Number 11

~ ~ ~

At first, after he had left the room, Laura was too angry even to think. She stood at the sash window, watching him walk back across the quad in the direction of the Porter’s Lodge, and fumed silently. Projecting her own resentment on to his receding figure, she felt that she could discern arrogance in the very cut of his clothes and the angle of his body as he walked. She watched him disappear through the archway and then returned to her desk, where the first thing she saw was the cup of jasmine tea she had poured for him. It hadn’t been touched. She took it out into the little bathroom halfway up the staircase and emptied it down the sink.

She had already been having a difficult day. The journal’s editors had emailed her yet again asking when they could expect her submission, pointing out that she had missed the second deadline by more than a month. And once again she had spent three or four fruitless hours at her desk, going through her own chaotic notes, and her late husband’s even more chaotic notes, trying to find the single overriding theme, the unifying insight that would draw all of these seemingly disparate ideas together. But nothing emerged.

Tim had arrived promptly at two o’clock. He was a second-year student who had come straight to Oxford from a boarding school which boasted notoriously high fees and an undistinguished academic record. He had come to see Laura to make a complaint.

When did this become a thing, she wondered? As a student, she could remember deferring to her own tutor’s every word, listening in awe as little nuggets of wisdom dropped from his lips. Of course, it was healthy that students nowadays had a more spirited attitude; but still, some of them — Tim being a case in point — had gone to another extreme, regarding her as little more than a service provider, to be vigorously challenged when the service in question turned out not to meet their expectations.

‘Whoever wrote that poem,’ he had said to her, ‘is not a serious poet.’

‘His name was Edwin Morgan,’ said Laura, ‘and he was a very serious poet indeed. I just chose to make you study one of his lighter pieces.’

‘But it was complete gibberish,’ said Tim.

‘I thought we’d established that it wasn’t. That was the whole point of the discussion.’

Laura had got her twentieth-century group to read Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, and thought she had managed to persuade them, by the end of the class, that there were fragments of sense to be plucked out of its apparently random assemblage of vowels and consonants.

‘Well, I mentioned it to my mum. She said she’s never heard of Edwin Morgan and she wanted to know why we hadn’t read any T. S. Eliot yet this year.’

Laura remembered, now, that Tim’s mother was an English graduate herself. These days she wrote historical romances, and presumably made a good living at it, as they were often to be seen at airport bookshops.

‘I’m not teaching your mum,’ she said. ‘Your parents may be paying the fees, but they don’t get to choose the syllabus.’

It was this reference to the tuition fees, she realized afterwards, that had really made Tim bridle. She had suspected, all along, that this was at the heart of his complaint. Increasingly, channelled through the students, she was aware of the vigilant, distantly controlling presence of concerned parents, looking at the money draining out of their bank accounts and wanting to make sure that they saw a good return on their investment. What had always, to Laura and her colleagues, been a solid but intangible thing — education, the elevation of the young mind to a higher level of knowledge and understanding — had now been redefined as a commodity, something to be bought in the expectation that it would one day yield a financial return.

She was still mulling over this annoying encounter in the pub later that afternoon, as she sat sipping a large Sauvignon Blanc and waiting for Danny to arrive. On the table in front of her was a sheet of A4, upon which she had been trying, once and for all, to list the main strands of this much-delayed paper and find a way of weaving them together. So far she had scribbled:

Paranoia

The numinous/supernatural

The Loch Ness Monster, in films/books/poetry

The Monster is nearly always a fake — often at the centre of some conspiracy to make money out of tourists/locals

What is being sold? What is being commodified?

Some sense of awe — wonder — the UNKNOWABLE –

And only now did it occur to Laura that there might be some oblique, tenuous connection between the ruthlessly pragmatic way of thinking Tim’s generation had inherited and the ideas she was trying to synthesize for this essay. Had this been the argument her husband had been trying to frame — did it explain the phrase he had kept returning to, in his analysis of all those forgotten books and films: the process he had called ‘monetizing wonder’?

In the midst of these thoughts, Laura looked up and found that Danny was standing over her.

‘All work and no play …’ he said, glancing down at the writing.

She half covered the words with her hand, modestly, as if he had caught a glimpse of her in nothing but her underwear.

‘Can I get you another?’ he asked, kissing her on the cheek. The kiss lasted slightly too long, she thought, and was slightly too close to her lips.

‘I shouldn’t really. I’m driving.’

‘Very wise. Sauvignon, was it?’

‘Well, just a small one then …’

While he was at the bar, she wondered if it had been a good idea to meet him for this drink, when maternal duty dictated that she should really have gone home forty minutes ago, to make Harry his tea and allow Keisha, the Malaysian nanny, to finish work at the agreed time. She was too pliable, Keisha, too cooperative. She had no family of her own in this country and was always only too willing to earn extra money by staying on for an hour or two, to cover the frequent occasions when Laura decided to work late, or pop into The Jericho on her way home for a glass of white wine. Usually having a quick drink by herself was just an easy way to unwind — and there was nothing wrong with that, surely? — but it was a different matter when Danny joined her. She liked him, but something about these occasions always made her uneasy. Danny was married, but he never mentioned his wife: seemed to behave, more or less, as though she didn’t exist. This had never bothered Laura much when her own husband was alive; she and Danny would meet for a drink and talk about work, about research proposals, conference papers, the students, the horrors of admin and paperwork. Harmless stuff; two colleagues letting off steam about the things that bugged them. She had never really been able to have this sort of conversation with Roger; by then, his thoughts were already too fixed on the past ever to be shifted. But after his death, in any case, there had been a change in her relationship with Danny. His wife’s absence from his field of reference was even more noticeable. He sat closer to her, spoke to her more tremulously, looked at her more intently, than he had used to. But why? She was still in mourning. If he wanted to have an affair, and somehow thought that she was more available than she had been a year ago, he was mistaken. And Laura believed that she had made that pretty clear, one way or another.

When he returned with their drinks he said: ‘What are you looking at?’

Laura’s attention had by now been drawn towards a bunch of undergraduates squeezed around a corner table. There were six of them, and they all had their phones out: they were putting their arms around each other and leaning in and taking selfies while joking and swapping empty-headed banter at the tops of their voices. There were pints of beer on the table as well as vodka shots. Incongruously, a copy of the student magazine Isis was lying there as well. It seemed to belong to a blonde-haired student who was sitting slightly apart from the others, not quite able to enter wholeheartedly into their spirit of raucous, alcohol-fuelled hilarity.

‘Just thinking what it would be like to be young again,’ said Laura, nodding in their direction. ‘Couple of my lot in there. The spotty boy, and the blonde-haired girl.’

‘She looks like she’d rather be in her room with a knitting pattern and a cup of hot cocoa.’

‘No, she’s not like that. She’s a bright girl. Just a bit more … independent than most.’

‘Teacher’s pet, by any chance?’ Danny asked, smiling.

Not rising to the bait, Laura continued (almost as if to herself): ‘I did that thing at the beginning of the first term. Asking each of them to bring in a favourite text. It could have been anything. Prose, poetry, drama, film. She brought in a song lyric. “Harrowdown Hill”, by Thom Yorke. Do you know it?’

Danny shook his head.

‘It’s about the death of David Kelly.’

He glanced across at the student now. ‘Interesting choice,’ he said. ‘Who is she?’

‘Her name’s Rachel. Rachel Wells.’

‘State or private?’

‘State. She’s a Yorkshire girl. Mother lives in Leeds, I think.’

‘And did she say why she chose it?’

Laura was looking at the group of students more closely. It was more obvious than ever that Rachel stood out from the others, did not feel at ease with them.

Abstractedly, she answered: ‘Not really. She said it brought back memories.’

*

Laura did not much like eating lunch on High Table, but she knew that it was a good idea to do so occasionally: otherwise word would get around that you were ‘chippy’ or ‘bolshie’. So the next day she took the plunge, and even found herself sitting next to the Master of the college, Lord Lucrum. They were not natural dining companions: Lord Lucrum was an influential figure in public life, with close ties to the present government; but like so many powerful figures in the British establishment he had the talent of pretending to be a good listener, and of keeping his own views to himself when in company. He was a relatively young peer — a robust and well-preserved fifty-nine — and he nodded with every appearance of alertness as Laura attempted a halting explanation of her current paper on the Loch Ness Monster, and its role as a generator of income in books and films.

‘Commodifying fear,’ he said, mopping up gravy with a slice of bread. ‘What a fascinating notion. Do you think that’s possible, with any degree of precision? Do you think that human emotions can be … priced?’

‘Well, that’s rather outside the scope of my piece, I’m afraid,’ said Laura.

‘Pity,’ he replied. ‘I thought you might be on to something interesting there.’

Their conversation dried up soon after that, and Laura’s attention was distracted, in any case, when she noticed Rachel Wells eating by herself in a far corner of Hall, the February sunshine throwing a shaft of late-winter light through the high stained-glass window on to her plate of shepherd’s pie and overcooked vegetables. On a whim, Laura excused herself to his Lordship, went to fetch herself a cup of coffee and then stopped by Rachel’s table. She was touched to see that she still had a copy of Isis magazine in front of her: she seemed to be taking it everywhere.

‘Hello. A rumour reaches me that you’ve got a story published in there.’

Rachel looked up and smiled, pleased but bashful. ‘That’s right, yeah.’

‘In your second term! Well done. Mind if I join you?’

‘No, of course not.’

Laura sat down opposite her. For a moment or two they ate and drank in silence. Laura had her back to the wall, and could see that Rachel kept glancing up at something behind her. She craned around to see what it was.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Him.’

They were sitting beneath a large portrait, in oils, of a corpulent, white-haired man in his sixties or seventies, sporting a spotted bow tie and a suit that must have been several sizes too small for him. His face had the ruddy glow of an enthusiastic drinker but was otherwise far from benevolent, being contorted into a combative frown. He was sitting at a desk in an austere, sparsely furnished office. On the wall behind him a motto had been picked out in elegant calligraphy: it consisted of the three words ‘FREEDOM, COMPETITION, CHOICE’.

‘Who is it?’ Rachel asked. ‘I see this picture every day but nobody’s told me who it is.’

‘One of our more colourful fellows,’ said Laura. ‘No longer with us, sadly. His name was Henry Winshaw. He was a Labour MP, once. Then he had a Damascene conversion, like so many people, and went over to the other side. My husband, Roger, started a petition once to get his portrait taken down. He had a particular problem with that word — “Choice”. He used to claim that it put him off his food.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Rachel said. ‘But for me it’s his eyes. They give me the creeps.’

‘Mm … The way they follow you around the room. That’s the sign of a good portrait, apparently.’

‘And the petition didn’t get very far, I’m guessing.’

‘Hardly. Our distinguished Master up there —’ she nodded in the direction of Lord Lucrum — ‘was something of a disciple of his, I think. I seem to remember reading they spent time on some influential committee together.’

Rachel did not seem to be listening any more. She put her fork down and pushed her plate of food aside, half finished.

‘You feeling OK?’

She grimaced. ‘I’ve got the mother of all hangovers.’

‘Ah. Yes, I saw you in the pub with your friends. Late night, was it?’

‘Very. Plus, I ended up having to take someone to A & E. A girl called Rebecca. She lives on my staircase. She tripped on the pavement when we were coming back. I think she’d had one too many. About ten too many, in fact.’

‘Oh dear. Is she all right?’

‘Yes, it was just a cut. We didn’t have to wait long, and the doctors were great.’ Rachel seemed embarrassed by all this, perhaps worried that it was not putting her in a good light. ‘Sorry. Typical student behaviour, I know. And it won’t help me get the Milton essay written on time …’

‘Don’t worry about that. My suggestion would be that you go and get some sleep. Paradise Lost will still be there when you wake up.’

Rachel smiled. ‘OK. Thanks.’

*

That night, sitting at home alone in the blue glow of her laptop, with Harry already deep into his second hour of untroubled sleep, Laura downloaded the online edition of Isis and read Rachel’s story. It wasn’t bad at all: a vividly imagined dialogue between a young, idealistic barrister and her client, a jaded prison officer on trial for whistleblowing. It had the ring of truth and felt experience behind it. Afterwards, Laura went on to Facebook and did a search for Rachel’s name. She found her home page quickly enough, but it didn’t tell her anything: the privacy settings blocked access to everything except her cover and profile pictures. Laura tried to click on the profile picture, at least, but nothing happened, and it remained the size of a postage stamp. But there was another, perhaps more promising avenue to explore: the other student she had recognized at the pub table last night, ‘the spotty one’, as she had rather unkindly designated him. She typed his name into the search box and after a couple of false starts found herself swiftly directed to his home page, on which — as she had guessed — no privacy settings had been put in place at all. She looked at the latest messages and found — also as she had been expecting — that Rachel had been tagged in a number of recent photos. Following the link took her straight into an album called ‘Larking About, Monday Night’.

There were about twenty or thirty pictures. Each one showed a number of students in various stages of drunken revelry, but none of them made Laura feel particularly cheerful. Rictus grins, pallid, luminescent skin and red-eye photography gave all of these young people the appearance of alien creatures, visitors from another planet who had somehow managed to colonize the bodies of human beings and learn the outward manifestation of their emotions while under the skin, at heart, lay something hollow and coldly mechanical. As for Rachel, Laura could not help thinking — as she had thought at the time — that there was something half-hearted, semi-detached, about her relationship to the rest of the group: in each image, her eyes seemed to be directed elsewhere, with a gaze that was at once far-seeing and inward-looking. The pictures were arranged in a sequence which began at the pub. In some of the earliest ones, Danny’s shoulder could be glimpsed in the background — and even Laura’s own left arm, once or twice. But the drinking and the photography had continued long after Laura and Danny had left, and the last few pictures had been taken out in the street, after the pubs had closed. They included one particularly disturbing — not to say pornographic — image which showed one girl (tagged as Rebecca) bent double over the pavement, apparently in the act of throwing up. Laura felt a sudden dismay that this moment, so private and so shameful, should have been not just captured in digital form but also uploaded for all of the spotty boy’s friends (and friends of friends, and, for that matter, anybody else who felt like it) to see. Had the girl’s permission been sought? She doubted it. Was she even aware that the picture was on public display? Laura doubted that too.

She shut the laptop down, sat back, closed her eyes and rubbed the lids softly. There was a slight ache behind her eyes now, something she always felt even after a few minutes’ computer use. One of the inescapable conditions of life in 2012.

She did not see Rachel again until the end of the week, when they had their regular tutorial meeting. It was late on Friday afternoon, and already dark outside. Once, this had been Laura’s favourite time of day: the hour after dusk, when lights went on around college and the yellowish glow of standard lamps from innumerable windows threw a patchwork of violet shadows over the whole of the main quad. Recently, however — in fact, why be vague about this, it was since the death of her husband — she had begun to feel differently, and now came to dread this hour, especially on a Friday, with the prospect of a long weekend in the countryside ahead of her, with only her five-year-old son for company. This depressing thought could not be put entirely to one side, even as she did her best to concentrate on the subject of Rachel’s Milton essay: or rather, its continued non-appearance.

‘I’m pretty sure I can get it finished by Monday,’ Rachel was saying, tugging at a strand of blonde hair as her eyes roved distractedly over the contents of Laura’s bookshelves.

‘Really?’ said Laura. ‘Well, that would be great. But don’t rush it. Honestly. It’s not a great precedent to set, but I am used to students handing work in weeks after the deadline.’

‘It won’t be a problem,’ said Rachel. ‘There aren’t many distractions at the weekend. All my friends seem to go home, for one thing.’

This, Laura had noticed, was another new phenomenon of university life: students who, in years gone by, would have regarded term as a welcome opportunity to live an independent life for eight weeks now went back to see their parents most weekends, to have their meals cooked for them and get their laundry done. But not Rachel, it seemed.

‘That must be a bit dreary for you,’ Laura said.

‘Yeah, but … well, Mum doesn’t want me under her feet. She works a seven-day week these days.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She’s a barrister.’

‘Ah! Is that what gave you the idea for your story?’

‘You read it?’ Rachel’s eyes flared with delight.

‘I did. And I really liked it. It’s nice to read something like that which feels as though … well, as though the writer knows what she’s talking about.’

‘My mum represents a lot of whistleblowers. In fact, that’s more or less all she does nowadays. It’s quite a growth industry.’

‘“You will be dispensed with/when you’ve become inconvenient,”’ said Laura, remembering the song lyric in which Rachel had shown such an interest. ‘She must see a lot of that.’

Rachel, not having expected the quotation, took a moment to recognize it. ‘Oh yeah — “Harrowdown Hill”,’ she said. ‘My own little obsession.’

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘we’re all prey to those, now and again.’ She smiled an unreadable smile. ‘Have you ever been there?’

‘No. It’s not far from Oxford, is it?’

‘Not at all. And it’s even closer to where I live. I bought a house very near there, with my husband, a few years before he died. We both liked the idea of living in a village, in the country. Thought it would be good for our son while he was still little.’

‘I didn’t know your husband had …’

‘Last year.’

‘I’m so sorry. Was it …?’

‘Cancer? A heart attack? No. It was an accident. A stupid accident. Or at least …’ She tailed off. ‘Well, there’s always more than one way of looking at things, isn’t there?’

In the silence that followed, Laura made a quick, impulsive decision; and before she’d had time to think whether it was a good one or not, she heard herself putting it into words. Why didn’t Rachel, if she had nothing much else to do this weekend, come and visit her tomorrow, at her house in the village? She could take the train out to Didcot and Keisha could pick her up from the station. And then, in the afternoon, they could drive out together to Harrowdown Hill itself.

Rachel seemed doubtful at first, and Laura wondered whether the suggestion sounded too morbid. ‘It’s a really nice spot,’ she insisted; and then added, even more recklessly: ‘You could even stay the night if you wanted. There’s a nice spare bedroom which hasn’t been used for months.’

Later that night, thinking about it soberly, Rachel knew that she had accepted the invitation more out of politeness than anything else.

*

The village of Little Calverton lies a few miles east of Didcot. The name itself is mysterious, since there is no Large, Big or even Great Calverton, nor is there any record of there ever having been one. It is a classically beautiful Cotswold village, where property prices are (relatively speaking) still on the low side, thanks to the proximity of Didcot power station, the massive chimneys of which rise up less than five miles away. If you can reconcile yourself to this, there are bargains to be had in Little Calverton, and houses there rarely stay on the market for more than a week or two.

‘Nice country,’ Keisha said to Rachel, as they drove along a single-track lane between high hedgerows. Rachel did not answer, but nodded cheerfully: she was not sure, in fact, whether Keisha was referring to the surrounding countryside or to England as a whole, and did not want to appear insensitive by misinterpreting her.

‘Very different to Malaysia, I expect,’ she said, in a non-commital way.

‘Very different. But I like it. I prefer all this. I’m very happy here. Very happy in the UK. Very happy to work for Laura. She’s a nice lady. She teaches you, yes?’

‘That’s right.’

‘For a long time?’

‘Just a few months so far. But she’s great. It’s been great.’

‘Very nice person. Kind, generous. But sad, you know?’

‘Because of her husband?’

‘Because of Roger, yes.’

‘You knew him?’

‘No. I never knew him. I came after he died.’

Briefly, just as they entered the village, a few glimmers of February sunlight broke through the clouds. On their left, the hedgerow tapered away. A triangle of lawn came into view, at its apex a war memorial flanked by two tubs of early primroses. The road curved around it, and after another fifty yards or so Keisha swung the car sharply right, into a short, loosely gravelled driveway that ended at the front door of a picture-perfect thatched cottage, its buttery-yellow, Cotswold-stone walls draped in curtains of wisteria. As soon as the car engine was turned off, the silence seemed chilling, absolute.

‘So, here we are. You all right with your bag?’

It seemed a silly question: Rachel’s tiny holdall was three-quarters empty. She followed Keisha to the front door which, before they had even had time to touch the handle, was thrown open from inside. There, standing in the darkened, flagstoned hallway, was a brown-haired boy of about five or six, who hurled himself at the nanny and crushed her in his arms without saying a word.

‘Hello, beautiful,’ Keisha said. ‘Did you miss me?’

‘You must be Harry,’ said Rachel, reaching out to shake his hand with mock-ceremony, but he ignored her and turned back towards the kitchen, pulling Keisha after him as forcefully as he could.

Rachel was left alone in the hallway. There was a steep, uncarpeted wooden staircase to her left, and three doors at the far end of the hallway, one leading straight ahead into the kitchen, the other two closed. For a moment, the sight of these three doors gave her a flickering sense of déjà vu, but it passed before she could decide whether it arose from a real or a phantom memory. What should she do? It would feel wrong to start calling out Laura’s name. She had been expecting Keisha to announce her arrival, but instead, she could see through the kitchen window that the nanny had already been dragged out into the garden by Harry, and he was trying to involve her in some sort of ball game.

Tentatively, still carrying her holdall, she crossed the flagstones in the direction of the kitchen. Pausing outside the two closed doors, she thought she could hear, from behind one of them, the muffled clicking of keys being tapped on a computer keyboard. She pushed the door open and found herself looking into Laura’s study. Laura herself had her back to the door. She was working at a desk placed in front of a large leaded window, and she was wearing headphones as she worked. She seemed unaware of Rachel’s presence. Through the window Rachel could see a further view of the garden — a sparse expanse of lawn rolling down towards a scruffy border which hinted at a stream beyond — making her suspect for the first time that the house and its grounds might be larger than she had thought. The sun was again doing its best to break through the clouds, throwing occasional patches of light on to the grass.

Rachel was still wondering what to do next when Laura, sensing her presence at last, swivelled round in her chair, took off the headphones and rose to her feet in greeting.

‘Hello, I didn’t hear you come in. Did you have a good journey? Did Keisha look after you? Where’s she got to?’

‘Outside with Harry.’

‘Come on, I’ll get you some coffee.’

In the kitchen, decanting coffee from a frothing, bubbling, gleaming chrome-plated machine, Laura said again: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t hear you. I meant to have hit my word target hours ago but the dreaded emails intervened as usual. They never stop — not even on a Saturday. So I’m afraid I’ve still got a bit to do.’

‘It’s nice to know lecturers have to set themselves word targets as well,’ said Rachel. ‘I thought that was just lazy students.’

‘Hardly,’ said Laura. ‘I promised myself five hundred words today. But I’ll do nowhere near that, of course.’

‘What are you writing about?’

‘Well … I don’t really know. And therein lies the problem, of course. I’m trying to carry on with a project my husband began. I suppose you’d say it was about paranoid fiction. With particular reference to recent British sci fi. And even more particular reference to …’ (she looked embarrassed) ‘… the Loch Ness Monster.’

Rachel was surprised. ‘Sounds fun,’ she said. ‘But quite a long way from Milton.’

‘Yes, well, the faculty isn’t too wild about it,’ said Laura, passing her a mug of treacly black coffee. ‘I’m sure they’d rather I just wrote the fifteen thousandth article on Lycidas — but … well, you have to go wherever your interests take you, don’t you?’

While Laura returned to the study to continue writing, Rachel took her coffee outside. As she had expected, the garden was impressive, with the generous lawn dominated, at its centre, by a classical stone fountain more than six feet high, although no water was cascading today over its three lichen-encrusted tiers. Harry and Keisha were playing down by the stream and took no notice of Rachel as she found a rickety wooden bench next to a rhododendron bush and sat down on it, positioning herself carefully between the many splashes of bird shit. Now that the sun seemed to have disappeared for good, it promised to be a cold afternoon. She shivered slightly.

It was an odd feeling, being here at her tutor’s house. Had she crossed a boundary, by coming? Had Laura crossed a boundary, by inviting her? She had not asked herself these questions before, and it was a bit late to be asking them now. Instead of welcoming her, Laura seemed to have viewed her arrival as an interruption, and for that matter the whole atmosphere of the house and the village made her feel like an intruder. The train ride to Didcot had taken only fifteen minutes and yet, thanks to the stillness and isolation of this place, the relative bustle of Oxford itself seemed already thousands of miles away. It wasn’t just a question of distance, either: Rachel felt, somehow, that in the last hour she had made a long journey through time, back to some far-off, half-forgotten era in her early life. To her childhood, even? This garden certainly bore no resemblance to her mother’s cramped old patio garden in Leeds; and it was at least three times the size of her grandparents’ garden in Beverley, where she had also spent a good many summers. No, these were not the images that were coming to mind this afternoon, as she sipped her coffee cautiously and looked around her. But still, there was an unmistakable aura of childhood about this place: not a badly off, urban, South Yorkshire childhood, such as Rachel’s had been, but a cosseted, Home Counties, 1950s childhood, of the sort with which Rachel was also familiar, if only in a second-hand way, through countless vintage children’s novels which had been her favourite choice of reading matter at the local library when she was growing up. It was all here: the spreading cedar tree which just cried out for a tree house to be built amidst the cluster of its lower branches; the shallow stream at the edge of the lawn, traversed by a footbridge, ideal for those long Sunday afternoon games of Poohsticks; the ramshackle shed which could, without too much effort or imagination, be converted into the makeshift headquarters of a junior detective club. And above all, that fountain: looking a little derelict and melancholy now, but otherwise the perfect centrepiece for a garden which felt eerily like a stage or a film set, on which idealized vignettes of a middle-class childhood were designed to be acted out. That would explain Rachel’s own growing sense of unreality, at any rate.

After another fifteen or twenty minutes, Laura beckoned her inside and showed her up to her room. It was on the second floor (she had not even realized there was a further floor) and turned out to be a low-ceilinged but otherwise spacious bedroom running the whole depth of the house, with windows looking out over both the front and the back gardens. The room should have been cosy but there was an airlessness about it, and a feeling of neglect. The books which spilled out from shelves ranged along every wall were sheened with a fine layer of dust. Glancing at them, Rachel could see that they were mainly devoted to cinema history and film theory.

‘Oh dear, it’s a bit cold in here, isn’t it?’ Laura said, laying a hand on the one small radiator. ‘I’ll get Keisha to bring up a fan heater. And what are these doing here? They should have been moved ages ago.’

She was referring to two large cardboard boxes, crammed to the brim with old VHS tapes. Her curiosity aroused by this display of antique technology, Rachel knelt down to look at the titles.

‘Wow. I’ve never heard of most of these,’ she said. The first tape she had picked up was labelled THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT BBC 2 24.2.85/THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN BBC2 3.10.87.

‘Well, you’re looking at my husband’s pride and joy,’ Laura said. ‘Or rather, a tiny portion of it. There are thousands more — and I do mean thousands — down in the cellar. Whether that’s a good place to keep them, I don’t know. I can’t think what else to do with them at the moment. Oh God, I’ve been looking for this one for ages.’

She plucked out another tape, its cardboard case torn and patched up with Sellotape. Rachel craned over to see the title.

‘What a Whopper?’ she said, amused and disbelieving. ‘What on earth’s that?’

‘Believe it or not, this is one of the films I’m supposed to be writing about. You certainly wouldn’t catch me watching it for pleasure. In fact it’s hard to believe that anybody ever did. Do you think you could help me take these down to the cellar as well? I don’t want them to be in your way.’

They picked up a cardboard box each and began the slightly hazardous business of carrying them down the narrow, uneven staircase.

‘Why are you writing about it, if it’s so bad?’ Rachel asked. ‘The film, I mean.’

‘Well, the plot — such as it is — involves the Loch Ness Monster. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to say about it, but in this business you always win Brownie points for digging up something obscure. Roger was particularly good at that, I must say.’

And when they reached the cellar, it was easy to see why that might have been. It had been excavated to quite some depth, so that it was easy for both of them to stand upright. And it was filled with boxes: beneath the glare of the two naked lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling, Rachel could see at least thirty or forty of them, some filled with books or files or papers, but most simply crammed to the top with more videotapes and DVDs.

‘Wow,’ said Rachel. ‘He was quite a collector, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Laura. ‘Roger never did anything by halves.’

They put their boxes down near the bottom of the stairs and then stood, for a while, in wordless contemplation of the scene of orderly profusion laid out before them. From somewhere in the cellar there emanated a faint, monotonous, electrical hum, which somehow seemed to accentuate the otherwise absolute silence. The light from one of the bulbs had started to flicker uncertainly. There was a damp, mouldering smell which made Rachel fear for the well-being of Roger’s collection, and a piercing chill which made her shiver not just with cold but with sadness. She was keenly aware that she was looking at more than just a jumble of files and boxes. These were the last remains of a human being: all that was left of Laura’s husband.

Laura’s only comment was: ‘What a mess. I’ve got to do something about it soon.’ And then: ‘Come on, it’s getting late. We’d better have this walk before it gets dark.’

She turned and led the way up the stairs, much to the relief of Rachel, who could not get out of there quickly enough. She had always hated cellars.

On the ground floor, Laura detoured into the kitchen, where Keisha was busy loading a full basket of washing into the washing machine.

‘Did you get the parcels ready?’ Laura asked.

‘On the table,’ Keisha answered, without looking up.

From the kitchen table, Laura picked up a large, eco-friendly canvas shopping bag, which seemed to be heavier than she was expecting.

‘Do you think you could take the other one?’ she said. ‘Sorry to be a bore, but this has become a bit of a weekend ritual.’

Rachel grabbed hold of another bag, and glanced down at the contents: tins and packets of food, a jar of instant coffee and some boxes of breakfast cereal.

‘We’ll drop these off on the way, if you don’t mind,’ Laura said, and ushered her into the hallway. They were almost at the front door when Harry came rushing up behind them.

‘Mum, where are you going?’ he asked, plangently.

‘We’re going to the food bank,’ she said. ‘And then we’re going for a walk.’

‘Can I come with you?’ he pleaded.

‘No. You stay here. I thought you were playing with Keisha.’

‘I was but now she’s busy. She says she has lots of things to do.’

‘Well … read a book, or watch a video or something.’ Her tone was noticeably abrupt, dismissive. Rachel looked at her in surprise.

‘Oh Mum, please. I want to come with you.’

With obvious reluctance, Laura finally relented. Out on the drive she heaved Harry into the back of the car and strapped him into his booster seat and then the three of them drove off in the direction of Didcot.

*

Rachel had never been to a food bank before. She had read articles about them, online and in the newspapers. But she had never been inside one.

It was a brief visit, so she only received a fleeting impression. The bank had been set up in what appeared still to be used, on other days of the week, as a café, located in a narrow side road running off the high street. People were sitting in family groups at each of the lightweight silver tables, but they were not drinking coffee: they were clutching vouchers and waiting for their parcels to be made up. Nobody bore any outward sign of poverty. Well-dressed couples waited in pensive silence while bored children sat beside them. The most noticeable thing was that nobody from one table ever seemed to make eye contact with anyone from another. The prevailing mood, as far as Rachel could see, was one of mortification: everybody simply wanted to finish their business and leave as quickly as possible. Somewhere at the back there seemed to be a store room, where the parcels were made up: these would then be carried to the counter where volunteers would match them up to the relevant voucher and call out a number. A family member would scurry up to the counter, eyes never leaving the floor, grab the parcel and then usher their partner or children out of the front door. A number would be called out every twenty or thirty seconds, and there was a constant stream of people going in and out. It was as busy as a GP’s waiting room.

People glanced up at Laura, Rachel and Harry as they came in carrying their shopping bags, but soon looked away again. It was painfully clear who was a donor and who was a supplicant. Rachel had rarely felt so self-conscious. They were shown straight to the store room, and dropped off their bags so quickly that Rachel barely had time to take in the variety of food on the shelves: row upon row of tinned fruit, tinned meat, bags of rice and pasta, packets of biscuits and cakes, all marked with use-by dates in thick black marker pen. Harry, his eye-level lower than hers, stared longingly at a stack of chocolate bars in different-coloured wrappers.

‘Why can’t we ever take any stuff from the food bank?’ he asked his mother as she tugged him away. ‘Why do we only ever give things?’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ she said, and Rachel was struck again by the note of severity and impatience in her voice.

After that, the drive to Longworth took about twenty-five minutes. By the time they turned off the A420 on the outskirts of the village, it was quite late, and the cloud-covered sky was already darkening to a deeper grey. The village itself seemed sleepy, relaxed, perfectly indifferent to (or oblivious of) the tragedy that had unfolded there almost a decade earlier. Laura seemed to know exactly which turnings to take, and where to park the car.

‘You’ve been here a few times before, then, have you?’ Rachel asked.

‘Yes, Roger and I used to come here quite often. You don’t have to be a David Kelly obsessive to like Harrowdown Hill. It’s a nice walk, apart from anything else. Which is why he took it that afternoon, of course.’

They pulled in to the car park of The Blue Boar pub, a cosy, welcoming thatched building in Cotswold stone, which nonetheless appeared to be closed this afternoon, going by the dimness of the lighting just about visible through its tiny windows. Wrapping up against the now very tangible chill, the two women turned right out of the car park and set off down the lane at a brisk pace, with little Harry dawdling behind them, tracing a more erratic route which involved zig-zagging from one side of the lane to the other. It was a no-through road, and there was no traffic: any approaching cars would have been easy to hear, so Laura did not seem at all concerned that he was playing unsupervised. She was more worried that he was holding them back.

‘Hurry up, Harry!’ she called, turning and frowning at him. ‘You’ve got to keep up with us. You’re making us all go too slowly.’

Harry ran towards her obediently and clasped her hand. Mother and son walked along like that for half a minute or so; then Rachel noticed that Laura unloosed his hand and let it fall.

‘So,’ Laura now said, ‘this is the lane he would have walked along, at about three o’clock in the afternoon. And that’s the hill he was making for — look, just ahead on the left.’

Rachel’s eyes followed her pointing finger, towards a nondescript, tree-covered mound in the landscape which made the word ‘hill’ seem somewhat hyperbolic. In the rapidly fading daylight, it did not look especially beautiful.

‘We won’t be able to get into the wood,’ Laura added. ‘They’ve put barbed wire around it now.’

Before long the tarmac had petered out and they found themselves walking up a dirt track, overgrown with grass and bordered with weeds and wild flowers. Harry took a stick to these and was soon hacking them down with gusto.

‘I can see why they’d do that,’ said Rachel. ‘You’re right, it does feel a bit … morbid, coming here.’

‘Why do you remember the news story so clearly, do you think?’ Laura asked. ‘You must have been very young when it happened.’

‘I was ten. I was staying with my grandparents, and I remember them being very shocked by it. My grandad always hated Tony Blair so of course he was prepared to think the worst. I mean, I’m not sure he thought he was murdered or anything, but he definitely thought there was something strange about it …’

‘I know, it felt very … odd, didn’t it, that day?’ Laura said. ‘But I’m not sure I believe in conspiracy theories, and what Roger said afterwards … He just thought that a line had been crossed, a terrible line, and it was the shockwaves of that which were giving everyone the sense that there was something else going on, something mysterious.’

They passed a sign which read ‘River Thames, ¾ Mile’, which surprised Rachel: she had not realized that the river was nearby. Harry was starting to look cold. Another few minutes and they would be as close to the top of the hill as the path allowed, with the fatal woodland spreading out to their left.

‘He had this theory,’ said Laura, ‘— Roger was full of theories, mainly I suppose because that’s what he got paid for … Anyway, this one was that every generation has a moment when they lose their innocence. Their political innocence. And that’s what David Kelly’s death represented for our generation. Up until then, we’d been sceptical about the Iraq war. We’d suspected the government wasn’t telling us the whole truth. But the day he died was the day it became absolutely clear: the whole thing stank. Suicide or murder, it didn’t really matter. A good man had died, and it was the lies surrounding the war that had killed him, one way or another. So that was it. None of us could pretend any longer that we were being governed by honourable people.’

‘That sounds about right,’ said Rachel. ‘But it’s sad.’

‘What’s sad about it?’

‘Losing your innocence. It’s just about the worst thing that can happen. Isn’t that what Paradise Lost is all about?’

‘Innocence is overrated,’ said Laura. ‘Anyone who hankers after lost innocence is … well, I don’t trust them.’ They had reached the edge of the woodland and were peering aimlessly into it, wanting to find meaning in its tangle of greenery and undergrowth. Harry was behind them, tugging at Laura’s coat, trying to get her attention, instinctively but for no particular reason. ‘Look at him, for instance,’ she said, glancing down at her son, whose eyes met hers in a plaintive but unspecific appeal. ‘He still has his innocence. Do you envy him for it? He still thinks his Christmas presents are brought by a big bloke in a red suit, in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. What’s so great about that?’

It was almost dark now. Putting her hands into her pockets and pulling her coat tighter, Laura started to lead the way back down the path towards the village.

‘I could tell you a story,’ she said, ‘about what happens when someone longs too much for innocence.’

Rachel looked down at Harry. Their eyes met and he shrugged: neither of them could guess what his mother was talking about. Rachel took his hand as they walked back down the hill.

*

Keisha had left a casserole in the oven for them: all Laura had to do was boil some rice. They ate in the kitchen, after which Laura went upstairs to put Harry to bed. It always took longer than she would like: when she came back down and joined Rachel in the sitting room, she found that she had managed to light a good fire, with a neat pyramid of logs already flaming on a nest of kindling wood and back issues of the Guardian. Now Rachel was sitting in one of the two sagging but comfortable armchairs placed on either side of the fire, her eyes fixed on the screen of her smart phone.

‘This is a bit harsh,’ she said, looking up only briefly to say thank you as Laura put a glass of red wine down on the table beside her. ‘“A film that makes you want to stab out your eyes with red hot knitting needles.” And that’s one of the better reviews.’

‘What are you looking at?’ said Laura, sitting down opposite her.

‘I’m on the IMDb, looking at reviews of that film you showed me earlier.’

‘What a Whopper?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t seem to have many fans on here. I think your husband must have been in a small minority.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that he was a fan, exactly. He knew rubbish when he saw it. But Roger responded to books and films in all sorts of different, contradictory ways. That was one of the nice things about him. And also one of the most frustrating. And of course, everything was grist to his mill as a critic. Look — I’ll show you something.’

She left the room and returned carrying a thick, leather-bound A4 notebook. When she opened it Rachel could see that page after page was covered with dense, spidery handwriting. It was a catalogue of films, in roughly alphabetical order, all of them glossed with Roger’s fragmentary, rather cryptic annotations.

‘What does he say about it in there?’ Laura asked.

Rachel turned to the ‘W’ section and soon found What a Whopper.

Lame British comedy, she read, about a bunch of beatniks who travel to Loch Ness to build a model of the monster.

1962. Sequel to What a Carve Up! (1961)? Not really. Two of the same actors.

*Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery.

‘What does this mean?’ Rachel asked, pointing to the asterisk at the beginning of the last line.

‘Ah, that means that something had given him the idea for an article,’ said Laura, craning forward to take a closer look. ‘Yeah, he was always doing that. Always coming up with ideas for pieces. When we first got married I was convinced he was some kind of genius and one day he was going to turn all this obscure knowledge into some great book, some academic masterpiece. I thought that’s what was driving him. It never occurred to me that it might have been something as simple as … nostalgia.

‘Moving to this house — that was the thing that began to open my eyes to what he was really like. I was pregnant with Harry and we had this clichéd idea that if we were going to bring up a child it would be a good idea to relocate to the country. Somewhere not far from Oxford, obviously.

‘So we started looking, and then, early in 2006, we found this place. I remember the morning we drove out here to look at it. It was a pretty hard winter that year, and this was in the last week of January. The day before, there’d been a heavy snowfall, and since then there hadn’t been much in the way of a thaw. Well, of course, that was what sold us, in a way. You can imagine how pretty this village looked, can’t you, when it was covered in snow? And the cottage itself … well, it just looked beautiful. Enchanting. The owners brought us inside, and made coffee to warm us up, and showed us around the house. We were both … taken with it, certainly, although I wouldn’t say that either of us was exactly in raptures at that point. As you can see, it’s a bit on the boxy side, and there were quite a few problems to do with damp and so on — none of which have really been sorted out. I could tell that Roger was unconvinced, was maybe having second thoughts about the whole thing. But that was before he saw the garden …’

Laura smiled to herself when she spoke this word, and stared, reminiscent, into the dancing flames of the fire.

‘It was the last thing the owners of the house showed us. Roger and I went out to look at it together, and when we got out on to the terrace we held hands, as much for warmth as anything else, because neither of us was wearing gloves. And after a few seconds, I could feel him squeezing my hand. Squeezing it so tightly that it was actually hurting. I turned to look at him and I saw this look in his eye that I’d never seen before. It was … it was kind of faraway and intense at the same time. It rather scared me, to tell the truth. I could tell that some weird, powerful emotion had come over him. So I said, “Roger, what is it? What’s the matter?” And he turned to glance at me, but only for a second or two, because then he turned away again and looked across the lawn and he said something. Not to me — he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to himself. And all he said, in little more than a whisper, was: “The Crystal Garden …”

‘It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that phrase. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.’

She fell silent, until Rachel felt obliged to prompt her once more: ‘So what did he mean by it?’

‘I wasn’t sure at first. It was only afterwards that he explained. You saw the fountain in the centre of the lawn? It’s not working at the moment, of course. The pump stopped working a couple of years ago and now it’s one of many things that I need to get around to fixing. But it was working back then, and it formed a proper centrepiece to the garden. That was the first thing your eyes were drawn towards. And that day, I remember, it looked particularly stunning. The water had frozen, you see — that’s how cold it was. So you had this cascade, this waterfall of ice, tumbling over the different levels of the fountain. It looked like some sort of chandelier in the ballroom of a fairytale castle. There were icicles hanging from all the trees, the stream itself was frozen, and the lawn was a shimmering blanket of pure white. It did look kind of … eldritch, do you know that word? It means uncanny. Other-worldly. Rather like it was made of crystal. I thought that’s what Roger had meant, at first. But it turned out there was more to it than that.

‘We stayed out in the garden for about ten minutes but he hardly spoke in that time. He was wandering around in a kind of trance, walking over to different corners of the garden and then turning around to view everything from different angles. He stood beside the fountain and touched the frozen water. I can still see him doing this, such a sombre figure in his long black overcoat, his fingers stroking the cascade of icicles gently, then flicking them with his fingernails so that they sounded little notes like some far-off, tinkling musical instrument. His eyes were misted over. The owners of the house were trying to talk to us about water drainage and the cost of hiring a local gardener but Roger wasn’t listening to a word. He didn’t reply to a single thing they told him, until right at the very end of the tour, when he suddenly turned to them and said: “Of course, we’ll buy it.”

‘I was amazed. He hadn’t even asked my opinion. And he hadn’t said “We’ll be making an offer”; he’d said, “We’ll buy it.” Just like that. In the car on the way back to Oxford, I was too angry to talk to him properly. Anyway, he was behaving especially strangely; he was on some weird cloud nine of his own. He never once mentioned the garden. He kept talking about the house, rhapsodizing about it as though we could never have imagined anything so perfect. Finally I cut him off in mid-flow and told him that he should never, ever do anything like that again. He didn’t even know what I was talking about. When I pointed out to him that, without consulting me, he’d assured these people we were going to buy their house off them, he didn’t even seem to be aware that he’d done it. And the strange thing is, I believed him. It was as if he’d experienced some sort of fugue state.

‘As soon as we got back to our flat, he disappeared into the study and went online. I didn’t see much of him after that, until later that evening, when he came and found me on the sofa, eating dinner. I’d ordered pizza but he hadn’t heard me when I told him it had arrived. He was carrying his laptop with him and he sat down next to me and started talking.

‘“OK,” he said. “So I have to tell you what happened to me today in that garden.” I told him that was probably a good idea, and he started to explain: “Something came back to me,” he said. “Something I thought I might have imagined. From a long time ago.” He was struggling, rather, to find the words. “When I was just a kid, probably aged about five or six, I saw this film. At least, until today I wasn’t really sure whether I’d seen it or not. I didn’t know whether it was something I’d invented, or dreamed, or misremembered, or whatever. All I know is that the memory of it — even if it was a false memory — was so precious that I’d barely even allowed myself to think about it in all that time.” He looked at me so earnestly that I almost wanted to laugh. Which wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, since I had a mouth full of pizza at the time. “I didn’t know anything about it, except that it was a short film, as far as I could recall. It must have been shown mid-afternoon, in the school holidays, as some sort of filler between programmes, and it was called The Crystal Garden. At least, I was pretty sure that must have been the title. It’s so hard to distinguish what belongs to memory and what belongs to real life. I can’t remember anything about the story. I can only remember … an atmosphere, a feeling. A very faded print, the soundtrack filled with pops and scratches. A young boy as the hero: in one scene — the only scene I can call to mind, in any detail — he wanders into this garden, and I can remember the music on the soundtrack — there was a sort of tinkling background, some sort of tuned percussion, and over the top of that, a tune — a beautiful tune, lyrical and yearning — with a soprano singing the melody — there were no words — but again, the whole thing was incredibly scratchy, almost distorted — the recording must have deteriorated so badly … And this garden … The whole thing was made of crystal, was made of glass … It was a walled garden, he had to pass through a sort of passageway, a sort of tunnel in the wall to get to it, and when he came out into the garden … Yes, everything glittered, everything was made of crystal, all the flowers, the roses, the little topiary hedges, there were paths criss-crossing each other between the flower beds and they led towards this … lake, was it? this frozen pond? … a sheet of crystal, anyway, and this fountain at the centre of it, shimmering, glittering, just like the fountain in the garden today. The resemblance was incredible.” He paused for breath. I think this was the longest speech he’d ever made in the whole time I’d known him. His voice was quiet, but it was shaking as well. I’d never known him speak about anything with such passion. “I’m sure this is real,” he resumed after a while. “I’m sure I’m not imagining this. I did see that film. I know I did. I just wish I could remember more about it. It’s crazy, I can’t remember anything about the story. Nothing at all. Like I said, the whole thing is just … just an atmosphere, and the strange thing is, that the atmosphere of the film sort of … bleeds in to the atmosphere in the room when I was watching it. It was the school holidays — it must have been the school holidays — or perhaps I was off sick, something like that — and Mum wasn’t sitting next to me on the sofa or anything but she was inside the house with me, in the next room, I think, in the kitchen, getting dinner ready for when Dad came home. And it was winter, definitely winter, because there were ice crystals on the window of the living room and icicles hanging down above the window, and snow on the ground outside, or at least a frost — these details blend in, you see, they blend in with the crystal of the crystal garden; and our gas fire was on, our little old-fashioned gas fire, and it was hissing, as it always did, and giving out little pops and scratches, and again, that blends in, somehow, with the poor quality of the film soundtrack, so that it becomes even more hard to distinguish between what I’ve remembered and what I’ve imagined.”

‘He tailed off, and fell silent, until I asked: “How come you’ve never mentioned this before, if it’s such an important memory for you?”

‘And he said: “Because I couldn’t be sure if it was true or not. Not until today.”

‘“Just because the garden reinforced that memory,” I said, “doesn’t mean that it makes it true. It sounds to me that what you’re doing is conflating two different —” But he cut me off, and went back to the computer. “No,” he said, “that’s not the point. The point is that seeing the garden today made me go online and start looking for some evidence. And here’s what I found.”

‘He passed the laptop over. I wiped my fingers on a piece of kitchen towel and took it off him. He was on the IMDb, looking at a page devoted to the filmography of some American cameraman. There was a long list of pretty undistinguished credits from the early 1940s onwards — some of them films, but mostly TV shows — and then just one credit as director, which said “Der Garten aus Kristall, 1937”. When you clicked on the link, it brought up a page which was completely blank except for the title of the film and the director’s name: Friedrich Güdemann.

‘I looked across at him and said: “That’s it?”

‘“That’s it,” he answered.

‘I double checked. “You’ve spent the last few hours searching the internet for this film, and this is all you found?”

‘“Yes. There’s no other reference to it. Nothing.”

‘I looked at the computer screen again. “So it’s a German film?”

‘“Apparently,” he answered. “When I put the English title into Google, nothing was coming up. So I started trying other languages, and slight variations on the title. And finally, this was what I found. It must be the right one,” he said, biting his lip. “It has to be.”

‘But was it the right one? This was Roger’s dilemma, and it turned out to be an agonizing, drawn-out wait before he would find the answer. Already, that day, he’d posted queries about the film on the message boards of every movie website he could think of. He’d asked if anyone, like him, could remember seeing the film on afternoon television back in the 1960s. He asked for any information anyone could provide about Friedrich Güdemann, whose IMDb filmography suggested that he had moved to America in the early 1940s and anglicized his name to Fred Goodman. There was no Wikipedia entry about him, and no further references anywhere online. Having made his enquiries, Roger could only sit back and wait for some answers to come in.’

‘And did they?’ Rachel asked.

Laura shook her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ She sighed. ‘He was crushed by that. Really disappointed. He’d been convinced that in this day and age, the age of universal information, there was no subject so obscure that it didn’t have its own expert online, somewhere or other. But for the time being he seemed to have drawn a blank. He kept checking the message boards, re-posting his questions and bumping the threads, but after a few weeks he seemed more or less resigned to the idea that he wasn’t going to hear anything that way. He didn’t talk about it much, but I knew that he was broken by it. He’d felt that he’d been on the verge of this … momentous discovery, and now he was back where he started.’

Laura sipped her wine again. The fire suddenly gave out a sharp crackle and one of the logs tumbled out of place. Rachel looked down at the fire, and the sounds it was making, the warmth it was giving out, made her think of the infant Roger, sitting in front of his gas fire at home in the school holidays, watching this film with its ancient soundtrack of pops and crackles, his mother next door in the kitchen, preparing the family dinner …

‘Well, life went on. In fact it became pretty busy. That year we had two life-changing events to deal with — moving house, which we did in the spring, and then the birth of Harry, which happened in the summer. Roger was … you know, pretty helpful about all this. He was quite involved, and for the first few months after Harry was born he was a pretty good father. Very hands-on. It seemed to be distracting him from all his other obsessions for a while, I thought, but it turned out I was wrong about that. The memory of that film was still weighing him down. The first I knew about it was when he told me that he’d been asked to contribute to a book of essays that Palgrave Macmillan were bringing out. It was a sort of Festschrift, paying homage to this film writer called Terry Worth, who’d been quite a name to reckon with in the 1990s. He’d also been a bit of a specialist on the subject of lost films, and this was the aspect of his work that Roger had been asked to write about. So of course I asked him if he was going to mention The Crystal Garden and he said probably not — there just wasn’t enough information available to make it worthwhile. He said it in a very offhand way, so I really got the impression that he’d more or less forgotten about it, or at least put it to the back of his mind. He did say that this article was going to involve a lot of research, which didn’t come at an especially good time, for me. There were about two weeks when I didn’t see him at all. I was stuck at home feeding Harry, while Roger was away for days at a time down at the BFI library in London. Or at least, that’s where I thought he was.’ She paused, stared ruefully for a moment into the depths of her wine glass, then looked up again. ‘One day I got an email from a friend, who’d just run into him — not at the BFI at all. He was at the Newspaper Library in Colindale.’ She looked quickly across at Rachel. ‘What’s so funny? What are you smiling at?’

‘Sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just — I thought it might be something a bit … spicier than that. That he’d been having an affair, or something.’

‘That would have been preferable, in a way,’ said Laura. ‘At least that would have been relatively normal behaviour. But there was never anything normal about Roger. Only he could cheat on his wife by working in a different library than the one he was supposed to be working in. Anyway, he wouldn’t have made a very good adulterer, because when he got back from London that night and I mentioned it to him, he confessed everything. Apparently he’d been going to Colindale every day to trawl through the entire TV listings of the Birmingham Post for the mid-1960s. I got pretty angry with him, as you can imagine, and accused him of wasting his time. To which he said: “Ah! But it hasn’t been a waste of time. Not at all. I’ve narrowed it down to two days.”

‘“Narrowed what down?” I said.

‘“The screening date. Here — take a look at these.” And he took two sheets of paper out of his briefcase and threw them down in front of me, like some self-satisfied detective producing his proof of the murderer’s identity at the end of a film. I looked at them and couldn’t see what he was talking about. They were just photocopies of two separate television listings from an old newspaper. No mention of The Crystal Garden anywhere.

‘“Don’t you see?” he said. “Look at this one: 14 December 1966. A Wednesday afternoon. The school holidays would just have started. I’d be five and a half years old. Now look at the listings for ATV. There — look. At ten past two.” I looked at the listing and read out the title. “Against the Wind. What’s that got to do with anything?” He sighed impatiently, as if I was some kind of imbecile. “Don’t you see?” he said. “Look when the next programme started.” I did. It started at four thirty, but again, I couldn’t see the relevance of this. “Against the Wind,” he pointed out, almost breathless with excitement, “is an Ealing film from the 1940s, set in occupied Belgium. And it’s only ninety-six minutes long. And films run even more quickly when broadcast on television. So let’s say ninety minutes. Add in even twenty or twenty-five minutes’ worth of commercials, and you’re still left with a big gap in the schedule. Something that would need to be filled.” He stared at me in triumph, but I just looked down with a frown, not liking the direction this was taking at all. “And this one’s the same,” he continued, “but even better: 16 February 1967. A Thursday. Probably half-term. This time the film is The Man Who Could Work Miracles — an H. G. Wells adaptation, which I know I saw round about that time. I can remember it, quite clearly. And it’s only eighty-two minutes long! Which leaves a gap in the schedule of more than twenty minutes this time. And the weather was right that week, as well — there’d been a snowfall two days before. I’m certain this has to be the one. Ninety-nine per cent certain, anyway. When else could it have been? I’ve been through all the other listings and these were the only real gaps.”

‘“You’ve been through them all?” I said, incredulous. “How long did that take?”

‘“Not long,” he said, defensively. “Just three or four days.”

‘I was pretty shocked when I heard this was how he’d been spending his time, as you might imagine. But it seemed that these things went in cycles. He was all excited about his discovery for a few days, but nothing came of it. He hadn’t managed to prove anything, of course. He wrote to Central TV in Birmingham but they didn’t have any of their archives from the old ATV days. No paperwork or anything like that. Anyway they thought he was some sort of crank, obviously. So once again, after a few more months, he seemed to have got over it.

‘Academic publishing, as you know, doesn’t exactly move fast. It took two years for that book of essays about Terry Worth to come out, and when it did, Roger’s was singled out as being one of the best. It was a really good piece, I could see that. This was the tragedy: when Roger could get past his obsessions and tackle something serious, he really was a good writer. A lot of it was about a Billy Wilder film called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is famous for having about a third of its footage cut out before it was released. In the bits that are left, Holmes and Watson go up to Scotland and encounter the Loch Ness Monster. Roger and I watched it together one night, and I suppose that’s when we both started thinking about the Monster and what it represents. The one in this film turns out to be a fake, of course. As they so often do.

‘That was a good night. We sat up together for hours, talking about all these different Loch Ness films and trying to decide what they had in common. We noticed that the main characters usually take people’s responses to the idea of the Monster — some sense of awe, perhaps, bordering on fear — and try to make a profit out of it. That’s when he came up with this phrase, “monetizing wonder”.’ Laura paused, and shook her head with sad incredulity. ‘How long ago was that? And I’m still trying to finish the article for him. Unbelievable.’

She fell quite silent. Rachel thought that some words of encouragement might be in order. ‘It’s a good phrase anyway,’ she said. ‘You should use it as the title. But what about the other film, the German one …?’

‘Well …’ said Laura, ‘the next thing that happened was a message. A message online, out of the blue, from someone who had finally seen one of Roger’s requests for information. More than three years after he’d posted it, in fact. (Yes, that’s right — because Harry was already at nursery.) And that was how he found out the whole story of the film. And it was also the beginning of the end, for him.

‘This guy Chris had been browsing one of these film fan sites and just by chance he’d seen Roger’s old post. So he sent him a personal message …’ She paused to take another sip from her glass, but found it empty. ‘Goodness, that went quickly. Is there anything left in the bottle?’

‘Afraid not,’ said Rachel, with a regretful glance at her own glass. ‘We’ve certainly been getting through it tonight.’

‘That’s all right. I think it’s time to open another. And while I’m doing that,’ said Laura, rising effortfully to her feet, ‘you can have a look at the thread. It’s still there, on the website.’

And so, while Laura opened another bottle of Rioja and poured two more glasses, Rachel sat with the laptop on her knees and read through the exchange of messages which Roger had initiated, on the forums of a site called Britmovie.

23 October 2010 18:32

Hi Roger

Sorry for the delayed reply! I have only just discovered this site and seen your queries.

First off — I have never seen The Crystal Garden but your memory doesn’t deceive you. It was indeed shown in the ATV region one afternoon in the mid-sixties. This was certainly its only British TV screening and one of its very few public screenings anywhere in the world! I know this because my grandfather, Tom Ferris, was the man responsible.

It’s a long story and I don’t know how much information you want apart from the fact your memory is accurate. Let me know and I’ll try to fill in any gaps.

Cheers

Chris Ferris

23 October 2010 19:05

Hi Chris

This is incredible. I had given up hope of ever hearing back from anyone about this (to me) mythical film, and now you have confirmed everything I suspected! To find out that I didn’t dream or imagine it is an amazing moment for me. I am literally shaking in front of the computer as I type these words.

Please tell me every single thing you know about this film and its screening on British TV, starting at the very beginning.

Roger

24 October 2010 23:53

Chris

Are you still there?

Roger

25 October 2010 22:17

Hi Roger

Sorry to have left it a couple of days before replying. I can see you’re pretty keen to hear about this. But it’s taken me a day or two to get my thoughts together and put the facts in the right order.

So, where to start? Let’s start with the director of the film, Fred Goodman, or Friedrich Güdemann as he was known before he got out of Germany in the late 1930s. Friedrich (my grandfather could never bring himself to call him Fred) came from Magdeburg, in the East. He was a young and talented DP who had worked for several years at UFA studios. But he also had ambitions to direct, and had apparently been getting quite frustrated that no opportunities had presented themselves. The only thing he’d managed to do was a tiny little film, about 8 or 9 minutes long, which he’d made over one weekend at the country house of some friends, in the middle of winter, using their little son as the main actor. As far as I know it had no real plot to speak of (you would perhaps know more about this), just one sequence of a little boy exploring the grounds of this house, making his way through this tunnel in one of the walls and emerging into a magical landscape, a garden made entirely of crystal. That’s all there was to it, and yet the few people who saw the film said it cast an extraordinary spell on them. Including my grandad. It was a visionary piece of work, he said. At the very least, it was an amazing calling card. But Friedrich was Jewish, of course, and he’d already left it dangerously late to get out of Germany. When he did finally make his escape, he took the film with him — the only print in existence, on a single 16 mm reel. He pitched up in Paris and then a few months later managed to cross the Channel to London. This would be in ’37 or ’38. He soon got introduced to the film-making community here and found some work at Gainsborough, where he was DP on a couple of lowbrow comedies — sub-Will Hay stuff. God knows what he made of the films themselves, but I’m sure he did a good, professional job. Anyway, this was where he met my grandfather, who was designing titles for Gainsborough at the time. Friedrich asked him to do some new titles for The Crystal Garden — unpaid, that is. In his spare time. He thought it would be good to have an English-language version, and it was only the opening titles that needed changing — the film had no dialogue as far as I know. My grandad liked Friedrich and was happy to do him the favour. So the film was screened for him and he was quite bowled over, apparently. He said it was beautifully photographed, of course, because Friedrich was a very gifted guy, but the thing that made the strongest impression on him, funnily enough, was the music. There’d been no money to use an orchestra or anything like that, so once again Friedrich had called in a favour, and got a friend to write some music for it, and persuaded this soprano — it may even have been the same woman who owned the country house — to do the recording. Just her voice, I believe, and a little chamber group. Grandad often used to talk to me about this music and how beautiful it was but I never heard it myself, sadly.

Well, this has already taken longer than I thought so I’ll pack it in for now and continue the story tomorrow if I get the time.

25 October 2010 22:33

Oh God yes, I remember that music. So lovely, and so sad! Like the distillation of every lament for childhood innocence that you ever heard. How did I understand that, how did I tune in to it, when I was just five years old? Or am I projecting, looking back on my five-year-old self, my eyes riveted to that tiny black and white screen, the recording of that music (already thirty years old) drifting out of the puny speaker on our little Ekco TV set through a quagmire, a forest of pops and crackles and distortions? And the gas fire hissing in the hearth, my mum next door in the kitchen, getting dinner ready for when Dad came home. I think …

… I think I’m already high on the stuff you’ve told me, and I’ve had 2 or 3 glasses of wine too many while reading it, and it’s always a mistake to post when pissed, so …

26 October 2010 22:42

Hello again Roger

I hope you didn’t drink too much more wine last night, and your hangover wasn’t too horrific this morning!

Anyway, I can see that this is an important story for you, and I’m sorry to have left you hanging in the air like that. It’s taking me longer than I expected to tell you everything. So let’s pick up where we left off.

My grandad Tom designed a nice set of opening title cards for the film and added them to the print, but I’m pretty sure Friedrich never saw them — not until many years later, anyway. In fact Grandad was still working on the film, and still had the print in his possession, when he got a telegram from Friedrich which gave him quite a shock. It was sent from a transatlantic liner and it said that a friend of Friedrich’s had obtained a work permit for him in America at very short notice and he was off to Hollywood. (Along with all the other, more famous European refugees from Nazi Germany who went there in those years — I’m sure you don’t need me to list their names.) And that was the last Grandad ever saw of him, as it turned out. Friedrich changed his name to Fred Goodman and after a few years in Hollywood he moved over to television and worked on a number of big shows for CBS and others. Which, coincidentally, is more or less what Grandad did after the war. He worked at Ealing Studios for most of the forties but made the transition to television almost as soon as commercial TV started up. He moved to the Midlands and worked for ATV, designing titles and captions to start with, finally ending up with a desk job in scheduling.

So that brings us to the mid-1960s. Grandad and Friedrich have sporadically — very sporadically — kept in touch during this time. A letter every two or three years. Grandad still has the print of The Crystal Garden and has shown it a few times at film societies and so on — at one point even offering to try and find distribution for it as a supporting feature but I don’t think anything came of that. Friedrich has given him carte blanche to get it shown whenever he can — he’s not interested in remuneration. And this is how Grandad one day gets his idea. The scheduling at ATV can be somewhat erratic, especially during the daytime, and the best care isn’t always taken to ensure that feature films, in particular, fill the spots that have been allowed to them. Quite often ten or fifteen minutes have to be filled in and for this reason a little stockpile of ‘standby’ material is kept on hand: sometimes cartoons and so on, but those can be expensive to use, so more often it’s cheaper material like terrible Public Information films from the 1950s. And so, Grandad decided to lend his print of The Crystal Garden to ATV so that they could drop it into the afternoon schedule like this if they ever needed to. To plug a ten-minute gap. And that is indeed what happened — once and once only — on the day you saw the film and it made such a strong impression on you.

So, I hope I have cleared up that mystery at least. It’s been nice connecting with someone who remembers the film — the story of Grandad and Friedrich and this one unrepeated screening is something of a legend in my household. It’s nice to know that someone saw it and, more importantly, actually remembers it.

27 October 2010 00:27

Chris

I can’t believe you have left the story unfinished like this. You haven’t answered the most important question of all.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRINT???

27 October 2010 21:46

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRINT??

28 October 2010 10:33

Dear Roger

Hm. Well, a quick ‘thanks’ or something after I told you all that stuff would have been nice, but anyway …

Briefly — when the Wall came down in ’89, Friedrich returned home to Magdeburg for the first time in more than sixty years. He wrote to my grandfather and asked him to send the print out to Germany as he wanted to see it again. And that’s what Grandad did. More than that I don’t know.

Hope this satisfies your curiosity.

Cheers

Chris

And that, it seemed, was the end of the thread. Rachel closed the laptop and handed it back to Laura, who had been watching her all this time, sipping her wine mechanically and leaning forward in her eagerness to observe her reaction.

‘Well …?’ said Laura, after a while, when no immediate response was forthcoming.

‘He certainly had it bad,’ said Rachel. ‘I hope that he didn’t … I hope you’re not going to tell me the next thing he did was go to Germany?’

Laura nodded slowly, with a sad, emphatic smile. ‘Of course. What else was he going to do?’

She ran a hand through her hair and took a deep breath. ‘Roger had a friend who lived over there. Well, not a friend, exactly — an academic colleague called James, who’d married a German woman and now taught film studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. When Roger was writing about The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, James had helped him to track down an old German TV documentary about Billy Wilder. He was resourceful and he knew his way around the key German film archives. So James made some routine initial enquiries but nothing came of them. Friedrich Güdemann had died in 2004 at the healthy age of ninety-five, but since then The Crystal Garden hadn’t turned up anywhere. So what had become of that single print? Was it with his family — and for that matter, where were his family? Did he have children and grandchildren back in America? Roger sent a message to Chris asking him if he knew anything about this, but Chris was no longer in the mood to answer any of my rude husband’s questions. So this was where James had to step in again.

‘Well, Güdemann had been gay, apparently — that was one of the first things he discovered. When he’d come back to live in Germany he was already an old man and his long-term lover was dead. Güdemann spent his last years in Leipzig, with his sister and brother-in-law. By the time James found all this out, the brother-in-law was the only one left alive, and he was in a care home and not particularly compos mentis. James found himself dealing with this man’s son-in-law, a guy in his late fifties called Horst. So we’re already several steps removed from Friedrich himself by now. After putting his father-in-law in a home, Horst had sold his house and put all his effects into a couple of big storage units in a warehouse on the outskirts of Leipzig. Did this include any of Friedrich’s stuff, James wanted to know? Horst wasn’t sure. He’d simply taken the entire contents of the house and stored them. His plan was to go through it all whenever he had the time but he hadn’t got round to it yet.

‘Now, I don’t know exactly what James said to him to get him to cooperate. But, somehow or other, he persuaded Horst to let him look through the contents of the units. And as soon as he emailed Roger to let him know about this, Roger was on the first plane to Germany. He literally booked the first flight he could find that evening. I was sitting up in bed reading, last thing at night, when he came in and announced that he was off to Leipzig the next day. He had to get up at 3.30. I remember him giving me a goodbye kiss and saying something to me about the film — how sure he was that he was going to find it, how this was going to be the end of the search, how it would all be over and done with in a couple of days. I kissed him back and told him that I was glad. And that was the last time I ever saw him.’

She tried to drink from her wine glass, but it was empty again. Her eyes seemed tired now, almost sightless.

‘I’ll fetch James’s letter,’ she said. ‘That will tell you the end of the story.’

Rachel noticed that Laura was slightly unsteady on her feet as she got up and left the room. She went into the ground-floor study and was gone for a few minutes. Rachel heard desk drawers being opened and shut repeatedly, papers being shuffled through, multiple tuts of impatience and frustration. But at last the document was found, and Laura returned, bearing it aloft in one hand while she carried a small bottle in the other.

‘Brandy,’ she explained. ‘Always good to finish off the evening with a brandy. And here’s the letter. Have a read of that while I pour you a little shot of brandy.’

There was still a little wine left in Rachel’s glass, but the brandy was added to it anyway, producing a liquid that was sickly orange in colour. She refrained from drinking it, and concentrated instead on the sheaf of handwritten sheets which Laura had given her. The handwriting was clear and firm, with a noticeable italic slant. The notepaper itself was thick, creamy yellow and expensively watermarked.

My dear Laura [the letter began],

What a terrible thing it is to have to write these words. You said, at the funeral (and how beautifully you spoke to the congregation, on that wretched occasion), that I was not to blame myself for what happened. But how can I not? I was the one who led Roger to the place where he died. True, I could never have predicted what would happen there, but still — the fact remains. If it wasn’t for my intervention, your husband would be alive today.

Thursday was not the time to discuss the details of his last few hours. I promised you that I would write and tell you all that I could. So I shall begin at the time that I met Roger off the plane at Leipzig.

It was a bitterly cold morning. I met him at the airport (snow had delayed his connecting flight from Hannover by half an hour) and we went for a coffee at the airport bar. He did not waste any time in small talk — he came straight to the point and wanted to know everything about our forthcoming meeting with Horst. We had plenty of time but he made me gulp down my coffee and leave. As a consequence we arrived at the storage units about 15 minutes early. It was getting ever more snowy and although by now it was late in the morning, the sky was a thick grey-black and it felt like there would be no real daylight today. The storage place was simply a large warehouse on the outskirts of town: a place totally without character or atmosphere. There was a big car park outside. We parked the car and walked inside through the snow, and bought ourselves more scalding black coffee from the machine next to the reception desk. Then we sat there drinking it and waiting for Horst to arrive. I explained a thing or two to Roger: that it had not been easy, at first, to persuade Horst to let us look through these storage cupboards in search of Friedrich Güdemann’s effects. He was mistrustful of us. Until I had contacted him, he’d had no idea that Friedrich had had a career in film and television and the only reason he had agreed to meet us this morning, I was sure, was the possibility that we might be able to alert him to something among these belongings that was valuable and might be worth selling. I warned Roger that this might include the print of Der Garten aus Kristall, if we found it, but this suggestion did not seem to worry him, but only to excite him further. ‘You mean — you really think it might be here?’ he said, and that was his only reaction. He was so fixated on the idea of finding the film that he didn’t give a thought to what might happen to it afterwards, what kinds of dispute over ownership might arise. So powerful was his need, I now realize, to see it just once again, to relive — as best he could — those minutes of far-off enchantment he had enjoyed once, as a young and carefree schoolboy.

And what a desolate place that quest had brought him to. We were drinking our cheap, acrid coffee while sitting on a plain wooden bench, our backs to a wall. Our bench was at the centre of a pool of feeble neon light: all around us, the vast spaces of the warehouse stretched out into oceans of dense, impenetrable gloom. Corridors ran off in every direction, made up of row upon row of identical storage units, each one about four metres high and two wide. Above us were metal gantries, crossing and criss-crossing and leading to yet more storage units. I could imagine the echoing, metallic sound that footsteps might make if they pounded these walkways: but today, in reality, all was silent. A smothering and deathly silence. The only sound was the distant, sibilant trickle of music leaking out from the earphones of the guy sitting behind the reception desk. Roger and I spoke in low, murmurous undertones, as if we were in a cathedral or a library. Which I suppose we were, in a way. A library of unwanted possessions. A cathedral of the forgotten. In any case, we didn’t have much to say to each other.

There was no mistaking the sound of the car when it arrived, even with its tyres muffled by the snow. We both stood up and awaited Horst’s entrance. He was brushing the snow from his coat and was in a bad mood. Without saying hello to us he went to the reception desk and retrieved the keys to his two storage units. Only then did he come over and address us. I introduced Roger but he did not seem particularly interested. ‘You think there might be a film in one of these cupboards, right?’ he asked us. ‘You are looking for a film.’ I nodded and he said: ‘If we find it, you cannot have this film. It’s my property.’ I said of course, that was completely understood, and Roger said: ‘But we must see it. You must let us watch.’ Horst said something non-commital to the effect that he would think about that, and then we set off on our quest.

Horst’s units were on the ground floor of the warehouse. They stood directly opposite each other: one of them was Number 24, and the other was Number 11. The doors were painted yellow, and each one had a strong chunky padlock fitted to it. When Horst unlocked the door to Number 24 and threw it open, I peeped inside, and my heart sank. The cupboard looked much bigger than you would imagine from the outside, and it was packed from floor to ceiling with furniture and cardboard boxes. As for Number 11, it was even worse. The objects were stacked right to the very doorway, so that you could barely close the door and it was impossible to imagine what lay beyond the first stack. Sifting through all this jetsam, I realized at once, was going to be the work of many hours.

Well, I shall cut a long and difficult story short. Slowly and with great effort, we began to work our way through all the junk of Mr Güdemann, his sister and his brother-in-law. Roger and I looked through the contents of Number 11, while Horst concentrated on Number 24: he was looking for something specific, I could tell that, I expect he was hoping to find items of jewellery or something similar. We explained to him very carefully what a can of film would look like and he gruffly assured us that we would be told if he found one.

It was long, tiring and painstaking work. Looking through the contents of the opposite cupboard, Horst had his back to us, but he still seemed to be fully aware of our movements, and was quick to call out ‘Be careful with that!’ or ‘Show me what’s in that box!’ whenever something caught his attention. As I had expected, it was the small items of jewellery that he would always take from us and put carefully to one side.

After about an hour we were both very tired and I thought it would be a good idea if we took a break. But Roger had a feverish glint in his eyes and would not suspend the hunt, even for a few moments. I offered to fetch him another cup of coffee, but he said he didn’t want one, so I just went to get one for myself.

I had been sitting on the bench by the reception desk for about ten minutes, drinking my coffee and attending to some emails, when I heard his cry. I have never heard such excitement, such exaltation — bordering on ecstasy — in a human voice before. ‘James!’ he called. ‘James — I think I’ve found it!’ Those were his words, but my impression was more that he was giving out a primal scream of joy. I put down my coffee, sprang to my feet and ran towards the cupboard but I had not been moving for more than five seconds before I heard a different kind of scream — the most terrible scream of fear — followed by a terrific crash. Or rather a series of crashes: three or four of them, each one louder than the last, culminating in what sounded almost like an explosion, the dying echo of which filled the warehouse like a reverberation, leaving behind it a shocking silence. In a few more seconds I was at the door of cupboard Number 11, where Horst was also standing, and where a scene of chaos confronted us. Half the contents of the cupboard were outside, in the corridor where we had been stacking them. Inside the cupboard itself was a vision of total disarray, with boxes, books, items of furniture and shattered crockery and glassware everywhere, forming a huge disordered pile, at the very bottom of which, crushed by the weight of all this junk, lay poor Roger’s already lifeless body.

The man from the reception desk came to hear what the noise was and then he went straight to phone for an ambulance. Horst and I began clearing away the debris that had crushed Roger’s body. We worked like demons now, tossing things to one side without looking at them, not bothering about whether we broke them or not as we did so.

I don’t know what else to tell you. The medics arrived on the scene quickly and Roger was pronounced dead as soon as they looked at him.

The next few hours are a blur. I remember only one detail, which is that in the course of digging through the junk in order to reach him, I spotted the item that he must have seen, and that must have inspired him to call out to me. It would have been at the very bottom of the pile, but in his eagerness to put his hands on it, he must have tried to pull it out from underneath, and that was what caused the huge, towering stack to tumble down. It was a metal can of the sort which might have contained a 16 mm film, and on the side of it was a label, upon which was written, in faded capital letters — more than seventy years old — Der Garten aus Kristall.

I opened up the can. It was full of old tobacco tins, most of them containing Deutschmark coins in small denominations. Also some buttons and ribbon and needle and thread and other things for sewing.

Perhaps it’s a good job he never saw that. Perhaps if he had, he might have died another kind of death.

*

Rachel was an early riser, and she was the first to get out of bed the next morning, although when she came down to the kitchen, Keisha had already arrived: she was making coffee and preparing Harry’s breakfast. Not wishing to disturb her, and finding the thought of conversation awkward, Rachel went out into the garden.

She sat on the old wooden bench again, as she had done the afternoon before. Once again, her eyes were drawn to the silent, broken-down fountain at the centre of the lawn. It was a shame that it didn’t work. Laura should really get it repaired. The garden still seemed attractive to Rachel, but no longer magical, no longer unreal.

After a few minutes Laura came out to join her. She was wearing bedsocks, and a jumper over her pyjamas, and a thick dressing gown over her jumper, and she was carrying two mugs of coffee.

They sat for a while drinking their coffee in silence.

‘Are you going to get the fountain fixed, then?’ Rachel asked.

‘I don’t think so. I think I’m going to put this place on the market.’

‘And move back to Oxford?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe London. I’ve been applying for professorships.’

Laura shivered, and leaned forward on the bench. It was far too cold to be sitting outside.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I don’t want Harry to turn out like Roger.’

Rachel wasn’t sure how to interpret this.

‘Obsessive, you mean?’

‘Oh, he can obsess as much as he likes, as long as he obsesses over something useful.’

‘You mean, something other than the broadcast dates of old black and white films?’

Laura corrected her quickly. ‘I mean something other than the past.’ She sipped her coffee, and gripped the mug in both hands, warming her fingers. ‘Like a lot of people, Roger was convinced — even if he never really admitted it, even to himself — that life was better, simpler, easier, in the past. When he was growing up. It wasn’t just a hankering for childhood. It was bigger than that. It was to do with what the country was like — or what he thought it had been like — in the sixties and seventies.’

‘Before I was born.’

‘A long time before you were born. The culture was different back then. Very different. For Roger, it was about welfarism, and having a safety net, and above all … not being so weighed down by choice all the time, I suppose. He hated choice. The very thing that Henry Winshaw — and every government minister after him — said we should have more of was the thing Roger hated most. I mean, think about it. Think about that image, the one he kept coming back to, over and over.’

‘The crystal garden?’

‘Not just the garden. Everything about the memory of watching that film. The whole … texture of it. Waiting for his father to come home from work — from the same place he worked for forty years. His mother in the kitchen, cooking dinner — the same dinner she always cooked on that night of the week. Can’t you see how secure that must have felt? The beautiful, blanketing safety of it? Even the fact that the film came on television that afternoon and he happened to be watching it. That wasn’t his choice, you see. Somebody else had made that choice for him. Some scheduler at ATV, or Chris’s grandfather — it doesn’t matter who it was, the only thing that matters is it wasn’t Roger. The whole thing that defined that situation, and the whole beauty of it, as far as he was concerned, was passivity. Other people were making choices for him. People he trusted. He loved that. He loved the idea of trusting people to make decisions on his behalf. Not all of them. Just some. Just enough so that you were free to live other parts of your life the way that you wanted. I suppose, apart from anything else, that’s one of the definitions of a happy childhood, isn’t it? But Roger also thought he could remember a time when we all felt that way. A time when we trusted the people in power, and their side of the deal was to treat us … not like children exactly, but like people who needed to be looked after now and again. As I suppose many of us do.’

‘It seems … a bit naive,’ Rachel ventured.

‘Yes,’ said Laura, crisply. ‘It is. Life’s not like that. In fact it gets less and less like that all the time.’ She glanced at Rachel: a sly, rapid glance. ‘I know that you’ve noticed how I talk to Harry. You think I’m too tough on him.’

‘A bit,’ Rachel had to admit.

‘But you see, I couldn’t bear him to end up looking back on his childhood — back on the past — the way his father did.’

And then, without another word, Laura rose to her feet and walked briskly towards the kitchen door, not looking back once: either to hide the tears that she had been withholding all this time, or simply because it had become too cold to sit in the garden for a moment longer.

~ ~ ~

William Cowper, The Task (1785):

Yet what can satire, either grave or gay? …

What vice has it subdued? whose heart reclaim’d

By rigour? or whom laughed into reform?

Alas! Leviathan is not so tamed.

THE WINSHAW PRIZE

OR,

NATHAN PILBEAM’S BREAKTHROUGH CASE

A ‘NATE OF THE STATION’ STORY

1

Scotland Yard were baffled.

Or rather, they did not yet know that they were baffled. But by the time Detective Chief Inspector Capes had finished reading the email, he would have a new case on his hands, and he would be baffled by it.

The email had arrived two hours ago, had been forwarded from computer to computer and eventually came to the attention of ‘Capes of the Yard’, as his colleagues insisted on calling him. Incidentally, why did they call him that, he asked himself, as he asked himself every day? It was a pathetic nickname. Totally without originality, and doing no kind of justice to his stature within the force. Why on earth couldn’t they call him ‘The Caped Crusader’? He’d been dropping hints about it for months. It was the perfect soubriquet, combining a subtle play on words with a clear gesture towards his almost superhero-like approach to police work. Why wasn’t it catching on?

Sipping his third black coffee of the day as he contemplated the stark injustice of this situation, he realized that his attention was drifting away from the email, which he was yet to read in full:

To Whom It May Concern

Forgive me for writing to you ‘out of the blue’ as it were. As a mere Trainee Detective Constable from the provinces, my name will not be known to you. However, two items of news from the London papers have recently caught my eye, and I wanted to make sure that their potential significance was understood by those in positions of authority at Scotland Yard.

The first of these items is the death by drowning of Michael Parr, a Caucasian male in his late twenties, on the southern bank of the Thames near Greenwich, on the 13th of last month. Mr Parr was, by profession, a stand-up comedian. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.

The second is the death of Raymond Turnbull, another Caucasian male in his late twenties, after falling from a seventh-floor balcony at a block of flats in Acton Town, west London, on the 18th of this month. Mr Turnbull was also a stand-up comedian and, once again, the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.

It is my belief that neither of these deaths was accidental, and that the two fatalities are connected.

You may wonder why it is that I make this declaration with such assurance. I would be happy to explain my reasoning to you over a drink at any time and place that might be mutually convenient. In the meantime, you might acquire some insight into the methods that have already brought me some modest measure of notoriety by perusing the attached article, which was published in the features section of the February issue of Police magazine.

Sincerely

Nathan Pilbeam

*

PC Pilbeam lived in an unremarkable apartment building on Guildford’s north-eastern outskirts. It was a new block, set back from the road and securely gated. You had to enter a code to gain access to the paved forecourt and then another, different code to get into the building itself. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor, which looked out over a pleasant but uninspiring communal garden. PC Pilbeam lived alone and used the second bedroom as his study.

This study was distinguished by the volume and variety of the books and paperwork with which Pilbeam had filled it. Two of the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, which overflowed not just with the expected volumes of Blackstone’s Police Manuals and Operational Handbook, but also a huge library of works devoted to history, politics, sociology, cultural theory, media studies, Marxist philosophy, semiotics, and queer studies. There were shelves filled with box files which contained back issues of journals dealing with the same subjects: PC Pilbeam was on familiar terms with most of the local postmen, who were forever arriving with copies of the latest issue of Prospect, Private Eye, the New Left Review, Sight and Sound, Monocle, Diva, History Today, Searchlight, Index on Censorship and Intelligent Life. He read them all, then filed and cross-indexed them on his computer using a complex spreadsheet of his own devising.

It was not that PC Pilbeam had a wide variety of hobbies or leisure interests. His ambition was to be the country’s leading expert in the field of criminal investigation, and every waking moment of his life was devoted to that aim. Ever since he was a young boy, and his grandfather had introduced him to the stories of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, he had been fascinated by the art of detection. A modest upbringing in the suburbs of Portsmouth had given him plenty of time to nurture his obsession. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, while his friends and contemporaries fell under the sway of the internet, Nathan felt himself set apart: he was drawn, instead, to the library of books left behind by his grandfather, which after his death sat in unsorted piles, accumulating dust in a spare bedroom. Here, besides a large collection of detective stories, were the classic works of Marx, Orwell, Tressell and Shaw; essays by Chomsky and Gramsci; histories by Hobsbawn and Thompson; well-thumbed volumes bearing the names of Marcuse and Lukács, William Morris and Raymond Williams. Nathan devoured these books and was shocked that his own parents took so little interest in them, regarding them as little more than an annoying clutter which had been dumped on them to take up space in their house. His grandfather had been an autodidact, relying on the public library, the Workers’ Educational Association and cheap paperbacks from Pelican Books and the Left Book Club. Nathan decided that this was a path he would follow himself, and chose not to enter university, applying directly to the police force at the age of eighteen instead.

Nathan was now twenty-four. At the station in Guildford he was a popular figure, although his colleagues certainly regarded him as eccentric, and were prone to teasing him, both to his face and behind his back. In part this was prompted by the seriousness — not to say earnestness — of his manner. But his fellow officers were also both fascinated and amused by his approach to police work.

PC Pilbeam’s theory, developed over many years’ reading and thinking, was that every crime had to be seen in its social, political and cultural context. The modern policeman, he maintained, had to be familiar with, and attuned to, all the most diverse currents of contemporary thought. In a recent case of indecent exposure, for instance, he drew on the modish discipline of psychogeography (as pioneered by Guy Debord, and practised in the present day by the likes of Patrick Keiller, Iain Sinclair and Will Self), to prove that the accused could not possibly be the culprit, because the anniversary of his mother’s death would have prompted him to walk a different route home on the afternoon in question, away from the public park and through the interwar council estate on which she had grown up and spent her early life. He solved another case after reading an article by James Meek in the London Review of Books, about the coalition government’s infamous Bedroom Tax, a charge levied on council house owners with spare or unoccupied rooms. In order to avoid paying this punitive levy, some badly off married couples were pretending to be estranged and therefore to be making use of two separate bedrooms. By proving, in the case of one such couple, that this was a lie, PC Pilbeam unravelled the mystery of a burglary that had taken place in their home. If both husband and wife were indeed sleeping in the main bedroom, he argued, then the intruder’s point of ingress was likely to have been the spare bedroom, and not the kitchen as they — in their fear of being reported to the authorities — had insisted. Sure enough, the spare bedroom window frame was found to be covered in fingerprints, and the thief was swiftly apprehended.

‘In both of these examples,’ Pilbeam wrote in his article for Police magazine, ‘traditional lines of enquiry proved inadequate. The criminal does not act in a political vacuum. To understand motive, one must understand what motivates: and this involves taking into account the effect of economics and environment, culture and capital, landscape and cityscape, the politics of identity and the politics of party. To solve an English crime, committed by an English criminal, one must contemplate the condition of England itself.’

It was this final sentence, read aloud by one of his colleagues, in tones half sarcastic, half admiring, to a bemused audience in the canteen one lunchtime, that had earned Nathan Pilbeam his own nickname: ‘Nate of the Station’.

*

PC Pilbeam was in the middle of a few days’ annual leave, but he was not exactly taking a break from police work. He had no wish to relax, in the sense in which most people would have understood the word. After sending his message to Scotland Yard in the morning, he made a brief visit to the local supermarket, to buy ingredients for the dinner he intended to cook that evening for his inamorata. After that, he opened the package from Amazon which his overworked postman had delivered earlier.

It contained two DVDs, which bore a striking resemblance to one another. The cover of the first showed a young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a loose brightly coloured shirt, untucked at the trouser. He was talking into a microphone. The DVD was entitled Mickey Parr — Would You Credit It? — On Stage and On Fire. The cover of the second showed another young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a loose brightly coloured shirt untucked at the trouser. He too was talking into a microphone, and his DVD was entitled Ray Turnbull — Last in the Queue — Live and Outrageous. Nathan could remember seeing both of these releases advertised on posters on the London Underground in the run-up to Christmas last year, along with about half a dozen other posters all advertising DVDs by young, tousled, slightly overweight white men wearing loose brightly coloured shirts untucked at the trouser. For the purposes of these posters, all of these men had adopted the same slightly quizzical expressions; they had also, it seemed, all been on tour earlier in the year, and had recorded their performances for use on these Christmas DVDs.

It had struck Nathan, even then, as being an interesting phenomenon. His understanding was that none of these men were regarded as world experts in any field of human endeavour, or public thinkers possessed of radical new insight. Nonetheless, they were able to command generous sums of money and attract large audiences for their ability to comment in a casual, sometimes humorous way on various aspects of contemporary life. Occasional cutaways during the DVDs would reveal well-dressed and seemingly affluent young audience members roaring with laughter at a series of unremarkable observations about gender roles or the minutiae of everyday social interaction. In the new A5 Moleskin notebook which he had recently bought and labelled ‘STAND-UP COMEDY’ PC Pilbeam copied down an observation from Hermann Hesse:

‘How people love to laugh! They flock from the suburbs in the bitter cold, they stand in line, pay money, and stay out until past midnight, only in order to laugh a while.’ — Reflections

Both DVDs were about eighty minutes long. He had been watching the second one for almost an hour when the breakthrough came. He had been certain, all along, that there would turn out to be some connection between the two men, something more than the generic similarity between their acts. And now he had the proof.

*

Like many great men — and most great detectives, for that matter — Nathan Pilbeam had a weakness. A fatal chink in his armour.

It was not alcohol, or drug addiction. He was too young to have a broken marriage behind him, or a teenage daughter with whom to have a fraught and problematic relationship. His flaw, in fact, was much simpler than that. It was an unrequited passion.

The object of his infatuation was called Lucinda — Lucinda Givings. It was an antiquated name, and Lucinda was, in many ways, an antiquated person. This might even have been the very reason he was attracted to her. Brought up on a diet of Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey, he could not believe his luck (or misfortune, depending on how he looked at it) in having stumbled upon someone whose natural home seemed to be in one of their stories, rather than the Guildford of 2013. Her speech was formal and demure, as was her manner of dress. One of her few concessions to modernity was that she sometimes used the branch of Starbucks where Nathan himself liked to call in at the end of a long shift. She was usually to be found there late in the afternoon, marking her pupils’ homework. After a few occasions when they had made shy eye-contact and nothing more, Nathan had finally summoned the courage to strike up a tentative conversation.

Like Nathan, she was in her mid-twenties. She was extremely pretty, and determined not to show it. She wore baggy trousers and shapeless jumpers which gave away nothing about her figure (thereby allowing Nathan to imagine it all the more freely). She wore her hair pulled back and tightly tied behind her head, thereby encouraging Nathan to picture, during his fevered nocturnal fantasies, the moment when she would untie it, shake it loose and remove her horn-rimmed glasses, which would be his cue to utter the traditional words, ‘Why, Lucinda — but you’re beautiful.’ She was a strict devotee of the Catholic faith. She taught chemistry at the local private girls’ secondary school, where she was famous for her abhorrence of indiscipline and her unquestioning respect for the school rules, prompting students and fellow teachers alike to refer to her, behind her (long, shapely) back, as ‘Severe Miss Givings’.

‘I had Severe Miss Givings last night.’ That was the joke which was passed around the staff room at least once a week. But a joke was what it remained: for nobody had ever had, or was likely to have, Severe Miss Givings. Least of all Nathan Pilbeam.

Never mind. PC Pilbeam’s passion was not of the base, physical sort. Nothing would have delighted him more than to gain admittance to Lucinda Givings’s bed, or to welcome her into his, but he realized that this was but a distant goal, and in the meantime, to spend time in her presence was enough. Which was why he proposed to entice her into his flat that evening with the prospect of penne alla puttanesca and a bottle of Marks and Spencer’s finest Chilean Rosé. It would be their third date, but the first time he had cooked for her; and he was hoping that it would precipitate a degree of thawing in her habitual froideur.

However, when she arrived, at 7.30 precisely, clutching a bottle of wine in her hand, she did not seem in the calmest of moods.

‘Lucinda,’ said Nathan, taking her coat, ‘are you all right?’

‘As a man,’ she replied, ‘you cannot possibly understand how fraught with stress and complication the simplest of tasks can be. On the bus over here I had to ward off the persistent attentions of a man who was sitting with his legs splayed — you know the type? — and kept saying, “Do you want this seat, babes?” Babes! I ask you …’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘He was your usual, casual labourer type. Paint stains all over his jeans.’ She shuddered. ‘The brazen cheek of these people! The arrogance!’

‘You poor thing. Have a drink.’

He handed her a glass of rosé and went to fetch some dips and bread sticks from the kitchen. When he returned, Lucinda was standing at the window. She explained that she liked to watch the autumn leaves spiralling down from the trees in the encroaching dusk. Nathan’s gaze, by contrast, had been fixed on Lucinda herself. He was impressed, in particular, by her dress. It was made of some thick bottle-green material and was positively heroic in its shapelessness. For a mere arrangement of cloth to be so accomplished at not just hiding the contours of somebody’s body, but even giving the impression that these contours didn’t exist and must be the product of the spectator’s lurid imagination was, he thought, quite a triumph of the dressmaker’s art. How was it done? The more time he spent with Lucinda, the more he realized that — whatever professional heights he might go on to scale in the future — there would always be some questions that could never be answered, or mysteries solved.

Over dinner, they discussed her day at school. The calm of her lunch break had been disrupted, it seemed, by the tactless overtures of the French assistant, Monsieur Guignery, who had insisted on sitting next to her. For some weeks now he had been conducting a campaign of low-level flirtation.

‘He’s your usual, self-confident, French type,’ she explained, nibbling uncertainly on her pasta. (Nathan had put a little too much chilli in the sauce.) ‘If it goes on much longer I shall have to complain to the headmaster.’

‘You do seem to be unlucky,’ said Nathan, ‘in the amount of hassle you get. And yet, I suppose it’s only to be expected. After all …’

The compliment trailed away into nothingness, as he realized that he could not find the words to complete it. Lucinda, in any case, allowed a half-smile to tremor at the ends of her exquisite mouth.

‘In my opinion,’ she answered, composing herself, ‘the trouble with all of these louche, sexually driven types is that they have too much time on their hands. Too much time to devote themselves to these … disturbing thoughts. It’s a lack of occupation, a lack of industry. It’s far more healthy for a man to be busy — like you are. That’s why you’re able to keep these things in proportion.’

‘It’s true,’ said Nathan. ‘I do love my work. Never more so than at the moment.’

‘Why? Are you working on another of your fascinating cases?’

‘It’s early days yet, but I may be on to something. Two people have met with sudden deaths in different parts of London in the last few weeks, and I think the deaths might be connected. Both were comedians.’

‘Comedians?’ Lucinda wrinkled her adorable nose. ‘I don’t like — I mean, I would never murder one, or anything — but I’ve never understood the appeal of comedians.’

‘Well, you know, there’s an old Yorkshire saying: “Jokes is all right for them as likes laughing.”’

‘But I do like laughing,’ Lucinda insisted, and to prove it, she let out a bright, tinkling, musical laugh, like a joyful glissando played on some distant glockenspiel. ‘It’s just that … the world is so sad, and nothing much amuses me, I’m afraid, and the idea of paying money in order to get something that should be spontaneous … It’s always seemed a bit desperate, to me. It’s almost like paying for sex.’

‘Very true,’ said Nathan, who at that moment would have offered her £5,000 cash on the spot if he’d thought she would have accepted it. ‘But comedians are everywhere. They sell out stadiums. They pop up all the time on television. No matter what the subject — even if it’s asylum seekers or global warming — every kind of public discussion has to have a veneer of comedy. Politics especially.’

‘I would have thought people listened to comedians to get away from politics.’

‘They listen to comedians to relax and escape from having to think about things too hard. Which is why it’s all right to talk about politics as long as you don’t say anything too disturbing. The important thing is to pick on a safe target. And when I watched their DVDs this afternoon, I realized this is what both of these unfortunate guys did. The same safe target, as it happens.’

‘And this,’ said Lucinda, leaning forward now that her interest was piqued, ‘is why you think their deaths might be connected?’

‘Exactly. One factor — indeed, one name in particular — links their material, and therefore, in all probability, links their murders. It’s the name of a journalist, whom they both attacked in the most aggressive and personal tones.’

‘And the name of this journalist?’

Nathan paused for effect, and looked directly into the measureless blue depths of her eyes.

‘Her name is Josephine Winshaw-Eaves.’

2

Josephine Winshaw-Eaves. Not surprisingly, Lucinda had never heard of her. She was not a great reader of newspapers, after all: especially not their online editions, where most of Josephine’s rantings were to be found.

She was the daughter of Sir Peter Eaves, one of the longest-serving national newspaper editors in the country, and the late Hilary Winshaw, who had been famous, in her day, as both a newspaper columnist and a television executive. Hilary had died in 1991, when Josephine was only one year old, so she was not even a distant memory to her daughter. And yet Josephine had grown up fascinated by her mother’s legacy. Her father, on the rare occasions when they had had a real conversation, was forever telling her that Hilary had been a genius among columnists, a superstar, a woman capable of taking the most minor event in public life and spinning from it 1,000 words of pure energizing vitriol. Not only that, but she had belonged to one of the most influential British families of the postwar era, of which Josephine, now, was the only direct descendant. No wonder that, from a very early age, she had carried with her a burdensome sense of her own importance.

The teenage Josephine had struggled to reconcile this sense of importance with a contradictory awareness that, as far as her father was concerned, she barely mattered at all. With the violent and premature death of his wife, Sir Peter had lost all interest in family life — if indeed he had ever had any. Increasingly, he lived at the offices of his newspaper (in which he had installed a comfortable bedroom right next to his own office) and rarely visited his Kensington home, in the spacious confines of which Josephine grew up, alone, under the desultory supervision of a series of nannies. A fiercely intelligent, articulate girl, she made smooth progress through London’s private education system — Glendower, followed by Godolphin and Latimer — before proceeding to Cambridge, where she graduated with first-class honours in art history.

Along the way, however, she made few friends. Those who tried to get close to her found her both conceited and needy. She had a tendency to make snap judgements about people, and developed a reputation for wounding and gratuitous put-downs. In this respect, at least, she was following in the footsteps of her father, who was well known for his bruising economy with words (and occasionally, after one too many brandies at the Garrick, his fists). One memory stood out in particular, for Josephine. During the school holidays, aged about thirteen or fourteen, she once had to spend a few hours with him at the newspaper, childcare arrangements for that day having fallen through at the last minute. She sat in on one of the editorial meetings and could remember vividly, for years afterwards, the way that each of the section editors, ranged around Sir Peter in a circle, had been obliged to pitch their story ideas to him. To each one, in turn — often before they had even finished speaking — Sir Peter had spat out his instant verdict: ‘Crap.’ ‘Bollocks.’ ‘Fucking awful.’ ‘Shit.’ ‘Bollocks — nobody’s interested in that fuckwit.’ ‘Great — we need an excuse to shaft that cunt.’ And so on. It had been an awe-inspiring lesson in editorial procedure which had increased her respect for her father a hundredfold, and made her more desperate than ever to gain his attention.

In her last year at Cambridge she started a blog, entitled ‘PLAIN COMMON SENSE’, in homage to her mother’s column. She regularly sent Sir Peter links to the latest entries, but he almost never responded, even though she was doing her best to imitate the tone and content of his own newspaper, and to carry on her mother’s tradition of ruthless, instantaneous opinion-forming. Undeterred by her lack of first-hand knowledge, Josephine began to campaign against what she called Britain’s ‘benefits culture’, which handed rewards to idlers, scroungers, loafers and cheats while ‘ordinary, hardworking people’ (of whose silent, victimized existence it suited her to appear convinced) picked up the tab. At the centre of her phantasmagoric worldview there lay a malignant, amorphous monster called ‘the left-liberal establishment’, dedicated to the redistribution of funds from the deserving to the undeserving, and to the general sabotage of everything that was right and proper in British civil society. The paradox of this monster was that, although Josephine knew exactly what its tentacles consisted of, she could not have put the knowledge into words. It was a slippery, evasive nexus of institutions, made up of grant-awarding bodies, human rights organizations, legal advice services, NGOs, certain branches of the Church of England and the judiciary and, of course, hovering over it all, more powerful, more insidious, more venomous than any other public body in the kingdom, the British Broadcasting Corporation itself, whose mission it was (in the eyes of Josephine and her growing band of supporters) to drip-freed a toxic daily diet of left-liberal propaganda to the nation at the taxpayers’ expense.

Sir Peter was now seventy-six years old, although he showed no signs of retiring: his rampantly illiberal views and irascible personality were so closely identified with the newspaper he edited that it was impossible to imagine the two ever parting company. When Josephine graduated, he temporarily stirred himself out of his state of paternal apathy and offered her, without much enthusiasm, a platform on the newspaper’s website. Josephine took it, of course, but what she really wanted was a regular slot in the print edition. But Sir Peter was reluctant to endorse his daughter’s efforts to that extent. He would relent only occasionally, when a star columnist went on holiday and needed a stand-in, and when this happened Josephine pulled out all the stops. Once, seeking inspiration in the archive of columns from her mother’s glory days, she chanced upon a particularly outrageous example from 1990. Hilary had been enraged by a recent court judgement in favour of a disabled tenant whose landlord had unlawfully evicted her and had railed with unusual vigour against the left-liberal establishment’s skewed value system. ‘The landlord of this property,’ she had written, ‘was a white, middle-class, heterosexual, God-fearing, law-abiding citizen of what used to be Great Britain, and every one of those attributes was a card stacked against her. Were her claims respected? Did her point of view get taken into account? Of course not. Asked to choose between her rights and those of — to choose a scarcely hypothetical example — a black one-legged lesbian on benefits, our judiciary would inevitably come down on the side of the latter.’

In her own column, more than twenty years later, Josephine set about defending the coalition government’s introduction of the Bedroom Tax. But her larger point was that the climate had not changed much in the intervening decades: Britain was being dragged down by an underclass of scroungers, who lived in a ‘something-for-nothing culture’, and Hilary’s ‘black one-legged lesbian on benefits’ could still be held up as a paragon of modern entitlement. It was high time, and only right and proper, that the government should be doing something radical to cut down Britain’s welfare spending.

Sir Peter agreed with her sentiment, but he was not impressed with her reasoning. He thought that the archetype Josephine had resurrected from her mother’s column was hopelessly out of date. ‘You fucked up your argument in the last few paragraphs,’ he told her. ‘A black one-legged lesbian on benefits? Even our readers know there’s no such thing. They’re only worried about Muslims these days. Put your little straw woman in a niqab and then you’ve given them something to worry about.’

Josephine was stung. She went and looked up ‘niqab’ on Wikipedia, and for the next few weeks turned her bile (once again confined to the online edition) on to Britain’s Muslim community, bemoaning its failure to condemn terrorist atrocities and accusing the Left of giving succour to radical preachers. Meanwhile, however, Sir Peter continued to ignore her efforts, and her sense of exclusion stewed. His words ‘Even our readers know there’s no such thing’ gnawed at her soul. Why was her father so dismissive? Why did he assume that, just because he was not paying any attention to her words, nobody else was? Did he not know that her one print column, about which he had been so scathing, had been picked up by a well-known satirical quiz show on television, and mocked and vilified on primetime TV? What was that, if not a badge of honour? Within a few weeks, any stand-up comedian who wanted to milk an easy laugh from his audience had only to mention Josephine’s name. What was that, if not a mark of success?

As a matter of fact, Sir Peter was aware of these developments, and he was furious about them. It was one thing not to think much of his own daughter’s writing; but it was quite different when other people, both inside and outside the paper, began to make fun of her. One quiet afternoon in the newspaper’s offices, a disturbing scene took place. Neale Thomson, the Deputy Features Editor, and Derek Styles, one of the few remaining full-time subs, were sitting at a computer screen watching something on YouTube. They did not realize that Sir Peter had entered the office and was standing directly behind them. They were watching a section from leading stand-up comic Mickey Parr’s DVD, Would You Credit It? — On Stage and On Fire. It was the section where he attacked Josephine Winshaw-Eaves. The routine was not especially funny, but Neale and Derek were enjoying the feeling of behaving like naughty schoolboys, the cosy subversiveness of having a laugh at the expense of the boss’s daughter, and they chuckled along enthusiastically with the live audience. The words that stopped them in their tracks came from a few feet behind them, and were uttered in the unmistakable patrician tones of Sir Peter himself; although they had never heard him speak quite so quietly before, or with such an icy note of menace.

‘Right, you cunts,’ he said, in little more than a whisper. ‘In my office. Five minutes.’

As Neale and Derek told the story to their ex-colleagues in the pub afterwards, it wasn’t the speed of their dismissal that was so shocking: it was the undertone of quivering, barely controlled hatred in Sir Peter’s voice, and the eye-watering inventiveness and cruelty of the violent acts which he swore he would arrange to have performed on them if they ever came within one hundred yards of the building or, indeed, if he ever saw them again. To say that they had touched a raw nerve would, clearly, be an understatement. A brief account of the sackings was included in the next issue of Private Eye, where readers were also offered a recap of some of the more colourful episodes in Sir Peter’s career (a punch-up with a rival editor at a Press Awards dinner; an allegation of assault against a Kensington parking officer, which never came to court). The magazine’s report concluded with one slightly sensationalized detail: the fire in Sir Peter’s eyes as he dismissed the two disgraced employees was described as ‘murderous’.

3

When he alighted upon the word, which Nathan himself had highlighted in pale green, DCI Capes allowed himself a long, grim smile of satisfaction before laying the magazine down emphatically on the beer-stained table.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, that certainly puts a different light on it.’

‘Now — I’m not saying that we should jump to conclusions,’ Nathan insisted.

‘Of course not.’

‘This is just gossip. It gives us nothing definite to go on.’

‘All the same …’

DCI Capes sat back and drank from his pint of London Pride, deep in thought. He and PC Pilbeam were seated in the public bar of The Feathers, a stone’s throw from New Scotland Yard. It was an old-fashioned pub, where they had found a secluded booth, at some distance from the other patrons. The lighting was dim and their seats were upholstered in discreet burgundy-coloured leather, adding to the atmosphere of subdued conspiracy.

Nathan was delighted, of course — and somewhat astonished — that his email to DCI Capes had elicited this invitation, rather than the expected wall of official silence. All the same, he was beginning to feel uneasy. His own as yet vague intuitions, combined with this one unsourced report in a mischievous magazine, seemed already to have planted in his superior’s mind the certainty of a deliberate, cold-blooded assassination campaign.

In truth, DCI Capes himself was far from certain. But then, certainty was hardly a prerequisite for taking action, in the world of twenty-first-century policing. Many other factors had to be taken into consideration. One factor, in particular, was of paramount importance, and in this case, it loomed very large indeed on DCI Capes’s horizon of considerations. This was the involvement of the media. It was some weeks since he had felt the gaze of a TV camera trained upon him, or had a journalist’s microphone thrust under his nose, and he was beginning to smart keenly from this deprivation. To arrest a national newspaper editor on suspicion of murdering two well-known comedians would certainly bring him back into the limelight.

A few years ago, such a thought would never have crossed DCI Capes’s mind. While the occasional sensational case might have called for a broadcast press conference, received wisdom held that the majority of police work was best conducted in private, well away from the media’s hungry, intrusive glare. But all of that had changed now. A series of high-profile arrests of British disc jockeys and light entertainment stars of the 1970s on charges of historic sexual abuse had brought DCI Capes into direct and exhilarating contact with top journalists from television, radio and the newspapers. Better still, these arrests had brought him into contact with the stars themselves, a development in his career which he could never possibly have foreseen, and which filled him with a sort of childlike, or at least adolescent, wonder. DCI Capes was in his early fifties. When he was a teenager, many of these celebrities had been, if not heroes to him, at the very least objects of awe and curiosity. In those days he had kept an autograph book, which was filled with the signatures of second-rate TV comics encountered at the dismal seaside holiday camps to which his parents would take him during the summer holidays, and with scribbled messages (‘Keep on rockin’!’, ‘Have a poptastic birthday!’) from disc jockeys he had queued to meet at special local events like Radio One Roadshows or the opening of a new supermarket. Now, more than thirty years later, he still struggled to comprehend that his latest role was to be photographed alongside these same figures as they were led, grizzled, bearded and bewildered, in and out of court rooms to testify in cases of alleged sexual assault which they (if not their victims) could barely remember. Truly, time played the strangest tricks.

But it was a few months since Capes of the Yard (a feeble, feeble nickname, he reflected, for the thousandth embittered time) had been involved in one of these cases. It was a few months since his name, let alone his face, had been in the papers. It was a few months since he had felt the power of life and death over a prominent figure in public life. He was aching to get back to it — and this was a fantastic opportunity. In this instance, show business met journalism in a heady, intoxicating cocktail. A national newspaper editor so sensitive to personal insult that it made him violent towards those who criticized his daughter. An Achilles heel that might easily — it was not too great a leap of the imagination — make him commit murder (or arrange to have it committed) when he discovered that there were comedians who had dared to pour scorn upon her for the sake of an easy laugh. Frankly, it couldn’t be better. So what if nothing was certain, at this stage? Speculation and innuendo made far better copy anyway.

‘So.’ PC Pilbeam leaned forward expectantly. ‘What will your next move be?’

DCI Capes pursed his lips. ‘It could be that this is too big for us to handle alone. We’ll have to call in some specialists.’

‘Forensics? MI5? Special Branch?’

‘No — I’m talking about a PR firm. Pott Bellinger, I think — they’re the best in the business. We use them a lot to liaise with the media.’

PC Pilbeam did not like the sound of it. ‘Before you say anything to the press,’ he cautioned, ‘I think you ought to take a look at this. It came out just a couple of days ago.’

From his document wallet he produced a DVD. The cover showed a young, tousled, slightly overweight white man wearing a large brightly coloured shirt which was untucked at the trouser. He was talking into a microphone. The DVD was entitled Ryan Quirky — Whimsy A-Gogo — Live and Loquacious.

‘Thanks all the same,’ said DCI Capes, sliding it back across the table, ‘but I’m not really a comedy fan myself. I prefer a good Britflick. Something with Ray Winstone or Danny Dyer.’

‘No — I mean, this is relevant to the case,’ said Nathan. ‘Extremely relevant. Start watching after forty-two minutes.’

‘You mean it’s another attack on …?’

‘Ms Winshaw-Eaves? Yes, it is. Not a severe one. Quite mild, by comparison with the others. But still, if I were Mr Quirky, I would be checking that my doors and windows were locked before going to bed at night.’

4

Looking back on his conversation with DCI Capes, Nathan could not help thinking that it had some disturbing features. It was not just his superior’s eagerness to go public with the case at the earliest opportunity: PC Pilbeam was equally disturbed by his own willingness to accept at face value the assumption that Josephine Winshaw-Eaves provided the only possible link between the two murders. Perhaps there was more to it than that? Was the fact that both of the deceased comedians had insulted her nothing more than a distracting coincidence?

Above all, what was starting to alarm him was that, in drawing this premature conclusion, he had betrayed his own philosophy. All he had done, so far, was to watch three DVDs and notice that they had something in common. What they had in common was, of course, potentially very significant, but all the same, his methods had hardly been exhaustive or rigorous. Wasn’t he meant to be England’s first truly intellectual criminal investigator? Didn’t he believe that every crime was best solved by reference to its social and political context? That cultural theory and moral philosophy could often point the way to a solution more surely than fingerprints on a window frame or footprints on a garden path? It was time to do some reading.

And so, for the next five days, PC Pilbeam rarely left his study.

He was surprised, initially, to find that so little had been written on the history and philosophy of humour. Apart from a few scattered comments from Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, the ancient writers had not found very much to say on the subject. The earliest significant commentator in the English language had been Thomas Hobbes, who agreed with René Descartes that laughter derived from pride and was an aggressive expression of superiority over one’s peers. Immanuel Kant was one of the first philosophers to offer an incongruity theory of humour, asserting that ‘laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing’, leading to ‘a feeling of health produced by a motion of the intestines’. Kierkegaard had broadly concurred, maintaining that comedy was born of contradiction, although in this case it was a ‘painless contradiction’ rather than the ‘suffering contradiction’ of tragedy. Henri Bergson, on the other hand, had gone back to the superiority theory of humour and refined it, declaring that we laugh at other people when we perceive in them ‘une certaine raideur de mécanique là où l’on voudrait trouver la souplesse attentive et la vivante flexibilité d’une personne’. Only a few years after this, Freud had published his seminal Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, proposing a theory which seemed to be the most penetrating and persuasive of all. The punchline of a joke, Freud believed, created a sort of psychic short cut, transporting us rapidly from one idea to another by a quick and unexpected route which thereby allowed an ‘economy of psychic expenditure’, a saving of mental energy which would then be expelled in an explosive outburst of laughter.

Nathan read through all these various explanations carefully, highlighting the most suggestive passages and making detailed notes. He realized that very few commentators had specifically addressed the topic of satire or political humour, although he did come across a dismissive observation by Milan Kundera: Kundera, it seemed, looked down upon satire as a ‘thesis art’ which sought to shepherd its audience towards a preconceived political or moral position, falling short of what he saw as the real purpose of artistic creation, which was to make people aware of ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning.

When he felt that he had exhausted the range of printed sources available to him, Nathan went online and started trawling through comedy blogs and message boards, most of them devoted to contemporary manifestations of humour. Here he found himself entering a very different world, where comedy geeks and nerds who knew far too much about their subject, and had far too much of themselves invested in it, discussed modern humour with all the unfettered passion, obsessiveness, hostility, vitriol, scatology, abuse, unfairness, aggression, mean-mindedness, rudeness, impudence and nastiness that the internet allowed. These were people who loved comedy with a fierceness which could transmute into hatred at the flip of a coin. A joke which they had not found funny, a comedian who had not made them laugh, would be taken as a personal insult which had to be returned tenfold. A grudging reverence was shown towards a handful of the more radical comics, those who used their platform to make bitter, shocking, fundamental criticisms of society in language which put them beyond the pale for most audiences. Mainstream comedians, those who set out merely to amuse and to entertain their public with gentle absurdity, were tolerated as a harmless distraction. Real hatred was reserved for those whose work fell between these two stools: those who peppered their toothless routines with comfortable, crowd-pleasing political digressions in order to advertise their liberal social consciences. These people were attacked, pilloried and abused mercilessly by their safely anonymous online critics.

After he had been wading through this material for two or three hours, Nathan followed a link to a blog which struck him, simultaneously, as being particularly well argued and particularly unhinged. The writer seemed to be some sort of would-be anarchist/terrorist, although whether his revolutionary impulses ever carried him any further than the screen of his laptop remained unclear. There was a profile picture, but in it his face was turned at ninety degrees from the camera, in shadow, and the photograph was so out of focus as to render its subject (deliberately) unidentifiable. The blog was called thisisyourwakeupcall and the writer’s username was ChristieMalry2.

The entry which caught Nathan’s attention was headed ‘No Joke’, and he found it interesting on several counts. It was obvious, for one thing, that ChristieMalry2 accepted Freud’s theory of the basis of laughter; but he transposed it, rather intriguingly, from the psychological sphere into the political:

Freud [wrote the blogger] believed that laughter is pleasurable because it creates an economy of psychic expenditure. Quintessentially, in other words, it takes energy and RELEASES or DISSIPATES it, thereby rendering it ineffective. So — what does that imply about (so-called) ‘political’ comedy, for which Britain is historically so famous? It implies this: political humour is the very opposite of political action. Not just its opposite, but its mortal enemy.

Every time we laugh at the venality of a corrupt politician, at the greed of a hedge fund manager, at the spurious outpourings of a rightwing columnist, we’re letting them off the hook. The ANGER which we should feel towards these people, which might otherwise lead to ACTION, is released and dissipated in the form of LAUGHTER. Which is a way of giving the audience exactly what they want, and exactly what they’re paying for: another excuse to sit on their backsides and continue on their own selfish, comfortable path with no real threat or challenge to their precious lifestyles.

That’s why it isn’t Josephine Winshaw-Eaves and her tiresome ilk who provide the greatest threat to social justice in Britain today. It’s the likes of Mickey Parr, Ray Turnbull and Ryan Quirky, with their oh-so-predictable jibes in her direction which the fucking Radio-4-listening, Guardian-reading, Pinot-Grigio-swilling middleclass wankers who pay to see them in stadiums and tune in to their radio shows lap up and laugh at and then feel they have to do NOTHING except sit back with their arms folded and wait for the next crappy one-liner. Chortling along at these pathetic, woolly-minded jokes, which a blind chimpanzee could write in its sleep, gives them the perfect excuse to salve their consciences and confirm their deluded self-image as righteous combatants in a playground battle between left and right which in any case was fought and lost years ago.

I hate these fucking middleclass liberal-left comedians and so should you. It seems to me quintessential that they are all wiped off the face of this planet, or we are never going to summon up the energy to overthrow our current rotten, corrupt and soul-destroying political establishment. Down with comedy, for fuck’s sake! And on with the real struggle!

PC Pilbeam read these paragraphs through a number of times. Then he bookmarked the site and also, to be on the safe side, printed out the relevant pages and placed them neatly into one of his box files. He yawned and looked at his watch. He was starting to feel that familiar ache in his eyes from so many hours staring at a screen. He was conscious, also, of another task that he needed to perform, unrelated to detective work but just as important. He put on his coat and left the flat.

Buttoning up his coat against the autumn chill, PC Pilbeam made the ten-minute walk to his local Tesco Express, where he filled a recyclable bag with tins of soup, vegetables and cooked meat. These items did not constitute his normal diet, and indeed he was not buying them for himself. He was on his way to the food bank. Normally he would have taken unused and unwanted items from his own kitchen shelves, but he didn’t have any of those left. The fact was that he had learned, on the evening of their dinner together, that Lucinda Givings had started to help out at the food bank during the evenings and weekends, and for this reason he had started to visit it regularly — although so far his timing had been unlucky, and he hadn’t encountered her. This would be his fourth visit in three days, and he had reached the point where he was having to buy food especially for the purpose.

And yet today — joy! — his civic altruism was rewarded, for there she was, standing behind the counter and looking as radiant, as desirable as ever. She was wearing a thick woollen jumper which would have made Marilyn Monroe herself look like a sack of potatoes but, even so, Nathan felt that he could not possibly have conceived a vision of purer loveliness, of sweeter, more crystalline beauty.

‘Hello,’ she said, with a smile — he was sure — of genuine affection. ‘How good of you to come down.’ She began to remove the tins from his bag. ‘And with such generous donations!’

‘I feel I must do what I can,’ he answered. ‘The terrible thing is that there should even be a need for places like this.’

‘I know.’ Lucinda sighed. ‘It’s very depressing, and I’m sure there’s some perfectly terrible explanation, but I don’t know what it is. I’m afraid I’m not really one of those angry, political types.’

Her colleague, however, a middle-aged woman in denim jacket and jeans, had definite views on the subject.

‘Essentially,’ she said, ‘this is what happens when the ruling elite uses a crisis of its own making to legitimize attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Caroline, by the way.’

Nathan shook her hand, but he was not really in the mood for further conversation on this topic. His real objective was to find out whether Lucinda was busy tonight, and whether she’d like to go out with him. Turning back towards her, he casually ventured:

‘I was walking past the cinema just now, and couldn’t help noticing …’ Then he stopped, and frowned. Something in Caroline’s last remark had suddenly set off a strange, intriguing echo in his mind. Talking more to himself than anyone else, he mumbled: ‘Yes, of course. That’s right. That’s perfectly right.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lucinda asked.

‘What you said,’ he repeated, addressing Caroline now, ‘was perfectly right. I don’t mean your comments about the economy, although I don’t disagree with you there, exactly. But I’m referring to your choice of words. You said “Essentially”. Which, of course, is the correct form of expression.’

Caroline was glancing in puzzlement at Lucinda, as if silently to enquire whether her peculiar friend usually carried on in this way.

‘You’re not making yourself very clear,’ said Lucinda, trying to put it tactfully.

‘I’m sorry. This is the way it is, when you’ve got your teeth into the meat of a case. You forget how to communicate properly. I’ve been holed up in my flat for days, reading and reading and reading. It’s just that the last thing I read — I’ve realized now that there was something a bit odd about it. A quirk of expression. Whenever he meant “essential” or “essentially”, the writer put “quintessential” instead. I’m sure there’s nothing in it. But you can’t help noticing these things, you see. Your brain starts to fixate on little details and … well, you start to go a bit mad, to tell the truth. Forget I ever mentioned it.’ Lucinda was staring at him, her eyes getting rounder and rounder. He wanted to dive into them and drown. ‘What I really meant to ask you,’ he stammered on, ‘was — I mentioned the cinema, and I was walking past it only a few minutes ago when I noticed —’

But once again, Nathan never managed to get any further with his invitation. This time it was the ringing of his mobile phone that interrupted him.

‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ Lucinda asked.

‘No. Not until I’ve —’ But then, unable to resist glancing at the screen, he realized who was calling. ‘Actually, yes. I’d better take this. Sorry.’

He withdrew to a corner of the hall and cupped the iPhone to his ear.

‘Hello? DCI Capes?’

‘Afternoon, Pilbeam. Glad I caught you. Is this a good moment to talk?’

‘Of course. What is it? Have there been … developments?’

‘Not yet. But I’m pretty sure there will be, very soon. Tell me, Pilbeam, have you heard of the Winshaw Prize?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Then you know that this year’s winner is going to be announced next week. The ceremony’s up in Birmingham. Well, Josephine is pretty much the only surviving member of the family, as you know, so she’s going to be there. So is Sir Peter. But get this … who do you suppose is the celebrity they’ve chosen to present it, this year? None other than — our good friend Mr Quirky. And he won’t just be in the same room as them, but sitting right next door. I’ve seen the seating plan, you see. They’re on table 12. Quirky will be on number 11.’

Nathan let out a whistle of alarm. ‘An explosive situation,’ he said.

‘I know, but don’t worry. We’re going to be there in force. And the reason I’m calling — well, as the person who brought all this to my attention, I think you should be there.’

‘But … but, sir, this is such an honour.’

‘Never mind honour, Pilbeam. I could do with your input. The dinner is on Tuesday week. Don’t worry, I’ll clear everything with your station, and make sure you get off for the night.’

‘Thank you, sir. This is … This is a big step for me.’ And then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Lucinda. Watching her walk from one end of the hall to the other, her lustrous (he assumed) blonde hair pulled back more uncompromisingly than ever, her slender (he imagined) arms filled with cans of baked beans, tomato soup and spaghetti hoops, he felt himself propelled forward by waves of lust. ‘There’s just … There’s just one thing, sir. If I might make a small … official request?’

‘Of course, Pilbeam. What’s on your mind?’

‘I was just wondering: would it be all right if I bring a date?’

5

The Winshaw Prize, by now established as the most prestigious and valuable in the country, was named in honour of Roderick Winshaw, the famous art curator, who had died on the terrible night of 16 January 1991, in the massacre which had also claimed five other members of his family.

A few months after Roderick’s death, once the shock waves it sent throughout the art world had partially subsided, a committee of friends and admirers gathered to discuss how the great man’s memory might be preserved. A prize was the obvious solution. But there was already a major art prize, the Turner. How could this new prize distinguish itself from its competitors?

A steering committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Giles Trending, the highly successful director of Stercus Television and owner of the Recktall Brown Gallery in Shoreditch. His first notion was that the Winshaw Prize should be the ne plus ultra of cultural accolades, and as such should be open not just to paintings, sculptures, videos and installations, but to novels, films, poems, ballets, operas, pop songs and even advertising campaigns. Pretty much everything, in other words. The fact that none of these things could be sensibly compared with each other would be precisely the point.

At this proposal, the eyes of the other committee members had lit up with excitement, and after many hours’ enthusiastic discussion, it was decided that the Winshaw Prize, in its first year, should be encumbered with absolutely no rules and no boundaries. Accordingly, the shortlisted entries for that year consisted of a book of short stories, a hip-hop single, a video of an artist writing anticapitalist slogans in letters made out of his own snot, a new strain of apple created by a fruit farmer in Herefordshire and the giraffe enclosure at Chester Zoo. This policy was continued for some time, culminating in the notorious edition of 2001, when the prize was awarded to ‘the distinctive smell you get when you visit your grandmother’s house and open a biscuit tin which has been empty for five years’.

The steering committee, however, became ever more aware that the prize had failed to capture the public imagination. It proved too challenging to interest the media in a prize which, every year, was awarded to a mere abstraction. Despite the best efforts of Pott Bellinger, the PR firm engaged to publicize it, the Winshaw Prize was far outstripped, in terms of column inches and front-page splashes, by the Booker, the Turner, the Baileys, the Costa, the Brits, the BP Portrait Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Rear of the Year and countless others. It was while contemplating this list of more successful rivals, one melancholy morning, that Trending had his second great idea. Of course! How could he have not seen it before? Later that week he gathered the other committee members for an Extraordinary Special Meeting and presented them with his proposal:

‘This prize,’ he argued, ‘is meant to commemorate Roderick Winshaw and, by extension, the whole of his family. Now, when we think of the Winshaws, what do we think of? What did they believe in, above all? The answer, of course, is competition. Competition between individuals, between companies, between nations. Competition, that is, in the sense of a fight to the death. Winner takes all, loser gets nothing. And what is an artistic prize but the very distillation of this idea — and a perfect poke in the eye to all those sentimentalists who still believe that artistic creation is some sort of haven from competition. There is no such haven, in this day and age! No one believes any more that the arts world is some sort of socialist utopia, in which different creative spirits work on their different projects side by side, in parallel and in sympathy. Things have changed, as they have everywhere else! It’s a free marketplace now. Survival of the fittest, and extinction for everyone else. So let’s put artist in competition with artist, let’s set writer against writer and musician against musician. Let envy, rivalry, economic uncertainty and status anxiety be the new spurs to creativity! What we need to create, by rebooting the Winshaw Prize, is a sort of über-prize. The ultimate prize. The prize to end all prizes. Do you see what I mean, ladies and gentlemen? Do you understand what I have in mind?’

There was an expectant silence. Nobody had yet seen the logical conclusion of what he was saying.

‘From this year onwards,’ he concluded triumphantly, ‘the Winshaw Prize will be awarded to … the best prize in the United Kingdom.’

Around the table there was an audible gasp, at both the audacity and the simplicity of the idea. Of course! What better way to establish the Winshaw Prize’s superiority over every other award in the country? From now on the Booker, the Turner, the Mercury, the Stirling and all the others would be pitted against each other, every year, in deadly competition, and there would be no need to announce the criteria for judgement, since the fundamental meaninglessness of the comparison would be the whole point, and indeed the very origin of the prize’s prestige. There might well be a reluctance to cooperate on the part of the other prizes’ organizers, but that was not important. Prizes would be considered eligible whether they were officially entered or not, and besides, each annual ceremony would be so lavish, so glamorous, and would attract so much publicity, that in a few years everybody would be clamouring to take part. And so, indeed, it proved. The media quickly latched on to the idea and before long the presentation of the Winshaw Prize, which took place every November, became one of the biggest talking points in the calendar of British public life. After a shaky and somewhat predictable start (it was awarded to the Turner Prize in its first year, and to the Forward Poetry Prizes in its second) the Winshaw got into its stride and went from strength to strength. The shock year in 2005, when it was awarded to the little-known Giggleswick Prize for the best flower arrangement in the BD postal area, blew things wide open, making people realize that the prize was not just open to the ‘big hitters’ but to any plucky little independent outfit which happened to catch the judges’ attention. In 2008 the prize was opened to other European prizes and in 2011, in a bold and controversial move, to American prizes, making it a truly global and continent-spanning award. 2012 was a spectacular year, in which the Pulitzer Prize went head to head against the Nobel Prize for Physics, and yet the award was finally carried off, in a dramatic last-minute reversal, by France’s Prix Médicis Étranger. Every year, now, the Winshaw prize was getting bigger, and the stakes were getting higher. In financial terms alone it was now worth one million pounds to the lucky victor. 2013 promised to be another milestone in the prize’s history.

*

The venue for this year’s presentation was the new Library of Birmingham, which fronted on to Centenary Square in the very heart of the city. Its striking, monumental design by the Dutch architects Mecanoo proclaimed an unapologetic postmodernism, evident especially in its glittering façade, which was festooned with thousands of golden curlicues. Completed at an eye-watering cost to Birmingham City Council of some £187 million, the library had been heralded throughout the land as proof that Britain had not yet quite sunk into a state of illiteracy and philistinism, and was lauded effusively by prominent writers and other public figures, who remained unconcerned (or unaware) that the city — like most others in the country — was at the same time overseeing the closure of many smaller, less prestigious local libraries. (In fact it would soon transpire that the library itself had been far too expensive a project, and little more than a year after it opened, the City Council would announce that it needed to save £1.3 million per year on running costs, and that it had no option but to slash its opening hours and make about half of its staff redundant.) The Winshaw Prize committee felt, for all sorts of reasons, that no more appropriate venue could be found for this year’s award ceremony.

Although not designed for large-scale public functions, the library proved readily adaptable for the occasion. The entire ground floor was put to use, and sixty tables were brought in to accommodate the 720 lucky invitees. The police, the security services and Special Branch all had a substantial presence: this year’s guest list, after all, included Richard Dawkins, Tracey Emin, Michel Houellebecq and glamour-model-turned-singer Danielle Perry, so no one could afford to take any chances.

Security was tight, too, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which stood opposite the library, and where most of the guests were booked to stay the night. And it was on the sixteenth floor of this hotel, in a king-size double room which commanded a fine view over the tower blocks and arterial roads of Birmingham city centre, that a painful scene was being played out, just one hour before the prize dinner was due to commence. Lucinda and Nathan were having their first argument.

‘I am so sorry about this,’ Nathan was saying.

‘It’s so unlike you,’ Lucinda replied, ‘to engineer this situation. To put me in such an uncomfortable position.’

‘I accept full responsibility. It’s my own fault. I should have made it clear to DCI Capes that we needed separate rooms. He assumed, because you were my guest, that we would be sharing.’

‘And now you say the hotel is completely booked up?’

‘Completely.’

‘Well, this is most … distressing. I can think of no other word.’

‘Lucinda, we can get through this, if you will just be brave. Look how large the bed is …’

She turned to him, horrified. ‘You’re not suggesting that we share it?’

‘Or look at this sofa. Easily big enough for a man my size to have a comfortable night’s sleep.’

She looked at it appraisingly, and for the first time seemed to be mollified. ‘It’s true. It does look quite substantial. And it’s at least two yards from the end of the bed.’

‘And I’ve brought my sleeping mask with me. I won’t see a thing.’

‘Do you mean that, Nathan? Can I trust you?’

She gazed at him in anxious appeal, and once again he felt that a lifetime spent contemplating the depth and blueness of her eyes would be a lifetime well spent.

‘Of course, Lucinda. Of course.’

For a moment she looked so relieved and grateful that he thought that he might be gifted a hug. But this was wildly over-optimistic. She merely nodded her approval and said: ‘All right, then.’

‘And now,’ he said, doing his best to conceal his disappointment, ‘I’m needed over at the library, so I must change into my tux, if I can use the bathroom first.’

‘Of course.’

She stood aside to let him pass, and, within a few minutes, Nathan had changed into his dinner suit and was on his way to rendezvous with DCI Capes at the library entrance.

*

‘For God’s sake where are the fucking menus?’ said Sir Peter Eaves, looking at his watch. ‘We’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes now and nobody has a fucking clue what we’re going to be eating.’

Helke Winshaw glanced across at him sharply. Her cousin irritated her. Come to that, he was barely her cousin: second cousin by marriage, or something like that. She was annoyed that they had been put at the same table just because of this distant relationship. He was always complaining. Complaining and, therefore, drawing attention to himself, which in her view was a strategic error when you belonged to this particular family. As for his drip of a daughter … well, it looked like they were going to have to sit next to each other all evening, and that was going to make this dreary occasion even more dreary. They had nothing in common. Nothing at all.

In fairness to Josephine, there were not many people in the world who would find Helke Winshaw an easy dining companion. She regarded her words, like everything else she possessed, as valuable commodities which were not simply to be spilled out in order to lubricate the gears of social discourse. On top of which, as Chief Executive Officer of Winshaw Clearance plc, she had a keen (though scarcely inflated) sense of her own importance. She had founded the company herself, twenty years ago, in memory of her husband Mark, who had died in the same massacre that had claimed the lives of Roderick Winshaw and Hilary, Josephine’s mother. Mark had made a fortune from selling weapons. As a result of his efforts, many parts of the world were now contaminated with unexploded ordnance (or Explosive Remnants of War). It was seen as touching — if somewhat ironic — that after he died, his widow should set up an organization devoted to clearing former conflict zones of the lethal detritus which Mark’s activities had left behind. However, she had not done it for humanitarian reasons. It made perfect business sense to assume that, if there was money to be made from facilitating wars, there was money to be made from clearing up after them as well. Helke understood all too well that ERW clearance was a ruthlessly competitive business just like any other, and she approached it in that spirit. She fought aggressively to secure long-term contracts in major war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, since this was where the big money was to be made. At the same time, she kept a keen eye on smaller, independent NGOs which specialized in ERW clearance, since these outfits were often run by young and idealistic people who would energetically seek out less obvious territories which were also in need of decontamination: once a smaller company had found one of these areas and commenced operations there, Winshaw Clearance would then pile in like a juggernaut, put them out of action and hoover up the rest of the business themselves. Now, after two decades of expansion, acquisition and asset-stripping, they were established as the undisputed world leaders in their field, with an annual turnover in the tens of millions. And Helke Winshaw continued to sit discreetly at the helm.

‘Have a bit of patience,’ she said to her cousin. ‘What does it matter? It’s only food.’

‘Rude bitch,’ Sir Peter said, leaning in close to Josephine, and whispering in her ear, ‘Looks like you’ve drawn the short straw tonight. Try to ignore her.’ He noticed that his daughter’s eyes seemed troubled. She was staring across at the adjacent table. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘See that man over there? The fat one with the piggy eyes.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s that comedian who slagged me off on his show.’

‘Really?’ her father said. ‘Right. Later on, I’ll have a word with him.’ There was a grim note of menace to these last five words, which bled into his next muttered question, a repeat of: ‘Where are these fucking menus?’ Looking around, he caught the eye of a waitress with the name ‘Selena’ on her name tag, and beckoned her over to make his feelings known.

*

Lucinda left it until literally the last minute to make her appearance at table number 11. She arrived at 7.29 precisely. For Nathan, however, who had been sitting there in a state of heightened alertness for a quarter of an hour or more, scanning the room for signs of villainy, it was worth the wait. For a moment, all thoughts of detective work flew out of his head. As for any attempt to conceal his feelings, this was in vain. His jaw slackened and he let out a clearly audible gasp. Lucinda was wearing a plain black cocktail dress and she looked — there was no other word for it — ravishing.

She had arms. She had real, human, female, bare arms, complete with elbows and wrists, suspended from a pair of lovely pale bare shoulders. She had legs, complete with calves, shins, and knees deliciously sheathed in black nylon. She had a figure: a gorgeous, womanly figure at which none of her other clothes had even hinted before. He had already known that he was in love with her: but that love was instantly magnified and intensified a million-fold, and supplemented by a surging, overwhelming wave of desire which made him feel so weak that when he rose totteringly to his feet to give her a peck on the cheek, he was sure that his legs were going to give way.

‘Nathan,’ she said, and unless he was imagining it, her voice was not quite as prim as usual; there was something almost coquettish in it, as though she was fully aware of the effect her appearance must be having on him, and was quietly relishing it.

‘Lucinda,’ he replied. ‘You look … amazing.’ He prolonged the kiss for as long as he dared, relishing the cushiony softness of her cheek, and breathing in the scent of her tantalizing perfume, the fragrance of jasmine with a hint of rose petal.

‘Please,’ he said, drawing back her chair and sighing with admiration as she sank gracefully into it. She brushed back a rogue strand of hair and smiled shyly at the famous TV chat show host sitting next to her on the left, and at Ryan Quirky, sitting across from her on the other side of the circular table. She didn’t recognize either of them. Nathan took his place beside her on the right, and poured her a glass of sparkling water.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t seem to have a menu.’

‘None of us have menus,’ said Nathan. ‘I believe our hosts have got a little surprise planned for us, in that respect. And we should find out what it is in —’ he glanced at his watch ‘— roughly ten seconds.’

Sure enough, ten seconds later, a remarkable thing happened.

From the centre of each table, a circular section was removed, like a little trap door, by hands at first invisible; and through each resulting aperture a man’s head appeared. Sixty different men’s heads, at sixty different tables. The rest of their bodies remained beneath the tables, hidden from view. A ripple of surprise and admiration went around the room.

At table number 11, the head was crowned by a mop of red hair. The head swivelled around slowly through 360 degrees, and each of the twelve guests found themselves being stared at in turn by a pair of piercing green eyes framed by large, owl-like horn-rimmed spectacles.

‘Good evening,’ said the head. ‘My name is Dorian, and I will be your talking menu tonight. I will be here all evening, to tell you about the food, and to answer any food-related questions. I’m afraid I cannot talk to you about any other subject. Nor, sadly, am I allowed to eat or drink any of the delicious items with which you are about to be presented. Don’t feel too sorry for me, please, I am being well paid for my work tonight, and I will be taking home a generous doggy bag. And so, without further ado, allow me to introduce the first item on tonight’s succulent smorgasbord. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare your palates for a selection of our chef’s amazing amuse-bouches!’

Right on cue, a team of waiters and waitresses glided towards the table. The plates laid down in front of the eager diners contained three small, exquisitely crafted items of uncertain provenance. Dorian proceeded to explain.

‘First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you have a cured-beet and Scottish salmon Napoleon with Bibb lettuce, topped with Beluga caviar and marinated in a cumquat distillation. We think you will find it both acerbic and whimsical. Next to that, you will find a cold potato-truffle soup with a hot, butter-poached Yukon Gold potato, parmesan, black truffle, and sea salt of a notorious astringency, especially garnered from the seas around the famous Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. And last but not least, throw yourselves upon a periwig of Kumamoto oysters, served with a green apple mignonette dusted with coriander and a fennel-cilantro salad with ponzu dressing.’

Wondering if the food itself could possibly live up to the sensory expectation aroused by these descriptions, the guests sat with their forks poised over their plates, their mouths filling with juices.

‘Any questions, before we start?’

‘Erm … what exactly,’ said the chat show host, ‘is ponzu dressing?’

‘Ponzu, sir,’ said Dorian, ‘is a citrus-based brown sauce from Japan. Not at all uncommon, I’m sure you’ve had it many times before. The word literally means “vinegar punch”.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I have another question,’ said Ryan Quirky. ‘Some oysters are known for their aphrodisiac qualities. Is this true of Kumamoto oysters?’

‘Sir,’ answered Dorian, ‘it is especially true of this variety.’

And with that, they began to eat. But Nathan noticed that Lucinda left her oysters on the side of her plate.

*

Between the main course and the dessert, Josephine slipped outside, ostensibly to have a cigarette but in reality because she could not stand making conversation with Helke for a moment longer. It was cold in Centenary Square, and her breath steamed in the air as she fumbled in her handbag, first for her packet of cigarettes and then, at greater length, for her lighter, which she seemed to have mislaid.

‘Oh, fuck it!’ she said out loud.

‘Do you want a light?’ someone said, stepping out of the shadows.

It was Selena, the waitress, who was also having a quick smoke.

‘Oh. Thank you. That’s very kind,’ said Josephine, too flustered and annoyed to feel particularly grateful.

‘No problem.’ She offered Josephine the end of her own cigarette. ‘Nippy, isn’t it?’

‘Well, that’s what you get for trekking up to the frozen North, I suppose.’

Selena smiled, but said nothing to this.

‘Enjoying the show in there?’

‘I suppose they’ve made an effort. The talking menus are original, at least.’

‘It’s given an evening’s work to a lot of out-of-work actors, that’s for sure.’

Josephine had no wish to get into conversation with this person. This whole evening, which she had thought would be merely tedious, was turning into a nightmare. She looked around her at the unfamiliar cityscape, the steady flow of evening traffic stopping and starting at the lights on Broad Street, the groups of cheaply dressed, rather threatening (she thought) teenagers wandering backwards and forwards past the library, and cursed the organizers for dragging her up here. Birmingham! What were they thinking? OK, so it was a fancy building all right, but still, that didn’t justify forcing her to spend a night in this dismal hell-hole. She would definitely have a word with the steering committee about it at breakfast tomorrow.

‘Queueing up to work here tonight, people were,’ Selena continued. ‘I was lucky to be chosen.’

‘Mm,’ said Josephine, not listening.

‘My girlfriend applied, too. But they didn’t want her.’

‘Really.’

‘Shame, ’cos she was hoping, with all these art people here, she might have met someone useful, you know?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You write for the papers, don’t you?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘One of the girls in the kitchen. I never read the papers these days, to be honest. Too depressing.’

‘Yes, well, I don’t write about art, so if you want any favours you’re wasting your time.’

‘Sure. Whatever.’ Selena fell silent, but not for long. ‘She’s really talented, though.’

‘Sorry, who?’

‘My girlfriend. She does portraits. Mainly of homeless people.’

‘How very fascinating and … worthy of her.’

‘But not ordinary portraits. She makes them pose to look like —’

‘You’re right, it is chilly out here. I think I’ll go back inside.’

‘Look, don’t get me wrong. My friend isn’t looking for help. She knows there are no short cuts. She knows you have to be tough in this business. She can cope with being knocked back a few times, you know what I mean?’

‘Well, look, it’s been a blast talking to you. Goodbye.’

‘She’s a strong girl, my Alison. Very strong. I mean, you have to be, to deal with some of the stuff she’s been through.’

‘I’m so glad to hear that. Now —’

‘Only having one leg, for instance. I mean, how many people could handle something like that?’

‘Great. She sounds like a real trouper.’ Josephine was halfway through the library’s main entrance when the meaning of Selena’s words suddenly came home to her. She turned round at once. ‘What did you just say?’

‘I said she was a strong girl.’

‘Not that.’

‘And really talented.’

‘Did you say she only had one leg?’

Selena noticed the change in Josephine’s manner. She nodded slowly.

‘That’s right.’

Josephine came closer.

‘And this is your … girlfriend, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Girlfriend — as in someone you … someone you’re … in a relationship with?’

‘We sleep together, yeah.’

‘So you’re lesbians.’

‘Um … yeah,’ said Selena, thinking that she had already made this fairly obvious.

‘And is she … like you?’

‘Like me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I don’t know. We’re quite different personality types, really. I’m Taurus, for one thing, and she’s Gemini …’

‘No — I mean, is she black as well?’

‘Ah.’ Christ, this woman is blunt, Selena thought. But she’d caught her interest, for some reason, and she was going to make the most of it. ‘Yes, she is.’

‘And does she have a job, your friend? Apart from the painting, I mean.’

‘No. Neither of us have, since we finished our course.’

‘I don’t suppose … I don’t suppose she’s on benefits of any sort?’

‘Well, yeah, we couldn’t survive otherwise. There’s the housing benefit, the disability allowance …’

She tailed off, and gave Josephine what she hoped was an appealing smile. To her surprise, the smile was returned.

‘Your girlfriend,’ Josephine said, ‘sounds absolutely amazing.’

‘Could you write something about her, do you think?’

‘Yes, I think I could.’

‘Wow,’ said Selena. ‘Wow. Just wait till she hears that you said that.’

Josephine held up her hand in a cautionary gesture. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t think you should tell her anything yet. If you can bear it, this is going to be our little secret for now.’ She put a hand on Selena’s arm. ‘You can keep a secret, can’t you? Good. Now — let’s have another cigarette.’

*

‘You missed all the excitement,’ said Sir Peter, as Josephine returned to the table. ‘They awarded the prize five minutes ago.’

‘Really?’ she said, stifling a yawn. ‘I don’t even know what was on the shortlist.’

‘Everyone thought it would go to the Hilton Humanitarian Prize this year. Either that, or the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership.’

‘So which one was it?’

‘Neither. They gave it to the Literary Review Bad Sex Award.’

‘Great!’ said Josephine. ‘Another triumph for the Brits.’

‘Exactly. Being embarrassed about sex is one of the few things we’re still world leaders at, these days.’

He drained his wine glass quickly, and signalled for a refill. Josephine wondered how many glasses he’d got through while she’d been outside. She also wondered whether to tell him that, thanks to her conversation with Selena, she now knew that he’d been wrong to criticize her column that time, and soon she would be able to present him with living proof. But she decided to keep it to herself for a while longer.

‘Your man made a fucking awful speech,’ Sir Peter said. ‘Didn’t get a single laugh. Don’t think anyone here had the faintest idea what he was on about.’

‘Did he mention us?’

‘Oh yes. Made sure he gave the whole family a good kicking.’

‘The cheek! I hope you’re not going to let him get away with it.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Sir Peter. He picked up an unused steak knife from his table and began thoughtfully stroking its serrated edge. ‘I have plans for Mr Quirky. In fact, I’m going to discuss them with him now.’

Still holding the knife, Sir Peter attempted to rise to his feet, but he was very much the worse for drink and it took nothing more than Josephine’s restraining hand to keep him in his chair.

‘I don’t think this is really the place to cause a scene.’

‘There won’t be any scene,’ said Sir Peter, breathing heavily. ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do to that fucker.’ He fixed her with a bug-eyed, resolute glare. ‘I’m going to offer him a job.’

‘You’re going to do what?’

‘You heard me. I’m going to take him on as a columnist.’

‘Oh, sit down, you’re completely pissed.’

‘I may be pissed but I know what I’m talking about. You don’t attack your enemies, if you really want to hurt them. You co-opt them. “Hey, Ryan,” we’ll say, “come and join us. No hard feelings, old boy. Love your schtick. Come and do a bit of work for us.” We chuck him a couple of hundred grand a year for a thousand words a week and then everyone sees he’s writing for us and thinks we can’t be so nasty after all. We look good, and he looks bad. We keep him on for eighteen months and give him a couple of pay rises. By then he’s lost most of his teeth and he’s hardly being rude about us at all. But he has pissed off quite a few of his fans. And then we kick him out on the street — bam! — and watch how he copes with having his income, which in a short space of time he’s become thoroughly comfortable with, slashed by about eighty per cent.’ He smiled at his daughter and relished the way she was staring at him, open-mouthed with admiration. Sir Peter’s eyes gleamed. ‘So now, if you’d just help a doddery old cunt to his feet, I’m going to get the wheels moving.’

Josephine did indeed take his arm and raise him carefully out of his chair. Then Sir Peter started to take a few slow, erratic steps towards table number 11. Whether it was because he was becoming forgetful, or because he was rather drunk, or a combination of the two, he was still wielding the steak knife, held at a decidedly aggressive angle, as he approached the unsuspecting figure of Ryan Quirky, who was deep in conversation with a young female admirer in a low-cut dress. But Sir Peter never got as far as the comedian’s table anyway. Before he knew what was happening, he felt his arm politely but firmly seized by a burly, middle-aged man flanked by four or five similar-looking guests, who blocked his path and formed a rapid, protective circle around him.

‘Now then, Sir Peter,’ said DCI Capes. ‘I think it would be a good idea if you put that down, don’t you?’

‘What are you talking about? Who the fuck are you? Get out of my way.’

‘Put the knife down, and come along with us quietly, and then there won’t be any problems.’

The other policemen gathered around Sir Peter in an even tighter group. And then Nathan was on the scene, tapping his superior urgently on the shoulder.

‘DCI Capes? What are you doing?’

‘Not now, Pilbeam. We’re kind of busy here.’

‘But, sir, I thought we’d agreed about not jumping —’

‘Drop it, Pilbeam, all right? I’m taking this man for questioning. Arkwright, have you got the media room ready?’

‘The media room? But you can’t question him there. It’s where the prizewinners are interviewed. It’s full of photographers and TV cameras.’

‘PC Pilbeam, I shall handle this situation in my own way, thank you very much.’

The other officers had by now relieved Sir Peter of his knife and were frogmarching him forward with his hands pinned behind his back. Nathan made one last appeal.

‘With respect, sir, we have no case against Sir Peter at all.’

‘That’s enough, Pilbeam,’ said DCI Capes, and there was no mistaking the note of aggression in his voice now. ‘Why don’t you sit down, and enjoy the rest of your evening, and concentrate your energies on impressing your very attractive date?’

With that he was gone, striding swiftly to catch up with the group of officers who were already propelling Sir Peter — too befuddled to protest any further — away from the dining area and in the direction of the awaiting media representatives. A few of the diners looked around to see what was happening, but the operation had been discreet and didn’t cause much of a stir. Most people were more interested in the imminent arrival of dessert.

‘Nathan, dear,’ said Lucinda, as he rejoined her at their table, ‘is everything all right? You look flustered.’

He was very flustered indeed: otherwise, the fact that she had used the word ‘dear’ — the first verbal token of affection to have passed her lips in the whole of their friendship — would have sent him into a swoon of excitement. As it was, he barely noticed it.

‘The case has been taken out of my hands,’ he said. ‘And I fear that DCI Capes is about to make a mess of it. And after all that work …’ He sighed heavily. ‘This has been a terrible evening.’

‘Really?’ said Lucinda. She sounded hurt. ‘But it’s been so nice, with all these famous people here, and this lovely food, and … well, I thought you liked spending time with me.’

‘Oh, but I do,’ he said, clasping her hand earnestly.

‘I mean, I know there’s been that mix-up with the bedrooms …’

‘No, it’s not that. I didn’t mean to sound gloomy. It’s just that I had a feeling tonight — an instinct — I was convinced I was going to find a clue that would crack the whole case wide open. And so far … nothing.’

‘The night isn’t over yet,’ she pointed out.

‘True,’ he said, despondent.

She squeezed his hand. ‘Come on, darling. Just relax and enjoy yourself. Have another glass of wine.’

Darling! He had graduated from ‘dear’ to ‘darling’ in the space of a few seconds. And still it made no impression on him. Abandoning the attempt to cheer him up, Lucinda turned her attention to Dorian, their talking menu, who was on the point of making another announcement.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, and — as I think I may now call you — friends, your dessert is about to be served. Our chef thought you might be feeling a little full by now, so he has prepared something light for you. You will be presented with shot glasses, each containing a delicate layer of cream cheese flavoured with blueberries, a further layer of cream cheese — as frothy as a soufflé — flavoured with Meyer lemons, topped with Alaskan blueberries garnished with a Meyer lemon zest, all served on a bed of crushed all-butter Highland shortbread.’

‘Mmm, delicious,’ said Lucinda, as her shot glass was laid before her. ‘I adore cheesecake. That’s what this is, isn’t it?’

The question was addressed to Dorian, who admitted: ‘Quintessentially, yes, madam: this is a cheesecake.’

And now, in an instant, Nathan was jerked out of his reverie. He looked straight across at Dorian and knew, with a thrilling but also terrifying certainty, that he was looking into the eyes of ChristieMalry2. He knew, as well, that Ryan Quirky was in mortal danger. The words from the blog came rushing back to him:

I hate these fucking middleclass liberal-left comedians and so should you. It seems to me quintessential that they are all wiped off the face of this planet, or we are never going to summon up the energy to overthrow our current rotten, corrupt and soul-destroying political establishment. Down with comedy!

How he had obtained employment at this dinner, and secured a place at table number 11, was not yet clear. What was clear, however, was that he had come here with no other intention than to commit murder. There was no time to lose.

Nathan dived under the table. The movement was quick, but not particularly elegant, since he banged his head loudly against it as he did so, thereby attracting everyone’s attention. Without pausing, despite the pain he was in, he lunged at Dorian’s legs and seized them in an uncompromising grip. The resulting spectacle, from the diners’ point of view, was bizarre, as the disembodied head suddenly found itself being yanked downwards through the hole in the table, a movement Dorian resisted by clinging on to the edges with his hands and screaming out for help. Two or three of the guests — including Ryan Quirky — grabbed on to his arms and tried to pull him to safety, resulting in a violent human tug-of-war and, ultimately, the overturning of the entire table amidst a cacophony of shrieks and screams.

‘Stop that man!’ shouted Nathan, as Dorian broke free and ran for the exit. Sure enough, a barrier of security guards appeared, and Dorian found his way blocked. At the same time, DCI Capes and his henchmen came back into the room to see what all this noise was about.

‘Who is this?’ said the detective.

‘This,’ said Nathan, having scrambled to his feet and made his way, panting and dishevelled, to the scene of the capture, ‘is your stand-up comedian murderer. And this is the weapon with which he intended to continue his campaign tonight.’

With that, he opened what appeared to be a spectacles case, which had fallen out of Dorian’s pocket in the course of their struggle. It contained a long syringe filled with a transparent liquid. DCI Capes took it from Nathan’s outstretched hand, his face a picture of bafflement.

‘I suggest,’ said PC Pilbeam (and he could not believe that already, so early in his career, he was using a phrase which he had always dreamed of using), ‘that you send this down to the lab.’

*

Two hours later, Nathan and Lucinda were having a final nightcap at the bar of the Hyatt Regency when DCI Capes came by.

‘We’ve extracted a full confession,’ he told them. ‘These pinkos soon crumble under pressure. No backbone, you see.’

‘Can I interest you in a brandy, sir?’

‘Well, why not. It’s been a long evening, after all. But a highly successful one, thanks to you.’

‘To both of us, I’d say, sir.’

‘All in a day’s work, Pilbeam. They don’t call me “The Caped Crusader” for nothing.’

He threw the potential nickname out hopefully, but Pilbeam had already turned his back to get the barman’s attention, and the effort once again seemed to have been wasted. What in God’s name would it take, DCI Capes thought, to persuade people to start calling him that? He gave a disgruntled sigh and took the proffered brandy glass from his junior colleague.

‘So it was merely a verbal tic, was it, that gave him away to you?’

‘Indeed.’

‘But what about his motive? How had you come across him in the first place?’

‘Well, there, sir, if you will allow me to show off a little, you find the vindication of my methods. Cases like this are best approached from the intellectual point of view. The key to the entire problem lay in the history and theory of comedy. So that was where I concentrated all of my research. I began with Aristotle, of course, although sadly the half of his Poetics that deals with comedy has been lost. However, it’s still possible to re-create something of his think —’

Fascinated as he was by PC Pilbeam’s discourse, DCI Capes was distracted at this point by the appearance of two uniformed constables walking through the bar towards the lobby, carrying a couple of cardboard boxes.

‘Ah — evening, Jackson,’ he said. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the first constable. ‘The suspect is safely locked up in the cells at Newtown Station. We’ve cleared out his room on the seventh floor and taken everything away.’

‘Excellent. Find anything interesting?’

‘Not really, sir. Just a few clothes and toiletries. Oh — and this book.’

From the top of the box, the constable produced a battered, well-thumbed paperback: an old Pelican edition of Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

Nathan allowed himself a knowing smile, and said:

‘Pretty conclusive evidence, wouldn’t you agree, sir?’

DCI Capes shook his head in puzzlement. He was yet to be convinced. ‘I rather think a syringe full of liquid cyanide will stand up better in court. I wouldn’t have given much for Quirky’s chances once he got that in his leg.’ He drained the glass of brandy and rose to his feet. ‘Well, I’d probably better go along with these two for now. Goodnight, Pilbeam. You’ve been a credit to the force this evening.’

‘Thank you, sir. You don’t know how much that means to me.’

‘Keep an eye on your mailbox over the next few weeks. There’ll always be an opening at the Yard for men of your calibre.’

The smile on PC Pilbeam’s face started to spread as the meaning of this remark sank in. Promotion … Fast-tracking through the ranks, and a move to London … This was the beginning of his ascent to greatness. He was on his way.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, turning to Lucinda.

Apparently she had.

‘I know,’ she said, her eyes shining — almost mistily — with admiration and contentment. ‘Isn’t it wonderful news? Do you want to borrow the key, so you can go and move your things?’

‘What?’

‘You heard what the constable said. That horrible man’s been locked up, so he won’t be staying in the hotel tonight. There is a spare room after all. So that solves our other problem!’

Which left PC Pilbeam with an entire, solitary, brandy-fuelled night to lie awake, staring at the ceiling in his seventh-floor room, and contemplating the unfathomable mystery, the frankly insoluble case that was Severe Miss Lucinda Givings.

~ ~ ~

George Osborne, addressing the Conservative Party conference, 6 October 2009:

‘We are all in this together.’