The House of Rumour A Novel

11

lust





He closes his eyes on a true darkness, submits his will to nothingness. The void. The empty, parallel world where he is zero. Everything descending into blackness: matter, energy, information.

Now.

He is on his knees, face at her feet in calm supplication. Nose up against toes that flex and creak in polished hide. He tries to kiss the glossy leather but she shifts her weight to stoop down over him. With gloved hands she loops the collar around his neck, buckles it, clips the dog leash on. She straightens up.

‘Hup!’ she commands with a swift tug of the lead.

His head jerks back. He feels a jolt of power run through him. That almost forgotten impulse of desire. Good Lord, he thinks with a wistful smile, there’s life in the old dog yet.

‘Open your eyes,’ she tells him.

He looks up. Booted and stockinged legs bestride his face. He sets his gaze on her pelvis thrusting forward, girdled in black lace. She grabs a meagre fistful of his wispy grey hair. Pins and needles tingle his scalp.

‘Naughty boy.’ She holds his head an inch or two from her crotch. ‘You want this, don’t you?’

‘Please,’ he whimpers.

‘But do you know what I’ve got for you there?’

He thinks for a moment. She glares down at his wrinkled, frowning face.

‘Whatever you care to give me, Mistress.’

‘Yes,’ she whispers. ‘Good boy.’



Marius Trevelyan had first spotted her on his way to Curzon Street on the morning he was recalled by the Service. She was tip-toeing up Shepherd Market on high heels. A short black bob, a fur-trimmed jacket, buttocks twitching in a tight skirt with that absurd erotic waddle. It was just before 9 a.m. but she wasn’t on her way to work, he decided. Oh no, on her way back, more like. He picked up his stride and followed at a discreet distance. All his years in retirement hadn’t blunted his appetite to pursue and observe. He felt a twinge of lust and an odd sense of recognition. She had finished for the night. She was coming off the game.

Coming off the game. Just as he had so many times. Only to be pulled back by the Service to consult on some little project or other. They never quite let you go, just kept you dangling. Trevelyan noted the hint of a swagger in this tart’s gait. A little too much emphasis in the upper body, he thought. Yes, that was interesting. Maybe this one really was in the same trade as he was.

The Curzon Street offices were not as changed as he had feared. He had imagined banks of computers replacing the musty confusion of Archive and Registry, the gloom of partitioned offices torn down and replaced in a bright and unforgiving open-plan. But as he made his way along the corridor, it seemed still the same dank labyrinth he had known from his days at Information Research.

The director of his old department was a woman. That was the shock he could not quite adjust to. Oh, he knew he had to. After all, there had been eight years of a female prime minister. They were everywhere in power these days. He remembered this one from when she was an assistant desk officer fresh from the Colonial Service. She’d had long hair then, and a habit of wearing exotic Indian silks. Now she had a cropped fringe and a skirt suit with shoulder pads. He noted the flat shoes when she stood up to greet him. Sensible shoes, isn’t that what they called them? She had beady, intelligent eyes.

‘Thank you so much for coming in, Sir Marius,’ she said, shaking his hand.

‘Not much choice,’ he retorted a little too sharply, baring his teeth in a grin. ‘You know, one is never completely retired. Just in suspended animation.’

She offered him a drink. Not a real one of course. That was another thing of the past.

‘There’s not a problem with this recall, is there?’ she asked him.

‘No, no.’ He shrugged.

‘You’ll be reporting directly to me, but if there is any, well, difficulty, we now have a staff counsellor.’

‘A what?’

‘It’s a new post. An independent officer that any member of the Service can consult with, concerning any problem that they might not feel able to discuss with their line management.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘We set it up after that officer from Counter-Subversion went to the press about being asked to carry out inappropriate investigations.’

‘I hope you don’t think that I’m going to go public about anything.’

‘Not at all, Sir Marius. I just feel obliged to let you know about new conditions of work within the Service.’

‘Since this Spycatcher business, Head Office really is worried about people blabbing, isn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Even got an injunction on Joan Miller’s memoirs. Ridiculous.’

‘Joan Miller?’

‘Worked for Maxwell Knight during the war in Counter-Espionage. All the stuff in her book is about that time. Nothing that could threaten national security. Though some of her work was tangential to Operation Mistletoe and the Service is still very cagey about that. Especially now, I suppose. I mean, that’s why I’ve been called back, isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Prisoner Number Seven. Hess.’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘Hanged himself in the summerhouse in the Spandau garden. Not easy if you’re over ninety.’

‘Quite. We’ve always known his death would be a political event so we’ve had a procedure laid down and ready for this, agreed to by all the Four Powers. The autopsy and investigation have been our responsibility.’

‘He was always our prisoner. First and foremost.’

‘Yes. And that is why we’ve called you in, Sir Marius. You’re the only one left who has known the case from the beginning.’

‘So the Service wants my post-mortem?’

‘Yes. And your take in terms of information strategy, naturally.’

‘Don’t expect much clarity.’

‘Nuance, that’s what we’re after.’

‘Because this one was dark right from the start. A perfect example of the craft. Nobody knew the whole story and nobody ever will. So it can be told again and again. Controlled confusion, that’s the key to negritude.’

‘Negritude?’

‘Sorry, an old section nickname. You know, the Black Game. Black propaganda. What the Americans insist on calling psychological warfare. As if there was anything scientific about it. The Yanks, well, they were always a bit heavy-handed. Never learnt how to play it as a game.’

‘And the Soviets?’

‘Brutal but playful. Like a cat with a mouse. Old liars, like us. And, like us, probably better at import than export. What are they up to with this one?’

‘It’s rather strange. They appear to have shifted their attitude just months before Hess hanged himself. In April, Der Spiegel ran a story that Gorbachev was considering agreeing to Hess being released. In June, a similar statement was issued to the German-language service of Radio Moscow.’

‘That’s odd.’

‘Yes.’

‘They’ve always exercised their veto before. If it hadn’t been for the Russians the old Nazi would have been out years ago.’

‘The obvious analysis is that this is all part of the glasnost policy.’

‘Glasnost,’ he sneered. ‘If you ask me glasnost is the slyest form of disinformation we’ve ever seen. Oh yes. What we said in the past is a lie but this, this is the truth. It has this confessional, redemptive trick to it. What about our side? What have we been up to?’

‘There we might have a little problem.’

‘Really?’

‘Just a matter of detail.’

‘The autopsy?’

‘No, not that. The son has commissioned another post-mortem but I don’t think that should cause us any problems. No, there was a note.’

‘He left a note?’

‘Yes.’

‘A nearly blind ninety-three-year-old left a suicide note?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ.’

‘We’re sure it can be verified.’

‘Sounds as if someone’s been a little over-zealous. What does it look like?’

‘It’s with our senior document examiner. We’ll get it to you as soon as possible.’

‘Good. And I’d like to run it past one of my old team, if that’s permitted.’

‘Eric Judd?’

Sir Marius Trevelyan nodded.

‘Yes. He should give it the old once-over.’

He spent the afternoon back in Archive, once more trying to make some sense out of the affair. Over the years it had continued to confuse him, even as he had been part of the confusion himself. Now the old bugger was dead. Prisoner Number Seven had a long history of attempted suicide. In June 1941, soon after his capture, he had thrown himself down the stairs of the country house where he was being held for interrogation. The banisters had broken his fall and he had merely fractured a femur. In February 1945, he had stabbed himself in the chest with a stolen bread-knife and later gone on hunger strike. In 1959, in Spandau prison, he had used the jagged edge of the broken lens of his spectacles to open a vein in his wrist; in 1977, he had severed an artery with a knife. But on none of these occasions had he ever left any sort of note.

And the contents of the missive were perplexing. Addressed to ‘all my loved ones’, most of the thing was taken up with an apology to his former secretary for having to act as if he didn’t know her. During his examination by psychiatrists at Nuremberg, he had been confronted with Hildegard Fath, who had worked for many years as his personal assistant, and he had claimed that he had never seen her before. She had been reduced to tears, but this was back in 1945, over forty years ago.

The note brought everything back to the question of the man’s sanity. Marius Trevelyan once more attempted to thread his way through the maze of delirium and forgetfulness. The Soviet doctors had always maintained that Hess had been faking his loss of memory. The British had been more ambivalent, concluding that he had ‘suggested an amnesia for so long he partly believes in it’. Hess protested that he had been subjected to hypnosis and psychoactive drugs. American Intelligence had been intrigued by the possibilities in the case for advancements in mind-control. A psychiatrist on their panel later developed brainwashing techniques for the CIA.

Trevelyan began to make notes on a series of index cards, a one-line subject heading on one side, details on the other. After some time he shuffled through this small pack of cards and turned up a blank one marked ‘American’. He buzzed for a desk officer and called up all the files pertaining to US Intelligence regarding Prisoner Number Seven. He had remembered that there had been an American commandant at Spandau in the 1970s who had got into trouble when it was discovered that he had been working on a book with Hess. He made a request for this file also, along with any relevant documentation.

By the end of the day they had got the suicide note to him. It had been written on the reverse side of a letter Hess had received from his daughter-in-law, dated a month before his death. A nice touch, thought Trevelyan, if it indeed was what Eric Judd would call a ‘moody one’. Yes, Eric might be able to spot something, he concluded, as he carefully replaced it in the evidence bag.



‘But what do you think is in there?’ she asks, a gloved hand still holding him by the hair.

‘Mistress?’

He feels the pressure sores as his bony knees dig into the floor and a tremor of arthritis in his right hip. His old and withered flesh is cramped and weary, trembling. She places her other hand between her thighs, lets out a little burlesque purr.

‘People often wonder what I’ve got down here,’ she says. ‘There’s uncertainty. You like that, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes, Mistress.’

She was right. That was what he liked. Subterfuge.

‘Yes. Well, it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other, does it?’

‘No, no it doesn’t, Mistress.’

‘It could be both.’

‘Yes.’

‘In fact it is both, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Until you look at it, it’s both, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t, um. I don’t understand.’

She lets go of his hair and slaps him across the face, sending him sprawling onto the floor.

‘Concentrate!’

She pulls on the leash and he is up on his knees once more.

‘You have to concentrate. This is a thought experiment.’

‘Mistress?’

‘Until you look at it,’ she goes on, adjusting the straps on her satin cache-sex, ‘it really does exist in two different states at once. It’s Schrödinger’s p-ssy. Now close your eyes and see what’s real.’



Eric Judd ran an antiquarian bookshop in Coptic Street. He had worked for Trevelyan in the Service as a senior art-worker in Technical Operations, and was an expert in handwriting and typography. Judd had been recruited in 1966, from Wormwood Scrubs, when he still had six months of an eighteen-month sentence to serve. For forgery. He had quite the genius for it.

He had worked in Trevelyan’s section, creating fake political pamphlets that could be used to discredit left-wing groups, forging letters from Eastern Bloc organisations to militant trade unionists and other documents essential for state security. When Trevelyan was posted to Ulster in the 1970s, Judd went with him.

Together they disseminated black propaganda, mostly aimed at undermining Republicans. One of their more obscure operations had been in disseminating disinformation that the IRA and other paramilitary groups had become involved in witchcraft and demonology. They circulated counterfeit literature on the occult throughout the province; black magic ritual sites were fabricated in derelict houses and on waste ground near army observation posts; animal blood and ceremonial objects were left on altars decorated with arcane symbols; and rumours were generated that some sectarian killings had actually been instances of human sacrifice. Judd became obsessed with the project, meticulously researching every detail of liturgy and sacrament, reading widely on the occult and the unseen. In the end, much to Trevelyan’s bemusement, he started to believe in it himself, which culminated in some sort of mental breakdown. He was given early retirement from the Service in 1979.

Eric Judd was now a book dealer specialising in the esoteric. As Trevelyan entered his shop, Judd was at the counter with white gloves on, carefully examining a battered incunable.

‘So.’ Trevelyan leaned over Judd’s shoulder. ‘What do we have here?’

‘Careful.’

‘A book of spells. Some ancient grimoire, is that it?’

‘Nothing of the sort. An early bound version of Otto von Friesing’s Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s extremely rare, so keep your grubby mitts to yourself.’ Judd began to wrap the book in cloth. ‘So, shall we get down to business?’

‘It’s good to see you too, Eric.’

‘The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure.’

‘Now, don’t get tetchy.’

‘I’m not. Just want to get on with it. Besides, you were never one to stand on ceremony. I’d better close the shop.’

Judd put down his shutters and locked up, then they both went out the back to a small workshop. With a magnifier he showed Trevelyan how he had compared the suicide note with other samples of Prisoner Number Seven’s handwriting.

‘It’s considerably distorted, of course. That’s to be expected. The bastard’s old, ill, about to kill himself. But see? The shape, the integrity of the signature, it’s still there. Now, any old f*cker can copy shape. Getting the dynamics right, that’s the difficult thing, the movement of a line, acceleration, deceleration. If you’re copying something, the chances are you’re going to lose speed and make a coastline.’

‘A coastline?’

‘Even with the smallest loss of flow, you can end up with tell-tale little crenellations. That’s a coastline and you know it’s a copy. Look, the hand may be unsteady here and there, and there’s a natural jerkiness to it. There are vibrations that tell us all kinds of things. But no coastline. I mean, we could enlarge it even further and do an analysis in terms of fractal dimension.’

‘Do you think we should?’

‘I think I’ve seen enough, Marius.’

‘Your eye’s still good enough, is that it?’

‘Well—’

‘All those years of kiting cheques. So, what does Eric’s clever little eye tell us?’

‘It’s a bloody good job, or . . .’ Judd shrugged.

‘It’s genuine?’

‘Could be. Or a very good copy of an earlier suicide note.’

‘I told you, he never left any notes on other attempts.’

‘Well, I’ve got a feeling that he did with this one.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just that—’ Judd sighed. ‘There’s another way of looking at whether or not this thing is true.’

‘How?’

‘The emotions.’

‘The emotions?’

‘Yeah. I can read the emotions from this.’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake.’

‘I knew you’d be like this.’

‘What, your extrasensory intuition or something?’

‘Do you want to know what I think or not?’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Because whether you like it or not, handwriting can tell you most of what you need to know about the writer’s personality. Their state of mind. And as I said, I got a feeling from this one.’

‘What kind of feeling?’

‘That whoever wrote this was sure that they were going to die.’

‘Eric—’

‘It’s all there in the hand. I can feel a vibration there, a shake to it that isn’t just illness and old age. A strange tremor of intent.’

‘Right.’

‘Look, you wanted my analysis.’

‘Yes, I did. Thank you.’

‘Still the unfeeling old bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Now, Eric, you’re not being very fair.’

‘Cold, that’s what you are, Marius. I might have been the one that went a bit doolally, but you—’ Judd stood up and opened a cabinet. ‘We’ll have a drink, that might warm you up.’

He produced a bottle of scotch and two glasses and poured them both a measure.

‘Cheerio.’ Judd toasted his old boss and nodded at the papers scattered on the work surface. ‘Curious business, the Hanged Man.’

‘What?’

‘Hess. That’s what we should call him. You know, the Hanged Man hangs upside down. An invert. Is it true that the KGB file of Hess is code-named Black Bertha?’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. The Russians were always a bit petulant over Prisoner Number Seven.’

‘They thought the Service lured him over, didn’t they?’

‘Eric, there’s been so much nonsense over this affair. Negritude of the highest order.’

‘Is it true that astrologers were used to convince him to make the flight?’

‘Rumour and disinformation.’

‘So why did the Gestapo round up all those astrologers afterwards?’

‘Because they fell for all that mumbo-jumbo. All those Nazis, many of them fell for that New Age stuff, just like you.’

‘I’m not into New Age stuff.’

‘No?’

‘No. Nothing new about it. I’m into the Western Mysteries. Traditions that we’re all part of, whether we like it or not. I’ve tried explaining it to you, Marius, but you never listened.’

‘Well, try me now.’

‘Influence can be brought to bear on events. Especially in moments when probabilities are so finely balanced. It’s known as sympathetic magic.’

Trevelyan laughed.

‘So, we put a spell on him, is that it?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying. You know that all sorts of things were played with. And they have an effect: we saw that in Ulster.’

‘A psychological effect, yes.’

‘That’s all magic has to be, Marius. A psychological effect. If you believe in something, it has power over you.’

‘It’s true some people on our side believed in some pretty strange things. Even Fleming was convinced that the whole episode had been predicted in a novel.’

‘Precognition: there’s proof of it everywhere.’

‘Proof, that’s a good one. You know, you can be very limited in your ability to spot fakery.’

‘You think so?’ Judd glared at Trevelyan and refilled their glasses. ‘Well, maybe I can spot one now.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘We always wondered about you, Marius. In the Service.’

‘Not this again, Eric.’

‘It was never much a question of political loyalties but, you know.’ Judd gave a shrug. ‘We often wondered which side you batted for.’

Trevelyan swallowed a gulp of whisky. He sighed sharply.

‘Shit-house gossip.’

‘Gibbs had the best theory,’ Judd went on. ‘Remember Gibbs from field projects? Well, he always said: “Trevelyan? Likes a bit of both but doesn’t get much of either”.’

‘I’d forgotten just how full of shit and shit-house gossip you were, Eric.’

‘Old times, eh, Marius?’ He raised his glass once more. ‘Old times.’

‘Should have left you to rot in the Scrubs.’

‘One of the best, you were. No one could ever work you out.’

No, thought Trevelyan, and no one ever will. There had always been two sides, two possibilities. The self and the other self. A double agent. Something Fleming had once let slip. The man inside. The unknowable one.

Back at his flat he found it hard to settle. He paced around, trying to align his thoughts. The Hess affair had come at the very beginning of his career in deception. Now it still haunted him at his retirement. Like his own life, the case was shrouded in rumour and now it conjured other remnants of intelligence. Things that he couldn’t possibly include in his report. Perhaps he should book an appointment with the staff counsellor, he mused. The modern confessional: therapy, analysis. All this fear in the Service of officers going public. They didn’t have to worry about him.

But he did have the sudden urge to write something, not for anybody else but for his own record. A memory system in which he might encode something of himself. A narrative, something more like a short story than a file or a dossier. He found a pad of paper and a pen and poured himself a brandy. The warm fuzz from the scotch he had shared with Judd was dying out. He rekindled the glow. All that shit-house gossip, yes, that was part of it too. He remembered an anecdote, something that he could hang a few ideas on. Yes. And the title came to him at once. That image Eric had used, a great symbol of ambiguity. He quickly wrote the heading: The Hanged Man.



‘Suck my p-ssy,’ she commands and pushes her penis into his mouth.

Sweet dissembler, mistress of disinformation, of transubstantiation. His mind is a labyrinth of corridors, a bal masqué, a school of night. Her flesh unhoods itself against his tongue, a worm uncoiling, growing inside him. Oh yes, she’s in the same trade as him. The art of deception.

She looks down as he groans ungrudgingly. An easy mark, a grateful punter. She won’t have to give him much. She’ll be quick.

A fluid pulse on his palate. Too soon, he thinks, surely. But no, another swift surprise, a secret blessing. She is pissing in his mouth.



On his last day at Curzon Street, Trevelyan carefully initialled off all the files he had drawn and arranged for a desk officer to take them back to Archive and Registry. A secretary came to shred all his handwritten notes and memoranda into a burn bag. He walked down the corridor to the Establishments office and signed off all his current secret indoctrinations with the duty officer. Then he went to see the director.

His report was on her desk.

‘It’s fairly routine stuff,’ he assured her. ‘Only one area of concern really.’

‘The note?’

‘Yes. I’ve come up with a theory about its source. Completely deniable, thank God, but it might be an idea to follow it up. Make sure it’s watertight.’

In the American files in Archive he had come across a file dated November 1969, a report that Hess had been transferred to the British Military Hospital in Berlin, suffering from stomach disorders and a perforated ulcer after a prolonged hunger strike. On the night of 29 November, the American commandant noted that Hess had declared on more than one occasion that he was sure he was going to die. Prisoner Number Seven had claimed that there had been instances when his heart had stopped beating and his pulse had disappeared. He had written a letter that night.

It was shortly after this incident that he agreed to receive visits from his wife and son, and on the first of these he mentioned his former secretary and his desire to explain his failure to recognise her at Nuremberg.

Trevelyan concluded that the ‘suicide note’ found in the summerhouse was actually a copy of the letter written when he was dangerously ill in 1969. Eric Judd was right: he had thought that he was going to die, only nearly twenty years earlier.

Had Hess been murdered? It seemed unlikely. More probable was that somebody had made a clumsy attempt to force a verdict of suicide on the inquest. Somebody with no sense of negritude. It would have to be dealt with. But not by him. It wasn’t his case any more.

He remembered what they used to say in the Political Warfare Executive: ‘There’s no such thing as intelligence, only counter-intelligence.’ In the last few days he had spent more time on his private narrative than with the official report. A personal account on how the case had marked his career, betraying a few secrets, offering a few conclusions. And something of a memoir of his own life. A chapter in his autobiography. Who had hanged the Hanged Man? He doubted if they would ever know for sure.

The story was in his briefcase. He was taking it with him. Completely against the rules, of course. He should have either submitted it or had it destroyed. But they didn’t have to worry about him going public. It was for his own amusement as much as anything. A souvenir for his own archive. A fragment of memory saved for posterity.

He said goodbye to the director and went out into the street. He hailed a cab and went to dine at his club. There was nobody there he knew. Such a lonely business, eating by oneself. For a moment he was overwhelmed with melancholy. He thought of Clarissa, his wife, who had died nearly twenty years before. The marriage had been a bit of a mistake really, but in the end they had learnt to bear each other’s company. He regretted that he had never found the time to thank her for putting up with his life of duplicity.

It was getting dark when he got home. As he was paying off the cab he saw the tart he had spotted that morning in Shepherd Market. Sturdy-looking and big-boned. A bit top-heavy. Oh yes. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in its proportion. He went up to her.

‘Would you care to join me for a drink?’

She smiled.

‘You’re a naughty boy, aren’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Come back to my place.’

She didn’t waste much time once they were in his flat. She carried the collar and leash in her handbag. It often came in handy on occasions like these. Playing away from home.



To finish she allows him to masturbate on her boots then lick them clean. He begs her to stay just for a little while longer. He wants to talk.

He has been so lonely for so long. He needs to share something of his own secret life. He feels that she knows the code somehow, that she understands the double world.

‘What’s your name?’ he asks her.

‘Vita. Vita Lampada.’

‘Oh yes.’ He laughs gently at her cover name. ‘Like the Newbolt poem. “Play up! Play up!” ’

‘I’m on the game!’

They laugh together now. She indulges him. A real gentleman, she decides. Only public-school boys ever get the joke of her name.

‘I’m on the game, too,’ he tells her.

‘Why, you naughty boy,’ she purrs. ‘Well, don’t expect me to pay you.’

‘Of course not. It’s another game I play. The Black Game.’

‘The Black Game?’

‘Telling lies and making up stories.’

‘What sort of stories?’

‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’

‘Naughty boy. Are you some sort of spy?’

‘I’m retired. Well, they never quite let you go. I’ve been pulled back for this wretched business at Spandau.’

‘Spandau?’

‘Look, I really shouldn’t be telling you anything.’

‘Like the Spandau Ballet?’

‘Yes, it was rather like a dance. A sort of quadrille between the Four Powers. You know, it was the last thing the wartime allies continued to do together. To guard an old man.’

‘I knew them, you know?’

‘What?’

‘Spandau Ballet. They used to come to Billy’s and the Blitz. I preferred Danny Osiris and Black Freighter.’

He frowns at her. He has no idea what she is talking about.

‘I used to be a bit of a New Romantic,’ she tells him.

He smiles. And he feels compelled to answer:

‘I used to be a bit of an old romantic.’

But he knows it’s a lie.

He falls back into his armchair. Exhausted. Sated. He lets out a satisfied sigh. Now he feels he has finished his job, though little flashes of Hess run through his mind. The Spandau Ballet: what made her say that?

‘I’d better get going,’ she is saying.

‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind me not seeing you out. I’m rather tired.’

He has already paid her. No need for that awkward ritual at the door.

‘See you again, perhaps.’ She grins and her eyes flash for a moment.

And she is gone.

She sees the briefcase in the hallway and says to herself, no, it’ll only get you into trouble. Her hand is already on the latch; she is ready to let herself out without looking back. But at the last moment she turns and grabs it, swinging it out of the door with her.

Back in her little studio flat she lights the gas and turns the case out onto the hearthrug. A copy of The Times and an A4 manila envelope. She opens it and pulls out a sheaf of papers. A manuscript. She sits down and begins to read.