that were appreciated at school, but he did achieve some success at his secondary school in boxing and, at his primary school, in playing the recorder. He was not backward in coming forward about the former, but he had been somewhat more reticent about the latter, even to himself. He hadn’t thought about his musical pretension for a long time, but his fingers were now telling him with amazing clarity that he could make beautiful sounds with that pipe…

Before his junior colleague’s astounded gaze, he put the pipe to his lips and began to play. His fingers worked themselves and the room was filled by a hesitant, but note perfect, rendition of The Skye Boat Song.

Collinge, who was no more astonished than Brierley, hissed, “Sarge!” at this breech of procedure.

Brierley, however, had already put it back in the box. He looked at Collinge menacingly. “That didn’t happen – remember?”

Collinge nodded slowly. The notes seemed still to hang in the air of the room, a spell that was broken by a belch from Brierley, who then said, as if nothing untoward had happened, “I can’t see there’s much doubt about it. I don’t know what the inspector’s playing at. There’s been a break-in at Deepcut Farm in Putley, apparently, and no one to attend.”

“You don’t think it could be murder?”

“Who by?” asked Brierley sarcastically. “Those two in there?” He indicated the next room where Beauchamp was interviewing Tom and Tasha. “Mork and Mindy? I don’t think so.”

Collinge looked down at Martin Waldeyer, at the drying blood, the vicious sword that seemed content to have been pushed right through the belly to appear, victorious, out of the back. He shivered. “Funny way to do away with yourself.”

Brierley said aggressively, “And you think he wasn’t a fucking lunatic? Look around you, boy.” Collinge didn’t want to, but complied with quick darting glances, like a bird surveying a tree line that potentially held dangerous predators. Brierley continued, “He was an artist.” His tone was difficult for Collinge to read; it could have been ironic, but equally it could have been deferential, or dismissive, or quite possibly angry. “True art comes from madness, Constable. Haven’t you ever heard that?”

Collinge didn’t want an argument. “Suppose so.”

Brierley was mollified by this acquiescence. He approached the body, his head on one side, looking at Martin Waldeyer as if he would like to prod him with his heavy size eleven shoes of shiny black leather. He said, almost to himself, “Martin Waldeyer certainly had something ‘artful’ about him, if the rumours are to be believed.”

“What rumours are those?” asked Collinge.

Brierley perhaps didn’t hear him, was certainly not going to respond. “I don’t think he liked me.”

“You knew him?”

Brierley was back perusing the exhibits. “A long time ago.”

“You think he was the kind of man to do away with himself?”

Brierley spun round. “Every man’s that kind of man, Constable.” He snorted and his voice writhed with disgust, as he said, “I’ve got a horrible feeling that Inspector Beauchamp is going to make our lives very difficult about this.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a bit keen, is what I mean. Didn’t you hear about the piglet?”

“Was that him?”

Brierley looked at his junior colleague and nodded soberly; on his face was the type of scowl that a gargoyle might make if it got its fingers caught in the church door.

*******

“What happened?”

Tasha looked uncomfortable. Beauchamp could smell the secrets behind that discomfort. He could smell, too, what kind of secrets they were, that they were important ones, although he did not yet know the details. She was clearly embarrassed, which meant that perhaps Brierley had been right about the gossip around Martin Waldeyer.

There was a noticeable hesitation before she explained, “There was a terrible row…” and thereby added nothing new at all. She had moved closer to her boyfriend and her hand had sought his, although the touch was light.

Beauchamp now had to prompt her. “And?”

She snatched a glance at Tom and he squeezed her hand and nodded encouragement at her, which Brierley didn’t miss. She said, “I don’t know the details.”

“What was the row about?”

Beauchamp had seen enough people contorting themselves in order not to lie, yet not to allow the truth enough light to make people want to pursue the matter. “I think they’d just wanted to move out and live somewhere on their own,” she said. Beauchamp said nothing. She added, “This is a big house, I know, but I think that things were probably getting a bit fraught, what with three generations in it.”

“Three?”

“They had a daughter, Simone.”

“How old would she be?” asked Beauchamp.

She had to think about this. “I suppose about fourteen by now.” There was the briefest of pauses before she added unnecessarily, “She’s my cousin.”

Beauchamp tried to make sense of the fragments he was being given. “This is Martin Waldeyer’s house?”

“Yes.”

“At first, he lived here alone with his daughter?

“I’ve told you that.”

“She then got married, and had a daughter, but they carried on living under the same roof?”

A nod sufficed this time.

“And then they decided that they were going to leave.”

“That’s right.”

Beauchamp noted that Miss Vogt was unaccountably pleased with this version of events; he was intrigued. “But there was a ‘falling out’,” he pointed out.

“Yes.” This was said warily.

“So… Did they leave because of the ‘falling out’, or did the intention to leave cause the ‘falling out’?”

So cautious was she now that he could see the mental calculations behind her tardy answer. “I’m not sure.”

Beauchamp asked, “Did something happen? After all, they were perfectly happy living together for years and years, then suddenly they left and, at the same time, they ‘fell out’.” He was hardly thinking about the questions he asked now. This was just another of a thousand such conversations and he was happily navigating a course he knew so well, it was imprinted onto his chromosomes. Natasha was a good deal better educated than a lot of those who had to answer his questions, but that was all; it didn’t mean that she was better at evading the truth.

“It wasn’t like that.” She sounded slightly desperate, so Beauchamp waited. Eventually, she spoke but her answer was tangential. “Uncle Martin was a very forceful personality.”

It was an answer that seemed to Beauchamp to be neither interesting nor relevant. He waited, as Bob Marley had once done, though he waited in vain.

The boyfriend decided to help. “Does it matter, Inspector? Either they had a row and they left, or they had a row because they were leaving. Same difference, really.”

“Is it?”

“I think so.”

“But they didn’t just leave, did they? They didn’t just move out, did they? They left and then they vanished to the extent that Miss Vogt here doesn’t know where they are.” He asked of Tasha directly, “Did Uncle Martin know where they’d gone? I take it he didn’t.”

She shook her head and Beauchamp suddenly realised that she was perhaps ashamed; he rather wondered why as he asked, “Before all this happened, how friendly were your family with Martin Waldeyer and the Bannekers?”

He saw more vacillation playing out inside her before she admitted, “Not particularly…” There was a pause in which he wondered if she were going to deceive him, but she went on, “I was quite close to my cousin, but we didn’t socialise much with the family as a whole.”

“Yet you don’t know where your cousin is?”

She shook her head, hair lightly brushing the russet cotton of her jacket. Beauchamp, feeling always small, slightly careworn, but knowing that he was good at his job, said, “The way the Bannekers have just vanished sounds to me like the behaviour of people who have something to hide.”

Another shrug, this time accompanied by an apologetic smile and oh-so-slight shake of the head; I really couldn’t say, she was telling him and Beauchamp, in turn, thought, there’s something here, something that didn’t have quite the right scent.

Tom said, “Don’t you think you’ve got all you’re going to get at this point, Inspector? Tasha’s had quite a shock, you know…”

Beauchamp scrutinised him, ingesting the words of rebuke and aware that this probably wasn’t a murder investigation and that these two weren’t suspects. Irritatingly, the boy was right, but there was definitely something odd here.

A couple of weeks ago, he had tracked down a rancid smell at the back of his fridge to a piece of month-old Camembert lurking behind the salad cream; it had evoked a similar reaction in him to the one he had now. Brierley had alluded to paedophilia; was that it? Or was it something else? Or something in addition?

He asked doggedly, “Do you know what they might have wanted to hide?”

Another shrug and the trace of a grimace, but no other comment. I’m trying very, very hard not to suggest anything in any way, whatsoever, she was saying. Beauchamp forced himself to give up. He sensed a crime; after all, that was his job, except that perhaps it was the wrong crime. An image of the piglet bloomed unbidden in his mind, as if he had post-traumatic stress syndrome which, in a way, he had. How was he supposed to have known it wasn’t a human baby? He’d had a tip-off from a distressed member of the public who had said that there was a child’s body buried on a farm near Sutton St. Nicholas. When he arrived at the smallholding, it hadn’t been long before he had made the awful discovery; a body that had been uncovered by some sort of wild animal – a fox or badger, he supposed without a great storehouse of natural history lore to back this deduction. It had been dressed in a pink romper suit and even had on a knitted woollen bonnet in a matching colour, for God’s sake. Of course, he hadn’t disturbed the body, as per protocol, but it was face down, so there was nothing to warn him that he might be dealing with a body of the wrong species.

He had declared the entire environs a crime scene, and organised a dozen constables to begin a fingertip search; the pathologist arrived from Birmingham and ducked into the hastily erected marquee (it was beginning to drizzle) just as he was detained updating Superintendent Rekorde. He was cutting the connection as the pathologist came back out, looking angry. Before Beauchamp could speak, he said in a loud voice, “You don’t want a pathologist, Inspector. You need a pork butcher!”

To make matters worse, the pathologist had been a Muslim.

What is wrong with these people, he had asked himself. The whole thing had the taint of a Wiccan, or perhaps druid ceremony, although he dared not say; he was half afraid that hooded figures wearing crowns made of twigs and birds’ skulls would come for him in the night. He knew that he must not make another mistake like that one. A small man with a small moustache and little patience, so that in Beauchamp’s mind he represented several brands of tininess, Superintendent Rekorde had had him in his office for forty-five minutes after the episode with the fucking pig. The hardest thing to swallow – surpassingly resplendent in the pain it had caused him – had been when Rekorde had informed him contemptuously that Mortimer Smith, his informant, had a reputation as a ‘psychic investigator’ who was forever bothering the constabulary.

Beauchamp breathed deeply at these memories. It took considerable stamina to get his head back to the present. He asked, “It looks as though he received some sort of musical instrument through the post this morning. Did you notice it?”

She shook her head.

He asked of Tom, “Did you?”

“Yes. It was on the desk.”

“It’s a sort of pipe. Can you tell me what, if any, significance that may have had for Martin Waldeyer?”

Tasha said excitedly, “Penelope’s a musician.”

Hence the bloody great harp, thought Beauchamp. Perhaps it was a message from her… Or perhaps it was some sort of gift… A peace offering.

Tasha was having similar thoughts. “It must have been from Penelope to tell Uncle Martin that she was alright!”

Tom asked, “Then why did it apparently make him kill himself?”

“Oh… Yes…” Tasha’s fall from joy to dolour was precipitate.

It was another mystery about this peculiar death, but Beauchamp couldn’t make it a crime. He couldn’t see Tom Newman and Natasha Vogt as killers, which just left the Bannekers, who had vanished because of reasons unknown – at least to him. He could construct all sorts of theories, none of which he could prove, and all of which would cost money to pursue. Not for the first time in the recent past, he felt frustrated and confined by forces he could not influence; it hurt greatly that one of those was Jeremiah Brierley. But he knew that he couldn’t justify continuing the interview and delaying matters further. Although there was something about the affair that he didn’t much like, he couldn’t say with certainty that a crime had been committed. He would have to back off.

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Eight

“Yes, Daddy. The undertakers have just arrived.”

“Can you cope?”

“I think so.” Natasha spoke in a brave voice. Although Tom couldn’t hear the conversation, he would have known well the architecture of the exchange, the intonations of loving father and only daughter, the reaffirmation of the bond, of understandings of mutual and shared expectations.

“Is Tom looking after you?”

“Oh, yes. He’s being brilliant.” As she heard these words, she was delighted to realise that she meant them.

“Good.” But Emanuel Vogt’s voice didn’t sound reassured, as it rarely did when the subject touched upon trusting his daughter’s emotional and physical wellbeing to another, especially one he didn’t feel he knew at all well. No one had ever spoken aloud that Tom was at a crippling disadvantage by not being a surgeon, but the subtext suffused the air like aether when his name was mentioned in the family, an invisible, intangible element that affected everything.

By one of the police cars, she could see the inspector talking to his fat, sour-faced colleague; Sergeant Beerley, or something, she thought. The undertakers were inside the house, as was Tom, and she was cold, but refusing to acknowledge either this or her shock at what she had seen – albeit briefly – in the front room of the house. She had given up smoking two years before and thought that she was over the addiction, but it didn’t feel like it now; not at all. Her father’s voice was in her ear again. “Were any questions asked?” He had a loud, imperious voice, this quality now shot through with uncharacteristic trepidation. She wasn’t used to such a sound.

“Questions?” She decided to switch on the car’s engine so that the climate control could do its work. She genuinely didn’t really understand what he implied.

Emanuel Vogt was not a patient man, a good attribute for a surgeon, but not necessarily one for a loving father. “About Uncle Martin!” he barked. Then, as if searching for the right, euphemistic vocabulary, “About his… lifestyle… About what happened… Or what we think might have happened.”

“The policeman did ask about some things, yes.” She was so used to the tone her father employed now, she hardly heard it, certainly didn’t allow it to perturb her.

“Such as?”

“He asked about family, so I had to tell him about Aunt Penelope, and how there’d been a bit of a rumpus when she left with Uncle Leo and Simone.”

Her father said nothing and the silence was oddly ruminative. She only half understood his agitation. Although there had never been a formal rift between him and his wife, Jean on the one side, and Martin Waldeyer’s family on the other, the two sides of the dynasty might just as well have inhabited different universes, one of matter, the other of anti-matter. She was well aware that Uncle Martin’s peculiarities had been a constant source of embarrassment to Emanuel Vogt, FRCS. Yet she knew that he was not an unkind man, merely one in whom a hard kernel of ambition, self-regard and rigid scientific rationalisation had formed a fearfully strong composite. His concern for the old man’s welfare after he had been left alone had not been entirely due to considerations of a potential inheritance, although sometimes she wondered about the precise proportions of sentiment and greed that formed his motivation. Like so many doctors, she knew, he had kindness within him, but he used it rather than felt it.

“Not too much detail, I hope.”

“There isn’t much, is there?”

And there wasn’t. In any case, she really couldn’t see that whatever had happened in the house behind would seriously dent Emanuel Vogt’s reputation in the surgical community; he obviously did, though. “No. Absolutely.”

“Just speculation and rumour.”

“Good God, Natasha. You didn’t go too much into the gossip, did you?”

“Oh no,” she hastened to give him reassurance. The inspector was approaching the car. “Hang on, the policeman’s coming to talk to me.”

She lowered the window. He did the policemanly thing and put his head down, gloved right hand on the roof of the car. “The body’s going to the mortuary now. An autopsy will be carried out in the next few days.”

“Does it have to be? Isn’t it obvious what he died from?”

His grimace told her he agreed, his words told her otherwise. “It’s the law. It’s a Coroner’s case now, which means that an autopsy has to be done. Your boyfriend will know the ins and outs.”

“Of course.” She had actually known the truth of it, but she wasn’t yet thinking properly.

“If you feel able to, I’d be grateful if one of you could make a preliminary search for anything that might be relevant.”

“Like what?”

“A note, perhaps a will. Maybe a diary. Something that might give the Coroner a clue as to his state of mind. That kind of thing.”

From the phone came a distant, yet nonetheless commanding voice. “What’s going on?”

The inspector indicated the phone. “Your family?”

“My father.”

“Perhaps he could help you.”

“He lives in Dorset.”

“Maybe not, then.”

“I just want to get away from here.”

He looked intently at her; for the first time she saw in his face what he was and what he wasn’t. She appreciated that he was actually quite perspicacious, and that he wasn’t altogether a fool. “It’s not essential that you do anything now. If you’d rather delay it, then that’s fair enough but, as your family is possibly the only known next of kin, one of you will have to do it at some point.”

“I see.”

He nodded and smiled. “I’ve left my contact details with Dr Newman, if you need anything more of me.”

“Okay.” He walked away quickly, as if a decision had been made and only by getting away as quickly as possible could he stop himself from changing it.

“Natasha? Natasha?”

She put the phone back to her ear. “The policeman said we should check for a note.”

“Are you up to that? It’s not as if there’s any urgency… I suggest that you leave it for now and get back home… Or stay here, if you like.”

She thought of the body, of the blood, of her shock at them. She thought, too, of her feelings towards Uncle Martin. There was no doubt that he had been a strange old man; she had never felt entirely comfortable around him, even in the presence of others. He had exuded an air of otherworldliness that she thought all too easily could be used to justify tawdry behaviour. She thought of some his so-called ‘art’ exhibits, and the rumours about his personal life, and how peculiar her aunt had seemed, and poor, dear, sweet Simone had become.

“I expect so… I’ll see,” she said. Then, in a deliberate rush, “Goodbye, Daddy. Love you. I’ll ring you later.”

The undertakers emerged. The one leading was tall and young with a hint of blond facial hair and, behind him, was a much shorter and stouter, middle-aged man with grey-flecked hair; between them was a gurney covered by a black, rubberised sheet incompletely hiding a shape. The topography would have been meaningless to an observer without knowledge of the context; it might have been assumed to be a very stout man under there, certainly not one lying on its side and completely skewered by a sword, no matter how beautiful the craftsmanship of the thing. She thought that perhaps she ought to go out to them as they loaded it into the back of the black van, but she couldn’t force herself to. What would she say, after all?

She rang Tom. “Where are you?”

“In the study.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a note.”

“I want to go, Tom; that can wait. Daddy says we can stay with them tonight.”

“Okay. I won’t be long.”

“Don’t be,” she commanded.

Tom found himself in no hurry to leave the scene of Martin Waldeyer’s death, despite Tasha’s injunction, issued in a tone he knew well, one that mixed authority and submission. Despite this, he kept thinking that maybe she was changing. She had never before sought to champion him to another, nor even referred to him in public, at least in public in his presence, as her ‘boyfriend’. It seemed like a coronation of sorts, and his earlier uncertainty about their relationship seemed now a trifle premature, if not unfair. He was, by nature, thoughtful and diffident, and too often in the past, such qualities seemed to him to have been interpreted by those around him almost as weakness. Until that day, he had feared that it had been precisely because of this that Tasha wanted to be with him, because she saw him as something that could be dominated; now, he started to wonder if there was more to it than that, if she really did see him as someone to be proud of.

The large bloodstain on the carpet (which looked to him like an expensive oriental rug of some kind, possibly silk as its hues changed depending on one’s position) did not bother him, although the demands to evacuate the environs that came from Tasha and her father really rather did. Something about the death intrigued him, although he was convinced it was by Waldeyer’s own hand; it was so strange, as he had learned had been Waldeyer himself… as was the house… as was the pipe. The pipe, he found, really did unsettle him, although he had no definite formulation as to why.

He picked it up, struck once again by its lightness, which only augmented its astonishing ornamentation. Unwillingly, yet eagerly, he put it to his lips and blew gently, leaving the holes uncovered; the sound made him shiver and stop almost at once. Only belatedly, did it occur to him that Martin Waldeyer might also have put it to his lips; he replaced it hurriedly, disturbing the tissue paper so that he noticed the handwritten card beneath it.

With no I and no other, who hears the sound?

He didn’t understand it, but it had meant something to at least two people, one of whom had recently been lying in front of him, rather messily deceased. He looked in more detail at the books on the shelves. They were of all ages, of all styles, but many of a type; many were about death, about its causes, its consequences, its side effects, its customs, its celebrations, its rituals, its art, its science; natural and unnatural death, mass murder and mass burial, the holocaust and the apocalypse; death as a way of life, and death as a way out of it. It was a comprehensive library, and well-read, too. He noted the number of books on Japan and its culture, in particular one on Japanese feudal society and Bushido, but his quick perusal did not illuminate Martin Waldeyer’s motive, although it strongly suggested the reason for his method of choice.

The thirteen death masks on the wall did nothing but add to the air of dread perturbation in the room. The word that occurred to him was, somewhat paradoxically, ‘lifelike’; it was as if real people were protruding through the surface of something like plaster; the detail was amazing. They were arranged in a display of four rows of three, with one above, as if it were the leader of the group, he mused. He didn’t immediately recognise the faces but they were all labelled; the one at the top was apparently Albert Pierrepoint, and that name was familiar but for the moment unknown to him. His eye looked over the others, unable at first to place either any of the names or faces, except one; William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), which was when he understood. Some of the other names suddenly meant something to him – Ruth Ellis, William Haigh, Tony Mancini – and he saw it for what is was. Another artistic display, this one based on the life’s work of state hangman Albert Pierrepoint and some of his infamous victims.

Shaken by this realisation, he returned to the desk, pushing the musical pipe to one side and thinking to go through the drawers, but they appeared initially to prove almost entirely barren of interest to the amateur detective; most of them contained only copies of magazines – the Times Literary Supplement, various arty magazines, Erotic Review and Tatler – and equipment catalogues from art suppliers, mortuary outfitters and horticultural wholesalers. One contained an unopened ream of copier paper, the top left was filled with a wide variety of pens and pencils, rulers and paperclips, and a pair of powerful binoculars.

Aware that time and Tasha were going to wait for no man, he turned to the computer. He powered it up, wondering what the password was and hoping that his natural genius would see him through, before quickly discovering he didn’t need to use it. He was straight in to Uncle Martin’s cyber world in all its facets. His first target was ‘recent documents’. Since he hadn’t uncovered an analogue suicide note, he reasoned that the old man might have been computer-orientated enough to write it digitally, although part of him doubted it. In this part, he was right to be skeptical. He found only letters of complaint to the county council on their road gritting policy, and what seemed like a letter a day to The Times on a range of subjects including funding for the arts, the ‘fetishistic infancy’ of organised religion, and, intriguingly, public misconceptions around sodomy; he wondered which, if any, had been published. Other document files were labelled such as ‘Stories’, ‘Mortuaries’ and ‘Critics’. The one that made him sit up, though, was labelled, ‘Penelope and Simone’.

His phone rang. He didn’t need Tasha’s image appearing on the screen to know that he was in trouble; he reflected that she always appeared impatient whenever her likeness was captured. He opened up this last computer folder as he spoke to her.

“Where are you?” she demanded, interrupting him.

“I won’t be long.” One subfolder of PDF documents labelled ‘Invoices’, another labelled ‘Reports’ a third simply labelled ‘Memories’.

“It’s cold out here.”

The one labelled ‘Memories’ required a password to open. “Come back in for a moment.”

“I don’t want to, Tom. Not after…” She didn’t finish the sentence but half of his mind could imagine the shudder that was implied, that she might even have experienced. In any case, he didn’t answer immediately because he was wondering why that single file should be restricted; Tasha had always tended constantly and sweetly to reassure him that he wasn’t very good at multitasking, and she was being proved correct. “Tom?” she said, sounding miffed.

“Sorry,” he answered. “Something caught my eye.” He tried the invoice folder.

“What?”

But again he didn’t answer. The first file in the PDF folder was an invoice from someone called Dorothy Hodgkin, Confidential Enquiry Agent. It was dated seventeen months before and required a remittance of eight hundred and ninety-seven pounds, sixteen pence (‘inc VAT’) for time and expenses, detailed in a separate PDF document appended, payable within four weeks. Tasha was becoming demanding. “Tom? Tom? What’s happening?”

Happening? he thought. Nothing was actually happening, at least outside of his head; inside it, though, there was a whirl of activity. He actually uttered nothing; at least nothing of consequence. He had found that in life as a doctor and as well as in life as a lover, speaking whilst saying nothing, and yet thinking a lot, was a sound strategy. “Sorry, Tash. Thought I’d discovered something.”

“What? What did you discover?”

“Nothing. I was wrong.” There were four such PDF invoices he saw. “I’m just coming. Won’t be a tick.” He cut the connection, then opened the folder marked ‘Reports’. The first document in this was written by Dorothy Hodgkin herself. He skimmed it, but it concerned her attempts to find Penelope and her family, and was effectively an apologia together with a promise to do better. He considered this, but not for long; with uncharacteristically nimble-minded action, he opened the computer’s internet provider and logged into his online email account. He sent himself an email to which he attached the PDF invoices and reports, and the password protected folder. It took a while and he fully expected Tasha to intrude in some way or other, but she didn’t. Trouble in store, he thought.

The landline rang and he jumped. Shit!

Should he answer? He had no real rights in the affair, other than nosiness…

“Yes?” he said into the handset.

“Can I speak to Martin Waldeyer, please?” It was an aggressive, young voice; sounding brash yet he guessed, nervous.

“Could I ask who’s calling?”

“No.” Which response rather floored him for a moment.

Perhaps it was the weirdness of it all that led him to behave uncharacteristically; he lied actively by commission, instead of passively by omission. “I’m… his assistant.”

A pause followed, one that bled uncertainty. Eventually, “This is Mervyn Smith. I’m ringing about my father.”

Of course, Tom didn’t know what he was talking about. “What about him?”

“I want to speak to Martin Waldeyer.”

Feeling empowered by the success of his first deception, he had little hesitation in essaying a second, saying, “Martin Waldeyer’s gone out. Can I help?” He was at least being rather more accurate, if no less misleading.

His mobile began to ring again; the petulance of the ringtone told him it was Tasha and he muted it without looking. He was feeling slightly lightheaded, he decided, as he sometimes did when he inhaled the alcohol in the machines in the lab too deeply. That accent… was it South London? Essex?

But the caller became overcome by coyness. “I think perhaps I’ll ring back another time. Will you tell Mr Waldeyer I called? He’ll know what it’s about.”

Before Tom could argue, or even tell this man that Mr Waldeyer’s ‘going out’ was permanent, the connection was cut. The display on the phone refused to identify Mervyn Smith’s number. He would have wondered what it was all about, but the imminence of the next summons from his beloved made him cut such cerebration short and he decided to leave. The pipe was just short enough to fit into the inside breast pocket of his corduroy jacket; the handwritten card fitted easily into its outside compatriot.

*******

The long journey from Herefordshire had been through barren countryside, and along damp roads and, for the first sixty miles, in a slightly frosty car, and not only because the heater in her car was lazy and recalcitrant. Tasha was not the kind of person to take dalliance in others lightly, not when a summons had been issued; there had been a time, not too long ago, when Tom might have been too aware of this, too anxious to please, but he knew that their relationship was mutating, and perhaps she also sensed this. Accordingly, he didn’t apologise for keeping her waiting and was non-committal when she asked questions about what he had been doing inside the house. He didn’t feel compelled to tell her about the pipe, or the phone call, or some of the wilder speculations that had blossomed in his head.

Fifteen minutes of silent running was interrupted when she said, “Thanks for your support, Tom. I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d been on my own.”

He was never going to be the kind of person who knew what to say to that kind of remark – he didn’t want to sound dismissive, nor yet self-congratulatory, and certainly not falsely modest – and so his reply was momentarily held back by a glitch in his vocal apparatus. “Not a problem, Tash,” he said softly. She smiled warmly at him, which expression he returned. The silence and the car became warmer for a while. He said, “I don’t understand something.”

She was tutting loudly at an innocent white van (if there can be such a thing, thought Tom), and then too busy breaking hard to avoid ramming it, to respond immediately. When she did, it was guardedly, he decided. “What do you mean?”

“You told the inspector that your family wasn’t particularly close to Uncle Martin.”

“We’re not.”

“Yet you and your parents have been looking out for him, visiting him regularly.”

Did she find this topic uncomfortable? He rather suspected she did; certainly she seemed to perceive the traffic around them with greater hostility, more suspicion, and to drive with even greater unpredictability, as if there were an element of transference from some inner conflict. She answered, “When Penelope and Leo moved out with Simone, he was left on his own. He was an old man.”

“You were the only family he had left?”

“Yes. That’s right. We felt we had a duty.” He didn’t say anything, which was possibly as eloquent as he needed to be, because she demanded, “We couldn’t just abandon him, could we?”

“Did you see him often before that?”

“Only ever at Christmas.” This was most definitely defiant, expecting to be judged and it made him wonder why; a lot of families met ‘only ever at Christmas’. She carried on, “I think my parents had the feeling that they were being kept at a distance.”

“By Uncle Martin?”

She searched for the words. “He was very much in charge in that house,” were those she eventually lighted upon as they passed through the outskirts of Chippenham. “‘Protective’ would be a good way to describe it.”

‘Possessive’ might be another, he forbore to voice.

She was silent for a moment, remembering. “I think it started when Aunt Nancy died and he had to bring up Penelope alone.”

He said provocatively, “He wasn’t right in the head, was he?”

Tasha, as he guessed she would, was outraged. “That’s not fair, Tom. You never met him; how can you say that?”

“The art?” he suggested.

“That doesn’t mean he was peculiar; he was just dedicated.”

“To his muse?”

She glanced across at him. “Something like that,” she allowed.

More silence and more miles passed, in which he couldn’t resist fiddling with the heater controls in order to coax it into action, much to Tasha’s annoyance. Then he asked, “What was the basis of your friendship with Simone?”

“What do you mean?”

He was intrigued to note that she wore the same tone she had adopted when answering Beauchamp’s questions. “There’s a big age gap, and you couldn’t have seen her very often.”

“I didn’t. We were ‘pen-pals’. We talked mostly by email.”

“You felt a bond with her,” he suggested as he wondered why she was always so evasive on matters relating to Uncle Martin and his family. “Why?”

She made a show of deep consideration, although she must have thought about it before. “I suppose because she was an only child, like me… And she couldn’t have had many friends her own age…”

This struck him as interesting. He switched to something she had said a moment ago. “But she had a computer with an internet connection?”

“Yes…”

“So she wasn’t completely isolated?”

She hesitated yet again. “I think that her contact with outside world was pretty tightly regulated. I’m not sure that she was allowed to roam freely over the internet.”

“Strict parental controls?”

“Over everything, from what she told me. I think I was pretty much the only person she ever emailed.”

Part of him applauded such close control over access, but another part of him thought it disturbing, given the context. “You say you saw them only at Christmas?”

“That’s right.”

“No other time? Not birthdays, for instance?”

“No.” He wasn’t going to pursue it, but she explained, “It was a sort of tradition that started because Great grandfather Jacob was dying. He insisted that we all get together, so we all met at a pub in Marlborough. It was a ghastly affair because most of us didn’t want to be there, but we knew that Grandfather Jacob didn’t have long to live so everyone felt duty bound, I suppose.”

Tasha wanted (maybe needed, he speculated) to talk. “It was the year that we first met Leo. We knew nothing about him, not even that he was going to be there; the very idea that Penelope would have a boyfriend was almost nonsensical, and yet she did. Mind you, Leo wasn’t what you might call a ‘normal’ boyfriend. Looking back on it, I suppose a ‘normal’ boyfriend was never on the cards, though.”

The heater in Tasha’s car had, at last, grumpily decided to do what it had been designed to do, so that Tom was feeling drowsy, but this comment awoke him. “What do you mean by ‘not normal’?”

“Well…” Perhaps she thought she had said too much, but the need to fill the lacuna that Tom left compelled her to continue, “Leo was an artist, too.”

“What kind?”

“He was a sculptor.”

“Really? In what material?”

“Anything and everything.”

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Nine

There came a time not long after Penelope’s death when reflections became abhorrent to Leo; optical ones as well as those in his mind. He did not smash the mirrors in the house, but he methodically removed all of them, including the ones in the bathroom, the front sitting room, the hallway and upper landing. He did so, taking care not to break them, in what seemed to Simone to be a superstitious way, although she thinks that he always mocked those who believed in fate or fortune. He carried them, covered, through the back door of the small house, to the gate at the bottom of the garden and thence into the dense woodland beyond. He never told her why he did this, but she assumes that it was at the behest of his muses. Nor did he tell her what he did with them, but she supposes he buried them in the Forest. It is another unwarranted supposition, but her fourteen-year-old life is studded with them. He now even avoids the windows, at least when it is dark outside, lest he catch sight of himself or where he is. It is as though he cannot bear to be reminded that he actually exists outside of his own mind. Simone has not told him that she has kept in a drawer of her bedside cupboard a small mirror with which she sometimes attempts to apply a little make-up, trying to grow into an adulthood that has actually already devoured her. She keeps it next to a small mouse made from clockwork, an early example of his craft.

In fact, Leo did not leave the mirrored surfaces in the forest. He took them to his studio – the abandoned Infirmary in the middle of Crowland Forest – and there put them in a basement room, one that had once been the office of the head porter, and that still had a desk and six stained and cracked orange plastic chairs in it. He has also gone through all the rooms in the Infirmary that he habitually uses – the operating theatre, the anaesthetic room, the offices, the store cupboards and the recovery room. Every surface that is mirrored, that might give a reasonable reflection, has been taken down and deposited in the head porter’s office in the basement below. There is much of the Infirmary that he has not explored, nor will he ever, and this is at least in part because of the fear of unexpectedly coming across a reflection.

Simone is wrong, too, in supposing that this has been at the behest of one of the muses or Apollo. Indeed, Leo heard them sneering to each other about him when he did it. They considered him a coward, laughing at his insipidity, questioning his fitness for their purpose; they made him feel ashamed and still do, whenever they repeat their insinuations, should he shy away from the glass of a window, or a diffused reflection off a work surface. He cannot help himself though, and has to endure their opprobrium, for he has found that, when he looks into what should be a clear reflection, he does not see what is, but what was, and not just one particular instance of it. He sees what he has done. He lives again through all that he has had to do to achieve what Penelope desired; what the muses and Apollo demand. The stainless steel benches at which he works are too diffusely scratched by cleaning to give a distinct image, but even these sometimes cause him pause, when he catches sight of a vague shape within them, perhaps when he walks past them. Even when he approaches water – whether it be as he washes in the basin, or when he removed the fat from the gut of his wife in the tank of aqueous caustic potash, or coated her long bones with silver by electrolysis – he looks away, and tries as hard as he can to disturb the surface, disrupt the rendering that will be of Penelope’s last moment and not of that which is around him.

Through reflections, he sees sometimes what he saw in the hall mirror as he hurried down the stairs to kneel beside her inert form and watch as she died and, in so doing, begged him to immortalise her. Often, he sees things far worse; her naked body on the metal dissection table in the mortuary that is not far from the head porter’s office, her beautiful head shrouded by a sheet. He is there as he did what he did all those months ago – as he opened her torso from her neck all the way down, cut away the flesh from her ribs, removed her lungs, her heart, her abdominal and pelvic organs so that he could gain access to the axial skeleton, the bones of the trunk. On occasion, the memories that a mirror procreates last what seem to be hours, sometimes they are only brief; sometimes these shorter episodes tell him again of the trouble he had amputating her left leg (the right was easier, because he was practised by then), or the horror of removing her head. All of them, no matter how short or long, induce in him such nausea and dread that, for a while, his resolve to obey Penelope, to fulfil her last wish, is overcome, and he is thrown into despair at his weakness. His muses excoriate him relentlessly, of course.

He has managed to avoid this punishment for many weeks now, but only by constant vigilance. On this day, disaster strikes, perhaps the fault of fate, but perhaps the culpability lies elsewhere; he cannot help but wonder if this is just another of Apollo’s goads or maybe a test, delivered this time in actions rather than words. There is, he knows, no such thing as undirected fate; meaning is everywhere, in everything, and all things signify.

He has been listlessly working on the remaining ribs, polishing them again and again, thinking to turn them into a percussion instrument; he has already worked the larger ones into simple lyres. At the back of his mind – yet, at the same time at the forefront of his consciousness, like a sentient and vicious hangover that wants bloody vengeance – his muses and their god discuss how pathetic he is, how his invention is puny, and his artistic worth dead. Beside him is the big lyre, now severely wounded for he has cut the useless strings; although he cannot remember how or when. It is truly a magnificent, wounded beast.

“He’s just scum,” muses Apollo.

Hypate replies, “These mortals all are, my Lord.”

Mese puts in her three pennyworth. “But some of them have talent.”

Apollo says angrily, “This one has nothing. We chose unwisely.” The god’s words are louder in his head, and each word is of greater amplitude than the last, as if Apollo is bending closer and closer from his seat outside the cosmos as he speaks, down towards him as an adult might chastise a child.

Leo knows, too, they are right. Can he think of nothing better than this? It is a children’s toy, something that mocks rather than panegyrizes Penelope, that does exactly the opposite of what he is pledged to do. No matter how hard he works, he hears constantly that he is inadequate to the task; his labours mean nothing, because he has not the ability and never will have. It is a basic defect; he is attempting the impossible. He is insignificant...

“He’s nothing. I don’t know why I bother with him.”

“You are merciful, my lord.” Nete, this time.

The voices are now almost booming, and beginning to echo, as if smothering him. He feels his pulse in his head, his lungs working too hard to take in air, his stomach churning. Tics and tremors run through his muscles, whilst uncontrolled pains shoot through his eyes; he feels at once about to be crushed, at once about to explode. What can he do? He has allowed the rest of Penelope’s intestine to rot; it was a leak in the tank, but he is all too aware that it was his responsibility to ensure the safety of something so precious. He has no more ingenuity and can think of nothing else that will make strings for the lyres. He feels so weary, and his enemies are crawling closer...

“He’s tired.” In Nete’s cacophonous comment, he hears something that suggests she might be intrigued, as if she cannot understand such a thing. Perhaps she can’t; after all, exhaustion must be alien to such as her. Her voice is so loud that it causes his head to ring, his sight to ripple, and he has a feeling that there is blood loose in his ears; it is an absurd thought, but he knows at once that he is right. Somewhere, in the part of his mind that he still possesses, he knows that he knows too much.

Abruptly, as if his patience has run too hard too quickly in sun that is too strong, Apollo starts to bellow, although Leo can’t hear what he’s saying – perhaps there are no words, and maybe this is just a sound or perhaps an emotion, but it is a terrible, gargantuan thing, whatever its nature; it agonises him, and it jerks him upward suddenly, knocking back the plastic chair on which he has been sitting, making his muscles taut so that his joints are locked almost into overextension. He actually leaves the ground, but has no awareness of this small achievement. His jacket, which was on the back of the chair, muffles the clatter and the contents of its pockets are spilled.

He stands that way for a long time, a decerebrate thing, no better than a pithed baboon until, with no concept of time that is passed or is passing, he gradually relaxes and becomes slowly sentient again. He looks around, without ratiocination, and is in such a state that he picks up his jacket and puts it on again, only then noticing what has spilled from it. Among the objects – two pencils, a euro coin, a brace of rubber bands, a folded picture of Penelope playing the harp, a key-ring without keys but with a cheap casting of the Eiffel tower – is Simone’s compact mirror. He has not known that she had it, does not recognise it for what it is, does not have memory of putting it in his pocket. He still isn’t thinking on a profound level as he opens it… to be faced by a reflection.

He sees nothing. He doesn’t see his own face, he doesn’t see a glimpse of his previous action; he sees nothing but is convulsively aware of all. For the first time in many months, and for just one instant, he has absolute comprehension of what he has done, and therefore what he has become. He sees his actions as unforgivable desecrations, the acts of a man who has been ground into madness. He appreciates that he is no longer human and that that is a truly terrible thing. For just an instant, and no longer, he sees the truth about himself.

Apollo has not been shouting; the god has been laughing.

*******

“You did well, Tom.” This unexpected compliment was uttered in an overwhelmingly condescending tone, negating the effect of the words completely, and destroying any illusion that Tom might have had that it was an encomium.

“Oh…”

“A terrible thing for Natasha to see, I should imagine.”

“Yes, it was.”

Tom sat with Emanuel Vogt in a large conservatory overlooking an enclosed patio; they enjoyed some cognac, because Emanuel Vogt enjoyed cognac. The patio was bathed in ghostly phosphorescent up-lighting from a covered swimming pool; in the summer it was a sun-trap, but now, in the spring’s cold night, Tom found it a peculiarly sinister, unappealing and almost sepulchral sight, what with the dead leaves that blew around, and the drizzle that pattered down on the tiled surround. Emanuel Vogt didn’t seem to find it so; whatever the time of year, it was a source of eternal pride to him.

“How… serious is your relationship with Natasha?”

Tom could scarcely believe that he heard a skein of embarrassment within the words. He searched for the correct response, wondering whether he was really being asked what his intentions were, as if this were a Victorian melodrama. He was a thirty-three year old doctor, for God’s sake. “Well…”

Emanuel Vogt sat forward. “I’m not asking out of sheer nosiness, Tom.”

“No.”

“And I’m not playing the overbearing father, either.”

“Oh…”

“Tasha’s been… badly treated in the past. Did she tell you?”

She hadn’t. He had been aware of some sort of emotional upset, but she hadn’t given him the details and he hadn’t asked for them. “She’s never spoken much about it.”

“Well, it was a long time ago, but it’s made her wary. You can understand that, can’t you, Tom?”

Tom had learned quickly in his dealings with Tasha’s father to suppress dissent and pretend obeisance; it was the only way. Emanuel Vogt considered himself the leader in all his dealings, be they professional or domestic, and self-control was the price that Tom had been willing to pay to get to know Tasha. Normally, therefore, taciturnity was his watchword.

“Absolutely.”

“So naturally, Jean and I don’t want that kind of thing to happen again to her.”

“No, no.”

“I know I can’t wrap her in cotton wool, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by, come what may…” Was that a threat? Tom couldn’t decide. It didn’t matter, for the surgeon continued grudgingly, “Anyway, you showed your mettle today.”

But if normally Tom erred on the side of reticence, tonight Tom’s tongue was uncharacteristically active, and not just due to the wine with the meal (Emanuel Vogt liked a bottle of juicy Malbec, often more than one), topped off with a real rather fine brandy. Tonight, Tom felt that he wanted to learn more about Uncle Martin and his peculiar clan. He said, “I had a quick scout around for anything that might be relevant.”

“I heard you kept Natasha waiting.” Tom ignored this. Vogt Senior enquired suspiciously, “What were you looking for?”

“A note… perhaps a will. Anything that might help explain why. The police inspector suggested that I should…” When he received neither approval nor censure, he found himself justifying his actions. “Don’t worry, I wasn’t prying,” he said and scolded himself for it.

Vogt Senior grunted softly. “What did you find?”

“Nothing much.” He put that peculiar pipe out of his mind. Nothing definite, he qualified to himself. He wanted to find out a little more about the inhabitants of that house before sharing its discovery with Natasha’s father.

Vogt finished his cognac with a quick, impulsive swallow. “Shame.” With this contemptuous remark, Tom felt that he was on the more familiar territory of failure; he was still being condescended to, but the tone and the words weren’t dissonant.

He said, “Tasha was in quite a hurry to get away.”

“Mmm...”

Emanuel Vogt was tall and once thin, although slightly shorter than Tom, which was probably another source of annoyance for the surgeon. He had a long face and an aquiline nose that carried his voice all the way from the heights of power to the mud huts of the subordinates. Tom knew the type and had to deal with them every day. Consultants like Emanuel Vogt had been at the top of the medical hierarchy for a long time; they were forged in the fires of ancient medical practice, when medicine was an apprenticeship with pockets of education tacked onto the side like barnacles, and the voyage was bloody, long and hard; the days of sail, in effect. Tom came from the era of mechanised ships, when everyone knew exactly how long the trip would take and if those who set out weren’t ready by its end, then… well, they got a job in occupational medicine or the Department of Health.

He could see that Emanuel Vogt was too much of a gentleman ever to voice his disdain for modern medical education, or its products, but wasn’t enough of one to keep it out of his body language. This attitude to the younger medical generation was compounded by the disrespect of all surgeons for all pathologists. Pathologists were an irritant for surgeons, a jigger in the foot, because they performed autopsies on their surgical failures, which could prove too much for a self-respecting surgeon to bear. Tom, in contrast, tended to the opinion that surgeons had too much of the god complex.

Vogt got up and fetched the bottle of cognac. He came over to Tom’s chair and topped up the crystal goblet without being asked, then he sat back down and did likewise to his own. He thought for a moment, while Tom enjoyed the silence. Then, he said, “Bloody rum lot, that side of the family.” He appeared to consider what he had just said and then added, “My mother’s sound, of course, but Martin, her brother…” He had been shifting in the soft brown leather of his seat for a couple of minutes now, an uncharacteristic display, like seeing an elephant do a handstand.

Tom at this point realised that his was not the only tongue that was loosened that night. Sensing something of interest, something that might prove of use in the competition that he was well aware Emanuel Vogt could not help but initiate between them, he asked, “Yes?” He had yet to meet Evelyn, Tasha's grandmother, but Tasha had told him of her. She had read natural sciences at Oxford, and subsequently risen high in Imperial Chemical Industries; Tasha had even obliquely suggested that she had been instrumental in developing the weed killer, Paraquat.

Vogt suddenly looked intently at him; it was the look of a man who wore a surgical mask much of the time and who was therefore used to getting a lot of meaning into his eyes. “How much has Natasha told you?”

“A few things.” That sounded evasive, but was true; and what she had said had been tangential. No need to elaborate, though.

“My grandfather, Jacob Waldeyer, was a publisher, mainly of scientific textbooks.” Tom wasn’t sure whether the consultant surgeon was enjoying this or not. “His wife was an opera singer.” It was clear what he thought about that. Perhaps to add interest through detail, he added, “A mezzo soprano.”

“An interesting mix of interests.”

Emanuel Vogt stared at him expressionlessly for a while; it was a tactic familiar to Tom and it had once made him uncomfortable. It had used to make him wonder what it meant, and to fear that he wasn’t approved of. No longer, though. Sipping more cognac, the surgeon said, “They had two children – Evelyn and Martin; my mother took after her father and went into biochemistry, Martin was of a more artistic bent.” He made it sound like a sexually transmitted disease. Tom, not feeling able to add anything useful at this juncture, took a tactical sip of cognac; he was by far from an expert in the stuff, but it slipped down with intoxicating smoothness. His host himself had paused and then asked suddenly, “You and I are men of science, Tom, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate art, does it?”

“No.”

“We might not know much about the technicalities…”

“Do we have to?”

Emanuel was momentarily preoccupied, something that Tom had rarely seen in him before. Suddenly, Emanuel realised what had been said and eyed him suspiciously. “Eh?”

After the red wine, the cognac was quite potent; Tom felt good, though. He explained, “Do we have to know about the technicalities to appreciate art?”

He was given another dose of Emanuel Vogt’s stare before the conversation resumed. “Well, I don’t mind telling you, what Martin Waldeyer did wasn’t art – although he called it so – it was just odd...” He groped for a synonym or three. “Bizarre, disturbing, ghoulish...”

“Yes. I saw.”

Tasha was with her mother in the sitting room, looking through travel brochures. Emanuel and Jean holidayed twice a year; in the Alps in February and somewhere hot in September. There was talk of the Maldives in the air; Tom even harboured faint hopes of an invite. Emanuel left such decisions up to Tasha and Jean, her mother. He said, “He was definitely the black sheep of the family…” This statement, at odds with what he had previously said, was left undisturbed by Tom, as if it were a cowpat in a field. Exhausted by food, alcohol and his girlfriend’s driving, Tom was feeling drowsy. The older man explained, “He married Nancy, also an artist, but not quite as… avant garde as Martin. She was a water colourist. You may have noticed we’ve got a couple in the dining room.”

Tom hadn’t, but he said, “Oh, yes.”

He suspected that Uncle Martin had been something of an embarrassment to Emanuel Vogt and his nearest; not that he could blame the surgeon for feeling so. However, he was enjoying the sight of a man perturbed from his usual orbit of lofty arrogance. The surgeon said, “They’re not bad pictures,” thereby implying he thought the exact opposite.

Surgeons were, by definition certain; ‘an uncertain surgeon is an unsafe surgeon’ was a mantra Tom well remembered from the earlier days of his medical education, and it undoubtedly contained more than a scintilla of truth; unfortunately, that way of thinking led too easily to heroic surgery that did more for surgical ego than it did for the patient’s quality of life. The patient died, although the operation was a great success. Tom suspected that Emanuel Vogt’s opinion of the water colours was sincerely held, and confidently put, but based on nothing more than prejudice.

“Tasha said something about a daughter…” Tom said ingenuously; he had been practising ingenuousness around Tasha’s father for several months now.

“Penelope, yes.” Tom had assumed that, as they moved away from Uncle Martin, Emanuel would become less ill at ease, but recollection of this name reignited his discomposure. “Her mother, Nancy, died in childbirth. An absolute tragedy. We all felt deeply for him.”

Tom tried to think of Emanuel Vogt – the bullish, arrogant orthopaedic surgeon – as a caring, sharing bereavement counsellor and failed spectacularly. If he couldn’t cut it – whether it be with scalpel, bone saw or laser – then Emanuel Vogt, generally speaking, didn’t have the time or patience for it. This penchant for psychiatric analysis was a new departure for him. On the other hand, as a pathologist, Tom could afford the luxury of appreciating that his senses were blunted – after all, he didn’t have to pretend compassion to any patients. Clinicians such as Emanuel Vogt tended to be unaware that their empathy was too often fabricated. Tom replied, “So Martin brought her up alone?”

Emanuel thought about this solemnly for a moment. “Yes, he did… in a way.”

“‘In a way’?”

Emanuel Vogt chewed on something, perhaps reticence. A deep breath and a slug of cognac helped him to swallow it. “You never met Uncle Martin, but I’m sure you appreciate he was in many ways ‘different’; I am afraid that led some people to think that his relationship with his daughter was not ‘ordinary’.” The glyphs came off Emanuel’s tongue with telling frequency. Neither of them was vulgar enough to use the term, ‘paedophilia’.

“But he brought her up well?”

“As far as anyone could tell, very much so. Whenever we saw her, she appeared happy, and she was clearly well educated.”

“Did you ever ask her directly?”

His host gave him a meaningful look as he said simply, “No, Tom.” That’s not the done thing, he was signalling. No matter how deeply Tom dug into his soul, he still couldn’t find enough courage to challenge the older man on his old fashioned beliefs. He was just grateful; this was far more detail than Tom had previously been allowed to hear. He was fascinated.

After more rumination, his host sighed. “It was Simone who worried us the most, especially Natasha: I think she saw her as a younger sister, or some such.” The last two words were spoken with a hint of something that a cruel man might construe as condescension.

“Really? She never said.”

“They didn’t see each other very much – only at Christmas, by Martin’s wish – but I think they stayed in fairly regular contact. When the Bannekers dropped off the radar, it was a big shock to all of us, but it hit Natasha hard.”

“Was there no clue in what Simone said to her?”

“Not a dickey-bird. It was presumably as much of a surprise to her as to the rest of us.”

“And no contact from them ever since.” Tom was musing to himself but the surgeon took it as a question.

“Nothing,” he said, and there was a surprising amount of bitterness in the word, as if he were offended by it.

The door from the kitchen opened, admitting Tasha and Jean Vogt to tell Emanuel of their deliberations; it was to be Hawaii, with no mention of inviting anyone else.

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Ten

Simone comes to the knowledge, quite abruptly, that she has lost her compact and it propels her from a sleep that is never easy, although she doesn’t realise this, because it has always been thus. She knows at once, within that moment of waking, not only that she doesn’t have the compact, but also that her father does have it; the knowledge of this, of the distress it will bring him, terrifies her. Because of what her father has told her of her mother’s agonal bidding – that she must help him achieve her dying wish – she now devotes her life to doing whatever is necessary and expending whatever resource is required, to supporting him, of which preventing incidents such as this, is an integral part. Distraught, she hurries into the night, not bothering to check anywhere in the house, knowing instinctively that he is in the studio, stopping only to pick up the torch that she keeps on the table by her bed.

Simone was been reared on an educational diet that is as rich as foie gras, extremely eclectic, almost kaleidoscopic, and equally distorting; it has been rounded, but circumscribed. It was neither trivial, nor quadrivial, and it was far from liberal. From her mother she has learned how to play and, possibly more importantly, listen to music, from her father how to read and what to read; from her grandfather she has learned things that she does not yet understand. She knows no history other than that of English literature, European art and music, and that which is to be found in books written by H. G. Wells. Well versed in anatomy, physics is just a word to her; but then, so are popular culture, anything but the most basic computer knowledge, and geography. She knows arithmetic and geometry, but no algebra. Much of the world is just words to Simone, yet she does not appreciate what a handicap this is because, in many ways it isn’t, for it liberates her; her horizons fit her expectations and experiences.

Her education has not formally encompassed such an incomprehensible thing as faith in God – but she knows a good deal about gods and ghosts, and she has come to believe that she is most definitely afraid of them. When she tells herself that the woodland, even in a moonless night, does not frighten her, she is telling herself a lie.

She hurries past the graves of the men her father has killed, and wonders about revenants, but is driven by greater anxieties. After fifteen minutes of following a narrow cone of yellow torchlight through trees cloaked in darkness, the path, previously straight, abruptly turns to the left for twenty yards; then, just as abruptly, it turns to the right and resumes exactly the same direction. Its linearity both before and after this unexpected occurrence is unnatural, but not as much as these corners; other than the dense trees that press in on either side of the path along its total length, there are no other features of the landscape that might explain the sharp turns. The path just does it apparently out of boredom or capriciousness but, in this action, it provides almost a dislocation between worlds. Although the route is aligned both before and after, it breaks any connection between the house at one end and what is at the other, what is at the heart of the Forest. It is another twenty minutes before Simone reaches this destination, before she is standing at the outer fence of the forgotten hospital.

She knows a little of the story of the hospital from her father. He has told her its name – Crowland Infirmary – and that it has been abandoned for many years, although she could not have told how many. She is also aware that it was once a psychiatric hospital in the style of such institutions from the nineteen-thirties and that her father was born there. It has been abandoned for decades, cast into an oblivion, one formed when the social forces of conservation, money, greed and bureaucracy pulled against one another.

Before even the woodland encroached – the trees that surround and crowd in upon the wire-linked fence also now tower above the Infirmary’s two stories – it was small; a men’s wing, a women’s wing on either side of a central block containing staffing accommodation, admin offices and a single surgical theatre with attendant facilities. Small it might be in daylight, but in the night it is a horrible, hulking thing, looming over her, no more than twenty yards away now. Her knowledge of what her father has had to do to appease his muses, to obey his final vow to her mother, to achieve what he must, is suppressed but still acts upon her consciousness to dread the Infirmary. She has rarely been there, and most certainly does not want to visit it in the night, but fear drives her.

The path ends at the fence. On either side, the branches reach through and it is slowly being ingested by undergrowth, but here it is still clear of vegetation; there is a tear here, too, through which it is possible to enter the confines of the actual Infirmary, her father’s place of terrible dedication.

*******

His sons were back at university (Harry, reading natural sciences in Norwich and Ben, reading sociology in Nottingham), and his wife, Faye, was at a cathedral choir practice; it was therefore a time for Superintendent Richard Rekorde to enjoy himself. Accordingly, his supper finished, the plate, knife and fork consigned to the dishwasher, and a cup of Earl Grey tea in his hand, he went to his study. Before, however, pleasure (tonight it would be the original cast recording of Les Misérables), came duty. He picked up the phone and punched in a number he knew well, waiting patiently because he knew it was rarely answered quickly.

“Brierley here.” The voice was slurred but then, it nearly always was.

“Hello, Jerry. It’s Dick. I thought I’d give you a ring to see how you are.”

There was a hesitation before his slow reply came, as if he were searching for words that were hiding somewhere just out of sight and mind. “I’m fine.”

You’re drunk. They lived half a mile apart geographically; half a world apart in most other respects. Rekorde could imagine him sitting there, probably still in his work clothes, drinking cheap supermarket cider. Brierley always sounded slightly drunk, but cider added an edge to the smeared words. The superintendent sipped his tea. “Beauchamp tells me that Martin Waldeyer committed suicide. Do you agree?”

“Maybe.”

Rekorde had abundant experience of Brierley’s contrary nature, having known him all his professional life, one in which he had risen easily through the ranks, and Jeremiah Brierley had remained almost completely and rather leadenly earthbound. “You think he’s made a mistake?”

Brierley thought about this, or perhaps he just took a big swallow of fluid. “Didn’t say that.”

“What do you mean, Jerry?”

“Waldeyer was a nasty bugger. Doesn’t matter how he died, does it?”

Well, yes, it does, at least to most people, was Rekorde’s unspoken reaction. He shouldn’t have broached the subject, not once he’d discovered that Brierley was on the apple sauce. “Did you tell Beauchamp?”

“Tell him what?”

“That you and that family have history?”

“No. Why should I? That was a long time ago. I can’t see it would have any relevance.”

“Any theories as to why he might have done it?”

“He was a fucking pervert.” This was reason enough, apparently.

“But why today and not any other day?”

Brierley’s belch was followed by a faint, contented sigh. “The inspector wondered if it might have had something to do with a pipe he got in the post, but I can’t see how, and neither could he, when it came right down to it.”

“Yes,” Rekorde said ruminatively. He had heard this theory from Beauchamp himself. “What do you think?”

There was yet another pause that Rekorde interpreted as being due to inebriation, discarding the possibility that it was because Brierley was thinking deeply. “I think that’s a load of cock. I think the old bastard finally came to realise what he was, and found he couldn’t live with that idea.”

“Well… No matter.” He finished his tea, thinking that a spot of Jean Valjean and Fantine would maybe go some way to restoring his equilibrium. He had another subject to broach. “Have you had any thoughts about what you’re going to do after retirement?”

“I’m turning a few things over in my mind,” lied the good sergeant. He belched, and not subtly.

“Good, good.” Rekorde didn’t believe him, and he suspected that Brierley knew this but didn’t care. He was unable to find any way of continuing the conversation.

The phone replaced, Jeremiah Brierley returned to his cider and to his brooding. He did not think beyond his daily routine, instinct telling him without words that to do so would be fateful, and so he never questioned or altered it; when not at work, he drank and he brooded. He had no photographs, but he did not need them; the damage done by his brain injury had not impaired his recall. He was envious of Rekorde, although was sly enough never to admit it; Rekorde had had all the background advantages, and the divergence between their careers was eloquent testimony to this. He was just as good a copper, he knew, except that he had had bad luck.

He didn’t think of his upbringing as neglectful, merely impoverished. His father had not beaten him, nor abused him, but he had had to work too hard and too long to contribute directly to childcare; he had quickly learned that, as the eldest child, his mother’s love was contingent upon reciprocation in the form of practical assistance around the house and garden. There had been an extended family, but they all had the same problems. He would have followed his father into agricultural work had Brierley Senior not died of blood cancer and, in the wreckage from that explosion, he had managed to escape with his long term girlfriend.

Their marriage had produced children, but the children had produced strife. He found that he didn’t like his sons, and they didn’t like him. They wouldn’t do what he wanted and the end came when the older one – Ryan – had become involved in drugs. Brierley hadn’t thought twice about finding the supplier and, after thumping him a bit, turning him in; that it was the son of a friend of Mrs Brierley hadn’t entered into his thinking, at least not until she found out what he had done. She hadn’t been happy that her husband had dealt with things so close to home in such an official manner; it had been the beginning of an end. His sons hadn’t forgiven him either.

And so he was alone, not feeling sorry for himself, not questioning his fate nor trying to work out how he had come to such a state; he didn’t do introspection, merely policing. It was all he had left.

*******

“Father?”

Simone has been through a kind of hell. Even in day, this place would be dreadful to her, but in the cold night, without stars or moonlight, she found a torch’s beam to be a very oppressive thing that only made darkness darker. Her passage through the Infirmary – even though she has only had to enter via a side door, traverse a short corridor and ascend a stairway to reach the place where her father’s work resides – has been petrifying and thus transforming. The knowledge that much of her mother’s spirit resides here seems to energise her imagination, so that the movements of the torch have amplified and distorted shadows into looping daemons, the freezing echoes of her footsteps have awakened hell-hounds and jinni. Having braved the woods and the bodies of the men that her father has killed, she finds herself confronted by worse things; this place – here and now – manages to whisper to her in a way that she has not known before. The scurrying of rats becomes the susurration of spectres; the breath in her own throat, the hoarse threatening of a blood-lipped assassin. She moves on, only because the universe in which she knew the safety of the house has been destroyed by the kink in the path; it is gone and she is in another place, only there because she is convinced that her father needs her.

At the top of the stairway, she rushes through double fire doors, not caring that they crash open against the walls. “Daddy?” she shouts and, for that moment, she does not care how many more ghosts she may wake; she cares only about the ghost who was once her father. She is thinking solely of fear, but the terrors of the past hour have done something to her, so that her thoughts are deformed, or perhaps transformed, and she perceives her father as more than he is, but less than he was.

She runs through a room that she doesn’t know was once an anaesthetic room, into the central theatre. The odours are strong in this room, but she recognises only damp and rodent droppings for they are the same as the ones in the house; those of formaldehyde, faintly rotten flesh, chlorine, bone dust and ozone are there also, but unnamable by her. It is cold. It seems also intoxicatingly high-ceilinged. It is mostly poorly lit, with only foci of illumination haphazardly scattered around the room by motley lamps but, in the exact centre is the strongest light; a cone of effulgence cast from a surgical operating lamp. Sparkling dust swirls around her father within it, as if he were a specimen of human pathos exhibited in a tank.

He sits with tranquillity, but his pose strikes her as unnatural, almost like paralysis. She has seen him in catatonia many times before, but this is different; he might almost be asleep. His limbs are not rigid; his arms are stretched out across an operating table, his head down so that she can’t see his eyes. There are many tools disarranged to either side of him, as if dropped or swept aside. There is also something of quite startling beauty to his left; she recognises it at once as his work; there is something sinuous and shimmering, resembling a snake about to strike, and like nothing she has ever seen before. It was once strung, but the strings now hang limp and flaccid, without use. Why? The frame still radiates, though, telling her that it is so nearly become something wonderful. Some part of her cries in silent despair that it cannot be played, but she is old enough to barely think this thought. She is fascinated and faintly revolted, yet oddly excited too; it is a macabre, yet perfect experience.

“Daddy?” she calls.

She approaches.

“Daddy?” she calls again.

*******

There was an unspoken assumption that Tom and Tasha did not occupy the same bedroom when staying with her parents. On a superficial, cerebral level – perhaps the outermost rind of grey matter, the one where television adverts strut their stuff and tabloid newspapers hide in waiting for the unwary with their addictive palliatives – he was quite comfortable with this, but he didn’t have to delve too deeply into the stuff of his central nervous system to reach some conflict regarding the situation. He and Tasha showed no such squeamishness when they stayed with his mother, and he was well aware that he felt he ought to be confronting Emanuel and Jean on the matter. But Tasha had demurred. Understandable, he supposed, given her acquiescence to them in so many matters. He missed her, though.

He sat in his bedroom that night – very clearly a guest room, as it smelled of disuse and was ornamented by oddly anonymous porcelain figures and an over-painted mock impressionist travesty that just suggested chintziness gone loco. The room was also too clean to be a place in constant use, or someone’s refuge. Tom sat at the small, white-painted dressing table, trying not to look into the oval mirror that was angled slightly towards the Chinese lantern-style lampshade hanging in the centre of the room. He had pushed aside the hairbrush, the empty jewellery box and the tiny china wheelbarrow and was using his laptop to open the computer files he had uploaded from Martin Waldeyer’s desktop, discovering all sorts of things that he found illuminating, as well as one or two that did little more than tower over his speculations portentously, inducing all sorts of conjectures and constructions.

The password-protected folder, for example. There were all sorts of reasons why a man might protect his privacy by such security, but its title was intriguing, especially in the light of secrets that dared not speak their name – that dare not even be referred to by other members of the family. Penelope and Simone. He didn’t know what documents nestled inside, passive, unregarded and unregarding, and that was the problem, his reason for thinking that perhaps he knew. Of course, it might have been all entirely innocent. He could think of scanned school reports, certificates for cycling proficiency, swimming ten lengths, bronze gymnastic medal, and (almost certainly in Penelope’s case) evidence of achievement in the more prestigious levels of playing musical instruments. His imagination suggested other possibilities; photographs, for instance.

Martin Waldeyer had been a very protective father.

Tom’s father had been a laugh and Tom still missed him greatly. His mother’s love and his love for his mother were a necessary but not sufficient part of his life; his relationship with his sister was something else. He remembered many great times with both his parents but, inevitably because he was gone forever, those in which his father played a role were preeminent in his head. He knew it was unfair of him to relegate his mother to a subordinate role, as if she came second in his emotions, just because she was still there and his father was gone and therefore frozen into a form of perfection. He couldn’t help it, though. How would he feel if his father had been as odd as Martin Waldeyer had apparently been, if he had perhaps been unnaturally close to his children?

Martin Waldeyer had brought Penelope up alone. How alone? How ‘protective’ was he? Emanuel Vogt clearly didn’t want to think too deeply about his uncle’s motives, and possibly about his actions, so deep in the night, when he was alone with his daughter. All that was speculation, but it was damned eye-catching speculation, the type that fitted perfectly into the gaps that everyone seemed to be waltzing cautiously around.

The other folders – those that were apparently strong enough to stand the light of examination – told him that Martin Waldeyer had not been sanguine about the disappearance of his immediate family. Fair enough, he supposed; the old man had been left all alone in a big house in a remote part of the country. He had spent a lot of money to find them but, it was now obvious, they hadn’t wanted to be found.

Over the months since Penelope left Martin Waldeyer’s house with her husband and young daughter, her father searched for her assiduously, turning eventually to a variety of investigators. In all, Tom found evidence that he used five of them; Dorothy Hodgkin was only the first, and the longest serving. Along with the monthly invoices for fees and expenses (she always detailed these with great precision, not to say tediousness), there were correspondingly dated reports describing just what Dorothy had been doing in her efforts to find his family for him. For eight months, this good lady attempted to justify the money her client was spending with little effect. According to her testimony, she had contacts in the police, the DVLA, the UK Borders Agency, and the Benefits Agency; none, however, produced any indicators of where the missing persons might be. All this despite her impressive qualifications that headed each officious yet apologetic report and each invoice; she had once been given (perhaps even earned), Tom read, a BA, a DipCII, and she was a member of the Institute of Registered Private Investigators.

There was no evidence of how Martin Waldeyer terminated the relationship with Dorothy Hodgkin, but a report dated just over a month after her last (similarly telling of a lack of success) was written by the spectacularly named Oliver Pickard-Cambridge. His claims for expenses were similarly detailed and somewhat longer, including (perhaps optimistically) several bar and restaurant bills; the appended explanation told that he incurred them whilst interviewing potential witnesses, which he did by travelling the country in his car, brandishing photographs of the missing family, staying in Travelodges and Premier Inns. It seemed to Tom to have been an approach that was best described as ‘scattergun’. Tom noted that he appeared to be less well qualified than Dorothy, and that Uncle Martin’s patience did not extend beyond four months.

The next lasted somewhat longer in the old man’s employment. Raymond L. Johnson boasted that he had spent twenty-four years in the Metropolitan Police, of which the final seven were in something he called the ‘Missing Persons’ Squad’, but he admitted defeat despite all this expertise, after just six months. The fourth agency was owned by the Charles and Victor Reason brothers who, so their notepaper claimed, were the only identical twin private investigators in the country. Whatever the novelty of this, they did not apparently prove any more successful than their predecessors.

The last file in the folder was not a PDF document but an email. It was from a man named Mortimer Smith, who billed himself as a ‘psychic investigator’. He had only been employed a few weeks before and there was no report, no plea for money, merely the introductory email. Tom found it fascinating. Mortimer Smith stated that he had a long track history of helping the police, that he had recently aided in the discovery of a buried body, and that he had picked up psychic signs –‘tell-tale disturbances in the all-pervading aether’ was how he phrased it – to indicate that he might be of help to Martin Waldeyer in locating his missing family. He had ended the message with the following, troubling (and verbose) passage: ‘I am afraid from the evidence I have, that I cannot help but believe that, although your grand-daughter is still alive, your daughter may no longer be with us. Should you engage me, I think that I will be able to furnish you with more information within a very few weeks.’

Intrigued, Tom searched for him on the Internet, making use of Emanuel Vogt’s Wi-Fi. Mortimer Smith didn’t have much of an electronic presence; he had no registered company and Tom could find only one photograph that portrayed a portly man of late middle-age, photographed in the course of raising money for charity by cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Tom was surprised by this, because he didn’t appear to have the physique normally associated with such endeavours. The only distinguishing feature was what Tom guessed was a radiotherapy scar in the middle of his forehead; Tom recognised it as such, because his father had a similar one following treatment for skin cancer.

*******

“He is even more of whining fool if he allows her to get away with it.”

“Absolutely, my lord.” Hypate, as ever, is quick to agree with her god.

“She is to blame, and yet she could be so useful.”

“She is an evil shrew, nothing more, my lord.”

“Can he not see how he can put things right? Is he so stupid? I had hoped for better. I had hoped that he might be more than the charlatan he has always appeared.”

“He has had the chance.” This is Mese, dismissive; her voice insinuates so much.

Apollo is angry and disgusted. “He is going to fail and it is all that tiny harlot’s fault.”

“She ought to die, my lord.”

“She needs to die.”

Nete says, “She doesn’t deserve life.”

And Hypate is frighteningly quick to agree. “It should be taken from her.”

“Now, my lord?” asks Mese.

“Now,” puts in Nete.

“Now!” Apollo’s voice is loud.

“Now!” Hypate’s is louder still.

“Now!” Still louder, from all three sisters. “Now!” They repeat louder.

And Apollo, loudest of all, shouts, “NOW!”

Leo’s head is filled with the command, leeching all emotion and all free will from his shaking frame; the majesty of it shakes him still further. He lifts his head to Simone’s call, and sees a girl. He knows that she is his daughter, but the words have no emotional resonance, no anchors in the turmoil that fills his head. He cannot recall a single trace of love for the girl; he cannot remember any feelings for her at all; he cannot even revive within him any notion that he might ever have had, or might ever consider having, any sort of sensation about her. In that moment, he sees her as just an object, and his muses and his god are telling him that she is responsible for his failure to honour his adored Penelope. They are the only point from which he can gain a perspective, no matter how distorted, and they are telling him to kill her. He stares directly at her but his thoughts swoop away into hell.

“Daddy? Are you alright?” The echo from the room is faint and rapid, but cold. This, she feels, is a hateful place, one without heart. He clearly isn’t alright, as so often before, but this time is different, for it is her fault. She kept the compact out of vanity and now she curses this act of weakness; too late, she knows and almost hears as she stands before her father. He is trembling, but his body is taut, as if fine steel wires that she cannot actually see pull at him from all angles, stretching and angulating him. She sees his hands clenched together with what appears to her to be intolerable frenzy, his flesh is lividly mottled. As she watches, the trembling transforms into something close to shuddering, as if he is battling something.

His muses, she guesses.

His head jerks up and his eyes stare, but not at her; not at anything, she thinks; his mind’s eye takes in things too terrible to allow sight of her world any significance, it seems. His wild, grey hair and long beard – uncut for many months – make him look terrible. His eyes are startlingly injected.

“Daddy?” She approaches him, knowing well that she is in danger. It is so cold in here. How does he cope? She has seen this blankness of expression before, and it has meant someone’s death. In this, she is far more experienced than most adults ever become, and she thinks she knows with perfect precision how much danger she is in, and that she can handle him. “Daddy?” she says again, more softly.

There is no silence in that cold room – she has learned that there is never silence in this world – but in that small space at that brief time, there is a tiny pocket between them of something close to it; for a brief fraction of time, the faint background sounds of winds and night creatures do not intrude. The moment stretches and dissipates, and then dies. Something that might be awareness, but is very far from reason, returns to Leo. He focuses on Simone, recognising that she is there, but no more. Mistakenly, she thinks that this means he knows who she is, but he really only knows what she is. She smiles and says, “Daddy!”

Before she can do anything or say more, he has grasped one of the tools on the bench. It is a stainless steel hammer, one once used to remove bone in surgical procedures. She sees with horror that in his head, he is striking her down with it. For a moment, she can actually hear a sound in her cracking skull and deforming brain that sounds impossibly to her like the word “NOW”, as she realises what he intends to do to her; she knows why, too; it is because she has failed him and (most significantly) failed her mother. She understands this and, impossibly, thinks to accept her fate.

But it doesn’t happen.

“NO!” he cries, and drops the hammer. The pause that follows rings with the sound as it hits the floor, sound that echoes and re-echoes madly for just a second. Then he gasps, “Run, girl! For God’s sake, run!”

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Eleven

“You still look peaky, dear.” Jean Vogt was solicitous as she sat with her daughter and Tom the next morning; it was something she did well, Tom thought, which wasn’t surprising. She was, after all a nursing sister. It was, though, focused; a coherent empathy, with no diffusion beyond the target. At this moment, Tasha was receiving her mother’s concern and, he felt, basking in it; good for her, he thought. The breakfast table here in the large, farmhouse kitchen was crowded with crockery, cutlery and comestibles, as if they were eating in an over-eager hotel that was keen not to get a bad review on the Internet. Tasha just had a grapefruit, Tom tried to enjoy organic granola and Jean Vogt ate a small triangle of brown toast with immense concentration. Emanuel was not there, having to play in a medal at the golf club.

Like her toast, Jean was dainty, although Tom knew from observing her as she gardened that she was no weakling; years of hauling the sick on and off bedpans, transferring the semi-comatose from gurney to bed, and pumping on the chests of cardiac arresters had given her hidden stamina; he suspected, too, that she had emotional strength. Tasha was quiet that morning; she bobbed her head in a show of hesitant agreement but said nothing.

Was he ‘peaky’ too, Tom wondered? He certainly felt so. His father (a jovial man who had died whilst sneezing one day, four years before) used to describe him as ‘pallid’ when others might have said ‘pale’ or ‘wan’ because he too was a pathologist, and such verbal eccentricities were a side effect of the job. Tom had slept little and dreamed much the night before, but most of these phantasms had been forgotten, except for those that concerned the pipe. He couldn’t remember any except emotional context from these dreadful imaginings, but he had awoken feeling most peculiar. Handling the pipe hadn’t helped; had, he feared, only made things worse. It was so beautifully made, yet somehow awful.

It was Sunday and, had Uncle Martin not so suddenly and inconveniently died, Tom and Tasha would have been at her parents for lunch anyway. The plan put to Tom had been that he and Tasha would go to the local farmers’ market because Tasha had told him about the wonderful buffalo burgers and cheeses that were to be had there; Tom’s experience of such enterprises was that the quality control tended towards zero and he was quietly ready to be unimpressed. In any case, it turned out that Tasha was still too affected by the shocking events of the previous day to contemplate such an expedition. Not long after she partook of breakfast, she returned to her bedroom, taken with a migraine; or perhaps the migraine was taken with her.

And so Tom was left with Jean Vogt who, having cleared the table and stacked the dishwasher (managing despite Tom’s attempt at well-meant but inept assistance), asked him if he would like more coffee. He said, “If it’s not too much trouble,” and she replied that no, it wasn’t. As she prepared the filter machine with Brazilian ground coffee and bottled water, he asked, “What kind of man was Uncle Martin?”

He was bewildered that she showed no surprise at the forwardness of this question. Her back was to him as she closed up the coffee bag and put it back in the cupboard, and it was a moment before she responded, seemingly unperturbed. “I don’t really know, Tom.” She spoke as if his question had given her some relief, as if something inside her had been pent up and he had unwittingly found a way for it into the world. When he said nothing, she turned back and switched on the machine before sitting down opposite him. “Emanuel and I weren’t very close to him,” she admitted.

Tom didn’t really know her at all well; he thought he knew her husband, and therefore, by illogical extension, her husband’s wife, but he had been wrong before. He thought her to be of a type – she was, after all, a consultant surgeon’s wife and intensive therapy sister, to boot – and he had now to admit to himself he had thought it to be not a particularly nice type. He imagined her to be like her husband in so many ways, perhaps because mimicking Emanuel Vogt’s attitudes and opinions was the defensive strategy he’d hitherto adopted himself, but he perceived now that, perhaps, he had been mistaken. “The house was…” he searched his lexicon for the word. “… Unsettling.”

She nodded sadly. “Like the man himself,” she acknowledged, making Tom feel uncomfortable; she wasn’t behaving as he had expected. This, he thought subconsciously, was why he opted out of clinical medicine; when he asked a question, he needed to know the answer he was going to receive, and patients so rarely did what you expected of them. He was sensitive enough not to comment, though. She went on, “I expect Emanuel’s told you about his family.”

Warily, he replied, “He mentioned something…”

“I always got the impression that Uncle Martin didn’t intend to be unpleasant; he was always polite, and seemed to try very hard.” This didn’t strike Tom as a complete sentence, more a phrase that desperately needed qualification, which Jean Vogt duly supplied: “He was considered something of a prodigy by the family; Emanuel always said that it went to his head, but I can’t deny there was something quite striking about his work.”

“It was definitely on a theme,” he agreed.

The coffee machine was old and seemed to perform its purpose in life only with great fuss and much moaning; it sighed, it gasped and, to Tom’s great but suppressed amusement, it even seemed to belch on one or two occasions. It was an aged relative that sat on the grey granite work surface of the kitchen, alternately shouting and soughing about something or other, ignored by all. Jean Vogt said, “Poor man. He was well known in the family for being melancholic, but the terrible death of his wife – Emanuel told you about that?” He nodded. “Well, it drove him into a profound depression. I suppose he used that in his work. They do say, don’t they, that all great acts of creativity are driven by mental illness?”

Tom had heard this theory, but wondered whether it wasn’t just a convenience for all; the artist was allowed to indulge whatever penchant for bad behaviour they may have wished to exhibit, and the common herd gratefully sucked it up, feeling relieved that there was a reason why they themselves couldn’t paint, or draw, or just be outrageous.

“Did he make any money?”

She appeared momentarily startled by the question. “I think so… Sometimes, at least.” There was a small space in which he could see her thinking and the thought must have spurred her into speech. “Not that he needed any.”

She sounded rancorous, he thought. “No?”

“No,” she said finally. As if wishing to move on from the subject, she appeared to notice for the first time that her filter machine had wheezed into a sort of depressed silence; she rose from the table and poured each of them a fresh mug. As she handed Tom his, she apparently felt compelled to say, “Emanuel’s father and Uncle Martin never really got on, so there was lot of history, if you know what I mean.”

Tom had never really got on with his sister. She was six years younger and had always seemed to him to have been outrageously pampered; this would not have been to him so unbearable, except that he was alone in believing this. So, he did know what she meant, although he said nothing directly in answer. “Still, the awful tragedy that happened must have brought them closer together,” he offered, afraid that he was being too forward.

She didn’t have to consider the family story for long. “It would have done, had Martin not been so damned peculiar.” She sounded bitter and Tom was afraid that he had lost whatever feeling of friendship had grown between them. Whereas, until now, she had always seemed to him to be a merely an icon (a potential adversary and her daughter’s protector), these past few moments had led him to see her as a real human being. Presumably, she had also been beginning to see him as something more than a player in a game, and he was aware that these later questions might have made him seem once more to her to be someone not to be unquestioningly trusted.

He couldn’t decide whether he was the only one in the room to feel the atmosphere grow uncomfortable. He said, “But you’ve all looked after him, since he’s been left alone.”

She looked up at him sharply and he detected that he had made a tactical error; no matter how innocently made, such mistakes were not always quickly forgiven. Her gaze reminded him of her other life, as a sister in intensive care. It was a world apart from most people’s – certainly from his present one – but one that he had experienced as a medical student and junior doctor. It was, of necessity, a sterile world, and one ruled by measurement; of mundanities such as blood pressure, temperature, urine output and heart rate; of more obscure parameters such as oxygen saturation, white blood count, and potassium level; and of arcana that include C-reactive protein and right atrial pressure. Such an arid place – where the patient was frequently not so much a human being as a physiological organism – did not select for the more affectionate nurse, rather those who were bright and quick and incisive. “We did our duty by the family,” she conceded. There was barely a pause before she added, “Although, I couldn’t say that he appreciated it a great deal.” Then, just in case he should have misunderstood, or perhaps read too much into this: “He was very much an individual.”

“Yes.” He didn’t mean to make that sound in any way significant, but apparently it did to Jean Vogt’s ears.

“Emanuel and I might not have had much in common with him,” she said. “But the split with Penelope affected Martin greatly. We felt that we couldn’t just abandon him.”

“It must have come as a big shock to you… especially Natasha, because she and Simone were quite close, weren’t they?”

She looked at him in such a way that he was almost convinced for a moment that he had said something inappropriate. He was aware that he was filling many roles – daughter’s boyfriend, house guest, intruder, inquisitor – and thought that perhaps he had drawn too much attention to one of those over the others, but she didn’t say anything in reprimand. “They corresponded,” she allowed, as if this were a secret so special he ought to be signing a receipt with body fluid. “Natasha saw herself as…”

The word eluded her, though. Tom picked up a piece of rough cut Demerara sugar from the bone china bowl and began to play with it. “Someone a bit like her?” he suggested. “An only child?” He was about to add, with few friends, but his diplomatic instincts had been honed by this family.

“I suppose Natasha felt a bit sorry for her,” conceded Mrs Vogt. “She was Simone’s only close relative anywhere near her age.”

Tom thought that it was poor ground on which to found a friendship, especially as Natasha was twice Simone’s age. She watched him playing with her sugar as disapproval found her features and prospered. He ventured, “There’s quite an age difference, though, isn’t there?”

“You must remember, Tom, that Natasha was only fourteen when Simone was born. She was delighted at the time, as adolescent girls often are when a baby’s born in the family.”

“Oh, yes, of course…”

Natasha’s mother had not yet finished. “And don’t forget, Simone had precious little company of anyone anywhere near her own age living in that house.”

“Was there no clue that they were going to leave in what Simone said to Tasha?”

“Not a word, and the first we knew of it was when Simone just stopped answering her emails. After a few weeks, we contacted Martin of course, and he said they’d just gone in the night, without a word as to where. I don’t think he’d have told us until Christmas if we hadn’t made the move first. It was almost as if he were in shock.” She shrugged. “He probably was, I suppose.”

He popped the piece of sugar into his mouth. As it dissolved inside his cheek, he commented, “Tasha said that Penelope was a musician.”

“That’s right. She was very good, I think, although we didn’t really get to hear her. She played flute and harp.” She seemed relieved to be able to issue this unqualified support for the Waldeyer branch of the family.

“Where did she learn?”

“Private tutors at first. Then she got GCSEs and A-levels, and then she won a scholarship to Oxford. Balliol, I think.”

“But she was never professional.”

Her face lost its shine. “No,” she acknowledged.

Tom felt that he was, once again, engaged in a dance around something that he knew was there, but couldn’t see, and something – moreover – that gave off a peculiar odour. “Why not?” he asked, and sipped some coffee to create an impression of artlessness.

He thought that she was about to deny everything but, after what he interpreted as an internal struggle, she allowed, “I think it was because Uncle Martin didn’t want her to.”

The weather was odd; it was as if God (or someone big, anyway) had put a lid of grey cloud over the world, but one that was ill-fitting, so that Mister Sunshine only managed to peek through around the horizon. There was a numinous quality to it all as Jean Vogt sat with one of the kitchen windows behind her. When Tom merely nodded as if in understanding, she seemed forced into confession by the lack of interaction. She took some coffee of her own and then explained, “I expect you’ve gathered it was an odd situation, what with Penelope’s mother dying so unexpectedly, so early in Penny’s life.”

The use of the diminutive – the first time that Tom had heard such informality when the Vogts were talking of Martin Waldeyer and his kin – brought some much needed humanity. “Yes.”

She chose her words with care – as if picking mushrooms in a field where she knew that there were poisonous fungi – saying, “He refused all help with her early care. Everyone tried to persuade him otherwise – his parents and Emanuel’s father most especially – but he was a strange, stubborn man. We never saw much of them, which was his choice, not ours; they didn’t even come to either of the funerals when Emanuel’s parents died, and I think it was then that Emanuel and I realised that Uncle Martin wasn’t interested in family interaction. That meant, of course, we didn’t know quite how he was bringing up our niece…”

The rules of engagement were now somehow subtly altered, which was why Tom felt no qualms as he asked, “How, precisely, was he bringing her up?” For him, this was a delicate membrane on which he tiptoed; one step in the wrong place, and he would find himself falling though.

“Intellectually, quite well, I think...” A sentence too short and ending, as well, on a dying fall. He waited and she said tangentially, “She used to write to me occasionally. It wasn’t as if he imprisoned her, or anything, I mean. And she wouldn’t have got into Oxford to read anything if she were stupid or ill-educated, would she?”

But she couldn’t avoid giving him the impression that she still wanted to tango around the subject. “What about her pastoral care?” he asked. “That’s just as important.”

“Yes… well.” She was suddenly prim and proper; she had found her toxic toadstool, he, his hole in the ground. “Who can say?”

“What was the row about, do you think?”

She was startled by the question, which came apropos of very little. “Row?” she enquired, either in surprise or in irritation, he wasn’t sure which.

“The one that led to Penelope and her family suddenly leaving.”

She stared at him; he thought that she might be running through what to say in her head. “Who knows what goes on between four walls?”

“Could it have been artistic differences?”

She opened her mouth but quickly closed it. “Quite possibly. I don’t think Uncle Martin was particularly impressed by Leo’s work.” She had said what he expected her to say, because he led her by the nose to it.

“Have you got any of his work? Could I take a look?”

“Good God, no. It was mostly abstract and metaphysical; either that, or rather fantastical. And very overpriced. We never bought any, nor were we offered any.”

“But I should imagine Martin Waldeyer felt fairly jealous when Leo came into the house.”

“Jealous?”

“He lost a daughter to him.”

“Yes, well… He gained a son-in-law…”

“One that he didn’t much respect, you said.”

She looked angry with him, although he didn’t think he had said anything overly outrageous. “No.”

“Was Uncle Martin close to Simone too?”

And, for some reason, she appeared to see that question as somehow impertinent. “Of course he was! He was her grandfather!”

A neutral question seemed wise, one that might help to dissipate the impression that he was interrogating her. “What did Penelope look like?”

“Oh…” She sounded surprised and he speculated, once again, on what was going through her mind; was there some familial rivalry, perhaps? Whatever the reason, her answer came slowly. “She was actually quite attractive.” As if that side of the family has the munter gene. Tom thought that Tasha had thankfully taken (in the way of looks) after her mother, although there was something of her father’s character within her. Better that than vice versa, he reminded himself.

“And she had the most astonishing hair. She grew it so long…”

“Like Rapunzel? To escape from a prison?”

She didn’t see the humour. “So impractical. It must have taken an age to wash and dry.” There was a distant rumble, although not of thunder. Emanuel’s return home was announced by the motorised door of the double garage opening to admit his rather large car. The mood was broken. Jean got up. “I really must start the vegetables for lunch.”

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Twelve

Inspector George Beauchamp kept telling himself that life in Hereford would get better, and life in Hereford kept telling him otherwise. His plan to wind down in the years leading up to his retirement was not going well; his visions of a bucolic life had been blown away by the cold wind of rural reality. He had imagined that criminal life in the county would involve no more than the illegal use of red diesel, illicit stills condensing apple brandy, and poaching, a crime mix perhaps leavened by apple scrumping and the odd case of misuse of a maypole. At first he had thought that his perspective of the society in which he found himself was distorted by his metropolitan point of view, but he was now forced to admit that it was actually proving completely wrong. These people did crime just as well as anyone brought up in an urban jungle; they just seemed to do it in a different way, with different ways of thinking. How could he detect and inspect without knowing how they thought?

A knock at his office door would, a long time ago, have excited him; in his later years in Walsall, such an occurrence tended to elicit no reaction at all, other than perhaps exasperation; in his present post, he had hoped to rekindle some sense of anticipation when such a sound came, but he now found himself experiencing only dread that he would be brought news of yet another crime that he couldn’t get his head round. Another deceased piglet (or other farmyard animal) perhaps, in the guise this time of a crashed Neptunian alien, or maybe a couple who had ended their lives by jumping headlong and arm-in-arm into a slurry pit, dressed as Cossacks. Who knew what macabre misdemeanours might be on the batting order today?

There came at that moment just such a knock on the door. As was the way in this time and day and in this place, he had not the time even to draw breath to issue a response before the door opened and it was born in upon him yet again that he was not in sole command of the vessel that was his life. Detective Sergeant Brierley entered with his characteristically heavy gait, a false smile lifting the pink, reticulate skin of his cheeks.

“I’ve got someone on the line who wants to speak to you, Inspector.”

“What about?” He tried not to sound suspicious, but he could feel that his efforts in this direction seemed to be becoming increasingly tired. He could not get it out of his head that Brierley was forever working to undermine him; and, if that wasn’t the case, then he was suffering from a delusion, which was effectively doing the same thing. Either way, Brierley was trouble, he knew.

“He says he’s got some information bearing on the Waldeyer death.”

Beauchamp was both pleased and worried, which wasn’t a novel situation for him these days. The pleasure was derived from the possibility that he had been right not to dismiss the death lightly; there was anxiety because perhaps he had eventually made the wrong call in not pursuing it further. “Who is it?”

“He won’t say.” But there was something about Brierley – the tone of voice, the smirk of the lips (although these always seemed to be smirking) – that made him warier than ever. Although he had no concrete evidence, he was sure that, much of the time, he was being laughed at by his colleagues, both junior and senior, and he thought that Brierley was orchestrating it. It was undeniable that he hadn’t made an overly auspicious start, but he felt that he had been dealt an unplayable hand – perhaps one that was tampered with. Was this another trap, he wondered? After all, why had Brierley appeared in his office in person? Why hadn’t he just put the call through to him?

“Okay. Put him through.” He tried to imbue the command with many meanings; authority of course, but also insouciance, and the façade of total control. He wanted Sergeant Brierley to know that he was no fool, but there was a feeling of desperation within a part of his mortal soul that wouldn’t be quashed. Brierley, he suspected, would believe exactly what he wanted to believe, no matter what he said or did.

The sergeant left the small office and a moment later Beauchamp’s phone sounded. He had in his hand a black roller-ball pen and it was poised over a pristine pad. “Beauchamp speaking.”

“You’ve been investigating the death of Martin Waldeyer. Is that right?” A youngish male voice, he judged. It was demanding.

“Yes…”

The other spoke before he could say more. “My father’s gone missing. He was working for Mr Waldeyer and I think his disappearance may be connected with the death”

“Really?” Beauchamp was interested but, again, was not given time for questions.

“I’m afraid my father might be dead, too.” The voice was gasping.

This is a worried man, Beauchamp thought, and the other’s anxieties were inevitably transferred to him, try as he might to resist. He felt the other’s panic and desperation within his head and it distorted his thinking. He asked, “What makes you believe that?”

“He said he’d ring me, and he hasn’t.”

“That’s not much reason...” The inspector kept trying to lower the pen to allow it to gain purchase on the paper’s surface, but it never quite got there, as if invisible fields were keeping them apart.

“He said he’d call me every evening. He hasn’t called.” There was an accent there, half hidden in the acoustic shadows of emotion, and not a local one.

“Even so…”

“He’d told me he thought he was going to be killed.”

“What? How?” The inspector found himself swept up by shock at his information and yet, at the same time, suspicious because recent circumstance had taught him to be so.

It was a stupid question, the tone of the reply implied. “He didn’t know that.”

Beauchamp took a deeper breath than normal. “What, exactly, was your father doing for Martin Waldeyer?” He commanded himself in an unheard yet imperious tone to be very careful.

“He was looking for his daughter and her family.”

“Penelope?”

“That’s the one. Dad said he’d almost found her.”

“And you think he’s dead?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

That accent was familiar, yet he was sure that he’d never heard the voice before.

“Just because he’s not been in contact, doesn’t mean he’s dead.”

He noticed that the door to his office was slightly open. How long had it been thus? Through the gap he could see… Nothing? The shape of someone, perhaps? His caller said, “Yes, it does!” He was exasperated. Beauchamp was used to the tone, because he heard it in his own mind often enough, and he appreciated that this man genuinely thought that he was being sincere. He eyed the darkness beyond the door, and wondered if anyone was there, and then as he wondered, he wondered why he wondered. This convolution was followed immediately by the thought that somebody most certainly was outside. With great effort, he somehow managed to concentrate at least some thoughts on his caller. Pulling himself out of his abstraction, he said, “I’ll need a few details. You are Mister…?”

“Smith. Mervyn Smith.”

It’s a common surname, he reflected but, nonetheless, he couldn’t escape the clutches of trepidation as he asked, “And your father’s name?”

“Mortimer.”

Mortimer. Most decidedly not a common name, and yet he’d heard it before. And that accent, too, acquired an origin as he recognised it as coming from the South-East. He was holding his breath as he enquired of this voice, “Is your father a ‘psychic investigator’?”

A figure flitted across the gap created by the opened door; the detail couldn’t be made out by his eyes, but his mind had no such reservations; the idea that it was Sergeant Brierley flew in and settled there, nesting, and ruffling its iridescent feathers as it indulged in some unnecessary preening.

Mervyn Smith said, “That’s right.” Which was all he said, his tone suggesting that his father was famous. Why not? Beauchamp thought bitterly. In a sense, he undoubtedly was.

Mining what he considered to be heroic reserves of self-control, Beauchamp asked, “How did you get hold of my name?”

“When I rang Sergeant Brierley, he said you’d be very interested in what I had to say.”

“You know Sergeant Brierley, do you?”

“My father does. Great mates, they are. Dad’s often tipped him the wink about some sort of funny business that he’s got wind of.”

“Psychically?”

The figure just outside the door – the one that he could make out but couldn’t quite see, that was insubstantial and yet grotesquely real – didn’t move; it didn’t have to. Mervyn Smith said artlessly, “That’s it.”

For a moment, he was suffused with anger; its effulgence devouring him, a painless consumption, almost a thing of ecstasy. Phone in hand, he stood and strode from behind his desk to the door, grabbing the handle and pulling it fully open with enough violence to send it banging against a battered green filing cabinet to which no one had ever bothered to give him the key. The loud noise made Superintendent Richard Rekorde, his diminutive and increasingly irascible commanding officer, jump and utter a muted screech as he was surprised while perusing the notice board opposite.

Beauchamp stared at the station superintendent, the torrent of angry abuse that roiled within him suddenly turning tail. It was replaced by remorse and embarrassment. His mouth was open, his face was red as the enormity of his faux pas crashed upon him. He muttered something to his superior, partly in apology, mostly in an attempt to suggest that there had been a very good reason for his behaviour, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious. He tried a smile, found it too hard to sustain, then shut the door gently. Returning to his desk and his caller, he hissed angrily at the phone, “Do you know how busy I am, Mr Smith?”

“I’m sorry?”

“And are you aware that, under the Criminal Law Act of 1967, wasting police time is a criminal offence punishable by up to six months’ imprisonment?”

“I’m not...”

“I don’t know precisely what your relationship with Sergeant Brierley is, but I suggest you mend your ways and have nothing more to do with that moron.”

Modern technology meant that he was unable to slam the receiver down with appropriate ferocity, but he pressed the red button as violently as he could.

*******

Simone did not sleep until the early hours. How could she, given what has happened in that hateful place where her father works; where her father seems driven to work by the voices? She has been terrified as she has never been before, and she has lain awake and wondered and tried to work out how it has all changed. Her father tried to kill her. She repeats it again and again – not a mantra but reiteration of a whole reticulate pattern of thought, all the implications of what has so nearly happened. She can no longer hide from the proposition that the voices may not always be benign towards her; two deaths and so nearly a third (her!). Yet she is bound beyond thought by the promise to her mother to help him.

And he didn’t carry it through. He is strong enough to resist them.

But why, though? Why should the voices wish her dead?

There is no answer to that question, at least none in her orbit. Her father, she knows, operates by very different rules. When he raised the hammer, she could see nothing in his eyes that she could recognise, that recognised her.

Such thoughts whirl through her head for hour after hour.

When she rises and washes late the next morning, she finds her father, tall and shaggy, sitting in the kitchen, and she is sure that he has been there all night. He is sitting at the table, arms by his side, seeing and hearing things that she cannot even imagine, things that she wonders if she might one day see herself. It is a familiar situation for her, yet now she has different emotions. He tried to kill her, came close, she must admit to herself, for to do otherwise would be reckless. For a moment, she was completely terrified and, although a partial night’s sleep has ameliorated this, some of her confidence – of her faith, although she does not know it as such – has been eroded. She still loves him, though, and there is still her mother’s ever powerful request that she should help him. But she is watchful, and sternly impresses upon herself that she must remain so.

He seems to be back to normal, although normal for Leo Banneker is a truly alien landscape. He doesn’t talk, nor even acknowledge that she is there, but this isn’t worrying. She doesn’t bother to talk to him – once she might, but no longer – as she prepares for breakfast. Perhaps he will eat some with her, perhaps he won’t, but she cannot allow the latter possibility to dictate her actions. She has to believe that normality has not completely left her life and her relationship with her father, for to do so would render her incapable of action, of thought, of living.

The tea made, she puts plates, bowls, some cutlery, and some mugs on the table; her mother would have put the milk into a jug, and she is unconsciously sorry that she can only be bothered to leave it in the carton. It is one of more than a myriad of things that remind her of things lost, of time’s unrelenting attack on happiness. She brings the pot to the table and pours tea for herself, then the toaster ejects two slices of toast and she fetches them, propping them against each other on the table between them, just as her mother used to; they form a parody of hands clasped in prayer. Her father likes Coco Pops, although they are not to her taste. She cannot appreciate the childhood that she never had, or the significance of his desire to relocate his own.

The toast cools, she takes the slices and places one on her father’s plate, the other on her own. As she is buttering hers, she becomes aware of a change in the atmosphere, as if someone unseen has entered, but there is no visible change in her father until he, too, starts to butter his toast. She does not show the immense surge of relief that fills her; it is a resurrection that she has to witness with increasing frequency and every time with increasing anxiety.

He says, “They wanted me to kill you.” His voice is normal. It is as though an entire conversation has ebbed and flowed between them, and as if he were announcing something trivial, perhaps the news that he thinks he might be coming down with something.

Even Simone, who has never led a life that any would describe as normal, and who has no concept of what others would describe as ‘small talk’, finds this a horrible thing to hear; her own obituary, perhaps. She wants to tell him that he isn’t giving her any news, and to do so awash with sarcasm. Her experience, though, tells her that she must maintain a show of tranquillity, that to do otherwise would be to risk a fracture in this moment of reality. She replies, “Why?” She doesn’t need to know who is calling for her death; she has never seen or had contact with her denouncers, but she is well aware that they have observed her minutely. Who is she to question the motives of the immortals?

He pauses in the act of unscrewing the Marmite jar and frowns. His voice is troubled as he says, “Because I’m failing them.”

There is no logic here that she can follow, but that is nothing new; she lives her life by rules that are not hers to understand. “How?” She is cautious now. She does not believe that her father would hurt her, but this man who brought her up and whom she worships is not always her father. He wasn’t last night; may not be in a moment’s time.

“To punish me.”

“Punish you? But why?”

He thinks about this. Perhaps he is not sure, she realises. Perhaps the muses do not always give him explanations. “Things have not been going well. I’ve got a problem with the lyre…”

The lyre. For a second, she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but then a memory from last night of what was on the table sparks and flares within her. She had never seen it before then, but she is now unlikely to forget it. It is wondrous, because of its beauty, its workmanship, and its significance, which stands alone, an independent quality that the eye can see but cannot explain. It already has a sinuous, surreptitious hold on her.

“Is it something I can help you with?” She knows that the question is almost laughable. What can she, a young girl, do to help his genius?

His hesitation is noticeable before he smiles weakly and shakes his head. Of course not, she guesses. She knows what her father has been doing only at a high level, one at which the beauty of the concept of turning her mother – once a dedicated and talented artist – into art itself is so compelling that it has needed no further analysis. She has not, until now, been required to get her hands dirty; the same is true for her mind, she appreciates.

He says matter-of-factly, “I thought it would be easy. The backbone is the perfect shape to form a lyre…”

Backbone? Leo’s use of that single word opens a wide chasm before her feet, and she is compelled to look into it. The room upstairs, in which there are so many wondrous artefacts, seems at once to be no longer a delightful place, but a place where a monster lurks, where a symbol of dreadful deeds lies in wait, until now held at bay only by her wilful ignorance. She thinks of all the times that she has handled those exquisitely crafted things, even timidly playing them when her father was not around, embarrassed to do it in his presence because she was sure that she could never be able to play them well enough. She discovers, to her shock, that much of what she once thought idyllic may have been abhorrent.

They are parts of my mother. She has known the facts, but refused until that moment to know the implications; she has wanted to see art, and beauty and high ideals, and to hide from the ugly facts. This shocking epiphany is visceral for her.

But, overriding in her mind is the fact of the promise that she made to her mother; she is forever forcefully conscious of this duty to her. She says nothing, but doesn’t need to, for he tries to expiate himself. “It has been so difficult to get it right. It’s a fiendishly tricky process… I didn’t appreciate how hard it would be.” He grimaces as he thinks back over the past few months of trying and failing to perfect the technique. “At first, I had the concentration of the lye too high, and it made the gut brittle. Then, I realised I was also keeping it in the tanning solution too long…”

“Are they talking now?” It is a question fathered by agitation, mothered by distraction, because she doesn’t want to know the details of the processes by which he has sought to accomplish his ends.

He is not perturbed at being interrupted. “They never stop,” he sighs and then, after a distinct pause, he shakes his head. “Never.” This last in an undertone. She sees for the first time how unkempt he is, as if her discovery has ripped away veils from more than one aspect of her life.

“What will my death achieve, Daddy?”

He appears to his daughter to struggle with this question. She knows that he struggles with so much these days, and she briefly wonders if he is beginning to doubt that it is all worth it, if the game has been worth any sort of candle at all. She puts the thought away at once, for it is heretical. He says eventually and simply, “A sacrifice, I think. All gods need a sacrifice, after all.”

Unlike Simone, he either does not need to pose questions of the voices who command him, or perhaps he does not dare to.

She has to consider how wise her next query is. “Are they telling you to kill me now?”

The wait is near to intolerable by its end. He whispers fearfully, “Yes.”

Now she too does not care to ask questions. That there was a moment when he might have killed her has shouted at her for hours now. When she first ran back, panic smothered everything but then the monstrous appreciation of what had so nearly happened burrowed its way to the surface and grew within her. Only gradually could she quell it, but it is back now, louder than ever. She begins to sob, something that she has not done since the day her mother had her accident; she is too immature to know that she should have done so, many times.

His first reaction is surprise; it is so out of character, he thinks, because he no longer sees her as a child, but almost as an assistant. This translates into immobility, almost rigidity, a parody of his blackest moods. It is only slowly that he relaxes, that his thought patterns ebb and then flow back into new configurations; she becomes his daughter, and someone not in service but in need. He stands, moves around the table and then hugs her awkwardly. It is only a moment before she hugs him back and whispers into his shirt, “Thank you, Daddy.”

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Thirteen

Tasha’s lovemaking had been almost frantic. She clung to him for a long time, making Tom feel that it had been done not just for mutual pleasure but because of something else as well, something that he hadn’t seen in her before, something that he found warming. She was telling him that she needed him, not just wanted him. It was a wonderful feeling, not least because it was the first time he had seen it unequivocally in another.

When she spoke, her tone was drowsy and soft, her words otherwise. “I suppose Daddy’s told you about my chequered past?”

“What do you mean?”

“About Jake?”

He took a deep breath; he felt that he could so easily play this the wrong way, and he didn’t want to do that. “He said something about you being badly treated in the past. He didn’t mention any names.”

She sighed. “Every single bloody boyfriend gets the same.” She did a bad imitation of her father’s lofty baritone. “She’s been hurt… I’m not unreasonable… I’m not over-protective… I’m just looking out for her, as any father would…”

He laughed, because he thought she wanted him to, although it wasn’t very funny. “Something like that,” he conceded.

She didn’t speak for a while. “It was just a mistake. I thought he wanted to get married, he thought he didn’t. I didn’t discover the divergence of opinion until too late. In my head, I was committed.”

“Ouch.” He hugged her.

Another pause. “I went to pieces a bit.”

“Oh.”

A longer pause. “That doesn’t put you off, does it?”

He couldn’t afford the luxury of a pause, he knew. “No. Not at all.”

She let out her breath, although he hadn’t been aware that she was holding it. “Good.” She began to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. Then paused and looked back at him over a bare shoulder. “I’m not a flake, you know, Tom.”

He reached out to pat her back. “I know that.”

He lay afterwards not only in her bed in her flat, but also in a self-constructed world that was mostly one of contentment, only marginally one of concern that another’s need brought with it sometimes unbearable responsibility. He had previously doubted that he was in love with Tasha, or possibly that he had once been in love but had tumbled out of it. Now he thought that he might be very much back in love with her; he could only hope that her need for him was chocolate-coated with true affection.

Tasha was in the shower; with previous girlfriends he had considered such an act to be as much symbolic as ablutionary, but he could no longer see that in what Tasha was doing. As he waited in his pleasant glow, he ran his mind through the events of the weekend, leading once again to that wondrous pipe. If ‘pipe’ is the correct term… It wasn’t a flute, he knew, and he thought that most other members of the woodwind genus had stops, or whatever they were called. Yet that wasn’t the point. In this instance, the name didn’t matter, and had no power; nomenclature and classification added nothing and might even, he suspected, obfuscate matters. This was about the substance of what the object was and of its symbolism, he knew, although quite how he knew he couldn’t say; not just the molecules used in its construction, but also what it meant. He was vividly aware that, although it held no significance for him, it held a huge amount for Martin Waldeyer. Even that, though, was not the entirety of it, for he couldn’t forget the sound that it made in his ears and the feeling that it made in his heart when he attempted to play it. Those experiences were not entirely normal; they were somehow aethereal.

The door to the en suite had been left unlocked, another positive sign, he thought. She emerged in a faint billow of strongly scented water vapour that swirled around a beige towelling gown. Her hair was swaddled by a damp towel of a similar hue. She sat on her side of the bed and reached for the hair dryer that was plugged in and ready for action on her bedside cabinet. She unfurled the towel but, before she could switch the appliance on, he asked her back, “What was Leo Banneker like?”

This gave her pause. She said carefully, “I didn’t know him very well. We only met him a handful of times.”

“How did Penelope meet him?”

“At university.”

“He went to Oxford, too?”

“No. I think he was only there on a summer course or something.”

“Oh.”

“It turned out he was from somewhere around here. Something in common, you see, although he clearly wasn’t her intellectual equal. Daddy was sure it would never last.”

“It did, though.”

She pause briefly. “Yes, I suppose it did.”

With which, she switched on the dryer and made great play of angling her face to the earth’s imagined corners, and combing her hair with her fingers whilst blowing hot air through it. He retired to the shower room to relieve himself and wash, assuming that the conversation was over, but he was wrong. When they were both back in bed, she said, “We were amazed when she gained a place at Balliol. One of the many things my family didn’t see eye to eye about with Uncle Martin was education. He didn’t believe in a general education, so that he refused to allow his daughter to go to school.”

“The authorities allowed him to do that?”

“He complied with all the rules and regulations. He was no fool, Tom. Far from it.” She sighed. “I wonder if that was part of the reason Daddy found him so aggravating,” she admitted. “His attitude to life was so different to ours, yet he was in many ways so clever... I don’t think Daddy could understand it. Uncle Martin didn’t play by the same set of rules as he did. He didn’t think a general school education was good for the artistic temperament, so he taught her himself, bringing in private tutors to teach those areas where he was weak.”

“Such as science?”

“And music. He soon realised that he had something of a prodigy in Aunt Penelope, so he got in the best tutors to bring her on. He cooperated fully with the education people, so I don’t think he ever got criticised for not doing things properly. It worked, too, because she got a prestigious scholarship.”

He thought about this, although his next question – asked abruptly and with uncharacteristic vigour - wasn’t directly connected. “Do you think he abused her?”

She answered at once, which surprised him and made him wonder how many times she had asked herself the same question. “There was never any evidence of that,” she said firmly. But he thought that he also heard her father in those words, and they failed to persuade him that he was the only one in the room who wondered about what exactly had once gone on in that strange, dark house.

“But do you think he did?” he insisted, not unkindly.

This time the answer took more time to arrive. “Mummy and Daddy were desperately afraid that their relationship may not have been entirely on the natural side,” she admitted. She apparently took his lack of verbal response to this complex piece of rhetoric as a judgement, for she said in short order and in an approximation of agony, “But there was honestly never any proof.”

“Tasha...”

She was angry, although he couldn’t tell at precisely what, and she wouldn’t allow him to complete his contribution to the duologue. “What were we supposed to do? He was so odd, yet that’s no reason to go about making accusations like that, is it? God forbid we should go back to burning eccentric old ladies because we think they might be witches.”

“I’m not saying…”

“Daddy used to get so cross, yet Aunt Penelope never once complained, and then she became such an accomplished musician, we felt we couldn’t say anything.” He thought that she was genuinely distressed, or perhaps it was her parents’ distress that he heard.

“Your father implied that Martin wasn’t a particularly successful artist,” he said; he recalled Jean Vogt’s reaction when the subject of money had come up, and remained intrigued.

“Depends what you mean by ‘successful’, I suppose. I don’t think he sold much. A bit like Leo in that respect.”

“Big house, though. Was that inherited?”

“Yes.” He heard that same defensiveness in Tasha’s reply as he had in her mother’s. There was a family sore here, he surmised. He was wondering how he would find out more – if, indeed, it would be wise so to do – when she continued, “Uncle Martin’s wife, Nancy, was very wealthy. He didn’t have to work to earn a living, unlike our side of the family.”

Ah…

“Then, when she died, he was able to live in that grand house and do his art and suchlike without a care in the world. He set up some sort of trust fund for Penelope, so she was in the same position.”

Clearly, Emanuel and Jean Vogt hadn’t enjoyed being the poor relations.

His assumption that this was the end of the conversation was proved wrong after several moments of warm and restful silence between them. They were both lying on their backs, looking at a colour that Tasha assured Tom was ‘wheat germ’, when she said drowsily, “It was the year before Grandpa Jacob died that we first met Leo.

“And only at Christmas after that?”

“That’s right. But we still saw Simone grow up, in a series of snapshots. She was such a vivacious thing.”

“Was she pretty?”

Tasha answered with a display of disinterested judgement that Tom couldn’t help but find affected. “In a delicate way,” she allowed, making it sound condescending. He decided to withhold final judgement on the issue.

“Your mother said that Penelope had amazing hair.”

She sat up and turned to her phone. “I’d forgotten I had these,” she said, bringing up the photo folder and scrolling through the camera roll. She showed the results to Tom. “I took these the last time we were together. I’ve managed to lose a lot of the earlier ones, but I expect Mummy can find hers.”

They had been taken in a comfortable looking dining room decorated for Christmas. Around an oval table were six people, none of whom looked particularly taken by the joy of the season or the occasion. Emanuel and Jean Vogt, whilst not exactly huddled together, looked uncomfortable and bore smiles that showed considerable strain. Next to them was a tall, cadaverous man who Tom recognised even without a Samurai sword accessory; he wasn’t bothering to smile or show any sign of pleasure. On his left was a pale woman with extraordinarily long blonde hair and thin lips forming something that at least approximated to a smile, albeit an odd one, suggesting a degree of toleration rather than amusement; she was emaciated and looked tired, perhaps ill. A very tall, very hirsute and solemn man in a crumpled tweed suit, undeniably Leo Banneker, looked at the camera over his shoulder, his arm around the shoulders of a prepubescent girl who was twisted right round in her seat; she had large, almost luminous eyes, cropped, dark brown hair and a full mouth that she had inherited from her father. Her nose was her mother’s, or rather her grandfather’s. She was the only one in the picture wearing a paper hat.

“They’re both good looking,” he remarked, which they were, although in different ways. Penelope was classically beautiful, but Simone’s looks were from a different place. Somewhere Celtic perhaps, he thought. The same place as the pipe, and the sound that it made. Somewhere haunting, or perhaps haunted.

“See what I mean about Penelope?” asked Tasha.

“Yes,” he replied. Penelope’s beauty was refined, almost conventional, but her daughter eclipsed her, he thought; Simone’s was an ethereal pulchritude. “You and Simone kept in contact despite the family tensions?”

“We exchanged emails every so often.” She was defensive. “Simone wasn’t a great correspondent but I watched her grow up and felt some sympathy for her, considering what her father and grandfather were like.”

He took a final look at the phone before handing it back to her. Leo’s face, although partially obscured by hair, suggested a man who still couldn’t believe his luck. “Leo’s certainly an interesting looking character.”

She sighed. “To be honest, we found it hard to discern what Aunt Penelope saw in him. He was almost comical, in many ways.”

“How?”

“As you can see, he wasn’t very image conscious, for a start.” Which, as the photo attested, actually translated as, ‘he looked a fright’. “Every time we saw him, he looked like that. He had no sense of colour coordination, he was frightfully bedraggled, and Daddy reckoned he was hoarding soap in case of some future global catastrophe.”

“Presumably, it was his artistic credentials that attracted her.”

He had to wait a long time for a reply. “I suppose.”

“Did you see any of Leo’s art? Sculpture, wasn’t it?”

“He had a show once in Hereford Town Hall that we went to; that was in the early days. It wasn’t a great success; not well attended at all.”

“What did you think of his work?”

“Oh, well… I’m not really qualified.”

“But speaking as an ordinary punter,” he urged.

She thought about it. “I remember thinking it was terribly over-priced.” Perhaps she thought she had been unfair, because she added, “Some of it was quite interesting – there was a striking harlequin figure, I remember, done in gold and black. Dancing on an eye, I think…”

“What did Uncle Martin think?”

“I don’t think he was impressed.” There was a long, sleepy wait for her next words. “As far as I know, he didn’t go to the show, and then…”

Fearful that she was finally relinquishing herself to unconsciousness just when he felt that he was, at last, seeing some detail in the curiously indistinct portrait that Tasha and her parents had sketched of their relatives, he prompted loudly, “And then?”

“Oh…” Was she going to remain awake long enough to tell him? “His whole attitude made it clear that he didn’t think much of Leo Banneker’s work. He often said some horrible things about Leo when we saw them, really belittling him in front of everybody.”

Tom thought of the musical pipe for no reason that he could analyse. He, too, was unqualified in any sense to have a professional opinion, but he didn’t think anyone seeing the pipe would have anything other than a high opinion of the maker. Yet something still told him that Leo was connected with it. “What did Leo do when Martin mocked him?”

“It was odd, actually. He didn’t seem to mind. He agreed with every word. In fact, he almost egged him on, as if he wanted to be belittled.”

“Really?”

Her last words that night were the most intriguing of all. “Leo was clearly very much in love with Penelope, but I think he truly worshipped Uncle Martin.”

*******

Nete is contemptuous. “He makes me sick, my lord.”

“Well he might. I gave him such skill, such talent, such ability, as mortal men may only ever dream of…” The lord god Apollo would perhaps like to express sorrow, but to Leo’s ears there is too much seething anger to allow such an effete emotion air to breathe.

As ever, Nete is ready with easy orthodoxy. “And what is the dolt doing with it?”

“He sickens me, as he sickens you, as he must cause fair Penelope to weep in her rotting soul.”

“Rotting, Lord Apollo?”

“Oh yes. Rotting. For without completion of this task, she is doomed to putrefaction, just another tiny spark of mortality, gone forever into a cosmos that doesn’t care. And why should it? She remains nothing if those who claim to care, who have screamed their love but cannot be bothered to act, do nothing but cringe.”

“It is a terrible sin.”

Apollo’s words are nearly hissed. “It is vile, venial and villainous, but it is no more than the cowardice that I fear is within all men.” He speaks with what sounds to be absolute loathing.

The words, the opinion, the implication all leave Leo degraded and abulic as he lies on his bed.

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Fourteen

What to do about the pipe was a problem that had greatly troubled Tom during that weekend. He still hadn’t told either Tasha or her parents that he had taken it from the house, and this omission was starting to bother him greatly. He wouldn’t have told Emanuel and Jean without first telling Tasha, and he wanted to find out more about it before surrendering it. Several things about it bothered – or perhaps ‘intrigued’, or perhaps ‘irritated’ – him. For a start, he didn’t like the power it seemed to possess over his intellect. Then there was its source, for he thought it rather unlikely that Penelope would have sent it to her father; she was a musician, but not a musical instrument maker or, at least, she hadn’t been when she had so suddenly abandoned her father. Surely, it was far more likely that it had come from her husband, Leo. True, he wasn’t aware that Penelope’s husband had been experienced in the craft either, but he certainly worked with his hands. There was also the significance it had held for Martin Waldeyer; enough, possibly, to have led him to take his own life. His hypothesis about suicide as told to Beauchamp led him to conclude that its significance was as yet hidden from him, although clearly it had been of colossal, not to say mind shattering, connotation to its recipient.

Or possibly, it had been a coincidence. After all, no one had seen Martin Waldeyer for many weeks prior to his death; perhaps he had been severely depressed and had chosen that Saturday to die not because of the receipt of the pipe but because of a small event individually minor, but one of many such making a major psychiatric load. That was entirely possible and Tom might have been convinced by it, except for the insistent pull that the pipe continued to have upon him. It whispered lasciviously that it was not just an unexpected gift to an old man from an errant daughter; it was a thing of power and meaning.

What, though, to do?

He could only think to examine it. Accordingly (and somewhat foolishly, he felt) he played it as well as he could whilst recording it, using his phone. It was merely a selection of notes made only by opening and closing the perfectly worked holes along it, not even trying to generate anything that might be interpreted as a tune; he did not need to, for the notes were enough to leave him feeling deeply stirred, almost fretful.

Next, he photographed it, again using his phone, from every angle, and including pictures taken as close as he could get whilst still in focus. The last stage of his examination, he knew would be the most painful for he reasoned that, in order to find out how it had been made and from what, he would have to take it apart. He felt that this was the most important stage, although he couldn’t have said quite why. How, though? It was of a piece; it was not articulated in any way. It could not be dismantled, only unmade, and probably the act of unmaking would be irreversible; it would be completely entropic. He wondered, too, about the reaction of the Vogts; he suspected that Emanuel would not be best pleased to discover his interference. He agonised over all this, but the mystery would not let him be. Perhaps there had always been huge symbolism merely in the act of sending an ornate pipe to someone, something that scholarly research into the more obscure tomes of Celtic folklore might uncover, but he doubted it. This was peculiar to Martin Waldeyer and whoever had sent it; it lay in their pasts. Maybe taking it apart would add nothing to his understanding, but something told him otherwise, and it was all he could think to do.

But the thought of such an act distressed him for a long while.

When at work the following Monday, worn down by the indecision, he put all else from his mind and went in search of Ganesh Prasad, the laboratory manager, whom he found in his small, cluttered office. Ganesh looked up from a financial spreadsheet as he came in, a wary, forlorn look in his eyes, or perhaps behind them. “Can you do me a favour?” Tom asked.

Ganesh was used to strange requests, although this was more peculiar than most. Having heard him out he expressed curiosity as to why Tom would want to do such a thing to such a beautiful musical instrument and Tom could only reply, “I’m not sure it’s exactly what it seems to be.”

This gnomic explanation had made Ganesh look at him long and hard. “What does that mean?” he asked, not unreasonably.

“What do you think it's made of?”

The laboratory manager examined the pipe; he weighed it on the palm of his hand, and gently tried to bend it. “It’s not metal,” he said. “Could be plastic, I suppose.”

Tom explained the circumstances under which it had come into his possession. “I think it made a man kill himself.”

Ganesh frowned. “Don’t see how.”

Tom thought about telling him how unsettling he found the thing, but decided against it. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “I’d just be interested to know precisely what it’s made of.”

Ganesh had clearly thought Tom to be acting oddly, but eventually he agreed to do what Tom asked. Parting with the pipe, though, brought strange emotions to Tom, although he could not say exactly what these were; they were shades, unseen except in peripheral vision, merely slight swirls in the aether. But they were very potent, and rather worrying. How had he become so attached it? Or had it become attached to him? Seeing and speaking to Ganesh brought about the presentiment that this thing was somehow, and inexplicably, stranger than he had hitherto imagined.

*******

The rent is due and they are running low on milk and bread; Simone thinks that she will have to buy some more today, and she may as well stock up on other things such as butter, marmalade and Marmite, because her father, when he remembers to eat, likes it, although she does not. The freezer is well stocked with ready meals, and mince, and chicken, but some more pizzas would be useful, too. Before Simone goes to the village and while she is clearing away and washing up the lunch things, Leo goes to the room where the memento mori are displayed. It is far from the first time that he has been there (although he hasn’t been there often), and before it has always engendered within him feelings of great satisfaction; in the intricacy and accomplishment on display he sees a god-given talent that has only become apparent since he started on his act of apotheosis; in the fact that the instruments have played so well, with a quality that seems itself to be close to paradisiac, and in the knowledge that he is doing as Penelope commanded. This time, though, there is something else, and it is a disharmonious thing that chimes quietly within him. Like flashbacks to sacrificial slaughter during an act of remembrance, he experiences for the first time faint qualms about what he has done in the name of devotion.

*******

“Did you find anything?” asked Tom later that morning. Why, he wondered, was the atmosphere in the lab manager’s office so odd? Ganesh was usually an exemplar of serenity.

“Yes.”

That was all.

“What?”

“I think that this is heavy stuff, Tom.”

He shut the office door before joining Ganesh in sitting. “Where is it?”

“You said I should do what was necessary to discover what it’s made of…”

Tom nodded thoughtfully, thinking that the other sounded sad. He also thought that perhaps he knew why. Ganesh opened the desk drawer to his left and pulled out a stainless steel tray covered by a length of blue paper towel which he removed to reveal what he had done to the astonishing beauty of the pipe. Tom found himself buffeted by a peculiarly strong swell of emotions, chief amongst which was profound despair. It was inexplicable, yet quite real.

“It’s a bone,” said Ganesh. “A human radius, I think, although it’s been worked a lot to straighten its line and make it more uniform.” Using the band-saw in the mortuary, Ganesh had cut it into two along its length, revealing the empty marrow cavity.

“You’re sure?”

“Look for yourself.” Tom did and he could only agree. “There’s been some sort of complex process of electroplating…” Tom found that he couldn’t speak. He also found that he didn’t want to. He felt like a conspirator in wanton destruction, a despoiler because, thanks to him, one particular thing of beauty wasn’t destined to be a joy forever.

“And then that pattern was hand-engraved, I think. It’s quite astonishingly intricate.”

He now knew what this thing was, and he found that he was the poorer for it.

“Did you try to play it?” Ganesh asked this in a voice that was almost timid.

“Yes.” He wasn’t a Catholic, and had never until now felt the need for confession.

Ganesh nodded. He admitted in a hushed tone, “So did I.”

“What did you think?”

But this question was doomed to remain forever unanswered for Ganesh had more pragmatic concerns. “Where did you get it? The Human Tissue Authority will want to know.” The HTA ruled the little lab manager’s life every bit as much as any elected government did. While Tom pondered his answer, he added, “There isn’t a musical mass-murderer out there, is there?”

The joke wasn’t funny. “I don’t think so.”

“We have to inform the police.”

“Don’t worry. I will.”

*******

Inspector Beauchamp had never done the exact arithmetic, but he estimated that of all the occasions during his career that he had been in a superintendent’s office, a good eighty percent of them had been to receive some form of opprobrium; a ‘bollocking’, in the vernacular. His first foray into Superintendent Rekorde’s sanctum had been a stiff and relatively difficult welcome, the second a rather livelier discussion concerning ‘jumping the gun’, ‘wasting vanishing resources’, ‘upsetting racial minorities’ and ‘piglets’, although he strongly, but ultimately uselessly, contested this third point. And here he was once more, awaiting the Superintendent’s convenience, fairly sure that he was not to receive a paean, or anything positive at all.

His knock received a command to enter; the door might have been able to withstand fire for six hours, but it failed to stop the brusqueness in Superintendent Rekorde’s tone. He did as he was told, to discover his superior standing behind the desk; this he approached and wasn’t surprised when he received no suggestion that he might like to be seated. He didn’t actually know why he was about to be told off, just that it was going to happen. Such a situation was not new to him, for it was inevitable in the competitive hierarchy that was the police service.

Superintendent Rekorde was a small, seemingly nervous man, but his South Wales lilt gave resonance to a pleasing baritone. In order to overcome his anxious demeanour, he had cultivated his talents as a public speaker, and so had a polished, rhetorical style. With his hands clasped behind him, he said, “I have been privileged to serve this stunningly beautiful county for many years now, beginning as a uniformed constable and progressing slowly and steadily, by way of dedication and duty, to my present rank as station superintendent.”

Beauchamp said nothing, although there was much he could have voiced, not least in admiration for his superior’s oracular style.

“The people of Herefordshire are not perhaps as sophisticated as those who live in large conurbations, and they have different concerns, different interests, and perhaps a different way of viewing life. They have identical needs, though, amongst which is a need to be policed.

“When you asked to be transferred here, Inspector Beauchamp, I recall that you were effusive in your proclamations of love for the rural way of live; in fact, some of my colleagues felt that you were somewhat hyperbolic in your prose. You also, I remember, hastened to reassure us that you didn’t imagine that it would be a quiet life, or that you would act as though you were already in semi-retirement…” His hand was already raised in a gesture of silence before Beauchamp’s lips had parted. “And I think I can assure myself that you haven’t so conducted yourself. I wonder, though, did I fully appreciate, quite what you would bring in terms of novel policing techniques? And, had I done so, would I have been so keen to have you?”

Beauchamp knew better than to try to answer these questions.

“It is bad enough that you offended a highly regarded medical colleague in rashly initiating the serious incident protocol over a dead farm animal, but now it seems that you’ve taken to bullying junior officers.”

“Sir?” His outrage at this baseless assertion caused him to interrupt his superior’s rhetoric. “What on earth are talking about?”

Rekorde had been standing totally still as he spoke, but he now waved his hand at the surface of his desk; when it came to rest, there was a slight but unmistakable tremor about the fingertips. “I have received a complaint about you.”

“From whom?”

“Sergeant Brierley.”

“What?” His surprise and outrage, as if tightening the cord between his larynx and testes, caused his voice to ascend some octaves.

“I have it here.”

“What does he say I did?”

“He tells me that it concerns a lead he passed on to you about the Waldeyer case.”

“You mean the ‘psychic investigator’s’ son?”

Superintendent Rekorde perused a single sheet of A4 on the desk; from his position, Beauchamp could see that it was an official complaint form, although the details were beyond his eyes’ resolution. “Someone called Mervyn Smith…”

“That’s right. The ‘psychic investigator’s’ son.”

Rekorde regarded his junior with distaste. “I know nothing of that, Inspector, nor do I regard his father’s occupation as relevant.”

“But, sir…”

“Enough!” Rekorde did not shout, but the exclamation mark sounded and his Welsh vowels became noticeably aggressive. Beauchamp realized that he was irritated that his speech of reprobation had been interrupted. He leaned over the desk, perching on his knuckles and read the words on the paper. “I understand that you told Mr Smith he was a ‘moron’. Is that correct?”

“No, Sir! Not at all!”

“You are denying that you called him a ‘moron’?”

“Absolutely.”

“You didn’t use that word at all?”

Beauchamp had reason to pause. “Well…”

Rekorde pounced. “So you did...?”

“I called Brierley a moron… not Smith.”

“You said that your colleague, Sergeant Brierley, was a moron to a member of the public?”

Beauchamp hesitated. “Yes, I suppose I did…”

Rekorde eyed him sourly. “And that’s alright, is it?”

“Well… yes… No… It was in the heat of the moment, though.”

Rekorde used his right forefinger to move the sheet of paper to one side, revealing (to his subordinate’s astonishment a second complaint form. “Mr Smith also tells me that you accused him of wasting police time when he called to report his father missing, that you threatened him, and that you were verbally belligerent.” He looked up at Beauchamp, his face holding an expression of incredulous anger; it made him look slightly deranged, the inspector decided. But then, isn’t everyone around here?

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

“Really?” The superintendent’s surprise struck Beauchamp as a little theatrical but he remained staunchly impassive. “Are you denying that you accused him of wasting police time?”

“I pointed out to him that it was a serious offence to do so.”

Rekorde stared at him and repeated the next three words under his heavy, angry breathing, almost as if chewing them, trying them for flavour, unfortunately finding none. “And your tone?” he asked.

Beauchamp sought the words, a hesitation that proved costly, for Rekorde took it as confession. He sighed impatiently and, as if exhausted by the exchange, sat for the first time, leaning his head over the desk, his hands clasped in front of him. It was a pose that suggested despair, which Beauchamp found irritating. He was becoming tired of everyone around here behaving as if he were a problem. He tried to explain. “Sergeant Brierley seems to have it in for me, sir. I found him very obstructive at the scene of the Waldeyer death.”

“And yet he tried to assist the investigation by putting Mr Smith in contact with you regarding information that might be of relevance.”

“Brierley knows full well that Mortimer Smith is a crackpot who has a history of wasting our time. I half suspect that it was Brierley who put him onto me about the pig, knowing I would be unaware of what kind of man he is.”

“And his son? Does he have a record of wasting our time?”

“No…”

Rekorde breathed out loudly, as if he were feeling bronchial. He thought for a while about what to say. “Sit down, Beauchamp. Let me explain a few facts of life to you.” The invitation to sit surprised him, even though it was issued in a dangerously controlled voice. He complied. Rekorde said, “I know that Jeremiah Brierley is not an easy man, but he was not always so.”

“No, sir.”

“Jeremiah Brierley has a long and distinguished history of service in Herefordshire. He was born here, and has lived most of his life in this county. His family goes back hundreds of years; he is practically made out of the clay on which we stand. He is, fundamentally, a good man. I say this both as a senior officer in the constabulary, and as his friend, for he and I started in the county on exactly the same day. Although our careers have followed different trajectories, I know him to be an excellent and dedicated policeman. He has even been injured in the course of duty. I admit that this means that he is not always diplomatic, but I have never found that to be a great obstacle to effective policing.” All Beauchamp could hear for a few moments was an exasperated groan that rumbled around his gizzards. Unaware of any competition, his superior continued, “Did you know he has a commendation for bravery?”

Beauchamp did not.

“He received it eight years ago for singlehandedly rescuing a child who had been kidnapped

To say he was surprised would not have covered it: Beauchamp was astounded.

“The boy was thirteen years old.” Rekorde stared at Beauchamp as he recounted what had happened. “He was picked up on his way home from school one winter’s evening by a man in a car. The crossing warden nearby was astute enough to spot that the boy did not appear to be a willing passenger as the car drove off and he told the police. The registration number of the car was checked, but the car was stolen; it effectively vanished. It was Jeremiah Brierley who saved the day. It was his extensive local knowledge and network of informers that enabled him to track the man down. Before any back up arrived, he had entered the premises where the man had taken him; he knew that he dared not wait, you see. He disabled the man and rescued the youngster.”

Undoubtedly, this shone new light on Brierley, but Beauchamp still had to deal with him on a day to day basis. “That’s certainly worthy of a commendation,” he allowed.

Rekorde continued, “There is a further reason why I am particularly grateful to Jeremiah Brierley.”

“Sir?”

“On the man’s computer were photographs of boys at other schools; future targets, presumably. One of them was my son.”

“Ah…” Scales tinkled metaphorically around Beauchamp’s feet.

“I have, I admit, protected him to a certain extent, because of my gratitude, but I still know that he is a useful member of the force. I teamed him with you because his local experience and knowledge would be a useful adjunct to you.”

“It’s just that I’m not always sure that he’s working to support me, sir…”

“Brierley is strong-minded and not particularly diplomatic, I agree. Nonetheless, he is a potentially useful detective.”

“Yes, sir.” Beauchamp knew better than to extend the argument.

“Jeremiah did not have an easy upbringing. His family was large and poor and prone to what was called then ‘mental weakness’. He doesn’t speak much of it, but I’ve done a little digging. His father died of leukaemia when he was still a teenager. His grandfather was a raving lunatic, as far as I can make out. The health authorities did what they could, but in those days…” He trailed off. “Well, they were less understanding and they had fewer treatment options.” Beauchamp could not find it within himself to be surprised at this news.

Rekorde observed, “Perhaps you will view him in a slightly different light now.” Whilst Beauchamp was getting his head around all this new information, Rekorde abruptly changed the subject. “And as for your treatment of Mr Smith…”

Beauchamp was goaded into speech. “He tried to give me some cock and bull story about his father being dead and how it was possibly related to Martin Waldeyer’s…” He failed to finish, aware that he shouldn’t have begun.

Dropping an octave after another deep breath, Rekorde inquired, “How do you know the story was ‘cock and bull’? Have you investigated any possible connection?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you bothered finding out if Mr Smith’s father is missing, or perhaps dead?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“‘Not yet, sir.’ The fact of the matter is that all you have done is threaten him and slander one of your colleagues to a member of the public – one with a distinguished career of service, don’t forget – when all he was trying to do was act conscientiously in furtherance of a case.”

“Sir, it’s a trivial matter. He thought his father had been murdered and tried to link it to Martin Waldeyer’s death. The only evidence he had was that he hadn’t heard from him for a while and his father had predicted his own death. We all know how reliable Mortimer Smith’s predictions are.”

“How long had he been missing?” Beauchamp didn’t respond, because he couldn’t; he had been too fired by anger to enquire. The pit of his stomach was filled with a feeling of plunging resignation which preoccupied him rather. The sensation brought with it a flashback of an angry Pakistani doctor stalking out of a crime scene tent. Rekorde asked nastily, “You didn’t ask, did you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I see.”

Only now did it appear that he was giving himself permission to breathe and Beauchamp saw that, boy, did he go for it. He had the impression erupt in his head that Superintendent Rekorde not only was a police superintendent in reality, he played the part on a stage in his own mind. He portrayed the part in a performance for which he was the only critic; doubtless, he was a vicious critic, too. Rekorde issued a sneering and damning judgment. “You didn’t act in any way like a police officer, did you?”

He was being forced to concede that he hadn’t, but felt that it just wasn’t fair. “I don’t think Brierley’s acted like one ever since I arrived.”

Rekorde ignored him, as he knew he would. Beauchamp scented something sour in the air. He said instead, “It’s not good enough, Inspector.” Rekorde was right, he was just talking to the wrong man, but Beauchamp said nothing, merely bowing his head. “It so happens that when he called you, Mervyn Smith’s father had only been out of contact for thirty hours.”

“So I was right…” he began hopefully, but the superintendent’s face bore nothing that encouraged him to finish.

“Now, he has been missing for fifty-six hours, however.”

“Ah.”

Rekorde pursed his lips. “Are you entirely certain that Martin Waldeyer’s death wasn’t suspicious?”

Beauchamp had nailed his proverbials to the mast and didn’t dare try to take them down, lest he inflict even more damage upon himself. “Yes, sir.”

“And is there the slightest possibility of a connection with the disappearance of this man?”

“No.”

Rekorde failed to look totally convinced. “I hope not.” And if his tone was mild, the implication behind it was feral.

“Shall I look into the disappearance, sir?”

Rekorde shook his head vigorously. “Oh, no, I don’t think that would be a good idea. Not a good idea at all. Oh, no… Not at all…” If there wasn’t a visible tremor that ran through his flesh, his expression certainly intimated that his vitals were under assault from a fit of the collywobbles. “Proper investigations into the disappearance have already commenced. I’ve also spent a lot of time on the phone to Mr Smith, trying to calm him down, as it were. I suspect he would view it as… inappropriate… if you were to take part in those enquiries.”

“Very well, sir.”

“You, I think, would be better employed making one hundred and ten percent certain that your conclusions in the Waldeyer case are correct,”

“Very well, sir.” Beauchamp was disappointed not to be able to correct his own lapse, but he was sufficiently experienced and professional to understand.

“And you will compose a personal letter of apology to Sergeant Brierley.”

“Oh, sir!” Beauchamp heard his own petulance and was oddly ashamed.

The hand came up again; clearly Rekorde had not forgotten his training in traffic management. Having silenced Beauchamp, he explained, “You have been under my command for less than three months and, whilst I would never contemplate – indeed, would abhor – a results-based system of policing, your record in the county is less than auspicious. You have been at odds with your professional colleagues and upset those whom you are charged to defend and serve. Just because Mortimer Smith has some unusual beliefs does not mean that we should treat lightly the possibility that he may have come to harm. To compound the offence by disparaging Jeremiah Brierley is, to me, inexplicable. I know that the sergeant bears you no ill will, and has told me that he is at a loss to explain why you have taken against him so. It may be that you have been under stress, but I’m afraid that I cannot consider that as any sort of excuse; it may be that it was a misunderstanding on your part but, if such was the case, I must ask how it came about. I fully understand that working in a completely different force after so long must be difficult, but I would have hoped that your professional experience would be a source of support…

“It would not be unreasonable of me under these circumstances to begin an official disciplinary investigation, but that is not my way. Whatever the circumstances that have led to your behaviour, I believe that the course I have outlined is for the best. Mr Smith is satisfied that his concerns are now being taken seriously, and Sergeant Brierley has told me that a letter along the lines I have suggested will suffice for him to let bygones be bygones. If, however, you disagree, I am more than happy to take things down a more formal route, and you may put your case before a disciplinary tribunal. The decision is yours, Inspector.”

Beauchamp got up, in something of a daze. Rekorde said more mildly, “Give Brierley a chance, Inspector. He may surprise you.”

He left the office, this speech still resounding in his ears, feeling almost battered by it. The sheer size of it was bad enough, let alone its content. He had been given a choice that was no choice at all.

The police station restaurant looked over a busy dual carriageway to the magistrates’ court, not as a bashful lover might look to a beau, more as someone might view a sibling, with a sense of camaraderie. Beauchamp sat at the window and watched a sudden squall of rain drive pedestrians into awkward hunched poses and hurried, stiff-legged trots. He thought acidly that it was as though they’d soiled themselves. Chicken cacciatore stared at him morosely from behind small pools of oil, trying and failing entirely to entice him to ingest any more of it. His tea was cold and his raspberry yoghurt doomed to remain unconsummated.

On the far side of the restaurant, Brierley sat, tucking into his meal with gusto, with two colleagues – both uniformed sergeants, both more or less of the same age and morphology as him. There was much low-level chatter going on between them, punctuated by loud and, to Beauchamp’s ears, coarse laughter. Sometimes, Brierley seemed to find the subject so hilarious, he gave the impression that he was in danger of choking.

They’re discussing me.

It was paranoia to think like that: the problem was that paranoia was such a soft, enticing pillow on which to lay his weary head.

More laughter came across the restaurant.

Beauchamp told himself, this is stupid. I need to fit in here. I have to play by the rules. He’s not right in the head. Rekorde said as much… But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been a good police officer, and might be again…

They burst out laughing once more.

His phone rang, although neither he nor the microchip within it recognised the number.

“Inspector Beauchamp?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Tom Newman.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got some information regarding the death of Martin Waldeyer. I’m not sure quite how it fits in…”

That name again. He had somehow known that he hadn’t yet escaped the trailing tendrils of that strange dead man, that he was still in danger of tripping up. He asked with not a little trepidation, “What?”

“You remember that odd pipe? The one on his desk?”

“Yes.”

“It’s made from a bone… a human bone.”

The words formed such an awful concept – a monster made from parts that individually were innocent of the terrible Caliban-like thing that formed in his head – that his comprehension bounced off it at first. “Pardon?”

“The pipe is a human bone. A radius, I think.”

“How do you know that?” This was not an unreasonable question, given the circumstances of Tom’s statement.

It merited a not unreasonable answer and received one. “I’ve just asked someone in the lab to cut it in half.”

“Where is it now?”

“I’ve got it here, at work.”

Beauchamp looked across at the chortling Brierley who seemed to be having a wonderful time with his pals. He said to Tom, “I’ll meet you at the Martin Waldeyer house in two hours. Bring the pipe.”

“But…”

The conversation was over as far as Beauchamp was concerned. He got up and walked over to Brierley and his compadres. “Sergeant?”

Brierley looked up, slightly surprised by the tone. “Yes?”

“My office. Ten minutes.”

He walked away. Brierley’s attitude had been insolent but, looking at the Sergeant’s expression as he left him, Beauchamp felt that he had won a tiny victory in what he suspected might be a long, hard and bloody campaign.

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Fifteen

Barbara Mary Frances Pearse has never ceased to look more or less the same, in that she has always looked something like a baby. Now, at the age of sixty-one years and six months, her loss of hair and teeth only emphasises the impression of neonatalism resurgent, although she has never become entirely free of the guise. It is only an impression, though. Barbara Pearse knows far more of what goes on in her world than is, perhaps, altogether good for her… Or indeed for anyone else in it. She runs the small supermarket in the village, always dressed in a blue blouse and jeans, and she owns the house in which Leo and Simone live. She forms opinions about those who come into the shop, as well as those in the external world who do not see her (either as they pass the glass of the window, or in the portal that is the television that plays constantly beside the till). She does not consider herself judgemental, but she is. If she likes the customer, she will serve them easily and civilly; if she doesn’t, she will take the money in return for the items she sells, but she will do her best to make the customer’s experience less than joyful. Loyalty is important to Miss Barbara Pearse, for she sees it as a bastion against forces that she cannot identify but that she knows are all around.

She has judged Simone to be ‘nice’, and therefore to be protected, for Barbara Pearse is, in her deepest part, a conservator, which means that she is ready to destroy that which she considers to be wrong. She identifies with Simone, although she does not herself appreciate this fact; she was left to provide for her family when her mother lost her job because the Infirmary closed. On the Welsh borders, where the people don’t have a sense of nation, only place, the closure cut a catastrophic rent in the social fabric. The village never recovered; Barbara never recovered either, although this is another fact that she doesn’t appreciate. She had already lost her father to alcoholism (he did not die, although he almost killed his wife, and then ran away) and never knew him; she has an idealised concept of what a father should be and – partly through slight facial resemblance to the few photos she has of her father, and partly because of Leo’s striking, Biblical look (Barbara’s mother was a devout chapel-goer), she somehow identifies with Simone’s father, even though he has never come into the shop and they have never conversed.

On this day, she sees that Leo has come with Simone, which he has not done for many weeks. He looks to her even more troubled than she remembers, even more unkempt, almost untamed. He sits now on the seat beside the war memorial – a simple cross in beige sandstone adorned with names mostly from the Great War – and seems to be looking at nothing but the distance, although she thinks that perhaps he is contemplating a great deal more than that. Through the front window of Barbara’s shop, he looks to her to be a tableau of loss and bewilderment.

Simone packs the groceries that Barbara has put through the till. Leo does not move, even when the chill of the wind blows his wild, grey hair. Barbara says, “There was a man in here the other day asking after you.”

Simone stops packing in a way that Barbara can tell signals something far more intense than mere casual interest. She knows no details about Leo and Simone – not even their surname, and certainly not their concerns or crimes, their needs or their desires, other than that to be left alone by those who would interfere – but this has allowed her to fill a huge void with her own dreams and duties and what she thinks they are and what they want. She feels a bond with them that is woven with many strands and that is fearfully strong.

“Did he say who he was?”

Barbara hears the anxiety but she understands it. “No. Dressed all odd, he was. Like an athlete, only he didn’t have the body for it. Yellow, too! That stuff that clings so you can see the balls and other things you don’t want to.”

“Lycra,” says Simone in a horrified whisper.

“That’s the stuff! Why would people want to dress like that?”

Simone replies with something, but she could not have said what.

“At least I think it was you. He said he was after a family – a husband and wife with a young daughter. The description sounded like you and your dad, and I remember when you first came here, seeing your mum a few times… She never looked well, though… How is she? I haven’t seen her for ages.”

She notices that Simone seems to have to drag herself back to these questions. “She’s not at all well.”

“In bed, is she? It’s a long time since she came into the village.”

What she means is into the shop. Crowland has houses and her shop, but it no longer has a church that is in any way alive, and the pub has not opened its doors for over twenty years. It is not ugly, but it isn’t particularly picturesque; other than the Forest – which looms over it to the north – there are no natural features to attract a visitor.

Simone nods but her eyes are not on Barbara’s face and Barbara sees enough reality to spot this. She asks, “Is your father well?” She indicates the figure that they can see sitting outside the shop.

“Yes.” Barbara hears again the lie.

“That’s good.” Barbara nods, partly out of empathy, partly out of understanding, but there are several distinct kinds of understanding in her old head.

The young girl asks, “What did you say to the man?”

Barbara has cataracts, so that she has little more than grey fog in her right eye, while the colours of the left are washed and smudged; she has acute vision shot through with certainty, though, because she believes what she sees and sees what she knows she should believe. She looks out at the man she knows only as Simone’s father and as ‘Leo’. She says, “Nothing to worry you.”

“Thank you.” Barbara can hear that Simone speaks with genuine gratitude and is reinforced in her convictions.

As Simone hands over cash for the groceries and the rent, Barbara adds slyly, “I didn’t say anything to the police, either.”

“What?”

Satisfied with the reaction, she explains, “They were in this morning asking about a missing man. From the description, it was the one in yellow.” Before Simone can say anything in response, she adds in a kindly voice, “Don’t worry, dear. I’ll look after you.” When Simone only nods, still too shocked to speak, she asks, “Did he ever find you?”

Simone packs away the butter, the last of the things she has bought. Whilst doing so and with her head down, she says, “No.”

Nothing more is said until, as Simone leaves the shop, Barbara offers, “If any other strangers come enquiring after you, I’ll say the same.”

Simone turns, smiles and thanks her. There are tears in her eyes, Barbara thinks, although perhaps she has made that up because, really, her own sight is too bad to see much detail in the world around her. It’s a predicament she finds satisfactory.

Outside, in gusting wind, Leo sits on a bench that is in need of varnish. He watches Simone talk to the old woman he knows to be Barbara and he listens to the voices in his head. It is no longer merely a god and his muses talking about him – criticising, carping and censuring him, execrating, insulting and abusing him often, and suggesting that he should kill his daughter; now there is a babble, a hoard, a convocation chattering in his head so that it is difficult to think, or to breathe, or remain in control, although he knows he must, for Penelope’s sake. His face is impassive, but the tension within threatens to break him.

*******

In his office, Beauchamp was gratified by his sergeant’s reasonably punctual arrival, although this was alloyed by the distinct lack of motivation that hung about his subordinate, and by that intangible but ever present air of impertinence that was forever in the corner of Brierley’s eye when he was looking at him. “What’s up, Inspector?”

“There’s been a development in the Waldeyer death.”

Brierley showed a glimmer of interest, like an old, sluggish glow worm that is on the point of sleep. “Yes, sir?”

“The pipe…” He stopped. “You remember that, don’t you? It was on the desk.” Brierley did, and said so. How well he remembered it, he did not disclose. “It looks as though it might be of interest to us.”

“What do you mean? Was it murder after all?”

“No. Dr. Newman’s been in contact. He’s been examining it and come to some interesting conclusions about its origin.”

“What the fuck has that got to do with us?”

Beauchamp stared at his sergeant coldly, then remembered what Rekorde had said. Controlling his temper, he said simply but strongly, “If I say it’s of interest to us, Brierley, then I expect you to accept it without comment or argument.”

Brierley stared at him, surprised. He had rather enjoyed having a superior who didn’t want conflict. He calculated as best he could before saying slowly, “Okay.”

Beauchamp stared him down; he didn’t for one moment think that he had won the war, nor even a battle; it had barely been a skirmish, in fact. Brierley fought using guerrilla tactics and was not likely to be deterred quickly. He said, “Dr Newman thinks it’s made from a bone.” Brierley opened his mouth to speak but Beauchamp added, “A human bone.”

At first, all that came from the direction of Brierley’s tonsils was a faint belch. Then he conceded, “Maybe that’s different.”

“I hope you’ll agree that it’s something we can’t ignore.”

“No, sir. I would say that you’re right there.”

*******

“I need to sit down, Simone.”

By road, it is fully fifteen miles around the edge of the Forest between the house and the village; even on foot via the hidden shortcut it is over four. She has noticed that her father does not look well as they walk out of the village, across the river on the footbridge and up the path over the heath, but she has not said anything because she has learned that it is best to know that you can do something with the answer before you ask a question. His face is grey and, despite the raw cold of the early spring month, he is greasy with perspiration. She wonders if it is his heart, and nothing to do with his head; she has never once in all this time even thought that he had a heart in a physical sense, or any other parts come to think of it. She has been obsessed with his mind and what it contains, what it can do. “Of course.”

They are on the edge of the Forest and the crows are growing loud. There are large, mossy boulders scattered over open heath land right up to the sharp edge formed by the tree line; soon the road, such as it is, will bend sharply left, away from the woods, but the two of them will keep straight on into the dense, crow-sounding darkness. She leads him to a low boulder beside a brown-watered brook where he sits and, elbows on his knees, holds his head. She drops her shopping bags and sits beside him. Out here, in this place, she realises he looks more than ever like an unhonoured prophet, with all the desperate melancholy that being such a thing brings.

“Is it your heart? Are you in pain?”

He shakes his head, still looking down; his fingertips press into his head and face. “There are so many voices. They’re so loud.”

She has lived only fourteen years and, in that time, the fundamental relationships in her life – with her mother, her father and her grandfather – have been strained and fractured. A man she thought was trustworthy is now cast as evil and her mother is dead. Her doting father became a strange mannequin controlled by unseen forces, but she at least thought she still had a loving relationship with him; the events of last night, however, have undermined even that. She is at a loss to know whom she can trust; she is terribly afraid that she can trust no one.

But she recalls yet again, her mother’s dying admonition.

She puts her arm around his shoulders and holds him; the cloth of his old grey jacket is coarse and damp. “Are they saying that you should kill me?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. It is a hesitation that doesn’t give her confidence; the fears that are growing like poisonous weeds in her mind prick her again, digging deeper than ever. “Don’t worry.” He tries a smile and she wishes he hadn’t, because it flutters irregularly like a dying butterfly. “I won’t listen to them again.”

She squeezes his shoulders to signal her confidence in him; it is a lie of sorts but, told between those who love each other, it is a necessary one. They sit there for a while, in the bright, cold but fresh air, together and each alone. She is thinking, so now it’s certain. The man who came to the house was looking for us. Which means he must have come from Grandpa Martin… Did he tell anyone else? Is he just the first of many?

And the police have been asking questions.

Is that better or worse?

She has only to think for a moment.

It’s worse.

She wonders if she should tell her father. She wants to tell him, but cannot. It is a burden she must bear without help. There is nothing either of them can do to forestall events and the knowledge would only increase the strain upon him. She fears the consequences of that.

He starts to talk in a voice suggesting that to talk is good, that to talk relieves some sort of pressure, “I need to complete the task, you see. They’re so impatient. I’m sure that they would be quieted if I only do that.”

“What’s the problem, Daddy?” She knows that she shows great hubris when she says, “Is it the lyre? Perhaps I can help…”

“I’ve run out of… materials for the strings.”

“Materials? What are you using?”

“Gut,” he responds simply. So simply that the significance eludes her callow view of the world; her knowledge of the details of what he does is so nebulous. He says nothing more, and then she realises. The gasp that comes from her is too quick to be suppressed, but he doesn’t notice, or perhaps he doesn’t mind. He reacts only slowly, and then obliquely. He looks up and the dullness that has been in his brown eyes for so long is gone. It is a look she remembers from the early days, when the fires of certainty and creativity weren’t catabolic for him; she thinks of their hug that has already become an emotional oasis for her. “But listen, Simone!” It is as though something has abruptly switched within him. Now, he is jubilant. “I know what I shall do with your mother’s head, Simone!”

She doesn’t see the relevance, but so often does she miss the knight’s move that her father’s mind takes as it views the world he has made. “What?”

“It’s obvious. It must be the figurehead.”

“Of course.” She doesn’t understand, though.

“The focal point. I can’t transform her, Simone, for that would mean the destruction of her beauty; I can only embellish it, and then preserve it for all time.”

“How will you do that?” She sees the enthusiasm mutating him, so that perhaps the voices are fainter, the imperious tones of Apollo less commanding for him. She wants to encourage him; God, how she wants to encourage him.

“I’ll have to preserve the soft tissues, of course.” He glances across at her, almost shyly. “There’s nothing else I can do. They’ll decay once the temperature rises, if I don’t.”

He’s apologetic. “I understand.”

Uncertainly. “But I can do that with embalming fluid.”

“That’s a good idea.” She is trying to sound engaged, but fears she only appears patronising. It is a symptom of her forced maturity that she should think thus.

“It won’t alter the way she looks.”

“That’s wonderful, Daddy.”

“And then I shall emblazon her with gold. She will be as a goddess of beauty, Simone. Everyone will know about her loveliness from her face and her talents from the things I have made, and it will last.”

“It’s perfect,” she says as eagerly as she can manage. He turns as much as he can, so that he is facing her; she can see that the voices are forgotten and she is so pleased. She asks carefully, “But what about the strings for the lyre?”

She expects him to be struck down by the question as he is reminded of his failure, but it seems he has found a source of inspiration from somewhere within him. “I know the answer to that, too! Your mother’s hair, Simone. Her hair.”

“What about it?”

“I think I can use it for the strings of the lyre! I’ve been so stupid; I don’t need to use gut. I think I can braid her hair. I’m sure it’s possible.”

“I suppose so.”

Mummy’s hair? She says nothing because she is afraid that she knows nothing, at least about her father’s grand project, but this strikes her as stupid. How can you use hair to string a musical instrument? She thinks he must be wrong but she doesn’t want to spoil this epiphany of his. Anything that keeps the voices away is good, she calculates.

“She had such beautiful long hair, but she won’t mind if I cut it a little shorter, will she?”

“No. I’m sure she won’t.”

“It’s a good idea, isn’t it, Simone? Apollo will be pleased, don’t you think?”

How can she answer that? She has never been privileged to hear these voices, the ones that have somehow led him to become such an immaculate craftsman.

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Sixteen

Beauchamp’s new perspective on Sergeant Brierley led him to attempt to get closer to the man as they drove to meet Tom Newman. He still felt chastened by Rekorde’s dressing down, aware that he had perhaps misjudged Brierley and not behaved as properly as he should.

“The Super said your family have lived around here a long time.”

“Donkey’s years.”

“That must have proved useful in the job.”

“On occasion.” Brierley wasn’t about to make it easy.

On a whim, he asked, “So tell me about Martin Waldeyer and his family.”

Brierley was driving, but that didn’t stop him staring at his superior in the passenger seat for an alarmingly long time. He enquired, “What’s Dick been telling you?”

Beauchamp felt stretched between anxiety that they were going to die in a car crash and a completely unexpected feeling of elation. He didn’t know what he’d done, but clearly he’d done something. He was very careful as he explained, “I could tell you knew more than you were letting on when the body was discovered.”

Brierley thought about this. They were passing through Martin St. Nicholas when he replied. “I never liked him.”

“Who? Waldeyer?”

“He were a high and mighty sort. Thought he was immune from the law because he was rich.”

“What did he do?”

Brierley looked across at him again, oblivious of the road. “Like I said, it were rumoured he were ‘funny’. Too much interest in his daughter… And later his granddaughter.”

“But no proof.”

“Naw.” Brierley was disgusted.

“You investigated though?”

Brierley thought the question almost idiotic. “No,” he said. “It weren’t like that.” Beauchamp was completely confused. What was he talking about? Brierley explained tersely, “I wasn’t in their class, was I?” The context became slightly less opaque; Beauchamp digested the vista that had just opened before him and Brierley expounded. “My family come from Woolhope, but it might just as well be a different planet. What happened to Martin Waldeyer’s wife was a local legend, and the way he brought up his daughter was the talk of the village, but he had money, and no one asked too many questions. I was only about the place because I was helping out an old mate who had been hired by Waldeyer to do some tree clearance around the house, just for some extra cash, like. I was still a constable and the pay wasn’t going far enough. I got to know Penelope Waldeyer quite well…” He paused. “As well as most people around here got to know her.” he added.

There was something about the way he spoke that told Beauchamp that he was holding something back. It wasn’t long before he explained, “She wasn’t interested in me, though. She’d just met Leo Banneker…”

“You knew Leo Banneker?”

“Hardly.”

“What was he like?”

“Weird,” said Brierley at once, and Beauchamp kept his mouth closed at this total lack of insight. “Martin Waldeyer was odd enough with his arty-farty ways, but Banneker was something else. Never met anyone so up their own, so intent on being the next Picasso or something.”

“You didn’t hit off, I take it.”

“Not exactly. I hit him, though.” He was pleased with himself. “It got me the sack from that job, but I caught him one that made his head sing.”

The sigh spoke a great deal to Beauchamp. He reflected that Brierley must have been lucky not to get chucked off the force, too; it was, though, no surprise to learn of this piece of his sergeant’s past behaviour. “Why did you hit him?”

”I could see he was no better than me, although he thought he was. We had a lot more in common than he wanted to admit. He didn’t like it when I pointed that out to him.”

Beauchamp could see that Jeremiah Brierley might not take kindly to pretentiousness. “I see,” he murmured, wondering whether he had been wrong in thinking this bonding session was going to get anywhere useful.

Brierley said after a little while, “If this pipe is made from a human bone, whose is it?”

There was an unmistakable hint of salaciousness in the question that Beauchamp didn’t miss. It was, he thought, odd but since he considered Jeremiah Brierley to be peculiar in everything he did and said, that in itself could probably be regarded as normal.

“A very good question.”

Another pause, before Brierley said, “Wouldn’t surprise me if Banneker’s at the bottom of it.”

“Really?” Beauchamp replied eventually. “Maybe,” and his tone spoke of a man making mystical connections, of tumblers – perhaps theosophical – clicking into place, and of vistas previously hidden abruptly rising into view.

As they arrived at the house, Brierley said, “You mark my words.”

They rang the bell and Tom Newman, who looked almost washed away because he had had to drive nearly seventy miles to get there and was tired, opened the door quickly afterwards and led them at once into the study. “On the desk,” he said. He let them enter the room, remaining by the door. He had laid the two halves of the pipe back in the packaging and they approached it – Beauchamp leading, Brierley behind but with oddly hungry eyes that only saw that peculiar musical instrument. Having arrived at the desk, and with the lead very clearly being taken by Beauchamp, they stood back a little, staring at the pipe from a variety of angles. This took a fairly long time, in which Tom mused upon what was going on, deciding eventually that he was watching ‘detecting’. He thought that he could see a slight change had happened in the relationship of the two men, and wondered about it.

Beauchamp looked up. “Tell me what exactly what you’ve done with it.”

So Tom did.

At the end of this explanation, Beauchamp picked up one of the halves, Brierley the other. The inspector asked dubiously, “You are sure about this, aren’t you?”

Tom nodded. “Definitely.” When the audience reaction was muted, he enlarged upon this brief explanation. “It’s the general shape of a radius, one of the two long bones in the forearm. It’s been carefully worked, though. You can see from the inner surface – the marrow cavity – that it’s been highly polished. The normal radius is slightly curved, as this is, and I think that some of the external cortical bone has been shaved, or possibly abraded, from the lower end so that its exterior is a little more uniform than it would naturally have been. Then, I assume that it’s been electroplated in some way, although that’s not really my field.”

Beauchamp was trying to like this fair-haired, slightly scrawny young man, but was finding it difficult. He demanded, “How do you know it’s human, though?”

“For one thing, I’ve seen a fair few in my time. For another, the human radius is unique; no other animal has a bone quite like it.”

“What do you think, Sergeant?”

Brierley was holding his half of the pipe almost possessively. He replied, “He’s the expert…”

“Couldn’t it be an ape’s? Surely, their bones are similar to ours?”

Tom shrugged. “I think it’s far more likely to be human.”

“Why?”

“A human’s would be a great deal easier to get hold of.”

This response disconcerted Beauchamp. He announced, “We need DNA analysis,” which, he knew, had become the magic bullet, the superhero, the omnipotent and omniscient god of modern police work. He was, though, now faced with another tricky decision. He knew that it would take some days to complete such a test, and that might be time enough for a murderer to escape. If, though, he were to rush into action only to discover that Newman was talking out of his backside, that this was an animal bone (surely not a porcine one, please), Richard Rekorde would kill him, probably by oratory. “Arrange it, will you, Brierley?” The sergeant looked at him, his expression suggesting he might quite like to argue, but Beauchamp’s newfound authority telling him to acquiesce. Beauchamp continued, “Let’s just ask ourselves a few other questions in the meantime.” Good, he decided as he said this, I sound considered and in control; quite like the old days. “I’d quite like to know who sent it and why, whichever species donated it.”

He turned to the box and its wrapping; it was featureless, as was the tissue paper. The address label was hand written. “Neat, level writing. Black ink,” he said, painfully conscious that he sounded like Sherlock Holmes, or more likely John Watson. “How many first class stamps is that? Eight?” He thought about this, then concluded, “Whoever sent it wasn’t sure of how much it would cost to post, but was keen to ensure it got here.”

“In the old days when people licked stamps, we could have got DNA off those,” said the sergeant sadly.

“The postmark’s smudged. Is that Worcester? Or Gloucester?”

“It could be Cirencester.”

“There isn’t a sorting centre at Cirencester,” pointed out Tom.

“How do you know?” For some reason, Brierley was outraged.

When Tom shrugged, Beauchamp told him, and not without rancour, “He’s one of those people who ‘just knows things’.”

“Is that all we’ve got?” demanded Brierley.

“For the moment. We’ll have to get all this to the lab.”

“There is something else,” Tom offered. The two policemen were on one side of the desk, Tom was on the other, standing in front of the large, geographic bloodstain. He found himself at once the subject of concentrated scrutiny.

“Go on.” Beauchamp’s suggestion was pitched in a dangerous tone.

Tom produced the card from his pocket and gave it to them. “This was in the box with the pipe.”

Brierley took it as the inspector demanded, “Why haven’t you told me this before?” He sounded as if Tom had cheated, as if he had lied in a game of Cluedo about Professor Plum’s use of the lead pipe.

“Why should I have done?” As with most reasonable questions, it could not be answered.

Brierley read it out loud. “With no I and no other, who hears the sound?” He had put no feeling into the reading and his accent hadn’t helped; his recitation died away at the end in a mystified voice.

“It’s identical handwriting and ink to the address label.” Beauchamp took it and turned it over to reveal the blank side. “The question is, ‘who wrote it?’”

“Leo Banneker, I would suggest.” Tom’s tone was so tentative, it might have betokened shame.

“What makes you think that?” Beauchamp could not desist from voicing this demand with some irritation. “Surely, if we’re going to identify anyone at this stage as the sender, it’s far more likely to be Penelope Banneker. She’s the musician.”

“She’s a musician, not a musical instrument maker,” Tom pointed out.

Brierley had read Beauchamp’s report on Martin Waldeyer’s case, but only in a somewhat cursory manner; it was the manner he adopted when reading all official documents. He pointed out uncertainly, “Leo Banneker wasn’t a musician either.”

“No, he was a sculptor, and so he was used to using his hands and a wide variety of materials to make things.”

“Was he known to use people’s bones?” Beauchamp was scathing.

“Not that I know of,” admitted Tom.

Beauchamp snorted. Brierley was preoccupied by his half of the pipe, looking at it minutely. “There’s a lot of skill gone into making this,” he mused.

Beauchamp ignored him. Indicating the card with its cryptic verse, he asked, “What’s the significance of this?”

“This is Japanese.” Beauchamp and his sergeant looked anew at the card, but it was clearly not in Japanese calligraphy and accordingly they were perplexed.

“No, it’s not,” said Brierley

Tom explained, “It’s taken from a Japanese death poem that was written by Zoso Royo in the thirteenth century.”

“Do you know every fucking thing?” asked Beauchamp. The answer had incensed him, so that his facial colour deepened and changed as Tom spoke, almost as if he had chameleon genes somewhere about his chromosomes.

“In the age of the internet, anyone can be an expert.”

Brierley asked for both of them, “What’s a Japanese death poem?”

“A Jisei. A poem written at the very moment of death, when for some there is a moment of lucidity like no other. The Zen monks considered them great art.”

“Was Banneker a Zen monk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Was Waldeyer?”

Tom was unable to say for certain, but expressed doubt.

Beauchamp actually harrumphed before enquiring caustically, “Then what on God’s good earth leads you to think that it’s significant?”

To Tom it was obvious. “Martin Waldeyer had an interest in Japanese art and culture, as well as in death.” He got up, went to the bookshelves and searched along them for a few moments. During the course of this, he pulled out two books that had both obviously been often handled. He showed them to the police officers; one was an inch think and entitled Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death; the other was thinner and called Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die (Death stories of Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, and Zen masters). He said, “Martin Waldeyer would have known what Leo Banneker was saying to him.”

“Which is?”

“‘Your daughter has died and I have done this with her’.” He held up the bone that had been turned into a pipe.

“Turned her into a musical instrument?” Beauchamp’s incredulity stretched his vocal cords.

Tom replied slowly, as if explaining to a child. “Penelope Banneker was a musician. It makes a kind of sense to me.”

They all considered the implications of this. Beauchamp didn’t want to believe it, but couldn’t stop himself from being attracted by the possibility. Brierley enquired, “Why couldn’t it be the granddaughter’s?”

At once, Tom replied, “I don’t think she was a musician. Certainly not a professional one like her mother.”

Beauchamp had been looking for flaws. “How did he know it was a bone, let alone a human one?”

Tom went to the display case beside the desk and said, “He had something to compare it with,” he said simply, indicating the disassembled human skeleton within it. There was a short silence.

Abruptly, as if he had been wandering around a dark, dank cave and only just seen a chink of light, Brierley asked hesitantly, “Just one pipe?”

The question made Tom think. “You’re right,” he said after a pause to think through the implications of the question. “Why stop at one? There are over two hundred human bones he could use.”

*******

Simone watches her father set off through the garden, then out of the gate at the end to enter Crowland Forest. Her love – always strong – now hurts her; she does not know that it has changed from being a thing of beauty to a bone-deep canker, a hot abscess that threatens to consume her. Her intense anxiety of the last few hours concerning the state of his mind, the apparent disintegration, the swelling chorus of voices in his head, is now gone, and the relief that he has found purpose again is all the greater. Yet she is all too aware that there will soon be no more time. Grandpa Martin’s agents have come close to finding them, and the interest of the police has been awakened. Barbara Pearse says that she did not help them, and Simone believes this, but others will have seen her at some stage in her visits to the village and, should they be questioned, they will feel no allegiance to her, or her father, or his great project.

This unwelcome interest must be connected with her father’s gift to Grandpa Martin – an inexplicable act that has weighted the probabilities towards disaster. Why do his muses want him to do such a thing? Because they believe he deserves recognition? Or perhaps they know how nasty her grandfather was to him, and think that receipt of such a thing will change his mind. She doesn’t want to believe (but can’t help doing so) that the motive was not intended to be beneficial to their interests, that there was something perversely impious about the act.

How might Grandpa Martin have reacted? Not well, she thinks, but of course she can’t be sure. Presumably, there is a chance that he will understand Daddy’s intentions, see the almost magical skill behind such an amazing deed. It would have been a shock, though. Her father has not been able to recall any details of the sending; he may have put in a note, but possibly not. He doesn’t think that he had included any clues as to their location, but his amnesia precludes certainty. He does not care; it is done, not to be undone.

Her grandfather scared her, even as he amazed her, entranced her, sometimes entertained her, occasionally appalled her. She knew that there were tensions between him and her father and, even now, she doesn’t fully comprehend all of the reasons, but she thinks that something in the way Grandpa Martin looked at her mother played its part. No words were spoken, but even a girl in her earliest adolescence doesn’t always need verbal clues. Simone never fully understood why they had to leave the house, but she knew that it was connected to that final cataclysmic argument – the one that had followed a long period of tension which rumbled around like a distant thunderstorm – that had come to a tempestuous climax the night that Grandpa Martin had knocked gently on her bedroom door, and not for the first time.

It is all blotted out.

She hopes desperately that her father will succeed, but the closer he comes to his goal, and the longer the voices endure, the greater the potential cost to him of failure. She does not understand all that has gone on, but she knows enough to be very afraid that the cost of failure will be disastrous for him. She is not even sure that there will not be a serious penalty for success. He continues because he has to, because the road that he travels is all that matters; once he reaches his goal, she fears that there will only be an abyss.

Her world has always been her family and it is now contracting around her. She wants to think that, like her father, all there is to do is concentrate on immortalising her mother, but she feels so alone and – a novel emotion – increasingly afraid of him. She cannot think of anyone who can help her.

*******

Beauchamp’s decision to search the house did not meet with Sergeant Brierley’s approval.

“What for?” he demanded.

“We might find examples of Leo Banneker’s handwriting to compare.”

“I’ve looked around already,” he pointed out.

Beauchamp grimaced. “Not for pieces of writing.”

Brierley’s face told of unvoiced rejoinders, but he acquiesced.

Of the seven bedrooms, four had just been used for storage of junk, of canvases that no one was keen to examine too closely, of old and tatty furniture, and of books – hundreds of books of a multitude of sizes, shapes, ages and subject types. The majority were fiction, some were reference, none, at least as far as Tom could see, were about art. At the western end of the house, a fifth bedroom had been turned into a multi-media studio, replete with a pottery wheel and kiln, a butler sink with ceramic draining board, an island workbench that was extensively covered in dried paint, plaster, and a variety of clear substances in jam jars that Tom took to include varnish and glue. There were stacks of pristine canvases behind an empty, skeletal easel in one corner; in another was a half-completed oil painting that leaned against a battered filing cabinet. It looked to Tom to be technically accomplished although hugely disgusting, for the sketch depicted a naked woman in a coffin shaped box; her breasts were being licked and stroked by a tongue that emerged from between her legs, but it was difficult to be sure if her expression was one of agony or something more lascivious. Beauchamp effected not to have seen it and then steered his sergeant away from it. Connecting to this room was a small, austere cubicle that had probably once been a dressing room, more lately a bedroom, albeit one that was unadorned and stark, without natural light.

The sixth had more ornamentation than the room off the studio and they recognised a woman’s touch in the pastel hues of the bedclothes and matching curtains; the furniture in the room – a dressing table, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers – didn’t match, though. It was a dust-filled room that had been furnished uncaringly, perhaps reluctantly, and certainly sparsely. It was here and here only that they saw what Tom assumed to be examples of Leo Banneker’s art; it gave him the impression that it was confined here, as if quarantined. Sculptures adorned most of nearly every available surface – the windowsill, the top of the wardrobe and chest of drawers, all but a small area on the dressing table – as well as much of the floor. It was an eclectic collection, ranging from the very small (a tiny mouse that sat upon one of the bedside cabinets made out of the electroplated parts of a watch, held together with soldered wire) to some that were over three feet high, including one that Tom recognised from Tasha’s description - a striking bronze and jet harlequin who danced upon a giant, silver eyeball.

Brierley took time to examine some of them. “Can’t see that any of these are made with bones,” he remarked pointedly, but Tom thought that some of the engraving, and not a little of the thought behind the artefacts had some similarity with the pipe, although even he could see that the techniques seemed crude. He thought that Beauchamp perhaps shared this opinion, because his expression when Brierley made his comment wasn’t one of total agreement.

They found confirmation (if not absolute proof) of Tom’s theory in the seventh bedroom. This room had the most personality imprinted on it; that of a girl growing out of childhood, but the imprint had faded, and had clearly never been bright, or intricate; it had been an attempt at a normal adolescence, perhaps even a pastiche of one. The duvet was covered in Lewis Carroll scenes and characters, the curtain design included fairies. On the bookshelves were children’s books, but all of them were old both materially and spiritually; a few cheap cosmetics were scattered in front of the dressing table mirror. There were a few more examples of Leo Banneker’s work, including a cat, similar in motif to the mouse, sitting on the windowsill; it was made from the parts of clock, Tom guessed. It was golden, except for the eyes, which were emerald. No clothes resided in the small wardrobe, but on the high shelf there was a shoe box in which were old birthday and Christmas cards. All of them were to Simone, none of them were from Martin Waldeyer, some of them were from her parents, written partly by Penelope, and partly by Leo in the same hand that had written the card with the pipe made from a human’s bone.

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Seventeen

“Where did you disappear to? I called the department and Felicity said you’d had to go early because the police wanted to talk to you.”

Felicity was Tom’s secretary. “Yes… It was about Uncle Martin.”

They were eating pizza in the living room; at least, she was until this announcement. “Uncle Martin?” Another nod. “Why you?”

He wasn’t sure how she would take the news of his appropriation of the pipe, but he feared that she would be indignant, allowing out the paternal part of her phenotype to maul him. He explained that he had taken the pipe and done a little detective work on the computer, then, seeing that she was growing restive and disturbingly leonine in demeanour, he rushed through what he had done to the pipe in order to uncover its nature.

As he had hoped, the news of its exact origin, pushed all other thoughts regarding the ethics of his behaviour into a tiny space at the back of her mind. The pizza was by now disregarded and unlamented between them; Tom’s eyes told him now only that it was a greasy mess. “Human?” she said in a voice that was partly incredulous, partly frightened.

“I think so.”

“And Leo sent it to Martin?”

“It’s his writing on the card.”

Tasha had her father’s nose, but her mother’s high cheek bones and piercing eyes. She pursed her lips in a way that Tom had come to recognise as characteristic. “I can’t believe this.” What could he say? What could he do? It was a matter of faith – in his experience and ability as a pathologist, and in his deductive abilities; he couldn’t blame her if she preferred to think otherwise of Leo Banneker. “That’s pretty tenuous,” she continued after more thought.

Tom had been quite proud of his reasoning, and was a trifle upset by this. “How else do you explain a human radius being turned into an ornate pipe? Who else might have done it? What other reason would Martin Waldeyer have had for committing suicide at the sight of it?”

But Tasha, having first trained as a nurse, had then taken a degree in law; her legal training had little time for Tom’s instinct. “We don’t know that the arrival of the pipe precipitated his death,” she pointed out. “As for the bone…” But she didn’t have the courage to continue, because to do so would be call his professional expertise into doubt; her inference hung there between them, though. To wave it away, she said, “Presumably the police are analysing it…”

“Of course,” he said, somewhat huffily.

Neither of them felt like continuing the meal. Clearing it up was easy, after which she laid her hand upon his arm and said softly, “I’m sorry, Tom. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He forced a smile. “Good.”

“If you’re right, though, the implications are shocking. I can’t get my head around them.”

He softened. To him, it was all horrible, but not personal; he was an observer, not a participant. That was his training. “No,” he said huskily.

They kissed. She said then, almost as an afterthought, “You should have told me.”

Her voice was too soft for him to read emotion in it, but he didn’t need to. “I know,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”

They kissed again.

*******

Leo sits at what was once an operating table, his body forming right angles so that his back and head, upper arms and lower legs are perfectly upright, his forearms and thighs similarly horizontal. It looks uncomfortable, but it isn’t to Leo, who has no sentience at that moment. The voices, recently quiet, are sounding again, a rising clamour in which he can discern Apollo and his muses discussing his failures all too easily. It is as though a sweating, jostling, unruly legion, an orgy or perhaps a convocation of Strife’s many children, is assembling in his head.

“Can he get any more pathetic?” enquires Hypate’s high-pitched, slightly nasal voice.

“Her father was right,” opines the lord god Apollo. “He is just a charlatan. A trickster with no intellect and no skills.”

“An idiot,” she agrees, ever enthusiastic. “His mother said as much.”

“A cretin,” chimes in Mese.

“Just a useless moron. He watched his wife die for nothing. She had merit, and he will fail to celebrate it. She will be forgotten, due to his wretched incompetence.”

Before him, between his forearms, his wife’s head is perched, eyes and mouth half open as if in slight surprise; the expression, although quite serene, should be shocking but, in Leo’s eyes, it is only devastating. It has been out of the freezer for fifty minutes and the ice crystals (some the size of sugar grains, some just forming a glistering, nacreous frost) that obscured the detail have left. The ravages of the freezing process are revealed; her once soft smooth skin is pallid due to the lack of life, and it is now marked by livid, reticulate streaks and looks puffy; the eyelids and lips are swollen. Her brilliantly blue eyes are clouded, the look of a long dead fish; the tongue is blackened and leathern. She is a caricature of what she was.

The hair, once so beautiful to him, is the worst. She died with it tied in a tight bun; although yet to be completely unthawed, he can already see that it is has become brittle. As he now realises, and as Apollo delights in telling him, braiding it into even a single strand will be beyond him. There is no space in his head to accommodate anything other than the sneering voices, the awful sight before him, and the thought of the consequences of yet another error. The crows are raucous in the woods around the hospital whilst, in the cold air of the old operating theatre, silverfish dart mindlessly across the dusty stone of the floor and unseen spiders spin their delicate webs in small corners; all this means nothing to this gangling, unkempt man who has so rarely realised that he surrendered long ago to madness, and that he is paying a ruinously high price for the abdication.

Yet in this matter he feels he has no choice; his act of taking Penelope’s head out of the freezer is irrevocable, a change of state as complete her death. He must move on, think about the lyre problem later. He has always before been able to translate her essence into pure, wonderful music; at this moment his task is to commemorate her beauty, and to do that he must preserve and emphasise her features; he must work on soft tissues in order to enhance them, and this is something he has never done before. Not even as an embryo sculptor, before he was fully formed, did he have experience of working with flesh. Unless he is to lose everything, he must learn how to do so quickly. Yet again, there is only one chance.

He studied the crafts of tissue preservation at the start of his great project, intuitive that it would at some point be needed; he has jury-rigged some equipment and made his own embalming fluid, but he is acutely aware that this task must not be undertaken without revision. There is no hurry, though – to do so would be potentially catastrophic, inviting disaster and disdain - for he must allow the blood to drain from it first, clearing the blood vessels to allow the embalming fluid to suffuse the tissues. He places her head in a deep tray formed of stainless steel, looking on through slitted eyes lest he catch a reflection, no matter how suffused, from its scratched surface, and this he puts in a refrigerator located beneath a bench upon which is a steriliser. In the anaesthetic anteroom, he collects his book on embalming as he leaves the hospital, trying to find some solace in what seems to him to be a darkening world. As he switches off the lights, he hears in his head a single whisper that has the slightest echo.

“Talentless oaf.”

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Eighteen

Four days later, Emanuel Vogt and Tom Newman arrived back at Martin Waldeyer’s house in Herefordshire in a Porsche Cayenne. If Tom was exhausted by Tasha’s driving style, her father’s left him feeling battered and he could see either nature or nurture (or probably both) had played a part in her learning. Being in a car that gave him not only engine power, but also a superior driving position, and a feeling of complete isolation from other road users, as well as being possessed of a naturally competitive temperament, Emanuel Vogt treated each car he came across as a competitor to be beaten – and beat them he always did. Emanuel had picked Tom up from his house in Cirencester at ten in the morning and they arrived at their destination in a little over an hour. Emanuel hadn’t engaged much in conversation on the journey, but his expression spoke of a man who was not looking forward to the next few hours.

As no will had been deposited with a solicitor, their mission was to search the house for one, and Emanuel had decreed, in view of the salacious nature of some of the decoration and the likelihood of finding yet more shocking things hidden about the place, that it was a man’s job. When he stepped into the cold, damp hall and saw the exhibit of a man’s face eaten away by disease, Emanuel snorted with disgust. “I always thought the man was strange, but he was clearly completely loopy. I said that this is no place to bring up children.”

Tasha had told her parents of Tom’s news about the strange musical instrument a few days before, and Emanuel had at first been incandescent at the liberties he felt Natasha’s boyfriend had taken. “What the bloody hell does that boy think he’s doing?”

The radio waves rang with his indignation. Tasha tried to calm him as she sat in her office at lunchtime. “He was trying to help, Daddy. He was only doing his best.”

“Best for him, you mean. Hardly the best for the family.”

There were times she thought that her father sounded like a Mafia don. She pointed out quietly, her voice full of meaning, “If he’s right, I don’t think it’s a matter that can ‘brushed over’.”

“No…” There was an uneasy mix of irritation, realisation and resignation. “He should have told us what he was doing, though, before involving the police,” he decided, but his ire had abated and this was just an afterthought, perhaps an aftershock.

“I don’t suppose he knew what he’d find until he found it,” she said, which was both conveniently true and a truism. “And then he was duty bound to involve the authorities.”

Emanuel Vogt had merely breathed heavily down his extended nasal passages.

They started their search in the study and it was tedious, as they had both known it would be and, because Tom had become not a little obsessed with the strange thing that was Leo Banneker and his family, he used the opportunity to find out more about them.

*******

“What have you got for me, Inspector?”

If attending on the superintendent in his office was generally a ‘bad thing’ in the life of a police officer, having one attend on you in your office was indubitably a ‘very bad thing’. When they swept into your office on a Saturday morning without knocking, looking angry and demanding an instant update, it was generally a ‘fucking bad thing’. Brierley and Beauchamp stood at once, and a pencil fell to the floor. “Sir?”

“The bone.” Rekorde had not been happy when Beauchamp had related the news of the pipe and Tom Newman’s theory. “You should have the results back by now.”

The result of DNA analysis had come in the evening before and the put-upon inspector had been dreading this moment. “It’s a human bone, sir. The radial bone from the forearm, probably the right.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s cuss which side it’s from. Whose radial bone is it?”

“The DNA analysis shows a match with the hair I took from the hairbrush in what we assume to be Penelope Banneker’s bedroom but not from a lipstick found in Simone Banneker’s room.”

Rekorde sat down heavily in the chair that Jeremiah Brierley had vacated upon his entrance. “Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!” he said. “So, we are potentially dealing with murder; at the very least offences under the Human Tissue Act.”

Sergeant Brierley said quietly, “Not necessarily.”

“Eh?” Rekorde looked up at him.

“Perhaps she’s not dead. He might have just cut one of her arms off.”

Beauchamp quite enjoyed Rekorde’s reaction. He was plainly horrified, although whether it was because of the concept, or Brierley’s lurid imagination, he could not say. There was a moment of quiet reflection, and then Rekorde said faintly, “Yes, I suppose so…”

“In any case,” put in Beauchamp, “we still have a crime.”

“Yes… exactly.” The superintendent visibly recollected himself. “We have a crime of some sort.” He avoided Brierley’s beatific expression, continuing to Beauchamp, “What have you done in regard to finding the criminal, Inspector?”

Beauchamp had foreseen this potential trap and had made the decision soon after the bone had turned up to begin making enquiries. He had had in his head a rosy scenario in which he would now be able to inform Rekorde that he was close upon making an arrest. “All the usual, sir. Mobile phone records, financial transactions, supermarket customer databases, applications for benefits…”

“And?”

“Nothing. They’ve dropped off the planet.”

Rekorde made no secret that he thought this was more a case of Beauchamp’s incompetence than Leo Banneker’s Macavity-like tendencies. “Rubbish! You just haven’t looked hard enough or well enough, Inspector. What about known associates?”

“There are none.”

“None? What about family?”

“There’s no record of who his father was. He was born in an asylum…”

“I think you mean ‘mental hospital’, Inspector,” reproved the superintendent.

Beauchamp grimaced and, thinking dark thoughts, continued, “… But he was brought up by his aunt, a university librarian; Amelia Banneker by name. Within a year of her son’s forced removal from her side, Leo’s mother was dead, hanging herself from a door handle, according to what I’ve been able to find out.”

“What about the natural father?”

“Unknown.” When Rekorde contented himself with nothing more than a grunt, Beauchamp continued, “At the time Amelia Banneker lived with her husband, Ralph, in Oswestry. We can’t be certain what kind of upbringing he had, but we have found out that Amelia Banneker divorced Ralph when Leo was seven, citing ‘cruelty’.”

“What happened to her?”

“She moved to the south-east when Leo left home – we don’t know where he lived, though. She was diagnosed with severe dementia two years ago, leaving her pretty much totally dependent on care; she’s in no condition to provide succour to anyone.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“She still lives in South London. The local boys have been to the home. She rarely gets visitors and certainly no one answering her son’s or granddaughter’s descriptions has called recently.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“None.”

“Friends?”

“He was always a loner, apparently. No special friends either at school or university. Everyone we’ve talked to says that he hasn’t been in contact.”

“And you believe them?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Rekorde stared at him, sniffing the air for the scent of impertinence, smelling only sincerity; he had run out of suggestions and didn’t like it. He had the privilege of rank, though. “Nobody disappears completely, Inspector,” he announced loftily, as if reciting a natural law from a particularly high and ornate pulpit. “That man has left a trace somewhere and I expect you to find it. Understand?”

They understood far more than his assertion but said only, “Yes, sir.”

“You are up to the task, aren’t you, Inspector?” It was unforgivable to ask the question in front of Brierley and they both knew it.

Beauchamp’s anger flared but remained confined. “Yes… sir,” he said.

Rekorde’s mind was racing. “This daughter…”

“Simone, sir.”

“Still a minor?”

“Yes.”

“Any evidence that harm has come to her?”

“None at all, sir.”

“Find them, Inspector. Find them!”

Rekorde eyed him maliciously before leaving the room in a billowing cloud of false dignity. Beauchamp, following a tradition that was old before Noah built his ark, said savagely to Brierley, “You heard the man. Shift your arse and repeat the searches.”

*******

Leo’s despair, while he looks at Penelope’s head as the light of a dull, misty afternoon wanes, unknown to him in the world around, is huge, almost too great to bear. He is not going to succeed in this either. With the fear that his allotted time had dried to dust and was blowing away in a cold wind, he took the risk of introducing untested, although logical, refinements to the process he was following, knowing the he risked catastrophe, yet feeling that they were things that he had to do, that caution would be a mistake. Thus, after the blood had drained completely from Penelope’s thawed head, he rigged up a low pressure pump to push the pink embalming fluid in via the left carotid and out via the right; and when the time came to desiccate her flesh, he not only packed Penelope in salt but heated it at low temperature for three long days in which he experienced the agony of uncertainty and fear of failure. Whilst cracking the crust of the hot salt, as though it were a baked fish to be presented to a banquet, he holds his breath. He has convinced himself that he has caught the tide just as it changed, that he is being carried away from the failure for which his muses would have scourged him. But, as he brushes away the last flakes, he sees that he has been deluded in this thinking; it has been merely wish fulfilment. He imagines that her skin was once so soft and fragrant that it was almost neonatal; now it has become hard and ochrous, almost like a mask. It is a horrible caricature, another celestial joke.

Despair comes crushing down upon him again, a collapsing wall of hopelessness as another buttress for his self-confidence crumbles. He stares at this ugly thing, and the knowledge that he has created it out of preeminent beauty through his own incompetence triggers something within him that has not occurred for many years. He begins to cry. But even as he does so, he knows he must go on, else the stone will roll back.

*******

As he and Emanuel searched Martin’s studio, Tom asked, “Did Leo tell you much about his origins?”

Vogt was applying himself to the hunt with ferocious concentration. At that moment he was attempting to open the filing cabinet with a screw driver and more eagerness than skill, while Tom searched through a low wooden box that they had dragged from under the bed in the connecting room. “What?” Emanuel asked after a second’s delay. When the question was repeated, he said dismissively, “Not much. Brought up by his aunt.”

Since the surgeon had learned about the pipe, mention of Leo Banneker’s name had tended to bring a strong essence of incredulous disapproval about his person, like an almost palpable aura. Tom could not resist his curiosity, however. “What happened to his birth parents?”

Having momentarily ceased his unrefined – but, Tom presumed, his first – attempts at breaking and entering, he wasn’t about to stop again; indeed he had second wind and was back at attacking the poor cabinet with ferocious intent. Tom guessed that Tasha’s father bore a similar expression when wielding the osteotome against a particularly recalcitrant femur. “No one ever knew anything about a father. As for the mother, she died in an asylum. Insanity clearly ran in the family.” He didn’t look up.

“Where?”

“God only knows. Somewhere in North Wales, I think.”

The box that he was looking through contained articles torn from magazines; there was no theme that Tom could discern. Martin Waldeyer had eclectic tastes in many things, it seemed. He asked, “What about his aunt, the one who adopted him?”

“What about her?” Emanuel had the screwdriver deep into the vitals of his opponent and was heaving mightily, showing the strain of combat on his patrician features.

“Is she still alive? Where does she live? Was Leo still in contact with her?”

The contest terminated with a sharp, loud crack like a bone breaking; the filing cabinet gave in and opened abruptly. Breathless, Emanuel said, “She lived in in Shropshire – Oswestry, I think – but moved some years ago to London.” He paused and frowned. “Why do you want to know, Tom?”

Tom had asked himself the same question several times in the past few days. Until yesterday, it had been the pipe, and an enticing, if macabre, mystery. Then Inspector Beauchamp had phoned to tell him that it was made from a bone taken from Penelope Banneker, and that had changed everything. “Simone,” he said simply. He didn’t tell Emanuel that Tasha’s anxiety about Simone’s safety was also a significant factor.

“What about her?” Emanuel’s head was in the top drawer and his voice was muffled around the edges.

“Penelope’s probably dead and I think it’s clear that Leo isn’t thinking normally. She’s what – thirteen, fourteen? That makes her still a child and very vulnerable.”

Emanuel reached and pulled out more cuttings from newspapers and magazines. “What the hell did Uncle Martin want all this for?” he demanded of no one except himself. It had been thus throughout their search of the house; boxes, drawers, wooden crates, plastic crates, cardboard crates were dotted throughout, but all contained similar, seemingly nonsensical detritus; Tom rather suspected they were in some sort of way rummaging through Martin Waldeyer’s psyche, given the eclectic mix of fashion, high and low culture, sensationalism, pornography (hard and soft, heterosexual and homosexual, and fetishistic) and ultra-violence he had amassed around the house.

“Ideas, I suppose.”

“There are some ideas that ought not to be thought,” the older man pronounced, at which he stopped, either unwilling or unable to supply a roadmap by which this undoubtedly desirable but somewhat difficult goal might be achieved.

“Some would say it’s the job of the artist to think the unthinkable.”

“Tommyrot.” He glanced at Tom. “You don’t think that, do you?”

He hesitated, hung between truth and diplomacy, wondering why truth was so often unattractive. “I think it’s too easy to use the label ‘art’ as an excuse for something outrageous.” He was quite pleased with that one, although Emanuel stared at him for a short while.

They were taking a break in the kitchen where they had found instant coffee to drink, when Tom said, “Of course, we don’t know now Penelope died, but Simone needs to be found in any case. I wondered if she might have been in contact with her paternal grandparents.”

Emanuel had sat down at the pine table, tired by his exertions physical and emotional. “Natasha’s mother and I are well aware of all the implications of that pipe, Tom.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to suggest…”

“Inspector Beauchamp has been in contact and asked us if we might be able to assist in locating Simone and her father. There was nothing we could add to what he already knew, but I do think it’s important to let the authorities do their job, unencumbered by unasked-for and potentially counterproductive assistance.”

The arrival of the pipe had changed the game, Tom guessed. There was strong evidence that Penelope was dead, even stronger that Leo was alive, if only in his own universe. Tom wondered if that meant that the Vogts were viewing the contents of any potential will in a light that was different to the one that had illumined their thinking when Leo and his family had effectively vanished into a void. That the surgeon was treating this whole exercise as a cumbersome duty was possibly because his chance of fiduciary advantage had shrunk; or was that unfair?

Natasha’s reaction had been less sanguine. Being told that Penelope was dead had been a terrible shock to her. “There’s no way of telling how she died, is there?” she had asked when the initial emotion had subsided. She knew that there wasn’t, but that had only been her first thought. “He must be mad, mustn’t he?”

“By normal measures.”

“We can’t leave Simone in the care of a lunatic.”

“No,” he agreed. But that wasn’t enough.

“We can’t, Tom,” she insisted, as if he had argued. Perhaps she thought he had, if only by lack of apparent eagerness for the cause.

“I’m not sure what we can do, Tasha. The police are looking for them and they don’t seem to have had much success, so I don’t see that we will.”

Tasha had not been happy, but she was pragmatic enough to accept his counsel.

Now, he asked her father, “Did you ever meet Leo’s aunt?”

“Good God, no. From what Martin said, she was quite a cold, uncaring woman who wasn’t particularly pleased to have been lumbered with looking after her nephew, and who couldn’t wait to see the back of him. No love lost there, I think.”

“Martin Waldeyer must have known her, though.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because he knew that she was a ‘cold, uncaring woman’.”

Emanuel appraised him, and Tom had the impression that he was being assessed as perhaps too perspicacious for a potential son-in-law. The surgeon said eventually, “The first time we met Leo, Martin and I fell into conversation after the meal and the subject came up.”

“That he’d met her?” It seemed natural enough for the parents of young lovers to meet. Tom suddenly realised his mother had never met the Vogts, and that the prospect seemed cold and remote.

“No…” There was a pause. “He had someone investigate Leo’s early history.” This was hardly as much of a surprise to Tom as Emanuel might have supposed, since he still hadn’t confessed to rummaging in the dead man’s computer. The surgeon continued, “According to Uncle Martin’s man, Amelia Banneker was not a particularly affectionate woman and not especially keen on being his mother. She was divorced when Leo was quite young because his adoptive father was a violent drunk. Leo wasn’t an academic high flyer; he drifted into art school not out of desire or drive but because of Amelia Banneker’s desire to make something out of him; she thought of herself as something of an intellectual, I understand. Classical literature or some such. Martin’s view was that he wasn’t worthy of Penelope, since she was a talented musician and Leo was clearly not in her class as an artist.”

“And not in his class either?”

Emanuel responded immediately, “That was the subtext, certainly.”

“So Leo’s adoptive mother was cut out of the family?”

“I’m sure she would have been, except that she disowned Leo first. It seems that Uncle Martin wasn’t the only one who disapproved of the match.”

“Poor Simone.”

Emanuel grunted. “Jean said Simone enlisted her help in trying to locate her once.”

“Really? Did she find her?”

“Oh, yes, but it did her no good. The woman refused to acknowledge her.” He added as if he thought he should, “A great shame.”

“That must have been crushing for her.”

He shrugged, looked at his watch and said, “Come on, I don’t want to be here all day.”

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Nineteen

“Why did Leo send the pipe to Martin Waldeyer?”

Tom was on the phone to Tasha. It was early in the working day, and he had finished yesterday’s leftover cases and the odds and ends that pathology brings trailing with it like coffee dregs. It was a moment to eat some breakfast as he authorised reports. Tasha was in her car, driving, using hands free; not that that’ll help those around her, those in peril on the tarmac, he thought.

She said, “You know that. You were the one who came up with the explanation.” She sounded impatient, but with what or whom was unknown to him.

“I don’t mean I don’t know what message it conveyed, I mean, why do it that way? Why not just write a note?”

There was a long pause and she said something under her breath that he couldn’t catch. Then – and quite perkily, he thought – she said accusingly, “You know, of course.”

“I think so,” he admitted.

“Well?”

“He wanted to send a message not only about his wife, but also about his art.”

“Come again?”

“Martin Waldeyer was always putting him down, telling him he wasn’t a good artist. He wanted to let him know how good he had become.” She considered this. He asked, “Where are you going?”

“Savernake.” Since it was a community hospital, Tom had little to do with it.

“Why?”

“Just a meeting.” Before he could continue this vein, she asked, “What does it matter if he sent it for that reason?” He noticed slight strain in her voice, and he guessed she was undertaking some tricky motoring manoeuvre, probably leaving several fellow road-users incandescent in her wake.

“Because it then occurred to me that maybe there’s someone else he would want to impress.”

It didn’t take her long to see what he was talking about. “His adoptive mother,” she said.

*******

In the night, in her sleep in her sparse bedroom, after the dream that now recurred every night, the one in which her father strikes her down with a hammer, a terrible idea had occurred to Simone, one that was even worse than thoughts of being murdered. It caused her to rise and pad softly along the old carpet of the hall to look in the room where the works of her father’s terrible yet wondrous art were displayed. What she saw haunted the rest of the night’s darkness and deprived her of any more rest.

After she rises and washes the following morning, she looks into her father’s room but he’s not lying on his bed; nor is he downstairs. His behaviour over the last few days has been even more erratic and strange than what passes for usual; he has been distracted and clearly perturbed, although he wouldn’t tell her why. In turn, she is yet more anxious about what he might do. He even tried to show a degree of levity on one or two occasions, although the effect was more disturbing than his usual close, lugubrious concentration on matters she can only guess at. She asked him frequently what was wrong, but he evaded responding. She asked how work on her mother’s head was going, and he said only, “Fine.” She enquired if he would be able to use some of her mother’s beautiful head of hair to complete the lyre, and he said at once, “Yes.”

She heard the lie.

Now, close to noon on a day of the week (she has become atavistic, and does not have any sort of calendar and only an approximate clock in her mind), she lays the table for a lunch for two, and waits, unsure if he will come; even though her father has been in the Infirmary for over a day, there is no certainty of this. He does, though, appear some time later and, even though the last few months have made her accustomed to his disregard of his appearance – washing infrequently and changing his clothes only after Simone has nagged him for a couple of days – he looks haggard, but, incongruously, almost evanescent. She knows better than to ask directly, knows too that he will want only toast; perhaps she will be able to persuade him to have some jam or Marmite on it, perhaps she won’t. Today, he doesn’t. She makes herself a cucumber sandwich, which is a fondness that she’s inherited from her mother, and makes tea for them both, then sits opposite him in the kitchen. The day is warm but grey and close, as if something ominous lurks nearby. She says, “You remember you sent Grandpa Martin a gift?”

When not using a knife and fork, he has taken to eating in the manner of a squirrel, holding the food in both hands and biting from the middle. His face shows concentration, but she knows that it is not on the flavour or texture or look of the food. His answer takes a long time to emerge; there are crumbs on his beard. “Yes.” He speaks softly but with some anguish.

“Have you sent out any more gifts, Daddy?”

This answer takes even longer to arrive, collecting even more distress on the way. For the first time since he came in, he looks at her. “Only one.”

She knows the answer already. There is another gap in the memento mori, one she missed when she looked. She refuses to let the fear in, though it batters at the door. “Who to?”

The hesitation is even longer, his voice even lower. “Granny Amelia.”

She gasps. “But why, Daddy? Why?” She almost weeps in frustration and despair.

He thinks about this, his face and forehead showing that this is a question that he has not considered before, has not even thought worthy of consideration. He says simply, “To make her proud of me.”

*******

“I still think we ought to have told the police.”

This time, Tom was in charge of the car but the reversal of their situations didn’t ease the atmosphere of tension that seemed inevitable whenever they were together in a vehicle. He could tell from her bearing and her voice that her reactions to his style of driving were just as potent, merely reversed. She displayed impatience – with him, not the other road users – and she tutted too much (although any tutting would actually be a surfeit, he had to admit to himself), clearly considering him to be something of a pansy when it came to how he handled the car. He was convinced he had even heard her sigh once when, coming off the M25, he had stopped at some traffic lights when they had only just changed from green to amber. He had said nothing, but then Tasha didn’t actually articulate any words either; there was no need to. “Why?” she asked. “She’s part of my family, if only by marriage. We’re visiting her.”

“Nobody’s ever cared about her before.” He immediately regretted saying this.

Tasha reacted. “That’s not fair!”

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed in a low voice. “I’m sorry.”

“There was really nothing we could do.”

“I understand.”

“And maybe there wasn’t anything we needed to do…”

“Probably not.”

“I mean, it’s not as if she’s a blood relative.”

“No.”

She took a few more minutes to reload and then, “It’s very easy to criticise.”

“I’m not criticising, Tash. I’m fully with you on this. I’m just slightly antsy about what the police might say if they find out.”

“They will find out, when we find Simone for them.”

Tasha had become increasingly anxious as the days had passed since the bone’s true nature had become known and, with this, had come increasingly irritability. When he failed to load the dishwasher in accordance with her standing orders the previous night, she had flipped. They had had a stand up row; their relationship was too young to allow either of them to have built up an arsenal of slights, grievances, irritations and exasperations and, although still fresh, it had become sufficiently deep for them to want to withdraw before too much damage was inflicted. That didn’t stop them, though, at least for half an hour; then, like exhausted pugilists, they had run out of enthusiasm for the fray and, after a period of heavily frosted silence, they had made up. Later, in bed, she had said, “He’s totally mad, isn’t he? He must be to have done something like that.”

Tom didn’t need to ask who ‘he’ was. “Yes.” She hadn’t clarified either what she meant by ‘that’ – making the bone pipe in the first place, or sending it in the post to his father-in-law, but he appreciated that they were signs of insanity, just different in kind, perhaps.

“I keep wondering how she died, or even…” She stopped suddenly, only continuing after holding her breath for a while. “…If she was still alive when he took the bone.” Her tone now was apologetic for some reason, perhaps because, although nightmarish, she was afraid the thought childish, like believing in the bogeyman under the bed.

But he had replied thoughtfully, “There’s no way to be sure,” only regretting it when he saw the look of horror on her face. “But it’s highly likely she was already dead,” he added hastily.

She had wanted comfort from him and he had failed her; she was looking at him with terrified eyes. “What about Simone? Have you considered her?”

“Everyone’s thinking of her, Tash.”

“But no one’s doing anything to find her. She’s living with a madman; supposing he harms her because of his madness? Supposing he decides to do something with parts of her body?”

“The police are doing their best, Tash. I told you.”

“I can’t get that image out of my mind, Tom. She was so vulnerable, and Leo was such a big man, if he were to use force, there’s no way she could resist.”

He had thought to follow her father’s dictat that it was best to let the authorities handle such matters, but Tasha was clearly finding that impossible. This was typical of her; once she saw something that needed doing, she wanted to do it, even if it wasn’t her responsibility, as this arguably wasn’t. He considered discussing the mental processes of the psychotic and how he couldn’t really see that Leo would come to harm his daughter, but further deliberation (he had no postgraduate psychiatric qualifications, only undergraduate experience) led to his silence. Tasha would quite rightly treat cod psychology with undisguised contempt.

“You’ve got to find them, Tom.” This also was typical Tasha. If she couldn’t do it herself, she commanded someone else to do it. He suspected that Emanuel had often heard a very similar imperative. “You must have some ideas…” A third familiar strand; if she didn’t have any ideas herself, she insisted – believed as fact – that the one she was relying on had.

And he had.

They drove on in silence until the sat-nav told them that they had arrived at Meninger Road, Streatham. The nursing home, sandwiched between a furniture superstore and a mosque, was a red-brick gothic monstrosity, that Tom thought might be late Victorian, although he wouldn’t have argued with someone who insisted it was early Edwardian. Whatever the regnal era, its three stories hulked over its neighbours like a school bully sitting resentfully amidst far smaller children. It treated the DIY store and supermarket opposite no better, frowning grumpily down upon them and casting them into grimy shadow. There was a small car park at the front nominally reserved for visitors, although Tom suspected the shopping trolley in one of the four spaces was not a mode of conveyance for any guest.

Up semi-circular yellow stone stairs and past lions couchant, they entered the hallway that was high-ceilinged and gloomy. An impressive fire surround was flanked by armchairs and faced off with an anachronistic reception desk, behind which they could see a head. The head looked up as they approached. It was a middle-aged head with a moustache and a goatee that Tom thought were a big mistake; its body sported a nurse’s uniform, on the lapel of which (at an untidy angle) was a smeared name badge. GRAHAM CROZIER, Charge Nurse. I wonder what that is on his badge, thought Tom. “Can I help?” His voice was comically camp.

It was Tasha who took charge. “We’re here to visit Amelia Banneker.”

“And you are?”

“Natasha Vogt and Tom Newman.”

“What’s your business visiting Mrs Banneker?” Perhaps he’d had a bad day. Tom was well aware that a carer’s professional existence frequently involved bodily fluids and hard work, and not infrequently verbal or physical abuse, but the question was asked in a challenging tone that Tom knew would be as salt upon Tasha’s raw dignity.

He had seen it before; her training in law, her upbringing by people such as Jean and Emanuel Vogt, and her own history as a nurse conspired and then synergised within her to produce a keen, irritated edge to her tongue as she replied, “We have no business with her. We wish to visit her.”

“Why?” He was undaunted; maybe it had been a very bad day. Tom was growing nervous. He was becoming aware of a background pong of cabbage.

“There’s been a death in the family… our family. We are related.”

She didn’t say how, and each syllable of the last word received equal emphasis.

He frowned. “I take it you’re not her granddaughter or son, are you?”

“No.”

Charge Nurse Crozier adopted a look of cynicism. “Then how are you related?” His accent – from the estuary – was becoming stronger, as was the background brassic odour.

“Her son was married to my great uncle’s daughter.”

“Not exactly close, then.”

Before Tasha could even draw breath through nostrils that were noticeably flaring, Tom spoke for the first time. “Nevertheless, we would like to see her, if that’s possible.” He had taken Tasha’s hand and squeezed it slightly, a gesture between them that was rapidly becoming familiar. Even though Nurse Crozier clearly equated the tasks of receptionist and Rottweiler, it turned out after some consideration that it was possible.

On their way to Amelia Banneker’s room, he tried his hand at conversation, perhaps trying to start afresh. “Amelia’s suddenly become very popular.”

“How so?” asked Tom.

“The police came calling a few days ago. They asked if her son or granddaughter had been to see her.”

“Have they?”

“Christ, no. Never seen hide nor hair of them.”

“Did the police talk to Amelia Banneker?” asked Tasha.

“For all the good it did them,” was his gnomic reply.

The old lady lived at the back of the building in the attic, perhaps in what had once been a servant’s room. It was little more than a large box room although the dormer window faced south and gave much light, even on a grey spring day; it was a shame that it overlooked a cemetery, but it was unlikely that the room’s occupier often took in the view. Crozier had knocked but it was no more than convention; he didn’t expect a response, didn’t get one and didn’t wait for one. When they entered the room, a small, plump woman with a drooping lower lip and eyes set in etiolated flesh looked up at them, but said nothing: her attention returned to Sunday morning television. She was well coiffured but dressed carelessly, her navy blue cardigan buttoned unevenly, an entropic lesson to all humanity.

She sat in what looked to be a comfy, though worn, armchair at the end of the made bed, facing a wall-mounted television beneath which was a chest of drawers. There was a Zimmer frame parked behind the door in front of a set of free-standing bookshelves that was crammed with books; more of their kin were stacked on every available surface. Crozier commented, “We had to give most of the books to charity; can’t have them on the floor, because of the mice. Still, she never reads them now.”

To the room’s occupant, he called over loudly, “Hello, Amelia,” and then (almost immediately) to Tom and Tasha in a normal tone, “She probably won’t want to talk to you.” To her once more, and again loudly, “Some visitors for you. Some relatives.”

She didn’t react to the sarcasm that he stuffed into the last word. Instead, she asked irritably, “When’s breakfast?”

“You’ve had it. Lunch in an hour.”

She looked around with wild surmise. “I haven’t!”

“Yes, you have,” he replied tiredly.

“I haven’t! They must have forgotten me again.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get a double portion of mince and potatoes for lunch.”

Only now did she turn away from the celebrity cooking programme. “You always say that,” she observed waspishly and with savage triumph.

His tight smile suggested that irritation wasn’t too far below his greasy, goatee’d face. “I’ll leave you with your family,” he said. All she gave them was a glance, but it conveyed disdainful disinterest; the television took her into its thrall again. To Tom and Tasha, he said, “No more than thirty minutes, please.” With which he left.

*******

The voices are quiet and this oddly unsettles Leo; he feels alone, although not lonely, in the operating theatre of the asylum that was his birthplace. He looks up at the windows of the high dome, seeing grey sky through them; that it is day means little beyond something primordial in the depths of his mind. Somewhere else in his psyche he tries to feel pleasure as he surveys the bust of Penelope’s head that he has just retrieved from the electrolysis tank; it’s still wet with the electrolyte. This is just the strike – the first step in covering her in gold – but it doesn’t look as if it will, as he has hoped, hide Penelope’s disfigurement, save his project, save perhaps his self-respect. The gold plating is patchy, and focally cracked. In places, it is incomplete and her coarse, darkened skin is still clearly visible, giving his wife a grotesque motley look, like a piece of modern art; he cannot have that, it is too much like an artistic joke. The head perches on the cathode that ingloriously spikes her neck; in the last throes of hope, he tells himself that his final solution will be more elegant, that this is only the first coating, that longer in the tank will cover the blemishes, and hide her swollen lips, her sunken eyes. An idea blossoms within him and gives him momentary joy. He did not use the cervical vertebrae in the lyre; he has realised with an oh-so-small thrill of comprehension that they will form the perfect plinth.

It is only momentary joy.

Remembrance of the lyre draws his attention to it as it rears up behind him serpiginously and, it seems to him in his fractured state of mind, threateningly; the cut strings, now starting to wither, are like the tendrils of a sea monster. It is both his apotheosis and his nadir. The hair will not work; he has to find another answer.

*******

There were few places in that room where a gift, no matter how small, could have been put and not be immediately obvious. Feeling like nothing more than a petty thief, Tom began searching first through the chest of drawers, and then under the bed. Even though it had been his suggestion to come in the first place, he was now experiencing serious qualms. Even if Leo had sent something to his mother, there was no guarantee that it would help them locate Simone. It was considerably more likely that, one way or another, it would get them into bother.

Tasha tried fruitlessly to make conversation with the old lady, but it was clear to them both, before she even began, that it was going to be without profit; Tom supposed Tasha did so from a sense of duty, remarking to himself that those four words usually led to much fruitless effort, occasionally to personal disaster. Amelia barely noticed that she was supposed to be part of a dialogue, and then only to express annoyance at being distracted.

“Even if it was sent, it’s entirely possible that it was confiscated or something. I wouldn’t put it past Nurse Crozier,” he remarked as he began to look through the books; they were all read, some of them nearly to death, and they represented an eclectic gallimaufry of genres and on a wide range of subjects, although mostly related to the arts rather than the sciences, and with much classic literature. The contrast with Martin Waldeyer’s library was stark; this represented a history of interests that was within normal parameters. It was, though, a chronicle of times past, to be read now by others, not by the compiler.

“Unless we ask him directly, I don’t see how we’ll find out.” They were both aware that they were talking as if there were no one else in the room.

They didn’t need to approach Graham Crozier, though. On the top of the highest row of books on the wood-veneered shelving unit, Tom found a cardboard box, similar to the one on Martin Waldeyer’s desk and, while Tasha told Amelia of what she knew of her son and her granddaughter, and Amelia told Tasha of nothing in particular, he opened it with a sense of excitement. The same tissue paper this time contained a single rib, covered thickly and without imperfection with lustrous black lacquer; running across the distorted arc made by its curve were five black strings of differing calibre under tension. It occurred to him that they were like the cat gut he remembered from the violin his mother had forced him to learn as child. They passed through tiny holes in the bone, and were held in place by intricate knots. He looked at it for a time, turning it over and over, feeling it, marvelling at it, as Tasha tried in vain to uncover some relevant truths within Amelia Banneker’s weakened mind. He wasn’t really thinking as he brushed his thumb against the strings in turn. The notes were pure and in perfect relative pitch; they seemed to die away forever. Tasha stopped talking abruptly and looked up at him, surprised.

Even Amelia looked away from the television and made eye contact with him for the first time.

*******

In her bed, in her bedroom curtained against the day, in a dislocated place, an exhausted Simone dreams of things she has not considered for many months. In those seconds that seem like hours from long ago, she remembers her mother, and just how much she loved, and felt loved by, her. The intimacy of the relationship floods back into her, born by remembrances of her voice as she talked and laughed, the delicacy of her fingers as she plucked the harp strings, the look on her perfect face, as she turned the flute into a heaven-sent singing creature. She knows once more the way her mother looked at her in moments of love, and anger and fear. She even believes that her mother’s perfume is around her. She hears her talking to her father, and to Grandpa Martin. The voice for her father is soft and needful, that for Grandpa Martin is something else, though. Frightening? No, not that…

In her dream, Grandpa Martin’s smile is at the same time comforting and slightly odd; he taught her so much, and did so in a commanding yet not unkind voice, but there is a later texture that colours the memory; it is almost the last one she has of him, after which it all changed. Again, she asks if it was that final night in which he came to her room. She is not sure and does not want to be sure.

The house was, after that, no longer safe or happy; her mother looked at Grandpa Martin in a different, far angrier way, and her father looked at him with newfound courage. No longer did her father give way in argument to him; no longer did he remain silent when Grandpa Martin made some rude or sneering remark about him or his work. More and more, there was tension, with her wonderful mother making less and less music, tending her beautiful hair more and more rarely. Her father became somehow empowered, she thought; her grandfather proportionately diminished.

And yet that empowerment seemed to come at a cost. She saw that he became also more erratic, sometimes distracted, and increasingly distant. She saw sometimes that her mother’s glances towards him held not just love, but also the merest hint of concern. Her grandfather’s no longer held nothing but faint contempt, for there was also a tiny bit of fear. The tension increased. She spent no time alone with Grandpa Martin, and she remembered that he once bitterly complained about this to her father when they thought she wasn’t around to hear.

The dream flicks to the last night in the house, when the horrible row erupted. Her father hadn’t been in the house, but had returned early… She was in her room, but was awakened…

What had happened?

She doesn’t know, and has never dared ask anyone. Her mother’s beautiful face, as she ran to Simone, was tear-stained, whilst her father’s had been distorted into a terrible mask of rage. Grandpa Martin had refused to come out of his room, even when her father had banged on the door. They had left within the hour.

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Twenty

“We should have told Nurse Crozier we were taking it.”

“He wouldn’t have let us take it.”

“I’m not sure that that’s considered a legitimate defence, at least in the UK.”

“Amelia won’t miss it. She didn’t know she had it.”

For someone not untrained in legal matters, Tasha seemed to Tom to be remarkably free and easy with her interpretation of the Theft act. “Graham Crozier might,” he said.

“I doubt it. Even if he knew she received it, he won’t miss it.”

It was late – nearly midnight – and they were seated at Tasha’s dining table in nightclothes and dressing gowns, each with a laptop in front of them, Leo’s gift to his adoptive mother between them on the polished pine. They had decided it was a sort of lyre, after comparing it with images they found on the internet. Tom judged that it had been manufactured from one of the upper ribs, perhaps the third or the fourth. The cardboard box and wrappings were next to it on one side, on the other was the card that had lain beneath. In the familiar hand, in the same black ink was written:

I would be Dionysus, come to Thebes.

Bless me, oh great Zeus,

And be mindful

In due time of my pain.

They’d spent the last few hours trying to decrypt this message; they had eaten only cheese and biscuits, and had drunk only wine, and Tom would have liked to have gone to bed, because tomorrow he expected to spend a normal day at work. They had made some headway in their efforts, but much was still opaque, and Tasha seemed driven to pursue matters into the wrong side of the night. They knew some things that were useful, despite some of them being negatives. It wasn’t a Japanese poem, for example. In fact, it wasn’t a published poem at all, at least not one that either of them knew or that was accessible via the worldwide web. There was an element of published work, however. It was Tasha who discovered that ‘be mindful in due time of my pain’ was a translation of lines from the second part of the Dante’s Divine Comedy, Purgatorio. The first couplet, though, seemed to be original.

“We are sure that Leo wrote this, are we?” Tasha asked.

“The handwriting’s his.”

“So that…” She indicated the lacquered lyre. “Belonged to Aunt Penelope.”

“Yes…” He didn’t make the syllable confident enough.

“But you can’t be certain.”

“No.”

“So it might be someone else?”

He knew that she meant Simone. “I’m sure it’s from Penelope, Tash.” He caressed her hand to emphasise his certainty. “The musical theme, for a start.”

“So I don’t have to worry until human bones start turning up that have been turned into something else, something non-musical?”

“It won’t come to that.” She looked at him and, under the pressure of this, he said, “I’m absolutely sure she’s in no danger.”

“Forgive me if I’m not so sanguine, Tom.”

He should have let it go at that, but it was in his nature to win the argument if he thought it winnable. “I don’t think Leo’s a murderer, Tash.”

“How can you be so certain? You didn’t know him. I met him several times, but I can’t say I ever got to know him. A man who could do this to a woman he supposedly loved – however she died – isn’t exactly behaving by normal social standards, is he?”

“No,” he allowed. “He’s operating by his own rules; internally consistent but outwardly bizarre.”

“Tom, you’re sounding like a psychologist.” He shrugged, not sure if this was meant to be mealy-mouthed or sarcastic. He soon got an answer. “And you’re a pathologist. You’ve got no more idea of what’s going on in Leo’s head than I have.”

“I’m sure this bone once belonged to Penelope,” was all he could find to say, hearing how weak it sounded.

She was looking at it fearfully, as if it were possessed of occult, malevolent powers. The macabre nature of the act of making musical instruments, no matter how fine-looking and well made, from one’s wife, was brought forcefully in upon her again, and she appreciated that it had somehow been managing to become quotidian. Tom was keen to draw her attention back to the words on the card. “To his father in law, who had an interest in Japanese culture, he quotes a Japanese death poem; to his adoptive mother he quotes Dante. In the first, he knew that Martin Waldeyer would infer that his daughter was dead, so what was he trying to imply in the message to his mother?”

“That he’s in hell?”

“Purgatory, not hell.”

“Which, if I remember my RE lessons, is temporary, not permanent.”

He nodded. “You can get out of it by being purified.”

She considered this and grimaced. “By doing unspeakable things to your dead wife’s body?”

“Maybe, in Leo Banneker’s version of the universe.”

“So what does the first part of the message mean?”

It was so late, he thought that he may as well go for broke. “Can I have some more wine?”

As she opened another bottle, he called through to her in the kitchen, “After all, Dionysus was the Greek god of wine.”

“Let’s get pissed, then.”

He went back to the internet. When she returned to the table with the bottle, he said in deep thought, “‘I would be Dionysus’...”

“Who was a son of Zeus.”

“He would be Dionysus, though.”

“Your point?”

He didn’t respond, saying instead, “‘Come to Thebes’.”

“That’s where Dionysus was born, isn’t it? Didn’t I read that somewhere?”

He thought hard and drank half a glass of wine before saying slowly, “He had two mothers.” His voice was full of awe, although at what was not clear. He tapped away on the keyboard excitedly while Tasha drank more wine of her own. Tom hadn’t noticed that she was really rather drunk, but then Tom was really rather drunk himself. He said after a moment, “He was the son of Zeus and, depending on who you care to believe, his mother was either Persephone or Semele.”

“Helpful.”

“But the point is, he’s often called ‘twice-born’.”

“I remember reading that. There are several different versions of the myth, but that’s a recurring theme. Is it relevant?”

“In a way, Leo was also born twice. Once to his natural mother, once to his aunt.”

Tasha made a face; because she was inebriated, it was slightly comical. “That’s a bit thin,” she opined. Her tone contained more than a hint of derision.

For the first time, Tom noticed her mood. He had seen her like this before, and it often didn’t end well. Carefully, he said, “He was born in Thebes, but returned there late in his life.” This stopped her as the potential significance struck her. He said, “Leo was born in an asylum, wasn’t he?” She nodded. “Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Daddy would know. Why?”

Tom thought again, not because he believed his hypothesis wrong but because he wanted to dispel Tasha’s skepticism. At the back of his head was the knowledge that he wanted to do that because he was driven to show others how bright he could be. He always had been. He said, without realising the forces at work under his consciousness, “He’s been showing off, hasn’t he? His father-in-law and his adoptive mother both received a gift that he made himself. They’re authority figures for him.”

“More cod psychology?” she asked witheringly.

“If you like.”

“What about it?”

“He’s never left his childhood.”

Tom opened his eyes, but the taste in his mouth was his first sensation, and the sights on his retina went through eyeballs that hurt, that in turn lay within a head that weighed far more than it ought to have done. He felt sick and he ached. His soul – that thing that sometimes, when he was lucky, soared – was nowhere to be felt. He was a thing merely of regrets, about how much he had drunk and the hour at which he and Tasha had gone to bed, and considerations about getting to work at a reasonable hour, and not appearing subhuman having done so.

He sat up. He was in Tasha’s bed, with Tasha beside him. She didn’t stir. She had dribbled. His head hurt some more; his stomach was empty, although his oesophagus told him that he was feeling sick. His back told him that he hadn’t relaxed all night and his bladder pointed out that it should have been emptied an hour or more before.

“Got to get to work, Tash,” he said, when he had ascertained that it was nearly eight-thirty. Did he have an early meeting today? He didn’t think so. His voice carried with it phlegm off his vocal cords, and his sore soft palate was evidence that he had spent quite a while on his back with his mouth open and snoring. She didn’t react. “Tash?”

She moved sluggishly, worked her lips in a decerebrate way. He touched her bare shoulder, feeling but not fully appreciating how greasy was her skin. “I’m getting up.”

When he had showered, he went back into the bedroom; she was in the same position. He dressed in the same clothes he had worn the day before, feeling like a gigolo and not liking it. Even when he hopped heavily across the room with only one leg in his trousers so that the floorboards creaked, she remained inert. His mouth was beginning to lose its mucoid coating, and his stomach was shouting a little louder than his gullet; his eyeballs were still moving in their sockets as if coated in grit, and his brain felt as if it had been roasted, but he could at least see his way to getting into work, even if beyond that was still over the border in hostile country.

He sat on the bed on her side. She had the day off, he now recalled. Lucky cow. He touched her again, this time with just a fingertip on the shoulder strap of her bright red singlet. “Tash?”

“Mmm?” This was a subaxillary syllable, coming from foetid depths.

“I’m going now. I’ll see you tonight?”

She emerged slowly and reluctantly; he could see that she was experiencing similar symptoms to his own. Her squinting eyes might have seen the digits of the alarm clock but they couldn’t identify them. “What’s the time?”

Her breath smelt, as his probably had before he brushed his teeth. “Quarter to nine.”

Her head dropped back into the pillow.

As he walked through the lounge, he saw the lyre that they had left lying on the dining table the night before. He was unable to stop himself picking it up and gently strumming the strings just once. What can they made of? Once again, the sounds seemed ethereal but this time he realised why the notes of these macabre instruments not only entranced him, but also unsettled him; it was because he was afraid that by sounding them, he was summoning something terrible.

His phone rang.

Tasha was unmoving but awake and thinking as she heard the ring of the phone. She listened to Tom’s side of the conversation.

“Good morning, Inspector.”

A pause.

“Yes.” His voice had changed, had become noticeably more cautious. She opened eyes that had been resting in warm darkness between her head and the pillow.

After a longer pause, he said with even more circumspection, “We saw it, yes.”

She turned and sat up quickly, reached down to the end of the bed and pulled her dressing gown towards her. In the lounge, Tom said, “We were going to tell you…” He sounded apologetic and subservient.

She got to her feet and padded quickly to the door.

*******

Inspector Beauchamp had been in no mood for pleasantries. The phone call from Croydon Police telling him that a nurse at Amelia Banneker’s nursing home had been in contact about a potential theft from her room had affected him badly enough for even Brierley to curb his acerbic insolence and flippancy when in his presence.

“Something wrong, sir?” he had enquired cautiously.

“That blasted pathologist…”

“Newman?”

“And the girl – Natasha. They’re making a nuisance of themselves.” Brierley said nothing. Beauchamp brooded about the news. It had to be significant… He said, “Get me Newman on the phone, Sergeant.”

Brierley complied, then gave the handset to his superior. Beauchamp said angrily, “I believe you and Miss Vogt went to visit Amelia Banneker yesterday.”

Brierley couldn’t hear the response.

“Did you take anything, Dr Newman?” Beauchamp was well used to hearing confessions and concessions in the silences that interviewees put up, as though they thought their evasions would fool him. When Tom didn’t say anything, he added, “A cardboard box. From the description of Graham Crozier, a nurse at the home, it sounds similar to the one received by Martin Waldeyer from Leo Banneker. He says it was opened in Mrs. Banneker’s presence and contained an odd musical instrument – something with strings, he says. She didn’t seem particularly interested, so it was put on a shelf in her room and now it’s missing.”

Beauchamp listened to the response.

“And you took it,” he said grimly.

“Where is it now?”

Beauchamp listened. He wasn’t just angry with Dr Tom ‘Bloody’ Newman, he was also livid with himself; he hadn’t thought to ask the local police to enquire if Amelia Banneker had been in receipt of any odd parcels recently; and that was stupid. He had made yet another mistake. “Is it a… part… of a human being?”

Brierley saw his superior’s complexion become ashen. Brierley thought that he’d been mistaken about Leo Banneker all those years ago; maybe he wasn’t such a prick after all, and maybe he was worth meeting. There was something about the man’s activities that greatly intrigued him; the pipe had engrossed him the first time he had seen it, even before he knew its true nature. And now…

*******

Tom felt a hot, unpleasant blush of embarrassment; he had been caught offending. It had always been thus, whether the authority was his parents, the school, or the state, and whether the wrongdoing was trivial or otherwise; in his eyes, something inside him told him that all sin was mortal. He felt as if he were treading carefully along a narrow gantry in pitch black. The inspector’s voice sounded calm, but much as a sniper has to be calm as he trains his gun sight on an unsuspecting victim; he knew full well just how irate the inspector really was.

“I think it’s a rib. It’s been turned into a sort of lyre.” Tom was struck by a thought. The strings… Surely not. He saw Tash standing in the doorway to the bedroom, dressing gown pulled around her, looking at him; he could see that she was alarmed by what she was hearing; he wondered how she’d feel if she knew what he was thinking.

Beauchamp enquired, “Was that all there was in the box?”

“No,” he confessed, but doing so with only half a heart and half a brain, because he had other things to think about. The hot blush of embarrassment at being found out was nothing as to the viciously blistering thought that was now spearing his psyche. It made him feel almost vertiginous in its implications. Surely Leo had used commercial catgut? Was it possible that Leo hadn’t used just Penelope’s bones, that he might have used soft tissue as well? He didn’t want to think about that… “There was a card in the box.”

“In Leo’s handwriting?”

“Yes. Exactly as before.”

“What did it say?”

Tom had looked at it so many times, dissecting it and reassembling the fragments, thinking about it and thinking around it, that he had no trouble recalling it; it now seemed to live within him, had probably even lurked beneath his fitful dreams during his unquiet slumbers. He had to recite it at dictation speed, spelling out not a few of the non-English words. Beauchamp in turn dictated it to someone else. “What does that gobbledygook mean? It doesn’t sound Japanese to me.” Beauchamp spoke from the lofty heights of those in a state of graceful ignorance but, at the same time, in a state of overwhelming authority.

“It’s not. We couldn’t identify it as a direct quote from anything.”

Tom looked at Tasha, who seemed to be pulling herself into a tighter and tighter bundle of dressing gown. He was thinking that he had a hypothesis and he ought to tell the inspector about it, but was on the point of deciding to remain reticent on the subject, when he was asked, “Do you know what it means?”

Tom found himself answering before he could stop himself. “Where was he born?”

“We’re not absolutely certain. There’s some story about his mother being unmarried and confined in a mental hospital, but we’ve been unable to unearth the details. Why?”

“I think that’s where he is. I think that he’s returned to his first home; that’s what this says.”

“How do you work that out?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Maybe, Doctor, but until I have more evidence than your cogitations, and until I have some idea of the whereabouts of the place he was born, there’s not a lot I can do. Where is the lyre now?”

“It’s here, in Tasha’s flat.”

“I want that lyre brought to me immediately, Dr Newman.”

Even if Tasha had the day off, it was a work day for him. When he pointed this out to the representative of law and order who was fuming at the end of the phone line, he was told, “Tough shit, Doctor. I want that box and all its contents in my office in three hours’ time. If it is, I might not charge you with theft and knowingly obstructing a police investigation.” When Tom didn’t immediately yield, he added, “The maximum penalty for each of those is seven years.”

Tom said quickly, “We’ll be there.”

Beauchamp cut the connection, aware that the glow of satisfaction that this piece of petty authority gave him wasn’t healthy, but grateful for any feelings of pleasure. Brierley asked “What did he say?”

“He’s got a theory that Banneker might have holed up the place he was born.”

Brierley said thoughtfully, “Has he, now?”

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Twenty-one

“What do we do?” asked Tash.

They sat at the table, the lyre nestled in the box between them. He said, “I don’t think we have much choice. He’s one angry man. I’ll have to take it to him.”

She looked upset but accepting of the situation. “I’ll take it. You’ve got to get to work.”

He thought of the lyre, and of the poem, and his ideas; he wasn’t actually on the rota for anything that day, so his absence wouldn’t be catastrophic for the service. It wouldn’t be the first time that he had phoned in to tell them that he would be catching up on his academic reading at home when he didn’t have anything specifically to do in the department.

“I think we should go together.”

She looked relieved, which pleased him. “Have I got time for a shower? It might help to clear my head and make me feel slightly more like a member of the human race.”

Feeling only slightly humanoid himself, he made coffee in the small, galley kitchen, and then phoned the department. Neither of them felt much like food although the coffee was welcome. They were out of the block of flats in fifteen minutes, heading towards Hereford in Tasha’s car in another five.

*******

Since his brainpan had met the farmer’s wife’s iron, Brierley’s ability to concentrate on matters at hand had been severely compromised. The discovery of the pipe – in particular, the discovery of its true nature – had excited something within him that had long remained dormant; one of excited interest, almost of compulsion. He felt it to be not a normal compulsion either, for strange ideas stirred – if not sluggishly then perhaps torpidly, even lasciviously – within him. Somehow, to his way of thinking, that peculiarly attractive pipe was conjugated with the art in that grotesque room, the photo of a Jap woman blowing her brains out, the piece with the muff hidden in its depths. The men who had done such things were not normal men, just as he was no longer a normal man; he might not have their abilities, but he did have the capacity to appreciate them and their work. No one else seemed to, he had noted. Everyone around him seemed hung up on what he thought were the mundane proscriptions of the Human Tissue Act, ignoring the amazing artefacts that had been produced.

And now there was a second example. How many more were there? The boy, Newman, had said something about two hundred bones in the human body; how many had Leo turned into art? That thought made him giddy with glee as he stood smoking by the big trash bins in the car park, unheeding of the cold bright sunshine of the middle morning. He wasn’t supposed to be doing that, but his unspoken reaction to this injunction was his usual, rather unfocussed thought, fuck ’em.

Such objects would be valuable but not easy to shift; he knew it was a specialist market, but definitely one that existed, even though it remained in the shadows, in faraway places. He wondered if Leo Banneker had an agent, and rather suspected that he didn’t. Yet…

He was so preoccupied, he didn’t see Richard Rekorde approach. “Jerry?”

He jumped and turned, ready either to argue or be oleaginous; he found he had need of neither. “Dick.” Rekorde wouldn’t bollock him, at least not seriously.

Rekorde looked at the cigarette but ignored it; his blind spot varied in diameter depending on where he was looking. “Beauchamp tells me another musical instrument has turned up.”

“Apparently.”

“He’s telling me he needs more resources to find this madman. Do you agree?”

Brierley considered, although the safety of the Bannekers or members of the public was far from the centre of his ruminations. He wanted to get to see what Leo Banneker was really capable of; would more officers crowd the pitch? He couldn’t decide. “Possibly.”

Rekorde pursed his lips and rang his tongue over the front of his incisors, fleetingly distorting his upper lip. He felt a piece of apple that had lodged between them; he would have to remove it the next time he was in private. “I have to admit, we can’t afford to have too many more of these things popping up. If it becomes public, we’ll have trouble.” By trouble, he meant adverse publicity, from which flowed likely attention, perhaps opprobrium from on high. Thus was his professional life spent choosing which path to take along a booby-trapped maze. “I think I can afford to assign some more personnel.”

“Not too many, though.”

Rekorde was slightly surprised. Brierley had never struck him as a man concerned with such ephemera as budgets. “Well…”

“He hasn’t done that letter to me yet,” said Brierley by way of feint.

Rekorde frowned. “No?” He thought about this. “I’ll have a word in his ear. Don’t worry.” More thought. “He’s a good man, Jerry. Go easy on him, eh?”

Brierley broke wind.

*******

Tom said thoughtfully. “Do you think your father would know where exactly Leo was born?”

“I don’t know.” They were making good progress, just driving along the Gloucester ring road. “Why?”

“Can you phone your father and ask?”

“Why do you want to know, Tom?”

“Just curious.”

Using hands-free, she rang the orthopaedic theatre suite at Bournemouth, but Mr Vogt was in the middle of a tricky hip revision and was unavailable. She identified herself as his daughter and asked if he could ring back,

He did so when they had left the Ledbury by-pass and were on the last stage of their journey to Hereford; they had forty-five minutes left until the deadline. They would be there in plenty of time. “Daddy, do you know precisely where Leo was born?” she asked.

“And good day to you, Natasha.” Heavy-handed paternal sarcasm mixed uneasily with annoyance, the whole given an eerie reverberant timbre by the technology. Tom couldn’t help thinking how uncanny it was, as if Emanuel Vogt had passed over so that it was his sepulchral voice, sounding as if speaking from a watery grave – perhaps Davy Jones’ locker itself – that filled the car.

“Hello, Daddy,” she replied, playing the game, rolling her eyes at Tom.

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m not. That last bloody case was a bugger…”

“Daddy, please. I need to know where Leo was born.”

“And may I ask why?”

She looked at Tom, who shook his head. She replied hesitantly, “Do you think it’s possible that’s where he is? And that’s where Simone is?”

It was partly the technology, and partly his imagination Tom knew, but there seemed to be definite note of underlying anger in Emanuel Vogt’s voice as he said, “I do not know, Natasha. Neither do I care. And nor should you.”

They were passing through Tarrington as she said, “You know how worried I am about her.”

“We all are, Natasha. Leave it to the police.”

Something has been nagging at Tom, a memory that Emanuel Vogt’s voice summoned. It was at the moment that it took substance and he whispered, “North Wales…”

He immediately regretted this, for the surgeon demanded, “Is that Tom with you? Why aren’t you two at work?”

“I’ve got a day off booked,” she explained.

Somehow, Tom realised, Vogt Senior knew that there was something fishy going on: perhaps he had heard something in Tasha’s tone of voice. “Really?” he enquired dubiously.

“Really, Daddy.”

*******

Until now, the muses have always worked magic through him. It is an experience that Leo has come to expect when he looks at the works he has made; the muses, despite their carping, have always worked their sorcery through him. Not this time, though. Despite another layer of gold, Penelope’s lips are still swollen, the sunken eyes still visible; the features still appear too coarse. They look artificial, with slight folds and creases, as if the face beneath were not beautiful but grotesque.

He is well aware that she would never have had the beauty she had when alive, but he knows that he ought to have been able to approximate it, so that he could feel a faint echo of the joy and wonder that knowing her brought. She had such classical beauty, he ought to have been able to recreate at least an outline of what she was. What he has created, though, is a travesty. Her seven cervical vertebrae that he has filed, and polished with abrasive, then worked with a tiny iron wool brush, before varnishing three times in a lustrous lacquer, emphasise the mockery that he has made of her face, for there his skill has not abandoned him.

And the voices are gone. He knows why, for the silence condemns him. They are gone because his failure is absolute, and they have abandoned him in their disappointment; they abominate him. Now the head sits on the operating table next to an exquisite lyre that is stringless. Side by side they form a diptych that demonstrates his abject failure, each in a different way. He has come so far but, without sight of how to complete these final tasks, and therefore finish his encomium, he will never arrive. He hasn’t said much for months; hasn’t spoken to anyone except Simone. Much has been said in his head, if not to him, then certainly about him. These commentators have now gone and the gap they have left aches. It must be due to anger, or perhaps disgust; he has failed not only Penelope, but also Apollo; because it is a binary – only success or downfall – he has nothing to succour him as he looks at the lyre and the head, his greatest achievements and also his most unforgivable failures. Without that final step, he cannot arrive.

In a feeling of desolation that is almost crushing, he shouts out into the echoes, stands and looks around with eyes blinded by despair. Impulsively, he picks up the head, holds it high and thinks about dashing it down. Within a moment, realisation of what he is about to do crashes upon him and he screams. He puts the head back down and then is silent, distraught.

And the voices start up again

“Does he not realise, he can only achieve salvation now by completing the lyre?” Apollo is almost sorrowful.

Nete giggles. “But he has no more gut, my lord.”

“Yes, he does. He has a ready supply, he just hasn’t realised it yet.”

“Good gut, too.”

Apollo laughs. “The best. Young and strong and supple.”

*******

Beauchamp looked at his watch. Tom Newman and Natasha Vogt were twenty minutes early. Feeling rather pleased that his authority had been respected, he said pompously, “Well done.” He thought that Tom looked sheepish, although the girlfriend rather less so, as they stood in his office.

She asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Analyse it, just as we did before.”

“Supposing it’s not Penelope’s but Simone’s?”

“We won’t know that until we’ve done the DNA analysis,” he pointed out. Brierley came in, pausing when he saw the lyre in the box, staring at it before it asking, “What is that?”

“A simple type of lyre,” answered Tom

“Liar?”

“Yes, lyre.”

Brierley was patently none the wiser, but Beauchamp saw him looking at it, and thought there was something almost covetous in his gaze.

Beauchamp asked, “Something wrong, Sergeant?”

“Oh no, sir.”

“DNA analysis will take days,” Tom pointed out.

“This…” The inspector indicated the box, “… was delivered over a week ago. I don’t see that there’s any rush. However many deaths there have been, they occurred some days ago.”

Tasha looked at Tom who shrugged before saying, “I still think you should put all your resources into finding out where he was born and looking there.”

Beauchamp seemed to be enjoying himself. “Work that out from the poem, did you?”

“Yes…”

“Reads like rubbish to me; the kind of thing that might be written by a lunatic.”

“All the same…”

“It’s easier said than done, Doctor Newman. Amanda Banneker adopted him and she is now incapable of telling us. All this happened decades before electronic records, and he could have been born in any part of the United Kingdom, perhaps even outside its borders. It’s going to take a long time to find.”

Brierley, concentrating on the lyre, thought about things in his own, slow and incomparable style.

Tom volunteered, “It was in North Wales, Inspector.” Beauchamp looked at him in surprise. He added, “That’s what Tasha’s father thought anyway.”

Beauchamp assessed this. “Not exactly an accurate set of coordinates,” he remarked acidly. Brierley continued to peruse the lyre and considered his options.

*******

Simone’s anxiety blew up into high-pitched, silent terror when she looked out of the window from the room of the memento mori and saw her father walking back from the infirmary, just the other side of the gate at the far end of the garden. There was nothing human (or humane) about either his stride, or his face, which was dead, as if he were an animated cadaver. As he came through the gate – opening this as a blind man might, without looking down, just feeling for the catch – she could see more detail about his face. His eyes were dull; the lights are on, but there’s no one home, was the thought that sounded in her head, but that wasn’t true. Leo Banneker might not have been at home, but she feared others were very much in residence. His cheeks above his voluminous beard looked odd and, for a moment at least, she couldn’t identify what it was that was wrong; then she appreciated that he had been crying. Another sign of inner turmoil?

That ought to have triggered compassion within her and, indeed, it did, but that was nothing as to the huge surge of panic that lifted her and carried her giddily into the conviction that she had to run from him; the idea that she might confront him to try to pacify him was laughable now. The look in his eye, the one that told her what was happening in the head behind, shouted at her that she was no longer in a privileged position with regard to his murderous fugues, indeed that she might be the target again. She caught her breath to stop the tears, thought of the cyclist and the tramp (so cold, they must be), thought of that terrible night when he had lifted the hammer to crush her skull, and turned away from the window. She didn’t know precisely what was in his mind, but she had seen that look too many times before to ignore it.

She had to run.

*******

“What do we do now?”

They sat in the car again, in a pay-and-display over the road from the station; they hadn’t been allowed to stop in the police car park. Outside, rain was beginning to fall from a sky that told all it had barely started yet. Tom was squinting at his phone, while Tasha’s agitation led her to tap her thumbs on a steering wheel that she was gripping too tightly. He said slowly, “If I’m right, Leo’s taken Simone back into his childhood.”

“The asylum where he was born?”

“Yes, most likely. But I suppose he might have more connection with the house where he grew up. The one in Oswestry.”

Tasha’s said in exasperation, “But you convinced me that it was where he was actually ‘born’, wherever that was.”

“Which we think might be in North Wales. As Beauchamp said, that’s hardly a specific address.”

“So what’s the point of going to Oswestry?”

“If we can find the address where he was brought up, we can at least exclude that as his bolt hole…”

“How?”

“The Public Record Office. We look at old electoral rolls.”

There was a sort of sense in his words. “And if they’re not there? If you were right about the asylum?”

“Then we should on to Wrexham. It’s in the same direction.”

“Wrexham? What the hell for?”

“I’d like to know how many asylums there were in North Wales, and I think that’s the likeliest place where we’d find that information out.”

“And after that?”

“We visit them.”

Her first reaction had been to belittle all this, but then she thought about it. They had all day to waste. At least they would be doing something. She looked at the weather. “We may as well,” she said, although she felt far from certain that this was going to achieve anything other than a large bill for fuel. A thought occurred to her. “Supposing, after all this, it doesn’t exist anymore?”

After thinking about this, he replied slowly. “Maybe it doesn’t. But maybe, in Leo’s head at least, it does.”

And so they drove north and west, first to Leominster and then to Oswestry, away from the rain.

*******

Simone had run out of the front door, retaining enough wherewithal to close it as quietly as possible, then sprinting across the yard, hoping that her father would not stride zombie-like around the outside of the house where he might see her making off, but look first through the house. She had then run along the lane as fast as she could, not looking back. The phone box. It was all she could think of. She had thought to take the phone card from its hiding place in the kitchen cupboard and now it was clutched in her hand.

She knew that it was a long lane, but she had never before experienced it as such; now she was forced to accept that it was murderously lengthy. It twisted as if it had twitched frenetically just before being laid down. She had no idea how far she first ran and then walked until she came to its end where it met the single carriage main road where she remembered there was a phone box that might or might not be working. The box, a throwback to a time she didn’t remember, looked weird to Simone. She had only been past it a few times because, when she went to the village, she turned off the lane to cut across country long before reaching the main road. Was it her anguished imagination or was the box leaning slightly? Even when still some yards away she could see that it was green with some sort of growth, like the stuff she’d seen on the side of fish tanks, and she was fairly sure that it was going to be damp in there. When she opened the door, she discovered that she was right, but that wasn’t the worst. An acrid odour hit her and made her wince because at once her nose felt runny. She knew enough to recognise stale urine, or ‘pee-pee’ as she had once called it, before Grandpa Martin had admonished her and told the proper, grown-up name.

There was writing and there was just random drawing, all in thick black ink, on every surface, including the glass. Some of the words that she could see were, as her mother used to put it, ‘off colour’. The phone was old-fashioned but she knew how to use it. She picked up the blue receiver and saw that it was badly chipped and it was dirty. She felt much trepidation in putting it to her ear, and she tried to hold it slightly away from her face. She inserted the phone card; the number three came up on the small grey screen. Relief lifted her as she heard a dial tone.

She had memorized Natasha Vogt’s mobile number a long time ago, when she had first realized that she might never see her again; she had done it hoping that she might one day be able to contact her again, so that the friendship would not be completely severed. It had proved a useless piece of knowledge until this moment, though, when it came back to her easily despite her panic. It rang only twice before being answered; Natasha’s voice was wonderfully familiar as she said, “Yes?”

Tasha’s phone rang just before they reached the outskirts of Oswestry, surrounded by countryside that gave Tom the feeling they were passing off the end of his world. The radio was on but automatically silenced as the ringing filled the car. Tasha answered it, not recognising the number that had come up on the console. “Yes?”

“Natasha?” The voice was querulous, tearful and young.

Tasha gasped. “Simone? Is that you?”

“I need help, Natasha.” It was loud, too, with the same gargly distortion that had made her father sound as if he were speaking from the other side; in Simone’s case, it amplified her distress so that she sounded as if her flesh were about to dissolve in her own tears. Tom could hear that she was breathless but he wasn’t sure if that was fear – there was obviously a lot of that inside Simone – or possibly exhaustion. Had she been running? If so, who from? Her father?

“Tell me.” Tasha sounded more maternal than Tom would have thought possible; he had never heard her speak like that before. In those two words, he came to realise just how deep their relationship had been, even if it had been at a distance because of the restrictions Simone had lived under. He could see that Simone would have got a lot from such a relationship, and he could see that, for Tasha, it had also been a thing of succour.

“He’s…” There was a pause in which there was a subtle change in the sound, a certain deadening, before she said, “The credit on the card’s running out. I haven’t got long.”

Tom spoke up. “Tell us exactly where you are. We’ll find you.”

The response was shocked silence; he had intruded on a private party. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Tom, Simone.” Tasha glanced at him venomously. “He’s a friend.” But Simone didn’t seem to have had her fill of silence, for she said nothing and Natasha asked, “Where are you, Simone?”

She still hesitated, evidently worried that a stranger was with them, but eventually she replied. “Near the hospital.”

Tasha looked at Tom. “Which hospital?” she asked.

“Crowland Infirmary…”

The phone cut off.

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Twenty-two

“She was terrified, Tom.”

“I heard.” He was reflexively concentrating on the road while Tasha, driving as fast as she could, did battle with a Mercedes whose driver didn’t see why it should allow a red and white Mini to overtake it. Oswestry, although invisible, was metaphorically disappearing eastwards into the distance behind them and he felt as though they were accelerating into blank areas on the map. He hadn’t been asked what they should do.

“She’s in fear for her life, Tom. We’ve got to help her.” When he got out his phone, she asked, “What are you doing?”

“Calling the police.”

She took her eyes off the road to look at him. “Good idea.” She said it uncertainly, as if this were a slightly off-the-wall concept.

*******

Leo has wandered around the house, an automaton driven by a single imperative. For this time, Simone has been his daughter only in fact, not in emotion. She is merely a source of gut, a way to complete his great commemoration, his deification of Penelope who, at that time, is his one and only love. When he finds the house empty, the imperative withers and, with it, his innervation. He is spent. He is empty.

He sits heavily at the kitchen table, breathing through an open mouth, trying to come to terms with what he is, what he wants, what he fears. The house is cold, he realises; he has never before noticed. This puzzles him. He feels the harshness of the table’s surface, the roughness of the cloth of his trousers.

He is alone.

Simone is not here. The voices are not here. Penelope is no longer here.

Remorse and self-pity explode within him.

He has failed everyone and he is abandoned. The hair was a pathetic idea; his treatment of Penelope’s head has been feeble. His muses no longer lead him, they only excoriate him, when they bother to talk. He can no longer hide from the fact that he has failed.

He stands up, unsure of what he will do, but certain that he must do something.

He leaves the house.

Tom’s call to Inspector Beauchamp was actually picked up by Brierley. “You’ve heard from Simone Banneker?” he asked, just to get things straight in his mind.

“She sounded frightened.”

“What of?” It seemed to him to be a reasonable question.

“She didn’t say.”

Brierley considered this. “Not her father, then?”

“I just told you, she didn’t say.”

Beauchamp came in. He had just been told by Superintendent Rekorde that he could have two more men on the investigation for a week. He had also been told that he’d better get results to justify the extra expenditure. Brierley didn’t even straighten up. His next question, though, was a little more pertinent. “Where was she phoning from?”

“Somewhere around Crowland Infirmary.”

“Crowland Infirmary, eh?” he said for his superior’s benefit. Beauchamp had just sat down; when he appreciated the significance of the call, it had the effect of galvanising him. His attention became intensely focused on his sergeant, who said, “How long ago was this?”

Tom said, “About five minutes.”

Beauchamp demanded, “What’s happened?”

Brierley put his horny hand over the receiver. “Dr Newman says they’ve had a call from the girl, Simone Banneker. She’s in the vicinity of Crowland Infirmary.” His voice was perfectly modulated; no hint of schadenfreude, nothing of contempt, not a sign of satisfaction, but he somehow managed to radiate something that suggested he thought he had won big.

“Let me talk to him.”

The phone was passed over to Beauchamp who had come to his side. “Dr Newman? Where are you?”

“We’re nineteen minutes away from Crowland Village, if the sat-nav is correct.”

“What are you doing there?” He tried not to sound put out; he tried, anyway.

“We thought we’d take a drive out that way, Inspector. Nothing more.”

Beauchamp told him grimly, “Don’t be a hero, Doctor. We’re on our way. Just make sure the girl’s safe.”

“Don’t worry, we will.”

Beauchamp turned to Brierley. “Find out as much as you can, as quickly as possible, about Crowland Infirmary.”

“No need, Inspector. I know quite a lot about it already.”

“You do?”

Brierley’s smile failed to make him pretty. “It’s not just local knowledge I have, sir.”

Beauchamp wanted to hit him. “Spill it, then.”

“It was a mental hospital in Crowland Forest, south of Wrexham. It was the old style of lunatic asylum. Had all sorts in there, they did. Tried all types of treatment, too – drugs, electric, surgery…”

“You said ‘was’.”

“It was closed down in fifty-nine.”

“What happened to it then?”

In fact he had already reached the outer limits of Brierley’s cogniscence. “Dunno.”

“But it was knocked down, wasn’t it? Or converted for use as something else?”

Brierley’s shrug was accompanied by a petrous expression. “Not a fucking clue… sir.”

“So there could be something still standing on the site? Something that might be habitable?”

“Suppose so.”

“Do you know precisely where it was?”

“Oh, yes. No problem there.” He was assured.

Beauchamp had the distinct feeling that, once again, his sergeant had not been telling him everything, but now was not the time to discuss it. “Then let’s go.”

*******

Simone felt like crying when the credit on the phone card ran out. Her immediate thoughts were that there had been so little time, that surely she should have had longer… But then, as she regained her breath, she began to think objectively, and found herself regretting her actions

She had stepped out of that hateful phone box with its damp, disgusting smells and was taking in cold, fresh air, but was still feeling sick; it was not only because of that foul little space and its overwhelming dirtiness, it was also because of a sense of betrayal – that was far worse. She had brought outsiders in and endangered her promise to her mother. She had acted out of panic, nothing more. Her father’s behaviour had scared her, and she scolded herself for her weakness. She had shirked her duty, she now saw and, in so doing, had committed an act of disloyalty to him. He was trying so hard to fulfil his promise, and yet she had behaved like a scared child. She should have had more faith in him; over the months, hadn’t he proved how strong he was?

His face, though…

He had lost the fight when he came out of the forest.

He regained it the last time it happened, she told herself sternly. A car passed – one of only a few that ever did – and she instinctively hid from it, while a magpie hopped away and flew out of its path at the last moment. Almost before she was aware of it, she began to walk back up the lane to the house; to what was now her only home.

She told herself sternly that she had to have faith in him. She had made a huge mistake in ringing Natasha. She had been seduced by her memories of those times at Christmas, when Natasha and her parents had seemed to her to represent a perfect family, when she had tried so hard not to look at her own family and draw damaging comparisons, when she had afterwards wondered in her dreams what it would be like to live such a life.

She had been a fool. That life was not for her, not after so much had happened, so much had been done by her and to her, and not now that there was this strange, ‘Tom’, standing between them. And, she now saw, the Vogts had always looked so uncomfortable, as if they looked on Uncle Martin and her parents and saw something that seemed to them to be almost distasteful…

But maybe it would all still be all right. They would never find the house, not without help; and even if they did, she would just persuade them she was safe, and they would go away. She hadn’t actually given away any actual secrets about her father’s great project, after all.

Her panic subsiding and her sense of having wronged both her mother and her father, she hastened her pace back to the house. She resolved to be wary of her father, though.

*******

They found the village easily enough, and also a large patch of woodland that Google maps informed them was the forest in question, but regarding the site of a hospital, or even the existence of same, the internet was silent. They had managed to locate, via Tom’s Smartphone, articles regarding the history of it, but all these were, to a man, vague as to its precise location and were all keen to inform them that it had closed down decades ago. There was no address, or even a postcode. A thought whispered mischievously to Tom; oblivion doesn’t have a postal address. There were few people to stop, and those there were all proved unhelpful, either because of linguistic problems or ignorance; Tasha couldn’t help but suspect that for some of them, these were feigned.

It did not help that the Forest seemed impenetrable with no obvious roads in. They stopped eventually at a small shop in Crowland village; the whole place looked diuturnal yet overlooked. There was something quaint in some of the houses and in the village green with its well cared-for war memorial, but that was tinged with sadness, or perhaps resignation. It ought to have been picturesque and, had the sky not been grey and angry – almost Cimmerian – and the wind cold, maybe it would have been. It was deserted so they went into the shop.

“Can you help us?”

The woman was in her fifties or sixties, unmade up, with cataracts; her smile was broad and wide, revealing slightly crooked teeth that were so brown they might have been wooden. “I hope so,” she said, and they believed her.

“We’re looking for Crowland Infirmary.”

“That’s gone, been gone a long time.” She had a high fluting Welsh accent, one that would have been perfect for a lullaby.

“Can you remember where it was?”

“In the Forest.”

“But where in the Forest?”

The woman’s frown told her as much as her answer. “I don’t know,” she said apologetically.

Frustration got the better of Tasha. “Doesn’t anyone know? How can a hospital disappear?”

“It wasn’t a normal hospital, dear,” she explained. “I mean, no one from round here ever got admitted there. No call to, if you know what I mean.”

“We’re actually looking for a young girl,” explained Tom.

“She won’t be in the Infirmary,” the shopkeeper pointed out. “There haven’t been any patients in it for a long time.”

“She wouldn’t be a patient.”

“Well, there are a lot of young girls around here; none of them to do with the Infirmary, though.”

“Her name’s Simone. Simone Banneker. She’s in her teens. Dark hair.” Tasha couldn’t think what else to add to the description.

The woman was sitting by the till in front of a short conveyor belt. The rubber of the belt was marked and starting to fray. She said thoughtfully, “I can’t think of a young girl like that round here.” Her voice was oddly supercilious, as if she knew things that Tasha could never hope to understand.

They had by now lost most of their hope; their faces clearly signalled this, because the woman said solicitously, but again also perhaps slyly, “I’m very sorry.”

Tasha said forlornly, “She’d be with her father, Leo, my uncle.” She began to add a description of him, even as it occurred to Tom that the two they sought might well have changed their appearance if they really didn’t want to be found.

The last two words had worked something of a miracle though, for there was a paradigm shift in the woman’s attitude. “Your uncle?”

“That’s right. He married my Aunt Penelope… although I think she might be dead. We’ve lost contact, you see…”

The woman’s appearance had changed, and it was obvious that she was looking at Tasha through different eyes. Staring intently at her, she said, “Has it not struck you that they might not want to be found?”

Tom could tell things had altered, although he didn’t know why. They were in a different place talking to someone else entirely, and the underlying premise now was that help might well be available. Tasha’s response was carefully considered. “I’m worried about Simone. Her father’s been unwell, you see.”

The woman nodded. “Yes, that’s possible.”

“Do you know where we might find them?” asked Tom, his voice low and calm, almost casual.

The woman’s lips pursed, obscuring the ligneous teeth. “I think I might, my dears.”

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Twenty-three

They weren’t surprised that they hadn’t spotted the lane that led into a track that led to the house that they were told Simone lived in, because it left the main road at a painfully acute angle through a dense copse of trees. They had quite possibly driven past it on several occasions when they were looking for the Infirmary, but it was without a signpost on a stretch of road that was featureless apart from trees; only the shopkeeper’s advice to “turn right down the path by the old phone box” allowed them to see it. It seemed to go on forever, in part because it was agonisingly varicose, in part because it was long; by its end it was unmade and the tall hedgerows, given the youth of the year, surprisingly thick and grasping. If they had not believed that they had been told the truth, they would have abandoned this particular course after fifteen minutes.

It came to a point where the road surface was so cracked with potholes, and the central growth of weeds and tufted grass so high, that they were forced to abandon the car just off of the carriageway. They began to walk through the cold, damp air, Tom telling himself sternly that it was all worth it, that they weren’t a pair of fools. His headache of the morning – hangover, he admonished himself sadly – had never really left him but, until now, at least it had been quiescent; now it was beginning to roar again, a beast with not only a sore throat, but a throbbing tooth abscess to boot.

The house didn’t deign to come into view until more than thirty-five minutes had plodded past. It wasn’t in any way special, other than in shabbiness and general disrepair. There were three casement windows on the top floor, and two on the bottom on either side of a rotting door that was only partly covered in flaking green paint. There was an equally dishevelled garage opposite a gravelled yard, and it was all hemmed in by a thick wall of trees that might have been a standing army waiting in umbrageous gloom, perhaps guarding the house. A sound of crows had been steadily growing as they had progressed, and was now shockingly loud. The place seemed deserted.

“What do we do now?” asked Tasha. She whispered, as if she thought they were being watched.

Perhaps they were, acknowledged Tom. “We could knock on the door,” he said.

He could tell that she wasn’t keen, and he couldn’t blame her. He remembered how frightened Simone had sounded; he had the feeling that there was something inside that they might not want to meet. “Or?”

“We could go round the back first. Scout out the territory.”

Without further discussion, they did this, Tom thinking that they were in deep trouble if this was the wrong house. The rain had chased them and was just arriving. There was no one in the small, poorly cultivated garden. Given the time of year, it wasn’t surprising that it was relatively bare, but someone had obviously tended it, marking out small plots and rows, weeding it and hoeing the soil. The thick, claustrophobic woodland – unbroken except for a narrow pathway that led from a gate at its far edge – could have hidden battalions of watchers, and the cold, dark windows of the house seemed to show bleak awareness of them. Each pattering drop hit each leaf with barely a noise, but there were so many of them, and there were so many leaves to strike, that they were both aware of growing noise from the Forest, one that might turn into a mighty roar should the wind get up and rain grow torrential. They both had the impression that the house was subterranean, sunk below the level of the world; it only added to the weirdly lipothymic air of the place. The back door was unlocked when Tom tried it. He glanced at Tasha, then pushed it open it quietly. She had no choice but to follow.

The back door – as decrepit as that at the front – opened into a plain kitchen that looked and smelled as if it hadn’t been redecorated or even touched for fifty years. There were Formica-topped work surfaces, a decades-old refrigerator, and a basic electric oven and hob. Tasha noted that it was all quite clean. “Simone?” she called softly, although Tom wished she had remained silent.

Nothing.

What had she expected, she asked herself? Simone Banneker had been nurtured in a strange place by strange kin. Her father appeared to be turning her mother into musical instruments and she wasn’t even totally certain that the poor woman was dead (or had died naturally). Of course the place where she lived was going to be odd. But this odd? Where was she?

They walked to the door to the hallway. “Simone?” Again, caution made Tasha’s words soft, as if the odd mad father hanging about might not hear a gentle call meant only for his daughter. Not for the first time in all this, a question occurred to her that she found not a little disturbing; Simone was a victim, wasn’t she? She had to be. Her father was the one whose moral, intellectual and emotional compass had become demagnetised and was spinning around without heed to the outside world. Simone had to be the normal one. She had to be.

*******

Simone sits in the memento mori room, the door shut, her eyes closed. She has always felt close to her mother in this place, and she needs to feel so now. Her relief that her father was gone from the house when she returned was always going to feel disgusting to her, for it illumined just how treacherous she had become to her parents. She has done exactly what she had faithfully promised she would never do; instead of aiding him in every respect, she has sneaked away and told on him; his life’s work is endangered. Nothing will come of it, she is sure. Natasha lives a long way away, and the house is difficult to find. There was the stranger’s voice, though.

Natasha’s expression comes to her. My friend...

She sees quite clearly that Natasha meant, my boyfriend.

Simone feels oddly let down by this idea, and not just because she feels concern that an outsider has some knowledge of her secrets. After all, what can it matter? Soon, her father will have finished, and they will be free of the burden that he has set himself.

No, her real sorrow is because she cannot stop herself from thinking that Natasha had somehow forsaken her.

She hears her name called by Natasha.

*******

“Do I take it you know where you’re going?” asked Beauchamp, doing so nervously because he was starting to ponder anew the mental health of Sergeant Brierley and because the car was rocketing along the A49 towards Ludlow at up to a hundred miles per hour on the straight stretches, but only slowing slightly at the bends, even the sharper ones. The car was performing manoeuvres that rocked the inspector forcefully around the cabin. Cars travelling at a legal pace had been treated with disdain; if Brierley couldn’t pass them, he merely switched on the blue LEDs and blasted them with the siren until they gave up and pulled aside. It had been like that since they left Hereford. When Beauchamp had been unsuccessful in trying to find the precise location of their intended destination, Brierley (with the demeanour of a man who knows secrets) had said merely, “No problem.” His affect had been odd. His bulbous nose was flecked with vivid lines like crimson lint that glowed in the cold, Beauchamp noticed. He was chewing something that, at first, Beauchamp thought was gum but now he was very much afraid was his own tongue.

“Oh, yes.” Brierley’s voice held something sly within its grasp. This in itself was worrying to Beauchamp. “Haven’t been there for quite a while, though.”

When they sprinted to the car, they had emerged from the station in a deluge that had soaked them both. Brierley had merely run through it, unheeding of the water that hit his heavy overcoat directly or splashed up from the tarmac; Beauchamp had held his mac over his head, although his feet had been soaked. Now, because the car was hot, the sergeant was steaming into the atmosphere as if subliming. The air was foetid for so many reasons.

“How come?”

A car flashed its lights at them as they sped towards it on the wrong side of the road coming out of a bend, but that was a regular event. Beauchamp was hanging on to the handle above his door and was aware how sweaty his grip was. Brierley stared ahead but, alarmingly, without blinking and without actually seeming to focus. It was as if his attention were on something ahead through space-time, an uncanny and unnerving impression. He was slow in answering. “My Gramps was a patient. I remember visiting him.”

“Your grandfather? He was in the same place as Leo Banneker?”

Brierley considered his response. “When I first saw Banneker, I thought he was weird. Then Penelope told me about his mother and where she had been put; I mentioned it to him, kind of friendly, but he just went fucking apeshit. Didn’t want to be reminded, I suppose, the prick. One of the reasons I ended up smacking him one.”

“Why didn’t you say this earlier?”

“Didn’t know till an hour or two ago you was interested."

Beauchamp’s mobile phone began to ring. It was the station; more specifically, it was Superintendent Rekorde. “Sir?”

“What’s going on, Inspector?”

Beauchamp explained.

“Do you want back up? I could get North Wales Police to meet you there.”

For the second time in less than an hour Beauchamp thought that Superintendent Richard Rekorde might actually have a use in life. “I’d be grateful, sir.”

*******

Simone came down the stairs slowly, almost fearfully, bearing a look of terror, and Tom wondered why. Was her father about, perhaps? He looked around nervously, thoughts of Psycho not far away. Tasha didn’t seem to have such fears as she rushed to meet the young girl at the bottom of the stairs and hugged her. Simone didn’t reciprocate with quite the same fervour, he noted. Tasha said, “We came as soon as we could.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“What?”

“It’s alright, really.” She was apologising.

Tasha frowned. “What do you mean?”

The girl from Tasha’s photograph drew back. “I shouldn’t have phoned you.” For the first time, Tom could see her in full. She wore jeans that were too short, a pale yellow blouse that looked too old for her and not quite well-fitting, perhaps because of multiple washes. She was pretty, but was ungilded by make-up.

“You were frightened. We could hear it.” Tasha was puzzled.

“I panicked.”

“What about?”

She wouldn’t or couldn’t say. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“Shouldn’t or needn’t?” asked Tom.

“Needn’t.”

Neither of them believed her. “Perhaps we should sit down,” suggested Tom. “I could do with a cup of tea.”

Simone was about to protest perhaps, but Tasha picked up what he was trying to do and added quickly, “So could I. We’ve driven a long way today.”

Simone’s eyes widened and once more Tom wondered what was lurking nearby, what bogeymen might be looking, or listening, or longing to attack. She clearly thought about prevarication but eventually acquiesced, though reluctantly.

*******

Brierley said in a thoughtful voice, “I suppose I fell in love with Penelope Waldeyer.”

Startled, Beauchamp guessed, “When you worked around the house?”

“Yep.”

Beauchamp digested this. “This is presumably how you knew about the paedophilia.”

“I never knew for certain – Penelope never actually said anything – but I could see the way her father looked at her…”

“And you were never particularly sorry he was dead.”

“It’s good for the rest of us when some people die; occasionally the sooner the better, I say.”

Beauchamp processed this. “Penelope’s almost certainly dead, too.” He paused. “Is that a problem for you?”

Brierley laughed. “Naw. It was a fucking long time ago, Inspector. Lot of cider under the bridge since then.”

They sped on.

*******

The tea was terrible.

“You sounded very scared, Simone.” The tone that Tasha used was gentle; Tom imagined that in her time as a nurse she had used it many times.

She was still denying that there was anything wrong. “I’m sorry.”

Tom said, “You live here with your parents?”

She answered. “Yes.”

He had read that it was easier to spot a lie when one can only hear it but, with Simone, he didn’t need to close his eyes. “Where are your mother and father?” he asked.

“Mummy’s out. Daddy’s… working.”

Tasha looked at him from over her mug; she at least was persevering with the liquid. He said gently, “We know about your mother, Simone.”

“No! No, you don’t!” she said immediately.

“We saw the pipe.” She just stared at him; her eyes were perhaps wider, though, and he did not see her blink. “We know…” He searched for the right words, “… How it came to be.” There was unmistakable portent in the way he said it. The girl just stared at him.

Tasha asked again, “Where are your mother and father, Simone?”

It was her turn to be the object of scrutiny. Simone said slowly and reluctantly, “Mummy’s dead.” She spoke as if, by doing so, she would make that which was dream a thing of awful reality.

Tasha was sitting next to her; she reached out, but Simone didn’t react. Tom could feel something changing, but whether it was in the girl, or in the room or in himself, he couldn’t say. “How did she die?”

Tasha proffered him a look from over her shoulder. That’s rather insensitive, it said, but he thought it might be important to know. Tasha said to Simone, “It doesn’t matter now.”

Simone pulled away. There were tears in her eyes, but not in her voice. “It was an accident. She fell down the stairs.”

“It’s not important,” asserted Tasha.

“Did she hit her head?” asked Tom, earning himself a look of annoyance.

“Daddy said she broke her neck.” But she was frowning as she said this, as if she were thinking deeply about this for the first time.

“What’s wrong, Simone?” he asked gently.

She dismissed it with a shake of the head. “Nothing.”

He was about to press her but he at last caught his girlfriend’s body language, and subsided. He was intrigued, though.

“Where’s Uncle Leo now?” asked Tasha.

Simone was distracted. “In his workshop, I think.”

Tasha was about to ask to meet him, when Tom said quickly, “I think we need to get you away from here, Simone.”

This energised her. “No!”

“Why not?”

“I can’t leave him.”

The vehemence had sparked again; he felt curiously impotent in its ferocious face. Tasha said gently, “Do you look after him, Simone?”

She nodded without words, but her expression was one of fierce pride.

“He depends on you, doesn’t he?”

Another nod, equally confident. The contrast of this person with the child who had been terrified enough to beg for help was arresting. Tom sighed. The situation was even more complicated than he had feared. He glanced at his watch. Assuming they could find the place, the police would be there shortly.

Simone abruptly asked him, “How would somebody die if they broke their neck??” The transmutation had brought about a tinge of sharpness to her tone.

“If it were a high cervical break, very quickly. If it were lower down the neck, it wouldn’t kill them immediately. They’d be tetraplegic…”

“What does that mean?”

“Unable to move their arms or legs.”

Tasha asked gently, “Was Aunt Penelope like that?”

But Simone shook her head. “She died within minutes…I think.”

“You think?”

“I wasn’t there...”

Tom concluded, “Then it must have been a high cervical break.”

Yet this information seemed to disquiet her, and neither of them could see why it should.

She asked, “How do you know all this?”

He smiled as he always did when anyone asked him his job; there was usually a reaction of some kind, whether interest or repugnance. “I’m a pathologist.” Her face told him she didn’t understand. “I do post mortem examinations.”

“Where is your mother’s body, Simone?” asked Tasha.

But she wasn’t interested. Instead, she said to herself, “He said she broke her neck…” and it was in a curiously lost voice, one that was nearly childlike. Then, in a contrastingly adult, almost business-like voice, “Would she be able to talk… If she’d broken her neck, I mean?”

He shook his head. “No. She wouldn’t have been able to breathe, you see.”

And Simone smiled.

Tom looked at Natasha, wondering if she too had been inexplicably chilled by that smile.

Simone saw that look, but she was thinking deeply. This strange man coming into her world was distorting things. He was saying horrible things, raising nasty spectres, banging away at the things she knew to be true… Why? Why was he being so horrible?

She had always known this day – this man, perhaps – would come. Her life with her father had been far from easy, but it had had so much about it that she now found she craved and was afraid that she had just now destroyed by ushering them in. She saw for the first time that the unimagined monsters outside the walls were far more dangerous than those she was familiar with. Their danger came from the light they brought with them, not from them directly. One of them was Natasha after all, and she was one of the few people that Simone had ever truly trusted.

Her mother’s death had been a terrible, terrible accident. Her father’s actions were a direct response to a dying wish, as were hers. She had tripped and fallen down the stairs, dying just before Simone arrived. Simone had been doing as her mother wanted.

She hadn’t heard her mother’s words.

But if she’d broken her neck as her father had said, she wouldn’t have been able to ask for any promises…

Her father was driven by the commands of his muses…

Only of his muses.

Her mother had had no other injuries.

She broke her neck. It was a terrible accident...

Perhaps.

*******

Alarmingly, the roads had grown narrower but incredibly, especially as it was now bucketing down, the car’s speed remained largely unaltered. Only the tightest of bends brought pressure from Brierley’s foot on the brake pedal, and then only the minimum that was required, and as late as possible. As a demonstration of driving skills, it was impressive but as an experience, it was stupefying. Brierley had sunk into taciturnity; he was still chewing whatever it was he had in his buccal cavity slowly and with a degree of determination that was not so much grim as baneful. The vapour had stopped rising from the serge of his overcoat because it had dried out, leaving the car’s interior atmosphere miasmic. Aware that the question was full of misplaced resonance, Beauchamp asked meekly, “Are we there yet?”

Brierley said nothing for a moment as the car rocked sickeningly because he drove at speed over a soggy but dead badger. “Not far,” he promised and, curiously, his voice sounded happy.

*******

Simone stood up. She collected all the mugs and put them in the sink. “I’ll go and get Daddy,” she said. “He can tell you what happened.”

She left by the back door before they could argue.

“What do we do now?” asked Tasha.

“Wait?”

Neither was sure if that was a good idea, but they felt they had no choice.

The next ten minutes lasted a long time. The rain got heavier, the sound of it hitting the leaves of the forest louder. At least it’s quietened the crows, thought Tom as he looked out of the window. Simone had gone into the forest, he saw; the gate at the bottom of the garden had been closed and was now slightly ajar.

*******

Brierley’s pledge to take them to the Infirmary was good. All the signs that indicated where it had once been were long gone, and the access road was lengthy, curved and overhung with trees, so that there was no possibility of identifying what lay at its end. Brierley turned into it at such a speed that the car slid on the drenched surface. Within two minutes, they were at the rusted gates, which were securely padlocked.

Beauchamp was erudite. “Shit!”

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Twenty-four

“She’s not coming back,” said Tasha quite abruptly. Until that moment she had been quiet, appearing far more patient than Tom felt. “She’s run away.”

“She went into the forest,” he observed.

“What shall we do? Wait for the police?”

It was tempting for him, no doubt about that. Something was bothering him, though. The change from frightened child to calmed, controlled, or controlling, adult had been striking for him. And there had been that smile, too. That had signaled someone who had just seen a glimpse of truth, and perhaps a whole vista of deception. “What did you think of her?” he asked, coming to the table.

“I don’t understand.”

“Has she changed?”

“Oh Lord, yes.”

“In what way?”

“She’s grown up a lot.”

“She wasn’t like that before they disappeared?”

“Nothing like it. Why?”

He wondered how she’d react when she heard him say, “She gave me the creeps.”

There was a pause, after which she surprised him by saying, “I see what you mean.” Then, “But she’s had to grow up fast, what with her mother dying like that.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “She knows what her father’s been doing, too. She knew about the pipe and what it signified.”

The implication of that washed over her and she whispered, “Yes, she does, doesn’t she?”

“She’s not a child anymore, Tash. Far from it.” Before she could answer, he opened the back door and said, “Come on, let’s see where she’s gone.”

*******

“Daddy?”

She was scared but, as always seemed to be case, she was impelled by urges that were not in her control; this time, however, the urge to protect her father and fulfil the promise to her mother was not among them. He sat with his back to the operating table, facing away from her. On the table to his right was the lyre, to his left a woman’s head covered in cracked gold; it looked funny, though. Almost, but not quite, human; almost, but not quite, like her mother. She walked over to it; he didn’t move. Careful not to touch, she examined it minutely, especially the plinth made of cervical vertebrae. Having done this, she looked away, and disgust flooded her; not just loathing for this man that she called her father, but self-loathing too. She had aided him in this.

“Daddy?” she repeated. She was wet from her sprint through the forest, but unaware of this. She stepped back from the table and raised her voice. “Natasha’s at the house. She came looking for me.”

Nothing.

“She’s with a man.”

Still nothing.

“He knows about how people die.” She began to move silently around the room. “You said Mummy slipped and fell down the stairs.” She could tell nothing from his back, not least because there was no movement. She continued moving around the perimeter of the circular room that was so cold and so still. “He says that if Mummy broke her neck, she wouldn’t have been able to talk.” She continued her circuit, always looking at him. “Mummy didn’t die like that, did she?” She was side on to him now. “There’s no sign of a break now, because there never was one.”

She could see that he was hunched forward, staring vacantly ahead. Was he hearing her? Maybe, but was he listening to her? She couldn’t have said. Perhaps he was paying attention to his muses; she wondered what they were telling him. Although he must have been capable of seeing her, he didn’t cast his gaze in her direction as he said in a low voice, “She tripped and fell. It was terrible; she screamed as she fell. She only lived a few minutes longer. There was nothing I could do.”

Simone’s whole head was pulsing partly with pain and sorrow, but also with self-loathing; he spoke in a monotone that was near sub vocal, but she heard in his voice something that sounded to her sometimes like falsehood, sometimes like wish fulfilment. She moved directly in to what should have been his line of sight. “Where were you when she fell, Daddy?” she asked.

No change in the look on his face, in his attention that was on the past, or perhaps the farther distance or, conceivably, on that which had never been. He said, “I was upstairs as well.”

She was now standing directly in front of him, receiving the full force of his stare and getting nothing at all. “You said that before she passed away, she made you promise.” She was reciting the story, the mantra, the code by which they had lived their lives since her mother had died. She felt sick. She was dismantling his world; she was dismantling hers.

“Yes.”

“What did she say, Daddy?”

Without obviously moving any muscle, his attention was contracted until it came slowly upon her. Hesitantly, he said, “That I was to turn her into music, and that you were to help me do it.”

“And nothing else mattered?”

“No.”

“But she couldn’t have, if she’d broken her neck.”

He opened his mouth, but for no reason. Her voice trembled as she asked, “Was it Mummy who said that, or was it the voices?” Still he said nothing; she found this unendurable.

“How did she die, Daddy?”

There was a long pause. He looked at her, but his mind’s eye was looking back into the past.

“How, Daddy?” she asked again, softly.

And finally, he whispered, “I smothered her…” His words were full of something that might have been wonder. “Apollo said that I should…”

“What are the voices saying now?” she asked in whisper.

Leo stood up slowly .

“She has come to him. How nice of her…”

“He should kill her, my lord, don’t you think?”

“She is offering herself.”

*******

Beauchamp’s attempts to get through the gates were, as he had expected when he first saw them, fruitless. His frustration as the rain undid all the good work of the car’s climate control – in fact, it was as if it made contact with his skin in all sorts of uncomfortable places – was held in check, but only just. He turned back to Brierley, who had taken no part in his fruitless antics. “We’ve got to get inside,” he shouted above the sound of water sloshing around them. “Do you know anyone who might have a key?”

Brierley, as wet as his inspector, stood as a stoic might once have done. “No,” he said simply.

“Damn!” Then, because it was clearly inadequate, added, “Damn, fucking damn!”

Brierley belched. The water might have been sunshine to him. He said, “I might know another way.”

“A back entrance, you mean?”

Brierley gave him an odd look, bobbed his large noggin from side to side, and turned down the corners of his mouth. “You could say that.”

*******

The rain hadn’t penetrated Crowland Forest, but somehow the dark skies made it gloomier than ever. Tom and Tasha walked down the path, unsure of where they were going, but reasonably confident that they were going the same way as Simone because the path was straight, without forking. They came to the point at which it turned twice sharply and were momentarily nonplussed, but it was obvious that they had to follow the path. After a wearying walk, they came out of the cover of the canopy, into gloomy light, confronted by the chain-link fence fighting its way out of rampaging undergrowth. The place where the fence had been cut and peeled back was obvious, even through the grass and weeds. The sight of the hospital, though, arrested them. There was no lightning in the sky, no thunder to shake the ground, but the sky had become deep grey, and the building – clearly long abandoned but somehow redolent of its past – seemed to be telling them something scary.

They ducked through the fence, already well soaked. “Where now?” asked Tasha.

Tom didn’t know any more than her, but he pointed straight ahead to a pair of double doors; it was, he reasoned, as good as any other direction.

*******

“Are you sure about this?” Beauchamp’s leather shoes were ruined. He felt as if they had turned to cardboard around besocked feet that squelched loudly as they trudged through dense, unforgiving woodland.

Brierley was leading him, but leading him where? “Yep,” was the response thrown back over the sergeant’s shoulder.

“This is the only way to get to it? We couldn’t have gone by the road?”

“Nope.”

“How far is it now?”

“Not far.”

After another few yards of trudgery, he asked incredulously, “What kind of entrance is this?”

Brierley stopped and turned. He thought about his answer. “A little-known one.” He turned and moved on again. He let a branch, that he had pushed out of the way as he strode forward, swing back into Beauchamp’s face. “Sorry,” he called, without looking back.

*******

Apollo says, “She’s an enemy to him now.”

Nete, in a tenor of faux disappointment, comments, “She’s been talking to agents of her grandfather.”

“She has betrayed him.” This from Mese.

Apollo agrees. “No wonder he is failing, and despondent. How can he succeed when his own daughter works against him?”

Simone has said something. He tries to concentrate on it. He recites the story of how Penelope died so tragically. It is always there, somewhere in his head, the terrible events of that day. He is looking at nothing; it pulls at his eyes, but he cannot turn away.

“It was terrible,” remarks Mese. “Such a shame.”

It was, he remembers.

Simone asks another question. Apollo says wryly, “What does it matter to her?”

He answers though, telling her where he was. He remembers that he was behind her when she fell…

Not right behind her, though.

“He was though, wasn’t he?” giggles Mese.

“Shhh!” Hypate scolds her.

She tripped, Leo is sure. He recalls a dreadful accident, nothing more. He didn’t push her, no matter what the voices might have suggested. Simone is talking about the promise, the one that has underpinned his world since that dreadful day. Why does she want to know about it again? She knows how it went.

“She is a bitch, isn’t she, my lord?”

Apollo sighs and agrees with Nete. “I am afraid she is, my child. I’m afraid she is.”

He just cannot understand. Why is Simone going over this again? Penelope died, but before she died, she begged Leo to make her into something wonderful, so that she would not be forgotten. He remembers it so well. He could do nothing, other than hold her as she died, looking into the mirror…

A reflection that lies, as Simone is doing now. It shows him smothering Penelope, his hand covering the mouth and pinching the nose of his unconscious wife. There is a struggle, but he grips her head strongly and does not let it thrash.

It’s not true. Martin has somehow tampered with it. Simone, perhaps, acting on his instructions… He got rid of all the mirrors, there can’t be another one, not even in his memory, surely.

“Martin Waldeyer is a clever and deadly enemy,” remarks Mese. “Leo must never underestimate him.”

“But the fool has,” says Hypate coldly.

Apollo whispers to Hypate, and his voice is so close to Leo’s own ear. “She has to die. Only then can he succeed. Only then can he defeat Martin Waldeyer. If he’d done it last time, things would be alright now.”

Leo at last becomes aware of Simone as a being, as someone in the room. He rises.

“DADDY, NO!”

The faint but obviously terrified cry gives Tom and Tasha a sense of direction that the dark and desolate building has denied them. Until that, they’d stumbled around without context in deepening shades of cold, echoing gloom; after it, they begin to run, first down a corridor past wheelchairs, rotting mattresses and, bizarrely, a mannequin, then up a flight of stairs and through double doors.

Beauchamp and Brierley hear the call as well, although faintly because they are still in the forest. They have just reached the break in the fence that Tom and Tasha went through a few minutes ago. Brierley, panting heavily has stopped for his superior to catch up. Beauchamp at once wriggles through the hole and begins sprinting to the hulk of the infirmary building, leaving Brierley to sigh and struggle through on his own. In fact, Tom and Tasha have wandered away from the correct route and Beauchamp is closer; accordingly, he arrives at the opposite end of the corridor at the same time.

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Twenty-five

Simone emerges from the anaesthetic room, her hands and sleeves coated in blood that has splashed up onto her face, covering her neck and the front of her blouse. Her face is empty, her eyes speak of shock. They converge on her, but it is Tasha who is first to touch her. “Oh, my God,” she whispers as she enfolds her. Over their heads, Beauchamp and Tom exchange looks; without speaking they proceed into the anaesthetic room and thence into the operating theatre.

“Jesus,” says Beauchamp, his voice low, so as not to excite the echoes, and sounding as if he is in the presence of magnificence. Tom doesn’t speak, just glances around the room at the equipment that ranges from the industrial to the precise, from that which has medical use to that which a carpenter or electrician might employ, from the delicate to the heavy. And at the lyre… And at the head…

Beauchamp, who has moved quickly around the room ignoring the detail in his quest for the source of the blood on Simone’s blouse, shouts, “Here.”

Tom follows him.

Leo Banneker is behind the operating table, his throat slit deeply and wide. There is a great deal of blood, but Tom squats down and puts two fingers to the side of the neck just to check that the obvious is not deceiving them. He is not used to feeling warm, pliant flesh and the sensation is horrible to him – stiff, refrigerated human meat is a much more comfortable thing to touch – but he applies pressure for a full minute before deciding that he is not being precipitate in their assumption that Leo Banneker is truly dead. In that space of time, Brierley arrives, breathing in a heavy, bronchial way. He sees the lyre and the head, and just stands there; Beauchamp has been similarly frozen in his regard of these for several seconds.

Tom is still crouched down by the body. “He’s dead,” he says without looking up. He is examining the wound as best he can without disturbing too much. His fingertips – but only those – are covered in cooling, congealing blood.

Brierley breathes, “Shit Macgregor! Are they what I think they are?” He means the head and the lyre. He moves forward, as if entranced, puts out a hand, remembers himself just in time, just before Beauchamp is about to warn him not to touch. Tom stands. “I would say they are the head and backbone of the late Mrs Penelope Banneker, yes.”

Beauchamp seems more appalled than enchanted. He warns Brierley, “Don’t touch. We’ll need them for evidence.”

Brierley looks at him, his face suggesting that he wants to argue, to disobey, but he decides against this, because he nods, albeit slowly and slightly. Tom stands up. They are all startled by a voice from the door. “His muses were telling him to kill me. It must have been the only way he could stop them.” Simone is there, Tasha behind her.

“We heard you cry out.” Beauchamp is staring at her. Tom is struck by how calm she seems; he thinks that perhaps Beauchamp is of a similar opinion.

“He was coming at me with the knife, and suddenly he stopped and put it to his own throat...” The pause is because she breaks into tears and Tasha holds her by the shoulders. “He had done it before I could stop him.”

Tom examines the objects on the operating table. Although golden, the head looks odd; it isn’t beautiful, or even particularly worked. It is ugly. The plinth on which it stands is arresting, though, and clearly something of a companion piece to the lyre, which is stunning. He feels Brierley’s eyes on him. Before Beauchamp is even aware of what Tom is doing, he picks up a screwdriver that is beside it and scrapes some of the gold off the swollen lips. “That’s evidence!” is the inspector’s outraged cry. Tom says only, “She didn’t die from falling down the stairs. I think she’s been asphyxiated. See the how blue and swollen they are?”

Simone is still crying but she says then, “He killed her. He always said that he didn’t, but he did. The voices told him to, and he couldn’t stop himself. He made it all up.”

It is difficult to tell whether her words carry remorse or spite.

*******

They went back to the house, Tom leading, Tasha holding Simone with Beauchamp and Brierley before and behind the pair. Beauchamp called Rekorde and updated him, advising him that the abandoned hospital was a crime scene and that the North Wales Police (who were nearly there) would need heavy duty bolt cutters to get in. He also requested an ambulance at the house. They sat in the kitchen and waited; Tasha made tea that they all drank gratefully. Eventually the ambulance and a police car arrived, strobing blue light down the hall. Tasha went with Simone to the ambulance and Beauchamp ordered the two police officers to stand by. Returning, he said to Brierley, “Let’s look around.”

He was irked when Tom asked, “Mind if I come?”

He debated, was on the point of telling him to stay there, then relented. It would be churlish, he decided. “If you must,” he said gruffly.

The house that the Bannekers had lived in was a squalid place, without human comfort, without a sense of home; Simone had not known enough to make it otherwise, and her father had not been able to see enough to care. It was after sunset now and the Welsh night was indeed bible black; the lights were low wattage, doing little more than adding a touch of jaundice to their features and further antiquity to the fixtures and fittings. Tom thought that it must have been hell to live there through the winter, hardly better in summer. There was little of interest until they reached the room with the memento mori, where they all stopped and looked on in amazement. Tom was silent. Brierley began to breathe oddly, as if an asthmatic attack were imminent. Beauchamp said, “My God!” He stopped them from going in. “Evidence,” he proclaimed. “I don’t want anyone in here until the crime scene boys have been over it thoroughly.”

He turned to leave, assuming that Brierley and Tom would follow, but Brierley stayed put. “I’ll remain here, sir. Make sure no one tampers with anything.”

Beauchamp stared at him for a moment, before saying reluctantly, “I suppose that’s a good idea.”

The two of them went back into the kitchen. Simone was in the ambulance at the front of the house and Tasha was with her; they were alone because the police officers were searching the garden and the outbuildings. “Did she do it?” Beauchamp asked quietly.

“Do what?”

“Kill her father?”

Tom looked at him steadily. “You heard her.”

“I think she did. I think she came to realise that he’d lied to her and used her in committing the most heinous crimes, and she wanted revenge.”

Tom had also been speculating. He said, “There are no practice nicks at either of the corners of the incision across his throat. It’s very unusual not to see those when someone cuts their own throat.”

“So she did it,” concluded Beauchamp with something that approached satisfaction.

Tom was less certain. “The rules are changed when you’re dealing with madness, Inspector. Maybe that’s one that doesn’t apply if you’re fighting voices in your head.”

“You heard her. There was something other than shock and grieving in her voice. I thought there might even have been a touch of satisfaction.”

“You think you can prove anything, though?”

Beauchamp’s look of pleasure died away. “No.”

“Well then, it’s all a bit academic, isn’t it?”

Tasha found him in Simone’s bedroom. She said indignantly, “They’re treating her like a suspect!”

“She is.”

“It was all her father. Isn’t it obvious? He was the mad one.”

“She aided and abetted him. At the very least, there may be offences against the Human Tissue Act.”

“She’s only a minor, Tom. That’s way over the top. She’s just seen her father slit his own throat; she’s an orphan.” He didn’t answer. “What did you mean, ‘at the least’?”

He didn’t feel strong enough to explain. Let the pathologist who did the PM raise the doubts. Let Beauchamp do his job.

She phoned her father. Tom wasn’t surprised to hear (from Tasha’s side of the conversation at least) that her news exercised him greatly. Wisely, he thought, she didn’t go into great detail about the circumstances of Leo’s death or what they had found. He heard her say, merely and apologetically, “It’s quite complicated. We’ll explain later.”

He said something else, something that made her look in Tom’s direction. She replied, “Of course he is, Daddy.” Then, “I’ve got to go, now. The police want to talk to me.”

When the connection was cut, he asked gently, “What did your father ask?”

“If you were looking after me properly.”

He found himself smiling, despite the situation they found themselves in.

The small house was crammed to the rafters with police and forensics teams, as was Crowland Infirmary. Tom had never seen so many uniforms, except in a war movie; there was a feeling of being in a state of post-apocalypse, as if the Second Coming had been and gone but no one had been told, so the constabulary were looking for evidence of four-tailed scorpion locusts, or the activities of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; he suspected that some of the exhibits in the house and in the operating theatre might qualify.

The bedroom at the back of the house was clearly especially attractive for photographers and scientists, cataloguing and recording Leo’s works. “What’ll happen to all the things he made?” he asked Beauchamp.

“It’s all evidence.”

“For Simone’s trial?”

The policeman hesitated. “If it comes to that…and for the inquests.”

“What will happen to them then?”

“I should think they’ll be disposed of in an appropriate and respectful manner, as with all human remains. Given what Leo has already done, I should think cremation would be the only practical method.”

Beauchamp found Brierley in the garden, smoking into the darkness. It had stopped raining, but the ground was so wet it was almost boggy. “I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?” Brierley was cautious. Beauchamp interpreted this as nothing extraordinary.

“How did you know about that way into the hospital? Where the fence had been cut open.”

“Ah.” Brierley sound oddly relieved. He thought about it. “You remember I said my Gramps was a patient?”

“Yes.”

Brierley looked at him slyly. “He got better.”

Beauchamp didn’t understand. “And?”

“They didn’t want to let him out.”

It took Beauchamp a moment to grasp what he was saying. “You broke him out of there?”

“Not me. My Ma and Pa. I was only young.”

“What was he in there for?” Beauchamp hardly dared ask.

Brierley said easily, “Nothing bad.” Beauchamp wasn’t reassured. It transpired that he was right not to be. “He thought he was a vampire. Used to suck the blood of cows in the field.”

His superior stared at him in horror. He knew what he was thinking: did he believe him? Did he dare disbelieve him? Shaking his head, Beauchamp left Brierley in peace with his cigarette, which suited the sergeant well. For a moment, he had thought Beauchamp was going to question him about the memento mori up in the bedroom, that he might have spotted that some were missing.

Only small ones, but beautiful; they had fitted in his pocket quite snugly. To the right – discrete – people, they would be very valuable, given their provenance.

Their sale would supplement his police pension quite nicely.

Gramps would have been proud of him, all in all.

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Epilogue

The sap had retreated, abandoning the leaves to their fate, and the husks of some of these now blew around Beauchamp’s car as he sat in it and waited. The sunlight through the windows was hot, although he knew that this was illusory, that the wind outside would have a bite to it. It hadn’t been a good summer, and he wasn’t sorry to see it go, hopeful as he always was that the next season along would bring something better, something that he thought the next season along ought to bring. He turned off the ignition to allow the heater a rest, but turned the radio up a tad because he was a Dolly Parton fan and ‘Islands in the Stream’ was a favourite. It made the wait more bearable.

Part of his problem was that he didn’t actually have to be there. No one had ordered him to attend. He was almost certainly unwanted, which was why his car was parked to one side of the car park, under a tree, as unobtrusively as possible. There were plenty of things he could have been doing, some of which he ought to have been doing. Having a word with Jeremiah Brierley for a start; that could wait, though. He told himself that he wanted to be there, but that wasn’t entirely true. He felt compelled to be there, nothing more. He did not like that feeling.

He had been there for fifteen minutes when the Porsche Cayenne had arrived, which meant that he had been parked under the tree – a beech, he thought – for over half an hour now. He had watched them get out and look up at Maindiff Court’s imposing façade of Edwardian redbrick and talked quietly about amongst themselves as if they were in front of a World Heritage Site and not a mental health facility. He recognised Tom Newman and Natasha Vogt, assumed that the other two – one a tall but paunchy grey-haired man who had been driving, the other a petit dark-haired woman who had sat next to him – were her parents. He had seen them go in after a while; that had been over ten minutes ago. How much longer? How long would it take to discharge Simone Bannister from care?

He was bored, but for some reason agitated and had to force himself to keep calm. Why was he agitated? Why was he there? The case was over. Leo Banneker was dead, along with his daemons. Penelope Banneker’s death was officially an open case, never likely to be closed; if Leo had been responsible, then there was no one left to prove it. Maybe it had been an accident, but maybe not; it was one of a billion uncertainties that would remain forever, an indelible stain on the face of truth.

And Simone Banneker’s part in it all was also officially decided. He had been told that there would be no action taken against her on the part of the Crown Prosecution Service, partly because of lack of proof, partly because they considered an attempted prosecution would ‘not be in the public interest’. And she wasn’t mentally ill; again an official determination. The psychiatrists had spent long hours talking to her and observing her, and giving her ingenious tests, and they had been unable to pin a specific diagnosis of illness onto her psyche. The reports admitted that she was odd, yes. She was withdrawn, yes. She was shockingly mature for one who had seen a mere fifteen summers. She did not fit easily, though, into a box that could be labelled with words summing up a mental affliction.

It was not surprising, the reports had unanimously opined. After all, she had been brought up in a weird, almost eerie environment, by people who were either eccentric, or borderline bonkers (depending on how charitable one wished to be), without contact with children her own age, and possibly abused. She had seen one of them become insane before her eyes, and there was a strong chance that he had duped her into participating in what, by most people’s standards, was a monstrous crime.

Beauchamp had some sympathy with all that. He had spent long hours sitting across from her in one of the interview rooms at Hereford Police Station trying to coax from her what she knew of her mother’s death, what part she had played in her father’s grand plan of homage, how her father had met his death, and he had seen then exactly what they were driving at. There had been a social worker with her at all times, as per protocol, but she hadn’t been needed; he had come closer to breaking down himself during those long sessions than she had. She had retained an almost praeternatural degree of tranquility.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

He sensed something within her that he did not like; he could not identify it, but he didn’t like it. Official truths and actual truths so rarely coincided.

They emerged from the main hospital building and he sat up, turning down the radio; Dolly had finished, anyway, and it was only Depeche Mode.

Natasha’s parents came out first, then Tom Newman and Natasha Vogt with, between them, Simone Banneker. He was fifty metres away, but the sunshine was bright and he had a good view. She looked thinner and paler than he remembered, which was something of an achievement, he thought, as ever since he had first met her she had had a ghostly complexion. The lights of the Porsche Cayenne flashed and there was an audible beep. As Mr Vogt went around to the driver’s side, his body language suggested to Beauchamp that he felt awkward. Perhaps the decision to offer a home to Simone – the adoption process was well underway – was not altogether to his liking. He just sat in the driver’s seat while Simone climbed into the back between Tom Newman and Natasha Vogt, and his wife got into the front passenger seat.

They drove quickly away and Beauchamp was left to wonder why he had bothered to come.

He had another loose end from the case, and it was convenient for him to see to it now. He waited another ten minutes and then drove out of the hospital grounds, heading for Hereford, but turning right off the road before he got there. This way took him past Martin Waldeyer’s house outside Fownhope, now up for sale although he didn’t think that there’d been much interest. He didn’t stop, though. He kept going until he reached Woolhope where he pulled up in the car park to the side of the Crown public house. He had drunk there a few times and found it a pleasant pub with good food and beer, but that wasn’t why he was visiting that day. He walked down the steeply sloping tarmac, around to the front of the building where a small porch led into the bar. As he had expected, Jeremiah Brierley was sitting at a table in the corner drinking cider and poring over a tabloid newspaper that was folded over on the table. He surreptitiously bought a pint of bitter and one of cider and then walked with them to Brierley’s table where he put the latter down in front of his erstwhile sergeant.

As soon as he did so, Brierley started and looked up with an expression of annoyance that did little for his less than pulchritudinous features. When he became aware of who it was that had disturbed his concentration upon the Sun’s crossword. “George!” he said and Beauchamp detected a sly impertinence in the voice.

He sat down opposite his ex-sergeant. “How’s life?”

“Not bad,” said Brierley after he had finished his pint in a single draught. He picked up Beauchamp’s gift and saluted him with it. “Thanks.”

Beauchamp joined him in quenching his thirst. “How’s retirement treating you?”

“Grand.”

“You look well.”

“I am, I reckon.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“How are you occupying your time?”

Brierley thought about this. “You know, George, it’s true what they say,” he said. “I feel busier now than ever before.” He didn’t go into details, though.

Brierley took another drink. Beauchamp wondered where his gift would come in the long line of pints that Brierley would polish off before closing time. “How’s the force? Are you missing me?”

What kind of a question was that? Was he serious? Beauchamp’s uncertainty both about the precise meaning of the question and how to respond to it led to hesitation. Luckily, Brierley filled the gap in the conversation. “How’s your new sergeant? Simon something, isn’t it?”

“Middlemarch. He’s good.”

“But not as good as me, I’ll be bound.” Brierley belched contently.

“He’s certainly different.”

Brierley didn’t hear the sarcasm. “Of course, you’ve got a new Super, too.”

Yes, thank the Lord, Beauchamp didn’t say. “Georgia Harkness.”

“What’s she like? I’ve heard she’s a bit of a bitch.”

She had certainly upset a fair number of his colleagues, Beauchamp reflected, but he rather liked her; she had bollocked a lot of people for lazy, entrenched views and behaviours, so he supposed that she wouldn’t have appealed to Brierley, but he personally had had no problems with her. “Do you see Rekorde at all these days?” he asked.

“Naw…” which was spoken into an emptying glass. This question seemed to quiet, or perhaps discomfort, Brierley. He became a tad broody, Beauchamp thought; he stared at the crossword that hadn’t been yet started. He asked abruptly, “Any interesting cases?”

Beauchamp was at that moment struggling with a case that involved a pile of human bones discovered in the basement of a town house in the city centre; there were definite signs of predation, and the dentist he had consulted was fairly sure that the tooth marks weren’t animal. And then there was disquieting memory that he had been cursed by a fifty year old woman who was sacrificing chickens to Satan; it was most definitely purely a coincidence that he had recently been suffering blinding headaches and his haemorrhoids were growing by the day. “Not much,” he said.

Brierley grunted, then belched.

“Except…”

Brierley didn’t react.

“You remember the Banneker case?”

Brierley raised his eyes slowly to his ex-boss. “Of course I do.”

“A funny coincidence…”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got an old mate, who emigrated years ago to Hong Kong. Did quite well in the police force – got to be a Senior Inspector - until the handover, then he took early retirement. Anyway, his son took some sort of degree in fine art, and now works for Sotheby’s out there.”

“Good for him.”

“My mate was over here visiting his sister a couple of weeks ago, and we met up for a drink.” Brierley was looking at him, his face appearing to cannon between varying expressions, as if no single muscular arrangement quite suited what he wanted to convey; thus Beauchamp thought that he saw assumed boredom, mild interest, vague alarm, and faint disdain surfacing and then disappearing one after the other. He said nothing. “Anyway, the conversation got onto to some of the odd things that have come through the auction house out there.”

Brierley finished his pint but was in no hurry to get more in.

Beauchamp went on, “He mentioned an odd musical instrument that had recently turned up. It was in the effects of some sort of business millionaire who had died unexpectedly. He said that his son had told him how beautiful it was…” He paused but Brierley was too old a hand to get drawn into the silence. “Something like a piccolo, but the workmanship was miraculous. His son, who examined it, recognised it as made from some sort of bone, although he couldn’t say what sort. He’d never seen anything like it before, and none of the experts could place it in any known school of art.”

“No?”

Having come to the end of his anecdote, Beauchamp waited, but did so in vain. Then, he fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of A4 paper. When it was flat on the table, he turned it so

that Brierley could see it. “That’s an image I pulled off the internet. Recognise it?”

Brierley peered. “Looks like the kind of stuff Banneker was doing.”

“I thought that.”

“So?”

“How do you think it got to Hong Kong?”

Brierley made show of thinking deeply. “He must have sold it to someone.”

Beauchamp nodded. “Possibly.”

They sat in silence for a while, before Beauchamp sighed. He had known that this wouldn’t be straightforward, and that it was likely to be unproductive. He ploughed on. “You were left alone guarding the room where all Banneker’s work was stored.”

Brierley’s belch was followed by, “No one got in. You can be sure of that.”

“Did you go in when you were on your own?”

“Naw. Why should I?”

Beauchamp hadn’t expected much more. He saw no reason in persevering. He sighed and said, “I just thought I’d ask.”

“No problem.”

He got up but before he left, he said to ex-detective sergeant Brierley, “That’s a nice watch. Rolex, isn’t it?”

Brierley looked at him directly and replied. “I wish it was. It’s just a cheap imitation.”

In the back of the Porsche Cayenne, Simone has her eyes shut and pretends to be asleep. Natasha has given up trying to engage her in conversation and now looks out of the window. Her boyfriend is listening to music on his iPod; he doesn’t like her, she thinks. She thinks also that she doesn’t like him. In the front seat, Uncle Emanuel and Aunt Jean exchange occasional dialogue.

The atmosphere in the car is not an easy one.

Simone is pleased to be out of the hospital and hopes that her time with the Vogts will be happy.

She hopes too that Apollo and his muses will soon sound in her head again.

… As they did for her that one time before.