YOUR LAST BEST FRIEND

By

Keith McCarthy1.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease that has one hundred percent mortality

Mrs. E.S.

91 years.

History from HM Coroner’s Office: Police gained entry to her house and found her collapsed in the bedroom. She was dressed in her night-clothes and her head was against the wall alongside her low single bed. Bruises to legs and left shoulder but nothing suspicious about the death. The flat temperature was cold. Not known how long she had been lying there.

Cause of Death: 1. Hypothermia

2. Immobilisation due to fractured left humerus, cerebral atrophy and senile macular degeneration.

3. Pulmonary restriction due to pleural fibrosis.

What is death?

Did Mrs. E.S. understand death, see it or feel it or hear it in her dementing mind as she lay there, gradually cooling into extinction, sleepiness overcoming her and perhaps seeming to be a welcome friend? What was her last thought? Was it full of fear, or full of love, or full of relief? Did she remember her youth and the one great love that she had lost, causing her to curse this thing called ageing? Did she know or think of anything to do with death?

Of course, I cannot answer these questions any more than you can. Or rather, I can answer them in a myriad of ways, none of them at all complete or satisfactory; every one of them dimly illuminating an issue but, by casting shadows that distort and hide, conspiring to conceal the truth. Every answer would be like one of the answers of the three blind men who attempt to describe an elephant and who thereby each gain an entirely erroneous impression.

Why does it bother me?

Death comes rarely to most of you, visiting usually with the demise of a parent or older relative, occasionally (and with increasing frequency as you age) calling when a friend dies and, thank God, rarely should a child die. It will, needless to say, pay special attention to you once in your life, but I wonder if that ever proves as affecting as all its other visits.

I, however, I see death every day, see where it has been and what it has done, and I attempt to discover why it has done it. Here I am, forty-five years old, and having to face mortality square on, look it in the eye and then continue with living as if life were nothing at all to do with death: the fundamental lie of life is that death does not exist.

Yet if I see so much death, if I search through the remains to find reasons for its presence so often, still I can see so poorly what death’s nature is: it leaves constant fingerprints and recognisable traces, but these do not easily translate into a name for the beast, nor do they bring comprehension of why there is death and whether there must always be death.

And I have to comprehend these things because I am steeped in death and I cannot escape it, yet I cannot discern it. Sometimes I fear I will go mad unless I know something of the truth of death.

Why?

I would suggest that you ask Sebastian Louis Marjolin, only he died.

But too late.

“What kind of madness do you have?”

Now there’s a question. Do I give the honest answer, or do what everyone else does and dismiss the proposition?

In the space of my hesitation there was assembled a look of understanding and from there came, “Oh, I see. A visitor.”

My interrogator was short - perhaps only a metre-sixty - with bright blue eyes set in a rounded, almost pixie-like face that was heavily pock-marked. His age was difficult to estimate, although I would have said he was no more than twenty-five. He was smartly dressed in casual clothes that looked new and that were undoubtedly smart, but there was a look of concentration on his face, one that marked him out as a resident.

He seemed disappointed with his discovery, at least momentarily, but then he looked more closely at me. This brought his face, with its curious pock marking that would once have marked him at as a victim of smallpox but now probably indicated terminal acne as an adolescent, unpleasantly close to mine. Clearly, ‘personal space’ was a sociological concept he refused to accept.

“You’re an undertaker, aren’t you?”

What was more peculiar? His manner or his question? The fact that he was wrong in his guess, or the fact that he was so nearly right?

I wanted to deny it absolutely but I was disconcerted and that allowed him, somehow, to see more of me.

“No. No, you’re not.” He frowned, still too close to my face. “But...” He now looked almost pained, almost as if he were experiencing biliary colic. “You have something to do with... death.”

That word again.

Used a million times a day all over the world without a thought of what it means. And yet said by this strange individual with care. That was the only way I could describe it - with care.

He continued to stare at me and I felt caught by his scrutiny, unable to react normally. The wind blew in the trees around us, bringing welcome relief to the late Spring warmth and it at least gave me a chance to break the contact and look up into the green of the leaves.

I looked back almost at once but he was already five metres away, walking swiftly towards the main house, hands in pockets, whistling nothing. His attitude was jaunty, giving the impression he was extremely pleased with himself. I thought it odd but no more than was to be expected. At least he had possessed the grace to end the encounter before it became necessary to be rude, something that could not always be guaranteed at Weber House.

I continued walking up the wide, gravelled path to the main entrance, glancing through the large windows on my left that fronted the lounge to see an empty room. The steps were wet, apparently newly scrubbed and slightly slippery because of it. On them I passed a middle-aged man dressed in jeans and bright red shirt. He didn’t acknowledge me and I played the game of guessing what he was - staff or resident? The days when the patients ate insects and wandered around in straitjackets were long gone, making differentiation between the so-called normal and the so-called abnormal sometimes impossible. You’re only mad if other people say you are.

Reception was in the charge of James, a pleasant and attentive young man who had rings all over the place, or at least all over the places I could see, and who stuttered. He stuttered to such an extent that you could feel angels sighing as he struggled to begin words, and as he took breath after breath while trying to push his diction over the uncrestable hills of consonants.

“Evening, James.”

“Hi, D-d-d-d....Doctor.”

“Is my wife in her room?”

“Yup.” He lengthened the start of the word, starting low and building up to it.

He was wearing a badge that proclaimed he was a supporter of the SSCA, but I didn’t dare ask him what that was.

I walked across the room, past original furniture, huge landscapes and portraits that were slightly grimed and therefore obviously authentic, and oak panelling that glimmered darkly and discreetly in the background. As I started up the broad stairs to the right and the rear of reception, a door slammed somewhere above me, but the intrusive noise was quickly hushed into subservience by the muffling disdain of all that was around. I turned left when the stairway split and then carried on up. The carpet was deep and spotless, the regency air of the house permeating everything to give a sense of peace and tranquillity.

And expensiveness.

Kate’s room was at the back, but that didn’t mean it was cheap. It was large and comfortable and it gave a view of what had once been the stable block, now one of many clinical suites. She had a sitting room, a private bathroom, a bedroom and a small kitchenette that she could use if she didn’t feel like fraternising with the other residents. There were a large television with video recorder, a stereo system and a full four-piece suite. It was light and airy and very depressing.

Kate was sitting at one of the sofa reading. She looked up briefly as I came in, but she didn’t smile.

I said, “Hello, Kate,” but even I could hear the awkwardness in my words. I held out the chocolates I had brought and she took them, put down her book and rose. She placed them on a small table, next to a large lamp, then returned. I supposed that the maids removed them every evening and perhaps distributed amongst themselves: certainly Kate had never eaten one.

She looked at me, said, “Thanks,” then returned to her book. I sat down next to her and looked around the room. I noticed that the television wasn’t plugged in, just like last week and the week before. I couldn’t see the stereo but I guessed that it was also still unplugged.

Kate was dressed in faded jeans, trainers and a pink sweatshirt. She had lost a lot of weight, making her look slightly strained, faded. There were lines on her face that I had never noticed before: she wore no make-up, so perhaps that was the reason.

In an attempt to make myself feel less of a dog turd in a bed I said, “Who’s the little chap with the pock-marked face? I met him as I was coming in.”

For a minute, perhaps, she didn’t react. Then she seemed to comprehend that something was required of her for she looked up at me, for a second vacantly then understandingly.

“Oh. That’s Sebastian.”

Three words before her book pulled her back. Progress, I suppose.

“Friendly with him, are you?”

She said, “Not really,” without breaking off her reading.

“But you talk, I guess.”

She shrugged. “A bit.”

I wanted to enquire what he was in for, what his particular disease was, but felt it wouldn’t be entirely tactful to ask Kate. Not the done thing.

More silence between us. There wasn’t even a clock ticking in the background to alleviate the sense of dissolution.

“Good book, is it?”

I expected a similar reaction but was rewarded, at last, with animation.

She shut the book with a loud smacking noise and stared straight into my eyes. Her face held a look questioning, as if she were unsure of me: was I worthy of her opinion? This continued for too long, beyond what was normal, thus reinforcing my sadness at her illness. Then she nodded seriously.

“What’s it about?”

“Truth!” she said simply, belying the fact that there is nothing simple about truth. Then she added, “About the truth that is all around us and yet hidden from us!”

I have to admit her words did not reassure me, but cautiously I asked, “Which truth is that, precisely?”

“About God!”

And every sentence ending with an exclamation mark, too. It just heightened the impression of artificiality.

I picked up the book from her lap, expecting it to be a religious tome, surprised that it was about quantum mechanics. Then I looked back at Kate and saw real pleasure there and I did not have the heart to shatter the spell. I hadn’t seen a look like that in many months.

“Tell me,” I suggested.

She was now almost energetic in her delight. She even grasped my hand and the touch of her, so foreign for so long, was warm and soft and full of memory.

“Do you know anything about quantum mechanics?”

I shook my head. Nor was that a lie.

“But you’ve heard of the Uncertainty Principle?”

“Sort of.”

“Well basically, the Uncertainty Principle, as it’s usually quoted, states that you cannot know exactly both the momentum and the position of a fundamental particle: the more exactly you try to ascertain one, the less exactly you can determine the other.”

I nodded slowly and slightly, not wanting to lose her, not actually having the foggiest.

“But that doesn’t even begin to explain the mystery of it!”

Now that I could agree with.

“What it’s actually saying,” she continued and she was frowning with concentration to recall exactly what she had understood, “Is that the values of certain parameters possessed by fundamental particles are indeterminate. They don’t have a fixed value, not until we attempt to measure them: it is the act of measurement, of our intervention, which fixes the value.

“Not only that, but an attempt to fix the value of one parameter actually forbids us from fixing the value of another parameter.”

I couldn’t have looked entirely with the flow of things because a frown grew on her face and she asked worriedly, “Don’t you see?”

I smiled at her.

“Explain, Kate. I think I do, but explain it anyway.”

“There’s a barrier. It is impossible in this universe for us to see beyond a limit: when we try, we see only the form that we impose upon it.”

When I didn’t smack my forehead and cry, “Of course!” she became quickly frustrated.

“But it’s so obvious! Nowhere else is there a limit to what we can experience; only here. Only at this point is there an impassable barrier, and it must be here that the boundaries of God lie. He is saying to us, ‘Past this point is something that you will never ever be able to comprehend.’ Where else would God live?”

Not having a ready suggestion to offer I could only nod and try to make it convincing. Apparently I succeeded for she added, “And out of indeterminacy, out of particles with properties that do not have a single, or at least a measurable value, comes forth the whole of Creation, almost exactly as described in the Bible.”

It was at this point that I made my mistake.

“But couldn’t it just mean that there is a limit to the resolution with which we can see? At least at present. Or perhaps it merely means that we, who are the end product of creation, can’t comprehend some of the clockwork that makes it run? Just as in the same way we can’t actually comprehend gravity, other than to say that it is a force associated with mass.”

With startling swiftness her face crumpled. She began to cry with a few seconds and I felt like a man who had kicked a kitten.

“Kate?” I said, and I reached out to touch her, to hold her. She drew back, waving me away.

“Go away!”

“Kate, I didn’t mean...”

“Yes, you did! You always do! You always did!”

She was almost blubbing, stretching away from me to avoid my touch, crouched into the corner of the sofa. I edged towards her, put out my hand and said, “Kate,” but I felt I wasn’t really going to achieve much.

Kate had other ideas, though. First she struck out at my hand and then, lurching forward, she slapped my cheek, putting her shoulder into and producing a noise in my head that made my auditory cortex think again about retirement. As if that weren’t bad enough she began to scream at me.

“You fucking bastard! You supercilious, fucking bastard! You don’t care about me. All you care about is yourself. You fucking bastard!”

Not the richest vocabulary, I grant you, but she got the point across.

“I’m sorry, Kate...”

“Sorry?” she asked incredulously. “Sorry? What are you sorry for, Phil? What are you apologising for now, then? Making me feel like an insect? Is that what you’re offering apologies for? Well, don’t worry about that, Phil. I put up with six years of that, while you fulfilled your career and feathered your nest. I don’t need apologies about that.”

Into the quiet that ensued I began, “I meant...” Only she interrupted.

“Or is it Alice?”

She hadn’t mentioned Alice before and her sudden appearance floored me. I opened my mouth, desperately thinking that perhaps here was an opportunity but, before I could formulate anything, Kate went on in a voice that was calm and therefore all the more unnerving.

“You didn’t want Alice, did you? Losing her was nothing to you, was it?”

She was sitting forward, her hands balled and on her lap. She wasn’t looking at me, as if to do so would elevate me beyond my station.

“That’s not true, Kate. I wanted Alice as much as you did, and I loved her. Her death was just as awful for me as it was for you.”

She laughed for about a quarter of second and then cut it off.

“We each cope in different ways, Kate.”

I didn’t think that was provocative, although Kate seemed to.

Before I could stop her she simultaneously rose, screamed and advanced. I’m out of condition - gave up squash and all ball games but one years ago - so even as her hand was coming towards me I was behind the action and losing touch with the front runners. Still, the bite of her nails as she dragged them down and across my left cheek sort of spurred me on a bit.

I jumped up, yelping, “Shit!”

When I took my hand away there was blood. Kate just stayed half on and half off the sofa, panting and staring at me with eyes were a long way from lovey-dovey.

I put my hand back and that made things sting even more.

“Fuck!” I said. The vocabulary was rather restricted but understandably so. “Why did you do that, Kate?”

She didn’t say anything. She merely laughed, although there is laughter and there is laughter, and I would have to classify hers as being of the less than amicable variety.

And then she began to cry: not just silent tears of restrained remorse, but the full, racking sob-filled variety, telling of despair, telling even me that here was a woman who had suffered more than any living creature should have suffer.

I could feel blood, cold and wet, trickling down my face, but I could feel Kate’s hopelessness and deep death-filled loss even more. I crouched down to hold her, as a husband ought to behave with his wife, and I remember feeling how strange that was. I was half-afraid that she would strike out at me again, but I thought that she was probably past that now, the hatred washed back into desperation.

For a while she didn’t react but gradually she relaxed, although the weeping didn’t leave her.

“Kate?” I whispered her name, as though we were lovers and this was a night of togetherness. “Kate?”

She didn’t respond.

“Please?” I asked. I moved my hand to put it over hers and then I kept it there, even when Kate didn’t give me hope that she even knew it was there.

“Please?”

She slowly swivelled her head to look at me. Her eyes were blank and almost questioning for a long time as she looked at me. Even when she took my hand in hers, her expression didn’t change. The sleeve of the sweatshirt was stretched to reveal the scars on her wrist.

“Kate, I love you, just as I loved Alice.”

Her eyes tracked down to my hand in hers, then back up to my face. Still tear-filled they looked less hostile after the trip.

She nodded slowly but she didn’t say anything.

I thought about trying to find Carl, to tell him about what had happened, but I was too tired by the end of my visit. Was it progress or regress? Carl would be optimistic, forgetting that I, too, am a doctor, that I know how the doctor-relative system works. Standing at the bottom of the steps outside the main entrance was James, standing with his arms wrapped around himself, his face turned up to the sun. He looked around as I came up. His expression was sympathetic, from which I gathered that Kate had screamed loud enough to be heard. I had tried to clean up the parallel red scratches across my left cheek: at least they were no longer actively bleeding, but they were hardly invisible to all but the trained eye. The way James’s face registered surprise, then the way that he tried to cover it up, were fascinating insights into human behaviour.

“How-how-how-how...” He tailed off a bit, then came back for a second try. “How-how-how-how did it g-g-g-g-go?”

I have to admit that, had I not liked James, he would have received a lesson in abuse then.

I made a face, feeling it unnecessary to relive the gory details.

He put his lips together in sympathy. We stood for a moment saying nothing and then a thought came to me.

“James, what do you know about Sebastian?”

“S-S-S-S-Sebastian Marjolin?”

I nodded confidently.

“That’s him. What’s his diagnosis?”

He wasn’t supposed to tell me, but who can resist discussing other people’s illnesses? Anyway, I’m a doctor, so it was all right.

“P-p-paranoid Sch-sch-sch-schizophrenia.”

That surprised me. Sebastian had seemed odd but he had shown neither the otherworldly disconnectedness of acute schizophrenia nor the coshed dullness of those who are taking the medication.

I made a non-committal sound that could have been anything at all and bade him goodbye.

Along the drive, at almost exactly the same point as before, Sebastian appeared before me, springing from behind a tree like a highwayman. His face held a grin, not a smile, as if he knew something I would have liked to have known but when he saw me his expression changed to suspicion, even anger.

“Katey sounded upset.”

“Did she?”

“Did you hurt her?” This was asked in a tone that was close to threatening.

“What if I did?”

For a moment, and perhaps for only the smallest part of a moment, I thought that we were going to have a fight. Then the thought and the moment faded and the grin slowly returned on his irregular, scarred skin.

“Don’t worry. It’s easily done.”

His patronising tone was exceedingly irritating but I didn’t want an argument.

I made to walk forward but he stood in the way.

“Is there something you want, Sebastian?”

Shaking his head, apparently in surprised innocence, he said, “No.”

He didn’t get out of the way, though. A game, then. I wondered if he did this often.

We stood and faced each other for a very long time, perhaps ten seconds, until I let out a breath, sighed and said, “Very well, then.”

I figured it would be best merely to walk back to the house and get some help; perhaps summon one of the nurses who was helping to pocket the huge wads of cash I was dishing out. As soon as I turned my back, however, Sebastian said, “I’ve found something. Something,” and here he lowered the tone and volume of his voice, “That will interest you.”

“Really?” I said, neither turning nor stopping.

“It’s a body.”

I knew it was a mistake, even as I halted and turned to face him, but I couldn’t ignore it. His eyes were large and fixed wholly upon me. There was no grin now, only distilled earnestness.

“A body?”

A very serious nod.

“Where?”

He pointed away from the house, over to the dense trees to the left of the driveway. As if to support Sebastian’s claim, a crow hopped out on to the gravel and then flew off. It had a red, ragged tassel hanging from its beak.

I looked back to Sebastian who now looked anxious, even frightened.

“Show me,” I suggested. Even if he was pulling my leg, it would do no harm.

We walked perhaps twenty metres down the path and then, close to where he had accosted me for the first time, he turned into the woodland. I followed him for forty or fifty metres through brambles, nettles and an aroma of gentle, saprophytic gastronomy, then he led me into a small clearing.

He turned and waved his hand to indicate we were at the scene of the crime.

In the middle was a rabbit, dead but that wasn’t the half of it.

Sebastian was interested in anatomy, clearly. The rabbit was pegged out and had been disembowelled: the organs were laid out neatly on a nearby tree stump. Only the brain was still in situ, although, to be fair to him, Sebastian had done his best to rectify that state of affairs: the problem is that a fist-sized boulder and a screwdriver are not what are recommended for the easy removal of the cranial contents.

I glanced back at Sebastian who looked sad.

“I couldn’t get at the brain,” he explained needlessly.

I thought about asking him why he had done this thing, but didn’t bother: the reason would be out of kilter with my view of the world, no matter how logical it seemed to him. There was nothing that could be said or done.

I began to walk quickly away from the clearing but Sebastian hadn’t finished with me.

“Aren’t you interested, Dr. Reed?”

He knew my name, but that wasn’t going to make me turn round. I just kept going.

“You and I are similar, do you know that?”

He had begun to follow me, running to catch up. Even when he had caught up and was keeping abreast of me, stride for stride, I didn’t react.

“Death frightens you, doesn’t it? That’s why you do what you do. That’s why you’re a pathologist.”

I just kept telling myself to say and do nothing. We were out on the driveway now. I thought it would be best to head back for the house.

“It doesn’t frighten me, you know. It doesn’t frighten me at all.”

Suddenly he laughed, but don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t the laugh of a maniac; it was the excited giggle of a small boy. He put his hand on my upper arm and I turned to shake it off and it was then that he said, “I am death.”

Now, you don’t have to be in a psychiatric hospital, private or not, to know that anyone interlocutor who throws that into the conversation is not operating with all his transistors. And, what is more, it is considered amongst the chattering classes to be a pretty effective non sequitur, so I didn’t immediately rush to engage him in interested conversation.

In fact, I stuck to plan A and carried on going housewards.

Sebastian hurried after me, keeping pace as I walked a few metres behind.

“I am Death and you think you know me, Dr. Reed.”

“I can prove it, Dr. Reed.”

I was near the house and there were at least two nurses outside, so I felt safer, which led me say over my shoulder, “Really?”

“You think you know me. You don’t, though.”

Nearly at the steps and he abruptly hurried his pace and again he put his hand, this time on my shoulder. This time the grip was hard, surprisingly so: it certainly made me turn to him, only to find his face back in overly close proximity to mine.

“But you will,” he whispered, although he so close it was like a hushed shout. He winked one eye very slowly.

And with that he was gone, running and laughing.

Obviously a complete lunatic.

2.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

“But he went off so suddenly.”

Ah, the cry of the worried clinician, heard occasionally but so very clearly within my natural habitat, the dissection room. It is almost as though they use the place as a rehearsal room, trying out different intonations and emphases prior to their first night on the stage in the coroner’s court.

“It wasn’t me, Guv, honest,” would be the cry if they were of lower than middle class.

Or perhaps they are really looking a little further into the future, when they stand in front of the Eternal Weighing Scales and have to defend their actions and inactions before the Great Heavenly Coroner.

The problem was that the object of our attention was young and the young are not supposed to die: not unless there’s a war on, anyway. Neither was my other client for the day and it was unusual to have two young deaths and no one else; to have no crumble on the table.

“We tried to resuscitate him...”

That much was obvious. Electrode pads adhered to the chest wall, paddle-shaped burn marks were present beside each nipple and an airway was protruding from his mouth, looking something like part of a snorkel. His young ribs had survived the enthusiasm of the resuscitation team as they had bounced up and down on his chest: older, more unyielding ribs tended to crack under the strain (‘You haven’t been doing the job properly unless you break their ribs,’ I remember being told as a medical student).

The registrar, Dr. Stills, looked uncomfortable in his rather fetching blue over gown and bright blue plastic overshoes: I suppose no one likes looking a prat and, believe me, the protective clothing they are forced to wear when they attend an autopsy fulfils all the criteria for making someone look a prat. Only slim, young, female house officers can get away with it, but they can get away with anything.

The organs were laid out on the dissection board, a mixed array of shapes, colours and odours, gradually drying under the lights. In the background Tony was busying himself with something - probably, but not definitely connected with his paid employment - and whistling loudly but unsuccessfully a theme from Mozart. The sunshine coming through the frosted windows high on the wall in front of us was starting to heat the room up: in full summer the temperature in the mortuary might reach eighty-five degrees, thus making life unpleasant, not to say unhealthy, but the hospital management could see no need to install air conditioning. Not when it would cost twenty thousand pounds, not when the Trust management offices needed refurbishment.

Me? Cynical?

If it got much warmer, my second patient of the day would be making his presence known. Already there were a couple of flies expressing an interest and they weren’t interested in the whys of death, taking the more practical view and seeing it as a source of nourishment.

But Dr. Stills hadn’t finished protesting.

“We were convinced it was myocarditis. There isn’t a lot you can do if that induces an arrhythmia.”

Except ring up your friendly Medical Defence Society and check your subscriptions are up to date.

“The lungs are terrifically heavy,” I began. “Both nearly a kilogram.”

I showed him the ruddy-grey lungs, their surfaces smooth and shiny. Then I opened them along the incisions I had made previously. The cut surfaces were wet.

“There’s no evidence of consolidation: it’s all due to oedema.” Squeezing the lung tissue produced a trickle of water like squashing a sponge. “And here’s the liver.”

I had retained a slice only, depositing the rest in the bright yellow plastic bag that now contained a cannibal’s idea of heaven. He seemed unimpressed with what I showed him: perhaps I could improve as a showman.

“This is..?” he prompted.

“Passive venous congestion.” A touch of exasperation just to show that he ought to have known that. “Right heart failure.”

He nodded sagely.

“And the reason for these changes is here.”

A heart is not a pump: it is two. It must pump blood at high pressure around the body, which is a long way and so requires a great deal of muscle, and it must pump blood at low pressure around the lungs, which are thin and delicate: the left side does the former, the right side the latter. Each side consists of an entrance hall - the atrium - a one- way valve, then the main pumping chamber - the ventricle - then another one way valve: there are four chambers and four valves and, to make matters just complex enough to be bloody irritating, all of this lot twists around on itself. By the time you’ve opened each of these chambers and valves and sectioned the arteries and looked at the heart muscle itself with a few strokes of the scalpel, it tends to resemble a fox at the end of an enjoyable day’s hunting.

I wasn’t convinced that Dr. Stills fully appreciated what he was looking at as I held the tatty, blood-oozing thing up to his nose.

“The ventricles,” I prompted.

He declined to comment, although his face didn’t seem to be expressing delight.

I pressed on. “They’re dilated.”

He raised his eyebrows but still an answer came there not.

“He has bilateral ventricular dilatation,” I said, giving him the answer and feeling even more strongly that I wasn’t carrying the audience.

“Oh,” he breathed, trying to look impressed. “Ischaemia?”

I showed him the coronary arteries, pointing out their rounded lumina and how there were few plaques of atheroma to impede the flow of blood.

He frowned and I was beginning to feel that the conversation had lasted long enough.

“The myocardium is somewhat congested. Also the pericardial surface is injected. It’ll require histology, but I’d guess you were right. These changes would be consistent with viral myocarditis.”

He left then, a happier man, leaving me to Tony and to the dictation of my report.

“Cup of tea?” asked Tony after I had done battle with the dictation machine. After every post mortem Tony would ask this question and every time I would shake my head and he would sigh a little sigh. It was ritual such as this that got him through the day, I reckoned, but it was ritual such as this that made him one of the most irritating entities in the universe.

“No thanks, Tony. I think we’ll get this one out of the way first.”

He didn’t say, “Okey-doke,” which meant he was disappointed in me. With an expression of martyrdom on his face that Sir Thomas Moore could have learned from, he moved to the body while I perused the paperwork.

Julian Havers, aged nineteen years. Sudden collapse in church hall during prayer meeting. Previous medical history of mild asthma as a child but nothing serious. Had not seen general practitioner for several years. No suspicious circumstances.

Tony was stripping the body with skill that came from thirty years of mortuary work. The check shirt and jeans, the trainers and the jet black, open waistcoat weren’t so trendy now: they were just charity shop fodder, ready to be turned into cash for some worthy cause, no doubt. He had a cross around his neck and there was a small lapel badge in the shape of a fish.

“A believer,” I said.

“I wonder what he was praying about when he went,” mused Tony as he stuff the clothing into a plastic bag. “I bet he wasn’t asking to die there and then.”

There were no marks on the skin. No one had had the sense - or was it the sense of theatre? - to attempt resuscitation. He had been handsome and had possessed a well-muscled figure without scars: he didn’t even have acne. The only blemish on his skin was a small tattoo on his left forearm was also in the shape of a fish.

“Do Christians approve of tattoos?” I asked.

Tony shrugged.

“Perhaps he was an angler.”

Except that he was dead, he might have been perfectly fit and healthy from the look of him. I stood aside while Tony began to eviscerate. The whistling began again, repetitious practice apparently proving ineffective in improving Tony’s musical talent.

In five minutes the organs were out in one large blob and I laid them out on the dissecting table to begin the detailed dissection and earn my bloodied crust.

Tony had partially sown up the body cavity, stripped the scalp from the skull and was noisily sawing through the bone to expose the brain when Charlie came down some fifteen minutes later. Charlotte Volkmann was my new colleague, relatively fresh from the rigours of the final exam for membership of the Royal College and new to the life of an independent medical practitioner that is a consultant’s. She was so inexperienced in the hackneyed ways of seniority that she still treated her older colleagues, the old duffers that clutter up every hospital in the land, with reverence rather than contempt.

Tony was smitten; a fact so obvious that he might as well have had it carved in metre-high gothic lettering in the tarmac of the consultants’ car park. As soon as he saw her standing at the door to the dissection room he stopped the less than delicate task of extracting the most complex machine in the universe from its God-appointed home so that he could rush to her side.

She called over to me, “Morning, Phil,” and I waved and smiled.

“Peter’s got some domestic crisis: he’s going to be late in. Will you be able to do the orthopaedic meeting?”

Peter Weiss was my older colleague and showing it. He was a locum who had been appointed until a third appointment could be made. Like most locums, he was adequate but not inspiring.

The last thing I wanted to do was spend an hour in the company of the five intellectual cripples that comprised the Department of Orthopaedics and Trauma, but I agreed since there was little else I could do.

She turned her attention to our mortuary technician who appeared to undergo a phase change from solid to liquid.

“Tony, sorry to bother you,” she began with a smile. I couldn’t see if he was drooling as his back was to me, but it was an interesting image to hold in my mind. “I‘ve just come down to pay you what I owe you for last month’s post mortems.”

He ushered her out and closed the door behind them. Tony believed fiscal matters should be private, not least because most of his fiscal matters were either of dubious legality or indubitable illegality. Either that or he was hoping to make a play for the luscious Charlotte.

And she was luscious, over that there could be no debate. Short but pleasantly proportioned, blonde and with eyes that somehow mixed innocence and depravity. It troubled me that I might have sat there on the appointments committee and participated in her selection as my colleague at least partly on the grounds that she was very, very attractive: at least it bothered me for fleeting moments that grew dimmer as week followed week.

Tony returned looking slightly flushed. He caught me looking at him and read my expression. He was physiognomically incapable of scowling so he merely assumed an air of disdain as he picked up the bone saw again.

“She’s a happily married woman, Tony.”

He said nothing.

“Did she give you what you wanted?”

Still he didn’t answer: the whine of the saw spoke for him.

The episode had at least served to distract me from Julian Havers, or at least from his belongings, but inevitably I was forced to confront them again and thereby forced back to the conclusion that I did not know why he had died: apparently he had possessed that rare things amongst humanity - normality.

I don’t mean that he was physically perfect - he wasn’t, for he had two renal arteries on the right instead of the usual two, and he early atheroma (but no more than I would have expected) - but I do mean that there was no obvious cause for his death.

Now if there is one thing that pathologists do not like, it’s lack of pathology. Give one of us a stonking big aortic aneurysm that’s burst and sprayed blood around the lower abdomen, or a dirty great lung carcinoma that’s eaten away at some poor bastard’s chest and then spread its offspring through the circulation, and we’re happy. That’s why it’s lucky for us that most people who die are old, because the old have more pathology: sometimes they have two, three, even four interesting conditions, perhaps even ones that we can photograph or even write up in a journal.

The young, though, they’re different. The young are tricky.

Young people do not normally die of natural causes and, if there is no convincing evidence of trauma, it is most probably either epilepsy, asthma or, rarely, heart disease that carries them off this world and into the next. Epilepsy is a bugger, not only for the sufferer but also for the pathologist because it doesn’t leave many clues: if death occurs during a seizure there may be evidence of the tongue being bitten, but occasionally epileptics just die, bang, without evidence of anything other than lack of life. Asthmatics may well leave behind them traces of their final attack - mucus plugs in overinflated lungs - but occasionally the poor sods drop dead without obvious post mortem changes and that can be tricky for all concerned. As far as heart disease is concerned, although the changes of premature myocardial fibrosis, cardiomyopathy or myocarditis are usually obvious, they can be difficult to see without the aid of a microscope or blood tests.

Julian Havers hadn’t bitten his tongue, nor had he overinflated his lungs in the asthmatic’s desperation to breathe out again, and he had not evidence of any form of heart disease. All his organs - his heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, adrenals, thyroid and gastrointestinal tract - all of them were in fine fettle: I wouldn’t have said no to possessing any of them, had anyone offered. There was still the brain to come of course, but the only intracerebral event that was likely to have dropped a young, fit adult was a spontaneous subarachnoid haemorrhage. Since there was no apparent history of sudden, excruciating headache (not that the history I received was necessarily the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth) and since Tony hadn’t informed me that the brain was surrounded by a large blood clot, I didn’t think it likely that such was the diagnosis.

I was right, unfortunately. Tony brought the brain over and it was firm and unbloodied, its wicked complexity not appearing capable of anything as Godlike as consciousness but still depressingly as it should have been. The normal outer surface of gyri and sulci hid only the usual pattern of grey cortex and inner white matter, the beautiful shapes and rounds of the inner nuclei - the basal ganglia, the internal and external capsules, the substantia nigra, the layered flake of the pons and a hundred others too numerous to name - all appearing correct and untroubled.

Good for Julian, bad for me.

Every post mortem has a hidden threat for a jobbing, in-the-trenches pathologist and that is the possibility that it might actually be murder or manslaughter. I wouldn’t be the first poor sod to have started a post mortem on the understanding that there are ‘no suspicious circumstances,’ only to discover halfway through that the hyoid bone is broken and that there really is faint, ill-defined bruising around the neck that just might be finger marks. There is a story, apocryphal I’m sure (but don’t be surprised...) that a post mortem was performed on a husband and the result was duly forthcoming that he had died of ischaemic heart disease: when the body was exhumed some six months later because his loving wife had confessed to shooting him, they could hear the bullet rattling around his unexamined skull.

As far as Julian was concerned, I was a long way from having to make the phone call to the Coroner’s office that would make the police jump up and down and bring down the wrath of some overpaid, over important forensic pathologist for having possibly destroyed vital evidence. No matter that there were ‘no suspicious circumstances.’ Still, no physical cause of death in a young person always makes the thumbs prick slightly.

“We need blood, Tony. Lots of it.”

“Okey-doke.”

He busied himself with a small, stainless steel bowl held to the transected veins of one of the legs, massaging the blood out of collapsed blood vessel. He worked his way around the limbs, producing nearly a hundred CCs of blood.

“What do you want done?”

“Virology and a general toxicology screen. Blood glucose and blood alcohol. Put the rest in a plain tube.”

The stomach had been empty, so nothing to keep there. I put a small piece of liver in a sterile container. I cut off small pieces of every organ to put into formalin for later histological examination. Then I tried to reassure myself that I hadn’t forgotten anything. Hopefully he’d either taken an overdose, had undiagnosed diabetes mellitus, drunk a huge amount of alcohol or had some weird viral condition.

The other thing to do was to talk to the Coroner’s Office and tell them that the cause at present was unascertained and, when they stopped groaning, press them to get me more history.

“Anything else?” asked Tony, having the poured the beetroot fluid into various glass tubes each with brightly coloured tops.

“Save the heart. I might have to send it off.”

“Okey-doke.”

Okey-bloody-doke it wasn’t, but I didn’t argue.

3.

But I do nothing upon my self, and yet I am mine own Executioner.

“It strikes me as bloody sinister.”

The ball, white, dimpled and quiet seriously scarred as there were eight, hard-fought holes behind us, lay temptingly on top of some light rough. Carl Volkmann, psychiatrist and extremely average golfer, addressed it as he spoke, a flop of dark brown hair hanging off his forehead and swinging gently from one side to the other as he twitched his club. Perhaps it distracted him, I mused, and perhaps that was why he was keen but oh-so-crap at the game. Surely a short cut and sides would reduce his handicap by a good ten strokes and at least give him scores that were less awesome.

He brought the club head down with a movement that wasn’t so much a swing, as more of a corkscrew. When it reached its nadir it had probably travelled about twice as far as it need have done and it wasn’t finished yet. Unfortunately, theory dictates that this point is supposed to coincide with the geographical position of the ball: perhaps the heavenly clockwork that moves the stars in their spheres had altered things, but Carl was a good two centimetres out. That’s not much, but it’s enough to mean that the ball moved perhaps only three metres forward and two to the right, further away from the fairway.

He sighed and moved after it. It was the sound of a man who expected no more.

“What is?” I asked.

“Clinical governance. It’s got implications that any decent, liberal-minded person would find abhorrent.”

He tried again and this time succeeded in making reasonable contact with the ball. It was badly sliced but it actually travelled a hundred metres or so and even ended up on the fairway. We moved off together to where my ball lay, perhaps thirty metres ahead.

“It keeps up standards,” I pointed out. “You must admit the medical profession has managed to hide a hell of a lot of dead wood in amongst those eye-catching, vigorous young shoots.”

Carl snorted.

“I wouldn’t deny that assessment of competence and the setting of minimum standards isn’t necessary - I’m all for things like that - but Clinical Governance is something different.”

We had reached my ball. It, too, was in light rough. As I was selecting a club, I said, “Why? Why shouldn’t we all be responsible for the level of competence, not only of ourselves, but of our colleagues?”

Carl was dressed in a sky-blue sweater and dark green trousers that looked, and probably were, new. He had a chubby frame and eyes that peeped out from behind wrinkled eyes: he looked older than his forty-three years, an impression strengthened by a slightly stooped posture caused, or so he claimed, by a parachute accident when he was an army psychiatrist.

The weather was cloudy and the wind gusty: this would have been a problem for golfers who could hoist the ball into the air, as theory dictated, but it had little import for us, save to make our bones chilled.

“Because it encourages the sneaks and the jealous little no-hopers to bring down their peers.”

I smacked the ball with a swing that I fondly imagined was natural and elegant but in all probability I suspect it would have made a professional golfer seriously depressed. At least the ball travelled a good distance, even if it wasn’t in quite the right direction.

We moved on.

“If you think that someone you’re working with is not up to standard, I think it has to be reported. Blindness in medicine kills; we’ve all seen that, once too often.”

“And how are you going to define substandard?” Carl demanded. “Is one mistake enough? Or will it be two that causes Phil Reed to reach for the hotline and screw someone’s career?”

“Every case is different. Persistent, serious errors would seem a reasonable guideline, though.”

We had reached his ball. This time he made good contact with the ball and it landed just short of the green.

“Good shot.”

“It happens occasionally,” he smiled. “About once every two holes.”

“Anyway, who says it would ruin a career?”

He looked at me as if I were naive and inexperienced.

“My dear chap, even if it didn’t get around that Dr. Littleknob from Pisspoor-on-Sea Infirmary has had to be retrained and retake his postgraduate exams, I can just see what it would do to his self-respect and confidence.”

My next stroke put me on the green and we spent the next few minutes holing out. When we had finished, I was heading for the tenth hole when Carl called and indicated a small shelter over to our left on the edge of a copse.

“Let’s have a rest,” he suggested and he winked in an obvious way.

We sat down and he rummaged in one of the pockets of his golf bag, resurfacing with a silver hip flask. He unscrewed it, raised it briefly and put it to his lips. Then he handed it to me, the fluid doing interesting things to his lacrimal glands.

“Are you coming?” he asked which, as far as I could see, was a propos of nothing at all.

I paused with the flask poised between heaven and earth and said, “Pardon?”

“Charlotte’s little do. Next Saturday.”

Now there was a problem about that, but I couldn’t really discuss the finer points with Carl. Asked point blank I was more or less forced to choose quickly.

“Oh, yes,” I said, with enthusiasm that I hoped sounded genuine.

And I’m fairly sure that his smile of approval was genuine, which made me feel pretty shitty.

After I had taken a swallow of his brandy, I felt that the only route to comfort lay in changing the subject. “Anyway, you don’t need to worry, do you? About Clinical Governance.”

He tilted his head towards me, this expression one of wary cynicism.

“Why do I get the impression that I’m about to hear another dig at psychiatrists?”

“Well how, precisely, do you assess the level of competence of a psychiatrist. What are the criteria?”

He smiled and answered, “Whereas you poor pathologists...” Which was no answer at all. He took another gulp and said, “Charlotte’s always telling me how hard-done by you histologists are, and how everybody thinks you’ve got a cushy life with no responsibilities.”

He emphasised his lack of empathy by snorting and then taking another swallow before handing the flask back to me.

“Doesn’t the fact that you don’t believe her tell you something? Anyway, aren’t you supposed to listen to what people say to you?”

He laughed. “Only in office hours and only if I’m paid for it. I get enough shit from the patients without getting any more from my wife.”

It seemed a good moment to bring up a certain little matter.

“Talking of patients...” I began. Carl looked at me warily; probably afraid I was going to seek a consultation about Kate.

“There’s a chap at Weber Hall called Marjolin: do you know him?”

Plainly relieved, he said, “Oh, Sebastian. Yes, I know him. What about it?”

“Is he your patient?”

“For sins that were quite clearly second only to the temptation of Eve, yes, he is. Why?”

I wasn’t ready to explain just yet.

“Paranoid schizophrenia, is that right?”

“More or less. An interesting case, to a psychiatrist, at any rate.” He stopped and smiled. “Though I can’t quite see what your angle is, old chap.”

If Carl was going to break confidence, he wanted a good reason.

After I had recounted the details of my encounter with Sebastian he said, “Ahh,” but then was silent.

I said, “It struck me that perhaps he wasn’t taking the medication.”

He frowned. He had a habit of tapping his finger on his lips when he was worried and he was doing this now.

“I’ll have to check, of course, but nothing’s been said to that effect.”

“He struck me as fairly compos mentis, that was all.”

Carl looked pained. “The days of the liquid cosh with patients wandering around shaking uncontrollably and looking as if they’ve had bilateral frontal lobotomy have gone, thank God. The newer major tranquillisers are extremely effective and have done away with most of the less acceptable side-effects.”

“I shall tell that to Peter Rabbit’s mother when I see her. Presumably her faith in neuroleptic drugs took a bit of a battering when she discovered her nearest and dearest staked out a good distance from his internal organs.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “That is a bit disturbing.”

I wondered which adjectives he would employ if it had been a human being that had been the subject of Sebastian’s amateur but enthusiastic forays into vivisection.

“Not to mention the inescapable conclusion that he seems to believe that he’s the personification of Death.”

“That’s not new, of course.”

Of course.

“Oh?” I asked.

A few drops of rain started to fall on the prospects pleasing that were before us. A group of four golfers hurried past the shelter to the next tee, cursing the weather.

“When he came to us, that was his problem.”

Jesus Christ, Napoleon, Bismark and other such august figures were fairly common subjects for schizophrenic delusion. Once I had even had the pleasure and honour of meeting a gentleman who believed himself to be Arthur Daley, but such concessions to modernity are rare. In schizophrenia, as in much of life, it is considered best to stick with the traditional. I took another swallow of brandy. The flask was becoming depressingly light.

“How did he come by this belief?”

Carl didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “His sister, his fiancée and then his father all died within the space of five months when he was twenty-two.”

“Bloody hell!”

Carl’s smile was almost too small to see.

“You can see that he was under a bit of strain at the time.”

“Did he have anything to do with these deaths?”

Carl looked startled by the question. “Good grief, no. They were all entirely natural deaths. It was just horrid luck. Really, you fellows are so morbid.”

By which I assumed he meant pathologists: still, better than being credulous.

“But presumably he blamed himself in some way.”

Carl looked momentarily impressed with my psychiatric abilities.

“Oh, yes. Although, as I say, they were entirely natural deaths, poor Sebastian took this as some kind of evidence that he was Death. The delusion is quite complex in its structure, but that is typical.”

It was raining very heavily now and every so often the wind would drive some drops into the shelter to fall about our feet. Carl took the flask and drained the last of the fluid.

“And how does he do it? Cause people to die, I mean.”

“He’s never said. He’s very bright and very secretive.”

“And does he have hallucinations in connection with all this?”

Carl was tucking the flask back into the golf bag.

“He used to. He used to hear his father damning him; damning him to eternal hell.”

Schizophrenic hallucinations are frequently auditory, at least in Western culture, and frequently rather abusive.

“And do I take it that you’ve supposedly made him better?”

It was a nasty question to ask of a doctor, but it had to be asked. Carl’s expression of mild embarrassment was as informative as his answer.

“He’s been with us for three months now. He was stabilised in the acute unit and we’ve all been perfectly satisfied that the acute symptoms were over. I had no idea that he was doing anything like this.”

The rain was lessening now and watery sunlight made things look a little brighter. We decided to try for the tenth tee and emerged from the shelter to put on waterproof clothing.

“Has he ever done anything like this before?” I asked. “With animals, I mean.”

Carl was quite definite. “Oh, no. Nothing like that.”

“How’s your face?” Kate at least had the grace to look embarrassed.

Three days had turned the four parallel wheals into scabbed rows that I kept absent-mindedly picking at.

“Fine.” And then I remembered to say, “Thanks,” because I’m polite.

The weather was fine and even quite warm so we were sitting on a wooden bench in front of an expanse of ornamental lake in the middle of which a wooded island, looking untidy and rather neglected, was home to various types of waterfowl. The lake was perhaps two hundred metres long and a hundred wide and benches were dotted around its perimeter for the use of the clinic’s patients. I often wondered whether the trees hid an ever-watchful lifeguard ready to dive in should the manic-depressives find the prospect too tempting.

I found it difficult to engage in sincere conversation with someone who had recently assaulted me and called me rather ear-catching names, even though that person was my lawfully wedded, so the talk proved rather stilted. That plus the fact that I couldn’t escape the unworthy suspicion that Kate didn’t really look forward to my visits with eagerness and excitement.

Inevitably it turned to the book she was reading.

“Another book on quantum mechanics?” I asked.

“Sense and Sensibility”

Jane Austen wasn’t Kate’s usual reading matter, or so I thought.

“Really?” I said.

She looked up. “Why not?”

It wasn’t an overtly threatening tone, but then it wasn’t said with a girlish giggle either.

“I didn’t realise you liked Jane Austen, that’s all.”

She had returned to the printed world.

“I’ve never read any before. I thought I’d give it a try. I’m told it’s worth reading.”

Two ducks were making ducklings over on the island; at least one wanted to, although the other didn’t. Marriage in Duckland seemed to be strangely familiar.

“Dickens is better: more variety.”

She said nothing, apparently didn’t even hear, but I suspected that it was more a case of my views not really being relevant.

More silence and then I tried again. No one can accuse me of lacking persistence.

“I played golf with Carl on Saturday.”

“Mmm?”

“He said you were doing well.”

He hadn’t, actually, but hey-ho...

Kate looked up at me and her gaze was penetrating. How could she know I was lying? I wondered. Then she dropped her eyes back to the antics of Mr. Rochester and murmured, “Does he?”

Well that was a great success.

“Don’t you think you are?”

She let out a lot of air through her nose as if she had applied pneumatic brakes: perhaps she was checking her temper for her next words were rather acid-tinged.

“No, I don’t.”

I thought she’d finished, for she paused, but it was only to load some more ammunition.

“I think quite honestly, Phil, that this is doing me no good at all. I think that it would be better if it were over and done with.”

Several thoughts buzzed like flies through my head. That she was talking about her stay at the clinic, that she was talking about my visit, even that she was talking about suicide; but I didn’t take long to spot the real one, the nasty, large, hairy bluebottle that spreads disease and sickness. I could see it in her eyes as she looked at me and didn’t blink.

“Us?” I asked. For some reason I was thinking what a peculiar sound that word had.

She couldn’t even dignify the thought with sound: she nodded very, very briefly.

At least scratches heal. This time she was really fighting, really aiming to maim.

I must admit it took me unawares. I would even admit to feeling lost, to feeling suddenly as though I didn’t quite understand what was going on.

Kate had turned back to her bloody book and I swear I didn’t make a sound but she looked sideways at me and she must have seen something that affected her. She put down the book and there was period of quiet as I looked at the a particularly arresting coot and she looked at me.

Then she took my hand and said, “I’m sorry, Phil.”

Sorry for what? Sorry for saying it, sorry for thinking it or sorry for wanting it?

I wanted to argue. I wanted to point out how she didn’t really mean it, how there was still a lot of distance to go before we needed to end it, but I couldn’t get the words out. Anyway, you don’t argue people of decisions like that. Either they’ve made the choice or they haven’t: only time dictates what happens.

I stood up and mumbled, “I’d better go.”

Suddenly she was all over me: hugging and kissing, sobbing even, for God’s sake. I held her and it could be that it had never happened, that we had never changed from a couple to grieving parents.

“I didn’t mean it, Phil.”

I held her tighter, hoping that she was telling the truth, wondering if she ever did.

“Please, Phil. Please.”

I rubbed her hair, smelled her perfume, recalled special times, then I held her away from me and looked into her face.

“I know you didn’t, Kate,” I lied and smiled.

We walked back to the house, holding hands and it really did seem like lovers again. Then she suddenly realised that she had forgotten her book and I went back to the bench to get it for her.

It was pure chance that I saw the name scrawled on the title page.

Sebastian Marjolin.

I hurried back to Kate, wondering why that bothered me.

I have to admit that I had been a bit wary of bumping into Sebastian, not only because of his affinity for all things leporine, but also because of the nature of his closing remarks which had struck me as a little personalised. I thought I’d got away with it but as I descended the stairs having left Kate in her room, he was sitting on an oak blanket chest by the top of the staircase down to the ground floor. It didn’t take the full neuronal array operating at one hundred percent efficiency to figure that he had been waiting for me.

“Very touching,” he sneered as I walked past, eyes ahead, giving him the beggar-in-the-street routine.

Since I didn’t turn around he got up and started to follow me down the stairs, keeping pace two steps behind.

“I do like to see happily married couples. They can care for each other in times of distress.”

When he reached the bottom and walked past the reception desk, James glanced up and registered mild surprise. I smiled at him to say, ‘Everything’s all right,’ and carried on out of the front door, my little friend following.

Two nurses walked past and one of them said, “Hello, Sebastian,” but Sebastian only had eyes for me.

“I’m a bit cross with you.”

I strode on, determined that there was nothing he could say that would make me pause or turn.

“Dr. Volkmann seemed to know about the rabbit. There was talk about increasing my medication.”

“Only talk?”

“You must have told him.”’

Sebastian quickened his pace and I was afraid that he was going to start getting physical again, but he contented himself with walking beside me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he was concentrating, his marked face furrowing its forehead, his fingers twirling strands of his dark, curly hair as he walked.

“Did you do my friend, Julian?” he asked suddenly, as if this were important to him.

I didn’t follow but wasn’t going to ask directions.

“Julian. Julian Havers,” Sebastian insisted. “He died about five or six days ago. Did you do the post mortem?”

Now I remembered. Somehow he knew it, as well.

“You did? What did you find?” His eagerness was disturbing. “I bet you found nothing. Nothing at all. Did you? Did you?”

And even though I was thinking all sorts of things, I still didn’t say a word and that still didn’t seem to matter to Sebastian. A look of triumph came over his face and his balled his hand into a fist and brought it down in a short sharp jab and crowed, “Yes!”

We were nearly at the small visitors’ car park.

“I knew you wouldn’t. I knew I could defeat you.” He was almost dancing with the joy of his imagined victory.

I had to stop then, because we were by my car.

“I killed him, you know. I killed my mate, Julian, and you don’t know how!”

I looked directly at him for the first time and opened my mouth to tell him to fuck off or something, but when I got to it, I couldn’t actually do it: I don’t know why.

I got in the car and reversed out of the space while Sebastian laughed and did his dance of success, for all the world a victor ludorum.

It was seven o’clock by the time I arrived back at the large, rather attractive house with its large drive and impressive garden and, as usual, I looked up at it and felt the leadening gloom of imposed solitude. It was now too large, too attractive and too impressive.

From years spent parking in the more cosmopolitan parts of London, I had acquired the habit of locking my briefcase in the boot should I have to leave it in the car. I went to the back of the car to retrieve it but on opening the boot I found it wasn’t immediately accessible.

Standing on a little plinth formed by a rectangular object wrapped in a plastic shopping bag was a rabbit’s head. It was held in place by thick rubber bands that went around the plinth and over a curtain of bloodied pelt that curtained out around the neck. The rabbit’s head looked curiously flattened out on top and on lifting it out (carefully so as to avoid touching the congealing blood) I discovered why.

Sebastian had succeeded in his attempts at craniotomy and the skull cavity was empty.

I didn’t know whether to be sickened, exasperated or very much afraid. I nearly threw the whole lot into the dustbin but I could feel that the plinth was some sort of soft-cover book. It was idle curiosity that made me dislodge the rabbit’s head into the dustbin then carefully removed the shopping bag. Inside was another shopping bag and inside that was a personal organiser.

The front page, filled in neatly using black ink, told me that I should return it to Julian Havers.

4.

O, Death, where is thy sting?

O, grave, thy victory?

I lay in the bed unable to sleep, the night too warm and active. Screech owls were crying raucously in the distance and a fox had screamed a few minutes ago.

It had been seven months since Kate had opted to move into Weber House, and in all that time I had never grown used to sleeping alone. The rhythms that had unconsciously come to be a part of the darkness - her breathing, her odd movements, her occasional breathy sounds - were gone and so the night was different.

It was better than it had been at first, when Kate’s absence had compounded the cold atmosphere of Alice’s death that had crowded out the little warmth that the house held for us. Then I had not slept for long hours, then there had been an overwhelming sense of aloneness, lightly spiced with failure, anger and frustration. Now I would fall asleep fairly quickly, only to awake again, perhaps only thirty minutes later, listening for nothing and hearing it loudly in my ears.

We had grown apart, of that neither of us had had doubt, although I at least had been wrong in assuming that we had fallen out of love. I had merely become accustomed to Kate, to the ways she had and the expressions she used, to the irritations she aroused in me and the things she did for me and with me. I loved her just as much as I loved my hand or my arm, in a way that was incapable of exciting passion within me but which was deeper and more abiding than any sentimental longing or lustful crush.

And now she was gone from me, both emotionally and physically.

The worst was not knowing whether the amputation was permanent or temporary. Had she made progress? Carl intimated she had, that she was on a path, and perhaps he was right rather than merely optimistic, but in the quiet of the night I would often wonder whether the path would lead her back to me or away from me.

She blamed me for Alice’s death, completely without reason but all the more intensely for that. That fact, originally just my intuition but now confirmed by her own words, was like a fungus growing in my bone. That she should believe it was bad enough, that I should know the truth and be unable to absolve myself of blame, was almost too much to bear.

It seemed to me an inevitable corollary of this delusion that Kate would turn away from me, that she would sever my love from her mind, screw up the memories of the good times we had and put them into an unreachable wilderness in her head.

It was all so unfair.

For comfort, I put my hand out to rest lightly on Charlotte’s ample breast.

She stirred in her sleep, half-waking. She moved on to her back, which allowed me to move over to her, suck her nipple erect and then travel swiftly down to meet and greet her opening moistness. By the time I arrived, Charlie was no longer asleep.

I know it looks bad, and I know that me saying that it was just one of those things will invoke nothing but cynicism, but it might just have saved me from sinking into the mire, never to return.

The start had been nothing dramatic, just a gradual shifting of emotions and inclinations, so that the feelings of trust in each other’s professional abilities, which had developed between us when she started, somehow becoming transmuted into enjoyment of each other’s company. It might have stayed there but then there had been a departmental meal to celebrate someone’s birthday. Charlie had given me a lift back to my house and I had kissed her in gratitude.

Within fifteen minutes we were coupling and it was the best fuck I’d had for long years.

Did I feel guilty?

Not, I think, as I was ramming into her and she was lying back with her hands grasped around the bed head and her breasts were moving with delightful synchronicity and there was a look of concentration on her face that included puckered red lips and wrinkled nose. Nor when she was employing those very same lips to help her tongue tease out the very last gram of orgasm from my ravished body.

But afterwards...

I wondered if Kate indulged herself; certainly she could easily have done so, for the staff of Weber Hall determinedly made no judgements on such matters. I suppose, if the truth be faced, I didn’t wonder, I hoped: I suppose also that I knew she did not. She was still too traumatised.

Then there was Carl, of course.

Kind, pleasant, matey Carl, with whom I played occasional golf and who was in charge of my wife’s psychiatric treatment.

Alright, yes, I felt like a shit: but that wasn’t enough to stop me. Nor do I think that I am rationalising the situation and merely making excuses when I say that the relationship with Charlie - a euphemism for regular, serious shagging - saved me. If nothing else, it showed me that Kate was wrong, that I was something more than a cold-hearted, uncaring bastard.

At least, I think it did.

We lay together, the night now quiet and deep, the bedside light on and leading us into sleep. I could feel Charlie beside me, warm and soft, feeling her almost glow. She was breathing regularly and I thought she was asleep. I was thinking of nothing at all.

“What happened?” she asked softly.

I must have been nearly dozing myself. I wasn’t absolutely sure what she meant but I was very afraid that I could have guessed.

“About your daughter. What happened?”

Not that one, Charlie. Please, not that one.

I took a deep breath but I didn’t say anything and she put out her hand to hold just my thumb.

“I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”

I was awake now, back in the past where no one should go, where life is dangerous. Ask Kate.

It was many minutes before I thought, What the hell?

“Alice was born five weeks early. We knew we were having a daughter - Kate had had enough ultrasound scans to cook a decent-sized turkey and then there was the amniocentesis.” It still struck me as funny. “God, the amniocentesis! We thought we were going to be all right because the amniocentesis results were normal! Of all the people in the world, you’d have thought that Kate and I should have known better.”

It was so quiet I could hear the tick of my watch resounding against a spring in the mattress as I lay with my head on my hand.

“She was small for dates - barely a kilo - so, of course, they whisked her off to Special Care. She looked red and raw, dressed in a wrinkled overcoat of flesh that had been made too big for her. Her eyes were just slits as if she didn’t want to look out on this world, and she was barely bigger than a guinea pig. The disposable was absurdly big, arching over her waist like a bridge so that she looked even smaller than she actually was. And there was that awful stump where her umbilicus had been; how Kate hated that! When she moved, it was with jerky twitches, and when she cried it was high and lost, a damned soul. Perhaps she knew what was going to happen: I hope not.

“They stuck tubes in her: one down her nose, one in her groin. They put tiny little pads on her chest and her head and they kept pricking her heel for blood. What kind of life is that?”

Fine, I suppose, if you’re going to make it out of there.

“For the first few days she did well, but then it all started to go wrong. The inevitable course that they see so often. Respiratory distress set in, the lungs fibrosing and sloughing in the face of an ever-increasing concentration of corrosive, toxic oxygen. Even then it might have been all right - lots of kids make it, even with those odds - but then, on day eight, she had a bleed in the head.”

Charlie could have been asleep, she was so quiet. I wanted to stop, couldn’t though. I’d never gone through it like this before, from beginning to end, hope to damnation.

“There were big conferences - we were medical parents so we were included in all the discussions, as if that was doing us a favour - in which the paediatric neurosurgeon went through all the risks and I could see that Kate sat there and wasn’t interested: all she wanted was a hero to dive in there and give her back Alice, give her back her daughter.

“In the end, they decided that there was no point, that the risk was too great. Perhaps it was then that Kate began to hate me, when I didn’t shout and stamp and demand that this man open Alice’s head and take away the badness.

“I didn’t though. I just looked into his eyes and saw that he knew she was going to die, whatever happened. Then I looked at the others, the paediatricians and then nurses and the physios, and I saw the same look of sorry acceptance that here was no story of joy.

“All I saw when I looked at Kate was betrayal.”

Deep breath. Nearly there.

“She hung on for four weeks and two days. The heart monitor beeping as if it were giving, not receiving, her heart beat. She didn’t move. Only the merest, decerebrate twitch when someone touched her: awful jerks that revealed in their symmetry an automaton, a thing. And we had to go there every day and look at her, perhaps so that we didn’t look at each other, and wonder.

“Did you ever realise how noisy those places are. All the machines counting out lives, the air conditioning a deep, washing counter-note in the background, telephones sounding constantly, low chatter, never laughter. And every day it got hotter and hotter, and more and more airless. And every day we grew further and further apart in our mourning.

“They took her off active treatment, waiting for the bronchopneumonia to come, but it took too long, and in that time, our marriage was killed. By the time Alice died, we were as dead as she.”

I had said a lot, but I hadn’t said it all, not by a long way.

I let the night continue in peace and Charlie held me without saying another word.

.

In the early morning, I prepared breakfast while Charlie wondered around, bored. She had a habit of picking up ornaments and books and examining them, as if this were a job lot in an auction and she was hunting out bargains: it irritated me, this interference in my life, in Kate’s life, but I didn’t dare to say anything. Anyway this was the last occasion we would be able to consort for a while, as Carl would be back from his conference today - two days on obsessive-compulsive neurosis at which, presumably, nobody dared to wash their hands too assiduously - and there would be no more nights of relief for a while.

Charlie left a good twenty minutes ahead of me so that she could arrive at the hospital, entrench herself and forget what I looked like. That left me alone in Kate’s home again. When the chores were done and the cat was fed, the house again became a space reminding me of what had gone and what had never been, full of sounds that wouldn’t stop silently repeating in the stillness. The radio was on, talking of irrelevancies, defining the news and telling me what was important to me, but it was only a space-filler in my head. The first thing that had gone when Kate had decamped was the newspaper subscription: the next had been the milk delivery.

The weather was going to be good again, a shame when I was going to have to go to work, but at least the endless days of working alone were largely gone and I had a colleague I could talk to and discuss things with: the fucking was an unexpected bonus. Work no longer held dread for me: such a pity that the rest of my life did.

I picked up Julian Havers’ organiser and looked again at it. Soft black leather embossed with his initials: a present, Dr. Watson, no doubt. It was full of trivia, scribbled and scrawled. I looked in the back, where he had written the names and addresses of his friends, acquaintances and useful businesses: the last of them all was Sebastian’s. The writing was identical to every other entry - black ink, untidy with a flamboyant air - and he had written just ‘Sebastian,’ so it certainly implied friendship.

I kept wondering if it could possibly be a fake and, if it wasn’t, what that meant.

The rational explanation was that he had really been a friend of Julian Havers and therein lay the source of his knowledge that Julian Havers had died. Easy.

Except for the personal organiser; how had he come by that?

There were a hundred explanations, all innocent, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe any of them, not without proof. Try as I might, I couldn’t just accept the obvious.

I called the office and told them I would be late in: Peter was on post mortems but I knew Charlotte would cover for me. I drove to the hospital, parked the car in the consultants’ area and then walked across the road, through the subway to the other side of the railway line and then on into the town centre. In the very middle of the town the streets formed a cross that had been pedestrianised some years before. A hundred metres further on from here, down a moderately steep hill, was the coroner’s office.

I had to tap on the armoured glass doors to gain the receptionist’s attention but she let me in with a smile and an apology. I went on up to the top of the building where, in rather quaint attic rooms lived the three coroner’s officers who organised, and pretty much looked after, the coroner.

George was there, erect and softly Scottish, every inch a military man with his trimmed moustache, short hair and unbendable back.

“Doctor! This is a surprise. What can we do for you?”

You could imagine him drilling some elite Highland regiment, screaming at the squaddies and turning red in the face with gleeful rage.

He indicated a chair that I could sit in. I got on pretty well with the coroner’s officers, even when they gave me clinical information that was completely duff, and I was hoping to trade on this cosy relationship.

“I was just passing,” I began and “I thought I’d call in and ask if you’d got anywhere with Julian Havers. You remember him, he’s the...”

George did remember him. Unascertainable deaths stuck inside George, somewhere between his thyroid cartilage and his oesophagogastric junction. There they nestled, all sharp corners and hard edges, causing him much pain.

“Oh, yes, I remember him,” he interrupted, emphasising the final monosyllable as if Julian Havers was a troublemaker of gargantuan proportions. George, in his tidy, military way, abhorred ends that were untied, that trailed and tripped: perhaps they reminded him of soldiers who didn’t march in step or whose kit wasn’t properly presented. Julian Havers, cause of death not obvious, was clearly a paradigm of this nastiness.

“I wondered if you’d dug anything up on him. Drugs? Illnesses? Things like that.”

He rose, his back never wavering from perpendicular, marched across to the filing cabinet and pulled out the file. His return was equally disciplined, although I noticed with some disappointment that he had lost the habit of wheeling around on his heel.

“The toxicology isn’t back on him yet: that’ll take another week or so.”

There was a pause as he deliberately picked up pieces of paper, looked at every column centimetre and then put them down.

“We’ve spoken to his mother - she couldn’t add much to what we already knew. She denies any drugs, drink problem, anything like that. His general practitioner hasn’t yet sent us his report, but from what he said on the telephone there’s nothing of significance in the past medical history.”

“What does his mother’s statement say?”

George sifted through papers to produce a three-page, typed report. He perused it and was, I fear, about to start reading it aloud as though in court. Then, thank the Lord, he reconsidered and said, “You may as well read it yourself.”

The prose style wasn’t exactly Flaubert; indeed, in some paragraphs it gave uncanny echoes of James Joyce, but there didn’t seem to be much that was useful to me. Julian had shown no signs of any malady, nor had he appeared depressed, or agitated, or in any way of unusual affect. His collapse during a prayer meeting - he was a devout Christian - had been as unexpected as it was shocking. Resuscitation had been attempted but without any success at all.

The only possible source of interest to me was that he had gone out with a friend the night before. He had returned relatively early, perfectly happy and not obviously drunk.

“Do you know who this friend was?”

George frowned as much, I think, because he was perplexed by my interest as because he found the question difficult to answer.

“Does it matter?” he enquired.

Sooner or later he was going to ask that one.

“I’d just be interested, that’s all. He might have given him some tablets of something.”

It was pathetic, and in my ears I could hear the cries of the audience demanding better lines than that one, but George had the mind of a man who saw the universe in minutiae like that. He nodded slowly in appreciation that I had a point.

“I’ll try to find out,” he conceded. Somewhat perversely, I had the feeling that my stature had just grown slightly in his eyes.

“Would you let me know who it was?” I asked as I stood to leave him.

For a moment he was slightly disturbed by the request, then he allowed me this eccentricity and he agreed.

It was shortly before lunch when Charlie came into my room, shutting the door behind her and looking worried.

We were not prone to snatched, passionate embraces behind the microtomes, which made her attitude instantly worrying. My first thought was that Carl had discovered something.

“Problem?”

“I hope not,” she said cryptically, only serving to increase sympathetic activity in my brainstem. “Tony came to me while you were out.”

I thought Tony’s level was fencing of stolen property, tax evasion, petty larceny and possibly procuring: blackmail didn’t seem to be his style. I was about to ask how he had found out when she continued, “He’s worried about Peter.”

“What do you mean, ‘worried?’”

She sighed.

“He says that Peter’s missing things when he does post mortems. Apparently there was one particular incident this morning where Peter ignored an intracerebral haemorrhage and called it death due to ischaemic heart disease.”

We went down to see Tony who was closing up the body of an elderly man. He was not his usual insouciant self: presumably his act of grassing had constitutionally disagreed with him. We discussed his concerns across the body as if it were an overlarge table decoration.

When he had finished describing what had happened that morning I asked, “And what about on previous occasions? Have you had worries before now?”

Tony’s physiognomy was habitually like large-print book and on this occasion he didn’t have to say anything to confirm that yes, he had.

“Have you still got the organs?”

They were in a yellow plastic bag and so resembled an exploded offal mountain. I put on a pair of gloves and picked out the pieces of organ very, very carefully, arranging them on the worktop along the side of the mortuary. In actual fact, it didn’t take that long because most of the organs were still intact. The liver, for instance, contained only a single slash, no more than three centimetres in depth. The heart looked as though a mad chef had taken a dislike to it and roughly chopped it with a cleaver once or twice.

“So much for one-centimetre slices through the liver,” commented Charlie.

“And how he managed to diagnose ischaemic heart disease after doing that to the heart is beyond me. He hasn’t even sliced the coronary arteries to see if they’re stenosed.”

The brain, which should also be sliced in serial sections, had been cubed, each piece about three of four centimetres in diameter. No finer points of neuropathology were going to be uncovered but it had at least been enough to reveal a large area of haemorrhagic tissue - a stroke.

“Did you point this out to him?” asked Charlie.

Tony struggled hard to shed the habits of countless police interrogations and tell the truth.

“I didn’t like to be too obvious about it. I showed it to him while he was writing his notes and I asked him if he thought this was significant.”

“And what did he say?”

There was a minor hesitation before Tony said, “He looked a bit put out, then said that it was nothing.”

“Was he annoyed with you?” I asked.

Tony made a face. People’s annoyance didn’t register with Tony.

I looked at Charlie and she raised her eyebrows. I thanked Tony and we left him to clear up the mess.

Back in my office, Charlie enquired, “What are you going to do?”

I was thinking of my conversation with Carl Volkmann, not enjoying the irony. When did a mistake become important enough to report?

“As far as you’re concerned, there isn’t problem with any of his other work, is there?”

She shook her head. “He’s a reasonable opinion on the tricky cases. The cytology screeners haven’t said anything, either.”

“That was my impression, too.”

There was silence until Charlie, smiling sweetly, said, “So?”

“I’d better have a chat with Peter, I suppose.”

Her expression said it all: Rather you than me.

She was on the point of leaving when she said, “Carl said that you’d told him you were planning on coming on Saturday.”

Ah...

“I thought we’d agreed that it wouldn’t be a good idea. You were only asked because it would look odd if you weren’t.”

“I’m sorry about that, Charlie. He rather caught me when the defences were down. I found I had said, ‘Yes,’ before I’d had a chance to think.”

I hadn’t been looking forward to the party and clearly neither was she. Pursing her lips she said, “Well, if you do come, don’t stay too long, will you?”

True love, I suppose, upon its rocky road.

Peter Weiss was balding, the little remaining hair clustering, pale and thin, around the edges of his scalp, scraping a living on inadequate sustenance. His face was heavily lined, although his weak, blue eyes were generally good-humoured. He had false teeth and I had constantly to remind myself not to stare at the movements they made when he talked.

He was sitting at the microscope, grinding through some cervical cytology.

“Can I have a word, Peter?”

He leaned away from the microscope and said, “Certainly.”

Where to start?

“How long have you been here now?”

He considered.

“About three months.”

How true. Whither next?

“You’re perfectly happy, are you? No problems?”

He said that yes, he was happy and that no, he had no problems. When the embarrassment meter had risen significantly in the ensuing quiet he asked, “Have you got a problem, Philip?”

There was my chance, and there it was gone. Before I had formulated my thoughts my lips, tongue and larynx - bastards one and all - were doing the talking for me.

“Oh, no, not really. It’s just that Personnel are enquiring about whether you’ll be staying for the foreseeable future.”

Peter, he assured me, was more than willing to stay on for as long as possible.

At the end of the day, George rang me from the Coroner’s Office.

“I’ve got the name of that friend. The one who went out with Julian Havers.”

In the pause that followed I could feel certainty congealing out of suspicion. I asked, “And?”

“Well, it’s not very exciting. We haven’t got anything on him. No convictions, nothing like that.”

Just tell me, will you? Just tell me that it’s Sebastian!

“What’s the name then?”

“Marcus Coombs.”

Which caused me to pause abruptly and consider the uncertain nature of human existence. I heard George say, “Does that mean anything to you?”

I said, “No. Nothing at all,” and we ended the conversation.

I should have been delighted. Surely now I could write Sebastian’s name down in the Great Ledger of Human Judgement under the heading of ‘Barking, Best Avoided, But Not Dangerous.’

Except I had a feeling that I wasn’t rid of Sebastian. Not yet.

5.

To die would be an awfully big adventure.

I hadn’t intended to meet Marcus Coombs, but he came to me; unfortunately the circumstances were such that introductions were not formally made.

It was Friday morning and my entrance into the mortuary brought to me the melancholic realisation that it was not going to be a pleasant day when I smelled the smell.

I won’t deceive you by claiming that there isn’t a smell that is death’s but at least ordinarily it is one that, although not pleasant, is at least tolerable.

Ordinarily: not always.

I waded through the fug and went into the doctors’ changing room. When I emerged, Tony was waiting for me. He was busy doing nothing, awaiting my entrance, whereas normally he would have eviscerated any clients we might have had that day. His only companion was a thick, dirty white body bag - a sinister sign to the experienced pathologist and clearly the source of the pollution. I could see that the olfactory nerves were going to take a bit of a hammering.

“I take it this one is past its sell-by date.”

“Just a bit,” he said.

Tony, looking rather fetching in his pink rubber gloves, began unzipping the bag and within thirty seconds the room was becoming significantly oxygen-deprived. As he opened the gap up to expose the contents, his head jerked back and an accentuated “Phhuck!” came faintly from his mouth. He retreated rapidly to a side room whence he emerged with a mask on, during which time the miasma had come upon me and was giving me a good going-over.

I know that decomposition is a necessary thing, that it is merely recycling of biological compounds to allow the food chain to be restocked, but did God really have to make it so loathsomely pungent? Did He really feel forced to paint it in nauseating colours and to accompany it with smells that reach right into the stomach and brain and squeeze them until you feel faint and there is the feeling that every cell of your body is irrevocably permeated with the stench? Did He really have to make it greasy and dark and depressing, watching sickly fluids run out of burst blisters, seeing the eyes sunk down into the skull and the hair detached in tufts?

It is difficult to appreciate God’s wondrous Creation when faced with such decay.

Tony took ten minutes to get the body out of the bag and then out of the stained clothes. I remember noting at the time that there were no maggots, but noting it only to forget it. By the time he had finished, the room was so full of the smell that it was a wonder there was room to move in. That the olfactory nerve tires easily is the best that can be said for situations such as these.

“Shall I carry on?” he asked, although the subtext was, You don’t really want me to remove the organs, do you? You won’t mind doing that yourself while I go and make a cup of tea, will you?

I nodded and he paused fleetingly but reproachfully before turning back to the client.

“Where’s the paperwork?” I asked.

“By the dictation machine.” His voice was strained as if his vocal cords weren’t working well in this particular atmosphere.

I went over the alcove where we dictated the reports. The information was, as usual, puritanical in its scarcity of useful information. I put a tape in the machine and started to read out the details I had been given.

I stopped rather suddenly and rather rapidly, feeling sick, but not because of the stench

Marcus Edwin Coombs, aged twenty-three years. Found in flat in sitting room. No past medical history of note. Police gained entry after visitor called, got no reply and noticed strange smell. All entrances secure. No suspicious circumstances.

I remember actually feeling dread, actually then believing that somehow Sebastian had done this. The certainty was born more of irrationality than anything else, but it was there, nonetheless. I also knew that I had to find a reason why this young man had died because, if I didn’t, it would only serve to reinforce the notion of Sebastian as some sort of supernatural slayer.

But when I looked at the body, I knew I would be very lucky indeed to find anything that I could truthfully give as a definite cause of death, for not only does putrefaction change beauty into foulness, it obliterates almost all of the evidence that a pathologist uses to assess why death occurred.

After forty minutes of wading through an eye-watering stench that would have made the worms think twice and that could have been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima just as effectively as Big Boy and friend, I had a lot of sliced and diced bits and pieces but no answers. The board ran with fluid gobbets of fat stained with red, green and brown, a mix that was almost as horrible as the smell, while the feel of the grease that permeated the organs made me shudder each time I touched them, even through the rubber gloves.

“Can we get blood?”

Tony was spraying the air with super strength freshener that in normal conditions would have been as welcome as a skunk’s fart but which at that moment smelled like Coco Chanel’s greatest creation. He stopped and gave me a look.

“If you could try, please, Tony.”

Our relationship was at least understood by Tony to the extent that open rebellion was not an option. He picked up a small stainless steel bowl and, while holding it below the cut-through veins of the leg in the pelvis, began to massage the leg to force blood out. I made sure he knew I was watching, and he did seem to make an effort, but it was to no effect. The other three limbs proved equally recalcitrant.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“What did he die of, then?”

Tony’s query was innocently cheery, which made it all the more irritating.

I had to admit my failure, though.

“I’m not sure.”

It was the second case in two weeks of death occurring in a young man and it was the second time that I had returned the dreaded verdict of ‘unascertained.’ Not even income tax was more inevitable than the phone call that I received from the Coroner, Mr. Tourette.

“I am led to understand that you have been able to identify a cause of death in the case of Marcus Coombs.”

“Not as yet.”

“And the case of Julian Havers? Have you made progress there?”

“No.”

There then followed a pause but I was buggered if I was going to fill it.

“Dr. Reed,” began the great man and I had the feeling that he was trying to be tactful, “Two cases in such a short time...”

What was he implying? That I’d lost it? That I was doing it deliberately to annoy him?

“The body of Marcus Coombs was badly decayed: I would suspect that he’d been dead at least a week, quite possibly longer. I’m sure you’re well aware that pathological examination of such bodies is frequently less than informative.”

“And Julian Havers?” The tone was almost but not quite sarcastic.

“There was no gross pathological abnormality,” I said quite firmly. “Microscopic examination of the tissues I sampled is also normal. Until we get something back from the toxicology lab, it would be premature to speculate.”

I knew that premature speculation was anathema to the Coroner.

Again he paused and I could see him considering the possibilities. I figured he would let it go a little longer before getting heavy; if the toxicology came back negative, then he could safely castrate me.

“Very well,” he consented.

He rang off, apparently forgetting to wish me well.

I looked again at the details I had been given on Marcus Coombs, feeling that something was bothering me.

I picked up the phone and called the Coroner’s office back, asking to speak to George.

“You’re not exactly top of the opinion polls around here, you know.”

“So I gathered.”

“Mind you, it’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? This poor chap Marcus Coombs dying like that. We were only talking about him yesterday, weren’t we?”

I took a deep, deep intake of oxygen, nitrogen and various pollutants: was this man deliberately trying to goad me? It is a testament to the civilising effects of a public school education that I said only, “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” and then, “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about, actually.”

We could have been discussing the price of fish fillets and I suppose, as far as George was concerned, we might as well have been: he had no interest in lunatics and all their works.

“You needn’t worry, you know,” George informed me proudly. “When I noticed the coincidence, I made sure that there was nothing untoward it all. The police did a thorough search of the premises. There’s no sign of a forced entry and nothing’s been disturbed.”

Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? Not if Death came to call. Death didn’t need to carry any implements that might be viewed with suspicion by the local constabulary.

“Oh, good, good.” I paused for a second so that I could demonstrate my appreciation of his foresight, then asked, “You don’t happen to have the name of the visitor who alerted the police, do you?”

George was bathed in roseate glow of cockiness and this, thankfully, obscured any curiosity he might have had at this question. A faint sound of paper moving and then he came back to me.

I had been spared this once before, but this time I knew what he was going to say. Even as he said the words, his voice cheery at being so helpful, I realised that the answer was built into the clockwork of the universe, sewn into the monstrous cloth of reality, as inescapable as sorrow.

“Here we are. A friend of his – Sebastian Marjolin.”

I spent the rest of the day working with half a brain, finding everything too much, too laborious and too irritating: by the time it was six o’clock I’d had enough. All I wanted to do was to get home, have a large libation and sit down to try to work out what the buggery was going on.

There was a package leaning up against sidewall of the porch. It had no address on it and was wrapped in thick brown paper. It didn’t have any bloodstains on it either, but I knew immediately that here was a message from Sebastian. I picked it up, half-wondering if it was a bomb, half believing that it might just be. I gently squeezed it at one end, feeling that such was not the action of a sage but unable to resist, and felt something solid inside, like a book. I shook it the merest fraction, ready to run if there was the slightest rattle, but it was mute and incommunicative.

I took it inside and put it gently on the kitchen table. I took off my jacket, poured myself that large drink that I had been looking forward to, and then sat down in front of the package. We eyed each other silently, the drink and I on one side, the gift from Sebastian on the other: I could feel it daring me to open it, but that was just one of a number of voices in my head, each saying different things.

I swear I didn’t sit there for long, but the drink went off somewhere and I suddenly felt alone. I made a top-up that was really a huge new drink and we sat down again with my visitor, trying to pretend that there had been no interruption.

Basically, the question that I was trying to answer was, What are you up to, Sebastian?

That he was up to something - or that he thought, in the labyrinthine construction that was his mind, he was up to something - was certain. I had merely to decipher the clues.

Was he trying to kill me? - if he was, then this was a bomb - but I thought not: he might well see me as some sort of enemy (for whatever reason) but he seemed to think that we were engaged in some sort of game: he might, in his head, believe that other people were dying because of what he did but I didn’t think he wanted me to die. So, assuming that his intention was other than to consign me to the afterlife, what was he trying to do?

He claimed to be killing people, claimed too that he was doing it by some means that I could not detect. Spooky maybe, but coming from a spotty youth who thought he was Death incarnate and who was residing in a private mental health clinic, not entirely believable.

Except...

Except that two people had died who were connected with Sebastian, and in neither case had I been able to identify quite how they had died. And that left room for Sebastian’s little lies to seep in and spoil the sweet air of normality.

Could he have poisoned them?

Possible, and one body was too badly decomposed for toxicology to be able to tell much (unless he was using the less than subtle toxins such as arsenic), but the body of Julian Havers would yield an answer to that question.

Another communion with my friend in the glass beside me seemed to shake me from my meandering.

I was being foolish, and thereby falling into the hole that Sebastian was so assiduously digging for me. Here was no plan or psychotic trail of murders. Here was a clever but disturbed man who thought to unsettle me.

After all, what did we have?

A body so far gone that no pathologist could be sure what he had died of. A young man who had died of something that I had yet to find. One thing was clear, there had been no evidence thus far that they had died by unnatural means.

Self-confidence restored, I drained the glass and looked again at the package.

So why did it scare me? I asked the question, looked at the glass by my right hand and suddenly I was lonely again.

By the time I returned with a replacement, the package was starting to annoy me. I couldn’t leave it there for eternity to find: in any case, if it was a bomb, there might be a timer inside. I felt people would laugh if the bloody thing went off and they found my remains sitting and staring at a crater in the kitchen.

“What the shit.”

The paper tore easily and there was no bomb. Just a book, just a puzzle.

Complete Nonsense Verse by Edward Lear.

There was an inscription on the front page.

I thought you might appreciate this (but probably not).

It was signed Sebastian.

Folie à deux.

The phrase kept me awake that night, tonelessly sounding in my mind, its very aptness giving it a sinister air.

Mad people affect those around them. They are like massive gravitational objects, sucking people into their orbit, trapping them in behaviours that are subtly altered, distorting perceptions and bending even the light that they see by. You cannot respond normally to that which is abnormal and so, by that very dangerous slide, you yourself behave abnormally. Take it to extremes, and sometimes it can be taken to extremes, the madness affects both.

Madness is infectious: more than that, it is contagious. Contacto, contactare, etc, etc

Was that what Sebastian, by design or accident, was doing to me?

I had sat and looked at a package, getting seriously drunk while believing that it was a bomb. I wouldn’t have done that a few weeks ago: ergo I had been changed, and been changed by Sebastian.

How far had the change gone, and how far would it go before I was done with Sebastian?

Who was I to tell?

6.

He knew the anguish of the marrow, the ague of the skeleton

A civilised affair it was. By which I mean that we conversed about the right subjects, in the correct tones, with the correct knowledge. We knew what to say, what to omit and what to be amused by, outraged by and, for we were largely a liberal lot, tolerant of. Plenty of food, plenty of good wine, port and brandy, and plenty of superficial camaraderie. Friendships were cemented with flour and water, hostilities temporarily suppressed.

A very civilised affair indeed.

I arrived as late as I decently could, being let in by Charlie who looked less than delighted to see her most intimate of acquaintances turning up to sup with hubby. I made a sort of disarticulated smile by way of apology and said nothing. I could, I knew, have come down with a bug and claimed that I was glued to the bog, but I had decided that a little embarrassment wouldn’t kill me, not when I wanted to find out a few more details on Sebastian.

She showed me into their capacious lounge and dropped me like some sort of unwanted rodent into a nest of psychiatrists as quickly as she could, returning only to thrust into my hand a glass of white wine, which was odd because I’d asked for red. I had a brief opportunity to look around and spotted the expected mix of hospital consultants and strangers who were presumably neighbours: there was a distinct over preponderance of psychiatrists, but then one would have been an over preponderance in my opinion.

There was a buffet meal set out against one wall and all the furniture had been pushed away from the centre of the room. Since the house was Victorian with high, decorated ceilings, this gave an impression of vastness. People had spilled out through French windows onto a sunlit patio: behind them the garden spread out like parkland: clearly the psychiatric part of the private sector was doing well and I wondered which of the several acres I had helped to purchase.

It took me fifteen minutes to extract myself from my three psychiatric colleagues, time in which whole populations of bacteria flourished and died in my intestine and in which we made talk that was so small it was invisible to the naked human eye. There are probably no other subspecialties of medicine that are further apart than pathology and psychiatry: we would have had more in common if we had been from different galaxies. I wondered how Charlie and Carl managed to get on, but then remembered that perhaps that relationship wasn’t as ideal as it appeared.

I wandered over to the food and stood there looking at mounds of rice salad, green salad, pasta salad, tomato salad and bean salad that cried out for me to eat them: I reflected ruefully what a shame it was that they could talk only in a foreign and, to me, incomprehensible tongue. Apart from that there were the cold meats, including a game pie that was covered in a ravishingly attractive pastry creation, and these undoubtedly spoke in more seductive tones, it was true, but I found it all too depressingly familiar. Even the usual trashy bits of food – the stuff you weren’t supposed to eat except in minute quantities – such as the cheese straws, the sausages, the bhajias and the scotch eggs, I had seen too often, eaten too many.

I found myself choosing food on the basis of what would be least nauseating, thinking that here was a side to Charlie that I rather wish I hadn’t discovered. I was about to pick up a plate when beside me a voice said, “It looks wonderful, doesn’t it?”

If only we lived in a world where the truth could be told.

I turned to find Peter Weiss beside me. He was in the company of a woman whom I took to be his wife.

“Yes, yes. It certainly does,” I agreed enthusiastically, wondering if God had marked that one down on the minus side of the ledger: to be sent to hell for social mendacity.

“You haven’t met Margaret, have you? This is Philip, my other colleague.”

She was hard, that much was obvious: still, I suppose one of them had to be. She was perhaps in her middle fifties, greying but not unattractively so, thin and taut. Her eyes were sharp, her mouth small. When she smiled, as she did now, it was minimalistic and conscious of energy conservation.

“How do you do?” she asked but I didn’t think she wanted to hear about any groin abscesses I might have.

“Nice to meet you,” I countered with equal sincerity, hoping God could keep up.

Peter had taken two plates and handed one to his wife. They turned their attention to the spread while I stood by.

“Aren’t you having any?”

“Maybe later,” I said. Just in case they should suspect my reticence I picked up a sausage and bit through it.

“It was extremely nice of Charlie to invite us,” enthused my colleague. His wife ignored this but I was unsure if that meant she was hard of hearing or that she didn’t entirely agree.

“Have you managed to meet many of the consultant staff yet, Peter?”

He shook his head.

“I’ve met most of the surgeons, of course, but that’s about it.”

“That’s the trouble with our job, isn’t it? It’s so easy to get stuck in the lab and never see anyone else.” He was digging into one of several varieties of rice salad while Margaret seemed to have managed to pile on to her plate a sample of every dish present.

“And twice as bad when you’re a locum,” I added.

There was then something about the atmosphere that changed subtly. They didn’t exactly exchange meaningful glances but I could see that I had said something that tripped switches inside both of them. Peter just paused over the roast chicken drumsticks: all I could see were the remnants of his hair and the side of his face but he seemed to have lost concentration. Margaret, however, looked across at him and even I could see that she was expecting something of him.

“I…” he began at last, putting an end to the misery he was creating in all of us, “I was wondering…”

Clearly. He was taking so long that already I knew that neither of us was going to find the next few seconds particularly comfortable.

“…If we could have a chat sometime.”

Eyes wide in innocence I said, “Sure.”

Mrs. Weiss didn’t seem to think that was enough. It is possible that she kicked him on the shin, although I couldn’t see for sure.

“…About the job.”

So that was it. Peter wasn’t taking about his job, the locum job, he was taking about the permanent job, the one that would shortly be advertised. The one that Charlie and I both knew would not be going to Peter. Trouble was, it now looked as though Peter didn’t know that.

I had taken in some air and opened my mouth, the brain was already concocting something when he said, “About the permanent position.”

I hesitated, realised that this was too suspicious, then smiled.

“Of course, Peter. But not here, eh? How about next week some time? I’m sure we can find fifteen minutes to have a chat about things.”

If Peter looked satisfied with that, his spouse appeared harder to please. She was only frowning slightly, but even my short acquaintance with her told me that this was no mean thing. It was with shameful speed that I made an excuse about looking for another drink and left Peter to death by disgruntlement.

The only escape route took me outside where there were perhaps thirty people outside, of which I recognised half. Mr. and Mrs. Bodian were dominating a small group of anaesthetists. Bodian was the chief surgeon in the hospital, a small, fat and horrifically repulsive man who had the manners of one of the less attractive Roman dictators. Curiously, his wife was a striking opposite, being tall and underweight, although she was reputed to have a tongue that could dice sturdy men at ten paces. Their audience was strangely obsequious in manner, but this could be explained by the fact that anaesthetists are a parasitic form of life who rely on obese surgeons for their sustenance. One word from Bodian and any or all of them could have been deprived of private funds, a fate far worse than eternal damnation in hell.

I was looking for Carl but he was nowhere to be seen outside. I had only been in the house once before and it took me a few minutes to find the way into the kitchen. Both Carl and Charlie were there, although coincidentally she left as soon as I arrived, pausing only to glare venomously at something behind me. Carl was opening wine.

“Hello, old chap. Do you want another drink?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

I indicated the red and he obliged.

“How about another game of golf some time?” he asked as he poured.

I didn’t particularly want to get too friendly with Carl, fearing that it would only exacerbate matters if we became bosom pals and then he discovered that I was bosom pals with Charlie as well.

“Sure,” I said, trying to sound as vague as possible. Then I added quickly, “Could we have a chat? It’s about Sebastian.”

We were all in the party mood so I don’t think he wanted to be too rude but I could see that here was a topic of conversation that was not in his top one hundred to make social occasions go with a swing. He picked up another bottle and began to apply the corkscrew.

“Sebastian?” he asked, as if the name was indistinctly familiar.

“He sent me something,” I persisted, ignoring the signals. “A book.”

I’ve always thought that extracting a cork from a bottle was one of easier of life’s chores. Of course, it depends on how pissed you are, whether you have some form of mobility disorder such as Parkinson’s Disease or cerebral palsy, whether you have reasonable vision and whether the environment is reasonably stable, but taking all of these parameters as more or less optimal, I thought Carl was making quite a seven course feast of sticking a corkscrew into a cork, twisting and pulling.

“And?” he enquired. I thought I knew what was going on. I thought that he was telling me that he didn’t want to know about work, and especially not about Sebastian, while he was in the role of bountiful host.

“Nonsense Verse by Edward Lear. He inscribed it to me.”

He frowned. “Very nice, I’m sure, old chap.” He paused in his labour and said, “I wonder why he chose that book?”

Personally I wasn’t wondering that: I was wondering whether a corkscrew through the eyeball would make him take me a little more seriously.

“More to the point, why send it to me? And it’s not the first thing he’s sent to me.”

I told him about Julian Havers’ personal organiser with its tasteful garnish of rabbit. The conversation was slightly disjointed since people kept coming in and insisting on behaving as though they were enjoying themselves. When I had finished, Carl gave up with the wine. He didn’t look too euphoric but at least I seemed to have got in amongst him a bit.

“We’d better go somewhere a little quieter.”

He led me out of the kitchen and we bumped into Charlie on the way. Her face switched from enjoyment to an expression that was commonly encountered on those who have to live with the smell of chronic infected leg ulcers.

“Phil and I just have to discuss something. We won’t be a minute.”

“Don’t be,” she ordered. Her eyes hardly saw me as they flicked from Carl to the kitchen door behind us.

Carl raised his eyes at me and then grinned slightly.

He took me to his study and we sat on the sofa with our wineglasses. Then there were a few moments of silence during which I looked around the room. It was decorated in a modern style – all greys, angles and spareness – that gave a distinctly clinical, ascetic impression: only the furniture was soft, deeply coloured and inviting. In accordance with tradition, the sofa looked as though it could double as a couch, but at least I wasn’t lying lengthways on it with Carl at my head. The room was untidy but it was an academic untidiness that suggested here was a busy brain: my mess never managed to look quite so intelligent.

Because I’m quick it didn’t take me long to notice that Carl seemed to be embarrassed. He was doing his lip-tapping exercise and frowning slightly.

“What’s wrong, Carl?” I asked. “I don’t want confidential information from you. I just want to know why he’s doing these things.”

He nodded and I thought I had reassured him because he asked, “Is it really very surprising that Sebastian should have latched on to you in this way? You know about his fixation with death: you’re a pathologist and Sebastian knows that.”

“It’s more than that. We don’t just share a common, if diametrically opposite, interest in death. This is more personal. He’s more or less said that he sees me as an opponent.”

“He’s playing a game, Phil. That’s all.”

Two flies were chasing each other beneath the light hanging from the centre of the ceiling. What evolutionary advantage is there to spraying pheromones under and electric light fitting?

“Maybe,” I agreed. “The trouble is that I don’t know what the game is. What are the rules?”

Carl smiled and suddenly seemed more comfortable. We were back to psychiatrists and patients, the game that he played for a living. I wondered vaguely what had happened to make him appear confident again.

“There are no rules, Phil. Or at least, there are no rules outside Sebastian’s head. Nor is there a game that you need to worry about. Sebastian will play his game and no one will be harmed, least of all you.”

I hesitated a bit before speaking again, but I wanted reassurance that I was being silly that those half-formed ideas about Sebastian were all rubbish.

“He claims to have killed two people, Julian Havers and Marcus Coombs, both friends of his. He claims to have done it in a way that I, as a pathologist, won’t be able to detect. I assume that was why he sent me Julian Havers’ personal organiser, as a hint that he was telling the truth.”

“And these two friends of his have died quite recently?”

I nodded my head.

“And was there anything to find at post mortem?”

I switched to head shaking.

We were still safely ensconced in the ‘doctor-knows-all’ mode so Carl was able to rationalise all my fears with the merest flick of his omniscient white stick.

“There you are then. He’s playing his game. Using circumstances, inventing things, reinforcing the illusion. He’s done it before.”

He was very good at it, this reassurance from the pinnacle; only I was a doctor too, and I knew medical bullshit when I trod in it.

“I don’t think you understand, Carl. I didn’t find anything. I’m a pathologist – I’m not supposed to find nothing. For one thing, the coroner doesn’t like it, and for another it leaves open the possibility that they died unnaturally.”

He sucked in some air. Evidently I had managed to shake his confidence slightly because he tapped his lips once before sailing gaily by.

“I think you’re being too negative. There is no evidence that Sebastian did anything to these people and, until there is something a little more evidential, I think you’d be doing both yourself and Sebastian a favour if you gave him the benefit of the doubt.

“In any case,” he went on, “There’s no evidence that he’s ever done anything at all…worrying.”

He rather spoilt things with that last remark because, and I don’t think it was my imagination, he didn’t sound completely certain. He smiled but it was frail and vaporous.

Much as I wanted to argue, there seemed little point.

Changing the subject I said, “Without betraying confidentiality, can you give a little of his background?”

Carl’s glass was empty and he obviously wanted to return to the partying throng outside.

“There isn’t a lot to say really. I told you that his father, sister and fiancée all died within a short time of each other.”

“What about his mother?”

“She’s still hale and hearty, as far as I can remember.”

This wasn’t what I wanted to know, but I wasn’t sure what I did want to know.

“Can you give me more details – like when and where they died. Also the fiancée’s name.”

Carl was not at all happy.

“I’m not sure I can go that far, old chap. Anyway, why on earth would you want to know things like that?”

“I just want to check that they died of normal things, things that a pathologist can discover.”

He tutted.

“Leave it, Phil,” he advised. “Even if I could give you that information, it would do more harm than good.”

He stood up.

“Trust me. Sebastian is ill but he’s not dangerous.”

There wasn’t much else I could do other than stand up and appear to agree. As we left the room Carl asked, “Are you going to have something to eat?”

I shook my head.

“I think I’d better go now, thanks.”

He looked crestfallen.

“Are you sure?”

Before I could answer Charlie appeared. When Carl gave her the sad news I am sorry to say that her face actually brightened.

“What a shame,” she said and I at least had the pleasure of knowing that God had probably put that one down in the book as well.

I hadn’t expected Carl to help me but nor had I expected to leave there with a vague sense of unease. I felt that he had lied to me somewhere, or at least he had hidden what he knew. Carl had never struck me as a deliberately deceitful man, certainly not one to enjoy deception for its own sake: if he was hiding something from me, he was doing it because he thought it was for the best.

Trouble was, the best for whom?

I had a nasty suspicion that it wasn’t necessarily the best for me.

7.

Nothing mortal is enduring, and there is nothing which does not presently end in bitterness

Something gnawed at me for the rest of the weekend. I had gone to Carl hoping for enlightenment concerning Sebastian but he had only worsened my state of mind by giving pusillanimous reassurance and raising other questions in my head – like what was he hiding?

He wasn’t going to tell me, that was certain, and neither did it appear likely that Sebastian would willingly fill in any details I might have missed. Which left just one option.

Subterfuge.

And that was why I walked up the steps of the clinic late on Sunday afternoon, although I knew that Kate would be in some therapy class or other and that Carl was doing whatever psychiatrists do whenever they’re not being ineffectual with mad people. The only problem that I foresaw was that of James since, despite being at permanent, not to say nuclear, war with his vocal apparatus, he was not stupid. He would know that I knew that Kate would not be available for visiting and he would wonder. I needed a plausible excuse and I had been unable to produce one.

In the event, I was blessed with good fortune. James was not on duty, his place taken by an older man whom I had seen around from time to time performing portering duties. He sat at his post looking bored, as if reception did not match the intellectual rigors of delivering crates of antidepressants to the pharmacy or making sure the fuses in the plug of the ECT machine weren’t blown.

He looked up Kate’s schedule when I had introduced myself and informed in a dull tone what I knew very well, that she would be in therapy for another thirty minutes at least.

“I’ll go and wait in her room, then, shall I?”

He considered this proposal while I learned from his name badge that he was Arthur. I had noticed before that most of the employees at the clinic were without surnames and, in the interval while his intellectual apparatus wrestled with the problem that I had posed, I tried to decide whether they were stripped of them when they started or whether mono-appellation was a rigid criterion for employment.

He nodded acceptance of my suggestion at long last, although he didn’t look very happy with it: presumably it was more agreeable than having me sit in reception for half an hour and engaging me in conversation about weighty matters of philosophy, semiotics or fluid mechanics.

I thanked him with a smile that he took and did not return, and went up to the first floor but then, I’m afraid, I went back down to the ground floor, this time by the back stairs. There was a short, dingy corridor that lead out past some linen rooms and suchlike, and then I was in the irregularly paved area that served as a car park for the staff. Opposite was the stable block that formed with the main house a quadrangle and in which there were clinical suites and the consultants’ offices. Kate was now safely ensconced in one of these, although there was a problem in that I had no idea exactly where. Half of the rooms had windows which looked out on the quadrangle which gave me a fifty percent chance of being visible to her: my main hope was that her therapy did not allow her to stare out of the window. In truth I wasn’t quite sure what the term ‘therapy’ encompassed but I was fairly confident it involved things like ‘analysis,’ ‘inter-personal communication’ and the emission of lots of carbon dioxide.

Directly opposite me was the front entrance and on either side of that were three windows: it was going to be difficult to gain access through that route without being seen from all of them. At either end, however, was an emergency exit and it seemed logical to try for one of those before having to use the front door. I skirted around the block, keeping as close to the back wall of the main house as I could, trying, and undoubtedly failing, to look natural and unassuming: I kept behind the cars but I might just as well have been a naked man with cotton reel for all the good that did me.

Eventually I came to the door that served as an emergency exit. This being real life and this being, in particular, my life, it was locked. My only alternative was therefore the main entrance, which meant I would have now to walk past the front of the building, directly in front of three of the windows. There was no point in not looking into the rooms as I passed. Only one was occupied and that was by about half a dozen patients sitting in the obligatory circle: I recognised the back of Sebastian’s head but Kate was not among them. I did my best to look as if I had a thousand reasons to be there and passed serenely on.

Feeling somewhat relieved I walked through the glass doors of the main entrance. There was a small lobby where visitors to consultants could wait and in here was an unoccupied reception desk. Here the decor was more modern but equally tasteful. On the wall were oils in a more impressionist flavour while the carpet was thick enough to impart a faintly bouncy feel to the footsteps. The magazines were neatly stacked in a rack. I remembered sitting in that room with Kate and going through the pile: apparently there is an abnormally high rate of mental illness amongst antique lovers, the riding fraternity and golfers.

I went through the doors that led onto the main corridor. Carl’s office was thankfully close, first on the right and there was no one about. The door with his name on was in fact his secretary’s cubby-hole: as soon as I was inside I gently shut the door and congratulated myself on a safe arrival.

I had been afraid that it would either take me a long time to find Sebastian’s notes or that they would not be there at all, but I was surprised to discover them quite easily. They were where they should have been, on a shelf in his secretary’s office marked ‘in patients.’

Have you ever looked through medical notes? In theory they are fascinating, what with the X-ray reports, the pathology reports, the descriptions of interesting clinical findings and the pontifications of learned men (and women, of course) of medicine. In theory they would provide the patient with hours of compelling reading, effectively a medical whodunit, I suppose.

Ah, well, reality fails again.

When you dip into notes you quickly discover that not only are they boring, they are confusing, illegible, contradictory, ill informed, irritating and largely full of uttermost crap. Radiology reports that mean all things to all men, pathology reports that contain enough weasel words to wipe out a rabbit warren, clinical impressions that vary from day to day, doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital, and the most confusing jargon ever invented. After all, there are very few outside the brotherhood who would know what PERL, FLK, PNH, JACCOL or BPH mean.

Added to all that there is the handwriting - and it really is variably atrocious - topped off with the facts that medical notes are never in the right order and they are rarely adequately dated.

Sebastian’s were no worse than most but, even though I am versed in deciphering the encrypted and scrambled mess, these were psychiatric notes; these were written by people who not only speak a foreign tongue to most, they speak an obscure dialect thereof.

It started off fairly straightforwardly. Sebastian Marjolin was twenty-four years old, born in Carshalton, Surrey. His parents had been well to do since his mother had a good post in the Civil Service and his father was a biochemist, both of them working in London. There was no family history of mental illness and his home life appeared to have been stable. He had a single, younger sister.

He had been educated at Public School and had gained good grades at A-level, enabling him to obtain a place at Cambridge. His father must have been delighted that he had opted to read biochemistry, even more delighted that he obtained a first class degree. When Sebastian had started a Ph.D. studentship in the same laboratory as his father - albeit in a different department - Pater’s world must have seemed perfect.

And yet, without warning, in the space of six months, everything had changed.

No warnings, apparently, just three deaths, wiping out most of the people close to him and then Sebastian was no longer Sebastian, as effectively as if he had been killed. Even I could feel sorry for him, but perhaps sorrier for his mother who had suffered the deaths of four people.

If they were the facts, the medical side was a little less objective, a little less steady in its foundation.

I came across enthralling insights into Sebastian’s state of mind, most of which clearly showed that it is very difficult to judge how sane somebody really is: there is the extreme of stark, raving loony, but you don’t have to be too far below that before you enter the territory of ‘could have the full cargo but actually we’re not too sure.’ The efficacy of Sebastian’s therapy therefore seemed to be assessed either by asking him how he felt or by recording his answers and behaviour during therapy sessions and on general, social occasions. As far as I could see, they didn’t even ask him trick questions, like, ‘Have you killed anyone lately?’ or ‘How are you brothers, War, Pestilence and Famine?’

I began to see why Carl had been a tad surprised to learn that Sebastian had a penchant for vivisection and I began to understand that there might just be a therapeutic window in which Sebastian was sane enough to say the right things when it mattered and insane enough to play games with me. What I didn’t learn was just how dangerous Sebastian might be. I still had no feel for him.

In the end, I almost missed it. It was couched in terms that were effectively code, but it stuck out as soon as I saw it.

Interpersonal Relationships - Sebastian continues to be a loner despite encouragement from staff. Discussion with his mother confirms that this is not a recent characteristic. The only exception to this is his friendship with Kate Reed, which appears to be supportive for both of them. There will have to be careful, constant review of this in view of possible future consequences but Dr. Volkmann advises against action at present since it is undoubtedly beneficial for both of them.

I was stupid and I was slow because at first I just thought, So they are getting friendly. I thought so.

The full realisation took a long time coming, and it was mighty languid about its arrival, but when it had finally parked itself inside my head it was like a bursting blood vessel in my eyes and in my head.

He was shafting her.

And once it was settled this concept started to grow, throwing out tendrils and roots all over my cranial cavity until all I could do was stand there and think while the world turned and while my autonomic nervous system took over housekeeping.

He was screwing her. Perhaps every night, perhaps more than once a night.

He and she were engaged in the most intimate acts, other than cannibalism and rectal surgery, that can take place between two human beings.

They were tasting each other, he her breasts and her skin and her cunt, she his...

I actually began to shake, although I cannot say whether it was with rage or sorrow or shame, as these thoughts billowed into my head.

They were fucking, perhaps after I visited, and they were laughing at me while they did so. While he entered her and while she groaned with pleasure and asked him for more intimacies.

Perhaps they had a favourite position as Kate and I had done once, and perhaps she allowed him to do things that I had never dared ask her to allow.

Perhaps he was bigger than me...

I felt sadness and I felt anger bloom all over me as I thought these things and I thought a million others. He was so much younger than she was, he was mad, I had done so much for her, I had...

And then, as my eyes began to sting, a huge discordant crash of thought jarred into me.

I had been screwing Charlie.

It was as if I had eaten something rotten then. A feeling came into my stomach and I was so confused that my legs didn’t fancy doing the hard work anymore and I had to twist slightly and lean on the secretary’s desk. I wanted to say that it was different, that there was mitigation, that it was less sordid, but even I couldn’t bring myself to believe that.

Carl would think exactly as I was thinking, and he would as justified in doing so.

I almost laughed as the contexts and the greater picture formed. La Ronde. I had never read the work, but it seemed to fit. I even speculated whom Carl could be pleasuring. Kind, jolly old Carl.

I did wonder then how kind and jolly and innocent he really was. Did he suspect something? Had a vague concept of what Charlie and I were doing lurked in his mind as he had used his professional judgement to conclude it was best not to stop the bedroom Olympics between Kate and Sebastian?

At least I could now understand something of his reluctance to discuss things with me, and at least now I could see why Sebastian adopted such a triumphalist attitude towards me. It must have seemed to him the height of victory to make me the cuckold. Clearly, I thought, here was a large part of his game, this was the ground on which he thought to beat me. The stuff about causing people’s deaths was just part of the dressing.

What to do, though?

From the corridor I heard a door open and suddenly there were people outside, although there was little in the way of cheery conversation. The door was half-glazed but the glass was frosted: I could see smudged figures walking past, most of them seemingly looking at the floor, but I couldn’t make out details. I stood as still as I could, hoping that the files on the wall behind me would effectively camouflage me. At any rate no one seemed to turn their head in my direction. I tried to make out if either Kate or Sebastian was amongst them, but the features were too obscure.

I stood there for five minutes after they had gone, listening to sound of the front door closing faintly, just waiting. I hoped that Kate was still in her session because in the time that had passed I had at least come to a decision about what to do next: above anything else I had to verify that Kate and Sebastian were going to bed together, and the obvious thing to do seemed to be to look around her room. I would have to leave at once, though, and risk being seen.

I opened the door, popped my head out and checked that there was nobody around. Then I slipped out, quietly shut the door to the secretary’s office and walked out into the lobby area.

Which was where Sebastian was waiting.

Well, of course there was shock and there was, not to overstate the case, flabberghastedness, but it was all on my side. Sebastian patently knew that I was coming and was perfectly prepared for the encountered. His poxy face was hidden by a grin that at any time I would have found irritating but, given what I had just learned, I now found almost unbearable.

“Philip!”

The tone was patronising, almost goading. It all seemed to fit now.

I opened my mouth but couldn’t think of what to say.

“I saw you come in,” he went on and my only response to that was to wonder just how he had managed that.

“You were in Dr. Volkmann’s office, weren’t you? What were you doing in there? Does he know?”

“I don’t really see that that is any of your business,” I said, finding it not very hard to sound angry.

He widened his eyes. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not bothered. In fact, I fully appreciate what you were doing.” This last he uttered in a serious tone. “I would have done likewise, I think.”

What was he talking about?

He closed one eye in a slow wink and said gravely, “Information, that’s the key.”

Before I could make any sort of response to this gobbledegook he immediately asked, “Did you get my present?”

And because I was slightly unbalanced by this I said nothing, but it didn’t matter.

“I thought long and hard about what to get you; I hope you appreciated it.”

His tone now was back to goading.

He approached me, his eyes serious, and spoke softly. “You did appreciate it, didn’t you?”

There’s something scary about mad people: they don’t contain the normal set of emotions and you can see it their pupils. What looks out at you when you stare into their eyes is as alien as a bug-eyed, tentacled monster from Jupiter. What you see is someone who doesn’t think like you and doesn’t care: what you see is someone who has different rules and different desires. Effectively what you see is amorality.

He stood before me and I saw all those things.

And then he smiled a knowing smile.

Well, it might be a cliché but there are times when a cliché is the only thing that will do: something went snap in my head as he stood before, not ten centimetres away, and I gave him first a shove and then, as he staggered back, I hit him as hard as I could in the face, raking across his left cheek and nose. He moved back even more quickly, almost falling but managing to retain his balance. His head was back and his mouth was open, although he didn’t make a sound.

For a moment we just stood there, now perhaps two metres apart, while he made faces of pain and while I wondered what I had done. Blood began to trickle from his left nostril but he didn’t seem to notice: he was more interested in his cheek, which he kept feeling and rubbing.

Then he looked up at me and I expected fury but I got satisfaction. He even smiled, the little bastard.

“That’s not a particularly intellectual thing to do,” he observed and there was monumental superciliousness in his words. “Not what I’d expect from a learned man like yourself, Philip.”

I took one step forward. I was going to hit him again but for just a single fleeting second there passed across his face a look of triumph and that stopped me.

I paused and he raised his eyebrows, then I walked past him and head for the door. I could sense his disappointment.

Just as the door closed behind me I heard him call out, “You still don’t know what’s going on, do you, Phil?”

I thought I did but I wasn’t going to argue with him. I walked across the quadrangle, no longer caring if Kate could see me or not. Just as I reached the other side he called out, “I’ll be in touch.”

I went back the way I had come and then up to the second floor of the main house. I felt nauseous and I felt black with hatred, but most of all I felt manipulated and from that followed shame. How was he able to do that? How could he goad me and use me like that?

At least it was clear to me what his game was: disorientation and subterfuge while he fucked Kate. Talking bullshit about deaths and undetectable murders while all he really wanted to do was have it off with an older woman. Really it was just juvenile one-upmanship: his game was to best me by taking Kate. Maybe he did believe he was death incarnate, but that was just a side issue now, one that didn’t seem to matter.

I passed one of the nursing staff just outside Kate’s room: he looked at me as if surprised and opened his mouth as if to speak, but I didn’t really fancy making light conversation and walked straight past him, just catching a somewhat surprised expression seeping on to his face.

Kate always left her room unlocked - everyone did - and I went straight in without bothering to knock, knowing she wouldn’t be there yet. Her bedroom was off the living room. I hadn’t been in there much and entering it now it seemed to be the domain of a stranger. I felt uncomfortable, as if I were a burglar, as if I had no business to be in there.

Once in there, I couldn’t think of anything to do, though. I didn’t suppose he would have his toothbrush in there and I didn’t reckon that searching the drawers of the dressing table would reveal a pair of pyjamas with ‘Sebastian’ written across the chest. In fact, the only thing I could think to do was to pull back the duvet and feel the under sheet.

At once I felt it, could even see it, and the touch of it made me feel sick and dirty: I remember once as a child putting my hand on a garden wall where someone had spat. The emotion of revulsion now was similar. I have never forgotten the touch of the cold, clinging spittle and I never will, just as I will always live again the feel of that hard discolouration in the sheet.

I think it was then that the anger turned to desolation and there didn’t seem to be any more to be done. I left the bedroom and walked out into the corridor

I didn’t bother to replace the duvet.

8.

What I like about Clive

Is that he is no longer alive.

There is a great deal to be said

For being dead.

“You didn’t mind me raising the subject, did you?”

Apart from traumatic amputation of my genitalia I could think of nothing that I would have minded more, but I gave Peter my winning smile and said, “Of course not.”

I had insisted that we should talk in my office and he sat opposite me now, clearly nervous and this anxiety serving both to illuminate his age and increase my discomfort. He seemed to me now to be prematurely aged and he kept rubbing his hands together between his knees, his posture well forward, his eyes almost beseeching.

Charlie had been no use. Obviously still angry with me for my unwelcome appearance at her party, she had merely grimaced when I had told her of Peter’s obvious impression that he was in line for a permanent job.

“The sooner you tell him otherwise, the better,” had been her advice, her tone broadcasting the cruelty in her heart.

So here we were.

Management entails making difficult decisions, was some fatuous comment that I recalled from one of the breathtakingly banal management courses that I had attended in my youth. It struck me forcefully that it wasn’t so much the decision-making but the face-to-face dissemination of it that was difficult.

“The thing is, Peter...”

He wasn’t stupid. Those four words alone were enough to tell him. I didn’t want to read his face as I proceeded with the litany, the overwhelming case against his having a permanent job in the department. It actually sounded impressive, detailing as it did our need for someone who would be able to take an active role in clinical audit, who had some experience, if not actual expertise, in renal and paediatric pathology, and who would take on the role of Co-ordinator of the cervical screening programme. All of these were genuine articles on our wish-list for the next consultant and as such were legitimate reasons why we shouldn’t employ Peter, since he couldn’t realistic claim to fulfil any of these criteria, but I still felt like a complete shit as I went through them.

Peter wasn’t fooled. He knew as well as I did how the game worked, how I could have airbrushed over the discrepancies between what we wanted and what he was. If you think someone is good enough and if you really want that person to work in your department, you take them: that’s all there is to it.

So even if I didn’t actually come right out and tell him that he was too old, that he was apparently fairly competent but not very impressive and that he had been doing locum work for too long to expect any decent department to give him a permanent job, the subtext was fairly plain for him to read.

He was very nice about it, of course, because he was always nice. Disappointed, though, sad that I had all these obstacles in the way of giving him a permanent job, dismayed that he would have to move on in a few months time, back to the locum trail, a ghostly highroad with no point of departure and no destination. It was even worse because I had met his wife and I knew that it had been she not he who had had the temerity to ask and I knew that he would return to her tonight to receive only rebuke and angry disappointment.

I went to lunch alone because Peter declined the invitation and because I couldn’t find Charlie. When I returned I was told by Jenny that there had been a phone call but that no message had been left. Charlie returned from a lunchtime shopping expedition and I was grateful to see that the retail therapy had lightened her mood. She at least commiserated when I told her what had transpired between Peter and me.

As I was about leave her room, she said, “Carl’s due in Truro on Tuesday, staying over until Wednesday.”

I raised my eyebrows but didn’t dare say anything. Charlie smiled sweetly.

My mood of excited anticipation lasted until my mystery caller phoned again.

“It’s a Mr. Edward Lear,” said Jenny, completely missing the literary reference.

Oh, shit.

I picked up the phone without enthusiasm, wondering what was coming.

“Hello, Phil.” Sebastian sounded breathless with excitement, a small child playing a trick on its parent, exulting in the thought of doing something so daring.

“What is it, Sebastian?”

“I’ve decided to forgive you, Phil. About yesterday.”

“What do you want?”

“I realise you were upset. Out of your mind, you might say.”

He thought this was tremendously funny.

“You’re wasting my time, Sebastian.”

The giggling stopped as if he had been smacked in the face again. His voice became a curious mixture of anger and sullenness.

“No. I don’t think so, Phil. That’s the last thing I’m doing.”

I paused, waiting and wondering whether it would be wisest just to put the phone down and cut him off.

Then, in a sneer that opened me up and then spat poison into my blood he said, “By the way, Kate sends her love.”

Was it really so easy to get to me? I found myself having to fight the desire just to fling a few choice epithets at him.

“Stay away from her, Sebastian.”

“Or what?” The enquiry was made in a voice of curiosity, as if he genuinely could not imagine what I could possibly do about the state of affairs: a state of incomprehension from which sprang triumph.

And it was then, in truth, that it occurred to me that there was absolutely nothing that I could if Kate were a willing partner. In the silence Sebastian sighed.

God, how I wanted to scream at him and how I had to fight the impulse, telling myself that there could be nothing gained from it other than more taunts.

“You seem to be having a bit of trouble,” he said at last and this time the tone was light and matey. “With these people dying.”

“The ones you’re killing, you mean?” I asked.

Immediately he picked up the sarcastic tone in my voice.

“But you don’t believe that, do you? Can’t see how Sebastian’s doing it, so he can’t be doing it. Is that right?”

“You’re a clever boy, Sebastian, no doubt about that, but you’re not Death.”

He drew in a lungful breath, making a whistling sound through pursed lips. The gesture was exaggerated.

“A challenge?”

“A statement of fact, Sebastian.”

“If that is your contention, then I must give you stronger evidence of the reality you deny.”

And I thought, Really? I expected him to name another dead person, thinking that he had done his homework and identified another corpse in our mortuary. Instead he hesitated which, because I am less than the brightest star in the firmament, I interpreted as weakness.

“What’s wrong, Sebastian? Can’t think of anyone else to kill?”

I think perhaps that I should not have said that. His tone was peculiar when he said in reply, “The choice is wide, Philip. I’ll have to think of exactly the right person. Give me some time: I’ll let you know.”

If the rest of the day was fairly sombre, what with my encounter with Sebastian and Peter’s mood of polite distance, the following one was excruciating. Clearly Peter had been left no room for believing that his wife was pleased with the outcome of our talk. He could barely muster ten words to say to me throughout the entire day, preferring Charlie’s company. His mood seemed to spread to the laboratory and clerical staff so that I felt much like a bride’s former husband at the wedding. By the time I arrived home I was ready for a large drink.

What I wasn’t ready for was the cat suspended from the kitchen light fitting.

There was little doubt that it was dead, given not only the lack of struggle but also the fact that its neck had been slit open: from the sodden red fur around its bib, chest and abdomen there had dripped blood into an irregular puddle on the floor. Mandelbrot for beginners. It swung almost imperceptibly in a faint breeze from somewhere: perhaps, ironically, the cat-flap. Around its neck and embedded deep within the cut was a length of rubber that, on closer inspection, I found to be a urinary catheter.

It was quite fresh for there was no odour and, on touching the body gently, there was still a trace of warmth to the flesh. I cut it down with a carving knife, took the body out into the back garden and left it locked in the shed where no predators could find it. Then I returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table, looking at the blood on the kitchen flagstones.

Kate had never particularly liked it, seeing it as too obviously a surrogate for a child, but I had come to enjoy its aloof presence, especially when Kate had left. I wondered if Sebastian had made sure that she would not be too upset at its loss before breaking in.

What to do?

The sensible, middle-class, ingrained reaction was to alert the police but I knew that I wasn’t going to do that. Without even bothering to look I knew that there would be no sign of forced entry because it would have been so easy and eminently sensible for Sebastian to use Kate’s key (but with or without her permission?). The police would find it an incomprehensible act and I knew that incomprehensibility presented an insurmountable barrier to the brains of the descendants of Robert Peel. Any intimations that I knew who it was and that it was part of the delusional behaviour of a lunatic would invite the natural question of motive; the suggestion that he was my wife’s lover and that we were fighting over her would, I was sure, do me as much harm as Sebastian.

Once again I found myself acting in Sebastian’s production, playing a part that he was writing.

I began to clear up the mess, trying to figure out a reason for this act: if I couldn’t do anything directly against him, I had to try to understand him. His motives might not be rational with respect to the external world, but they were logically consistent inside his own world, and if I could discover what was going on inside his head then I might be able to counter it.

That was fine in theory but try as I might the only motive that recurred was that he was simply trying to unsettle and scare me. That was an unsatisfactory conclusion both because it was a strategy that was working extremely well and because it didn’t actually point to an effective strategy to combat it.

It took me an hour to clean up the blood and then bury the cat. At the finish I was tired and I had managed to get mud on my suit. The only thing left was the rubber catheter, still hanging from the light fitting.

Then I discovered the message.

He had hidden it well and I could easily have missed it because it was written on a scrap of paper that had been rolled into a tube and then pushed inside the end of the catheter. It was only that I noticed how stiff the rubber was at that point that I investigated further.

It was plain paper and the words were written in pencil: Melinda Starry.

I had expected that the events of the early evening wouldn’t do much for my night of passion with Charlie, but lust somehow fixed things up and we managed to enjoy a rampant and apparently mutually satisfying time together. Afterwards, we lay in the bath together, my hands gently soaping her breasts while she lay back on my chest.

“What will you do?” asked Charlie, her eyes closed, her wet hair smelling heavenly.

“Well, I need to find out who this person, Melinda Starry, is. Find out if anyone of that name has died recently and, if so, what was on the death certificate. As far as I know, we haven’t had anyone through the mortuary of that name, but I’ll have to confirm that with Tony.”

“Presumably she’s got something to do with Sebastian.”

“I don’t doubt it. I also fully expect to discover that she died of natural causes some time in the not too distant past. Sebastian will use that as more ‘proof’ of his true identity, but it proves absolutely nothing, of course.”

There was a pause during which I moved a little further down Charlie.

“What about Kate?”

Charlie rarely mentioned her name and now that she did so, it was with a noticeable inflection.

I sighed and stopped what I was doing.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “What do you think?”

It was some time before Charlie answered.

“I think you’ve got to talk to her, Phil. If she is sleeping with Sebastian, whatever you might have to say about it on a personal level, he’s clearly completely insane and possibly dangerous. Assuming that she’s not aware of what he’s doing to you, I think she has to be warned.”

I had come to more or less the same conclusion myself, but hearing it from someone else didn’t make it any more palatable.

“I suppose so,” I agreed.

“Soon,” insisted Charlie, using the female tendency to become maternal and authoritative instantaneously.

By way of reply, or at least by way of changing the subject, I moved my hands all the way down the front of her body until they met inside her. She moved her legs apart and the water swirled around. Rubbing gently round and round I began to move myself up and down between her buttocks.

There was no way we could do anything in the bath, so we moved to the shower and continued things amidst the white noise and spray. We didn’t mention the subject again.

It all seemed simple. Sebastian was deluded, but that was all.

How wrong I was.

The next morning I knocked on the heavy door feeling as though my puny rapping might well have gone unheard. As it was a good few minutes passed before the door opened and Kate looked out from her room, a hermit crab staring into my eyes with a rich mix of curiosity, defiance and, I am afraid to admit, loathing. She looked at me for a moment, her mouth pinched slightly so that faint pleats formed around her lips, then stood aside to let me in.

I hadn’t expected much of a welcome. I had telephoned her before coming, telling myself that it was the polite thing to warn of my unexpected arrival, knowing that all I was really doing was making sure that when I knocked on her door she wouldn’t be in the throes of sexual congress. Her voice had told me that she didn’t want to see me just as her words had reluctantly agreed. My only consolation was that I had been unable to hear traces of a companion in the background.

She didn’t sit down and didn’t invite me to do so but I plonked my buttocks on the sofa anyway while she held her elbows and waited for me to explain myself.

“I thought we needed to talk,” I began, desperately attempting to put reason in place of the more atavistic emotions that were in reality driving me. I heard the snort but chose to ignore it. “I…”

But it was there that the script ended. That was as far as I had managed to in planning this little encounter. It was only to end the silence that I continued, “I take it that you and Sebastian are…close.”

She was too furious to be in any way ashamed or embarrassed, and for the first time I wondered if there was more to this anger than I had supposed. Sure, in some completely baseless, undeserved way she blamed me for the death of Alice, but this transcended that.

“I’m sleeping with him,” she said helpfully and then she cocked her head slightly and stared directly into my face. Fuck off and die if you’ve got a problem with that, was the translation.

To be completely honest with you, I was actually going to go in shocked, scorned, outraged husband mode at that point – after all, hypocrisy is cheap to buy and easy to keep – but Kate had one more thing to share with me.

“If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me.”

You see my problem, of course. The remark implied knowledge that she shouldn’t have possessed.

“What do you mean?” I demanded, figuring that ignorant innocence had worked pretty well in the past.

“You and your friend. You and your blonde.”

Ah.

Illumination filled the air and cast a million shadows. Sebastian.

“I don’t know what Sebastian’s been telling you, Kate, but I think you should know that he’s not reliable.”

If I tell you that she burst into laughter at that, it might convey the wrong impression: if I tell you that the sound was as cold as a dead man’s handshake, it only begins to describe the desolation and the fury.

“Reliable? Reliable? Who are you to talk of reliability?” she demanded and, as angry women often do, she continued before I could say anything in my defence, “You two-timing, sneaky, snivelling cunt! You bastard! You couldn’t wait, could you? I bet you were inside her knickers before she’d even finished her first day at work! I always knew you had a loose cock but this is un-fucking-believable! Alice isn’t even cold and you’re screwing some blonde tart as often as possible. You bastard!”

Apart from the repetition at the end, it was fairly eloquent stuff and she kept it up seemingly without taking breath. It was only at the end that, despite several attempts at interruption, I managed to put the opposing argument.

“Sebastian’s lying, Kate,” I contended, earnestness pouring from every orifice, “He’s got some sort of vendetta against me…”

I paused because Kate had advanced towards me and the look on her beautiful face was slightly alarming. She came within a metre of me and I fully expected another bout of fisticuffs, but all she did was say, “We saw you. We saw her leave the house in the morning. We saw you kiss her and fondle her.”

Oops.

Both Kate and Sebastian were voluntary patients and, as such, could come and go as they pleased. It was entirely possible for them to have spied on Charlie and me one post-coital morning. Kate exuded enmity and satisfaction like an impenetrable carapace.

A change of subject seemed to be a good idea.

“Do you know what he did to the cat? Did he tell you that?”

The question was so incongruous that despite her mood it had the desired effect.

“What do you mean?”

“He broke in to the house yesterday and slit the cat’s throat. Hung it from the kitchen light. Did he tell you that?”

It was plain that she knew nothing of this exploit, which implied that she knew nothing of his campaign against me.

“You’re lying,” decided Kate with irritating simplicity and certainty.

“I’m not, Kate. It’s like the business with the rabbit in the woods. Did you know about that?”

Her mood was changing, the certainties buckling.

“Rabbit?”

“He didn’t tell you? How remiss. It seems he decided to do a little anatomical experimenting on a rabbit in the woods.”

She was rapidly looking for excuses but couldn’t find any.

“So?”

I laughed. “Remind me to be elsewhere if he gets an urge to experiment on anything a little higher up the evolutionary tree.”

When she didn’t say any more, I said gently, “He’s still…disturbed, you know. He still thinks he’s Death.”

I had been about to say ‘mad’ but thought it wiser to employ a euphemism.

She shook her head, trying to make it confidant and signally failing.

“No, that’s not true. He’s much better now. Carl says so.”

I thought, A psychiatrist would be the last person I’d ask, but I didn’t say it.

“He’s not, Kate. On the surface he’s fine, but deep down he’s still the same.”

She was nearly there, I thought, nearly won to the cause.

“He broke in, you say?”

“I don’t think he broke in. I think he used your key.”

Frowning she moved away and into the bedroom. She returned a moment later with her handbag. She rummaged inside and produced her purse. Opening that produced a key.

As she looked up at me I could see the return of hostility.

“He put it back,” I explained but that did nothing to stop her mounting anger.

“Yesterday, you said?”

I nodded.

“Sebastian was with me most of yesterday. He couldn’t have done what you said.”

“Oh, come on, Kate. All day?”

She was quite definite now. She nodded and said, “Yes.”

She was lying, as much to herself as to me.

“Are you sure? There wasn’t even an hour when you were apart?”

I could see the lie becoming reality in her head with each passing second.

“No.”

I knew enough of human psychology to know that there was no point in arguing with her. I said, “Well, at some time he got into the house and he killed the cat.”

She wouldn’t even have that now.

“You’re lying,” said Kate with an inflection that was so low the ground seemed to shake.

“Lying? Why should I lie about something like that?”

“To split us up. To make me think Sebastian’s bad.”

“It’s the God’s honest truth, Kate. Sebastian’s completely crackers.”

Looking back on it, that was an error. People who start talking about the ‘Gods honest truth’ are usually confabulating at sixteen to the dozen. And as for describing her beau as ‘crackers…’

All this certainly didn’t make Kate any more amenable to my cause. She approached me again and it was as if there were pressure building up inside her

“Get out,” she commanded quietly.

I had only one chance, it seemed, for when I hesitated she suddenly screamed right into my face, “GET OUT!”

I backed away, hands up and said, “Kate…”

She moved towards me and I think that if she had been holding a knife she would have used.

“FUCK OFF, YOU BASTARD!”

“Please, Kate…”

She ran at me then and I have to confess that I turned and walked from the room at a less than dignified pace. There were two nurses hurrying along the hallway towards Kate’s room. They tried to speak to me but I was in no mood for in depth analysis of the last few minutes.

My only consolation was that I didn’t meet Sebastian on the way out.

9.

We owe God a death

After my frank and forthright exchange of views with Kate I wasn’t in the mood for work but I was just dedicated enough not to head for the nearest pub and stay there for a few days. I went in via the mortuary, expecting to find Charlie at work but Tony was alone, looking unhappy.

“No work today, Tony?”

He grimaced.

“Four, as it happens. I’d quite like to get going, but Dr. Volkmann said she wanted to read the notes on one in her room before doing anything.”

Occasionally we would be asked to do autopsies on deaths would that didn’t quite ring true. There would be something about the history that suggested it would be better done by the forensic guys.

“Got a tricky one, then?”

Tony shrugged. “I didn’t think so.”

I went upstairs, thinking nothing of it. Having dumped my briefcase I went into Charlie’s room where she was sitting at her desk leafing through a thin set of patient’s notes. When she looked up the look on her face was clearly worried. Before she could open her mouth to say anything I began, “I’ve just been with Kate. She knows.”

Charlie’s expression mutated into one of shock.

“Knows? About us?”

I bounced my head around a bit. “Not exactly us. She didn’t mention you by name, but she knows I’m seeing someone.”

“How?”

“I think Sebastian has seen us together and he took her along one morning to spy on us as you were leaving the house.”

Charlie looked pale and understandably troubled. She and Kate had never met, but if Kate did find out who she was, it didn’t require much intellectual capacity to foresee she might feel obliged to share the knowledge with her consulting psychiatrist.

“Anyway, she admitted that she was sleeping with Sebastian: in fact she seemed to be using it as a way of getting back at me.”

“Did you tell her about Sebastian? About what he’s done?”

“I think, quite honestly, that given Kate’s present state of mind, I could have given her video evidence of him committing mass murder with a machete and it would have had little effect. She’s in denial about that just as she’s in denial about what happened with Alice and about a million other things.”

Charlie had clearly been perturbed by the news that Kate might learn about her. Frowning and looking down at her desk she asked, “Do you think we ought to let things do quiet for a while? I mean, until this business with Sebastian is sorted out?”

I had been afraid she would react like that and, in truth, I couldn’t blame her. It was Sebastian who would have to shoulder that particular burden.

“If you wish,” I responded guardedly.

She would have to have been severely hearing impaired and wearing ear defenders not to have picked up the tone in my voice, but she smiled gratefully and I thought, Thanks, Charlie. Thanks a million.

She covered the breakdown in mutual understanding by changing the subject. A change of subject is supposed to calm things down, make the atmosphere more breathable, reduce tension. Charlie failed on all counts.

“There’s something else. It is one of the post mortems that have come through from the Coroner.”

She showed me the request for autopsy that had been faxed through from Toilette’s office.

Melinda Starry.

As so often, I thought a thousand things and all of them were monumentally mistaken.

I thought that here was proof that Sebastian was bull shitting. I thought that he had somehow found out about her death just before passing it on to me. I thought that here was yet more evidence of how pathetic his game really was. I thought that he was sad and that I was somehow righteous because I could see through his conundrums and confusions.

I thought all that and more.

Consequently I didn’t read the details before handing it back to Charlie and saying, “So Sebastian’s running true to form, then.”

But Charlie didn’t smile and she didn’t nod. Instead she shook her head and said, “I think you’d better read the details - like the time of death.”

She proffered them again and I took them with a feeling of nervousness that I hadn’t felt since taking my last postgraduate exam.

When I read the scrawled message the feeling became one of solidifying emptiness and all I could the things that I had thought were shown to be hubris.

Melinda Starry had collapsed while talking to her husband. The ambulance had been called and resuscitation attempted but with no effect. The time of collapse was unmistakable; she had died at just after seven o’clock the previous evening, and that was at least one hour after I had found Sebastian’s note.

Charlie had already checked the information, since details that emerged from the Coroner’s Office was not always blessed with even a tenuous association with reality, but there could be little room for argument in this case: the ambulance service confirmed that the time of the emergency call was at thirteen minutes past seven.

“I was just looking through her hospital notes to see if there was anything in them to explain a sudden collapse, but there’s nothing. She hasn’t even been seen here for four years, and that was for a cataract operation.”

I had sat down, trying to spot the trick, a feeling of hopelessness suddenly come upon me. How the hell was he doing it? The question kept looping through my mind like a stunt pilot repeatedly buzzing my thoughts.

Charlie was at least looking similarly discomforted.

“I’m glad it’s you and not me who’s doing this one,” I joked. “If there’s no obvious cause of death, at least Tourette can’t claim it’s my incompetence.”

“If there’s no obvious cause of death,” she pointed out, “We will be forced to conclude the Sebastian really is killing them.”

I stood up.

“You’d better find a cause, then, hadn’t you?”

Charlie, too, rose from her chair.

“Are you going to be there when I do it?”

I smiled.

“No way, Charlie. I want to keep as far away from this as I can possibly get. This is yours, all yours.”

Charlie was in the post mortem room for over three hours all told. I passed the time describing and cutting up the surgical specimens from the day before, as well as signing out reports. I bumped into Peter but he didn’t seem able to elevate himself much past meaningless civilities, and he scuttled back into his room almost at once. Late in the morning I had to attend a meeting at the Health Authority’s premises - a strangely lush, well appointed place - so that it wasn’t until early afternoon that I finally caught up with Charlie.

“Well?”

I’ve seen her experiencing sexual ecstasy (or so she told me) so that it quite obvious to me that she was not possessed of peace of mind.

“Nothing,” she said simply. She was almost sorrowful.

“Nothing?” I questioned. “Nothing at all? Not even a touch of ischaemic heart disease? Some chronic obstructive airways disease, or maybe even some mucus plugging of the airways?”

Charlie sighed. “Well, of course there was a bit of coronary atheroma, but at worst it was producing only fifty percent stenosis.”

I jumped on this admission.

“Well, there you are then. That could have been enough...”

Charlie would have none of it and, I have to admit, she was correct. Fifty percent of the lumen blocked by atheromatous plaque is not usually considered enough for a cause of sudden death.

“Wasn’t the myocardium fibrosed?”

“Not particularly.”

Becoming desperate I began to fling out diagnoses. “What about asthma? Epilepsy? Suicide?”

To all of these she shook her head firmly.

I found her lack of co-operation irritating but she was only being reasonable. I tried a few other suggestions but Charlie knew what she was talking about: if she had been unable to identify a cause of death, no amount of bullying by me was going to change matters.

“I’ve saved the heart and the lungs. I’ll send them off for an expert opinion in a day or two.”

That was standard practice. It was possible that Melinda Starry had suffered from an obscure defect of the heart’s conducting system or from a rare genetic disease that affected the myocardium: such conditions required the hand of an expert.

“Perhaps that’ll give us an answer.”

Charlie was being kind but it didn’t really matter. Even if a cause of death could be identified, there was still the residuum to consider. There had been three deaths recently in which no discernible cause could be found: in two of them, there was a social connection with Sebastian but in the third there was apparently incontrovertible evidence that he had known she would die before the fact. Even if Melinda Starry had suffered from a small-print disease in the cardiology textbook, how had he known about it? How had he been able to predict her death?

“What are you going to do?”

The use of the pronoun indicated that this was my problem: Charlie was an interested observer, no more.

I shrugged.

“Christ knows.”

I fully expected to hear from Sebastian in the near future, and was sure that it would be in an unexpected and unpleasant manner. When I arrived home that evening, I wondered if he had been in the house again, if he was even hiding away in some cupboard: the fear was so strong that I searched the rooms, checking in the wardrobes and under the beds, but found nothing. The attic was locked so I knew he wasn’t up there. Having completed the search and having fully signed up to Neurotics Anonymous, I sat down in the kitchen and tried to instruct myself to act normally.

I found myself laughing out loud. How could I behave normally when the world was becoming insane? How could I know what normal was? Dissect your sanity and you will destroy it. Anyway, Sebastian was the one doing the dissection.

After a few minutes of such pointless cerebration, I got up and poured myself some beer. That act, at least, managed to point my head into more meaningful speculations.

There were three possibilities.

One, this was all an illusion somehow conjured by Sebastian from fragments and figments of reality. He was neither supernatural nor a killer, but he was a manipulator. He picked incidences and coincidences and he built them into his fantasy. He discomforted with his manner and his necrophiliac talk and then, in the lacuna created by my uncertainty and disorientation, he placed his construct of facts, lies, truths and dreams.

It was a plausible theory, one that would have pleased me no end, except for the fact that he had somehow predicted the death of Melinda Starry.

The second possibility was that he told truth, in its entirety and without superadded fabrication. In short, he was really Death.

Yet even I, someone who was considering ideas that the man in the proverbial would have judged, quite shrewdly I would have to admit, as being uncomfortably close to gibbering, could not accept that one. It wasn’t just that I didn’t believe in the supernatural, it was also because Sebastian was too over-the-top to be any form of spook, ghost, god or daemon.

I mean, surely Beelzebub isn’t going to manifest himself on earth as a spot-covered twenty-plus year old with all the trappings of lunacy, is he?

Unfortunately, the third possibility was only slightly more believable - that Sebastian really was killing these people, but that he was doing so using rather more terrestrial means. That hypothesis at least had the advantage of being within the realm of reason, but it was followed at once by the irritating question of how; how was he doing it?

There was still a chance that it would turn out to be poison - the toxicology report on Julian Havers would be back in a day or two - but if that was shown not to be the case, then I would be at a loss to explain anything.

The beer was gone and I had no food in the house. Much as I wanted to slob around the house for the rest of the evening, I decided I would do the domesticated thing and visit the supermarket.

I pushed the trolley around for a while, filling it with meals for one and other convenience meals so that after a while I might just as well have been pushing around a flashing sign that said, My wife has left me and I’m a sad bastard.

It was while I was heading for the checkout that I saw Sebastian watching me. He was standing quite still and completely overtly, the expression on his face one of rapt, almost adulatory attention. His hands were in his pockets and there was a scarf wrapped around his neck as if this were the deepest part of Winter. Perhaps it was coincidence that he was standing beside a display of savoury crackers.

The sight of him evoked within me an unsettling amalgam of anxiety and anger, but I had learned enough to know that I couldn’t afford to lose my temper in any way at all. I considered ignoring him altogether but experience once again told me that this would be ineffective: if Sebastian wanted to talk, he would talk.

I pushed the trolley in his direction, picked up a packet of savoury digestives and put them into the trolley. Sebastian moved a few of his spots around on his face as he smiled and said, “Evening, Philip. Everything okay?”

I tried to smile back at him but I was having difficulties with orbicularis oris and it didn’t feel as if it worked out quite right.

“Fine, Sebastian.”

There could have been one of those awkward pauses but Sebastian was eager to discover how the game was progressing.

“How’s Melinda?”

“Melinda?”

I was not unpleased to note that this irritated him.

“Melinda Starry,” he said in a vexed tone. “I killed her. Remember?”

“Did you? The post mortem doesn’t indicate anything like that, you know.”

He began to protest but abruptly stopped, then broke into a broad smile.

“Ohh, I see, Phil.” He nodded his appreciation. “Good try. Good try.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Sebastian.” I began to move away from him, feeling that here was one encounter that I was winning. “I must be going now.”

His hand shot out and it stopped the shopping trolley as if it had been welded to the ground. I looked around and his face was in mine, the wide smile still there but no longer quite so chucklesome.

“I killed her,” he repeated.

I was scared, that I will readily admit. To be completely open about it, I was experiencing enough intestinal peristalsis to have throttled a grizzly bear.

“You do understand that, don’t you, Philip?”

It was then that there came the point when I had to stop ignoring his madness, when it could no longer be viewed as unimportant, amusing or merely curious, when it opened itself wide and I could see that, like it or no, he had incorporated me into his universe, that in some indefinable way I had become his.

I nodded slowly.

“I know that you didn’t find anything, but that’s the game, you see. I kill and you must find out how. I am death and you are my adversary, for you seek to explain me.”

He frowned.

“But you don’t play it, do you? You’re like all the rest, like Dr. Volkmann and his cronies. You won’t play the game.”

The furrows on his face deepened and the grip on the trolley became tighter. His voice took on almost subaudible tones of anger.

“I keep leaving you clues, but you don’t take any notice of them.”

I’m sorry? Clues? I could find no words to use in this conversation, was convinced that there were no words.

At once his mood changed again.

“How to make you play?” he pondered. I felt as if a rattlesnake were rearing up in front of me, playing its skeletal song while it wondered whether to strike me.

Then, again quite suddenly, he breathed in deeply, still only centimetres from my face and still holding the shopping trolley, as if he could smell a delicious aroma exuding from my skin. His eyes closed and he seemed to be so happy that I was afraid he might cream his jeans in pleasure.

Suddenly he opened his eyes, released the trolley and breathed out explosively. Then he tapped his temple, held his forefinger up in the air, and pointed it at me.

“You have nothing to lose, do you?”

I swear that I didn’t look smug when he said that. I made no reaction at all.

“Or so you think,” he continued. He reared up at my face so that I could almost have read off the day’s menu at the clinic from the detritus around his tonsils.

“Or so you think!” he hissed.

“What do you mean?”

He grinned but it was the grin of satisfaction.

“What do you mean?” I repeated. “Kate? Do you mean Kate?”

He said nothing but he did relax his grip on the shopping trolley. At once, though, he grabbed it again and threw it sideways with enough force to wrench it from my grasp. It crashed into a wire basket full of tins of spaghetti and nearly knocked it over. A young, pregnant woman looked up startled and then quickly looked away again.

Sebastian stepped forward and jabbed his finger into my chest.

“No one is safe when Death is around.” Then, almost as if a different person were speaking, he said, “I’m going to make fucking sure you don’t ignore me, my friend. Fucking sure.”

He suddenly jumped into the air and ran off.

10.

My name is Death: the last best friend am I

Although I knew it would useless, I had to try to warn Kate. It struck me as unlikely in the extreme that she would believe me, but I reckoned that it might just plant the germ of some doubt in her mind.

I thought about going to the clinic to confront her in person, but that idea was no more attractive than being sodomised by a gorilla and, in any case, I wasn’t sure if my life assurance was fully paid up, so I rang her. The first time she put the telephone down after about three words. The second time, some two minutes later, there issued forth down the wires a stream of such emotion-charged obscenities that I was forced, after about four minutes, to put the telephone down.

I didn’t try again.

“What the hell do you want?”

Neither the tone nor the language was what one wants to hear in a loved one, especially one whose erogenous zones one has tasted so recently.

“I came to see Carl, Charlie. Is he in?”

“Carl?”

She phrased the question as if suspicious that I had switched allegiances and was now dallying with her husband’s affections.

“Is he in?”

She shook her head. She didn’t exactly glance around in a furtive manner but I felt that her demeanour was less than natural.

“Will he be back soon?”

She looked at me and I tried to look desperate and pathetic and generally in need of supplication. She sighed and said, “He’s only gone for a run. He’ll be back in a ten minutes or so. Come in and wait.”

She stood aside and I saw her look around as I walked in. Her manner remained agitated even after the door was closed.

“I’m sorry, Charlie. I had to come.”

She said nothing, merely leading me into the lounge where she indicated I should sit in an armchair, while she stayed a good three metres away and we kept both our feet on the floor.

“Is this about Kate?” she asked.

“And Sebastian.”

A worried, nearly panicked, look passed across her face but before she could say anything, there came the sound of the front door opening.

Carl, dressed in a pale blue tracksuit, came into the lounge looking flushed but not especially exhausted, an observation that led me to admire his fitness. It made me think that I ought to take up running but then I remembered that I was a lazy bastard, so that was all right. He expressed surprise at my presence but he didn’t reel backwards in shock and he didn’t open his eyes wide in suspicion and alarm.

“Phil! What are you doing here?”

Apparently Charlie was afraid that I might be about to break down and confess that we regularly played rumpy-pumpy games without any clothes on, for she said, “He’s here about Kate.”

I won’t say that Carl closed his eyes and took a deep breath, but his reaction to this was along those lines. He rubbed the back of his neck and then wiped sweat from his forehead before saying anything.

“Look, would you mind if I had a quick shower before we have a chat?” he asked. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable.”

“Sure.”

Charlie took the opportunity to leave the room with him and I was left to leave footprints on the carpet and to pinch a few ornaments while the Volkmanns were absent. They were such a long time I began to wonder if they were exchanging bodily fluids.

Carl returned alone, smiling and I almost burst out laughing.

“Drink?” he enquired. He always seemed to preface our little chats with a drink if he could.

Having declined and having waited for him to settle down I told him what had transpired with Sebastian.

“He threatened Kate? You’re sure?”

I had expected Carl to disbelieve this. What would happen now would be either that he would claim that I had misunderstood Sebastian, or that Sebastian didn’t mean it. The worst case scenario was that he would disbelieve me completely and assume that I was making it up.

“What, precisely, did he say?”

Was it a mistake to tell the truth? Should I have said, “He said that he’ll kill her”? Would that have negated all that was to follow?

Carl’s countenance was one of superciliousness when he heard what had transpired.

“If that was all he said, I can’t really see that you need worry, old chap. I’d hardly call that a blood-curdling threat. He didn’t even name Kate, did he?”

“We both knew that he was talking about her.”

“Well, even if he was talking about her, he didn’t actually threaten harm to her, did he?”

“The guy’s got a fixation with death, Carl. I think he may well have killed at least three people…”

Carl interrupted at that one.

“Oh, really, Phil. You have no proof of that.”

“Maybe not. Not yet, anyway. But you can’t deny that he thinks that he is Death and he said that he would deprive me of Kate.”

Carl smiled.

“I really don’t think that you have anything to worry about, Phil. Sebastian’s obsession with death is affective but it’s never been effective. He says a lot but even before he was under treatment he never actually did anything.”

There comes a time when patronising superciliousness from an expert stops being reassuring and becomes fucking irritating.

“He thinks he’s Death, Carl. Death kills people. I know, I’m a pathologist.”

Carl tutted at my obtuseness.

“It’s a game, Phil. He plays games. In any case, if we tried to lock up everyone who threatened to kill their nearest and dearest, there’d be more people inside than outside the mental health system.”

“And the rabbit? Doesn’t that sound like someone who goes for a bit of blood and gore from time to time?”

Carl nodded slowly.

“Ahh, yes. The rabbit.”

Generally, when people don’t use verbs it’s because they are trying to convey great meaning. Carl’s voice was full of meaning now and I didn’t like the sound of it.

“What the bloody hell does that mean?”

He paused. As a psychiatrist he was well used to dealing with people who were excited – by which I mean about to clock him one – and it was clear that all the skills were being assembled for the next phase of this particular conversation.

“Well, there was never any proof about that, was there? I mean, we took your word, of course, but Sebastian never actually admitted to doing anything along the lines that you suggested, and…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” and here I thought I was being fairly restrained, “What the bloody hell are you talking about? The guy’s a nutcase! If I say that he’s been rearranging the internal organs of small mammals and then he denies it, are you saying that you’re going to take his word for it?”

Carl smiled. I could not believe it, but he actually smiled. It was as if I’d made a slight witticism that politeness demanded he should acknowledge.

“Not at all, Phil. Not at all. It’s just that…” He paused and it didn’t require much more than a single GCSE to spot that he knew I wasn’t going to like the next bit. “It’s just that, there is a background to all this, isn’t there?”

He was wrong. I didn’t dislike what he said, because at first I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

When it hit me, it sort of smacked me three times around the chops and then once in the midriff. It was so momentous, it was like a divine revelation.

“You think I’ve got it in for him! You think I’m making this up!”

He didn’t nod but he didn’t shake his head either.

I thought about this while my larynx recovered.

“Why should I make it up?” I asked slowly. “What motive would I have?”

I didn’t see why Carl shouldn’t squirm a little. If he thought I was persecuting Sebastian for some reason, let him tell me why.

I should have known better than to try to discomfort a psychiatrist. They’re like philosophers – they’re paid to have an answer to everything.

“Because you know that he’s sleeping with Kate,” he explained and he used the kind of voice that I should imagine that he employed for his more backward patients.

My first thought was that Charlie had told him that I knew, but it didn’t take long to see that was unlikely. No way was Charlie going to get any more involved than she had to be.

“How do you know?” I asked after about six hundred thoughts had gone through my head and perhaps twenty seconds had passed.

He was clearly reluctant to divulge this information but that told me at once.

“Sebastian,” I whispered.

To which Carl responded, “You did hit him. You were quite lucky he didn’t take the matter further.”

He will never know how hard I had to fight the impulse to clobber him. It took a few seconds but eventually I was able to ask in a steady voice, “Do you disbelieve me when I say that he threatened Kate?”

He parted his lips and drew in breath as if to reply but then chickened out with a wide smile.

“I think that it’s entirely possible that he said words that could be interpreted as a threat. Whether they were intended as such, and whether there is in his mind any purpose with regard to them, I think is open to debate.”

“Well, then, I think that Kate has the right to know about those words. If Sebastian has said something that might be a threat, she should hear it.”

He considered this in a judicial manner, then he assented grudgingly.

“I’ll tell her,” he suggested.

“No way. I’ll tell her.”

He looked surprised by my vehemence.

“Why?”

“Because I heard it. You didn’t.”

He returned to his chambers for more deliberation.

“But she won’t see you,” he said at last. “Your last meeting was, by the accounts of the nursing staff, tempestuous and she is no longer accepting your telephone calls.”

“Then set up a meeting between us. You can be there. That should reassure her.”

He agreed surprisingly quickly.

“Okay.” He couldn’t stop a supercilious countenance shaping his features as he added, “Perhaps it would be a good idea for you two to talk. Some marriage guidance, that kind of thing.”

While I imagined the shades of Hell devouring his body, he said, “Now, about that drink.”

I left shortly after that. Carl was happy and understanding, and Charlie was nervous. Again and again I went over how it was possible for a man who was completely and devotedly mad to be the one who was persecuted, when it was so obvious to me what was going on. I drove home and wondered what else, if anything, I could do.

Trying to get Kate to keep away from Sebastian was one thing, but there was still the problem of mass murder to consider.

I thought about going to the police. I knew that they would do nothing, that they wouldn’t believe what I said and that, if they did more than laugh, they would only talk to Carl and Kate and Sebastian before concluding that insanity seemed to be on the increase. It actually caused strange cringing sensations in my gut to think about what they would say when I explained that Sebastian could kill people by an undetectable means, and that he had been doing this for several months if not years.

But what was the alternative?

Dig around a bit. Try to find out how and where Sebastian might have obtained his gift for sudden death.

In other words, to play the game.

In the end, I did speak to the police, for circumstance steered me in their direction the very next day.

At lunchtime, I was just starting on the tedious task of writing the next year’s business plan when Tony phoned.

“Could you come down here, Doc?”

I could tell from his tone that it was bad news and I was still sufficiently compos mentis to add small numbers and come to an approximate answer.

Charlie was already down in the mortuary. They were standing beside an open body cavity, the organs decorously arranged in two stainless steel bowls by its opened head. The corpse was that of an old woman, so thin that she could be described as cachectic. The most striking feature was that she had a black eye. There was also extensive bruising over left shoulder and both forearms.

I looked at Tony and, in true petty criminal style, he said at once, “I tried to warn Dr. Weiss that this one might be a bit dodgy, but he reckoned it would be all right.”

“What’s the story?” I asked Charlie, ignoring Tony’s automatic defence manoeuvres. She handed me the coroner’s details.

Jean Vinson

Aged 56 years.

This lady was widowed and lived with her son. They were both known alcoholics. Her son went out for the day and returned in the evening to find his mother at the bottom of the stairs, apparently having fallen down them. The house was securely locked and there are no suspicious circumstances.

Just reading the thing made me want to reach for the phone and call in the forensic pathologist. God knows how Peter came to the conclusion that this would all right for him to do.

“What did he find?” I asked. If he had found evidence of coronary thrombosis or perhaps a stroke or a ruptured aortic aneurysm, everything would be okay. But I didn’t think I’d be down in the mortuary having this conversation if that were the case.

“He’s put down ischaemic heart disease,” said Charlie. She said in a sort of tired way.

“Is that all? Didn’t he even mention the fall?”

Tony chimed in with, “He reckoned she had an arrhythmia at the top of the stairs and that she was already dead as she fell.”

Ischaemic heart disease – the sequela of chronic insufficiency of the blood to the heart – often kills not by obvious death of the heart muscle but by inducing a fatal arrhythmia. Unfortunately you can’t see an arrhythmia at autopsy, and a lot of people are walking around with severe ischaemic heart disease.

“You haven’t heard the best bit yet,” warned Charlie.

She had on a pair of disposable gloves and she picked up the top the skull that Tony had removed to get out the brain. There was a jagged fracture along the left-hand side. Then she turned to the head of the body and everted the flap of the scalp that hung down loosely over the empty cranium. There was a large, fresh blood clot on its underside.

“Oh, shit.”

“He reckoned that happened during the fall,” said Tony.

Maybe it did.

But maybe it didn’t.

I said to Charlie, “I take it that we’re agreed that this needs further investigation?”

She nodded. “I personally wouldn’t have felt happy with that interpretation; not without supporting evidence. He didn’t even ask Tony to do a blood alcohol.”

I raised my eyes to the ceiling but there was divine guidance up there today.

“I think that this should have been a full forensic post mortem and I think that one is going to have to be performed now. Yes?”

Having nodded again she asked, “What will you do?”

That singular pronoun again.

I breathed in and out and then said, “Talk to Peter. Get him to ring the coroner if I can: it’ll be better for him if he’s seen to be the one who’s not happy with what he’s found.

“That might be a bit difficult,” said Tony in a slightly embarrassed sort of a way.

When I turned to him he smiled apologetically and said, “I faxed through Dr. Weiss’s conclusions as soon as we’d finished. I didn’t think about things ‘til afterwards.”

Fearful that I would either break down and weep or that I would throttle him I walked off without saying anything. I just heard him say, “Sorry,” as I slammed the door behind me.

To say that it went well would be only accurate in that it went well for me, and by that I mean that Peter didn’t have a titanic row. He could have told me in precise anatomical detail just where I could take my interference into his practice as an independent medical practitioner. He could have refused completely to accept my fears that his interpretation of the post mortem findings was not safe. He could have shouted and become irate and generally done the sort of things that professional people do when someone says that they disagree with them.

Yet all he did was sit there while I tried to explain that Charlie, Tony and I were voicing these worries merely because we were trying to make sure that Peter didn’t end up in big shit. And that was true, although I was well aware that the motivation behind our little talk was far more intricate than that.

He hardly even argued. His face held a sort of waxen sheen that grew in masklike rigidity as I spoke of other interpretations, of how the possibility could not be discounted that the injuries could have occurred through other ways than falling down the stairs.

At the end I was almost ready to beg him to argue, to stand up for himself, put the opposing case.

But he didn’t and, in contrast to the expression on his face, his body seemed to soften and deform as if crushed. He sat in his chair behind his desk and there seemed no life within him. A great lostness seemed to sit within him and hold him in sway.

“You understand, don’t you?”

He nodded but it was with difficulty, as if he had only just heard the question. I was on the point of leaving when he asked plaintively, “What should I do?”

When I turned back, I thought for a moment that there were tears behind the glass of his spectacles.

“Call the Coroner. Tell him that you’ve changed your mind.”

Easily said. I wouldn’t have fancied making the call.

I left him quickly, feeling as if I had just throttled a kitten and wondering why he had reacted so. Most pathologists would have argued, some to the point of complete denial: if persuaded of the case, they would have been anxious, they would have sworn and they would have been fearful of the fuss that was about to engulf them, but they wouldn’t have behaved in such a supine way. It was as though Peter was contemplating the end of all joy.

It was bloody and it quickly became obvious that it was going to get even bloodier. Tourette, the Coroner, went ape, and immediately called me. The conversation I had with him was fairly hot, so I could only imagine how volcanic Peter’s must have been. The first thing he did was call in Steve Munro, forensic pathologist to the stars and general all-round pain in the rectum. The police were notified and, with a cravenness that was mind-boggling, they immediately announced that they had been extremely worried about the death all along. A forensic post mortem was scheduled for two that afternoon at which, as is usual on such occasions, Steven Munro’s performance was watched by a moderately-sized crowd of assorted police people high and low, and a couple of coroner’s officers.

Steve’s initial act was to demand to see Peter. There followed what is best described as a long and agonising performance of sadistic bloodletting during which Peter’s post mortem technique was discussed, analysed and then ridiculed. Steve being Steve, this particular act started in a pleasant civilised manner, passed into concerned surprise and ended in Steve shouting and ranting that so much possible evidence had been, and I quote, “Completely bolloxed up by this incompetent half-witted shithead.”

This time there was little doubt that there were tears in his eyes as he was at last allowed to depart from the mortuary.

I left the mortuary then, wanting to comfort Peter but not able to face him. I told Charlie what had happened and she at once went into his room while I tried to get on with work. She returned ten minutes later and announced, “I sent him home. He’s incapable of doing any work anyway.”

I could have done without the work but I nodded.

“I don’t understand why he’s taken it so badly. It’s unfortunate but it happens occasionally. We all make mistakes.”

Charlie was staring at me.

“Didn’t you know?” she asked.

There came upon me the uncomfortable feeling that I was about receive enlightenment and that I should have known about something.

“Know what?”

The look on her face was as if she were breaking news of a death.

“This happened once before to Peter. It was why he left his old job. It was why he’s been doing locum work.”

She left me with that little explosive device and I had the distinct impression she thought I was handling things badly.

After three hours I was summoned down the mortuary to be told that Steve had finished and that, pending further analysis of the thirty-seven tissue and bodily fluid samples he had taken, he was unwilling to make a definite conclusion concerning the precise cause of death. I thought that this was unsatisfactory – although I said nothing – but the police were well used to Steve’s habit of careful under diagnosis. They would proceed on the assumption that there was something suspicious about the death until told otherwise.

While Steve was writing down his conclusions in rough note form, I wandered out into the lobby of the mortuary where Detective Inspector Sonya de Morgan was talking with a plain-clothes sergeant. We knew each other vaguely from other bodies that Steve had carefully dissected into intricate jigsaw puzzles of flesh, bone and skin, and she smiled briefly. Before I had time to formulate any sort of forethought, I had said, “Do you think I could have a word with you? It’s not about this, it’s about another matter.”

Curiosity flicked across her face but her voice held only slight wariness as she said, “Umm, yes, I suppose so.”

“Do you mind if we go up to my office? We can have some coffee while we talk.”

She left the sergeant who wandered back to his colleagues standing around the dissection room.

I must admit that I’ve never actually done a formal study of the police force, and therefore my impressions could be quite legitimately attacked as being based largely on prejudice, but it seems to me that there are very few attractive women in the police force. It might be that the pretty ones never actually attend post mortems or inquests, that they’re all given the choice jobs, like the Fine Art Squad and Interpol, but I can’t bring myself to believe that. Whatever the reason, most of the police officers whom I bump into in the course of my professional duties are not over blessed with physical beauty – and, of course, that applies to those with a mixed pair of sex chromosomes as well as those with two identical ones. Spiritual beauty in abundance, I’m sure, but less of the comeliness.

Sonya de Morgan was an exception. Blonde and slim, she had dark brown eyes and a small, pert mouth. She had the hardened look of all experienced police officers, but at least that was grafted onto a basic model that appeared cockle-warmingly attractive.

She sat in my office and sipped the coffee that I made for her.

“What’s the problem?” she asked after I had prattled on about how unfortunate all this was for Peter.

I had known there wasn’t going to be an easy way to present my case but that was seriously underestimating the difficulty. By the time I had struggled through all the sundry details such as Sebastian, paranoid schizophrenia, delusional beliefs, three deaths for which no cause could be found but in which there was no actual indication that anything suspicious had occurred, massacred rabbits and a suspended cat, even I was seriously doubting my sanity.

Having struggled through this pot-pourri of deranged suspicion and notable lack of physical evidence, I could feel the heat in my face as she looked at me. It was actually worse that she wasn’t laughing or smiling.

She pursed her lips, still looking at me.

“What do you want me to do about all this?” she asked after a while.

I thought I’d misheard.

“You believe me?” were the only words that were lined and ready to go, and they came out with a sound of shear incredulity.

She raised her eyebrows.

“I believe you believe it. Whether that means there’s anything to it is another matter.” Then, just in case I became a little too relieved she added, “But I don’t see what you expect me to do. If you’re formally telling me that these are suspicious deaths, then that is one thing, but I don’t think you are, are you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“So there isn’t much I can do.”

I had expected no more. I could guess how busy she was. Why should she do anything for me?

I smiled and shrugged and she stood to leave. We walked back down the stairs to be mortuary and, just before we went back in, she said, “I’ll tell you what. If I get a chance, I’ll dig around, see if I can find anything on this Sebastian Marjolin. There may be something in his background that supports what you say.”

Surprised, I could only say, “Thanks. Thanks very much.”

Steve had finished and was showering. Tony still had a good hour’s work left but nobody much cared about him.

It was getting late so, having made sure that there was nothing urgent that couldn’t wait until the morning, I left then, leaving a bit of a mess in the mortuary and a bloody great mess in the rest of the department.

I was just on the point of leaving the department for the day when Carl’s call came through.

“I’ve had a chat with Kate.”

“And?”

He paused.

“She wasn’t easy to persuade.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“In fact, she called you by an impressive list of epithets, none of which was less than white hot.”

What did this bloody man want? Applause?

“In the end, though, I managed to convince her that it might be for the best for you to meet with her. In my office.”

I sighed relief.

“Thanks, Carl. Thanks a lot.”

But the response was less encouraging.

“Umm…there was a condition.”

“What was that?”

“She insisted that Sebastian should be there as well.”

The enormity of this so-called ‘condition’ exploded in my abdomen like an airbag.

“You what!”

“She wouldn’t do it without that.”

“You have got to be having me on! For God’s sake, Carl!”

“I’m sorry, Phil.”

What could I do? I had to agree in the end. The appointment was made for the following evening at six o’clock.

“You didn’t mention my conversation with Sebastian, did you?”

“No. I said merely that I thought that you and she should talk.”

That was something at least.

11.

To fear death is to fear life itself

Most of the next day was taken up with the toxic fallout from the forensic post mortem. Tourette, a man whose moral skeleton was so rigid that it was a wonder he could wipe his bottom, felt it his duty to write to Arthur Lennert, the Medical Director, and acquaint him of what had occurred. Arthur called on me and for an hour we discussed the ramifications of it the whole pungent mess. Clinical governance reared its strikingly unappealing head and, having had to assure Arthur that neither Charlie nor I had ever had doubts before about his Peter’s abilities, it was suggested that I should undertake some form of systematic review of his work to see whether there were any other areas in which he might be underperforming.

Which was just what I wanted to hear.

When I told Charlie the good news she reacted once again as if this were my problem and it therefore came as something of a shock to the poor girl to discover that she was on the list for sharing the extra work entailed in checking a few hundred surgical and cytology reports.

The corollary of that was a further reduction in the temperature of our relationship. There had been a time when a suggestion that she might like to come over and look at my slide collection the next time Carl was away on some jolly would have produced a strangely exciting smirk upon her face. As things stood now, even the idea that we might be seen talking together in the same office made her jumpy and react as if I were the slime monster from the swamp.

Hey-ho.

Needless to say, Peter went sick and nobody asked to see his sick note.

At six o’clock the following evening, we convened in one of the therapy rooms at the clinic. The room were as joyless as I remembered them from my days as a medical student, with putrid prints on the walls, pastel paintwork and furniture arranged in a non-threatening circle in which all were equal and no one led the group.

From the off it was clear that Kate and Sebastian were a couple, that their relationship had become far closer than I had hitherto realised. They sat together, even going so far as to move their chairs slightly closer together, and they constantly looked to each other for mutual support. It took a stomach of adamantine strength to look across at them and keep my bile-stained lunch in situ.

Another thing that became immediately apparent was Carl’s position in all of this. Although at the very start of proceedings he proclaimed his neutrality, using the patronising voice that was obviously part of the membership exam for psychiatrists, in practice things seemed a little different. I had the clear impression that I was considered by him to be the aggressor, that the defendants were his patients, and that nothing was going to be allowed unless I could produce specific and actual proof of Sebastian’s intentions. Past actions were ruled out of court because Sebastian was under therapy and therefore, in Carl’s prismatic eyes, changed.

I didn’t stand a chance.

I started off by trying to ignore Sebastian altogether. I addressed all my remarks directly to Kate, attempting to keep rigid eye contact with her, only turning to Carl when he had something to say and not even acknowledging Sebastian’s existence. I was restrained and I tried with all my heart to present an image of concern for Kate, regret for what had happened and desire to make things better.

It proved useless.

To everything, in a voice like toxic sludge, Kate said things like, “You’ve been screwing around, so what right have you to say anything about Sebastian and me?”

At every opportunity she used pleural pronouns in referring to Sebastian and her, and she made continual reference to all my supposed infidelities. Somehow she had come to believe that I had been having love affairs with a huge assortment and variety of women throughout our entire married life. To hear Kate talk, it was a wonder I hadn’t died of terminal knob-rot years before. Needless to say, Sebastian sat through all this with a superficially neutral expression, although it was obvious who had been putting these ideas into Kate’s receptive cranium.

At one point she said in a voice loaded with disgust and loathing, “I saw that blonde bitch leaving the house – our house. I saw you kiss and cuddle her, your hands all over her large breasts.”

My eyes flicked across to Carl who was taking notes. His face was completely neutral as he made occasional notes. He didn’t appear to recognise this caricature of his wife’s comely figure.

And during all this Sebastian sat next to Kate and was calm and serene. From time to time they would even find each other’s hand and make reassuring contact. Once they even looked at each other and smiled in a sickly way.

Carl would poke in occasional helpful things like, “It’s not surprising that you feel such inward aggression,” and, “Was this when you first contemplated suicide?” He was making note after note at one point and it occurred to me then that we were probably pencilled in as part of a chapter in some future magnum opus.

I could feel desperation growing. I had not mentioned Sebastian’s threat because I had hoped that it would not be necessary and had feared that it would prove counter-productive, but I sensed that things were quickly reaching the point at which it seemed inescapable.

After a lull in the invective stream I tried one last time.

“I love you, Kate. I really do.” I took a deep breath. “I admit that I’ve been seeing someone else, but…”

It was almost as though someone had tripled the current.

Where before there had been merely hate, suddenly into Kate’s face there surged a tide of malevolent abhorrence mingled with triumph.

“You fucking, fucking bastard!” she breathed but then suddenly yelled, “YOU FUCKING CUNT!”

It was so shrill that it hurt my ears. Suddenly she was on her feet again and screeching incoherently. She began to advance towards me, and Carl, who had at first been petrified by this instantaneous and rather loud transformation, jumped up and stood between us. Sebastian just sat there and looked on smiling.

“Sit down, Kate,” ordered Carl.

She looked past him at me as he put his hands on her shoulders. He was calm but surprisingly authoritative. For the first time I appreciated that he was experienced at things like this.

Although she didn’t try to get past him, she ignored him and looked directly at me.

“You killed Alice, didn’t you?”

I was stunned. For a while there were so many thoughts in my head, that I was incapable of moving, that I even held my breath. Carl, too, jerked his head round to look at me, his face wearing a look of shock. Then he turned back to Kate.

“Kate, I don’t think you meant that.”

She turned her bitterness upon him.

“Didn’t I?” she sneered. Then, at me she hissed, “You fucking bastard never cared anything for that baby!”

I tried to argue but she wasn’t interested. In a cathartic monologue she went on, “You stood beside me day after day, making the right noises, but I could tell. I could tell that you were willing her to die, to put an end to this distraction. Oh yes, you stood beside me, but you never actually stood with me, did you? Not when they came and said that it was best to let her die. Then you didn’t fucking argue too hard, I remember. Then all you did was turn to me and I saw then how much you wanted her death, wanted her out of the way. I could see the relief deep in your soul when they made that suggestion, when the excuse came along and you could say to me how it was all for the best really.”

She suddenly pushed forward so that Carl staggered back slightly and she was thrusting her head over his shoulder at me.

“You killed her! You killed my Alice and for that I will never, ever forgive you!”

She subsided, as if the invective were fuel and now she was spent. Sebastian stood up and took her by the shoulders. She turned around and buried her head in his chest, crying. On his face the expression was impossible to deconstruct. Was it as surprised as it appeared to be?

Carl sat back down and indicated that I should do likewise. He seemed a trifle shaken by this unexpected rise in the emotional tide and for a second or two he didn’t seem quite so sure as usual what to do or say.

“I think,” he ventured at last, “That there is little to be served by prolonging this meeting.”

He looked at me and I shook my head. I suppose that I had hoped that this would effect some sort of reconciliation, at least the seed of one, but all it seemed to have achieved is to have tapped into vast reservoir of undiluted detestation within Kate. I hadn’t fully appreciated how much she blamed for all that had happened. And, from the look on his face, neither did Carl.

Nor did it seem wise to mention Sebastian’s threat against Kate.

Kate was in tears, sobbing openly on Sebastian’s shoulder. He helped her to rise and they headed for the door, but before opening it, he said, “I can understand if Phil has negative feelings towards me: I guess that in the circumstances, they are fairly natural. I would, though, like to say that I bear no ill will to him. Kate and I are deeply in love, and that I believe in all honesty it is only death that will separate us now.”

He opened the door. Carl looked down to make a note and it was in that moment that Sebastian gave me a huge wink. Then he closed the door behind them.

I was full of frustration, anger and incredulity, yet I could only hold it inside and try to smother the life out of them. Carl looked up at me and tried a smile but it was sadly out of kilter.

“I’m not sure I know quite what to say, old chap.”

At least he had lost his air of condescension. I stood up, the chair falling backward behind me.

“Oh no? How about, ‘That was a complete and utter waste of time?’ How about, ‘That was totally counter-productive?’ Will they do for starters?”

I went to the window. Sebastian and Kate were walking into the main house, still huddled together, she still relying both physically and emotionally on the little bastard.

Speaking to the glass, my breath misting it, I said, “I suppose that I can take reassurance from the conclusion that Sebastian has effectively taken Kate from me, that his threat was not to kill her but to break up our marriage completely.”

“Yes,” agreed Carl, his voice suggesting that he hadn’t thought of that, “That is quite a sensible conclusion.”

I didn’t look around, but I suspected that he was making a note of it.

“I have to admit that,” he went on, “ In all our talks together, Kate has never shown such violence and aggression against you. True, she has had hostile feelings towards you, but nothing to quite that degree…”

I let him prattle on to my back. Kate and Sebastian had gone from view but not from mind.

“…Of course, your little peccadillo would contribute…”

I turned round. “For Christ’s sake, Carl! Don’t be bloody stupid! It’s obvious why she’s turned against me!”

He looked miffed.

“Is it?”

“It’s that little bastard! He’s put all these ideas into her mind, worked on her, made her think that I’m responsible for everything that’s ever gone wrong in her life. It’s clear to anyone.”

He sighed.

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that, old chap,” he said. The patronising tone was back.

The next day or two sucked the spirit from me. At work things were nearly unbearable, what with the repercussions of Peter’s mistake, the loss of one third of the consultant medical staff of the department and the continuing erosion of my relationship with Charlie. Whatever small satisfaction I had gained from my profession in prior days was now gone, transmuted into griming unhappiness. Now there was only an atmosphere of exhaustion, suspicion and fear of failure.

And then there were the journeys to and from work.

I knew he was watching, you see. I never saw anything, but it didn’t make any difference to the conviction that the little shite was out there and he was peering at me. I didn’t think he’d actually dare to break in while I was there, but I had the locks changed just in case and all the while that the locksmith was working I kept thinking that excluding Sebastian I was also excluding Kate.

For the first time since Kate had left I found the nights truly unbearable and tediously long; for the first time I was lonely. I didn’t even have a cat anymore.

I had lost Kate. The situation could no longer be disguised as anything else.

And now that I had lost, in the grand tradition of human stupidity, I found that I had never really wanted anything else. That I was only the latest in a long and serpentine list of idiot humans was no consolation, however.

So did that mean that Sebastian’s game was over? Did that mean that he had won and therefore he had no further interest in me? I didn’t think so.

If there was any consolation to be had, it was in the hope that the answer to both questions was yes. Moreover, since my chances of proving that Sebastian was guilty of undetectable murder were negligible, it occurred to me that I might be able to forget all about the little shit.

Although there were only two days left of the week, by the time Friday night arrived I was semi-comatose, both through the extra workload and lack of proper sleep, but I still had a big problem to confront in the shape of Sebastian.

A large problem and no solution presenting itself. No prospect of immediate assistance either.

Effectively Charlie had now shut me out of her life completely: we were colleagues, no more, and colleagues who didn’t even have a particularly warm working relationship. I tried hard not to feel bitterness, worked at understanding that she was afraid of being pulled into my predicament, but I have to admit that I failed completely. I didn’t go so far as to voice my sentiments but I felt that she was being a selfish bitch.

Nor did I expect much to come from my brief conversation with Inspector de Morgan. She had been polite enough not to burst out in girlish giggles, but it didn’t require perspicacity in great abundance to spot that she thought I was to be humoured and no more. Pity really, because she had been really quite attractive, but I didn’t feel that I could blame her.

And so, whatever the physical charms of Inspector de Morgan, it appeared that I was alone in trying to unravel the enigma that Sebastian presented. Alone and not looking forward to the weekend with immense anticipation. I couldn’t face cooking – truth be told, I hadn’t been able to face cooking for quite a while – so it was off down to the Indian Takeaway as soon as soon as I had showered and changed.

As usual it was not too busy and I returned to the house having only been gone twenty-five minutes. It wasn't dark but the day was dying and there was little to choose between shadow and light. As I walked from the car, holding the bag of food slightly away from my side, my footsteps crunched loudly on the gravel of the drive, which was odd because whoever came up behind me didn’t make a sound.

The first that I knew of matters, was just an awareness that I wasn’t alone. That, not surprisingly, caused an interesting reaction in both my upper and lower gastro-intestinal tracts such that I felt instantly as if there were a couple of weasels fighting in my stomach, and as if someone had been lacing my coffee with a potent laxative.

I turned around and was mightily relieved to see a woman standing behind me, smiling. True, she could have had a part-time job advertising anabolic steroids, but it was certainly a more welcome sight than Homo Australopithecus with a flick-knife would have been.

I opened my mouth, presumably thinking that she was going to ask for directions to somewhere, although I have now to confess that I can’t remember precisely what was passing through my brain at the time.

You see, before I could articulate any of the usual polite conventionalities, she did two things in quick succession that left me with other things to mull over.

Firstly, she reached out with both hands, took my face in them, and kissed me. And I mean kissed me. She made a complete examination of the inside of my mouth, probably also straying into the nose and ear sub departments of otorhinolaryngology. I don’t know what my hands were doing while all this was going on, but I would imagine they were waving up and down ineffectually because she had a grip like a drayman.

When at last she put me down – it felt like that, as if she had lifted me off my feet – I was gasping for oxygen and feeling sort of light headed, but that didn’t last for long because it was then that she lifted her left thigh very sharply and very forcefully, and thereby kneed me in the testes.

There is no point in describing the pain in great detail, since half the audience will know all too well what it is like and the other will not care, but I will say that it was bad. Accordingly I doubled up, which was when I met her other knee on its way up to my chin.

The next few hours were marked by embarrassment. Apparently I was found by the adolescent boy who delivered the local free newspaper every week. I had always considered him to have the intellectual capacity of a tree-trunk but somewhere inside that mass of disorganised neural tissue were enough networks to enable him to phone for an ambulance.

I actually came round lying on a trolley. It was in a side room off the accident and emergency department of the hospital. The room had been painted in a lurid yellow hue by someone who had clearly lost his brush and therefore applied the stuff with threadbare yard broom. My finer sensibilities were also assaulted by a smell of vomitus.

There was a nurse with me, taking my blood pressure and other neurological observations. She was young and inexperienced, and I thought that perhaps that explained why she was smirking. I felt pretty groggy and both my face and my external genitalia were bellowing at me that they were exceedingly pissed off, but it was obvious enough to make me wonder why.

I soon discovered why.

A junior doctor came in, one whom I vaguely recognised and whose name badge told me was called Dr. Andrew Caplan, and he asked me a few questions about what had happened. He did this while doing things like looking into my eyes and examining, with a distressing lack of compassion, my bruised face. Then he asked me to undress. It was then that I noticed that my trousers were already undone and, not long after that, not only was my scrotum beating bass tom-toms of tenderness, it was also naked. Someone had shaved me.

“What the hell?”

I looked up at Doctor Caplan who returned the gaze with raised eyebrows.

“Did you do this?” I asked, to which he shook his head solemnly. I looked again at this travesty of manhood. It had been done rather inexpertly, with areas where coarse stubble remained, and numerous small cuts.

I lay back on the trolley, overcome by horror, but I hadn’t reached the end yet.

“Umm,” began the good Dr. Caplan, “I think you know that there’s something else.”

He turned to the nurse.

“Could you get a mirror, please, Karen?”

She was gone a couple of minutes during which he looked at me and I looked at him and I had a growing sense of anxiety. When he held up the mirror in front of me, the anxiety vanished to be replaced incredulity.

Across my forehead, written in capitals with bright scarlet lipstick, was the word, DADA.

Dr. Caplan was trying sympathy but there was too much curiosity within him to make that work.

It didn’t end there, either. Even after I had wiped my face clean and Dr. Caplan had determined that I was not seriously injured, the police turned up. Two constables, both clearly of the mind that I was a jerk, asked me questions about what had happened and wrote down the answers in their notebooks: I won’t say that they used crayon and stuck their tongues out while they scrawled slowly across the grubby paper, but you get the picture. Of course, the details about what was written on my forehead and about the indignities visited upon my privates caused much interest tinged with amusement. I’m afraid that I lost my temper when one of them said, “And this was done by a woman?” His grin certainly didn’t help.

They left with a description of my assailant and assurances that they would instigate further enquiries, which left me completely devoid of comfort, after which Dr. Caplan returned to inform me that I would need a skull X-ray and a night in hospital. I had to disabuse him of his naïve assumptions concerning what I was going to do and summarily discharged myself. I got a taxi back to the house, checked that it was secure, then took some painkillers. I had a pain in my face and head that I could easily have shared with the entire household cavalry without significantly diluting the agony, and a pair of aching testes that felt as if they were gradually being inflated and were about to explode. I kept thinking to myself that I really ought to try to figure out what was going on, but I was incredibly tired and really rather depressed. I went to bed and, oddly enough, slept soundly until the morning.

I felt better the next morning, although I looked a whole lot worse. My face was swollen and there was ill-defined bruising around my temples and jaw line. As for my scrotum, I took one look and then hastily covered it up again: purple, naked and distended, it was no sight for anyone of a delicate disposition.

There wasn’t much food in the house but my enthusiasm for a trip to the supermarket was also in short supply and I made do with cheese on toast for lunch and for my meal in the evening I had a pizza delivered. When the helmeted youth knocked on the door, I put the chain up and made damn sure it was really a pizza he had in the box before accepting it. He must have thought he had missed the signs for the asylum on the way in.

Luckily there was quite enough alcohol in the house to pass the day quite smoothly.

Sunday morning brought with it the realisation that I would have to do some serious shopping or else they would find my body, emaciated and pallid, lying at the bottom of the stairs and there would be talk of odd behaviour and self-neglect. The staff at the hospital would suddenly remember how erratic my mood had become and they would talk amongst themselves of their unvoiced suspicions that my personal problems had been proving too much...

The doorbell rang.

Feelings of trepidation returned as I opened the door, but they were misplaced for Sonya de Morgan, not an Amazonian barber, stood there. Behind her was a police car, in which one of her male colleagues sat and looked bored.

“Dr. Reed. Can I come in and have a chat with you?”

I smiled, aware that I probably looked about as enticing as a pair of somebody else’s underpants, and said, “Sure.”

I led her into the kitchen and she sat at the table. She accepted my offer of a cup of coffee and while I was preparing it said, “I read the report of what happened to you on Friday night.”

I was standing on tiptoe, my head inclined upward so that I could see into the back of the cupboard behind packets and pots of things that only a woman would use.

“Uh-huh,” I grunted, trying to achieve a difficult balance between sounding intelligent, sounding preoccupied with finding a jar of coffee and sounding unconcerned with the finer details of what had occurred that night.

There was a pause behind me and, bugger it, I found the coffee, which meant that I had to turn and look at her.

She had a pale blue eyes and they were completely unreadable. Was she amused? I could not say.

“It was a most peculiar thing,” she opined neutrally after a moment.

Now that couldn’t go without a little annotation.

“Peculiar and funny, I believe. Judging from the reaction of the two clowns who took my statement, I should imagine they could hardly wait to get back to the station to spread the word. A bloody good story, I should think it made. I shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t on the Internet by now.”

To my surprise she didn’t defend them, didn’t even deny that I might be correct. Instead she said only, “You can hardly blame them,” and she used such a light, neutral voice that there was no point in my anger. I turned back to making the coffee and waited for the kettle to boil. She wanted neither milk nor sugar. I put the mug down in front of her and sat down opposite her.

“When you came to me last week, I assumed there was nothing in what you had said,” she said.

“And now?”

She didn’t answer directly.

“But I checked a few things anyway. I’ve learned enough to know that the secret is to cover every possibility.”

She took a sip of the coffee and didn’t seem to notice the heat while I wondered what her lips and mouth were coated with. She looked up at me and there was reproach in her eyes.

“You weren’t entirely truthful with me, were you?”

I smiled a winning smile but needn’t have bothered.

“What do you mean?”

Somewhat reproachfully she said, “You forgot to mention that this man Marjolin is sleeping with your wife.”

Caught in the omission I could only shrug and say disingenuously, “I didn’t think it was relevant.”

Another sip. She looked out of the window and asked suddenly, “Where did you bury the cat?”

We abandoned the kitchen and I took her through the overgrown garden to the area behind the shed. I hadn’t marked it in anyway but the earth had clearly been recently disturbed.

“Would you like me to dig it up?” I enquired, not entirely facetiously.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

We returned to the house.

“That, of course, made me think that it was all rubbish,” she resumed. “Just a story to get back at Marjolin. You were odds on then for a caution.”

And to think I had been entirely unaware of this doom.

“And now?”

“The attack was so odd, and your story was so odd, they seemed to connect, somehow.”

“So you believe me?”

But she wasn’t going to be dragged into the affair easily.

“I spent yesterday doing some more checking. I checked on you, and I checked on your wife, and I checked on Sebastian Marjolin.”

I must have shown some affront that she should have dared to investigate me for she added, “It was only logical.”

Again the tone was neutral and almost apologetic so that all negative reaction seemed unnecessary and even crude.

I let her take some more coffee.

“It seemed to me that it would be interesting to get a look at the post mortem reports on Marjolin’s father, sister and fiancée.”

“And?”

She frowned. She sought out her handbag and delved inside it in that uniquely feminine way. She produced a notebook and then read from it.

“His father was fifty eight when he died, and previously quite healthy. The cause of death is given as ischaemic heart disease.”

Not unreasonable, I suppose.

“The sister and fiancée, were nineteen and twenty respectively.”

Before I had assumed that their ends were accidental. A tragic coincidence of death, nothing more, but Sonya de Morgan’s voice and face were worried.

“Both their deaths were given as natural. In both cases there was an inquest and there was full toxicological analysis, and there was absolutely no evidence of anything suspicious...”

She left sentence hanging.

“But?”

She sighed, “But both were officially recorded as ‘unascertained.’”

I only breathed the word, “Shit,” but it sounded loudly in the quiet house.

“So you can see, that struck me as very intriguing.”

And what it was doing to me was most peculiar. Something popped up in my head and made me feel ever so slightly giddy.

“Have you got a copy of his father’s post mortem report?” I asked.

She indicated the front of the house.

“In the car.”

“Could you get it?”

She returned a few seconds later and handed it to me.

It wasn’t what you might call a particularly thorough examination, judging from the brief, almost curt descriptions of organs and systems. It was also entirely possibly that it contained more than a hint of exaggeration, but it was just possible...

I let out a lungful of air and smiled.

“Found something?”

I held out the report and pointed at the description of the coronary arteries. She read the words but not the meaning.

“What is it?”

“He had no more than fifty percent stenosis of any the main coronary arteries and there was no evidence of a coronary thrombosis or myocardial infarct.”

“So?”

“To be confident that someone has died from ischaemic heart disease, you really like to see at least eighty percent stenosis of the arteries and some evidence of damage to the heart muscle, even if there is no clot blocking the artery or no area of muscle death.”

“So he didn’t die from ischaemic heart disease?”

I had to be slightly hesitant about that.

“If another cause of death had been found, the changes in the heart would probably have been ignored as not too serious. That they weren’t suggests there was absolutely nothing else that could have killed him.”

She even smiled, God bless her.

“Unascertainable?” she asked.

12.

The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.

“So what do we do?”

I asked the question hesitantly, having chosen the pronoun carefully, aware that all we had was more curiosities to answer.

She frowned and it struck me that she didn’t smile much at all, but at once I thought that this didn’t matter much for her seriousness seemed so benign and caring.

“There isn’t much that I can do,” she admitted. “Even if there were strong evidence that a crime or crimes had been committed, I wouldn’t be too happy about taking it on simply because I’ve got too much to do already.”

I had suspected as much. I think I did very well in not showing my disappointment.

Suddenly she asked, “Why ‘Dada?’”

I shrugged. She had finished her coffee and I took the mug from the table and put in the sink. “I assumed that it was a reference to my age. You know, he’s the youngster who’s stolen the older man’s possession.”

She didn’t look particularly impressed by that.

“Why not just ‘Dad?’ Why anything at all?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know what’s going through his head? He’s schizophrenic. He does things for reasons that make no sense to normal people.”

“But he has a reason? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Undoubtedly.”

She stared at the table.

“What about Dadaism?” she asked, displaying a knowledge of twentieth century art that was somehow disturbing coming from police lips.

The obvious answer was to ask what about it, but I refrained.

“Surrealism?”

She looked up. “Doesn’t that chime with schizophrenia?”

I was wondering what the art establishment would make of that particular connection, and in the gap she continued, “Dadaism was about deliberate anarchy, about a complete negation of what people would regard as normal, or common, sense. That could also be regarded as schizophrenic, couldn’t it?”

Bloody hell.

She looked enquiringly at me for a while before I could speed up the intellectual processes sufficiently to formulate a reply.

“Yes and no,” I began, feeling that a cautious response might be the most prudent course while I adjusted to the idea of a cultured police person. “While I can’t absolutely claim to be an expert in Dadaism or any other branch of art, I think that you’ve missed the point about schizophrenics. They have no insight, you see. They believe that their reality is the only reality. It would be quite impossible for Sebastian to suggest that what he believes is not the truth, which is what you are implying.”

She returned to contemplation. I passed the time by admiring her pleasant, quite delicate features and her quite strikingly thin, nylon-clad legs that gave the impression of ending somewhere not too far south of her navel. Having reached a stage of tumescence that was nearly beyond my control, I turned my head away and stood up.

“More coffee?”

She shook her head but still seemed to be thinking deeply.

“What about the girl? The one who attacked me. Have you made any progress with her?”

At once she shook her head and, lest I should harbour any old fashioned thoughts about the modern world, said, “We haven’t bothered to look.”

I thought I took the news well. Admittedly I said, “Oh,” in a disappointed voice, but I must say that I considered that fairly restrained.

“It’s not worth it. If what you say is true, it’s someone hired by Marjolin, someone who’s completely anonymous. In any case, your description wasn’t the most precise we’ve ever had to work on.”

Policing and medicine in the twentieth century had obviously reached the same point: resource management meant that if it was too expensive or too improbable to achieve a good result, sod off.

She stood up then. I vacillated between sorrow that a rather attractive woman was going to leave and relief that a member of the constabulary was departing.

“I’d better go now. My sergeant will be getting irritated.”

This idea of being possessed sparked vague feelings of envy.

As I followed her to the front door, I asked the question that I had been delaying for a while.

“What are you going to do about Sebastian?”

I opened the door and we faced each other just inside the house. Behind her the young man in the car started the engine, although his eloquent expression of irritated boredom remained fixed to his features.

“We’ll check his alibi. We’ll perhaps have a chat with him, just to make sure that he knows we’re interested. I am afraid, though, that it’s going to be extremely unlikely that we’ll ever link him with this.”

“But what about all the deaths? Aren’t you going to look into those?”

For the first time she smiled, though it was a weak thing, soon gone.

“I wish I could justify the time, Doctor Reed. I really wish I could. But it’s not enough.”

She turned to go and before I lost her I felt I had to try something.

“Then let me do it. Tell me where to start, what to look for.”

She stopped and at once turned round, her hand in her pocket. She produced a scrap of paper that she handed to me.

“Try his mother,” she said.

She got in the car and it was gone within five seconds. Clearly her sergeant had felt the loss of his owner.

On the paper was a name over an address.

The address was in a small satellite town, an old marketplace around which were a few shops that charged too much and sold the wrong things, as well as coffee shops, charity shops, tourist traps and newsagents. In the right light, on the right day, it had charm for the visitor but I should imagine that living there was probably only just preferable to being dead there. There had been a fine drizzle as I drove north through the heart of the city and then turned slightly west: eight miles of insistent moistness that seemed to be telling me something negative about this trip. That it had stopped by the time that I arrived, and diluted sunshine was making an appearance, didn’t seem to help: the brightness only served to bring out the emptiness of the place. Clearly Sundays were not the social high spot of the place.

Her house was semi-detached in a road that was so suburban it made me feel ill. As I looked up and down it, as the identical pairs of houses, all facing one another across tarmac lined by middle of the range, two or three year old cars, marched into a tree-spotted distance, I was suddenly back in my youth, back in a time where this was the whole world. It was a dizzying experience and, although I knew that my parents could not possibly be behind any of the painted front doors, still there was a peculiar dislocation in my head.

Mrs. Marjolin’s house was newly painted, her garden carefully tended. The lawn was close-cut and I could see few weeds in it as I walked up the short, paved drive. There was no car: a single garage was attached to the left of the house and it occurred to me that she was one of a rare type, those who actually put their cars, and not rubbish, in the garage.

A brass doorbell complemented a brass letterbox, and this tastefulness was evident also in the array of potted plants that crowded into the porch. I couldn’t hear a noise as I pressed the button of the bell and there was such a silent delay before the door opened I was about to press again.

The woman who looked out at me didn’t exude welcomeness. In fact, whatever was coming out of her wouldn’t have compared too unfavourably with adder venom. She was small and trim, like her garden and house, her eyes two hard grey marbles in a face of pale stone. I was at once startled by how old she looked and I noted that she had numerous seborrhoeic keratoses on her neck, like large brown scale insects sucking the sap from her skin and drying it to parchment.

“Yes?” she asked, although she clearly meant something else.

“Mrs. Marjolin?”

“What do you want?”

Yes. What did I want?

“My name’s Reed. Doctor Philip Reed.”

Ah, the old doctor gambit. People are taken aback. Irritating bastards on the end of the ‘phone pause and address you in a different tone of voice. Suddenly, things are easier.

“Yes?”

Clearly, Mrs. Marjolin was one of that increasing, and increasingly irritating, population who do not appreciate the value of their medical practitioner.

And there, I must admit, I reached the end of my forward planning. I had hoped by now to be both within her home and within her confidence, but it appeared I was in neither. There was only one thing left to do; fabricate.

“I’m involved with the care of your son, Sebastian.”

Was that a lie? It certainly felt like one and, unfortunately, it worked. For a momentary pause her face clearly showed pain, then rebellion, then acceptance.

“You’d better come in.”

The house was neat, but obsessively so. Somewhat cluttered but little to suggest that dirt was allowed much room amongst the ornaments and mementoes. It was very much the house of someone who has finished, who has only memories to look forward to.

She bade me sit in the front room, on an over busy settee cover that had the odd worn patch. She sat to one side of the low, seventies-style mantelshelf that surrounded the fuel-effect electric fire.

“What is it that you want?” She phrased the question guardedly. She sat forward, her hands in the pockets of a long, pink cardigan that hung over a pale grey blouse.

I cast around for some way of not lying but not telling the truth, aware that I could not reasonably be expected to divulge to her my suspicion that her son was a mass murderer. The passage of time seemed to be slow in its progress and my mind was empty. I was going to have to lie again.

But before I could say anything, she abruptly asked, “How is he?”

This was at once odd, asked not by a mother but by a friend or distant relative; almost as if the question were a formality, forgotten until just then. I wondered if Sebastian’s mother actually ever visited him. Perhaps she did not; perhaps she had had to expunge him from her life.

“He’s fine, Mrs. Marjolin. Fine.” I smiled, relieved that I could answer truthfully. Then I went on, “I wanted to ask you about the time that this all started. About the time that the illness first appeared.”

Something about her face hardened and, although there was no other sign of pain, I could see at once that I was asking much, perhaps too much.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked, standing suddenly. She was already moving towards the door as I said, “Yes. Yes, please.”

She was gone about ten or twelve minutes, in which time I listened to the quiet hum of a quartz clock and tried to work out how I could make this less painful for her. She returned with a tray on which were cups and saucers, milk in a jug and sugar in a bowl, a cosy over a silver teapot. She had brought out her best for me.

She placed the tray on a low table between us, took off the cosy and flipped back the lid of pot. While she stirred the tea she said in a slow, almost sly tone, “Do you have children, Dr. Reed?”

I was no longer then in a small suburban living room, surrounded by the quiet noises of a widow’s later life, about to sip tea from her finest, faded china.

A claustrophobic, hot room full of white and black noise, full of quiet people bending over brightly-lit plastic hoods while machines stood impersonal guard and I wondered how it was possible to be so isolated from all the rest of the world.

Kate was bending over Alice, so completely engrossed in this miniature of a human being, this thing that was so pathetic that it could not possibly be human, that was so human it could not be less pathetic, that she was effectively alone, effectively in a quiet nursery at home. I was not there just as much as I was actually wishing that I was not there: and who said dreams never come true?

The plastic of the incubator was cheap and demeaning. This thing that kept my baby alive was nothing more than a heated box, no better than was used to hatch out chicks and ducklings. Was that all Alice was?

I looked around the room, at the other three occupants of that dark, humid, cave of a room, at the two or three people around each island of lumination, at the single, blessedly empty incubator. One the nurses looked up at me and smiled a smile of sympathy and encouragement that made me want to cry.

What if I were alone..?

In my hesitation at Mrs. Marjolin’s questions, there were a million answers that I could not bring myself to give. I shook my head.

“No,” she said quietly. And then, while I held back my thoughts on fatherhood, she added, “Some two years ago, in the space of five months and two days, I lost my husband, a future daughter-in-law, a daughter and a son. Of all four, it was the loss of Sebastian that hurts the most and it is that I will probably never be able to come to terms with.”

I said nothing. The tea was weak.

“My father died of Alzheimer’s disease. His final illness was in a nursing home and it lasted only two days, but he had been dying for years. It’s difficult to know when exactly he passed away from us but I would imagine that it was about four years before his heart stopped beating: that was when he used my mother’s name for the last time. Thereafter he was a stranger who did not care one whit for us.

“Sebastian’s illness was like that. In the space of a few months, he became a stranger to me and the son was gone. At least Joseph’s death and Eve’s deaths were absolute: they’re no longer here and I can mourn them. Sebastian is here but his body is occupied by a different person.

“I would give anything not to have had his mind alone taken from me.”

If I’d been feeling pretty ashamed of myself up to that point, the feeling was nothing compared with what it became then.

I had to know though.

“I realise how painful this is for you, Mrs. Marjolin. I wouldn’t be asking you to recall these things if it weren’t of great importance.”

She held the cup in both hands as she drank, as if the cold in the room was seeping into her bones.

“What would you like to know?”

I felt as if I had won a victory in which there was no pleasure.

“I’d like to talk to you about the events of two years ago. You think that it all started with your husband’s death?”

She nodded.

“Sebastian hadn’t shown any signs of his illness before that?”

At once she was shaking her head and saying, “Not at all.”

“Is there any family history of schizophrenia, or depression, or anything like that?”

Another negative.

“Do you have any brothers of sisters?”

No.

“And your husband? Are there any brothers or sisters on his side?”

She admitted to one, but it was almost grudging, and at once she said, “But we lost touch with him years ago. He was a loner.”

And quite possibly a schizoid personality.

“And while Sebastian was at school, there was never anything that, looking back, might lead you to wonder if it was his illness growing within him?”

She was far too emphatic in her denial. We were rereading old texts and losing the perspective. I changed direction.

“You’re husband died of a heart attack, didn’t he? Was that completely unexpected? He’d never had any chest pain or anything before?”

Her reply of, “Never,” was accompanied by the tiniest of looks, as though she wondered why I should ask.

“Were you with him when it happened. Was it a sudden collapse?”

I was getting clear signals that she couldn’t understand why she should be asked these irrelevancies. “I was at home. He collapsed and died at work.”

“He worked in a laboratory, didn’t he?”

“My husband was research biochemist.”

“Where did he work?”

Again the fleeted impression that she was disturbed that I should be asking these irrelevant questions.

“At Friedrichson’s. They have a research facility about five kilometres north of here.”

Friedrichson-Waterhouse was a large pharmaceutical company, one of the area’s largest employers.

“And Sebastian? He was a doing a PhD. D. there, wasn’t he?”

She nodded.

“Did he work directly with his father?”

There was a discernible frown on her face when she replied, “My husband wasn’t his supervisor - that would not have been proper - and so they were in separate departments, although Sebastian used to help his father out with his research whenever he could.”

I could see that she was about to add something and, before she could, I said, “What was Sebastian’s reaction?”

He was distraught, of course.

“He was with his father as it happened?”

“He wasn’t in the same room; I think that he was at coffee, or something. He was summoned at once, though.”

She had put down her empty cup. The consternation at my questions was gone and she looked at me through watered eyes.

“Did Sebastian seem odd at around that time? Does it seem to you that the disease might have been started around then?”

She frowned into thought for a brief moment before saying, “We were all in shock, Doctor Reed.”

Of course. What I really wanted to ask was if Sebastian had mentioned Martians controlling his arms and legs, or tiny Chinese burrowing into his brain, but I didn’t have the vocabulary of tact for those enquiries.

Feeling more and more like a bastard, I asked then, “And shortly afterwards..?”

Thankfully she took the cue.

“Shortly afterwards - some six weeks - Sebastian’s fiancée, Pauline, died quite suddenly whilst the two of them were on holiday in Wales.”

Even I realised it would be less than tactful to enquire too deeply into the details, but I had to find out more.

“It happened on holiday?”

She nodded just once.

“Sebastian felt that he needed to get away and I couldn’t blame him. They were camping in Pembrokeshire. One morning, he woke up and she was dead beside him. There was an autopsy and they held an inquest, but they never got to the bottom of how she died.”

Oh no?

“That must have been an incredible shock for Sebastian,” and then, in case that sounded a bit crass, “For you all.”

She looked directly at me. “I thought it was unbearable. But…”

She took a deep breath and then I thought she was about to cry, but instead she just whispered, “I didn’t know anything.”

I decided then that I had heard enough. This was doing me no good and it was clearly deeply distressing her. It was too late to regret ever starting this; not that such sentiments helped either of us.

I said, “I think I’d better go, Mrs. Marjolin. I’m sorry if I have upset you…”

I made a move to stand up but she had neither heard nor seen me. She continued in a voice that was speaking from two years before.

“Within three weeks, Eve was dead and I felt nothing. I was beyond grief by then. The doctor put me on some tablets and it made the world continue but it did nothing for the pain. I couldn’t understand how such a thing could have happened again, but it was exactly the same: no cause found. An autopsy and an inquest and no cause found.”

She was weeping as she looked up into my face.

“How could that be?”

I’ve done some fairly nasty, snivelling things in my life, but none, I think, that ranked with what I was doing then. I felt cruel and evil, but I couldn’t stop it now. All I could do was to say, “I don’t know.”

We lapsed into silence for a few seconds. She ended the torment by saying, “It was then that Sebastian began to show real signs of oddness. He retreated to his room, refusing to recognise me, shouting out in the middle of the night for no reason. He stopped eating, even threw the plate at the window on one occasion when I tried to insist. He began talking about the angels as his enemies, as real people who teased and tortured him, who whispered in the darkness about him.

“Eventually it got to the point that he wouldn’t even come out of the room. He just lay on his bed, soiled, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide, his limbs as hard as wood. I could see the cords in his neck standing out all the time, as if he were fighting against something that was holding him down.

“By then he no longer knew me, and I had lost him.”

Oh, Christ.

She took in breath as if it smelled bad and, her face moulded into a rigid mask, said, “The rest I think you probably now.”

She showed me to the front door where she asked, “Has it been of some help to you?”

I nodded and smiled assurance. What was another lie? “Oh, yes,” I said.

One further question occurred to me.

“Who was Sebastian’s supervisor? Can you remember?”

It required a few seconds thought before she recalled it.

“Martin Hailey.”

I walked back to the car feeling a shit.

13.

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all.

There has been only one period during my life that Mondays did not necessarily bring with them depression and loathing, and that was when I was a junior hospital doctor doing weekends on duty. Then the dawn of Monday morning would mean the coming end of seventy-two hours of on-call work, the hospital would transmute gradually from a depressingly empty place of sickness and sighs to a more populated bustle of shouts and the odd bursts of laughter, and the sheer presence of humanity would, for once, lift my spirits.

Those days were long gone and Mondays had recovered their sickly hue. When I trudged into the laboratory the day after my visit to Mrs. Marjolin, therefore, I was not bouncing with joyful emotions and this state was quickly reinforced by two events. The first was the receipt of a letter in the post from the County Forensic Laboratory that informed me that all the samples from Julian Havers that I had sent to them for analysis were negative: he had imbibed no poison, drug or medicine to explain his departure.

I thought again of Mrs. Marjolin and her grief.

Charlie was downstairs doing autopsy work and so I had no one to talk to. There was work to be done but what use is work when there is no will to do it?

I picked up the ‘phone, feeling that I could assuage some of the varied feelings of guilt by calling Peter to see how he was.

“Mrs. Weiss? Is there Peter there? Could I have a word with him?”

The voice was cooler and sharper than ever, it seemed to me; like a razor dipped into liquid nitrogen.

“Who is that?”

“It’s Phil, Mrs. Weiss. Phil Reed.”

Did I say liquid nitrogen? Well sudden there was liquid helium oozing quantum mechanically down the telephone lines.

“Oh.”

I should imagine that Judas got much the same response when he called up the lads to see how Jesus was.

“Peter’s out.”

Fair enough.

“Could you tell him I called to see how he is? Perhaps he could ring me when he’s free.”

She drew in some toxic vapours and then said, “I don’t think I will, Dr. Reed. I should think that you’re the last person he wants to speak to at the present time.”

Which left me rather at a loss. While I cast around for something a little more erudite than, “Oh,” and, “Um,” she continued, “Do you know what you’ve done to him? Do you know how he feels?”

She was gathering a fair amount of angular momentum by this time, and these questions were being used as sharp-pointed missiles rather than interrogatives, but I tried to join the spirit of debate by saying weakly, “I’m really very sorry about all this…”

“You’ve nearly destroyed him, Dr. Reed. You’ve set him back three years, back to when it happened before. We all make mistakes, Dr. Reed: even you, I should imagine.”

“Of course I do, and…”

“Then why do this? Why persecute him?”

I began to protest that it wasn’t persecution, that it was an issue of quality, but I knew that she was basically right. This wasn’t about improving Peter, improving the service or making sure that patients and relatives got the best service; this was about making bloody sure that the I was shiny bright, that I didn’t get pelted with dung, that I had been seen to do my duty.

“I really am very sorry, Mrs. Weiss,” I said.

She put the phone down with a crack and I looked across at the piles of Peter’s work that I still had to review.

I found things to do until lunchtime, by when Charlie had returned.

“What about lunch?” I enquired.

The look on her face was answer enough.

“You do realise, don’t you, that people are just as likely to begin to talk if we are not seen having lunch together as if we are?”

I had the pleasure of seeing her pause for contemplation and then reluctantly agree.

We sat in the depressing dining hall eating depressing food and feeling, not altogether surprisingly, a tad depressed.

I anticipated that Charlie would not want to hear much about Sebastian or my investigations, but it was either that or pass the meal in intensely painful silence. I told her about Sonya de Morgan’s revelation that there had been other unascertained deaths in Sebastian’s short, although eventful life. However, it was when I told her of my trip of the day before

Charlie was incredulous.

“You did what?”

“I went to see Sebastian’s mother.”

Admittedly Charlie had not been finding the food too appetising before my revelation, but now it apparently took on the cast of dust and ashes.

“Are you mad?” she asked, which I thought was a bit tactless.

“What’s the problem? I wanted to find out a little bit more about the start of Sebastian’s illness.”

She had put down her knife and fork in order to instruct me. “How did you represent yourself? As a pathologist who thinks her son is killing people?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t really say much about the reason for my interest. I just...implied things.”

“And you used your own name?”

“Yes,” I replied, but now more slowly. It was starting to germinate within me that I had been a little unwise.

Charlie was looking at me with undisguised sympathy.

“And what if she mentions this to Carl? What if she happens to tell him that his colleague, that nice Dr. Reed called, and that he was interested in Sebastian?”

Hubby would not be pleased, she implied, and I could see the point.

“Perhaps she won’t mention anything,” I pointed out in optimistic hope, “I’m not sure she visits Sebastian much. She seems to have coped pretty much by denial.”

Charlie resumed eating but she very nearly shrugged.

“What did you find out? Was it worth it?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “She dates Sebastian’s illness to the time of the deaths, and is fairly definite that it didn’t predate them.”

“So?”

That single, small interrogation told me that I was talking to someone who didn’t want to be interested. We were colleagues again, not friends.

“So, if Sebastian had shown signs of his illness before the deaths, at least before the deaths of his fiancée and sister, it would be consistent with the hypothesis that somehow he killed them, just as he killed our three cases.”

“So your hypothesis is wrong.”

“Not necessarily. You know as well as I do that people are incapable of ordering their memories accurately. Sebastian’s mother remembers it that way because that is the way that it ought to be, probably the way that it has been suggested to her that it happened.”

Charlie had finished her meal. It was with something that hinted at cruelty that she said then, “Your visit hardly achieved a great deal, then. At least, not in the way that you might have imagined.”

My retort was interrupted by the arrival at our table of Arthur Lennert. There were smiles all around and he fiddled with his food a bit, seeming to find the prospect of Chicken Supreme - admittedly an exaggerated name for the dish - a daunting one. He cast occasional, semi-covert glances at Charlie who took the hint and excused herself after a few minutes.

“How’s it going with Dr. Weiss’s work?”

I asked for clarification. “You mean coping without him, or having to look at everything he’s done again?”

He didn’t spot the hidden reference.

“Reviewing his stuff.”

“I don’t know how Charlie’s doing, but I’ve done about a third of it so far.”

He was stirring bits of chicken around with his fork, his other hand clutching a salt pot tightly, as if he thought he might need emergency salination at any moment.

“And?” he asked, not looking at me. He gave me the impression he was a bit embarrassed, as if he found the whole business slightly plebeian and not at all what he wanted to be involved with.

“And a few minor errors, but nothing that I would care to crucify anybody for.”

He nodded as if that was exactly what he had expected to hear, as if I had insisted that a review should take place and he had merely acquiesced to keep me smiling.

“Good.”

And then, after a pause during which he scraped together the courage to place a piece of the repast in his mouth, “And the forensic post mortem? Any news about that?”

“Not yet.”

Again a nod, again that feeling within me that whatever happened, Arthur Lennert was not going to be seen as the villain. Perhaps it was this that prompted him, somewhat rashly some might say, to begin to eat his Chicken Supreme with what, for a physician, was positive abandon.

I was ready to leave and was just putting my water glass on the tray when he suddenly looked up from his plate and said, “I’ve been making a few calls about Dr. Weiss.”

“Oh?”

He stared at me for a brief moment and clearly I missed an implication somewhere.

“Apparently this isn’t the first time. He got into some sort of trouble about three years ago. Similar thing, only it was a baby.”

“Yes.”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You knew?”

“Charlie told me something had happened.”

His eyebrows, tired of the altitude so high on his forehead, plunged down like twin bungee jumpers as he initiated a deep frown.

“You mean you employed this man even though he’d done something like this before?”

I might be a political ingénue, but even I could see the territory ahead was mined.

“We didn’t know at the time, Arthur.”

“Didn’t you ring around? Find out what he was like?”

Oh, boy. This was priceless stuff, even coming from the Medical Director.

“Forgive me, Arthur. I thought that the procedure was to read the CV, interview them and check the references.”

He looked momentarily at me as if he thought I were being facetious.

“You know what I mean.”

Suddenly I was fed up. I stood and picked up the tray.

“Now there you are entirely correct, Arthur. I know exactly what you mean.”

I had often visited Kate on Monday evenings.

The afternoon passed slowly and with tedium. My mood was not improved as tray after tray of histology specimens and gynaecological cytology specimens passed under the objective lenses of my microscope, as badly typed reports appeared for my approval, and as idiot clinicians rang up for clarification of what were quite plainly elegant, pithy epistles extolling the pathological features of crap specimens.

By five I wanted to leave, but there was only home to go to. I said goodnight to Charlie and she looked up briefly from her desk and replied in kind: I spared a single thought on asking her out for a drink, then came to with a start and moved on.

It was raining hard and by the time I got to the car I was completely wet. I switched on the ignition and just sat there thinking that it was going to be a shitty night to follow a shitty day. The radio came on and I could have cranked up a bit of concern about famine in Africa, only I had other, more important, things to think about.

I found myself heading for the clinic without conscious thought of why, or how, or even if I was as loony as Sebastian was.

She would only shout and scream at me again. She would only refuse to see me. She would only broadcast our condition to all those around.

But she was my wife.

After all these years, I couldn’t just let it go at that. I couldn’t just let the marriage end with such poison.

The car park was empty and it was getting colder: perhaps visiting patients with mental illness is temperature-dependent, like ice-cream sales or the incidence of head-lice.

It was still raining and I didn’t have an umbrella in the car. I arrived at the main house feeling that life was not good. The hall was deserted except for James who was scribbling something on a pad, presumably trying to look as though he was earning his salary.

“James.”

His initial glance was startled but, in contrast to my expectation, it did not break down into a grin of welcoming warmth as he recognised me: perhaps the rain had altered my features, I thought. Perhaps I was so soaked in moisture that he mistook me for someone else, someone wetter.

“D-d-d-d-d…” he began and, I am afraid, looked like continuing.

“Is Kate in?”

He changed his approach, or at least he changed his syllable.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh…”

“Upstairs?” I asked, moving away from him, to his left. This panicked him to the extent that we achieved an entire word.

“No!”

Both of us were surprised by such welcome but unexpected success, to the extent that there was a moment’s pause.

“Sh-sh-sh-sh…” he began again, but before I could interrupt he said, “She’s not here.”

I admit I was perplexed. I thought he meant that she was in therapy or something, although that would have been unusual at this hour.

“Where is she? Shall I go and wait in her room?”

He was shaking his head in such a disorganised way that, what with the contortions he was forcing on his mouth, I feared that flying spittle would be the result.

“N-n-n-no!” was pushed out with violence and not a little cruelty.

Then I thought I knew what was going on. I thought that Sebastian was in there, that James was worried lest we proceed to fisticuffs amongst the elegant furnishings.

“Oh, I see,” I said.

But instead of producing mutual understanding, he gave me then an odd look, as if surprised that I should be seeing anything at all.

“Y-y-y-you’d b-better wait here. I’ll f-f-f-fetch Dr. Volkmann.”

He was gone before I could agree, disagree or even take breath.

The wait was short, which was a relief as the only magazine I could find that was in the least bit entertaining was a three year old copy of the Beano. Carl hurried in from the clinical offices at the back of the house, closely followed by James. He was smiling and that immediately worried me. Suddenly I had a premonition that I was about to have my cosy view of the situation changed, that I was about to undergo a paradigm shift.

He said, “Phil, good to see you,” and that only served to heighten my concern.

“What’s going on, Carl? Where’s Kate?”

Being a psychiatrist, he didn’t answer. Instead he suggested that we should retire to his office. On the way he made talk that wasn’t so much small as wraithlike, ghostly words that died in the mind before you knew it.

“Charlie tells me you’ve got a problem at work. Your locum..?”

Short of tripping him up, sticking a knee in the small of his back and banging his head against the ornamental floor tiles, I couldn’t really see any to make him end this little playlet and tell me the truth.

“Possibly. It doesn’t look too good at the moment.”

“A lot of extra work for you both.”

“Yup.”

And so we continued until we passed through his secretary’s empty office and sat down in his. There was a large pointillistic drawing on the wall behind him, an amateur but talented picture that I took to represent souls in torment.

“One of your patients?” I asked, gesturing with my head.

Turning slightly to look at it, he said in the kind of voice that people use when you’ve just made a social gaffe, “Actually, it was done by Sebastian.”

Well, I only had myself to blame.

“It’s a bit of a coincidence that his name should come up,” said Carl, with as much sincerity as a chemical toilet, “Because it was about Sebastian that I want to talk to you.”

This hardly came as a complete shock to the nervous system so, in the absence of complete neural paralysis I was able to say, “What about him, Carl?”

He began to look uncomfortable and that really was alarming: psychiatrists go on courses that train them not to look uncomfortable.

“He’s discharged himself,” he said.

There were two chains of thought in my head. One was a rather atavistic Good fucking riddance, the other was to wonder why, and whether this had anything to do with his ‘game.’

But Carl was still looking at me and it was obvious I had missed an implication.

The third chain of thought sparked into my head and outshone all the rest.

K-K-K-Kate’s not here.

“Where’s Kate?”

He opened his mouth to speak, breathed out and only at the end of exhalation did he say quietly, “She went with him.”

They had discharged themselves just before lunch. Both were voluntary patients, the clinic could not stop them, although several members of staff had attempted to dissuade them. They had declined to give a forwarding address

“Why the fuck didn’t somebody ring me?”

“I was going to come and see you tonight. You beat me to it by turning up here.”

He had offered me some tea or coffee, which was a laugh I suppose, and when I had declined he had suggested we should go out for a drink. We sat now in the saloon bar of some anonymous country pub, empty except for the barman and a hideous one-armed bandit.

“For Christ’s sake, Carl, he’s threatened her! Couldn’t you have stopped them on that alone?”

He shook his head. His voice oozed nauseous reason and objectivity as he pointed out, “You know I couldn’t do that, Phil. There is no evidence to suggest that he intends anything harmful to Kate. Of course, I didn’t want this to happen, but legally there was nothing that any of us could do to prevent it.”

I felt as if something were inside of me, fighting and scratching at my intestines, so that I couldn’t sit still.

“Look, Phil. I have to admit that the moral side of this is entirely with you, but morals aren’t enough. Since neither Kate nor Sebastian were sectioned under the Mental Health Act, they were free to come and go.”

That was joke, although he wasn’t laughing.

“Fucking hell, Carl! He’s slaughtered rabbits and cats, he’s threatened Kate, he’s implicated in the deaths of at least three people. He’s even arranged to have me beaten up. What more do you want?”

He looked up at me from what was clearly a beer mat in a million, the way it held his gaze.

“Yes. You were beaten up. I’d heard something about that. What happened?”

And so I had to go through it all again. My sole consolation was that, being professionally trained to receive news of the more peculiar aspects of human behaviour, he didn’t burst out laughing at the details.

“How do you know that Sebastian was behind this?” he enquired.

“Oh, sure, Carl. It was just a coincidence. It’s quite common for people to be kneed in the groin, shaved and have daft words written on their foreheads. Who else was behind it?”

He made a face. Maybe he couldn’t name anyone, he was saying, but he wasn’t going to do something too illiberal and admit that Sebastian was the likeliest candidate for the position. Instead he said, “The police came to see Sebastian this morning. They mentioned to my staff that it was in connection with an attack on you. I do wonder if that was the trigger for his departure with Kate.”

His voice was vaguely questioning, his reasoning seductive: so much so that I wanted to screw my beer glass into his face. There was something supercilious in his eyes and I came close to telling him. Came close to putting him in the picture about Charlie and me.

“How do you know that she went voluntarily? How do you know he wasn’t forcing her?”

“I was there, Phil. I talked to her…” He held up his hand as I opened my mouth and said, “We were alone, Phil. She was quite determined and quite happy about going with Sebastian. She signed the discharge papers without any hesitation.”

I snorted. I couldn’t believe that Kate hated me that much. Not enough to go off into the blue yonder with that pimply little shite.

Carl was looking at me. It was quite slowly that he reached into his pocket and handed me an envelope. My name was written on it in Kate’s hand.

I looked up at Carl who had apology written in secret ink all over his patronising face.

The note was short.

Dear Phil,

I am writing this because Sebastian insisted that it was only right and proper; had it been left to me, I would not have bothered. Since you have demonstrated quite clearly that you consider our marriage to be at an end, I have thought very deeply over my situation and decided that a complete break from my previous life is the only option for me. I am now sure that Sebastian and I love each other. He cares for me deeply and has not betrayed me.

Wish me luck,

Kate.

Carl had a look of concern on his face as I put the letter down: it was like the laminate on cheap furniture.

“May I?” he asked, without waiting for permission.

When he had finished he looked up and murmured, “I’m terribly sorry, old chap.”

I really hated him then and again thought about spreading a little truth and light of my own.

I should have done: it would have made no difference.

14.

Non omnis moriar

She took it very well, I suppose. Woken in the middle of the night by her station sergeant to be told that there was a man who was insisting on talking to her, who was agitated, slightly drunk and who was babbling about someone called, ‘Sebastian.’

She could have told them to lock me in the cells for the night, put the telephone back on the rest and returned to her slumber, but she didn’t. Looking back on it, her behaviour was miraculous: she told them to arrange for a car to bring me over. I was fairly inebriated but not so much that I sat in the back of that car and kept thinking she was quite possibly the most understanding human being I had ever encountered: and that included my mum.

From there, things took off into fanciful hopes and anticipatory dreams that brought me much tired pleasure as I sat in the darkness, amber sodium lights flecking and stretching across the interior of the car. Clearly, I reasoned, there was something between us, or why else would she be willing to see me so late in the night, why else would she arrange to have me brought over to her home?

And then I thought of Kate, and I knew for certain that I was the biggest shit in Christendom.

She lived in a converted warehouse that overlooked the dockland area of the city: the area was clean of rubbish, derelicts and graffiti. Indeed, so assiduously had the place been sterilised for its vacuum-packed inhabitants, all life, soul and atmosphere had been removed to be replaced by clinical cleanliness, fresh paint and varnish, and tourist-friendly, bijou shops.

I was escorted into the lift by my companion, a middle-aged constable who said not word to me during the entire trip. He had patches of psoriasis just showing above his collar, peeping angrily and desquamatively out at me. The lift rose quickly and quietly to the fifth floor: it was carpeted and unmarked and noticeably free of pools of stagnant urine like most communal lifts. As we walked along a plush corridor I noticed that my footsteps bounced slightly on the sprung floor, and the ceiling was suspended with the lighting hidden. These features gave an impression of insubstantiality that contrasted oddly with the solid painted brickwork of the walls.

She lived at number fifty-four and she responded quickly to the constable’s ring of the bell. The door opened to reveal that she was dressed in a tee-shirt and jeans. The look on her face, however, was not quite what I was expecting. As soon as she saw me, she turned to the constable, said curtly, “Thank you, Fleischer.”

He departed with a nod at her and nothing at all towards me, which left me with a silly grin on my face. If I thought to charm her, my thinking was mistaken. She stood aside without saying anything, allowing me to pass into her flat. I looked around at the spacious and nicely furnished lounge. I was about to ask her if I could sit down, but she didn’t give me a chance.

“What the hell is going on?” she demanded. Her tone was, I should imagine, the one she used for incompetent traffic wardens or police constables caught consorting with known criminals. Before I could get anything out of my mouth at all, she continued, “Who the hell do you think you are? I’ve put myself into a delicate situation with regard to you, and how do you repay me? You turn up at the station, shouting and screaming, demanding to see me. What is so important that it can’t wait until morning?”

Allowed at last to make a contribution, I said, “Kate’s gone.”

She frowned.

“Gone? You mean disappeared?”

I nodded. “With Sebastian.”

She went into deep thought mode, as she had done in my kitchen the day before. While she was occupied I took the liberty of sitting on a very nice pale yellow leather sofa. I wouldn’t have said no to a drink but I thought it would probably not be a wise move.

“She went willingly”

“Apparently.”

“When did they go?”

“Late morning. After your visit.”

She let out some breath. “Well, it doesn’t require much deductive power to spot the link.” She looked across at me. “What do you want me to do about it?” she asked. Her tone was distinctly guarded.

Clearly I wanted her found but as I said it, she was already shaking her head.

“Not easy if she’s gone willingly. And not at all after only a few hours.”

This felt disturbingly familiar.

“But she’s gone with Sebastian! He’s going around murdering people!”

“I’m sorry. I can’t do anything officially; not yet, not on what you’ve given me.”

I didn’t know quite what to say. I had assumed that she would help, assumed that there was no other course to be followed.

“Jesus Christ, Sonya. You’ve got to do something! She’s my wife!”

I had never used her first name before. She sat down in the chair opposite me, her forearms together, her elbows on her knees. She had long fingers, although her nails were unvarnished. There were no rings.

“You have to understand that this is a very tricky situation. My position is not that strong.”

What was she talking about? Did she think that I’d come to give her some career advice?

“I’m relatively recently promoted and there are plenty of people around me who don’t like the idea of senior female police officers. If I’m seen to be pursuing something that could be construed as a waste of manpower or resources, then it will be used against me.”

Well I could see that it was tough for a girl, but this wasn’t exactly balm on my anxieties.

“But if I’m right, it would be a tremendous boost for you,” I pointed out. I tried to sound enticing and seductive, although I fear that I merely sounded wheedling, for she looked at me as if I were nothing more than an idiot child.

“I’ve got no proof that you’re right.”

“You’ve got five deaths that are all connected with Sebastian, the causes of which are all unascertainable on post mortem examination.”

Still no smile. She really was remarkably attractive. The way she was leaning forward slightly accentuated the curve of her breasts. It occurred to me how it odd it was that she should have been quite happy to have a constable bring me to the door of her flat in the middle of the night.

“All I’ve got is a man who has had his wife stolen by another, and who has concocted a story about mass murder by a means apparently undetectable by forensic science. All I’ve got, when you look at it closely, is a man who has a motive to get back at someone but who hasn’t got the brains to do it properly.”

If she had slapped me, she would have hurt me less. I stood up and said, “Fair enough.”

I headed for the door. She remained sitting: I could feel her looking at me as I walked away from her. I had actually opened the bloody thing before she said, “Sit down, Phil. I think we have a lot to talk about.”

She made some coffee and we drank it sitting at the circular dining room table, set in an glazed corner bay: the view was of the cathedral in the distance, the rippling reflections of the docks to the fore.

“Did you go and see his mother?”

“For all the good it did.”

“Tell me what she said.”

So I did. When I was finished, she stared into the night for a short while.

“Do you think she’s scared of him?”

It hadn’t occurred to me until then, but that was exactly what she had been.

“And you think she doesn’t visit him much?”

“I’ve never seen her there, certainly.”

She lapsed into contemplation again.

“But if she knows something,” I said, “Why deny it? If she thinks that Sebastian might have killed her husband and her daughter, why not shout it out to anyone who’ll listen?”

“Maybe she doesn’t know she knows it,” she suggested. “Or maybe she loves him too much.”

That would be love indeed. I don’t think I would be capable of such a love as that: I don’t think I would want to be.

Sonya had a small scar just below her lip that produced a slight wrinkle to the outline of her mouth. Her expression was again so serious I was dying to ask if she ever smiled. Nor would I have minded being the man to make her laugh: I imagined that it would be a greatly joyous thing to behold.

“Tell me about this ‘game’ of Sebastian’s.”

I hesitated. “I’m not entirely sure myself. It seems that he considers himself to be death. I am a pathologist, therefore we are ‘adversaries.’”

“And what are the rules?”

I shrugged.

“They’re whatever Sebastian says they are, I should imagine. All I know is that he considers my task to be the defeat of death, his task to be the spread of death. If I can stop him, I win: if I don’t, he wins.”

“But I thought that Kate was the prize? Surely now that she has chosen him…”

“The game is over? Maybe. Certainly that’s what I hope, but I doubt it. In any case, it doesn’t change the fact that I think he’s going around killing people”

Sonya still seemed to be having trouble understanding something.

“But he’s schizophrenic, isn’t he? A split personality?”

“Multiple personality disorder is something else: that’s rare and it’s a form of hysterical reaction. Schizophrenia was originally thought to be a disorder in which the personality was fractured or splintered but it’s viewed slightly differently today.

“The present thoughts about schizophrenia are that there is an organic basis to it, that it’s a physical disease every bit as much as cancer or influenza or arthritis. In the case of schizophrenia, the disease is in the brain.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

She was asking for more than I could provide and we were rapidly approaching the limit of my knowledge.

“There seems to be an inherited element, but probably what is inherited is a tendency to the disease: environmental factors play a large part. They trigger it in susceptible individuals.”

She interrupted.

“But I still have a problem with the idea that someone who is mad and irrational can behave in such a structured, logical way. If you are right, Sebastian has constructed some sort of master plan that involves engaging you in a contest. I thought that schizophrenics couldn’t function in that sort of way.”

“You got to rid yourself of the idea that madness is the same as anarchy or illogicality. Schizophrenia is a disease and it therefore has symptoms. The most obvious of those is that they experience abnormal sensory inputs. Classically, schizophrenics hear voices talking about them - not to them, but about them - and usually they are abusive or unpleasant in tone and content.

“They also have delusions: basically that means that they have abnormal beliefs. Thus they might believe themselves to be some great figure from history, or that the Martians are invading. These beliefs often become extremely complex and well-structured but, and it is a relevant but, they have an internal consistency that can be quite breathtaking. It is impossible to argue the sufferer out of them because you will not find a flaw in the logic and because they can’t be made to see that it’s all completely baseless crap.

“The reason for the uselessness of argument is that the sufferer loses insight: ‘insight’ in this sense has a carefully defined meaning and implies that they lose the ability to know that what they are experiencing is not real.

“The end result of all that is that you end with somebody who operates by different rules, but who operates within those rules just as logically as normal people do.”

Sonya got up. “More coffee?”

When I nodded she turned away and walked to the kitchen. I could see her through the open door.

From the kitchen she called, “What you’ve described doesn’t exactly square with some of the wrecks we get in the cells.”

I had to raise my voice to reply.

“There are shades of schizophrenia. People who have a so-called schizoid personality may have some of the elements in a mild form, but not to the extent that they can’t function. The severest manifestations of schizophrenia may render the patient incapable of functioning in any way at all - that’s called catatonic schizophrenia. Most are in between, and you see the worse end of those in the cells and in the prisons.”

She returned with more coffee.

“And Sebastian is a mild case?”

“Sebastian is treated. I think that the medication has had an effect, but not as complete an effect as his doctors think.”

She paused into thought again. With nothing to do I had time to sit there and think how late it was, how lonely it was without Kate.

Sonya said at last, “You have presented a very convincing case, but it’s difficult to swallow, you must admit, Phil. What I don’t completely understand is why Kate can’t see him the way you do. Surely she must see how dangerous he is?”

“You’ve met him. Did he start frothing at the mouth and mumbling about being one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse when you were there?”

She shook her head. “But I was only there for half an hour.”

“Part of Sebastian’s psychosis seems to be that Death is mysterious, hidden. He doesn’t go around proclaiming himself to be Nemesis because Death comes silently and anonymously, because no one has ever seen Death.”

“Then why tell you?”

“Because of what I do. Because it was a chance to play a game and play out his role as Death.”

“With your wife as the prize?”

“In a way, although,” I corrected her, “I don’t think Sebastian wants Kate, I think he wants me not to have her.”

She said nothing more for a long time. Suddenly she sighed and said, “Oh, dear,” and when I looked at her she said, “I believe you, Phil. Really I do. But...”

“But what?”

She didn’t answer.

I couldn’t take it in for a while, then at last I found words.

“I don’t believe it. You meant that you’re not going to do anything to help me?”

She was most apologetic; I’ll give her that.

“There is still nothing that can be done. She is an adult and she left of her own accord. There is no record of a death threat made against her and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Sebastian has unlawfully done away with anyone.”

Except the rabbit and the cat, I thought. Don’t forget them.

I tried not to feel disappointed and downright, bloody well pissed off, but it wasn’t a battle I particularly wanted to win. I felt panic-filled dread begin to rise.

“I am not making any of this up, Sonya. Sebastian is dangerous. He has a serious and deep-rooted psychosis, and I believe that it is driving him to murder. Every day that Kate is with him puts her further into danger.”

Sonya just looked at me. Her eyes were for a second startlingly reflective and I thought that perhaps there was a fleeting waver in them.

It was then a door opened in the flat and into the dining room came a short, dark-haired woman dressed in nothing but a long tee shirt. She had clearly just woken from sleep and was scratching the top of her arm, walking with her eyes only half-open

She walked past us and into the kitchen. She was not in the least perturbed by my presence. I turned back to Sonya and I swear that I didn’t have a surprised and perplexed expression on my face.

“My partner, Jo.”

On her face was the nearest that she had yet come to a smile.

Jo nodded in my direction as she returned with a glass of water and I raised my hand a few centimetres from the table and managed to manipulate a few muscles into a sort of deathbed grimace.

The silence when we were alone again was dense, like a sort of psychic fog on my senses. I might have been in that room still had Sonya not then said, “I probably would have a hard time justifying it, but on the pretext that he is a suspect in an assault, I am going to commit some resources to finding the two of them.”

She spoke cautiously and her words were full of doubt, but they brought me no small relief.

I managed to croak out, “Thank you.”

“But to be realistic about all this, we’re not going to get anywhere unless we can discover how he’s doing what he’s doing. And I think that that’s more your area than mine. Have you got any ideas?”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call them ideas, but there are a few things that keep surfacing. And one of them is Sebastian’s talk of games.”

“How does that help?”

“Sebastian’s a joker. The rabbit dissected like an autopsy, the cat suspended with a urinary catheter, the choice of a woman to beat me up - all of those are his ideas of jolly japes. Now, he once said to me that he was giving me clues but that I wasn’t taking any notice of them: if that is true, he’s told me something about what is going on, but I haven’t twigged exactly when or how.”

Sonya didn’t exactly explode into enthusiasm at my analysis.

“In my experience, clues are rarely as useful as you might think,” she warned. “If I were you I’d pay more attention to his past.”

“Why?”

“Because if he’s somehow managing to kill people, he’s doing it using a specific weapon, and how he might have acquired that weapon ought to tell us what it is.”

Sonya de Morgan had a habit of seeing things with a clarity that was rare amongst most of the people I had met.

“The likelihood is that it’s a form of poison,” I ventured. “That would be top of the list in view of the lack of physical evidence, but it would have to be a rare one.”

“And since he was a scientist, and since these deaths started when he was working in a biochemistry laboratory, wouldn’t it be the logical place to start asking questions?”

Martin Hailey. Sebastian’s supervisor.

“I’ll go to the laboratory tomorrow, if I can get away.”

I stood, since there seemed little chance of being asked to stay.

“Is your car at the station? Shall I get you a car to take you back?”

While I waited for it to arrive, I tried a little inconsequential chatter.

“This is a nice flat. Have you lived here long?”

“We bought it about eighteen months ago, when I was posted here.”

“What does Jo do?”

“She’s in marketing.”

It rather ran out at that. I must have looked fairly woebegone, for into the quiet she said, “I wouldn’t worry too much about your wife yet, Phil. If what you’ve told me is correct, Sebastian may consider the game to be over. I can’t see him harming your wife now.”

She put out her hand and briefly held the fingers of my left hand.

It was the kindest and yet the cruellest thing she could have done.

I consoled myself with the newly acquired understanding of why she hadn’t been bothered that her colleagues should know I had been in her flat late at night.

Tuesday was born in sorrow and lived its short life in aching misery. My head pained and my eyes felt hot and dry: there was a taste in my mouth like a bird’s cloacal slough and I had much trouble keeping my mind on my work for more than three milliseconds at a time.

Charlie was even more distant and she had a look on her face as if she had troubles of her own, so I didn’t feel much inclined to share mine. There was a heap of routine work to get through, including four autopsies, and I had no time to address the problem of rechecking Peter’s work.

At about eleven-thirty, the ‘phone rang. Jenny, one of the secretaries, had just brought some coffee in. She told me it was coffee, so it must have been.

“Phil? It’s Steve Munro.”

Whatever he was about to say, I didn’t want to hear it: only Satan himself would have been less welcome whispering in my ear. I took a small drink and shuddered.

“Hi, Steve.” It was wondrous that I could still speak.

“I’ve been doing some work on this death, Jean Vinson, and I’ve come up against a dead stop.”

“In what way?”

My second sip of the vile brew that I was expected to imbibe had failed to dispel the impression that in making it Jenny had had a small but significant nose bleed over the mug.

“Well things have got a bit complicated. Did you know that she had some sort of bleeding diathesis?”

He was not irritated that she had this thing called a diathesis: he was telling me that she had a tendency to haemorrhage. Suddenly, and somewhat incredibly, the coffee was forgotten.

“What sort?”

“She was on steroids for ITP.”

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura; low platelet levels because the body destroys them too quickly. Not rare, but not common either. It would make her bleed easily, though.

Now I was unsettled to the extent that I could have just drunk a pint of Jenny’s coffee and not have been overly bothered.

“But what about the skull fracture? And the subdural?”

“Well that’s all a bit odd,” he said while I thought, Oh, hurrah. “You see, I reckon the skull fracture is actually post mortem, possibly caused by her trip down the stairs.”

I didn’t actually say, “But that’s what Peter said,” but the words fluttered around my hairline like a Hollywood cartoon.

“That was a big blood clot if she was dead when it happened, Steve,” I pointed out, quite the objective debater.

“Now the blood clot is very interesting. We know that she had a tendency to bleed, and I understand from the police that she was known to have given herself a bang on the head about three days before she died. Apparently she dropped some change in a shop and when she straightened up, she hit the underside of a table.”

“But that was fresh clot.”

“Not all of it. Under the microscope there’s been quite a bit of organisation in the deeper parts. Three days old would be about right.”

Shit, shit, shit.

“So I reckon,” he blathered on, “That she started the bleed about three days before, and that there was only a small amount of post mortem haemorrhage, but enough to give it the macroscopic impression of being fresh.”

Shit, shit, shit.

“But the fall didn’t kill her.”

“I can’t really see that it did. There were bruises, of course, but you’d expect that in an elderly woman, especially one with ITP. There were certainly no features that suggested her son might have done away with her.”

I was feeling so embarrassed by this time that I felt as if my buttocks had rolled right up my anus.

“What about the ischaemic heart disease?” I enquired. I knew that he was going to say that Peter had been entirely right all along.

But this time, I was surprised.

“Not really, Phil. That’s the really odd thing. Maximally fifty percent stenosis and no real fibrosis of the heart muscle. I can’t, in all honesty, put that down as the cause of her death.”

I had come fully round to my starting place. Now I wanted to giggle. Now I wanted to laugh so much that I would wet my underwear. Was it really what I thought it was? Was it possible that the universe could be so perverse?

“Tell me, Steve,” I said, trying to sound academic and dry but feeling positively exuberant, “Are you saying that you can’t find a reason why she should have died?”

Good old Steve. He said in the words of the innocent, “At the moment, no, I can’t.”

When I put the telephone down, I felt winded, I felt afraid, I felt thrilled and I felt damned.

I was actually shaking. I felt charged with an emulsion of conflict and emotion. For a few minutes I had to sit back and try to think.

Clearly Peter would have to be told, but told what exactly? That he had been correct in assuming that her injuries were the result of her death and not the cause of it? That he had been wrong in assuming that she had died of coronary artery disease? That it was just possible that she was the victim of a mass murderer?

As yet, neither Peter nor I was out of trouble.

I rang the police station and asked to speak to Inspector De Morgan. She was out, expected back shortly. Frustrated I decided that I owed it to Peter to at least tell him that he had been partly vindicated, but there, too, was no joy. The telephone rang and rang but nobody answered.

I looked at the piles of Peter’s work and at least had the consolation of knowing that I wouldn’t have to do any more reviewing of his work.

Until Sonya called back, there were other people to inform. I found Charlie coming back from an inquest. She looked miserable enough to sour milk and kept her eyes down. She took the news with an odd reaction, partly relief, partly surprise, but mostly uninterest. I didn’t bother conveying my suspicion that Sebastian was involved.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded but it was not a wholly convincing effort. She turned away but I caught her arm so that she had to look directly at me.

“What’s wrong?”

I think that she was about to deny everything, but then she looked around as if Secret Squirrel might be listening in.

“We’d better go to my room.”

And in her office she sat down heavily behind her desk and said with a sigh, “I’m pregnant.” There was a distinct moistness in her voice.

Since it seemed to be the thing to do, I sat down too, finding the chair more by memory and radar than any of the normal five senses. Suddenly I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m fucking sure!” she snapped. Fair enough, she was sure.

I let the atmosphere settle a bit before tentatively voicing the next question that seemed to require an answer.

“Who’s…?”

She laughed, although in truth it wasn’t the kind of sound that induced relaxation in the audience. More sort of high-pitched and bitter.

“Carl’s had the snip,” she explained.

I took in some and air and then let it out again, like breasting a hill. As I was thinking, Fucking hell, I was saying, “But how? I thought you were taking precautions.”

Obviously It wasn’t my day for saying the right things.

“Oh, yes!” she said, and her voice suggested a depth of contempt that I found frightening. “You were happy because I was taking precautions. How absolutely fucking typical!”

I thought that we had had a rational discussion and decided that it should be her responsibility, but clearly it was not the time to pursue the argument. Trying to squash the panic, anger and fear, I asked calmly, “Were you?”

She sat back suddenly in her chair looking at the ceiling.

“I was on the mini-pill. I had a deep vein thrombosis a few years ago, so the combined contraceptive was contra-indicated.”

And the mini-pill ain’t as good as the usual type.

I tried to concentrate on solving the problem rather than spreading blame like dog muck.

“How far advanced is it?”

“My period’s ten days late and the pregnancy test is positive.”

Too late for anything other than a formal abortion.

I knew better than to make assumptions.

“What will you do?”

She remained staring at the ceiling for a long time before answering in a small, tired voice, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Why did I feel embarrassment? I couldn’t decide, but felt it would be better to leave. I stood up but Charlie said, “Carl’s been a bit odd. We had a row last night.”

“You think he knows?” I couldn’t believe that.

She shrugged but said nothing.

I left her, feeling that suddenly there were so many problems, one of them was bound to get me in the end.

It took some little effort to concentrate on what to do next. Eventually I rang Arthur Lennert.

The ensuing dialogue was uncomfortable.

“He was right?” he asked, and I had never heard such a perfect expression of incredulity.

“Not entirely,” I pointed out.

“But it wasn’t a suspicious death.”

“No,” I said, an answer that depended on one’s point of view.

The sound of his respiration was loud in my ear.

“You do realise that there are all sorts of implications about this, don’t you? I mean, he might choose to take some form of action about this.”

“I hardly think so, Arthur. For a start off, Peter’s not that sort of person. And anyway, what’s been done? He wasn’t suspended, he went sick.

“Plus the fact that if he does start making a fuss, there’s always the question of his giving the cause of death as ischaemic heart disease, which the forensic pathologist disagrees with.”

“What does he think is the cause of death?”

Without hesitation, “He’s not sure at the present, but he’s definitely excluded heart disease.”

Arthur digested this in silence.

“Should we get him back to work?”

“We don’t have to do anything, Arthur,” I said, “He’s on sick leave.”

I ended the conversation feeling that no matter how hard I tried to dodge, there were small packets of brown stuff flying through the air, and some of them were congealing on me.

I tried Peter’s number again, but still nothing.

Then Sonya returned my call. I told her of the developments and told her of what I suspected. She didn’t exactly whoop in the American style, but she at least agreed to look for a connection between Sebastian and Jean Vinson.

It was then that I remembered I had planned to call on Martin Hailey. I got Jenny to find the number for Friedrichson-Waterhouse and, after navigating a computerised answering service that spent eight minutes (I counted them) giving me menu after menu, I finally managed to speak to a human being. The female voice knew of Martin Hailey and willingly went off to find him while I listened to Vivaldi’s Four-bloody-Seasons. When the receiver was picked up again, I thought I was back to the computer, for the voice was low and devoid of emotion.

“Yes?”

“Martin Hailey?”

“Yes?” It could have been a digital recording of the first, so similar was it.

“My name’s Phil Reed. I’m a consultant at the Royal. I wondered if you were free late this afternoon as I’d like to come and have a chat with you.”

“Why?”

Oh, great. This, the third monosyllable he had spewed forth, was said with exactly the same intonation, exactly the same disinterest. It struck me that I was dealing with a nerd.

“I want to talk to you about Sebastian Marjolin.”

“Sebastian? What about him?”

“You were his supervisor when he became ill, weren’t you?”

“That was a long time ago, Dr. Reed.”

Why did I get the impression he didn’t want to chat over old times?

“I know it was, but I think that it might be of value to go through what exactly happened when he first showed signs of his illness.”

Before he could ask, “Why?” in that same bloody way, I went on, “I talked with his mother, and she suggested that you might be able to help.”

At least that made him pause before saying, “I don’t really see what help I can be.”

This wasn’t going according the master plan. Feeling slightly panicked that he was going to terminate the conversation in fairly short order, I strained the neuronal network for something that would at least get me ten minutes with the bugger.

“You see,” I started and, even if I say so myself, there was barely time for a fly to fart before I carried on, “I’m doing a Ph.D. thesis on schizophrenic triggers. I’m sure you’re probably aware that there is normally some specific event that triggers the onset of the disease, and I’m researching these. You can see, I’m sure, how valuable it would be to talk to you, since he was working with you when his schizophrenia struck.”

Bloody hell, I thought. Nobody could possibly say that I hadn’t given the ball a hefty stroke. If it didn’t cross the boundary, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

For the first time there was a human reaction, in that he hesitated. Then, somewhat slowly, he said, “Would five o’clock be all right?”

Grateful for anything and feeling that at last something had gone my way, I said, “Fine.”

I think I deserved a rest after that, something of a respite from the endless battles that fate thought I should fight, but it was not to be. Barely an hour had passed before I was informed by pathology reception that my visitor had arrived. Life had been hectic of late and it was therefore with some consternation but no real surprise that I found myself unable to remember any appointment: even the fact that there was no record in my diary did not cause me much concern, since I assumed that I had merely forgotten to record it.

I hurried down to the front of the pathology building, assuming that it was either some rep from a medical equipment firm or possibly somebody from the Health Authority.

“Phil!”

The reception area of pathology had a small waiting area where up to ten people could sit and wait, usually for a small clinic that was run by the haematologists. It conformed with NHS regulations in that it had uncomfortable plastic-backed seats, a cheap, threadbare carpet that was covered in the most intriguing stains, and a dying rubber plant. Seven people were sitting there, one of whom was Sebastian.

He stood up at once. Everyone was looking at us, even the two reception staff. Sebastian’s call had been loud and effusive, as if we were father and son greeting each other after a prolonged separation.

“You! What the hell are you doing here?”

Our audience could not but be intrigued by the tone or the lexicon.

Sebastian made a mock check, as if startled by this response. There was a pause during which our public’s attention increased, if anything. It was as if they had reached a crucial point in the plot and dramatic tension was pulling them in. Then from Sebastian, “Phil, what’s wrong? Aren’t you going to ask me up to your office?”

The enquiry was couched in expectant tones, but the look in his eye was unmistakable. There was a glint of cocksure triumph.

I dare you to make a scene.

Something clicked.

I moved forward, feeling that I had little to lose by throwing the runt out.

At once he said, “I’ve got that urgent sample you wanted.”

Again the voice was slightly louder than it need to be, its amplitude enough to carry to all those assembled. I stopped.

He held out a package. It was covered in bright stickers that proclaimed Pathological Specimen – Handle with Care.

What was this? When I looked up from the box and into his face, I saw guile.

“You know the one,” he said, “The amputation specimen.”

He pushed it towards me and I took it reluctantly, still not sure what was going on. When next I looked at him, the expression I saw was full of devilish fun. It was when he winked very slowly and very knowingly, that I began to feel afraid.

“Bye!”

With this syllable, almost shouted and proclaimed in a bright, breezy way so that everyone who looked on thought must have thought that here was one of life’s sunbeams, he walked quickly out of pathology reception.

I looked at the package, aware that now Sebastian had departed, I was the lone performer; aware too that whatever was in it was unlikely to delight me. I didn’t like what he had said, or the way that he had said it.

Amputation specimen?

Surely not…

Ever since Kate had left the clinic with Sebastian there had been at the back of my head nagging thoughts about her safety. He had threatened violence if she should attempt to leave him, but did that mean she was safe as long as she stayed with him? If his delusions should demand that she pay a price, then no force on earth would dissuade him otherwise.

And now there was this…

I left the reception staring at the package, thinking back to the other packages that Sebastian had so thoughtfully left for me in the past. Would this one prove as grisly?

Back in my office I opened it gently, a million possibilities clamouring to be heard amongst which was the not inconceivable option that he had devised a small explosive device.

A grey cardboard box lay inside.

I prized the lid off very, very slowly. My mind kept telling me that I was being stupid, that I could have yanked the lid off as quickly as a child at Christmas and it would have made no difference: a bomb was a bomb.

Nestled in cotton wool were two things. Kate’s wedding ring, gold and battered and so familiar, and a tube of blood.

The blood was human.

“Are you sure?”

The haematology technician, who spent several thousand hours a year looking at blood films, was slightly miffed but assured me that it was.

“Where did it come from?”

“I found it in the pocket of a corpse.”

Even as I said it, the full ironic horror of the remark made my stomach gloop round in a sort of emetic heave.

She made a face.

“On a corpse? But where…”

“That’s what I need to find out.”

“Do you know what blood group your corpse was? We could type this and the corpse and compare the two.”

Somehow, amidst the fear and the dread, I managed to dredge up from memory Kate’s blood group.

“A-plus”

She frowned.

“But how do you know that?”

I smiled reassuringly.

“He had had several major operations here over the years,” I lied. “I looked up his medical records.”

It took an hour of anxious waiting around the haematology laboratory before the result came through. The blood was O-plus: it was not Kate’s.

Back in the office, I tried to make sense of all this. The ring could have been sent by Kate as a sign that our marriage was over, but the blood? This vial of blood had to be Sebastian’s work but its significance was clouded. Surely Kate could not have known about it? Presumably he had slipped it into the package when she was not there, but what did he mean by it? Was it a threat? If so, to whom – Kate or me?

And where had he got it from? Had he opened one of his own veins? That seemed unlikely, and thus the only other possibility was that there were yet more corpses littered around Sebastian.

I thought about ringing Sonya, but felt it could wait until I saw her next. I couldn’t see the entire constabulary swinging into action because of one tube of blood.

I passed the rest of the day trying to contact Peter Weiss with no success. Just before four I had had enough. I would call on him after I had been to Friedrichson-Waterhouse. I cleared it with Charlie, who was understandably distracted. I left the hospital feeling that in terms of career advancement, the day had not been of the best.

15.

‘Twas only fear first in the world made gods.

Tell the truth, I could have down without sitting in Dr. Martin Hailey’s office. I had seriously contemplated forgetting this little trip: the alternative of diving into something that was forty proof and head-spinningly relaxing was coaxingly attractive. Kate had gone, Charlie was suddenly no longer quite the compensation she had once been, and I had a job that seemed to be exploding into faecal shrapnel around me.

So there I was, in an office overflowing with journals, books, papers, acetates, carousels of projection slides and curious articles of African craftsmanship, looking around at the diplomas and awards that he had framed and hung on the walls. I didn’t check them all, and so it would be wrong of me to say that he had his ten metres’ swimming certificate up there, but I stopped counting after seventeen. Either this guy was such a total anal retentive that he hadn’t had a good dump for a decade, or he was centimetres away from a Nobel Prize.

When he finally came in, I knew at once my answer.

He didn’t smile and he had enough facial hair to stuff a bolster. It ringed his face like a mass of grey-black wire wool. These features were gilded by the white coat that he wore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a doctor and I’ve worn a few white coats in my time, but there are ways of wearing them and there are ways of looking a tit in them, and Dr. Martin Hailey, with his coat buttoned to the neck and his breast pocket sporting six, count them, six pens, had chosen the avian approach.

He eyed me suspiciously as if I might be about to laugh at him, which hinted at least that he possessed some insight.

“Dr. Reed?”

He proffered a hand that I noticed was severely eczematous.

“I’m sorry to bother you.”

Magnanimously he shook his head.

“You said you were a psychiatrist.”

Did I?

“I’m interested in Sebastian’s time with you,” I explained, carefully not even nodding at his assertion.

I was sitting in front of a desk in a moulded plastic chair that had been craftily built for aliens with only one buttock. My host moved behind the desk to a chair that I noticed was padded and could tilt and swivel. On the desk there was a bicycle helmet on a pile of paperwork: next to this was an oriental tea set.

“What do you want to know?”

“Do you have clear memories of Sebastian?”

“Oh, yes. He was an excellent student. Careful, conscientious quite, quite dedicated. He was a model. It is a pity that his peers and successors do not have such a degree of assiduousness.”

The irony that he was now barking mad did not seem to impinge on Dr. Hailey’s tinted recollections.

“What was his research project on?”

Dr. Hailey hesitated as if unsure that I had the intellectual goods to comprehend what he was about to say.

“My work is concerned with pharmaceutical delivery systems,” he ventured warily. When my brains showed no signs of exploding out of my ears on hearing this, he continued, “It is all very well to develop a compound that has a useful pharmacological property if, for instance, it is not well absorbed into the bloodstream or if, once there, it is rapidly metabolised by the liver, kidneys or other organs. However, should one alter the molecular structure of a drug in order to increase absorption or decrease metabolism, that is frequently deleterious with regard to its useful properties.”

A snatched glance at me to ensure that I had not expired with the weight of this, and he went on, “It is the work of my department to attempt to circumvent these trade-offs by developing generic modifications that can be applied to any drug.”

“And Sebastian?”

“His project was on the utilisation of glucose transport mechanisms as a means to facilitating drug absorption.”

I thought I understood and in any case I wasn’t going to let him know any different.

“Was there much practical work in all this? I mean, was it all computer modelling or did Sebastian get his hands dirty?”

He frowned but not, I think, because he thought the question odd, merely ill informed.

“Good grief! The amount of practical work is immense. This kind of thing entails huge numbers of man-hours just performing the necessary chemical manipulations, let alone the animal testing that must then be undertaken.”

Before I could stop it my mouth was asking, “Was there a lot of work with rabbits?”

Even Dr. Hailey could not fail to be taken aback by that one.

“I beg your pardon?”

I shook my head and smiled.

“I’m sorry. It’s just that Sebastian has had a bit of a thing about rabbits. It’s not really relevant.

“Um, can you recall when you first noticed something amiss with Sebastian?”

He paused to think. I had the feeling that he really was trying to work out the first time that he thought Sebastian’s behaviour odd, and I had to admire him for that.

“Well, I suppose it was in the May of that year. We were just starting to think about his MPhil examination.”

“What did you notice?”

“He became distracted. That was the most obvious thing. He had always been rather introspective and quiet, but this was of an order of magnitude more intense. He would sit at his desk and stare for long periods. On one or two occasions, he was heard to be mumbling to himself.”

“What about?”

He shrugged. “Nobody ever heard.”

“But his father had just died, hadn’t he? I mean, you might expect him to be introverted and depressed following that.”

Dr. Hailey, I could plainly see, had many faults that would have driven me to hammer him to death were we to be marooned on a desert island, but uncertainty was not one of them.

“Oh no. This was before the tragic death of Professor Marjolin. Some two or three months before.”

Bingo! I was deprived of the opportunity to dance a little jig, but then I had other things to think about.

“Professor Marjolin?”

“His father.”

Nobody had actually told me before that his father was a professor.

“What was he a professor of?”

“He was head of the Cancer Therapeutics section.”

Why did that bother me?

“So you would say that it was not the death of his father that precipitated his illness?”

“Well, you would know better than me what part that event might have played, but I can be sure that Sebastian was showing signs of oddity well before the illness was actually diagnosed.”

“What about the day that his father died? Can you remember much about that?”

“I am hardly likely to forget it, Dr. Reed. It was a Thursday, the day on which during term time that we have a lunchtime seminar. The speaker was not very good, I recall, and it was only a short presentation. Many of us retired to the coffee lounge since there was still twenty minutes or so before two o’clock.

“Professor Marjolin collapsed in full view of everyone at about five minutes to two.”

“Where was Sebastian when that happened? Was he in the room?”

Hailey’s frown was one of concentration.

“No,” he decided. “He had been in the coffee lounge only briefly. He had left after about five minutes.”

“Was he with his father?”

For the first time, it struck Hailey that the questions were odd.

“Why?”

Quick.

“Because he blamed himself for his father’s death. If he had been with him just before it happened, but not actually when it happened,” I paused, “Well…”

He frowned and nodded.

“Yes, he was, as a matter of fact. I think they had a brief chat before Sebastian left.”

I could feel significance in this, but what it meant, I could not fathom.

“Do you think that the death affected him deeply? Is that when the real deterioration set in, do you think?”

It took Hailey a moment or two, but when it came it was worth waiting for.

“Actually, that was very peculiar, now that I think about it. It didn’t obviously change Sebastian at all. He was no worse or better after his father’s death than before. He seemed immune to it.”

“He went away on holiday, didn’t he? With his girlfriend?”

There was a knock on the door and immediately it opened to admit his secretary.

“Dr. Hailey? I’m just off, if that’s all right.”

He considered this with brows that could only be described as knitted.

“Yes, I suppose so,” he allowed grudgingly.

She was advancing on sixty with a resignation that was palpable. Her hair was grey in a sort of lacklustre way and she seemed almost wearied with age. It would have required a good many opiates to imagine that they were having a torrid and exhausting love affair: once again Dr. Hailey failed to escape his own image.

Alone again, we returned to Sebastian.

“Nobody could believe it when we heard what had happened on the holiday.”

“And Sebastian?” I asked eagerly. “How did he seem?”

“If anything, I would say that he became more withdrawn. Certainly he threw himself into work. He seemed to spend most of his time here. On one occasion, they found him asleep in the coffee lounge when the cleaners came in at seven o’clock in the morning.”

“So even then he didn’t seem to be obviously schizophrenic?”

“Well, I’m not an expert,” he began in a self-deprecating manner that implied that this was a small lacuna in a whole vista of expertise, “But in comparison with what I am told happened to him later, I would say he was still relatively able to function. Not absolutely normal, of course, but certainly not sick.”

Thus reassured, we continued.

“Presumably he really broke down when Eve, his sister died?”

Dr. Hailey sucked his lips together as if I had asked a question on the finer points of generic modifications to drug delivery systems. He even unbuttoned the neck of his white coat as if pressure were building up in there.

“We didn’t really see much of that,” he admitted. “It happened at home, I understand.”

“Where was he when he heard about Eve? Was he here?”

Another consideration.

“Yes, he was, I think. I certainly remember a bit of commotion.” Another pause, and then, “Yes, he was definitely here.”

“Can you remember at what time? Approximately, I mean.”

If he thought this an odd query, he said nothing.

“I’m fairly certain it was late in the morning. Sebastian had spent most of the day in the library, because that was where they found him. The librarian had to tell him that there was something up at home, I believe.”

It proved to be fairly difficult to part with Dr. Hailey. He had clearly decided that he enjoyed remembrances of things past and, inconceivably, seemed to have taken a liking to me. I could only leave with extended explanations of my theories on the trigger points for acute schizophrenic breakdowns and promises that I would keep him informed of my researches.

I drove back away happy that I had been given a lot of useful information, desolate that it was shouting me things that I could not understand.

Peter lived in a part of the city that I didn’t know very well. I drove down a few wrong turnings before I found the road. It was full of big houses, clearly the haunt of middle management and above, no doubt cross-pollinating with a few solicitors, accountants and, of course, a pathologist.

The number of his house was forty-two and I had no trouble in identifying it because there was a police car outside. What with that and the ambulance, I began to feel the first pangs of anxiety as I parked some fifty metres away.

It was as I parking the car on the opposite side of the road that the anonymous white van drew up next to the police car. Only the small words ‘Private Ambulance’ printed on the sides and rear doors distinguished it from the kind of van that builders, plumbers and electricians use. It was as though members of a cast were arriving, each with a part to play, each contributing to a drama.

I actually prayed then. For perhaps the first time in ten, maybe fifteen years, I addressed a Supreme Being in a miserable attempt to achieve something. I’m not sure what, though. Maybe it was to ask merely to be wrong about what I suspected, or maybe it was to beg for supernatural intervention and change what I feared had happened.

But I think it likeliest that I was asking for forgiveness.

I got out of the car and made my way across the road to the house.

It was large and probably built just after the Second World War. It had an attached double garage and what estate agents refer to as ‘mature gardens.’ The drive was quite short and fairly ropy, with weed patches and shallow potholes. One of the garages was closed but the other was slightly open, its metal up-and-over door at a slight backward incline. There was a light inside and you could see shadows reflecting off shiny concrete as somebody moved across the bar of light beneath the door.

Two gentlemen in sombre clothes had climbed out of the white van and they now came up behind me carrying a collapsed stretcher. They glanced briefly at me and I thought that I recognised one of them: probably when they had come to the mortuary to pick up or collect a body. It began suddenly to rain and within an astonishingly short time it was heavy enough to have soaked through my jacket. I looked around at the houses and saw an old man staring out at the scene, his face clearly one of avid curiosity. He had the net curtain lifted with one hand while in the other was a mug from which he took occasional distracted sips.

The garage door was lifted up to admit the stretcher and its corsage.

I didn’t see much, but I saw enough.

There was a shape on the floor, incongruously covered with a bright, multi-coloured blanket. There was no car in the garage but I just managed to make out of rope hanging from an overhead rafter.

I turned away.

I was muttering again, but my prayers had turned to profanity.

Charlie’s voice as she answered was curiously quavering. When I told her who it was, she nearly shrieked into the mouthpiece.

“Phil! For God’s sake, what are you doing?”

“I had to call you, Charlie…”

There was near panic in her voice as she interrupted, “Are you mad? I thought I told you that we had to cool things off. Carl’s behaving very oddly. He suspects something, I’m sure of it.”

It would be a lie to say that I could imagine nothing more unwelcome than the news that Carl might suspect his beloved and I had conjoined in intimate bliss - I think that being told that I would have to spend the rest of my days pleasuring a homosexual gorilla would have edged it - but there was undoubtedly a menacing aspect to it all.

“How?”

“I don’t know, but he’s so peculiar at the moment. He’s hardly spoken to me for the last few days, and now he’s positively hostile. He didn’t come to bed until after two last night, and then he was drunk.”

It certainly didn’t sound like Carl. I had never seen him drunk and somehow I had assumed that he never could be. It was a bit like the Queen picking her nose.

“I’m sure that there’s nothing to worry about, Charlie,” I lied. “Perhaps there’s just a problem at work.”

“It’s more than that. I know it is.”

I hardly dared pose the next question.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do about…?”

“No.”

She used the word as if it were a sharp blade.

“I think we may have another problem. I think that Peter’s dead.”

Even though she said nothing I could sense that the news hit her so hard that she didn’t know what to think for a few moments.

“Dead?”

“I think he hanged himself this afternoon.”

Another long pause before, “Oh, my God.”

She was crying already and that only made me suddenly feel completely responsible for this death. Ever since I had left Peter’s house with its retinue of policemen, paramedics and undertakers, with its crowd of death-seeking ghouls, with its star turn a shape under a multicoloured car blanket, I had been trying to tell myself that I was implicated but not directly responsible for Peter’s death. Now Charlie told me that I had been lying.

Even if Sebastian had somehow worked his arcane magic again, there could be no doubt that it was my interference that had led to this climax. I could claim that I had not known that Peter was under personal stress because of a similar incident in the past, I could claim that I did what I did because of clinical governance, I could even claim that no specific allegations had been made and that Peter had chosen to go sick rather than remain at work.

I could claim all of these and they would only be mitigating, not exonerating.

I had killed him and I would have to learn to deal with that.

I mumbled something about having to go, and put the telephone down. I suddenly felt the full burden of guilt in my soul, suddenly wished that I was a million years away in another life.

The telephone began to ring.

“Phil!”

Sebastian’s voice, cheery and somehow imbuing a single syllable with as much superciliousness as a rich man’s friendship, was not what I wanted to hear.

“What do you want?”

“Aren’t you pleased to hear from me? Don’t you want to know about Kate? Make sure that she’s all right?”

Hercules could have done no better in the strength that it took to restrain my anger.

“How is she?”

“She’s fine, just fine. Although,” he dropped his voice into commiseration, “I’m not sure that she wants to speak to you.”

“How do I know, Sebastian? How do I know that she’s ‘fine?’”

He sighed. “You don’t.”

It was as simple as that. Yet I couldn’t, daren’t, push him. I had to trust that Sonya was right, that Sebastian had a game to play.

“What about the blood? Where did you get that from?”

He was delighted to be asked.

“Ohh, from a cow,” he lied. “I snuck into a field late at night and bled the stupid thing while it stood there. It was much fun.”

“It’s human.”

He found this even more amusing.

“You had it analysed?”

“Whose is it?”

He paused, then slyly, “It could be Kate’s.”

“It’s the wrong blood group.”

He laughed, almost a crow.

“Very good, Phil. Very, very good.”

“So whose is it?”

Another pause, then, “Find out.”

There seemed little point in continuing that particular conversational thread.

“What do you want, Sebastian?”

“I just wondered how you were doing. Whether you’re playing the game properly.”

“But you won, Sebastian. You took Kate from me.”

He laughed. The tone was high-pitched so that it was almost a cackle.

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”

“So there’s no need to continue with the game anymore.”

He drew in his breath sharply. Suddenly he began to mumble, as if he were talking to someone else and I wondered if Kate were with him. After a minute or so of this, he suddenly said quite loudly, “No!”

It wasn’t Kate who was with him. All the daemons of hell perhaps, but no one human.

Then, abruptly, he came back to me.

“Sorry about that, Phil. There are people around who just want you dead, you see. They don’t enjoy the sport like I do.”

“I don’t get it, Sebastian. What is there to play for now?”

He made a sound of great revelation.

“You, know, you’re right. We need another prize, don’t we?”

Most of the things I needed at that moment involved alcohol but rather than dismiss this suggestion I thought it best to try to massage his madness.

“Another prize?”

“Yes, you know. I’ve won Kate, so we need something else to play for. Make the game worth winning. Make it worth playing. Because I get the impression you don’t really want to play this game.”

He gave the impression that it had required great intellect to work that one out. I was too honest to protest very vigorously.

“What did you have in mind?”

I asked this with some trepidation but, in the end, with not nearly enough.

“Well, it’s got to be worth something, hasn’t it?” he said, “Valuable to both of us.” He became quiet as if thinking deeply.

In the space, I tried to deflect him. I think it was almost certainly a stupid thing to have tried.

“There is no need to play the game anymore, Sebastian. You have won. As you said, Death always wins.”

He came back at once, full of suspicion.

“Don’t you want to defeat me? Don’t you desire in every part of your being to defeat Death?”

“But you’re not death,” I said, and at once regretted it.

He reacted badly to this.

“Oh, yes I am, Phil! Oh, yes, I am.” His voice became strained, full of fury. “How many more would you like me to kill before you’ll accept that? There are plenty to choose from, you know. There’s a whole world of people out there, all of them waiting to die.”

And then, he started again to mumble. I tried to hear what he was saying but there was little sense in the small amount that I heard. Mostly profanity and isolated syllables.

Then he was back.

“Play the game, Reed. Play it or take the consequences. I am death and death takes life. If you don’t try to defeat me, then I will kill and kill again. I will kill until there is no more killing to be done. I will kill every living thing that there is. I will kill in ones, then in twos, then fours. I will kill in thousands – I can, you know. Everywhere I go there will be death, for I am Death.

“Remember that, Phil.”

Suddenly he shouted, “I AM DEATH!”

And then he uttered a single short, “Ha!” before asking in a gentle tone, “Are you playing, Phil?”

I swallowed something inedible and sharp-cornered.

“I’m playing.”

“So what have you done? Please tell me, do.”

Was this wise? Should I tell him the truth, or should I try to fabricate something? Supposing he decided to do something against the people with whom I had spoken.

“I’ve been to see your mother.”

“Really? And how is she? How is mater? You know, she’s been a bit naughty, Phil. She hasn’t been to visit me recently. Perhaps I should go and see her.”

Oh, no. Please, no.

I swallowed something that I couldn’t recall eating: it felt like a cut-throat razor. What to say?

“I’m sure she’d be delighted to see you, Sebastian.”

“Do you think so? Mmm…” he paused. Did he know what he was saying, know what effect he was having, or was this genuine? After an age that could have seen the rise of a great civilisation, he continued, “Maybe not. I know that all this has been a great shock for her, but I don’t think she deserves a visit, just yet.”

As much to divert him as in expectation of useful information, I asked, “Did you visit Mrs. Vinson?”

The laugh told me as much as the words.

“Ah, yes! I was wondering when you would get round to Mrs. Vinson. That’s very good, Phil. Now you really are playing the game.”

“Why, Sebastian? Why did you visit her?”

Another laugh. “Why not?”

He put the receiver down and left me wanting to scream into the darkness of the house.

And then the telephone rang again.

Sebastian’s voice said, “About that prize.”

I knew that I wasn’t going to like this.

“Yes?”

He waited, then said, “We’ll play for Kate again.”

It was a different voice, full of portent. I didn’t know what he meant, and didn’t dare to hope that he meant anything good, but I’m sane so I didn’t fully appreciate how deep and dark madness can be.

“But you’ve got her. She’s yours.”

“Tut, tut, Phil. One mustn’t talk of the ladies as possessions.”

Be patient.

“She’s chosen you, Sebastian.”

He laughed, delighted at my misunderstanding.

“That’s not quite what I meant, Phil. I meant, let’s play for Kate’s life.”

My mouth was suddenly dry. I clenched the telephone receiver so that pale patterns of white flesh appeared on my knuckles.

“No, Sebastian…”

“Oh, yes, Phil. Now, we play for Kate. If you win, she lives; if I win, she dies.”

He cut the connection.

I needed a drink before I did anything else. The burning sensation in my throat and gullet were good and I could have continued topping it up for a good while longer, but I had a call to make of my own.

16.

If the triangles were to make a God they would give him three sides.

It took fifteen minutes to get in contact with Sonya. It was as if there were a conspiracy at the police station to ensure that I did not talk with her. Either she had just been in the room, or she had not been seen for an hour, or the speaker was not even aware that she was on duty that night. When I did manage to track her down, her voice was full of irritation and tiredness, two qualities not noticeably dissipated when she heard who it was.

“What’s wrong?”

She asked it as people ask it when they fear they will not like the answer

“I’m sorry to bother you, Sonya. I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

“That’s okay.” Although her tone told me otherwise. “What can I do for you?”

“Sebastian called me. He wants to continue with his game.”

Perhaps she other things to worry about. Whatever the reason, she didn’t sound too concerned as she said, “Oh, really?”

“He’s threatened Kate again. This time he says that he’ll kill her if he wins the game.”

It made her stop and think, at least.

“He made a specific threat against her?”

“That’s right.”

She let out a long, exhausted sigh.

“Okay. I’ll step up the search for him. I’ll try to assign some more men to the enquiry, but you’ve got to understand, Phil, that things are chaos around here. We’re completely overwhelmed at the moment, and most of my colleagues are not going to see the urgency of this.”

Worried sick as I was, I couldn’t see what her problem was.

“But he’s threatened her, Sonya. And he will do it. He’s deteriorating, and that can only be bad for Kate.”

Her voice was exasperated and sharp. “I’ll do what I can.”

When I didn’t reply, she waited and then relented.

“I’ll ring you tomorrow. Let you know how things are going.”

When she had gone, I dived in the whisky bottle and tried to tell myself that there is such a thing as natural justice.

The last person I wanted to see as I arrived at the hospital the next morning was Carl. Although it was entirely possible that Charlie was being paranoid about him, it was equally possible that she was one hundred percent right.

Actually I didn’t see him – he saw me. And having seen me as I got out of the car, he wasted no time in attracting my attention. Indeed he attracted the attention of the rest of the hospital as well. Two nurses and an elderly couple were intrigued enough by the impact to turn and stare.

“Hey!”

The tone was not matey. In fact the general drift was that of a man who had something on his mind and who didn’t much like it. A man, in fact, who disliked it about as much as he would have disliked a tense and angry boil right on the end of his willy.

I paused and turned, rather as I might have paused and turned had I been hailed by a drunken man with a submachine gun. It has now to be admitted that there was trepidation in my sinews as I waited for Carl to approach me.

It was all too obvious that this was going to be an unpleasant discussion.

“I want a word with you.”

Was he drunk? It was difficult to tell. He was dishevelled, and his eyes were slightly unfocussed, but all of that could be put down to emotion, and of that there was plainly a good deal.

“Morning, Carl.”

It was worth a try: words are cheap.

“Don’t give me that crap,” he said and then, just in case I was under the mistaken impression that he was pleased to see me, he added, “You ssshhhit!”

He managed to make it last an impressively long time. He was standing no more than half a metre away from me now and leaning forward. Short of having a sign on his forehead that read, ‘I am being aggressive,’ he could not have made his attitude and intentions plainer.

I looked around. He was very loud and the total audience had now been swelled by two more patients, a porter and a junior hospital doctor.

“I can see that you’re a bit upset, Carl, but is this really the time and place?”

“Have you been screwing around with Charlie? Have you? Have you?”

Having opened my mouth to deny it, I felt it important to carry on, but I had a horrible feeling it was to be to no avail.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Carl.”

“You bastard! You lying bastard!”

He gave me a prod on the chest with a hard forefinger. His face was screwed up into a fleshy crumple and I could smell stale breath. He had a slight tick that made his right eyelid flicker slightly.

“I don’t know who’s been talking to you, Carl…”

Oh, but I could guess.

“…But it’s a pack of lies.”

He pushed me again, this time a hard shove that caused me to fall against the front wing of the rather nice Range Rover that belonged to some overpaid bugger in the finance department.

“Bloody liar! You’re a shit, Reed.”

“Honestly, Carl. I haven’t the foggiest…”

“She’s pregnant, you cunt!”

If he had hit me, it wouldn’t have been more shocking. She had told him.

He suddenly fished in his pocket. It was possible he planned to produce something with a flourish, to wave it in front of my mouth and beneath my nostrils in a triumphant manner, but the effect was spoiled by his choice of the wrong pocket. By the time he had found his prize, the moment had gone. Still, it had the effect of heightening the tension for the assembled throng that stood fifty metres or so away and that now grown to about twelve.

What he presented to me was a photograph. The Lord only knows how it had been taken, for it was through my bedroom window. Unfortunately, it had never seemed worth netting the upstairs windows since the house was not overlooked but this, I could now see, had been an error. Through the leaded frames, Charlie’s golden tresses were clearly visible, as were her pneumatic breasts, to one of which it was easy to see my profile was closely applied.

“Well?”

I looked up into his eyes. Suddenly I could see that he wasn’t really angry. He was bitterly disappointed, bewildered, perhaps even incredulous, but not really angry.

Above all else, he was desperately sad.

I had destroyed his world.

What to say? What could I say that it would not make it ten, a hundred, a million times worse? Like death, this was an experience that could not be reversed, could not be mended, only forgiven, and that only with time and only with something that approached godhead.

I didn’t feel that my voice was going to work as I tried to speak. Obligingly it did.

“I’m sorry.”

He was crying when I left him alone in the car park. Thankfully the crowd had mostly had their sport and dispersed.

I kept telling myself that things weren’t going to get any worse, but I didn’t believe that any more than God did. The car park was out of sight of the lab and so my recent exchange of views with Carl was not going to be a topic of conversation, although I had this terrible feeling that such a happy state would prove distinctly metastable.

Charlie’s door was shut.

Jenny pounced on me as I passed the general office.

“Tony’s been trying to get hold of you. He’s very excited.”

Presumably Peter’s body was down there and Tony had discovered it. That could wait.

“Is Charlie in?” I enquired of Jenny.

“’Bout fifteen minutes ago.”

Jenny had a sly voice accentuated by a broad accent. I couldn’t be certain of it, but I wondered if she knew or suspected something. I waited five minutes before knocking on the door.

“Come in.”

The voice was completely neutral; artificially so.

I opened the door. The expression that met me was one of shock, grief and anger.

“We need to talk.”

She shrugged. What did it matter to her if I chose to exist in a space near her or a billion miles away? I came and stood in front of her desk.

“You told Carl.”

I had tried not to sound too accusatory but even I could tell I had failed.

She just nodded, nothing more, and I got angry.

“What the fuck did you do that for? I’ve just spent ten minutes in the car park with him, providing free entertainment for every shitbrain in the vicinity.”

Stung by my tone she in turn flared up.

“How dare you? How dare you question me like that? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Our voices were becoming too loud but I was overtaking caring and well on the way to completely reckless.

“Don’t you think it would have been polite to have warned me that you had let him in on the secret? What are you? Brainless or just selfish?”

She said nothing for all of three seconds and I wondered if she was having some sort of apoplectic fit, but then, being quick, I twigged that she was crying. Not just crying but all-out sobbing.

I stood there and, not for the first time, realised that I was a totally pure, unreconstructed bastard.

“Oh, shit, Charlie,” I said quietly, not expecting this to provide much in the way of balm but just wanting to fill the gap between us. A small part of me wanted to go to her and hold her in comfort, but it was only a small part. If anyone came in and discovered us cuddling in the office…well, the repercussions made my toes curl into rounded knobs inside my size nine moccasins.

She just kept on crying. What could I do? I couldn’t go and get help and I couldn’t rush to her side, yet if I left her to it, it would seem callous. All I could think of was to make her talk her way through it. She was starting to sob and to make those sort of whooping noises that blubbering people do.

“How, Charlie? Why?”

For a long time I thought she hadn’t heard. It was between ‘whoops’ that she said, “First there was a letter. He showed it to me last night. That came on Monday morning. It was typed and said some nasty things about me: it didn’t name you, but it implied that I was sleeping around.”

The crying was receding as she talked. Her eyes were red, like an experimental rabbit’s, and she was sniffing all the time, but at least she was receding from the tears. I came over to the desk and pushed a box of tissues in her directions.

“And the photo?”

“That came yesterday. He didn’t open it until the evening, but when he did, everything blew up.”

“Was there any letter with it?”

She shook her head, a tissue stuck to her nose.

I waited for her to continue, wondering why Sebastian had done this.

“For about two hours, he was really sullen, withdrawn, as if he was pondering what to do. I kept asking him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t say.”

“That was when I rang? In the middle of that?”

“That’s right. You can see why I panicked when I heard your voice. I didn’t know for certain, but I could see that something was up.”

I suppose that it could be described as, ‘something being up,’ a bit like bilateral forequarter amputation could be described as, ‘minor surgery.’

“Then, quite suddenly, he just exploded. He slammed the photo down on the kitchen table and ranted and raved for what seemed like hours. He called me all sorts of names – horrible names – and he demanded to know how long it had been going on, where we had slept together, all sorts of things like that.”

“Did he hit you?”

“No. I think he came close a few times, but he never actually did anything like that.”

“And you told him? Everything?”

She looked at me then as if I had spoken in tongues.

“Once I had started, there didn’t seem much point in stopping,” she said simply.

Well, it was one option. Possibly not the one I’d have chosen, but certainly on the list.

The next question was tricksier. I felt we were getting to the nub of things.

“What happened then?”

She was crying again, which was something of a disappointment, but at least now she had the tissue box.

“He left me alone for a while. He went into the study, slamming the door. I heard him throwing things around, but I didn’t dare go in. Then, after about another half-hour, it went quiet. Sometime after that, he came back into the kitchen.

“He was quite calm. He said that he would spend the night in one of the other bedrooms and that he would then leave. I tried to explain, tried to apologise, but I don’t think he even heard me. This morning, we didn’t exchange a single word, although I tried again to say sorry. He threw some clothes in a hold-all, then left for work.”

I felt desperately sad for her, but that didn’t stop me from feeling slightly relieved that she had somewhere to sleep. There was another awkward pause.

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” I said softly.

Was that the wrong thing to say? Apparently so, for this quintet of syllables acted to transform her from wrecked to venomous with surprising efficacy.

“Sorry?” she hissed. “Sorry?”

Sensing that all was not right with the distaff side, I proceeded cautiously.

“Yes, of course.”

She just looked at me, but that doesn’t really convey the quality of that stare.

“You bastard.”

I could see where this was coming from. Now it was my fault, now I was the one to blame. Culpability is red-hot and hard to carry; best to pass it on as soon as possible.

“Now look here, Charlie…”

“I’m the one with the ruined marriage! Me! Not you. You’re all right, yours was finished before all this.”

I’d like to have seen the dictionary that took my particular situation as an illustrative example of being ‘all right,’ so I thought this rather unfair.

“It took both of us, Charlie. I didn’t have to use too much force to make you sit up straight and ride up and down.”

She opened her mouth while her tongue, apparently caught between phonemes, quivered in the orifice indecisively. If she chooses to start shouting now, I thought and was about to try to calm her down as best I could, but then she was weeping again, rapidly escalating to the full works, her head down on her arms. She only paused to instruct me to get out, although her vocabulary was more vitriolic than that, and then returned to her tears.

“About Peter,” I ventured as gently as I could.

To her credit, she looked up at once, her eyes suddenly filled with more than self-pity.

“Oh, God. I’d forgotten.”

“It’s going to be fairly shitty around here for the next few days. Can you cope?”

She took a less than ladylike sniff and sat up straight.

“Yes. Don’t worry.”

“I’m going to have to make some sort of announcement to the people in the lab.”

She nodded. She seemed to be missing something of the nuances of the situation. She had returned to a sort of discorporate, lost pose.

“Charlie?” I said.

She looked up.

“You do realise what may happen? This business with Peter, I mean.”

She frowned.

“We’ll be in the firing line for a lot of criticism. We have to be convinced that what we did was right.”

She nodded, but already there was more water on her cheeks, and they weren’t tears for poor, dead Peter.

I left the room, slipping through a half-open door and feeling like a sneak-thief.

There was respite in my room, but it was brief. The telephone started ringing within ten minutes as the repercussions of Peter’s death began to lap against my world. Firstly it was Tony again. His perturbation was matched only by his disappointment that I already knew, that he could not rock me with his news.

“What are you going to do?”

“Inform the coroner that we obviously can’t do the autopsy here and that we’ll have to ship the body to another hospital. The guys at the Infirmary usually oblige in cases like this. I’ll make arrangements with them if you can organise the undertakers.”

Then, while I was still trying to breathe easily and slowly but rapidly losing the battle, Arthur Lennert rang.

“I’ve just spent twenty minutes on the telephone to Mrs. Weiss,” he announced. He sounded as tired as me, but that rated zero in the sympathy stakes. “She’s threatening to sue the hospital.”

“I’m not surprised, Arthur. She had all the human warmth of Snow White’s stepmother when he was still alive, so now he’s dead I should imagine she’s been dipping apples into poison all night.”

“That’s not a very helpful attitude.”

This admonishment surprised me.

“You’re not worried, are you, Arthur? Not feeling guilty about what’s happened?”

“I don’t see that the Trust has anything to chastise itself about. Procedures were followed, giving the information on which we were acting.”

He didn’t actually say that in a nasty voice, and his words weren’t coated in sinister implication, but his tone just dropped slightly at the end, which just spoiled the matiness between us.

“Meaning?” I asked.

He sighed before answering.

“Well, if anyone is going to get shirty about what happened, it really all hinges on whether or not it was right to question his diagnostic acumen.”

Get the professional insurance paid up to date, Phil, old chap.

It was with a slightly chilly feel around the region of the small intestine and pancreas that I realised that once again I was back with Sebastian. If I could prove that he was killing people, then my actions were more easily defensible. Not that it could ever salve my conscience: even if I could prove beyond anyone’s doubt that Mrs. Vinson had been killed unlawfully, there would always remain the knowledge that Peter had been victimised by me because I was afraid of the consequences of giving him, a tiny piece of benefit of a tiny piece of doubt.

“Are you now saying that you disagree with the concept of Clinical Governance? That it is wrong to alert the Trust when one is worried about the competence of one’s colleagues?”

Very quickly, he was back with, “Oh no, Phil. That remains the principle. But we, the Trust, cannot take responsibility about the quality of information that is given to us concerning the competency of one of the medical staff. Of course, we realise that it is a fine and difficult judgement to make, but I think that it must be the responsibility of the complainant to ensure that he is making a valid criticism.”

In other words, I was the one solely responsible for what happened to Peter.

“The funeral is scheduled for three o’clock tomorrow afternoon, at the crematorium,” he went on.

“Tomorrow? That’s a bit quick, isn’t it?”

Arthur’s tone was the nearest that I had ever heard him come to sarcasm.

“If you don’t like it, you can always put your point of view to Mrs. Weiss.”

While I tried to find some oxygen, he went on, “I’ll be attending on behalf of the Trust, but I think it would be a good idea if you were to come as well. I think we owe that to Peter.”

Even as my mind was screaming alarums at me, I noted that now he was dead, Arthur was apparently on first name terms with the poor sod.

“Me? Are you sure about that, Arthur? His widow isn’t exactly going to take me to her bosom, you know.”

Arthur, now that he could see that this was merely a tragedy that would not implicate the Trust directly, could afford to be magnanimous.

“I think it would show that all of his colleagues valued him and recognise what a loss this is.”

“What if Mrs. Weiss doesn’t share your magnanimous world view, Arthur?”

He swept past without even noticing that one.

“I’m sure that it’s the right thing to do. I’ll meet you there at three.”

I put the telephone down; disappointed but not surprised, cursing and wanting to laugh out loud.

I made the announcement to the lab staff and received a mix of shock, sadness and silent accusation. They had learned enough of what had been going on with Peter to know that Charlie and I had been checking his work. There were one or two personalities in the lab who would naturally use all this as ammunition, but that would be nothing new. As I listened to their comments afterwards, I realised that this dreadful business at least had one minor advantage: here, clearly, was the reason that Dr. Volkmann was so upset. Providing no one got to hear about my encounter with Carl, there would be no speculation about the cause of Charlie’s distress.

I returned to my room with the post. It contained a report from the Toxicology lab to tell me what I already knew: the samples from Marcus Coombs had either proved too decayed for analysis, or the analysis was negative. Back to Sebastian again: everything seemed to lead back to him.

I spent the rest of the day sorting out the rippling waves of Peter’s death. I rang the Coroner and explained why the body would have to be moved, then I rang my colleagues at the Infirmary to tell them why they were being involved. Late in the afternoon, I received a telephone call from an extremely pleasant young man whom I knew by name only, Ben Plummer: he was the Risk Assessment Manager, the chap who got involved when complaints were made against the Trust. Clearly he had been chosen for his manner which was full of brightness and merriment as he told me that Mrs. Weiss had wasted no time in contacting a solicitor who had, in turn, wasted no time in informing the Trust of his lupine interest.

Mr. Plummer took my rather sour response to his news with great fortitude, saying only, “We’ll need some sort of report from you as soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

I wanted him as far away from me as possible, but he had one more gift to produce before leaving.

“There was some mention of a complaint being made to the General Medical Council.”

He rang off, the startlingly cheery tone that he had employed for this last little acid-bomb echoing around my emptied consciousness.

I looked around my office. I looked at the piles of slides to diagnose, the cervical smears to screen, the paperwork to get through, the list of meetings to attend that was scribbled on my white board, the letters to write and the External Quality Assurance test slides that I was obliged to look at and be assessed on.

I thought, Who the fuck cares?

Sonya rang that evening

“News?” I asked eagerly.

She hesitated. “Yes and no. You see...”

“Can we meet? Are you free for a drink?”

She seemed surprised at the offer.

“It’ll be an hour before I’m due off. If you don’t mind waiting, we could meet then. Where do you suggest?”

“I’ll drive to the station. Meet you there.”

I closed my eyes when she had rung off. The prospect of another evening, alone except for the memories of what had happened that day and the fear of what was going to happen in the next few days and weeks, had been almost too much to bear.

I drove to the station far too early and had to wait in the car, tense for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. I kept thinking about Kate, about what might be happening to her.

In the event, Sonya was just coming down the front steps as I came around the corner. She was looking around for me. When she saw me, she just stopped and waited: she didn’t smile and there was on her face a faintly curious expression. She took me to a pub that was about a hundred metres down the road, heading towards the river. She was clearly known in there, for the landlord nodded as she entered. I assumed that this was the local favoured by the constabulary and wondered whether she had brought me because this was home ground for her.

I bought the drinks and she had a large vodka and tonic, while I, mindful of the company, contented myself with a coke.

“What have you found out? Have you found Sebastian?”

She shook her head.

I had expected nothing more, but it was still disappointing.

“We’ve made discreet enquiries with his mother, who hasn’t heard from him: she had been informed that he had discharged himself from the clinic, but that was all. She seemed not to care much.

“We’ve checked his last known address, but he hasn’t been back there. His mother suggested a few names whom he might contact, but we’ve got nothing at all from that either.”

“So, what now?”

She considered. Her drink was almost gone: clearly life with the boys in blue required stamina in all its forms.

“Two things, I think. If we’ve lucked out with the places that he might take your wife, it would be logical to start checking the places that she might take him. For that, I’m obviously going to need your help.”

“And the second?”

“We wait for him to contact you. He might give you some idea, some sort of clue as to where he is.”

“Did he suggest where he was? No hints, nothing like that?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

She frowned then looked up at me.

“What about your wife? Is she all right?”

“So he says. He wouldn’t let me speak to her, though.”

Back to the frown.

“A phone tap might help, but I daren’t even ask for it. They’d never okay that, not on what we’ve got.”

“So what then?”

“Tell me where to look. What places might she have taken him to?”

That was hard. After ten minutes of stuttering thought, I had managed only five, and none of those seemed particularly probable.

I got up to get her another drink and she didn’t object. If it was affecting her, she hid it well. She was wearing black jeans and a thick, roll-neck sweater.

“There have been a couple of other things,” I said when I returned. It occurred to me for the first time that I was going to have confide in her certain facts that might prove slightly embarrassing. In my hesitation, she looked at me and I swear that she was drawing all sorts of conclusions.

“Yes?”

“Well...he appears to have come into possession of certain information concerning me and one of my colleagues - a female colleague - and he has told her husband. In fact...he had a photograph.”

She stared at me then. The most intense, disconcerting look that I think I have ever endured. Yet when she spoke, there was not a hint of judgement.

“You’re sure it was Sebastian?”

“Not exactly. It was all anonymous, but who else could it have been? Anyway he’d already told Kate about the two of us, so I know that he knew all about it.”

“Why? Why would he do this?”

I shrugged. “Because he’s trying to destroy me before I destroy him. It’s part of the game.”

“You said that there were a couple of things.”

“Mrs. Vinson. The pathologist who did the first post mortem has killed himself. There’s a stink because I questioned the original diagnosis, although now it appears that no unnatural cause can be found. That puts me right in the sights of anyone who cares to throw a few bullets.”

“So you’ve got even more reason to hope that Sebastian really did kill her?”

I tried to smile but my cheeks were having none of it.

“Something like that.” To cover my discomfort, I leaned forward and said, “Sebastian admitted to me that he had called on Mrs. Vinson. ‘Visited’ her was the way that he put it.”

“Did he? That’s very interesting, not least because we seem to have uncovered something with regard to Mrs. Vinson.”

“A connection? With Sebastian?”

“Indirectly. Sebastian didn’t appear to know the deceased, but he used to work with her son, David. He used to work at Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

I bloody well knew that was significant, even if there was still a thick, cloying fog around it all. But Sonya hadn’t finished yet.

“Also, it appears that Mrs. Vinson had a daughter, named Pauline. She died about two years ago...”

I couldn’t help it. Before I knew that I had said anything at all, much less a piece of fairly fruity profanity, I was saying, “Jesus-fucking-Christ!”

The look in Sonya’s eyes was completely neutral. Was there the merest whisper of a smile as she murmured, “I see you’re ahead of me”?

I took a long drink: even if it was only shandy and I felt as if I needed something with a proof percentage closer to one hundred, it would have to do.

“The question is,” she went on, “Does this help us? Is this significant, or is it a random act of killing?”

There was nothing objective about what I knew to be certain.

“It’s significant, Sonya. I can feel it.”

“Why?”

“Because he didn’t boast about this one. He didn’t tell me about it until I asked.”

She looked resolutely unconvinced.

“You don’t know that he makes a habit of telling you about all his acts of homicide,” she pointed out. “If you’re correct and he is a mass murderer, he might have killed tens or even hundreds of people that he hasn’t told you about.”

“But he boasts about his ability, don’t forget. It’s part of the game that he tells me what he’s done or what he’s going to do.”

She pursed her lips.

“Maybe,” she conceded.

The door opened and about six men came in. They were loud and raucous, but seemingly happy: they were so obviously off-duty policemen that there could have been a town crier going before them announcing the fact. One of them caught sight of Sonya and was about to come over and join us when she looked at him and shook her head. He stopped in mid-bellow and nodded back: we were forgotten.

“Is there any way that you can talk to the son?” I asked. “Because I think that Sebastian went there for a specific reason, more than just another unexplained death. I think he went there to see the son, not the mother.”

“I could do. But what do you want to know?”

“About his relationship with Sebastian. Also about what he did at Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

“Is that relevant?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “But this all started when Sebastian was working there. I just have a suspicion that however Sebastian does what he does, it’s connected with something about Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

“If you’re after technical stuff, I think you’d better be there as well.”

My first reaction was to kick that one away as fast as possible, but the sense of it was clear. Anyway, not only would it keep me from eating my liver in frustration, it would keep me in Sonya’s company.

“Okay. When?”

“Tomorrow,” she said simply. She finished her second drink and offered to buy the next round.

When she sat back down she asked, “Tell me, Phil. Do you love your wife?”

The tone was one of curiosity, the expression slightly puzzled.

“Of course.” I said it at once, like a spinal reflex that never reached any higher cerebral centres. It was a few milliseconds later that the pain of longing struck me.

“Of course,” I repeated, only now it was felt.

“I just wondered. You know, in view of what you’ve told me.”

I found myself protesting, but that, too, was a decerebrate response. By the time my cortex had got involved with things, my tongue didn’t know what was going on.

“I’ve always loved Kate,” I said at last, but that was not quite right. “I’ve always that that I loved Kate,” I corrected myself, “But I didn’t realise until a few days ago quite how much.”

I smiled. “That’s the funny thing. I love her more now probably than ever before. Ever since her illness, I had known that she’s had fairly negative feelings for me, but I didn’t appreciate how deep and intense they had grown. As far as she’s concerned, the love’s gone, but now I know that on my side it’s far from gone.”

I knew where we were going. Sit still and let it come, I told myself.

“How did it start? The illness, I mean.”

Back it came like a comet in the sky.

“How’s Kate? Is she coping all right?”

Stupid question. What did he expect me to say? ‘Oh, sure, she’s having a ball. All she ever wanted to do was have a dying baby.’

“She’s close to breaking, Guy. I don’t know how much more of this she can stand.” I laughed. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take, if it comes to that.”

Guy Hartnup was the consultant in charge of the neonatal intensive care unit. He conformed to the stereotype of consultant paediatric neonatologists, refusing to wear a white coat, stethoscope forever slung around his neck like a coronial decoration, and a sense of calm that few corpses ever match. Even if his gate was upright, his soul was perpetually horizontal, kept there by some form of incarnate spirit level.

“There really is little point in Kate being here so much, you know. It’s just exhausting for her, and it just increases the strain on both of you.”

“I know that, Guy, and so does she, but she can’t stop it. She’s completely obsessed with Alice.”

I was thinking of the occasions on which I had tried to dissuade her from spending another day and night by the incubator, how she had immediately ignited into abusive anger, accusing me for the thousandth time of not caring, not wanting Alice, not wanting her. The velocity of the transformation, from exhaustion to white-burning incandescence had been praeternatural.

Guy pursed his lips. He had dark eyes, as if blackened by smoke, and his hair was wiry, grey and viciously curled. The office lights seemed slightly yellowed, so that his skin seemed sallow.

“You know what the odds are, don’t you?”

“Tell me,” I said, although I had looked in at least eight paediatric textbooks, had seen the graphs that drew lines around my daughter’s chances of death.

“We would expect less than ten percent of babes like Alice to survive. The longer this goes on, the lower her chances become.”

“And would you like to me to tell Kate that?” I enquired. “Or is that a treat you’d rather keep for yourself?”

He grimaced.

“Whatever Kate may say, Phil, it’s a fact that won’t go away.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me about the brain damage? Don’t think I’ve missed that one, Guy. I’ve even made the mistake of trying to prepare Kate for it.”

For all the good it did. Another screaming row.

He shook his head slowly and softly from side to side.

“I think you should know that we’re starting to get some fairly horrible muck up from Alice’s lungs. We’ve put her on antibiotics, but I don’t know if they’ll do any good.”

“Kate was never going to cope with Alice’s death. We’d had a lot of trouble conceiving her and to be told that your baby, the thing that has run its thread through your life for years on end, that has replaced the normal sinews and cords that keep you sane, is gone, was a blow that she was never going to withstand.”

Sonya was just staring with large eyes. No other expression touched her face but there didn’t need to be.

“I have never wanted children,” she said simply.

I finished the insipid crap that I had been drinking and put down the glass.

“You’re cursed if you want them and cursed if you don’t: one of God’s little puns, I’m afraid.”

17.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

For men to take their exits.

At seven-thirty the next morning, Sonya picked me up from my house. It was cold and again I had not slept well. My eyes felt dragged down onto my cheeks, my skin felt cold and hard, and my mouth was under the impression that I had been eating rubber. She didn’t get out of the car, merely sounding the horn to tell me that she was there. She was alone.

“No colleague?”

“I’m not due on until nine. This is semi-official.”

She drove like police officers do; all eyes and muttered comments.

“Does he know we’re coming?”

She shook her head.

“When his mother died and it became clear that things weren’t what we had assumed, we brought him in for questioning. The obvious assumption then was that he had pushed her down the stairs in some sort of argument. He denied it, of course. After that, he vanished for a while. Presumably someone was putting him up, but we couldn’t find him.”

“But he’s back now?”

“He’s been seen.”

That didn’t seem much cause for optimism but I let it pass. Presumably she would not be wasting her time on this trip if she weren’t fairly sure that he would be at home.

“Why are you doing this?”

I asked the question as much to fill the space between us as to elicit information.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “Don’t question it. I might lose interest.”

“Fair enough.”

It was a few cold, damp roads later that she said, “Do you have any idea what it’s like being a middle-ranking female police officer? Especially one that’s not in uniform?”

Since I was neither a member of the constabulary nor a woman, I took that as somewhat rhetorical.

“Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s brilliant, but every so often it’s pure, undiluted crap. Those are the times when I really do wonder whether I want to do this job.”

“I think it’s a bit similar for women surgeons,” I ventured, just to show that I was with her in spirit, although obviously not in body.

“You think so?” She considered. “Maybe, but I doubt it.” Her tone was acid. I felt as if I were sitting next to sugar glass bottle of cyanide.

She was silent for a while, then she said, “And for me it’s been a thousand times worse.”

There was one of those gaps in the conversation that only humanity has to endure. What was I suppose to say now?

I felt as if I were blindfold and putting my hand inside a box of razor blades as I said, “Jo?”

We were slowing to traffic lights. It was several heartbeats before she pulled on the handbrake. Then she looked across, straight into my eyes. She said only, “Yes, Jo.”

There were another fifteen minutes of silence before we reached David Vinson’s house. It was on the edge of sixties housing estate, replete with open spaces that were patched and tastefully decorated with dog’s mess in varying states of decay. The houses were built of pale yellow brick – those that were not stone-clad – and so rigidly right-angled as to pierce the eye wherever you looked. There were some graffiti, not much, and a few of the houses and apartment had boarded windows dotted about, like patched eyes, but overall the air was one of resigned disinterest: change and decay all around, rather than active demolition.

Sonya parked her car outside a row of garages, each closed by a metal door at least half of which were bent and buckled. There was a pile of sand beside us and so many dogs had used its convenience that it now resembled a sort of gigantic spotted dick: the tufts of grass and moss that were growing here and there in this rich, fertilised medium merely suggested a parsley decoration.

“He lives on the corner.”

We trudged through the morning air, noticed by empty windows and a passing postman.

The house was badly in need of repainting. The open-plan front garden was just an uncut lawn with a single, circular central bed in which a rampant rose bush threw out shoots.

I thought that we were going to be disappointed, for when Sonya rang the doorbell, for long minutes there was no intimation of life within.

“He’s not here,” I said.

She shook her head. “He’s here all right. It’s just a question of whether he’s in.”

This decidedly gnomic utterance forced me to retreat to silence and Sonya sounded the bell again, this time with considerable enthusiasm.

I was beginning to feel slightly foolish, standing there in front of this plainly unoccupied house, when there was a blurred movement through the frosted glass of the front door.

The door was opened to reveal a young man in a shabby towelling dressing gown that was pale blue and in need of a boil wash. It was loosely tied together around a hairy chest, a small but not unimpressive paunch and a pair of black boxer shorts. The face above it was bearded and oily, the hair cropped short. The eyes, reddened and injected by poor sleep, were clearly pained by the light. He was in the act of wiping his nose on his sleeve.

Sonya held up a card, presumably some sort of identification. She held it so close to his face that he had to bend backwards slightly in order to focus. While a look of panic flowed across his face as he finally took in what the card said, she was pushing forward through the doorway. He retreated a little but then stopped. Halting just inside the hallway, Sonya said, “Don’t worry, David. We haven’t come to arrest you.”

He looked less than completely reassured by this. He looked at me over her shoulder.

“This is Dr. Reed. He’d like to ask you a few questions.” When he didn’t react, she added, “If that’s all right.”

The way she said this, it was quite clear that all right or not, he was going to be asked some questions.

“What about?” His first words had to fight their way through some thick mucus, thereby acquiring a guttural tone. He coughed once and I felt as if I could taste the salty flavours.

“About your mother.”

He looked quickly at her, the fearful expression returning.

“What about her? I told you…”

“We have further information, David. The forensic pathologist thinks that she was killed by the fall. What we don’t yet know is why she fell down the stairs in the first place.”

Her voice was calming and I was struck by the similarity between how she was handling him and how a doctor might talk to a patient about the diagnosis of a serious illness.

“I didn’t kill her! I told you I just found her!”

At once she smothered the alarm with more balm-filled assurance.

“We know that, David. We know that.” She looked around at the houses opposite. “Can we come in? We don’t want to talk about things like this standing on the doorstep.”

He was reluctant but he could see the sense in it. He seemed to have a cold, or perhaps a habit, for he was wiping his nose again. I made a note not to pat him on the arm in a friendly sort of way. As I walked past him, he looked at me with deep suspicion. He shut the door behind me, its closure rattling the glass panes although he was not violent with it. I looked down and noticed that the putty had all but gone around the glass.

Sonya asked, “Where shall we go?”

“The back.”

He indicated that she should go straight ahead. We found ourselves in a small back lounge. To our left a doorway led through to a minute kitchen. There was a round dining table in the middle of the room and Sonya sat herself at it. Around us were a sideboard, a chest of drawers and a standard lamp. All available surfaces, save for the table, were covered in ornaments and there were many pictures on the wall. Clearly this was the house of an elderly person: David Vinson looked incongruous standing in the midst of so many memories he could not possibly know. The air ought to have been filled with the scent of lavender and lilac.

I sat down next to Sonya and she indicated with a wave and a smile that David should also sit. He was nervous and fidgety: he didn’t want to be anywhere near us, but somehow Sonya had created a weak authority over him and he did as she bid. He coughed again, producing yet more mucoid noises. Fishing in his pocket produced a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. As he lit up and hid himself in smoke his tremor became obvious: I noticed that his hands were covered in small cuts and that his knuckles were bruised and scraped.

The smoke had a pacifying effect on him, it seemed. I marvelled at the power of psychological addiction. He didn’t have an ash-tray, but luckily the carpet was dark in colour and didn’t seem to kick up much of a fuss.

He sniffed loudly and moistly, then asked, “What do you want to know?”

Sonya looked at me and he therefore transferred his bleary, wary gaze to me.

“I want to talk to you about the time that you worked at Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

He was firstly at a loss, then incredulous.

“Friedrichson’s? What the fuck has that got to do with anything?”

The question was addressed to Sonya, as if I were merely the pet monkey doing the tricks.

“Please, David. It might be very important.”

He stole a glance at me, then back to her. A drag of smoke and then, “That was a long time ago. A fucking long time ago.” For a moment I wondered if I had a bogey hanging off the end of my nose, so loathe was he to make eye contact with me.

“I appreciate that. Can you remember much about it?”

He reared up that. “Of course I fucking can!” Almost like a son appealing to his mother, he said to Sonya, “What does he think I am? An idiot?”

With all the patience that Job had left to the world, Sonya replied, “No, David. We don’t think that at all.”

I tried again, ignoring the hostility.

“What did you do there?”

He curled a lip as if the memories were unpleasant.

“I was a research technician. ‘Scientific Research Officer,’ if you want the official job description.”

“And unofficially?”

He snorted. “Underpaid shitsweeper.”

Fair enough.

“Which department did you work in? Was it with Dr. Hailey?”

A smile came over his face as he recalled the delightful Dr. Hailey. It didn’t seem to me to be a particularly nice smile, but maybe he was just experiencing an attack of flatus.

“Bog-brush? No, I never had that pleasure.”

“But you knew Sebastian. Sebastian Marjolin.”

For the first time he looked up and directly at me, but it wasn’t exactly the warm light of brotherhood that was sparking within him. I couldn’t decide whether it was fear or anger in his eyes.

“What about him?” he demanded aggressively.

Startled, I was about to stammer something out but Sonya got there first.

“David, we realise this might be painful for you, but it is important. Sebastian’s name has come up in connection with our enquiries, and we need to clarify things a bit.”

He was frowning, trying to make connections. I felt that we were back where we started. Apparently Sonya also felt this, for she said, “Sebastian has attacked someone. Killed them, in fact. Your name has come up in connection with that.”

For a while I thought that it would not work for he remained withdrawn, the expression on his face unchanging. Then he said, “Killed someone, you say? Well, that doesn’t surprise me. How did he do that?”

Sonya said only, “The details don’t matter, David. What does matter is that you used to know him.”

He was distracted now. He pinched out the stub-end of his cigarette and I noticed that the shakes were back. It took him a while to locate another. He muttered to himself, “I knew him all right.”

He lit the cigarette, then became silent.

“David?”

Suddenly, looking up at Sonya, he said, “I always knew that he was dangerous.

Looking quickly at me, Sonya asked, “Why do you say that, David? Why do you say that he was dangerous?”

I couldn’t see the joke but I must have been feeling slightly dense that day. Vinson began to laugh, but the mucus took exception and he ended up coughing. To me he said, “Pauline died while she was going out with that little prick. Did you know that?”

I nodded.

“And do you know what that mad little bastard said? Do you know what he said, as I walked away from her grave, as they were shovelling the dirt back on to her coffin?

“He said that he was Death and that he had ‘come amongst us.’ He said that he had killed her, that he had killed his old man, and that he would kill again. And then, as if he hadn’t quite made it obvious enough that he was stark, staring, fucking, out of his tree, he laughed.”

Hardly daring to speak, I asked, “And did you believe him?”

He held the cigarette upright, then blew gently on the tip so that it brightened to orange and fine flakes of ash fell on to the tablecloth.

“Not then. I thought he was sad and mad, nothing more. It had been the talk of the lab for months how nutty he was. I felt like hitting him for making a joke out of my sister’s death, but I certainly didn’t think that he was for real. Not until he told me that he was going to kill his sister. That was two days before she died.”

“Did you tell anyone?” asked Sonya.

He looked at her as if she were playing Mrs. Stupid.

“Oh, yeah,” he sneered. “I had a mother who was drinking a bottle of vodka a day because her daughter had just checked out, I had a fucking massive overdraft at the bank, and I had a job that was on the line. I figured it would make the set if I went around telling everyone that little Sebastian was really death in a spotty body.”

He became silent for a second, then subsided and said, “I mentioned his remarks to Bogbrush.”

Sonya had taken over the questioning. She asked, “And what did he say?”

“He gave me crap about the strain Sebastian had been under. It was all very polite, but basically he was telling me to shut up. Sebastian was his star pupil, you see.”

Sonya gave him three seconds rest and then changed the subject slightly. I marvelled at how she handled the interview so that the angles kept changing.

“Did you know Sebastian well?”

“As well as anyone could know the little cunt. Better than I wanted to.”

“So how did you get to know him so well?”

“I couldn’t very well avoid him, could I? Working for his old man.”

We didn’t exactly exchange meaningful glances, but I could feel Sonya was as interested in that little nugget as me.

“You were Professor Marjolin’s research assistant?”

Another drag, then a nod.

“And Pauline met Sebastian through you?”

He took a long time to answer that one. His face seemed to want to speak, but there was something holding him back. Two more ingestions of nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide and sundry pollutants were required before he mumbled, “Yeah. She was home from college and there was a Christmas party at the lab. I thought she would have a good laugh if she came. Sebastian was there.”

“Was he normal then?”

He shrugged.

“He was never absolutely normal. Always a weird geek, always distant, always snooping, but at least he wasn’t barking at the moon and eating insects. Not like later.”

“Were you bothered that they got to know each other so well.”

“Bothered? Not really. Surprised, I suppose. Surprised that she should see anything in him.”

“What did she see?”

“How the fuck should I know? She didn’t confide in me. Never did. She was ‘Mummy’s girl.’ Ask her.”

“Where you there when his father died? I mean, actually in the room?”

Vinson smiled tiredly.

“I was the only one there. I was the poor bastard who suddenly discovered I had a dying professor on my hands.”

Well, at least you weren’t the poor bastard who was dying.

“Could you describe to me what happened? Did he choke, or did he seem to be in pain?”

“All I remember is how fast it was. The old boy was just inspecting some autoradiographs when suddenly he dropped them. I bent down to pick them up and then, when I straightened up, he was going grey. Then he just collapsed.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran like shit out of the room and started screaming for help.”

“How quickly did it take for help to arrive?”

“Not long. Maybe a couple of minutes. There’s a first-aider on every floor of the building.”

“So they attempted resuscitation at once?”

“Yup. Not that it was going to do any good; even I could see that. He was dead when he was still on his feet.”

“And Sebastian? When did he arrive?”

“He came in about ten minutes after it happened. Someone had run to get him.”

“He was upset, of course.”

Vinson considered.

“I suppose so. He certainly made a bit of a fuss.”

Suddenly Vinson looked up at Sonya.

“Why?”

I thought it time for another subject change.

“What was Professor Marjolin’s area of interest?”

Vinson took a while to come round to me. He sniffed again, wiped his nose delicately on his sleeve and said disinterestedly, “Anti-cancer therapies. Novel ones.”

There didn’t seem much scope there. Chemotherapeutic agents are basically cellular poisons that target dividing cells, the rationale being that cancer cells spend more time dividing than normal cells. Unfortunately the distinction is poor, thereby explaining some of the unpleasant side effects that accompany cancer therapies. I couldn’t see any hope that Sebastian had slipped his father a quick dose of cyclophosphamide or cisplatin in the expectation that he would drop silently to the floor some minutes later without even a grunt.

“Novel ones?”

He stubbed out his cigarette. “He was in charge of a whole section devoted to them. The company considered it to be a bit of venture capitalisation, I think. They certainly dropped it like a red-hot cinder when he turned up his toes.”

“What kind of things was he researching?”

Vinson got up and went into the kitchen. He returned with a bottle of vodka and a plastic beaker that had a picture of Minnie Mouse on it. He held up the bottle, first to Sonya, then to me.

“Want any?”

Without waiting for a reply he poured himself a generous beakerful and drank half.

“What were these novel anticancer therapies he was researching?” I asked again.

Vinson shrugged. He was already on his second go at the beaker and this, in turn, induced a fresh cascade of mucus. After all that, only another cigarette was going to help things.

“What the fuck does that matter?” he enquired daintily.

“Tell us, please, David,” insisted Sonya. There was something about the gentility of the tone that suggested adamantine.

He stared at her for just a second, then looked down.

“Immunotherapy, genes, stuff like that.”

“Can you be more specific?” I asked.

He finished the beaker, then poured another. Maybe it was doing things to his testosterone levels, as he was becoming more belligerent by the second.

“No,” he decided at last. “No, I can’t.”

He sat back with a smug grin, his cigarette making grey patterns around him.

I’m not sure what I would have done, but that needn’t concern anybody now. What is worth noting is that Sonya suddenly sat forward and swept the vodka bottle off the table and across the room. It smashed against the wall and fell in ethanolic pieces to the carpet.

“Yes you fucking can, David,” she said. She didn’t sit back down, but remained crouched over the table. Vinson jerked forward as soon as the bottle left the table, and there was just a moment when I thought he was going to be unpleasant, but he remained seated, staring at Sonya.

He swallowed and put his cigarette in his mouth.

“What did you do that for?” he asked plaintively. The cigarette see-sawed jerkily.

“Tell us, David,” insisted Sonya.

He took the cigarette back in hand and the tip of his tongue appeared between his lips.

“It was a long time ago,” he said and, before Sonya could repeat her request, he said, “Wait a moment.”

He got up and left the room. I thought he might be making a run for it, but Sonya seemed unconcerned.

“Leave him,” she suggested.

He returned about five minutes later. He had in his hands three A4-sized hardback notebooks. These he threw onto the table.

“There,” he said. He sat back down, turning himself away from us and at the wall. He stuck his cigarette back between his lips and sucked.

Sonya picked up one of the books, opened it and read briefly. She handed it to me with a shrug.

It was a laboratory notebook, detailing experiments and results. It was untidy, written in a variety of colours, with tears and smudged stains on most of the pages. There were also black and white photographs stuck in to it, and between the pages there were numerous inserts – developed photographic films, computer print-outs and photocopied journals. The other two were similar.

“You want to know what we did? Read those.”

Sonya looked at me, her eyebrows raised, enquiring whether I thought we should go. I nodded and we both rose. Vinson ignored us, apparently attempting a sort of androgynised Greta Garbo impression.

“Thank you, David,” said Sonya politely.

All she got for her pains was an invitation to fuck off.

It was by now nearly eight-thirty. There should have been people going to work, perhaps a few apelike school children off to truant somewhere, but there was nothing. It could have been early Sunday morning, two days after the bomb dropped.

“Doesn’t anyone live here?” I asked as we got into the car.

Sonya grimaced. “No, they don’t live here. They exist here.”

As we drove away, three dogs appeared from nowhere and barked at the car as if they could sense that we were aliens.

We exchanged no more words until she dropped me off back at my house.

“We’ll start checking all the places that your wife might have thought of going. I’ll try to make sure that it gets reasonable priority, but you know how it is.”

“Yeah, sure.”

She indicated the notebooks.

“Do you really think that there’s an answer in those?”

I had run out of optimism for that week.

“I don’t know. I don’t really know if there was a specific reason why Sebastian decided to call on the Vinsons. I’m just hoping there was, and I’m hoping that it was to do with Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

She left me on the gravel of the drive. Her exhaust smelt in the cool morning air as she drove away.

There wasn’t a huge crowd to mark the passing of Peter Weiss, an observation that left me even more ill-disposed to the venture: massive crowds throwing themselves on the coffin would have been unlikely, but they would have given me a degree of cover. I arrived shortly after three, an act of deliberate unpunctuality, feeling distinctly nervous. Charlie had declined my invitation, using the excuse that someone had to be in the department, but she had done so with little disguise of her disinclination to be seen anywhere with me. Arthur’s car was already there, parked under a yew tree and one of only five cars.

The building itself was tall and rectangular, totally devoid of any feeling: this is a place for the disposal of the dead was the major impression received. To the left of the entrance was a covered walkway draped with roses that were already dying in the autumn air.

I walked over to the entrance, imposing double doors that had already been closed. Thankfully they opened silently and I found myself in an octagonal lobby area. Two further double doors, also closed, led into the main body of the crematorium. There were flowers dotted around the perimeter of the lobby, mainly yellows and whites, and there were muted lights on the walls. I could hear singing coming through the doors, sounding pathetically underfed and timorous. Holding my breath I went forward and opened one of the doors ahead of me.

There were no more than fifteen people there. Most of them were clustered to the front of the cold, damp room, but Arthur had positioned himself at the back. He nodded as I joined him: no one else noticed my arrival. He indicated where I should open the tatty purple hymn book and I joined in the polyphonic rendering of the first hymn.

The vicar stood at the front, opening his mouth wide and presumably lustily praising the Lord in song, but there was about him an air of boredom, of mechanical absent-mindedness that suggested he had done a few too many of these things. To his left the teak-coloured coffin lay on a dais and was covered with an ornate but faded cloth, all bright reds, blues and golds, a single wreath on the lid. The dais The doors of the furnace, like a hatch into hell’s kitchen.

Peter’s wife was at the front, dressed in black and, from what I could see of it, her face set into angry condemnation. Perhaps it was her husband who was the object of this emotion, and perhaps it was the Lord Himself, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that your present company was probably little more than a hair’s thickness away from the cross-wires. Apparently there were no children, for all the other mourners looked too old: neighbours and colleagues of old presumably.

The service lasted twenty minutes. We heard about Peter’s qualities, about his life and about how he would be missed by all those who had known him: the words were pious, the tone almost disinterested, the sentiments devalued by the suspicion that the vicar had never even met him. We sang two more hymns and we were silent in prayer, the dankness of the building and the occasion gradually working their way through to my skin and thence to my spirits.

And then it was over. The coffin had travelled into the back of the crematorium, away from view, its sudden departure producing within me an uncomfortable urge to giggle. We all stood for the vicar, who walked slowly out, his hymn book notes clutched to his chest, a look of solemnity on his face that could have been painted on. I wanted to leave at once, but before I could stir Arthur into life, Mrs. Weiss was coming down the aisle, still not crying, still plainly extremely pissed off.

She was about five metres down the central isle before she saw me. She didn’t faint and she didn’t scream, but she did cast upon me a look that was quite clearly designed to cleave me in two. She stopped for a moment, an act that caused a certain degree of consternation in the elderly gentleman who was following her with his head bowed down, then carried on, her face, quite incredibly, assuming an even more thunderously determined expression.

I looked at Arthur and he raised his eyebrows.

“If you don’t mind, Arthur, I think I’ll forgo the formalities.”

He smiled weakly.

“I can’t say I blame you.”

Such was the plan, but it was not meant to be. Mrs. Weiss, having spotted me, was not going to let me leave without some sort of expression of sentiment. She was standing with the other mourners in a sort of untidy huddle around the wreathes and flowers laid out along the covered walkway. As soon as Arthur and I appeared through the main doors of the crematorium, she detached herself and made an intercept course.

Watching her approach was like seeing a shark’s fin head my way.

I assumed she was going to shout at me. In my mind the scenario was one of her ranting while I tried to get words of sympathy and calm into the soliloquy, and while I kept glancing over her shoulder at the mourners and the waiting undertakers, all of whom were staring amazed at the scene.

There seemed little point in trying to outrun her, so I stopped and waited. Arthur was slightly wrong-footed but soon came to a halt as well.

I opened my mouth, figuring I could at least get a word of sorrow and sympathy in first.

I didn’t.

Before I could utter anything, she barged straight into me and I staggered back. Then, while I was still off balance, she brought the open palm of her hand across my face. For half a second she looked as though she might follow it up with a few upper cuts, but then she turned and walked away. It was so quick that few of the other mourners even knew it had happened.

Arthur said, “Well,” which I thought just about summed it up.

I moved my jaw from side to side, half of my face feeling warm enough to cast shadows in a dimly lit room.

When I felt it safe to speak again, I said, “I think we’d better go.”

I just wanted to escape, and Arthur looked as if he would rather be anywhere but in my presence, but it was not to be. A voice called to me from my right. Sebastian’s voice.

I stopped and turned. Arthur, caught slightly unawares, didn’t decelerate for another couple of paces.

Sebastian, wrapped up against the weather with a scarf and gloves, was looking at me from under a small copse.

I looked at Arthur who adopted a quizzical expression.

“Hang on a minute, will you Arthur?”

I walked over to Sebastian. As soon as I neared him, I saw his eyebrows were lowered and his lips pouted. I was struck by the difference in his demeanour, afraid of what it might mean. He had let himself go, too. He had the beginnings of a scruffy beard and his hair was slightly greasy. A few spots were erupting on his face.

“He is burning,” he said. “He is burning and in that fire his sins are cleansed.” He looked at the ground, not at me. His voice was low and full of fury, as if this nonsense meant everything to him. Still with his eyes down he continued, “My mother is upset. She is confused. She no longer loves her son, the son that she suckled, the son that she raised to be the bringer of peace.”

What to say to that? What to say when awful fear was burrowing into me, when dread was engulfing my head.

“Your mother?” I asked, fearing the answer.

“She has betrayed me, I think. She told me how you’d been to see her, how you had said asked lots of questions about my Dad, and about my time at Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

There was something of a distracted air to him, so that even while he was speaking he seemed to be listening to something, although to what I could not say.

There was no point in denying anything, no point in even speaking.

“She said that you had said I was mad.”

He looked up then and what was in his eyes took my breath away.

Sebastian had gone and within his soul there dwelt absolutely nothing. It was like looking into the eyes of a reptile.

“Did you?” he demanded.

I opened my mouth, wondering whether it was worth denial, whether anything I said would be heard with normal ears.

“You didn’t harm her, did you, Sebastian?” I kept my voice as calm and gentle as I could. “You left her alone, didn’t you?”

He just stared at me then. Stared as he breathed through his nose so that it made a mellow whistling sound. Stared and stared with eyes that were without humanity.

“You turned her against me,” he whispered. “She is lost to me.”

I was saying to myself how silly this was, how he couldn’t hurt me, no matter how insane he was, how there were witnesses if he happened to try violence. Yet there was also a voice in my head that insisted that this wasn’t in the slightest bit silly, that if he was psychotic he wouldn’t care about who saw him slaughter, that this madman was the only one who knew where Kate was.

“You left her alone, didn’t you?” I was almost pleading now. For a long moment I thought that he was beyond any form of contact, for he remained rigid, his face staring, occasionally frowning as if trying to catch misheard speech.

Then he almost started, as if jerked by a spasm, and a look of theatrical innocence came on to his face, spreading like a stain.

“Of course I did.”

And the look was gone, wiped in an instant as he grabbed my arm and squeezed it so hard that I could feel the blood vessels bursting.

“You haven’t asked about Kate.”

His face was so close to mine I thought I might fall into the emptiness that was his eyes.

Hesitantly I said, “How is she?”

I felt small and timid in the face of this monstrous lunacy.

“What about her?” he sneered.

I swallowed.

“Let me see her, Sebastian. Let me talk to her.”

He seemed startled by this request. For a moment I thought he was seriously considering it: perhaps in the dark, echoing streams of madness in his head, he was.

A slow, sinuous smile crept over his face, never once touching his eyes.

“She doesn’t want you. She hates you.”

“How do I know that? Let me talk to her. Let me see her.”

Still the smile counterpointed by eyes that were devoid of life.

“I’ll think about it.”

He released my arm and the rush of blood brought paraesthetic pain to my fingers. He turned around and walked away. I had an impulse to hurry after him and stop him, but it died as soon as it had formed. I did not think it would be wise to detain him.

I returned to Arthur who was nervously waiting by the car.

“Who on earth was that?” His voice was testy.

I said only, “An acquaintance. Nobody of note.”

He grunted and we climbed into the car.

As soon as I was back in the laboratory, I telephoned Mrs. Marjolin. The ringing went on and on , sounding more and more as if it was calling to an empty house, before the receiver was picked up and Mrs. Marjolin’s voice called out imperiously, “Yes?”

I apologised and claimed a wrong number, hoping that she wouldn’t recognise my voice. I put the telephone down, greedily welcoming at least a small piece of relief.

I worked until seven and then went home. The last thing I wanted to do was to start looking through the cryptic puzzle that was presented by Vinson’s notebooks, but one thing was clear to me now – they mattered to Sebastian, and if they mattered that much, there was a reason.

The fear that hovered at my back was that I would be unable to recognise the gold when it appeared amidst the dross, that I was not equipped to know when the answer was revealed.

I sat down and began to leaf through the first book. It took me a long time just to learn to decipher the scrawl, but that was only a tenth of the task. The language was foreign, almost made beyond comprehension by the jargon of abbreviations.

After two hours I had made progress, if progress be judged by the number of pages I had perused, but I felt that I was a long journey from discovery. I dropped off twice over the pages before I decided to go to bed, and when I got there I only dreamed of Sebastian and Kate.

He was deteriorating, that much was clear. Presumably he was no longer on medication, and becoming less and less likely to take it. That meant only that the delusional complex would strengthen, the hallucinatory part of his reality would solidify and he would retreat further and further from what the rest of the world called normal.

What that meant for Kate, only the devil’s spawn could guess.

How long was she safe with him? How much time did I have to find out his secret, to play his game and therefore keep her unharmed?

All this I saw time and time again in my head as I tried to sleep. All this together with the nagging worry that he was too far gone, that no bargain could be kept now.

The next day passed in a sort of blur. Charlie was no longer prone to sudden, disconsolate outbursts of weeping, but nor was she extruding witty one-liners and going around clapping people of the back. I spoke only once to her during the day and that was to ask how she was: her reply was a magnificently understated, “Okay.” She suddenly found something else to do and the mysteries of human communication once more asserted themselves as I deduced the she was very far from ‘Okay,’ that it was all my fault and would I please leave her alone, preferably by finding a sharp stake and impaling myself upon it.

Then there was the work. It started off with four post mortems, two of which were complex cases where the deceased had died in hospital amid a welter of speculation concerning their precise diagnoses, and merged into shitloads of work from the general surgeons, the gynaecologists, the ENT surgeons (a strange and peculiar breed of human), general practitioners and the gastroenterologists. It is a good rule in life to assume that if a gastroenterologist comes at you with a tube, rigid or flexible, you will not be leaving the room with all your mucosal surfaces intact.

By four in the afternoon, I was completely knackered, having passed into the stage of tiredness that means that the mind is numb, the backside so insensate that a firework down the trousers wouldn’t be noticed, and there is a small voice telling you that you are very shortly going to make a serious mistake.

Perhaps it was just as well that I was in that sort of frame of mind, considering what arrived in the department just before five.

Just a letter, would be one description.

Just a letter, like the one that Chamberlain wrote to Hitler.

This one came by registered post in a brilliantly white envelope made of thick and expensive paper, almost like parchment. It was marked ‘Strictly Private,’ so at least nobody in the secretaries’ office got to read it. I unfolded the paper, half-knowing what it would say and I was not disappointed.

It was from the General Medical Council. It was short, but then you don’t need a claymore to kill someone, a scalpel blade will do. It informed that it had received a complaint from a firm of solicitors, acting on the behalf of a member of the general public, stating that I had behaved in a manner that had led directly to the death of Dr. Peter Weiss. The complaint alleged that I had shown myself to be incompetent and it questioned my fitness to practice. The General Medical Council, in accordance with its recently acquired statutory responsibilities, was therefore about to commence an enquiry into my competence.

Ever since I had qualified as a doctor, I had paid my annual fee to the GMC, and every time I had wondered what they did for me.

Now I was about to find out.

I didn’t want to do anything that Thursday night. I was tired and there was no food in the house. I wanted to sleep and I wanted it all to go away. I did not contemplate suicide, but I appreciated the peace the death might bring.

Yet I had to continue to look through Vinson’s laboratory notebooks, knowing only that there would most probably be nothing there of use to me and, even if Sebastian really had targeted the Vinsons for a reason and that reason was connected with Friedrichson-Waterhouse, I would be unlikely to comprehend the scientific details. I could sense that time was running out, even if Sebastian decided to obey his own rules, and much depended on that.

I kept begging God to make him ring, to make Sebastian recall in his distorted reality what I had said and ring.

By eleven I had reached the middle of the second notebook, none the wiser. By then I could not have continued even if Sebastian had been in front of me plucking out Kate’s fingernails with heavy-duty pliers. I had to sleep.

I dragged myself into work the next morning, the night having passed, but only just.

And Friday took off where Thursday had ended, with work, with a feeling of impending doom and with a faint but irritating feeling that there was an answer somewhere in all the mess.

At two in the afternoon, Sonya rang.

“There are a couple of things I think you should know,” she said.

When people say things like that, you are usually about to hear things that bring with them sadness and despair. I consoled myself by thing that if there were only a couple of things that I ought to have known, I was doing far better than I had realised.

“Go on.”

“We’ve checked all the places that you suggested.”

Her tone meant that she didn’t have to continue.

“And there’s nothing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me, is that the good news or the bad news?”

She drew in breath.

“I have a horrible feeling that that was the good news.”

Already, in my head, was repeating the word Shit!

When I didn’t bother to waste anything on the sweet desert air, she said, “We’ve just had a report that David Vinson has been found dead.”

I had known precisely what she was going to say, but I had expected it to surprise me. This, however, merely left me feeling winded. Suddenly my mind was whirling with conjecture and ominous dread. Suddenly I had the feeling that all bets had been cancelled, all the ground rules rewritten.

I managed to say something like, “Oh,” and Sonya said, “That was my sentiment as well.”

“You realise what this means?”

She was perfectly logical, her position one of an observer.

“It means that you were almost certainly correct. I would say that Sebastian had a very good reason to visit the Vinsons twice, and that reason was almost certainly because there was something that David Vinson could give us, or perhaps something that he could tell us about Friedrichson-Waterhouse.”

There was in my mind a dreadful thought and, when she said nothing more for a moment, I at least had a few moments in which I could believe that I was mistaken. Alas, when she continued, my hopes proved wrong.

“It also probably means that he will know that you have been to see David Vinson. I don’t know precisely the implications of that, but it is a worry.”

Well, I would describe the possibility that I hadn’t paid my electricity bill on time as ‘a worry,’ but the possibility that some homicidal basket-case might decide to go out a wreak mass murder I would feel warranted a slightly stronger description.

“Can you help me?”

I didn’t expect much. I got less than that.

“About two hours ago, I was called into the Superintendent’s office, Phil. I’m sorry, but…”

I thought I’d misheard, perhaps.

“You’re sorry but what?”

“He spent an hour, in the presence of the Chief Inspector, asking why I had been wasting time and resources on a minor assault. He also wanted to know why I had been pursuing someone who had no record of violence, who had no criminal record whatsoever, and who had left a private psychiatric clinic of his volition and entirely legally.

“I didn’t have an answer to give him, Phil”

I tried a few things, things that started out in my head as cogent arguments but, in the harsh, cruel world, they turned into sentences that were weak and ill-designed for a long and healthy life. We ended the conversation shortly afterward.

“I’m sorry, Phil.”

I think she meant it, too.

I managed to get home by six, a take-away in hand. While consuming this in the kitchen, I started work on the second laboratory notebook.

Much of what Professor Marjolin and David Vinson had been employed on was completely beyond me. This lack of technical knowledge was compounded by Vinson’s appalling handwriting and his apparent tendency to write his notes while eating and drinking, thus producing smudges and stains of greatly varying hue. From what I could gather, most of their work was immunotherapeutic in approach, involving the production of tumour-specific antibodies. This concept had had some success reported in malignant melanoma and occasionally in other tumour types, but in most tumours it had been worse than useless.

By eight o’clock I was halfway through the second notebook and beginning to feel that I was completely wrong in supposing that this was going to be of any use.

Then Sebastian rang.

“Hello, Phil.”

Now the sound of his voice, soft and young, was enough to make me worry.

“Sebastian.”

He laughed. A quiet, hushed sound, so deep and baritone that it meant anything but amusement.

“You’ve been busy, Phil.”

“Playing the game, Sebastian. As you wanted.”

There was a long wait before he said anything.

“Absolutely, Phil, absolutely.”

They were just words exchanged along a telephone line, but with everyone my stomach churned. Somehow the tenor had changed. I could feel that Sebastian’s mind was full of strange things, things no sane person would ever understand.

“How’s Kate, Sebastian?”

He sucked in air through pursed lips, a low whistling coming to me from the telephone.

“Ahh,” he sighed.

In the silence that followed, I could hear a million dead souls breathe.

“Sebastian?” I said. “How’s Kate?”

He laughed, but now it sounded apologetic.

“There’s a bit of a problem there, Phil.”

Something with claws scuttled across and squeezed my insides.

It was without thinking that I said, “What have you done, you bastard?”

And all that came back was, “Tut, tut, Phil. Calm down. Bad language won’t get us anywhere, will it?”

“Have you hurt her, Sebastian? Because if you have…”

“You’ll what, Phil?” The voice had changed. He could have been asking where I bought my underwear. There was a confident lack of concern to it that was a hundred times more frightening than a threatening tone.

I breathed twice, slowly and deeply, then asked, “Please, Sebastian. How is Kate?”

I could hear the smile. “That’s better, Phil. Kate? Well, she got a bit worried, so I had to persuade her that she was best off with me. You know how women are, don’t you, Phil? Sometimes they don’t know what’s best for them. They need to be pointed in the right direction.”

“But she’s all right, isn’t she? I mean, you haven’t..?”

He took a moment to grasp what I was saying, then he laughed.

“Oh, yes. I haven’t done anything like that.” But then he added, “Not yet, anyway.”

“And you won’t, will you, Sebastian? The rules of the game mean that she’s safe unless you win.”

There was silence at that, so long that I thought he’d gone.

“Sebastian?”

More silence. Panicked, I said again, “Sebastian?”

At last, he came back.

“You went to see David, I understand.”

I noticed that I was shaking, and that thought at least served to stop the panic from scrambling everything in my mind.

“David?”

He didn’t even bother to argue.

“You took some notebooks.”

What should I say? Like an imbecile I was about to parrot, ‘Notebooks?’ when he said, “They’re mine.”

Amidst all the fear, I found a small voice that was crowing triumph.

“Are they, Sebastian?”

“They’re mine and I want them back.”

I looked across at the table where they lay. I felt I had the beginnings of something with which to fight him.

“What will you give for them, Sebastian?”

Another gap, but this time I had the impression that I had caused it, that I had given him a reason to pause and consider things.

“Will you give me Kate?” I said at once. “Shall we arrange a swap, Sebastian?”

Nothing came back at me. For second stretching after second, there was nothing but faint interference.

And then…

“We’ll see.”

He put the telephone down.

. Now, as Sebastian’s condition worsened, I had the first intimation that he might have harmed Kate. And that fear synergised with the faint possibility that I might be able to get her back. Yet the hope was worse than the despair; at least when I had expected the worst, there had not been the erosive prospect of progress, the possibility that I might be able to resolve this nightmare.

It occluded my thinking. I knew that the notebooks were important, and that importance made their decipherment all the more urgent, but I kept wondering what he might have done to her and, more worryingly, what he might be capable of doing now that he his psychosis dug deep into his mind.

Two hours later, the telephone rang again.

It was Sebastian. He spoke at once, as if there had been no hiatus.

“Ah, yes, the game. You know,” and he paused, then, “You’re very good at the game, I’ve decided. Very good indeed.”

What did that mean?

Where was this going? I listened for a clue in his voice: got nothing.

More silence.

Then, “I think fourteen hours is fair, don’t you?”

What did he mean? Surely he couldn’t intend that?

“Fourteen hours?”

“Well, we can’t let the game go on forever, can we? I think we should bring it to an end at noon tomorrow.”

“But the rules…”

“The rules,” he pointed out as if I should have known, “Are what I decide them to be. Fourteen hours, no more.”

“I have to find you in that time. Is that right?”

“Um, yes and no. You have slightly less than fifteen hours to defeat me. If you don’t, little Katey will die.” He seemed to have finished, but then his voice abruptly became intensely excited. “I know! You wouldn’t want to live without your Katey, would you? I know what a loving husband you are, so I’ll tell you what. I’ll kill you as well! How’s that?”

He didn’t giggle. His voice suggested that he was doing me a favour.

I didn’t know what to say. For quite a long time there was nothing crossing the telephone lines, just the sound of the world’s whispers, then…

“By the way, Phil. Katey’s sent you another present. Just to let you know how she is. I delivered it earlier on today.”

His words were soft and innocent and they made me very afraid.

“What do you mean?”

He sounded hurt as he said, “Just a little gift, Phil. Something to remember her by.”

Things began to go through my mind. Horrible things. I was almost begging as I asked, “Where is it, Sebastian?”

He laughed, a sound that came from far away.

The telephone was put down.

I looked at the clock: it was eleven minutes past ten.

When she answered the telephone, Sonya’s voice changed to weariness as she discovered who it was.

“What is it, Phil?”

Oh, nothing. Just the usual. You know, a homicidal schizophrenic who’s threatening to murder my wife. Oh, and by the way, he’s now going to do me in as well, and he’s decided that Kate and I have less than fourteen hours to live.

She listened and while I was speaking I heard rustling and not words but sleepy, droning tones and I dimly realised that she was probably in bed.

"I think he means it, Sonya."

Still I could sense only reluctance.

"Sonya, he's going to kill Kate. I know that."

She sighed. "Wait a minute," she said.

More rustling, more whispered syllables, unintelligible to me.

Then, "I'll be over right away."

The relief I felt was like a high.

While I waited for Sonya to arrive, I returned to the notebooks.

More gobbledegook made almost indecipherable by the scribbled writing, the obscure shorthand jargon and the patches where drops of liquids, some of them almost certainly highly toxic, had happened to fall. I made my way through with as much pleasure as I would have had wading through rancid pond water.

I looked at the clock. It was already after eleven. Where was she?

Back to the notes. Must concentrate.

It became apparent that Professor Marjolin had tired - or perhaps he had been informed from higher in the company that he was tired - of immunotherapy, but to what he had then turned was not immediately obvious. I read of hints, words like 'recombinant,' 'complementary' and 'gene therapy' and, having read of such things, I knew that they were somehow interested in using molecular biology to treat malignant disease, but the details remained obscure. It was a return to tedium, but now the obscurity was greater, for the jargon and ways of thinking are even further removed from normality.

Or so I thought.

Until David Vinson obligingly wrote one word and, quite suddenly, the task became slightly interesting.

Quite suddenly things that were unconnected grew friendly and became close and made links and bonds that were not going to be put asunder by man.

Quite suddenly, I began to see possibilities about how Sebastian might be doing what he was doing.

For the first time I felt that it wasn’t hopeless. For the first time I felt that I was a centimetre closer to Kate. I felt almost euphoric. I found myself muttering things under my breath, nonsensical things. And then I remember how little time there was, how far away Kate might be.

Twenty-three minutes past eleven. Surely it wouldn’t take Sonya that long?

It took her two cans of beer to arrive. The sight of her in the doorway, framed by darkness and brilliantly lit by a security light, seemed to me almost like the sight of an angel. She came in without being asked. She looked tired.

"Has he called again?"

"No. I don't think I'll hear again until he calls to say that the game is over. Not unless I can find him first."

She barely grunted.

"Look, I'm sorry to drag you over here, Sonya, but I didn't know who else there was.”

She shrugged. "I wasn't doing anything."

"Listen, Sonya. I’ve got an idea about how he might be doing it. How he might be killing."

For the first time she showed more than indifference. She gave me a long, hard stare and then asked in a cautious tone, "How?"

I showed her into the kitchen, talking to over my shoulder. "He's been giving me hints all along - part of the game, I suppose, but they were deliberately arcane until you realise the context."

We sat at the table.

“Go on, then.”

“Sebastian’s father was a cancer researcher. In particular, he was trying out novel methods of curing cancer.”

She thought about that for a moment, then asked, “What of it?”

“He tried a lot of ways, none of which were particularly successful, but the last approach he adopted was something called Antisense therapy.”

She suddenly looked interested and I admired how sharp she was.

“Antisense?”

I nodded. “Sebastian’s been making oblique references to nonsense, to the antithesis of sense. I think he was referring to antisense, and I think that he’s been telling me how he kills people.”

“And how does it work, this antisense?”

“It turns off genes.”

She considered this.

“And could it be used to kill someone?”

Perhaps I had thought that she would accept my assurances, that she would take what I said with due deference to my authority. I almost began to try to bullshit her, but I knew at once that I wouldn’t succeed.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know enough about the subject to be able to give you any details.”

At least she didn’t dismiss the idea as soon as I admitted that it was no more than an inspired guess, but I could see that her weak and nascent enthusiasm for the idea had taken a knock. Before she could speak again, I said, “But we could ask an expert.”

“Who?”

“Martin Hailey. It’s not strictly his field, but he should know enough to help us.”

She looked doubtful.

“It’s very late.”

I stood up. It was indeed very late and I had no other place to go.

18.

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright.

Except for the paisley pyjamas and the tartan dressing gown, Martin Hailey at midnight looked more or less identical to Martin Hailey in the office. Certainly his attitude didn’t seem to have changed in transferring the scene from his office to his living room.

We had located his home address from the telephone directory but had decided against ringing him up before arriving. The door had been opened nervously by a small but fat woman, Hailey hovering in the background. That we were not burglars had provided little joy for them. We had only been invited in after Sonya had intimated that this was official.

“It’s very late,” he stated both robotically and unnecessarily when his wife had been dispatched to bed.

“I’m sorry Dr. Hailey, but it is important.”

He made a noise.

“What can I do for you?”

I brought forth the notebooks.

“I’d like you to look through these. They talk about ‘antisense’.”

I indicated where he should look and, while he read through the notes, I asked, “What exactly is antisense?”

Hailey was concentrating. With a frown he was turning the pages quickly and reading intently. I had to repeat the question.

“Antisense is a theoretical way of treating genetic disease. The details are really very simple. Genes are just coded instructions for making proteins. The genes are made of DNA but that stays in the cell nucleus, whilst proteins are made in the cell cytoplasm. In order for the information to be transferred to the cytoplasm, an intermediary molecule is used – RNA…”

He went on like this for some time, as if we were slightly dense tutorial students. After a while Sonya interrupted him.

“So in antisense, you destroy the RNA?”

He shook his head.

“No. You merely make sure that the information that the RNA carries – how to make a protein – cannot be read by the cell. In effect you negate the sense of the information that the RNA carries by introducing an RNA molecule that carries antisense.”

“And thereby switch off the gene?”

“More or less.”

We lapsed into silence while he read the notebooks. Every so often he would mutter to himself.

“Is it possible,” I asked, “To switch off a gene and thereby…kill someone?”

When it finally got through to him, he jerked his head up and looked at me, his mouth forming a circle.

“Kill someone?”

“Yes. Turn off a gene that’s vital to life.”

He didn’t change expression for a long time, just stared at me as if I were the maggot in his apple. Then he said quickly, “The problem has always been getting the antisense molecule into the cells. It hasn’t been easy, not in high concentration.”

Back to the book, where apparently the groves of academe provided cover from the nasty world around him.

Time was getting on.

“From those notebooks, could you say whether Professor Marjolin succeeded in getting the antisense into cells?”

Hailey was near the end of the books. He considered my question for a while, then said, “There are hints that he might, but nothing definite.”

Was he lying? I couldn’t tell.

“Wouldn’t that tie up with your work? Drug delivery?”

His reaction was curious, as if he didn’t want to lie, but didn’t want to tell the truth either.

“Professor Marjolin never approached me to collaborate in this project,” was all he said.

On the way out, Sonya said, “You didn’t answer the question. Would it be possible to kill someone using this technique?”

He looked as if he would rather have done a million other things than answer that one, but eventually he nodded very slightly.

“Theoretically, yes.”

We drove back to my house in silence. When I had parked, Sonya said suddenly, “I don’t buy it.”

“Why not?”

She considered.

“Well, I admit it’s a nice idea, and I admit that it seems to answer some of the characteristics of these deaths, but it begs a million more. For instance, if Professor Marjolin had developed this technology, how come nobody else seems to know about it?”

“I don’t think he did manage to develop it. Not in its entirety.” I indicated the notebooks on the table in front of us. “He was working on the technique, like a thousand others probably are, but he never actually got over the problems.”

She was about to say something but I held up my hand.

“I think Sebastian did. That was basically the work that Sebastian was doing for Hailey – how to get drugs into the right places in the body to be effective. I think that Marjolin teamed up with his son and together they produced the breakthrough.”

She thought about all this.

“Wouldn’t Hailey have known?”

“You saw his reaction in there. What little he knew, he didn’t want to know. Anyway I’d guess the Marjolins father and son would have wanted Hailey right out of it.”

“And what about Vinson? Surely he must have known?”

“Apparently he didn’t. I wonder if Vinson was excluded at Sebastian’s suggestion; or maybe Professor Marjolin didn’t have much confidence in Vinson anyway.

“Whatever happened, I think that father and son started to collaborate and I think that they were successful. I think that they developed a variant of the original substance that could be administered easily and that produced high effective concentrations within cells.”

I waited for Sonya to catch up.

“And Sebastian then used it to kill his father? Is that when he went mad?”

“I think he was already developing his disease. I know his mother dates the onset of his schizophrenia from after the deaths of his father, sister and fiancée, but what Vinson and Hailey said makes me rather doubt that. I think that it is possible that he his first killing was just after the complete delusional complex had formed in his mind.”

I was thirsty and finished my beer. Sonya’s face was hard to read. Then she shook her head, as if she thought I might be spinning stories.

“And this method of killing would be entirely undetectable? It fits with the facts, does it?”

I rushed to agree, like a salesman selling crap.

“It fits absolutely. You see, if Sebastian’s found a means of delivering the drug with high efficiency, the dose need only be small. Also, it is like no other poison or medication that is currently in use. Normal toxicological methods don’t even look for substances like these.

“The only way that you’d find them is if you thought about looking for them. You could probably detect them with fancy things like nucleic acid separation kits, chromatography and hybridisation, but you’d have to know exactly the substance you were looking for: and I mean exactly.

“And if you picked the right gene, there wouldn’t be any evidence of how it had happened. It would be completely without post mortem evidence. In the old you would find a touch of coronary artery disease, or perhaps infection in the lungs, and you would conclude that you had must have found the cause of death. In the young, you might find nothing, but you would be forced to wonder about epilepsy, asthma or some rare metabolic disorder. You would never guess the truth, unless you knew.

“There’s no doubt that it’s the perfect poison.”

Then she looked up and I began to be afraid.

“You haven’t got any evidence for any of this, have you? This is basically speculation.”

“None at all. But that doesn’t stop it being right.”

She said only, “Mmm,” in that way people have.

“I know I’m right, Sonya. I can’t give you a signed confession or a bloodstained hatchet, but I know that I’m right, or bloody close to it.”

I waited ten seconds, the car’s silence filling my head. I was just glancing at the clock on the dashboard to find the bastard thing had already decided it was after one when she looked up at me. I thought she was going to say something, but without a word she opened the car door and got out. She bent down and looked at me in the darkness of the car’s interior.

“I’m sorry, Phil.”

She was going. I couldn’t believe. So much couldn’t I believe it that she was nearly at her car before I had even realised.

“But you’ve got to! For Christ’s sake, Sonya, you’ve got to!”

She turned to look at me, the car door open.

“It no longer matters what I believe. I can’t, daren’t, continue with this unless I can go to my superiors and give them something that will bring them in. And there’s nothing, is there? You’ve worked out a clever way that he could, theoretically, be killing people, but you cannot point to any evidence, any indication at all, that he’s actually doing it.

“And I can’t risk it, Phil. This afternoon, when I was invited to chat with the Superintendent, it was about a lot of things, but most of all it was about me and them and my position in the police force. This afternoon, I was being told that they wanted me to know that I was being tolerated but that was all. I was being given due notice that I had no leeway whatsoever.”

Of all the reactions I had expected from her, I had not even considered this one. I had thought that she was an ally, that she might not understand what I was saying but that she would realise its significance.

“But you don’t understand…”

She interrupted me in a voice that at least had the decency to sound slightly ashamed.

“No, you don’t understand. I’m a graduate police offer, I’m female and I’m living with another woman. Short of being black, I’ve got the full house for being regarded as dogshit by my colleagues. The last thing I need is to be involved with some unofficial vendetta against someone who is undoubtedly mentally ill but who is also, as regards everybody else in the world, innocent.”

There was something in me now that hadn’t been there ten minutes before, that had probably never been within me at all before. It felt like an alloy of panic, fear and rage and I suppose it was really just desperation. For the first time in my life I was afraid that I was to be left without hope.

“You believed me, Sonya. You said that you thought something funny was going on.”

“I still do, Phil. But that’s not the point, is it? Supposing we do find him, what are we going to do? A citizen’s arrest? Clever scientific analysis to show that you were right and the rest of the world was wrong? My superiors breaking down in tears as my colleagues hoist me on their shoulders and bear me through the cheering crowds?

“Is that what you think?” She came right up to me, looking directly at the back of my skull. “I don’t. I don’t think that at all.

“You know what I think will happen? I think that we probably won’t be able to find Sebastian anyway but, if we do, he’ll claim he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. He’ll play the innocent, whispering how you hate him because he’s fucked your wife, how you’ve got it in for him. Perhaps they’ll talk to your girlfriend and ask her what she thinks. They’ll almost certainly talk to his psychiatrist: what’s he going to say?

“You’ll end up looking like a nasty piece, vindictive creep and I’ll end up looking like a prat. If we’re lucky we’ll only lose our jobs. But that’s only if we’re lucky.”

She turned away to get into the car and I couldn’t allow that. I put out my hand and grabbed her arm. She looked at the hand and then back at me.

“Let me go.” The tone was low and somehow scary.

I released her at once and she slammed the door. The engine started.

“He will kill her, you know,” I said through the window. “He’s said he would.”

She drove away from my tears.

It took until three o’clock that morning but eventually I figured out that self-centred despair was only going to kill Kate and so, with only nine hours left, I sat down again, trying to fight through the slightly hysterical fright and the anxiety, to work things out as logically as I could. I knew that I was right about how he was doing it, all that I had to do now was try to discover where he was hiding.

With nothing obvious to go on, the only approach that I could come up with was to try to work out how Sebastian might be thinking. Sonya had looked in all the places that he might be expected to have been in, but there was always the possibility that we were missing the point: Sebastian’s logic was not our logic, and what he saw as a logical place to hide might seem bloody illogical to the rest of us.

But it was hopeless. Another hour passed and I had worked my brain around a thousand possibilities, all of them equally likely, all of them equally and exceedingly unlikely.

Yet still I felt that I was missing something.

The telephone woke me.

“Hi, Phil.”

My gut felt as if an oil slick had ignited within it.

“Sebastian?”

There was no doubt that it was Sebastian, but the sound of his voice was slurred and deep. The call could have been coming from a fissure in the earth.

“Hope I didn’t wake you. I just wondered how you were doing.”

It was after five. Still dark, still emotionally cold and depressing night outside, cortisol levels still telling me that I was supposed to be tucked up in bed.

“What do you want, Sebastian?”

He seemed surprised that I had no time for pleasantries.

“I’d guess that you’re not doing very well…After all, I can’t hear the screech of tires outside…the police sirens wailing…and the news hasn’t told me that I’m Britain’s most wanted.”

Every phrase was separated by the sound of breathing, of instructions received and understood. I wondered what the voices were telling him, what whispered, evil things they were chanting into his brain.

“I will find you, Sebastian. Count on it.”

A laugh.

“I don’t think you have the faintest idea about any of this…This is too easy for me.”

“Give me Kate, Sebastian. Give her to me and I’ll give you the notebooks.”

He sighed, so long and so softly that it died without my realising it.

“Death wins again and you are out of it. Death always wins, doesn’t it? You doctors run around and all you do is extend life into misery, make Death come another way. There is no defeat for Death.”

There was something about his soft voice that seeped into me: I wanted to kill him then, as simple as that, and with that thought, with that clarification of Sonya’s question (What will you do if you find him?) a sort of calm rationality came into me. Suddenly the fear of failure was gone, the dread of losing the game and therefore Kate vanished, and I was left with a simple desire to defeat him.

For a few seconds I said nothing and then, “You’re right, of course, Sebastian. There is no escape from Death. You’ve made the game too hard.”

He said nothing for a long while.

Then, “Have I?”

He withdrew into contemplation.

When he returned, his voice was almost normal, as if he had taken a deep breath and drawn himself together for a big effort.

“You’ve done very well, of course. Getting to David Vinson like that.”

I said, “Really?” I tried to make it as naïve as possible.

Would he buy the innocence? It seemed important to make him believe I was ignorant of the significance of the notebooks, although I could not say why.

There was a silence, the kind that distant relatives experience when talking on the phone: things unsaid are as informative as those that fill the prattle of talk are. I waited as long as I dared, and then decided that if he wasn’t going to bite, I would just have to risk all.

“I’m not getting anywhere, Sebastian. I don’t know how you do it and I don’t know where you are. What chance do I have?”

More silence, but this time it seemed to me that it was contemplative.

“Please, Sebastian.”

Was there too much pleading, too much obsequiousness?

When he spoke again, his voice was again slurred and hard to make out. I had to pin the receiver to my ear to hear what he had to say.

“I sent you gift.”

What did he mean? He had mentioned a gift from Kate – was that what he meant? I was frantic with fear that I had missed something of great importance.

“I haven’t received it, Sebastian.”

I felt as if I were talking to a dying man, trying to extract the location of the will, trying to find the key to the fabulous fortune.

At last he said, “Ask the Doctor.”

What did that mean? I was almost in tears with frustration, but before I could beg him for more the telephone was put down.

Charlie wasn’t going to be delighted at being rung at half past five, but there was no other way. Sebastian’s reference had to have been to Carl and Charlie was the only person I knew that might be able to tell me where he was.

The ringing tone began to sound in my ear.

Once, twice, thrice…

Where was she? I knew that she had a telephone by the bed, so why wasn’t she answering it?

Maybe she was away…

After the sixth ring, there was a click.

“I know it’s early, Charlie, but I’ve got to speak to Carl…”

I stopped, suddenly realising that Charlie wasn’t listening. It was an answer phone, whirring at me, the tape gearing up to play me some pusillanimous message of greeting.

Shit!

I thought about slamming the receiver down, then thought that it was just conceivable that she was using the answer phone to filter calls, that she would actually be listening if I spoke.

I waited.

“Phil? Phil?”

For a second I didn’t understand. The voice was drowsy, almost delirious, soft and far away, but it wasn’t Charlie’s.

I was abruptly flooded with horror as my brain came out of surprise and into comprehension. It was Kate’s voice, drugged or feverish, that whispered down the line.

It repeated.

“Phil? Phil?”

And then again it repeated, exactly the same, as if on a tape loop.

“Phil? Phil?”

I just stood and listened, my mouth open, no breath to make a sound.

When it returned again, it was fainter, as if she were drifting away from me, as if she were becoming comatose or even dying in the darkness.

The fifth time and it had faded almost to silence.

The machine was switched off and the line went dead.

I sprinted for the door, putting on a jacket as I went. I opened the door, feeling for car keys, when I heard a car on the gravel and looked up.

It was Sonya.

She stopped the car and got out as I walked towards her. She wore a look of exhaustion, infuriation and anger.

“I woke up with a crappy head and had to call in sick.”

Before I could say anything she added, “If I help you, I’m kicking my career into Shitsville.”

“He’s ‘phoned me again, Sonya. He says he’s sent me a gift.”

“What does that mean?”

I shrugged. “He says that I should ask the doctor. The only person I can figure that to mean is Carl Volkmann, but when I rang his wife to find out where he might be, I heard Kate’s voice on the answer phone.”

A frown of worry passed across her face.

“How far away is the house?

“Four, maybe five miles.”

In the car I asked, “Why did you come back?”

She didn’t answer for a while.

“You can thank Jo. She pointed out that either I came back to help you, or I would have nothing left of myself to respect. I would have been destroyed by that which I want to change.”

I could sense that she still wasn’t sure that she was doing the right thing.

“Thank you.”

She snorted.

“Thank me when this is over and I’m out of a job,” she advised.

As much to change the subject as anything else, I told her about Sebastian’s mood swings.

“He’s deteriorating fast, I think. His personality is fracturing. I suspect that very soon there will be nothing left of Sebastian.”

“Will he become violent?”

She was concentrating on driving. Put starkly the question could no longer be avoided.

“He thinks that he is Death. I think that he will be capable of the most dreadful acts of violence that it is possible to imagine.”

We spent the rest of the journey in silence.

The house was a brilliantly illuminated as we drove up to the front door. Every light in every room that we could see appeared to be on, and yet there was no indication of life. The effect was far more disturbing and ominous than if it had been in darkness.

Already it was a quarter to six. The sun would soon be rising, effectively another day would begin and there would be less time to find Kate.

I knew as we stood in front of the front door that there would be no response from that house, that Charlie would not hear my rings and knocks and shouts. My only hope was that Sebastian had broken in when it was unoccupied, that Charlie had gone away for the weekend.

The door was open, pulled shut but the latch locked back.

“Charlie?”

The central heating had just come on and the hall radiator was just warming, although the atmosphere was corpse-cold. There was a faint smell of stale coffee in the air.

“What do we do?” I asked.

Sonya’s voice was dusted with anxiety mixed with experience.

“Look around and hope that we don’t find anything.”

We moved on deeper into the house.

“Charlie?”

Nothing.

Was Sebastian still there? Waiting, perhaps, behind a door?

While Sonya went up the stairs, I moved into the living room where so few days before I stood and passed excruciating chatter with Peter and his wife. There was the answer phone. It had been disconnected and the tape removed, and under it was a folded sheet of paper.

Couldn’t wait for you. Hope to see you soon.

It wasn’t signed, but then it didn’t need to be.

We searched the entire house, but there was no sign of Charlie. The bed had been disturbed, and that struck me as deeply worrying and suggestive that she might have been there when Sebastian called, but it was equally possible that he had found the house empty and the rucked sheets of the bed were his idea of a joke.

Which left us with the problem of what to do.

We stood in the living room and looked again at the note. Was Sebastian leading or misleading us? There were only five hours to go and that meant we had to choose the right option the first time.

“There’s no doubt that Sebastian has been here, and that means that we can be sure that his reference to the doctor was either to Carl Volkmann or to his wife.”

“But which?” I asked. “If it referred to Charlie, then this gift of his might be here. But if it was Carl that he meant, then we would be wasting a lot of time looking for it here.”

Sonya looked around.

“This is a big house and we have no idea what we’re looking for. We could look for days under those conditions and still not find it. The task is hopeless. It isn’t even worth starting.”

“So we assume it’s Carl we should be looking for?”

She looked far from confident as she said, “That’s what I would advise.”

To Sebastian, Carl would be the one most obviously identified in his mind as ‘the doctor.’ Perhaps tampering with Charlie’s answer phone was Sebastian’s idea of fun, designed to confuse and delay.

“But where is Charlie?” I asked.

We looked at each other, words unnecessary. I shivered.

“What about telling the police?”

Sonya looked around.

“I admit that it looks suspicious, but we have no proof of a crime as yet. I doubt that anything would be done until either a body appeared or she had been missing for another twelve hours.”

But that still left us with trying to locate Carl.

We went back into the kitchen and started looking for a forwarding address, hoping that relations between Charlie and Carl were not so bad that they had broken off all communication.

I found it quite quickly. A small slip of paper pinned to a cork notice board beside the Aga, the writing distinctively Carl’s.

I will be staying at the Clinic for a while. Please forward my mail there.

It took twenty-five minutes to reach the clinic. The sun was just high enough to make things look gloomier. We drove all the way up to the main entrance and parked right outside the steps leading to the front door. The illumination was from high arc lights, casting multiple, faint shadows. It was going to be a cold day, bright, brittle dew forming on the grass of the lawns around me.

I rang the front door bell and then waited.

When the door opened, it was to reveal James’ worried features. When he recognised me, he registered some relief.

“D-d-d-doctor Reed!”

“Can we come in, James. It’s rather cold out here.”

He allowed us in and shut the door behind us.

“I didn’t know you did nights, James.”

He rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers: money.

“Fair enough. Actually, we’ve called to talk to Dr. Volkmann. I understand he might be here.”

James looked hesitant. He glanced across at Sonya, then back to me.

“W-well,” he said.

“I’m terribly, sorry, James. This is Miss de Morgan. She’s a colleague of mine.”

James smiled and nodded at Sonya, who said in reply, “Hi.”

These politenesses finished, I said, “About Dr. Volkmann.”

Yet still he would not co-operate.

“We’re under orders not to speak to you, or to Mrs. Volkmann.”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard, James, but this is nothing to do with his wife. I have to speak to Dr. Volkmann at once.”

There was yet more hesitation from James. I felt that life – Kate’s life – was too short to allow him the luxury of deep pontification.

“Please, James. It’s urgent,” I plead, trying to make my voice as imperative as possible. “I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t of the utmost priority.”

He nodded at last. We then had to endure the agony of James trying to explain the whereabouts of our quarry.

“H-h-he’s b-been sleeping u-u-u-upstairs. I-I-I-In w-w-w-one of the g-g-g-g-guest rooms.”

“Is he there now?”

Thankfully he nodded.

“Call him.”

James moved across to the reception desk. He looked up the number, then dialled. It rang for a very long time. After five minutes, James put down the receiver.

“Hu-hu-hu-he’s not there.”

And then I think it occurred to both of us that Sebastian didn’t give out straightforward clues. Not when there was murder to be done.

“Which is his room?” I demanded of James. My voice sounded very loud in the dark quiet of the hallway. James looked slightly startled by it. He said, “Th-th-th-thirty-two.”

Thirty-two was on the top floor, where the corridors became narrower, the ceilings slighter lower. It was still opulent and still serenely tasteful, though. The walking across the carpet was like wading in a warm woollen stream. I raised my fist to knock on the door, then dropped it and tried the handle. The door was unlocked.

The room was empty.

“Well, the bed’s not been slept in today,” observed Sonya. She was poking through some magazines on the table beside the bed. I looked around the room: it was like a hotel room, no personality about it or within it. Where was he, I wondered?

Sonya asked, “Is it possible that he decided not to sleep here tonight?”

I was poking my head inside the bathroom.

“Who knows? It’s possible he’s decided to go elsewhere, I suppose, but James clearly thought he was still here. It’s certain that he didn’t go home.”

“So where then?”

It was unlikely, but it was the only suggestion I had.

“Let’s look in his office.”

I led her down the ornate stairs and then out through the back of the house. There was a fair amount of light now, the sky glimmering orange and yellow to our right.

The entrance to the offices should have been locked, but it was slightly ajar. The glass had been smashed, fragments of it lay on carpet beyond.

“It doesn’t seem likely that he’s in there then,” concluded Sonya.

We looked at each other.

“I’ll go first,” said Sonya. Her demeanour had suddenly changed, so that now she was in charge.

I told myself that there was no cowardice in my acquiescence to her command.

The entire building was in darkness.

“Where is the office?” She spoke in a low voice but it wasn’t a whisper.

“To your right. It’s the first door you come to.”

She moved stealthily but not slowly. Carl’s office door was closed but unlocked. Sonya opened it firmly and let it swing open. The secretary’s room was empty and appeared undisturbed.

We walked through and stood before the closed door to Carl’s room. There was no sound from within. Again Sonya opened it and let it swing open. I was half expecting to see Carl, perhaps slumped on the desk, but he was not there.

The room, though, had been ransacked. Files were everywhere, loose paper apparently flung about and come to rest on every available surface. The three chairs in the room were overturned and there was a gap on the wall where Sebastian’s work of art had once hung.

I let out some breath while Sonya moved in front of me, looking around at the mess.

“Sebastian?” she asked in a whisper. She didn’t turn round to face me as she asked this.

“I think so.”

We drew the curtains and put on the light. The light made the mess look worse. The filing cabinet drawers had all been opened and mostly emptied. The drawers of the desk had been forced and the contents emptied onto the floor. The surface of the desk was covered with yet more paper on top of which Sebastian had emptied the soil from a large cheese plant.

“So what does this mean?” asked Sonya. “Another joke?”

“Carl’s missing, just like Charlie. I don’t think that can be called a joke.”

She sighed.

“No,” she agreed. “I don’t think that it can. But why bother getting you all the way over to the clinic just to find all this?”

I was feeling deflated, trying to fight the dread that Sebastian was winning this one without even trying particularly hard.

“I should imagine Sebastian would find it extremely satisfying to get me over here for no good purpose. At the very least it wastes time, at the worst it could involve me in illegal entry and God knows what else.”

Sonya began to move a few papers around, looking at them.

I then voiced the question that had been nagging in my head.

“Do we assume that the Volkmanns are dead? Could he not just have kidnapped them, or something?”

She stopped what she was doing and turned to me with a grimace.

“What do you think? Sebastian has no need to kidnap them, certainly not if you consider how difficult and inconvenient it is to persuade living people to do as you want. Corpses are much easier to handle.”

She spoke quite objectively, as a police officer should. It was for me to mourn the possible death of two of my friends. I thought then of the pain that I had caused Carl, but it was almost certainly too late for me to amend his distress.

Sonya returned to hunting through the mess.

“What are you looking for?”

“Well, if we assume that the Volkmanns have been killed by Sebastian, there could be a specific reason, as there was for killing Vinson.”

I still didn’t follow.

“Well, presumably the Volkmanns would know nothing about molecular or cell biology: the reason for killing them can’t lie in any specialist knowledge they might have. In which case, it’s just possible that Sebastian told Carl Volkmann something during therapy sessions that he now feels might incriminate him.”

I suddenly understood.

“Sebastian’s medical records! You’re looking for his records!”

She nodded.

“It might also explain why he made this mess.”

I looked around the room.

“If Sebastian did do this because he was looking for something that might incriminate him, you realise that he’s probably either stolen or adulterated the notes, don’t you?” I pointed out. I began examining a row of three filing cabinets that was against the wall behind the door.

Sonya said only, “Unless you can suggest something else, we might as well look.”

I went over to the desk and started to help Sonya with the notes. She was standing behind the desk, treading on soil from the plant. I stood in front of the desk decided that the plant had had it. I pushed in bodily to one side so that it fell over and then tumbled off the desk.

The box had been hidden beneath it. It was wrapped in bright wrapping paper on which the salutation, 'Happy Birthday!' was written in gaudy letters.

Some sort of gift for Charlie.

Only it wouldn't be Charlie's birthday for another seven months.

"It's addressed to you."

She was wrong. It couldn't be.

'To Phil, with all my love from Kate.'

The handwriting was spidery, almost querulous.

"Is it your wife's writing?"

"It could be." The admission felt as if were a slice through Kate's throat.

"Well, you'd better open it then." The suggestion was whispered, almost prayed, as if she were afraid of awaking daemons.

Inside the paper was a large jeweller's case, coloured a bright blue. It was the kind of box that ought to contain a necklace.

If only...

I opened the lid, and the hinge was stiff.

On the shimmering, manmade fabric there had been placed, daintiness a prime concern, an ellipse of flesh.

Clotted blood clung to it in gobbets, a chromatographed stain running away from it into the fabric. There was an ellipse of pale skin about ten centimetres long and four wide: beneath it was about three centimetres' depth of ragged, fatty tissue. Tattooed on the wrinkled skin was the word, ‘Death.’

I nearly dropped the thing. Suddenly I couldn't stop myself shaking, there was no breath in my belly and I could feel a high sound of protest rising in my throat. I wasn't thinking whole thoughts, just fears and dreads fragmenting as soon as they formed, whirling around. My mouth was open, my eyes fixed on the opened box. I seemed to be full of nothing but all the terror in the world.

Sonya took the box. Perhaps she had spoken, I could not say. I watched her look up from it and faintly heard the sound, 'Oh,' as her mouth opened. She snapped it shut and put it down on the table. Then she came around the table to me and, taking both my arms, guided me to sit in a chair. She leaned against the table.

A long time I think it was that she waited. I sat in the chair, hunched forward, my head down, seeing patterns on the dirty carpet. After a while she took my hands, cupping them in mine.

Gradually I began to think again. I looked up at Sonya and she said, "Better?"

I drew in breath threw my nose, straightening up. The box was in the middle of the desk, behind and to the left of Sonya.

She followed my gaze and said, "Another prank."

"Ha, fucking, ha."

"It might not be..."

Now that was funny.

"I think we've both seen enough human flesh to know the real thing when we see it."

Poor, dear Sonya carried on trying.

"But it isn't necessarily from Kate."

I snapped.

"Don't be so fucking stupid! Of course he's carved it out of Kate! That's the fucking point!"

She didn't argue the point. It was really irrelevant who was the lucky donor.

She said, "But this seems to be somehow...madder than anything he's done before. It doesn't seem to be entirely consistent."

"That's the point. He's deteriorating. I don't suppose he's been taking the medicine every night, like Nursey told him to. I should imagine that by now any residual effect has pretty much gone, and that means the delusional belief complex will be as rigid as a carapace around him.”

I felt a spear of panic, quite sudden and quite unexpected. God only knew what Kate was going through now. Sebastian's words came back to me – I had to persuade her that she was best off with me.

Was that how he had persuaded her?

I wasn't capable of imagining how much pain she must have been in from the excised flesh, and there was the terrible thought that he might have done much, much worse.

There was a dinky little alarm-chronometer on Carl's desk, a gift from a grateful drug company. It said that the time was seven thirty-eight.

“We've got to find him, Sonya.”

19.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,

Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

I thought about trying to tidy things up a bit, perhaps to hide our presence in the room, but Sonya pointed out that there was no point.

“That chap, James, has seen us and he knows that we have come looking for Carl Volkmann,” she said. “It’s logical that we should have come over here to look for him.”

“So what do we do?”

She deliberated.

“There is no overwhelming need at this juncture to report the disappearance of Carl Volkmann, just as there was no need to report his wife’s. Although we have strong suspicion that they may have been the victims of foul play, we can’t afford the time in explaining the circumstances to the police.”

“What about this? Should we report all this?”

She nodded slowly.

“At least,” she went on, “We should report it to James. Let him inform the police.”

She picked up the jewellery case, using her fingertips as if the exterior were bloodied. She was going to put it in her pocket when I said, “I'll take that.”

Surprised she asked, “Are you sure?”

I just held out my hand and, reluctantly, she gave it to me. I couldn't explain why, but I felt that I owed it to Kate to look after it myself.

Some cleaners were unpacking Hoovers and floor cleaners. A lorry was in the courtyard, emptying catering supplies. There was no point in hiding our presence so we walked across to the main house as if the world was a place of perfection.

James was seated behind the reception desk looking tired. We made him jump as we came up to the desk, so I assume that he had been dozing.

Before he could utter anything, I said, “Listen, James. We’ve had no luck in trying to find Carl, but it looks as if there’s been a break-in at the clinic offices. The front door glass is broken and Carl’s office has been ransacked.”

James at once began to vocalise, although all that came out was a series of staccato consonants.

I had to interrupt him.

“’Phone the police, James. I’d do it myself, but it’s very important that I find Dr. Volkmann. I can’t afford the time to hang around.”

He looked across at Sonya who nodded. As if this were all that he needed, he at once picked up the telephone. We left as he was issuing a series of explosive sounds down the telephone line at the operator.

Outside I asked, “Will that be all right? Won’t the police want to talk to us? Surely they’ll think it odd that we didn’t stay.”

We got into the car.

“They’ll think it very odd, but it won’t be top priority to speak to us. After all, it’s only a break-in. I hope that we’ll have plenty of time to do what we’ve got to do.”

“Which is?”

Her answer was simple but depressingly daunting.

“We find Sebastian.”

I didn’t dare ask how she thought we might achieve it.

She drove to a nearby beauty spot, a look-out place where the city and the surrounding countryside lay flattened out in an ostentatious display of grandeur and scale. The sun was quite high now, although at this time of year it was illumination only. The clouds were high and frail, the sky a weak, cold blue. The wind was sharp and cold.

By the time we arrived it was nearly fifteen minutes after eight, leaving us less than four hours to find Sebastian. We climbed from the car and stood in front of it.

“Where do we start?” I asked, gesturing at the view before us. “He could be anywhere. He could be hiding a hundred miles from here.”

She shook her head. “I don't think so. He's close. Probably a lot closer than you think.”

“It doesn't matter how close he is. If we don't find him in time, he might as well be on another planet.”

Sonya leaned on the bonnet.

“Well, let's start with where he isn't. The first place we checked was his mother's, but she hadn't seen him. I would be fairly sure that she was telling the truth: she had obviously been informed that he had discharged himself from the clinic, but she didn't seem to want to know.”

“That's the impression I got.”

“We then checked the three possible addresses that she had given us: all of those lucked out as well.”

There was nothing to say.

“As for the addresses you gave us, all five of those also proved negative.”

She looked across at me.

“So start thinking.”

I thought that I'd misheard.

“Is that some kind of joke?”

“No,” she said gravely.

“How the bloody hell am I supposed to know where he is? He hasn't given me any clues, he hasn't dropped any hints.”

“Hasn't he? You said that he gave you clues about the way he was killing these poor suckers.”

“Just a few childish clues. Sebastian's idea of a jape. They didn't mean anything in the end.”

“Can we go through them? I’d like to hear about each one in detail.”

“What the hell does it matter? It's not going to help Kate now.”

“Probably not, but humour me anyway.”

“Well, the first thing he did was to give Kate a book. Sense and Sensibility - I assume that you get the joke?”

“A reference to anti-sense, right?”

“Then he carried on in the same vein, really. As you know, he left me a copy of Edward Lear - another reference to sense and nonsense.”

“And then, of course, there was ‘Dada’ written on your forehead.”

“The Dadaists were anarchists; they completely rejected sense. The ultimate believers in ‘anti-sense.’”

“Anything else?”

“Not unless I’ve missed something.”

She considered what I had told her

“Can we get hold of that particular copy of Sense and Sensibility?”

I had to disappoint her optimism.

“Either Kate took it with her or it’s still at the clinic. Either way it isn’t anywhere readily accessible.”

“But what about the Lear? Presumably you’ve still got that?”

“Somewhere, I guess.”

“Did you examine the book? Was there anything odd about it?”

“Not really. It was just a book.”

“He hadn’t written anything inside it?”

“Well, yes, he had. There was an inscription at the front.”

She stood up straight.

“Come on. I want to see this book.”

As we were climbing back into the car, I said, “It was a book, Sonya. Just a book. There aren’t any more clues in it. And, in any case, all the clues he left were for how he was killing people. He’s never left any sort of hint as to where he might be hiding.”

There was a look on her face that was almost one of sorrow as she said, “Maybe. Maybe not. But there’s nothing else that we can do, is there?”

We arrived at my house with only three hours to go. Sonya drove slowly past the front of the house without stopping.

“Aren’t we going in?”

“Is there a back entrance?”

“There’s a lane that leads between two fields. A small gate leads into the garden. Why?”

“Just in case the police come calling here. I don’t particularly want to talk with them just yet, do you?”

Point taken.

“In that case, you’d better back up the lane because it’s too narrow to turn in.”

Even after getting out of the car and going into the back garden, she moved as if we probably being observed. It was only when we were safely in the house and she had checked the front drive that she seemed to relax a little.

It took me fifteen minutes to find the book. Sonya sat at the kitchen table and examined the outside of it minutely, peering down the top of the spine and testing the inside front paper. All the while the clock ticked traitorously on the wall while I watched her languidly doing her detective things. She read the inscription intently, apparently re-reading it time and again. When she began to leaf through the pages one by one, seeming to have developed a scholarly appreciation of the genius of this comic poet, I came close to bursting. At least she had the grace not to smirk at the limericks.

After a while she looked up. Showing no sign that my impatience was in any way irritating her, she said, “Could you get me some coffee? I’m very thirsty, you know.”

It was quite struggle not to tell her in fairly direct terms what she could do with that suggestion. She sort of decided the matter by turning at once back to the book.

It was half an hour and a mug of coffee later that she finally reached the end of the book. With less than three hours to go before Sebastian’s deadline she sighed, put down the book and said, “Nothing.”

Voices screamed inside my head, I told you so! Why the fuck didn’t you listen? You’ve wasted over an hour, you stupid tart! But I said nothing. What was the point? What was the point of anything, so late was the hour?

She was considering again, so cool I could feel the frost.

“There were no other clues? You’re absolutely sure?”

I shook my head. “No.”

For no reason that I could comprehend, this seemed almost to disappoint her.

“I don’t understand it,” she said at last.

Impatiently I asked, “What’s not to understand? He left me with three hints, no more. Why do you think there might be more?”

Considering, she said, “Well, from what you’ve told me, I thought that Sebastian’s view of the world might be warped from our point of view, but it is consistent. Is that true?”

“Self-consistent, yes. What of it?”

Another annoying hesitation, another few ticks of the clock.

“Then presumably these clues that he left were part of the game that he is playing.”

“Obviously.”

She picked up the book, moving it up and down in her hand as if weighing it.

“Then why give you clues as to how he was doing the killing, but not clues as to where he is hiding? I mean, without some sort of information he could, as you said, be anywhere. That doesn’t seem to be fair. You won’t have a chance of finding him.”

For a few seconds, the despair lifted. What she said seemed then to be true. Sebastian might play by different rules, but he did play by rules.

Then, things thumped back down into darkness.

“That might be nice thinking, Sonya, but either he’s left such an arcane clue that I’m too stupid to recognise it, or he really has left nothing else at all.”

“Are you completely sure, Phil? Was there nothing else at all that you received from Sebastian? Nothing at all.”

“Nothing except a dead cat,” I said dryly. Then, almost without conscious thought, I went on, “And a dead rabbit’s head.”

And then there was a gap that was both eternal and brief before my brain at last began to work. There was a single moment of joyous epiphany.

“The fucking personal organiser!”

It took ten precious minutes to locate it but at last I was able to bring it to the kitchen table.

“This belonged to Julian Havers. Sebastian sent it to me along with a rabbit’s head. At the time I just assumed that it was to prove that he had known and killed Julian Havers, but it’s possible that it had another meaning.”

Sonya took the book.

“Look in the back, at the addresses. Sebastian’s name is in there, along with an address.”

She turned the pages to the back, to the list of a dead man’s friends and loves, and found Sebastian’s entry.

“31, Gerota Place.”

She frowned. “That’s derelict.”

“So?”

She looked through the other addresses, although I couldn’t see why. Then, incredibly, she began to look through the rest of the pages.

“What are you doing? We’ve got the address!”

She looked up, mildly.

“Have we?”

Somehow, the tone and words shut me up.

It took another ten minutes for her to look through it, through the scribblings and initials, the odd doodle, the occasional near-intelligible note of something or other, through the brief summary of a young man’s slowly maturing life.

“Any one of these entries could be a clue,” she said at last. “After all, it would be a bit obvious for Sebastian to just write it in like that.”

I shook my head, despair and disbelief mingling within my frustration. Glancing up at the clock, I said, “We’ve only got just over two hours left. We’ve got to try that address. There’s no other choice.”

But still she seemed calm, disinclined to hurry.

She had turned back to the addresses.

“This one is in capitals. None of the others is. It’s the last one in the book as well.”

“So?”

“So maybe Sebastian wrote it in.”

I couldn’t believe this was happening. Here was the last chance and she was rubbishing it, painting it out without even an expression of sorrow or regret.

“However…” she murmured. She had once again turned to the book. She was pursing her lips, concentrating.

“Look through the other addresses. See if there’s one that means anything to you.”

She handed me the book and watched as I looked down the list.

I saw it immediately. It was so obvious it was ravishing, so cute I could have kissed the paper.

Mr. and Mrs. Priestley, Valhalla, Wade Avenue, Fite.

“There!”

Sonya took the book and looked where I was pointing.

“That’s a real address,” she said, “It’s a village about twenty-five miles north of here, across the city. Why do you think he’s there?”

“Valhalla was the palace of Odin, the home of the gods.”

She frowned, shaking her head.

“I don’t get it.”

“Where else would Death go? Especially considering the names of the people who live there.”

When she still didn’t seem to grasp it, I said impatiently, “Priestley! Don’t you see? Sebastian would find it fitting to go to a house where the inhabitants have a name that suggests an involvement with godhead.”

She still seemed reluctant, although she said slowly, “Yes.”

“I’m convinced of it, Sonya.”

She looked up at me.

“If you’re wrong, you understand what that means? There’d be no time to go anywhere else.”

“Can’t we ‘phone them?”

She looked at the entry.

“There’s none given.” She went to the wall phone and dialled directory enquiries. When she asked for the telephone number of the Priestleys there was a pause. Then she grimaced and thanked the operator, putting the receiver back.

“Either they’re not on the ‘phone, or they’re ex-directory.”

“Shit!”

“Which means we have to decide whether to go there or not. I think that is one for you to decide, Phil.”

I looked again at the address, but the feeling of certainty wouldn’t go away.

“I’m sure.”

Sonya sighed, “If Sebastian is there, I wouldn’t hang on to much hope on the chances of Mr. and Mrs. Priestley still being alive.”

Much as I grieved for the Priestleys, there was little that we could do about that.

“How long will it take us to get there?”

She considered.

“It’s on the other side of the city. It’ll take at least forty-five minutes.”

That would leave just over an hour. Sonya was looking at me, clearly leaving the decision to me.

For a second I hesitated, then I realised that there was no choice. No choice at all.

“Come on,” I said and then, just as we were about to go out of the back door, there came a knock on the front door. There was something about it that sounded awfully official.

Sonya put her finger to her lips, then moved quietly to the kitchen door. She opened this silently and moved out into the hall. Thankfully the front door was solid wood, so she was able to go into the front lounge without being seen.

It was whilst she was out that I went to the kitchen drawer and withdrew a large cook’s knife. I put in the inside breast pocket of my jacket, splitting the lining so that the blade slipped deep down inside. I figured that if Kate and I both got through this, she wouldn’t mind doing the necessary minor repairs.

When Sonya returned, she ushered me out of the back door without saying anything. I locked the door and we sprinted for the back gate.

Sonya drove the car steadily along the lane and then turned left at the end, away from the house. We didn’t see any other cars.

“Who was it?” I asked.

Her reply was toneless.

“Two of my colleagues.”

We couldn’t hurry and the traffic was fairly bad, swelled by Saturday morning shoppers who either didn’t know where they were going or couldn’t drive or both. There were a couple of occasions when we saw police cars but they ignored us completely.

Fite was small and rural, set back from the main northbound road out of the city, reached by a side road that was narrow and ill-defined at its sandy edges. Hedgerows sprawled out irregularly in scattered places and the road sign that told us of the approaching crossroads was almost obscured by a large elder bush.

The only shop was at the crossroads, a combined village stores, post office and newsagent that also apparently supplied liquid gas and took in dry-cleaning: presumably it defied the laws of physics and was larger inside than out. We never actually found out because it was shut. Apart from the road along which we entered the village there was no other major thoroughfare. There were no pavements and there was no street lighting and, because there were no people, it felt like the day after the Martians came.

After eight precious minutes, someone at last came into view. He was about sixty years old and dressed in a tatty three piece suit and tie. On his head was trilby and on his feet were wellington boots liberally coated with some species of manure. He carried a thick cane walking stick. His red, veined face didn’t alter its expression one whit as Sonya stopped the car beside him and I asked him the whereabouts of Wade Avenue through the opened window.

He considered this question deeply and seriously. By the time an answer of sorts came forth in a thick, country burr, I was ready to scream at him. The clock on the dashboard had flicked through two minutes but I knew that it was lyingly slow.

In the end he didn’t actually say anything intelligible. He grunted some sort of syllable and pointed behind us and to our right with his stick.

Sonya turned the car around and we moved slowly off in the direction indicated. We turned right down the first side turning and then drove along this muddy track that passed for civilisation in these parts. The tall hedges on either side meant that it was dark and enclosed.

Wade Avenue was the second on the left. Even narrower and muddier than its parent road, it was far more open, with low fences and hedges separating widely-spaced bungalows. We passed a succession of twee and slightly nauseating abodes - ‘Hazel Cottage,’: ‘Yew Tree Bungalow’ and even, can you believe it, ‘Cum Bah’ - before ‘Valhalla’ appeared on our right.

“There!”

Sonya didn’t shift her gaze as she murmured, “I see it.”

She kept the same speed, looking ahead, occasionally to the right or left but never at the house.

“Tell me when we’re out of sight of the house.”

We had to travel a further hundred and fifty metres before I thought we were safe. Then she stopped the car and said, “It’s very open. He’s going to see us coming from a long way off, if he hasn’t spotted us already. There’s no possibility of a surprise element. I’m not even sure if there’s access from the back, so we’ll be forced to come at him from the front.”

I admit to some puzzlement when she said all this.

“Surprise? What do we want to surprise him for?”

Sonya raised her eyebrows.

“What else do you suggest?”

“We play the game. I found him, so I win. That means I get to take Kate away from him. What happens to him after that is up to you lot.”

“And you think you’ll just walk in there, he’ll give you a boyish grin and let the two of you walk out of there?”

There appeared to be something approaching scepticism in her words.

“Yes, I think he will. I think he’ll abide by the rules, his rules.”

“Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? He’s mad, you’ve said so yourself. And you’ve seen how he’s deteriorating because he’s not been taking the tranquillisers. Do you really think you can trust him to acquiesce just like that?”

“The belief systems of psychotics are rigid and they become more rigid as they get sicker. I think he’ll be far more bound by the rules than I am. In any case, what’s the alternative? You’ve just said how difficult it’s going to be to surprise him.”

She looked back along the lane. After a few moments she got out and walked carefully back the way we had come, keeping close to hedges that were just hiding us from the house. She stayed out there for five minutes, peering through the foliage, then she returned.

“Okay,” she agreed. “If you’re sure, we’ll do it your way. But we need an insurance policy. You never do this kind of thing without making bloody sure that there’s either back-up or an element of surprise.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Normally I’d be talking about half a dozen armed officers, but this isn’t normal. The first thing we do is telephone for help. The second thing we do is wait.”

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes past eleven.

I shook my head. “Sorry, Sonya.”

I began to get out the car.

“Phil? Phil?”

I was out of the car and past the bonnet before she caught up with me. She pulled me back by the arm. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Look, Sonya, in thirty-nine minutes time, Sebastian has said he will kill Kate. Make no mistake about that, he will kill her. To him that is as inevitable as the next beat of his heart. We can’t wait.”

“Okay, okay, but if you just waltz in there without any cover at all, and you’re wrong about him, then it is equally inevitable that he will try to kill you as well as Kate. We need to plan for that.”

I looked again at my watch.

“Thirty-eight minutes, Sonya. Start planning.”

For long instants she thought and then she said, “You go in, alone. We just have to hope that he didn’t see the car as it went past. While you’re walking up to the house, I’ll ‘phone for reinforcements. As soon as you’re inside, just keep him talking as long as you possibly can. Do anything you can to keep him away from the windows and occupied. I’ll scout around the back, try to stay out of sight and try to see if there’s a way in through the back.

“Have you got anything that makes a loud noise? If things do get unpleasant in there, it would be useful if you let me know outside.”

I thought about the knife. That would make a loud noise, I thought.

Shaking my head, I said, “I’ll shout loud and long if things go pear-shaped. Don’t you worry about that.”

She nodded.

I began the long walk to Valhalla.

20.

In the midst of life we are in death

Just an ordinary house. Not grand, not even particularly pretty. Just ordinary.

It was a long garden, the path paved and bending: there were even small garden gnomes placed along its edges. It was all neatly tended, although I noticed that the lawn needed a cut and I tried not to wonder why. There was a vegetable plot in the front garden and I could see that it had been a good year for Brussels sprouts. They needed a bit of water, though. The bungalows to right and left were similarly kept, similarly cosy. I could imagine that in the summer evenings all these gardens were occupied by people, middle-aged and older, occasionally stopping to exchange words.

I had never before taken a longer walk. When I took my finals at medical school I remember that the corridor along which I went for my final viva, the one at which they could decide whether or not you were just that little bit too hopeless to risk upon the general population, had seemed very, very long indeed.

But this, walking up to the blue front door, towards windows that I knew were looking back at me, this was a million miles of adrenaline and churning anxiety. I didn’t dare feel the knife in my pocket but, in truth, there was little comfort to be had in its presence. Did I really think that I could stick into another human being, no matter how mad, how lost from humanity he was?

I thought of Sonya, thought of her ringing the police, and tried to lift the sense of dread that I felt.

I tried, at any rate.

I stopped about five metres from the door, looking up at Velux window in the roof. Was Kate in there? There was no sign of life at all.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I would knock on the door and Mrs. Priestley would open it with a cheery smile and then Mr. Priestley would appear from the kitchen at the rear and they would stand there looking at me, slightly perplexed at what I could possibly want.

But that would be worse. That would mean that Kate was elsewhere and that I had missed the final chance to find her and save her.

I knocked on the door.

While I waited, I looked at my watch. Half past eleven. For a moment the second didn’t seem to move and at once I was seized by the fear that it had stopped, that I had been fooled by God yet again, that it was already too late to save what remained of the Kate I had once known. Then the second hand finished its joke and began to sweep around while I stood there and in no time at all there were only twenty-nine minutes left.

I knocked again. I looked around but there was no human life to be seen anywhere around. Where were they all?

I experimentally pushed the door. At first I thought it was firmly shut, but a second shove moved it slightly; a third and it was open. It had been held shut by a warped frame.

I smelled the first faint odour of decay then, flowing out of the interior of the house. It was a smell I knew well: the smell of an old, lonely man who fell asleep in front of the gas fire and never woke up, the smell of a woman who has hung herself from the banisters not to be found for a further six days, the smell of all lonely deaths.

But was it Kate?

The interior was dark. I debated whether to call out, deciding against it. I stepped across the threshold, feeling more than ever that I was truly walking into a charnel house. The smell was at once magnified a hundredfold.

The entrance hall was long narrow and dark, running into the heart of the house, then turning to the right. The carpet was dirty and muddied. Just at the turn in the hall, a closed door was situated on the left. Two pairs of old shoes, one male and the other female, were on the left. They were beneath a mirror around which a variety of shabby clothes were hung.

With a final glance back at the world and a feeling that I was leaving normality, I moved into the house. There was no sound at all to be heard from the house; the blows of my heart against my ribs, and the rasping of air through my dry throat were all there was in this quiet place.

At the turn in the corridor, I peered forward and to the right, where the hall continued on. Another closed door was on the right, ten metres past which the hall turned left. Still nothing.

I looked at the door on my left.

With a feeling of disembodied, fear-filled anticipation, I put my hand to the doorknob, turned and pushed, hoping that it would move silently.

The smell wafted out on the air current and made me catch my breath, but it was the scene before me that made me close my eyes against tears.

The Priestleys sat in their front sitting room, facing each other across a low table. They were in high-backed armchairs, erect in posture with their forearms resting on the arms. Anti-macassars made a background for their heads and their slippered feet were placed squarely on the ground, parallel and perfect. The television was off, but neither was complaining.

The tea had been made, cups and saucers, sugar and milk – even teaspoons – were neatly arranged on a low table between them. There were three of everything because the Priestleys had a guest.

Charlie sat on the sofa. She was incongruously dressed in a night-shirt, given the slightly formal garb of her host and hostess. It was must have taken Sebastian some time to arrange them all so neatly.

They were green, of course, the Priestleys more so than the Charlie. The exposed flesh mottling nicely, a few patches of skin slippage where presumably Sebastian had brushed past them or maybe adjusted their posture. A few flies buzzed around, no doubt feeling the first pangs of incipient motherhood.

I wondered where Carl was. In another scene from provincial life, perhaps. Maybe he was in the kitchen battling rigor mortis whilst doing the washing up.

The door opened.

I looked up and into Sebastian’s eyes.

He was smiling broadly but that didn’t hide the light of dislocation that I saw in his eyes. If I had thought him mad before, I had been mistaken. Now I could see that he had changed, that the belief system had swallowed him alive and he looked out from a world where reality had no place.

“Phil! At last! I thought you weren’t coming.”

“You didn’t make it easy.”

He laughed. A hearty sound, full of companionship and delight at seeing me. Then he looked past me at the party. A glance at his face told me that he thought they made a nice tableau. There was little point in asking for an explanation of this monstrosity.

“Where’s Kate?” I asked quietly, trying not sound panicked.

He said only, “Around.”

“Can I see her?”

He didn’t seem to hear. Instead he said, “We’d better leave these good people alone. Come through to the kitchen.”

I shut the door behind me and followed him along the corridor, past the closed door on our right. I wondered what particular display he had in there: the milkman perhaps, or possibly the entirety of the local Women’s Guild.

The corridor turned again and there were two more closed doors, one on either side, before it ended in the kitchen. This was small and old-fashioned, the only concession to modernity being a small microwave oven. The decor was stringently pre-seventies and unwashed, a sort of greasy grime clinging to all the surfaces.

“Coffee?” asked Sebastian. He was already sorting through a mound of unwashed crockery and cutlery. I noticed that there was a hammer on the shelf above the cooker but, although I thought it an odd place to keep it, I considered it no more.

“I want to see Kate, Sebastian.”

“And you shall. But first coffee, I think.”

“Now, Sebastian,” I insisted. “I won the game.”

He paused, his hand dropping a red mug that he had just picked up. It bounced off the bottom of a plate on the draining board and smashed on the floor at his feet. He turned slowly around to face me. He was still smiling.

“No you didn’t,” he said.

It was as much the way he spoke as the words he used. There was no space for contradiction in them, no capability of recognising that he might not be right. I began to feel so afraid that I felt sick.

“Yes, I did, Sebastian. Remember? I had until noon today to find her. That was in the rules. And we have to abide by the rules, don’t we?”

The smile seemed not to change for a while, but then I saw that it was slowly broadening and deepening, and, with this exaggeration, I saw that in his eyes there was a type of gleeful insanity.

“Oh, yes, Phil,” he said happily. “We always play by the rules.”

“Well, then.”

He giggled at first, but it was soon so wonderfully funny to him that he was almost doubled up with jollity. It took him a few moments to compose himself again, time in which I found my hand in my jacket pocket, feeling the handle of the knife.

When at last he could speak again, he said, “You forgot rule forty-two, Phil.”

“Rule forty-two?”

He nodded gravely. “I bet you didn’t read all the way through the rules. I bet you skipped the ones at the end.”

I held the knife a little more tightly.

“Tell me about rule forty-two, Sebastian,” I suggested.

“That’s the most important one. That’s the only one that matters really.”

“What is it?”

He sighed.

“It’s quite simple. ‘Death always wins.’”

To say that I felt disappointment would be an understatement: to say that the disappointment was at the same time overwhelmed by fear would also be minimising what I felt as he said this. It was suddenly borne upon me what I was going to have to do.

“That’s not fair, Sebastian,” I pointed out.

He made a face, a mix of mockery and unconcern.

“Well, I suppose this is where Death says that life isn’t fair.”

He cracked up again at his wittiness.

“Take me to Kate,” I said.

He shook his head.

“No. You lost.”

“You’re not Death, Sebastian. You’re a spotty little man with a clever Dad, that’s all.”

He stopped suddenly, narrowing his eyes.

“Dad?”

There was a flicker of movement through the window behind him. Was that Sonya?

“I know how you do it, Sebastian. I figured out how you killed those people.”

The smile returned. There was some slyness in his expression as he asked, “Do you?”

“Your father was a clever man. He cracked the problem of anti-sense, the problem of how to turn off genes and thereby treat cancer. All you did was steal it and turn it against him.”

He was shaking his head, making faces of confident denial.

“You adapted it so that it would kill people,” I persisted. “Which gene did you choose, Sebastian? One of the respiratory ones, I bet.”

“No,” he said simply. “No, no, no.”

“You can deny it, Sebastian, but it won’t do any good. You’re not Death; you’re just a mass murderer. A loony with a vial of poison.”

Was there a sign of strain on his face? Was I getting through the psychosis?

“You killed your father because he knew about it, but why did you kill your girlfriend? And what about your sister? Were you getting a taste for it by then?”

He was concentrating, thinking back perhaps. There was a shadow at the frosted glass of the backdoor. I was unsure whether to risk it now, to bring out the knife and stick it into his stomach as far as the hilt would allow, or to shout out and call Sonya in so that we could overpower him together.

In the event, the decision was made for me. Sonya must have knocked over a milk bottle or something, for there came the sound of breaking glass from the garden behind Sebastian. He whirled around and saw the diffused shadow in the glass of the door. He began to turn back to me, his mouth open to say something, but he didn’t actually get the chance.

As soon as he had turned away, I gripped the knife, took it out of my pocket and pushed it towards his torso. There was a surprising amount of resistance but then, suddenly, it slid through the skin, the subcutaneous fat, the muscle of the abdominal wall and penetrated his upper abdomen. I remember thinking it was probably in his liver.

It was a strange feeling, for medicine slices, never stabs, but it was nothing compared with the strangeness of the feeling I got when Sebastian stopped, looked down, looked up and smiled.

In fact, that particular smile made me want to run away from that room as fast as I could. That smile terrified me.

He looked down again, this time for longer, as if he himself couldn’t quite believe it, then he breathed in, perhaps experimenting and, obviously satisfied, looked directly into my eyes. Just then I wanted to be anywhere but there.

There was a look of triumph on his face.

The only thing that I could think to do was to shout and, boy, did I yell. It brought Sonya in with a crash of the door that broke the glass and for a second she just stood in the doorway and looked at me and looked at Sebastian.

With a speed that would have been impressive for anyone, let alone someone with a major knife wound, Sebastian turned, dived for the hammer by the cooker and brought it up. There was a detached, mechanical air about the way that he strode across the room, raised the hammer and smacked it down on Sonya’s head. She tried to stop him, but the speed with which he approached her was extraordinary. All she could do was raise her arms and twist her head, warding the blow to one side.

The thud as it hit her skull sounded like the Devil’s kiss.

I couldn’t do anything. She collapsed as if all of life’s breath had been sucked from her, falling vertically and heavily down, her head smashed again, this time by the cold hardness of the floor. Her face was hidden behind blonde hair but there was already blood spreading around her head. She didn’t move, not even apparently to breathe.

Sebastian stood over her. He wasn’t seemingly tired by the exertion and when he turned back to face me, his face, although possibly slightly pale, still bore an almost idiotic grin. Despite the fact that there was a pleasantly large red stain around the knife, he wasn’t even panting.

He dropped the hammer beside the body without a thought. Then he looked down at the knife handle and touched it gently: then he closed his fingers around it, looked up at me from beneath his eyebrows and pulled it smoothly out.

His face registered no pain. Examining the blade for a second, he pursed his lips and said, “You can’t beat Death, Phil. You of all people must surely appreciate that.”

I kept telling myself that soon he would feel the effect of the knife wound, soon he would lose so much blood that he would feel faint and weak, and then I would be able to surprise him. The only trouble was, I didn’t think I had much time, and he seemed to have a good way to go before he realised that he was not really invincible.

He pointed the knife in my direction and walked towards me. His steps were firm and his gait was steady. I think it was at that point that I first began to wonder if he really was supernatural.

“Come on, Phil. Let’s go and see Kate.”

There was something about the way that he said it that made pain inside my chest.

He forced me to walk in front of him, down the corridor a short way until we were outside the first door on the left.

“Open it,” he suggested. His voice was close to tenderness.

I turned the handle and pushed the door open. It stuck slightly in the frame and then came free. There was no waft of putrefaction.

I walked into the bedroom and Sebastian followed me.

Kate lay on the bed; her hands tied to its head. She was plainly still alive, but unconscious, her breathing stertorous and ragged. There was a sheen of sweat on her face and even as I looked her whole body was shaken by a violent rigor. Although her upper body was partially covered by clothes, these were disturbed and rucked up, half exposing one of her breasts. Her lower body was hidden by a single sheet on which was a large, partly dried bloodstain.

She had fouled the bed.

“She got sick,” said Sebastian, his tone suggesting puzzlement. “My bride became sick.”

I didn’t whether to laugh, cry or just commit suicide by turning around and smacking him in the face. I swivelled around and almost surrendered to the impulse to go out in glory, but the look on his face stopped me. He genuinely couldn’t understand what was going on, why she should be so ill.

I started to move towards the bed, but at once Sebastian jabbed the knife in my back.

“I can help her,” I said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Please, Sebastian. I can make her better.”

I thought for just a moment that I had persuaded him, but I had forgotten that he was mad.

“There’s no need, Phil.” Suddenly his voice was silked smoothness.

He took out of his breast pocket a small glass bottle. It was filled with clear, viscous fluid. There were only about five c.c.s in it.

“What’s that?” I asked, although I could easily guess.

“Death’s Tears,” he said, which I thought was rather high blown.

“And what are they for?”

He didn’t seem to mind that we were into silly games: I suppose he was too far gone and couldn’t comprehend that anyone would stand in front of Death and play stupid buggers.

“Just a drop on her lips. They will give her peace.”

“And if I don’t?”

He frowned and for the first time he seemed to be affected by the stab wound, for he closed his eyes briefly before speaking again.

“I will slice her throat.” Then, just in case I felt left out, he added, “After I have sliced yours.”

He was looking decidedly pale now, but not pale enough as far as I was concerned. Was he never going to fall over?

He held out the bottle. I was about to take it when suddenly he snatched it back and said, “Don’t think that you can do anything foolish, Phil. I will have the knife to your throat throughout. Turn round.”

At first I hesitated but then he began to advance towards me, the rictus above the blade. When I came into contact with the side of the bed and he kept coming, I decided that there was little valour to be had here. I held up both arms and turned around.

Close up, Kate looked close to dying herself. She smelt of stale sweat and urine, and there was a blueness around her lips that worried me. Her breathing was cyclical in amplitude.

I felt Sebastian come up behind me, the knife coming around in front of me to press into the soft flesh just to the left of my laryngeal cartilage. His left hand came round and in it was the glass bottle, held between forefinger and thumb.

“Take it,” he whispered into my right ear.

I took the bottle.

How volatile was it? Would it achieve anything to smash it against the wall or crush it in my hand? Would it vaporise and kill us all?

“Go on. Just a drop on her lips. It is quite easily absorbed from mucosal surfaces.”

Would I be able to throw it back over my shoulder and into his face? It would probably catch me as well, so we would both die. What then of Kate? Were the police coming and would they arrive in time to save her?

He pressed harder and I felt pain as the blade sliced through the epidermis.

I unscrewed the cap slowly, holding the bottle out in front of me.

“Is this how you killed the others? Did you wait until they were asleep, or did you stick it in their food?”

His answer was a short, sharp slice that made me suck in breath with a loud, gasping shout.

“Don’t delay, Phil. I have other matters to attend to. People never stop dying, you know.”

I could feel blood trickling down inside my shirt. I began to bend forward, proffering the bottle close to Kate. If I was going to do anything, I would have to do it now.

I hesitated for a moment and I could hear Sebastian behind me breathing quickly. Was that because he was turned on by this or because he was losing consciousness? He seemed to be muttering something, but I couldn’t tell what.

Suddenly he dug again with knife, so deep that I feared for my external jugular vein, the pain making me jump.

“Go on!”

I began to tilt the bottle, moving as slowly as I could.

The next moment froze for a hundred years, as there came from behind us a sudden, falling sound, gasping and shuffling loudly erupting from the doorway to the room.

Sebastian’s grip loosened and the knife came momentarily away from my throat. I righted the bottle and shoved back with my knees braced against the bed. For a second he was off balance and I thought he was going to fall backwards.

He was still close behind me, but for an instant he was close to falling and I braced myself again and pushed backward with even more force. It was as he began to topple that I felt a vicious thump in the side of my abdomen. It was as if he’d just kicked me, although I couldn’t see how it was physically possible for him to have done so.

I looked down to see the knife sticking in my side. The sight and therefore the realisation of what had happened brought the pain to an intensity that I would not have believed possible, but there was too much going on to appreciate it fully.

I looked up as Sebastian was falling to his knees, revealing behind him Sonya. She didn’t look too good, what with blood covering half of her face, an expression of glazed agony and a hammer in both hands raised above her head, but she looked fucking marvellous to me at that moment.

For the second time in ten minutes the hammer came down, but this time it was with the kind of satisfying, crunching thump that brings out the happy side to my nature. She caught him full square on the vertex and it was Sebastian’s turn to look understandably perplexed at the vagaries of the world.

And yet he didn’t go down all the way.

Sonya, the exertion of the blow having used up whatever was keeping her going, took one tired look at Sebastian and dropped to her knees, but her victim appeared more surprised than rent asunder. The hammer dropped from Sonya’s gasping hands as she looked at him.

He stood there and the world was for us still and calm. Nothing was moving in that room. It was as if we were damned and cast forever into a scene of hellish carnage: Kate on the bed, Sonya on her knees with bloodied head, I with a knife in my side and Sebastian, still standing despite a hammer blow to the head and deep stab wound in the stomach.

And then he smiled.

The sound of his voice was full of wonder as he whispered, “I told you!”

He began to turn away from me and towards Sonya. His eye fell on the hammer and he bent to pick it up. She was too sick to stop him, although you could see in her eyes that she knew what was coming.

I remember thinking that there was nothing I could do now, that he was going to batter her skull into bony splinters, and that then he would turn his attention to me and to Kate.

Nothing I could do.

He was picking the hammer up, but he dropped it, as if his fingers weren’t quite in agreement with the action plan. He tried again, this time with success.

I thought about the knife in my side, began to move my hand to grab the handle, then realised what I was still holding.

He was starting to stand, but he was slow.

I took a deep breath and that hurt like shit but it kept me awake at least.

He was almost upright now.

“Sebastian.”

He didn’t hear me, or perhaps he didn’t want to.

“Sebastian!”

He was raising the hammer.

“SEBASTIAN!”

He turned at that, although the pain it caused me nearly made me faint. It was only a quarter turn. His face was white and without expression.

I thrust forward, hoping desperately that whatever came out of the bottle would not land on Sonya, hoping that it would not evaporate and kill us all, hoping that it would be a quick thing.

His reaction was to blink as drops of the liquid sprayed in his face. He paused, then shook his head.

Then nothing.

His grin was wide and sly.

“Sorry, Phil,” he murmured.

He turned away from me and raised the hammer high.

There was a thud as it dropped from his fingers and bounced on the carpet. Then, his arms still above his head, he crumpled, first to his knees, then sideways. His spotty face looked across the carpet at eternity.

21.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men

Someone walked into the bungalow.

I had fallen on him side, aware of nothing but pain, blood and how little air there was in the world. My head on the floor, I could see Sonya across the room, her head almost completely caked in blood clot, just kneeling with her head back against a red-smeared wall. She didn’t look conscious. Kate was behind me, moaning occasionally.

The footsteps sounded in the corridor. I couldn’t believe that they would someone miss us, but I called out anyway. I stopped as the effort paid me back with savage anguish. I waited, the world turned on its side.

Brown leather shoes appeared in the doorway, stopping just inside. I expected something to happen. Presumably there would be a gasp, perhaps an entreaty to God, certainly a rush forward to help.

Yet there was nothing.

For long seconds the shoes just waited, no sound.

Then they moved to Sonya, and the knees bent.

Carl.

His face was calm and even though I wasn’t at my dandiest, I thought it all a bit odd. He checked Sonya’s pulse. Next he went to Sebastian, again checking for life. Then he turned to me.

“Hello, Phil.” The voice was disturbingly calm.

He rose so that it was only his shoes again. They walked across to me and became huge, as if here be giants. A huge hand came down from the clouds and picked up Sebastian’s vial. He went behind me, presumably to check out Kate. For a few seconds there was nothing, then I felt hands under my arms and with a small grunt he lifted me off my side and into a sitting position. I had thinking that the pain couldn’t get any worse, but it proved me wrong. It scaled a height that transcended mere agony, but when he began to drag me back across the floor, for a few seconds it melded into something physical and malevolent.

He backed to the wall and stepped away so that I could lean against it. His bloodied hands he wiped on one of the bed sheets. He was always fastidious. Then he came to crouch in front of me. There was a serious look on his face.

“I am sure that your friend called the police before venturing in here, so I don’t have long.”

I couldn’t yet speak, was wondering if I ever would again, so I didn’t ask him what the bloody hell was going on. Thankfully he proved perspicacious.

“I expect you’re wondering what’s going on.”

Got it in one.

“When I discovered that you were bedding Charlie, I was faced, as all cuckolds are, with the options of ignoring it or doing something about it. I think it was your obnoxiously arrogant attitude that decided me.”

Whatever my brain said, there was no way my body was going to be able to express the shock and surprise I now felt. From a saviour his words suddenly now transformed him into someone every bit as dangerous as Sebastian.

“You see, kind as it was of Sebastian to let me in on the secret of you and Charlie, I had known for some time before that.”

His words were a distraction. It was clear that he wasn’t telling me all this so that I could put it in his biography, so I could only assume that this was a preliminary to my execution. And that meant I had to think of some way of stopping him.

“Why is that all lovers are so certain that they are undetectable?” he pondered. “Anyway, having determined to act, it was merely a matter of working out how and when.”

The pain was gradually subsiding but my breathing was getting worse. I was certain that there was blood pooling in my chest.

“Are you…” I began, but I had to stop for a couple of moments. Very politely he waited. “Are you going to kill me?”

He smiled modestly, but didn’t answer.

“And poor little Sebastian proved so helpful. Sebastian with his delusional complex based on Death, so well worked out, so beautifully formed and cast into the stone of his mind. It occurred to me that here was a man who might be induced to view you as an enemy, who might be persuaded to take you on as an opponent.”

I was trying to start my brain thinking, but it kept going off at tangents.

“When he showed some attraction for poor Kate, I am afraid that I encouraged him.”

How was he going to kill me?

“And then, in the course of therapy, he happened to let slip how he had killed his father and the others. That night, the knowledge safely mine, I thought that I had been blessed. Here was the answer. Here was the way not only to kill you but to make you suffer!”

He sounded as mad as Sebastian and I might have said so, except that he had reached into his pocket and brought out a vial that was full of clear, colourless liquid. He held it up for me to see.

“So who did the killing, Carl? Who killed all those innocents?”

He appeared slightly shocked that I should suspect him.

“Sebastian, of course. He was desperate to prove himself in the role of Death. I merely suggested that the victims should be designed to interest you. Get you to play the game.”

I knew that I had to talk now, no matter how much it hurt. Had to talk about one thing and think about another. At least I knew how I was to meet my end.

“And Kate?”

“Ah, when Sebastian fell in love with Kate, it was quite easy to push him into observing you. Once she had discovered your infidelity, her reactions were entirely predictable.”

Say something else!

“You should become an actor, Carl. Your scene in the car park was brilliant if you had really known all along about Charlie and me.”

The bastard actually looked flattered.

“Of course,” he said modestly, “It helped being told she was pregnant by you. That was news, and certainly something of a shock.” He sighed and his glance flicked in the direction of the living room. “Unfortunately, it also meant that whatever hopes I had had in the direction of a reconciliation became dissipated.”

“Did you kill her?”

He shook his head.

“I haven’t killed anyone,” he assured me but spoiled it by adding, “Yet.”

“But you suggested that Sebastian might like to kill her?”

He shrugged. He looked at the vial, then back at me. “It is amazing that something that appears so innocuous should be so lethal.”

“And the Priestleys?”

I think that he was becoming worried about the time. He stood up and I began to panic. I was in no state to resist, and anyway I had no weapon.

“I told you, I have killed no one until now. Once Sebastian decided that you were an opponent to be bested, he did everything, albeit with the occasional direction from me. It’s only a pity that he didn’t quite manage to finish you off.”

Say something! Anything!

He looked again at the vial. When he twisted the top off, he looked in my direction thoughtfully.

“You can’t kill me in front of Kate and Sonya.”

Carl smiled.

“I don’t think they’re in any sort of state to know anything.”

“Won’t it look a bit odd to the police if you’re here?”

He shrugged.

“Whatever they think, they’ll have the testimony of your wife and your policewoman friend to think about. There’s plenty of evidence to show that Sebastian was a madman who stuck a knife in your side. And this, of course, won’t be detectable.”

He raised the vial and began to move forward. At least he had the grace not to smile.

And thankfully, neither did I. Ironically, Carl had given me the answer.

I groaned and leaned forward, clutching my midriff. It hurt as if the Devil’s fire were consuming me, but I knew that if I lost consciousness I would be dead. Carl kept coming toward me and I tried not to think about what I was about to do.

He stood over me for a moment, then crouched down. He lifted my chin, saying softly, “Just a drop, Phil. It’ll be a relief, I should think.”

He held the vial over my lips and began to tilt…

I shut my eyes, but it wasn’t to receive his benediction. While he concentrated on the liquid, I grasped the knife that was buried deep in my side, pulled it out, screamed and drove it as hard as I could into Carl’s epigastrium, through his diaphragm and, I hoped, into his heart.

His face lit up, as if electrified. Air went between his teeth and he paused. He froze and I saw that the vial was vibrating between fingers that were no longer alive. Feeling as if all the world’s agony was focused in my body, I drove one last time and pushed him as hard as I could. He fell back and the vial flipped into the air, splattering his trousers and the carpet around him.

I began to pass out, greyness seeping into my eyes.

I dimly wondered if this was Sebastian’s potion, not really caring any more.

It was the last I knew.

In the event it was Kate who recovered first, physically at least. Kate who had been through the worst, who had had the odd pound of flesh hacked out from her thigh and who subsequently developed septicaemia, who had been repeatedly raped and beaten, Kate who had been tied to a bed for days on end and petrified by the slow deterioration of Sebastian.

I was confined to bed for a week, the knife having found its way into my kidney, narrowly missing my inferior vena cava. I lost a kidney, a fact that the surgeon who operated disseminated in a cheerful and, I thought, quite inappropriate manner. I kept telling myself that I only needed one, but I am by nature a cautious man and I felt exposed without the added insurance of a spare.

Poor Sonya was the gravest of us, the hammer blow causing a skull fracture with acute subdural haematoma and some superficial cortical damage. The operation to repair the injury was long and her recovery would be slow.

And then there had been the police. They had been held off for two days but when they were at last unleashed, they had spent three days going through what had happened. It was clear that they didn’t believe me about Carl, and they suspected me at least of complicity, and quite possibly sole responsibility, for what had happened at the Priestleys. But when Kate told them her story, even though she could not implicate Carl, I think that it became plain even to the constabulary that I was more the victim than the perpetrator. Now we waited for Sonya to recover sufficiently to corroborate what they had been told.

About a week after the incident, I was sitting out by the bed when there came a cautious knock on the door. It was opened to reveal Kate, looking hesitant and large-eyed. She had lost much weight and her eyes were dark and sunken.

“May I come in?”

I was surprised and I suppose that it showed. We had not communicated at all since the incident, first because we were too sick and then, I had assumed, because there was nothing left to say.

“Of course,” I offered at last. I put aside the book and indicated the bed.

She came in warily, as if it might be a trap, and when she sat on the bed, it was in a sort of half-hearted way, as if she might want to make for the door at speed.

“How are you?” she asked. “I heard that you lost a kidney.”

I shrugged.

“Easy come, easy go.”

“And that policewoman?”

I frowned. I had asked her to do too much; what had happened to her was down to me.

“She’s stable. Getting better slowly.”

There was a pause. Convention dictated that it should not last.

“What about you? You look as if you’re much better.”

She smiled and nodded.

“The only thing now is this.”

She pulled aside her dressing gown and the nightie beneath to reveal a thick bandage around the top of her thigh.

“It’s clean now, but they say that it’ll need some sort of plastic surgery, and even then it’s going to leave a scar.”

We looked at it for a while and I wondered if she were giving me a sort of coded message.

“Thanks for getting me off the hook,” I said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“Telling the police about Sebastian. They seemed to have it all down to me for some reason.”

Her face clouded over.

“I don’t particularly want to think about that.”

Another one of those pauses. All sorts of things were being said, none of them expressed, none of them heard.

Abruptly she got up off the bed and I wondered how it was that I hadn’t heard the sound of the starting gun.

“I’d better go.”

She walked to the door with a quick glance at me.

“Kate?”

She turned.

“Thanks for coming. We must talk.”

She breathed perhaps three times while she looked first at the floor and then at me. Then she nodded and was gone.

I figured that it was as good as I could hope for.

Prologue.

Whisper it quietly in the night

Baby A.R.

5 weeks, 2 days.

History from HM Coroner: This baby was born at thirty weeks gestation with severe congenital abnormalities, including heart defects, lung hypoplasia and intestinal atresia. She is believed to have developed bronchopneumonia on the neonatal intensive care unit and subsequently died.

Cause of Death: 1a. Multiple congenital abnormalities.

All doctors see dying, for it is a part of their lives. Many will admit in private - and a few in public - that they have in some way participated in death, that they have either actively or passively assisted Death's work.

I am afraid that I am ignorant of the vast majority of Hippocrates' teachings, but I do recall with utmost clarity that he admonished the medical profession, "First, do no harm." This profound piece of wisdom is followed widely in the care of patients in all areas except one - the care of the dying. Here harm in the form of suffering, pain, misery and indignity are not only allowed, they are positively encouraged by some social forces.

Medicine's aim must be to relieve suffering, not to prolong life at any price. True, it has been a happy side effect of medical advance that we now enjoy longer lives, but much of our increased longevity has followed advances in public, not personal, health: a safe water supply, mass vaccination and an understanding of sepsis and its prevention.

So, if we must primarily aim to bring relief to the suffering, where is the sin in euthanasia?

A Christmas that wasn't, the contrast between public celebration and private misery shredding us at every moment. Exhaustion leaching out our love for each other so that we constantly argued, bickered, sniped...call it what you will. Carols sung in a different universe to ours, Christ's love for mankind made into mocking doggerel. Only drink to keep me going, only unrealistic hope to keep Kate from suicide.

On Boxing Day I went into the hospital alone, leaving Kate asleep on a bed of tranquillisers, planning to do some work alone in the office. God will testify that this was what I intended, and perhaps He will also admit that it was not my will that found me at the doors to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

It was empty save for Alice, a fact that seemed to emphasise God's hatred for Kate and me, His love for the rest of the world. Two nurses were with Alice, silent through the glass-panelled doors, intent on machinery and plastic while inside the lit plastic womb my daughter moved feebly and unsentiently. They didn't see me: no one did.

When I returned some fifteen minutes later, there was in my mind a resolve that brought me the first comfort I had known for weeks. I donned the gown and the overshoes and pushed open the doors.

The glances of the nurses were full of compassion and I had come to hate them. There was smiles and dying phrases, all whispered and hushed as if we were in a church, while about us the loud white noise of the air conditioning and the regular pulsed tones of the machines around Alice drowned us as they drowned our words.

Alice's respiration was bad today. Perhaps she was nearing the end; perhaps the bronchopneumonia was at last helping. I wondered then...but to see her small bruised arms wave ineffectually as if fighting something, to see her clenched fists and her sightless eyes...

I stayed for hours, just sitting and staring, thinking and being thought about. Nurses appeared and disappeared, helping each other out because it was so quiet.

Just after lunch came my chance. New arrivals, twins, was being rushed over. One nurse was talking on the 'phone in the sister's office, two others were on the far side of the room, preparing incubators.

I was alone with Alice.

It was such a small syringe I could not believe that it would work. The bag of dextrose-saline, a mini-bag for a mini-patient, hung beside my chair. It was merely a question of standing and moving slightly to shield my hands, from both the opened door of the office and the nurses on the other side of the room.

For a moment I wondered if I could do it.

And then the tiniest coughing sounds came from my baby and I knew that I had to.

I pushed the needle into the rubber flange at the bottom of the bag and watched the clear viscous eddies of the potassium swirl around and vanish inside the bag.

After ten minutes I left, too cowardly to witness the end of Alice's pain, telling myself that Kate would never cope with my presence and her absence at the final moments of our daughter