Art of Murder

8

Black.

The backdrop is coal black, the floor a smoky black. Rising from the floor is a metal chair like a bar stool. Annek Hollech is sitting on the stool swinging one of her bare feet. All she is wearing is a black T-shirt with the Foundation's logo on it, and the three labels at her neck, wrist and ankle. Her slender thighs, bare almost to her groin, are like a pair of open scissors with the light glinting on them. Her auburn hair has a tendency to fall like a curtain across her eyebrow-less face, a shadowy face as pure as fresh clay. The fingers of her right hand play with her hair, pulling it back, combing it, stroking a handful.

'Do you really think that?' asked the man from somewhere invisible. A nod of the head.

‘Perhaps you're confusing a lack of time with a lack of interest. You know the Maestro is fully occupied with finishing the works in homage to Rembrandt for 15 July.'

'It's not his work.' Now she was playing with the bottom edge of her T-shirt. 'It's that he doesn't want to see me any more. We paintings all realise that. Eva has noticed it too.'

‘You mean your friend Eva van Snell has also noticed that the Maestro has apparently lost interest in you?' A nod of the head.

'Annek, we know from experience that paintings with an owner feel better, more protected. And Eva has been bought at the moment. Isn't that what's worrying you? The fact that you haven't been bought yet? Do you remember when we sold you as Confessions, Door Ajar, and Summer? Didn't you feel good with Mr Wallberg?' That was different.' Why?'

She blushed, but the priming prevented her cheeks changing colour.

'Because the Maestro used to say that he had never done anything like Deflowering. When he called me to Edenburg to start the sketches, he told me he wanted to paint a childhood memory with me. I thought that was so nice. Mr Wallberg loved me, but the Maestro had created me. Senor Wallberg is the best owner I've had, but it's different… the Maestro tried so hard with me…' 'You mean with the hyperdramatic work.'

'Yes. He took me to the Edenburg woods… while we were there, he saw an expression on my face… something he liked… he said it was incredible… that I was… was like one of his own memories…'

The left foot was tracing slow circles over the black carpet: a graceful needle turning on a vinyl record. As it moved round, the ankle label caught the light.

'I don't mind not being bought. I'd just like… him not to suffer because of me… I've done everything he asked of me. Everything. I know it's selfish of me to think he owes me something in return, because when he painted me in Deflowering he… he gave me. .. the best thing in the world, I know, it's just that…' 'Tell me,' the man encouraged her. As she raised her head, Annek's green eyes shone.

'I'd like… I'd like to tell him… that I can't avoid… I can't avoid growing up… It's not my fault… I'd like my body to be different…' She choked with emotion. 'It's not my fault…'

At that moment, something incredible happened. Annek's body split down the middle, like a flower, from head to toe. The chair she was on also collapsed in two. Through the centre of the two halves appeared a middle-aged man in a dark suit, bald head with a fringe of white hair. He came to an abrupt halt, and spoke: 'Oh, I'm sorry. You were on the video-scanner. I didn't know.'

Lothar Bosch stepped to one side, and Annek's three-dimensional figure came together again in pure silence, just as water flows back around the void when a finger is withdrawn from it. Miss Wood pressed the pause button, and the adolescent hung immobile in the centre of the room.

‘I’d already finished,' Miss Wood said with a yawn. 'It's all much of a muchness.'

She pressed the rewind, and Annek started a strange Saint Vitus' dance. Miss Wood took off her virtual reality visor and left it on the table, dismissing the apparition. The table was a half-crescent moon built out of the wall. It was the only wooden-coloured piece of furniture in this small audio-visual room in the MuseumsQuartier. Everything else was black, including the stiletto-like chair legs. Miss Wood was seated in one of them, her pink cardigan and suit gleaming in the dark. Next to her lay a pile of virtual reality tapes. On the wall to her left, cameras and loudspeakers stuck out like gargoyles.

Bosch, wearing an elegant grey suit in which the red label shone like a wedding carnation in his lapel, sat in a chair opposite her and pulled out his reading glasses. 'How long have you been here?' he asked.

He was concerned about her. They had been in Vienna for five days including this Monday 26 June, working non-stop. They had suites in the Ambassador, but only used them to sleep in. And no matter how early Bosch appeared at the MuseumsQuartier, she was already there, working away. The thought suddenly crossed his mind that Wood probably did not go to sleep at night either.

'For a while’ she said. 'I still had to check a few interviews Support had done, and my father always told me never to leave work undone.'

'Good advice,' Bosch agreed. 'But be careful not to overdo the virtual reality visors. They can damage your eyesight.'

As Miss Wood sat back in her chair, the cardigan opened like a pair of wings, and Bosch was treated to a wave of perfume. The mounds of her breasts pushed against the pink dress. Embarrassed, Bosch lowered his eyes. He liked everything about this woman: the sudden smell of her perfume, her tiny, cutglass body, even the extremely slender legs of hers, and the knees peeping over the top of the desk. And the sombre gravity of her voice, which he was now listening to.

'Don't worry, I have been taking walks. There is something soothing about Vienna at dawn on a Monday morning. And I've realised something: people here buy a lot of bread, don't they? I've seen several men with a baguette under their arm, like in Paris. I almost thought they were deliberately parading the bread under my nose.' 'In fact, they're Braun's men keeping an eye on you.'

Her smile told him his joke had hit the mark. It was dangerous to talk about food with Miss Wood.

‘I wouldn't be surprised’ she said, 'although they'd do better to keep an eye on other things. Our bird has flown, hasn't he?'

'Completely. Yesterday was Sunday, so I couldn't talk to Braun, but my friends in CID tell me no one has been arrested. And don't go thinking the other news is any better.'

'Go on anyway.' Miss Wood rubbed her eyes. 'God, I'd kill for a decent cup of coffee. A cup of black, black coffee, a good Viennese schwarzer, hot and strong.'

'An ornament is serving the people in Art this morning. I told her to pass by here.' 'You're a perfect gentleman, Lothar.'

Bosch felt naked. Luckily, his flaming cheeks soon died down. At fifty-five, there's no fuel that can produce a lasting blush, he thought to himself. Old blood is too thin. 'I'm beginning to know your habits’ he said. The papers were trembling between his fingers, but his voice sounded firm enough. Miss Wood leaned forward on the desk, head in hands, as she listened to him.

'We said the other day that there were three legs to this particular construction, didn't we? The first, Annek; the second, Oscar Diaz; and the third what we could call the Competition.' He saw Wood nod in agreement, and went on: 'Well, the first has produced no results. Annek's life was a mess, but I haven't found anyone capable of harming her for any personal reason. Her father, Pieter Hollech, is a madman. At the moment he's in jail in Switzerland after causing a traffic accident while drunk-driving. Annek's mother, Yvonne Neullern, divorced him and got custody of Annek when she was four. She works as a press photographer, specialising in animals. She's in Borneo. Conservation has been in touch with her to tell her the news…' 'OK, so the painting's family had nothing to do with it. Go on.' 'Annek's previous buyers don't offer much either.' 'Wallberg fell in love with the canvas, didn't he?'

'Yes, he liked Annek,' agreed Bosch. 'Wallberg bought Annek in three works: Confessions, Door Ajar, and Summer. The last of these was a performance. Do you recall the meeting we had with Benoit, when he insisted we should find out what Wallberg really felt for Annek?… No, that's not quite right. "We have to distinguish between Mr Wallberg's artistic and erotic passions"…'

The baying laugh (cut short by Wood) pleased him. So his Benoit impression had gone down well. 'My God, I'm making her laugh. That's fantastic'

All at once the sense of satisfaction drained from Bosch's face: it was as sudden as a dark cloud passing in front of the sun. His grin faded; his mouth turned down at the corners. 'Poor Annek,' he said.

He blinked several times, then shuffled the papers on the table in front of him.

'Whatever the truth, Wallberg is on his deathbed in a hospital in Berkeley, California. Lung cancer. There's nothing suspicious about any of her other purchasers either: Okomoto is in the States, searching for paintings; Cardenas is still in Colombia, and his record is as dubious as ever, but he didn't bother Annek when she was on show in Garland, and he hasn't touched any of the substitutes…' He coughed, and his finger pointed to the next paragraph. 'As for all the other madmen… according to our information, almost all of them are either in hospital or serving prison sentences. A few are still on the loose, like that crazy Englishman who covered the facade of the New Atelier with stickers accusing the Foundation of dealing in child pornography…' 'What's he got to do with this?' 'He used a photo from Deflowering on the stickers.' 'OK.'

'His whereabouts are unknown. But we'll continue investigating. So that's all for the "Annek" leg.' 'Nothing there. What about Diaz?' 'Well, there's Briseida Canchares…'

'Count her out too. That art nymphomaniac has nothing to do with it. The most interesting thing she said was about that person with no papers. Go on.' Wood was playing with her cigarette lighter – a lovely black steel miniature Dunhill. Her long, slender fingers made it flick over and over like a magician's playing card.

'Diaz's friends in New York say he's a simple, goodhearted sort. The guards on tour with him are more "scientific" as you would call it: according to them, he's a loner. He didn't like making friends, and preferred his own company. Our second search of his New York apartment turned up nothing. Everything to do with photography, but nothing related to any supposed obsession with destroying paintings or even with art. In his room at the Kirchberggasse we found Briseida's address and phone number in Leiden and… listen to this… a notebook with landscape photos which, in fact, is… a diary.'

Miss Wood's head, with its cap of cropped hair shiny as patent leather, snapped back so quickly Bosch was afraid her skull would come loose. He immediately reassured her:

'But it doesn't offer us any leads: Diaz took snapshots of places so he could go back there later on when the light was better. Sometimes he mentions Briseida or a friend, but they are completely ordinary references. He also writes about his love of the countryside. There's even a poem. Plus a few references to his work, along the lines of "I see them as people, not as works of art". The last entry is on 7 June.' Bosch raised his eyebrows. 'I'm sorry: there's nothing about anyone without papers, man or woman.' 'Shit.'

'Exactly. But I do have some good news. We've found a cafe near the Marriott hotel here in Vienna where the barman remembers Diaz. Apparently, it was one of the places he used to go to when he left the paintings in their hotel. The barman says he used to ask for bourbon, which was unusual for his customers, and that was why he noticed him, as well as because of his American accent and his dark skin.'

'New York completely corrupted our poor landscape photographer,' commented Wood. Her fingers were smoothing down her hair. To Bosch, they looked like the hands of a medium: it was not Wood's mind directing those soft, irreproachably aesthetic gestures that were so typical of her. No, her mind was focused on Bosch's words (not on me, on my words, don't get confused, kid) with the look of a shipwrecked mariner who thinks they can glimpse the lights of a ship in the dark night.

'But there is one odd detail,' Bosch said. 'The barman swears that the last time he saw him was exactly a fortnight ago, on 15 June. He remembers the exact date thanks to another coincidence: it was a friend's birthday, and he had made arrangements to leave the bar early. He says Diaz was at the bar chatting to a girl he had never seen before – she was dark, thin, attractive, wore a lot of make-up. He reckons they were speaking in English. The waiters cannot really remember her, because there were a lot of customers that night. Diaz and her left together, and the barman has not seen either of them since.'

'When did Diaz ring his Colombian friend to ask for information about residence permits?' 'On Sunday 18 June, according to Briseida.' Wood's outline seemed sculpted in stone.

'Three days: more than enough time to get close. Our friend Oscar took pity on our Colombian friend in a lot less.'

That's true,' Bosch admitted, 'but if we put Unknown Girl into the mix, it could be that Diaz is completely innocent. Just imagine for a moment she is working with accomplices. They manage to get information out of Diaz about when and how he is picking the painting up, then on Wednesday they forced their way into the van and make Diaz drive to the Wienerwald.' 'So where is Diaz now?' 'They've taken him with them, as a hostage…'

'And run the risk he might escape and give the game away? No, if Diaz isn't guilty, that can mean only one thing: he's dead. That seems to me the obvious conclusion. The fundamental question is: why hasn't his body appeared yet? That's what I don't get. Even if we admit they may have needed him to drive the van, why wasn't he found in it? Where have they taken him? Why would they want to hide Diaz's body?' 'That means you think Diaz is part of this.'

'If we forget about the girl with no papers, what are we left with?'

'In that case, the police's theory is the most likely one: Diaz makes the recording, and cuts Annek up inside the van. Then he drives to a remote spot, wraps Annek in the plastic sheet, dumps her on the grass and strips her. Then he puts the cassette at her feet and drives another forty kilometres north, where another car is waiting for him.' ‘I don't buy that theory either.' ‘Why not?'

'Diaz is a ninny,' Miss Wood declared. 'He writes little poems, takes photos of landscapes and gets taken in by girls like Briseida. If he's involved in this, he wasn't alone.'

'But he was a very efficient security guard,' Bosch objected. 'Remember, we only choose the best for transporting paintings to their hotels.'

Tm not saying he was bad at his job. I'm saying he's a ninny. A country bumpkin. He can't have organised all this on his own.'

Soft knocks at the door, and a waft of perfume. The server was not a Trolley or any other proper piece of furniture, but a Decoration, a wretched thing that worked on Mondays (the day off for the works of art in the MuseumsQuartier) one of the objects dreamt up by the Decorative Arts Department to fill an empty room – and the lack of experience showed when it came to him serving their coffee. It took Bosch several seconds to realise it was a young male, about eighteen or nineteen years old. His hair was a symmetrical mass of blue-black scrolled curls pierced by silvery feathers. His long, tubular tunic in black velvet was cut almost too drastically at the back, and revealed the top half of a pair of black buttocks painted chestnut brown as was all the rest of the body. He placed two cups of coffee on the table. His make-up gave no clues as to what he might be thinking or feeling: it was the mask of a Polynesian warrior, a voodoo priest. The white label hanging round his neck read 'Michel'. The signature low down on his back was by someone called Garth. He was wearing ear-protectors.

When he turned towards Bosch, he got a good view of his hands: they glowed a deep bronze colour, with onyx fingernails.

'It's all too perfect, Lothar,' Miss Wood was saying. 'A second car waiting in the Wienerwald, false papers… in other words, a carefully laid plan. I could accept he might have been paid to take the painting to the Wienerwald, but even that seems farfetched to me.'

'So you want us to reject the "Diaz" leg as well. That means the whole construction is in danger of collapsing…'

'We can't eliminate Diaz altogether. I think his role was that of scapegoat. What I can't understand is why he's disappeared.'

They could have hidden his body so that suspicion would fall on him, while the real criminal made his getaway,' Bosch reasoned.

Miss Wood had leaned forward to examine the ornament's lower back and the signature. The ornament stood perfectly still while she did so. The label said he could be touched, so Wood slipped a hand round his waist and down towards his gleaming bronze buttocks. Her expression, with her brows knitted intently, was that of an expert judging the value of a porcelain vase. As she was doing this, she responded to Bosch.

'That's the most likely theory. But my question is: where is he? The police have combed several kilometres round the area, Lothar. They've used dogs and all kinds of sophisticated search equipment. So where's Diaz's body? And where did they kill him? The van offered no clues at all: no signs of struggle, not a drop of blood. And consider this for a moment: he destroys the painting, then wastes time taking all her clothes off out in the wood, running the risk of being discovered. On the other hand, whoever it was, worked out a detailed escape plan and managed to divert all the suspicion on to the security guard who was looking after the work. Does that seem logical to you?' 'No, you're right, it doesn't.'

Miss Wood stopped fondling the ornament's backside. She raised her arm, got hold of the neck label and pulled it down towards her, obliging the ornament to lean forward so she could read it. As well as the model's name, the label gave details of the craftsman who made it, and its specifications. Bosch knew that April Wood bought ornaments and utensils for her London house. Despite an official ban on the sale of human handicrafts, it still went on, and many people of a certain social level bought them just as they did soft drugs.

When she had finished reading the information, Miss Wood let go of the label. The ornament straightened up, turned on his heels in the darkness and walked out noiselessly, his bare feet gliding across the thick black carpet. Miss Wood grimaced as she sipped her hot coffee.

‘I’m sure Diaz is dead,' she insisted. 'The problem is how his death fits in with everything else.'

'We still haven't considered the Competition and Rivals.' Bosch riffled through his papers. 'I have to admit this is where I get lost, April. I can't find anything. The people behind BAH, for example, are not up to much. You know Pamela O'Connor wrote a book about Annek.. .'

'The Truth About Annek Hollech,' Wood concurred. 'Pretentious nonsense. What she does is use Annek as an example to denounce the use of underage models in supposedly obscene works of art.'

'We're also investigating the Christian Association Against Hyperdramatic Art; the International Society For Tradition and Classical Art; the European Society Against Hyperdramatic Art…'

'You're leaving out the real competition,' said Wood. 'Art Enterprises, for example, has become a serious enemy. Stein says they would do anything to throw a spoke in our wheels, and, in fact, they are taking investors from us. Just imagine if what happened to Deflowering is only part of a master plan to discredit our security system.'

'But that doesn't fit in with what happened. A bullet in the back of the head would have had the same effect. Why all the sadism?' 'What do you mean exactly?' The question filled Bosch with horror.

'Good God, April, he cut her up with… look, here is the autopsy report. Braun sent it to me this morning. Look at these photos… the lab tests confirmed it: whoever it was used a portable canvas cutter

… do you know what that is?… a saw with a cylindrical handle and serrated edges that fits into one hand. Artists who still work with canvases and old picture restorers use them to change the size and shape of paintings. It's a powerful gadget – with the right fittings, you can cut a normal tabletop in half in five seconds… and he made ten cuts with it, April…'

Wood had lit one of her ecological cigarettes. The dark green smoke produced by the vaporising of coloured water that was guaranteed harmless, curled up towards the ceiling. Bosch remembered when it had become fashionable to use these fake cigarettes in order to give up smoking. He had succeeded in giving up thanks to the classic nicotine patches, and regarded this other method as unnecessarily showy.

'Look at it this way’ she said. 'They want public opinion to think that Oscar Diaz was raving mad. So, if they can say we take on psychopaths to look after our most expensive works of art, then no one will be able to trust us, and so on and so forth.'

'But if that was what they were after, why on earth didn't they kill her before they cut her up? According to the autopsy report, they sedated her with an intramuscular injection of a neuroleptic drug, probably using a hypodermic pistol to the back of her neck. The dose was strong enough for her not to be able to defend herself, but not to anaesthetise her. I don't get it. I mean… and forgive me for insisting, April, but it seems to me… if all this was simply a bit of theatre, why go so far? The murder would have been just as regrettable, but… it would have been… there would have been… I mean, imagine I wanted to pretend it was the work of a sadist… Well then, first I get rid of her, I inject her with something, anaesthetise her… then I do all the other things… but there's a limit that never… Money has got nothing to do with it, April. I won't make any more money by doing that. There's a limit which…' 'Lothar.'

‘Don't tell me they only did it for money, April! I may be getting old, but I'm not completely gaga yet! And I am experienced: I used to be a police inspector, so I know about criminals… they're not as sadistic as all those films would have us believe. They're human beings… I'm not saying there are no exceptions, but…' 'Lothar.'

'That guy wasn't trying to fool anyone: he wanted to do what he did, and in just the way he did it! We're not facing some underhand ruse by the competition – we're trying to track down a monster!… He cut her face and left her writhing while he made ready to… to cut her breast off!… Would you like me to read you the report…?' 'Lothar,' came the weary, deep voice. 'Can I say something?' 'Sorry.'

Bosch had difficulty recovering control of his emotions. 'Come on, kid, calm down. What's got into you?'

Miss Wood stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. She lifted her hand; leaving a green thing there, a steaming, crushed broad bean. She exhaled the last of the green smoke through her nostrils. The Dragon's Poisonous Breath.

'She was a painting. There's no need to look any further than that, Lothar. Deflowering was a painting. I'll prove it to you.' She pounced on one of Annek's studio photos and thrust it in Bosch's face. 'She looks like an adolescent, doesn't she? She has the shape of an adolescent, when she was alive she walked and talked like an adolescent. She was called Annek. But if she had really been an adolescent, she wouldn't have been worth even five hundred dollars. Her death would not have interested the Ministry of the Interior of a foreign country, or mobilised a whole army of police and special forces, or led to high-level discussions in at least two European capitals, or meant that our positions in the Foundation are on the line. If this had been only a girl, who the shit would have been interested in what happened to her? Her mother and four bored policemen in the Wienerwald district. Things like that happen every day in this world of ours. People die horrible deaths all around us, and nobody could care less. But people do care about the death of this girl. And do you know why? Because this, this’ she shook the photo in his face, 'which apparently shows a young girl, is not a girl at all. It cost more than fifty million dollars.' She repeated the words again, emphasising them with a pause between each one. 'Fifty. Million. Dollars.'

'However much the work cost, she was still a young girl, April.'

That's where you're wrong. It cost that much precisely because it was not a girl. It was a painting, Lothar. A masterpiece. Do you still not get it? We are what other people pay us to be. You used to be a policeman, and that's what you were paid to be; now they pay you to work as an employee for a private company, and that's what you are. This was once a girl. Then someone paid to turn her into a painting. Paintings are paintings, and people can destroy them with portable canvas cutters just as you might destroy documents in your shredding machine, without worrying about it. To put it simply, they are not people. Not for the person who did this to her, and not for us. Do I make myself clear?'

Bosch was staring at a fixed point – he had chosen April Wood's anthracite-coloured hair, and in particular the fiercely drawn parting on the right side of her head. He kept his eyes on it as he nodded agreement.

'Lothar?' 'Yes, I understood.' 'Which means we have to keep an eye on the competition.' 'We will,' said Bosch.

'And there's also the anonymous madman,' Miss Wood sighed, and her thin shoulders hunched. 'That would be the worst of all: a freshly baked psychopath, just like all that Viennese bread. Is there anything else in the forensic report?'

Bosch blinked and looked down at his papers. She's not being cruel, he told himself. She doesn't talk like that out of cruelty. She's not cruel. It's the world which is. All of us are.

'Yes…' Bosch looked several pages further on. 'There is one curious detail. Of course, the analysis of the painting's skin is very detailed: the forensic experts don't know much about the priming process, so they haven't picked up on this. Near the wound in the breast they found traces of a substance which… I'll read you what it says… "the composition of which, while being similar to silicon, is different in several fundamental aspects…" Then they give the full name of the chemical molecule: "dimethyl-tetrahydro…" well it's an enormously long name. Guess what it is?' 'Cerublastyne…' said Miss Wood, her eyes wide open.

'Bingo. The report says it must have been part of the painting's priming, but we know that Deflowering did not have any cerublastyne on it. We called Hoffmann and he confirmed it: the cerublastyne cannot have come from the painting.' 'My God,' Wood whispered. 'He disguises himself.'

'That seems most likely. A few touches of cerublastyne would have been enough to change his looks completely'

This news had suddenly made Miss Wood uneasy. She had got up, and was pacing to and fro about the room. Bosch looked at her with concern. Good God, she hardly ever eats, she's a skeleton. She'll make herself ill if she carries on like this… A different voice, also part of him, counterattacked: Don't pretend. Look at the light reflected on her breasts, look at that tight arse and those legs of hers. You're crazy about her. You like her just like you did Hendrickje, perhaps more even. You like her the way you liked Hendrickje's portrait later on. Nonsense, the other Bosch replied. And

… why not say it? the other voice came back. You like her intelligence. Her sharpness, her personality, the fact she is a thousand times more intelligent than you.

It was true, April Wood was a precision instrument. In the five years they had worked together, Bosch had not seen her make a single mistake. Stein called her the 'guard dog'. Everyone in the Foundation respected her. Even Benoit seemed cowed in her presence. He often said: 'She's so skinny her soul is too big for her.' Her record was brilliant. Even though she had not been able to avoid all the attacks on the works during her five years as head of security (it was impossible to prevent them all), those responsible had been found and dealt with, sometimes even before the police had heard about the incident. The guard dog knew how to bite. Nobody was in any doubt (Bosch least of all) that now she would also find whoever it was who had destroyed Deflowering.

And yet, outside their professional relationship, he scarcely knew her. Black holes in space, according to the scientific magazines his brother Roland collected, cannot be seen precisely because they are black, their presence can only be inferred from the effects they have on the other bodies around them. Bosch thought Miss Wood's free time was a black hole: he inferred it from her work. If Miss Wood had managed to rest, everything went smoothly. Otherwise, there were bound to be sparks. But so far, no one had so much as glimpsed what might be hidden in the dark hole that was Miss Wood's time off. Wood without her red pass, Miss Wood outside working hours, Miss Wood with feelings, if such things existed. Could there be a blot on such a perfect character? Bosch wondered about it sometimes.

The truth of it, Mr Lothar Bosch, is that this youngster of hardly thirty, who could be your daughter but is your boss, this soulless skeleton, has completely hypnotised you. 'April,' said Bosch. 'What?'

'I was thinking that maybe Diaz leads a double life. Maybe he has two voices inside his head, one normal, the other not. If he is a psychopath, there would be nothing odd in the fact that he behaved properly with friends and colleagues. When I worked for the police, I had some cases of…'

Mozart rang out from the table. It was Miss Wood's mobile. Even though her features did not alter in the slightest as she took the call, Bosch was aware something important had happened.

'AH our problems are over’ she said as she switched off her phone, smiling in that disagreeable way of hers. That was Braun. Oscar Diaz is dead.' Bosch leapt from his seat. They've caught him at last!'

'No. Two anglers found his body floating in the Danube early this morning. They thought it was the carp of their lives, a Guinness Book of Records carp, but it was Oscar. Well, all that was left of Oscar. According to the preliminary report, he had been dead more than a week

… That was why they wanted to keep his body hidden.' 'What's that?'

Wood did not reply at once. She was still smiling, but Bosch soon realised it was a tremendous rage that was paralysing her. 'It was not Oscar Diaz who picked up Annek last Wednesday.' This affirmation threw Bosch into confusion.

'It wasn't…? What do you mean?… Diaz turned up at the agreed time last Wednesday, chatted with his colleagues, identified himself, and…' All at once he came to a halt, as though forced to brake before coming up against the stone wall of Miss Wood's gaze.

'It's not possible, April. One thing is to use resin to escape the police, but it's quite another to imitate someone so well that you deceive everyone who knows them, who sees them every day, the colleagues who greeted him on… on Wednesday… the security screens… all of them… to be able to pass off as someone you'd have to be a true specialist in latex. A real maestro.' Wood was still staring at him. Her smile froze his blood.

'That bastard, whoever he may be, has made fools of us, Lothar.'

She said these words in a tone Bosch recognised perfectly. She wanted revenge. April Wood could forgive other people being intelligent, just so long as they were not more intelligent than her. She could not bear any opponent to do anything she had not thought of. In the heart of this slight woman burned a volcano of the blackest pride and will to perfection. Bosch understood, with the kind of sudden certainty which sometimes grasps the deepest, most hidden truths, that Wood had slipped her chain, that the guard dog would hunt down her adversary and would not relent until she had him in her jaws.

And not even then: once she had him, she would chew him to bits.

'They've made fools of us… fools of us…' she went on in an almost musical whistle, scarcely separating her two rows of perfect white teeth, the only white showing in the darkness of the room. A white slash on a black background.