The Investigation

2

A strong wind scattered the clouds, and the yellowish glow of the setting sun became visible above the rooftops. The street lights dimmed, the snow darkened and blended into the sidewalks and gutters. His hands in his coat pockets, Gregory walked quickly, not looking into any of the doorways he passed.

Hesitating for a moment at an intersection, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, shivering in the cold, damp air. Finally, angered by his own indecisiveness, he turned to the left.

The meeting had ended — in fact, dissolved — immediately after Sciss’s dramatic exit. Nothing had been accomplished. Sheppard hadn’t even decided who was going to take over the case. Since he had only seen him five or six times before, Gregory hardly knew the Chief Inspector. Of course he was aware of all the usual methods for bringing oneself to the attention of a superior officer, but he had never resorted to such tactics during his short career as a detective; now, though, he was beginning to regret this, because his relatively low rank reduced his chances of being put in charge of the investigation.

Sheppard had stopped Gregory just as he was leaving the conference room and asked him how he would conduct the investigation. Gregory had answered that he didn’t know. The truth, of course, but honest answers usually don’t pay. Sheppard would probably regard Gregory’s response as a sign that he wasn’t too smart, or that he had a poor attitude.

And what had Farquart told the Chief about him, he wondered. Surely nothing very impressive. Gregory tried to reassure himself with the thought that he was just overrating Farquart by worrying this way, since Farquart’s opinion really wasn’t worth anything.

His thoughts wandered from Farquart’s rather dull personality to Sciss. Now there was a character! Gregory had heard a lot about him.

During the war Sciss had been in the Operations Section, working close to the chief of staff, and from all accounts he had some pretty solid achievements to his credit. About a year after the war, though, he’d been fired. The story was that he’d insulted some VIP — it might have been Field Marshal Alexander — and the story was certainly believable. Sciss was well-known for his ability to antagonize everyone around him. It was also said that Sciss was standoffish, nasty, absolutely devoid of tact, and as unmercifully frank as a child in telling other people his opinions of them.

Remembering his own dismay at the meeting because he hadn’t been able to counter Sciss’s seemingly perfect logic, Gregory could well understand the animosity which the scientist seemed to inspire wherever he went. At the same time, though, he respected the intellectual powers of this strange man, whose tiny head made him resemble a bird. “I’ll have to get busy on this,” he said to himself, bringing his deliberations to an end, but without any clear sense of what “get busy” actually meant.

The day faded quickly, so quickly that the displays in the shop windows were soon being lit up for the evening. The street narrowed. Gregory found himself in a district of the city which hadn’t been rebuilt since the Middle Ages. It was jammed with dark, clumsy old buildings, most of them sheltering brand-new modern shops that sparkled unnaturally like transparent glass boxes.

Gregory turned into an arcade, amazed that the thin layer of windswept snow at its entrance still hadn’t been trampled. A woman in a red hat stood nearby looking at some smiling wax manikins dressed in evening gowns. Beyond her, where some square white floodlights brightened the concrete walk, the arcade curved slightly.

Walking slowly, hardly conscious of his surroundings and whereabouts, Gregory brooded about Sciss’s laugh. What exactly had it meant, he wondered. It had to be significant. Despite appearances, Sciss didn’t just do things for effect, although he was certainly arrogant enough, and consequently it followed that Sciss must have had a good reason for laughing, even if he was the only one who knew it.

Farther up the deserted arcade a man was walking toward Gregory — a tall, lean man, whose head was nodding as if he were talking to himself. Gregory was too busy with his own thoughts to pay much attention to him, but he kept him in sight out of the corner of his eye. The man drew nearer. Three shops turned off their lights for the night and the arcade suddenly became darker. The windows of a fourth shop were covered with whitewash because of a renovation in progress, and the only lights still visible were a few glittering displays in the direction from which the man was approaching.

Gregory looked up. The man’s pace slowed, but he kept coming, albeit hesitantly. Suddenly they stood facing each other, no more than a few paces apart. Still engrossed in his thoughts, Gregory stared at the tall male figure before him without really seeing his face. He took a step; the man did the same.

“What does he want?” Gregory wondered. The two men scowled at each other. In the shadows the man’s broad face was hidden; he was wearing his hat pushed down on his forehead, his coat was somewhat too short, and his belt was all askew, with its end twisted loosely around the buckle. There was certainly something wrong with the buckle, Gregory thought, but he had enough problems without worrying about that too. He moved as if to walk past the stranger but found his path blocked.

“Hey,” Gregory began angrily, “what the…” his words faltering into silence.

The stranger… was himself. He was standing in front of a huge mirrored wall marking the end of the arcade. He had mistakenly walked into a glass-roofed dead end.

Unable to escape the disconcerting feeling that he was really looking at someone else, Gregory stared at his own reflection for a moment. The face that looked back at him was swarthy, not very intelligent, perhaps, but with a strong, square jaw that showed firmness, or at least so he liked to think, although more than once he had decided it was only pigheadedness.

“Had a good look?” he muttered to himself, then turned on his heels in embarrassment and headed in the direction he had come from.

Halfway up the arcade, Gregory couldn’t resist an irrational impulse to turn and look back. The “stranger” stopped also. He was far away now among some brightly lit, empty shops, heading down the arcade, busy with his own affairs in his mirror world. Gregory angrily adjusted his belt in its buckle, pushed his hat farther back on his head, and went out into the street.

The next arcade led him straight to the Europa. The doorman opened the glass door for him, and Gregory strode past the tables toward the purple glare of the bar. He was so tall that he had no trouble seating himself on one of the high stools.

“White Horse?” asked the bartender. Gregory nodded.

The bottle tinkled as if there were a glass bell hidden inside it. Gregory drank quickly. The White Horse was acrid; it tasted something like fuel oil and burned his throat… he hated it. It so happened, however, that several times in a row he had stopped at the Europa with Kinsey, a young colleague at the Yard, and each time he’d had a drink of White Horse with him; from then on the bartender had considered Gregory a regular customer and made a point of remembering his preferences. Actually, Gregory had only been meeting with Kinsey in order to put the finishing touches on an apartment exchange. He really preferred warm beer to whiskey, but was ashamed to order it in such a fashionable place.

Gregory had ended up at the Europa now simply because he didn’t feel like going home. Meditating over the shot glass, he decided to see if he could organize all the facts of the “series” in some kind of systematic pattern, but found that he couldn’t remember a single name or date.

He downed his drink, tilting his head back with an exaggerated gesture.

He flinched. The bartender was saying something to him.

“What? What did you say?”

“Do you want supper? We have venison today, it’s in season.”

“Venison?”

He couldn’t understand a word the bartender was saying.

“Oh, supper,” it finally dawned on him. “No. Please pour me another.”

The bartender nodded. He rinsed out the glass at a silver-colored tap, rattling the faucets as if he wanted to smash them into little pieces, then raised his reddened, hard, muscular face to Gregory, and, watching through beady eyes, whispered.

“Are you looking for a —?”

There was no one else near the bar.

“No. What the hell are you talking about?” Gregory added indignantly, as if that had been his real purpose and he’d been caught in the act.

“No, nothing. I thought that you… for service,” the bartender mumbled, withdrawing to the other end of the bar. Someone touched Gregory’s arm lightly. He whirled around in a flash and was unable to hide his disappointment: it was a waiter.

“Pardon me… Lieutenant Gregory? Telephone for you, sir.”

Walking as quickly as possible to avoid being jostled, Gregory made his way through the crowd on the dance floor. The light in the telephone booth was burned out, so he stood in darkness, except when an occasional flash from the revolving light over the bar streamed through the booth’s little round window.

“Hello, Gregory speaking.”

“This is Sheppard.”

At the sound of the Chief’s far-off voice, Gregory’s heart began to beat faster.

“Lieutenant, I want to see you.”

“Of course, Chief Inspector. When should I…”

“I’d rather not put it off. Do you have time?”

“Naturally, yes sir. Tomorrow?”

“No. Today, if you can. Can you make it?”

“Yes sir, of course.”

“That’s fine. Do you know where I live?”

“No, but I can—”

“Eighty-five Walham Street, in Paddington. Can you come over now?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you’d rather come in an hour or two.”

“No, I can come now.”

“All right, I’m expecting you.”

The receiver jangled when Gregory hung up. He stared at the telephone in confusion. How in God’s name did Sheppard know he was at the Europa, a place he only went to occasionally to find an outlet for his penny-ante snobbism. Had the Chief been so eager to find him that he’d systematically phoned around from bar to bar? The very thought made Gregory turn red. He walked out into the street and ran to catch a passing bus. From the bus stop it was a long walk. He chose a roundabout route through back streets where there weren’t too many people. Finally he found himself on a deserted side street lined by small old houses. Here and there a puddle shimmered in the light of the antiquated gas lamps illuminating the street. Gregory had never imagined there was such a seedy little neighborhood buried in the middle of this part of the city.

He was surprised again at number 85. In a garden behind a low brick wall, at a considerable distance from any of the other houses, there stood a massive building. It was completely dark, as if dead. Taking a good look around, Gregory finally spotted a weak glow coming from one of the upstairs windows.

The spiked gate made a creaking sound when he swung it open. Forced to grope in the darkness to get his bearings because the brick wall cut off the light from the street, Gregory used the tip of his foot to feel his way along a flagstone walk to the solid black door of the house. Instead of a bell there was a knocker. He pulled it gently as if afraid to make too much noise.

He had a long wait, occasionally hearing the dripping of an unseen rainspout or the sound of a car whizzing by on the wet pavement at the intersection. Finally, and soundlessly, the door opened. Sheppard was standing in the doorway.

“You’re here already? That’s fine. Please follow me.”

The hall was completely dark. Farther inside the house, a weak glow streaked the stairs in a trail of light, beckoning upward. An open door on the second floor landing led into a small foyer. Gregory noticed something staring at him from overhead — it was the skull of some kind of animal, its looming, empty eye sockets clearly standing out from the yellowed bone.

He took off his coat and entered the room. The long walk in the fog had irritated his eyes and they still burned a little.

“Please sit down.”

The room was almost dark. There was a lamp on the desk, but it was pointed downward toward an open book, its light reflected onto the wall and ceiling from the flattened pages. Gregory remained on his feet. There was only one chair.

“Please sit down,” the Chief Inspector said a second time. It sounded like an order. The lieutenant sat down reluctantly. He was now so close to the source of the light that he was almost unable to see. A few blurred spots that were actually pictures were barely visible on the walls; under his feet he felt a deep rug. Opposite him was a long bookshelf. A television set glistened in the middle of a dull whitish area.

Sheppard walked over to the desk, pulled a black metal cigarette box out from under some books, and slid it over to his guest. He lit one himself and began pacing back and forth between the door and the window, which was screened by a heavy brown drape. The silence lasted so long that Gregory, who had nothing to do but watch the pacing figure, soon began to feel bored.

“I’ve decided to give you the case,” Sheppard said all of a sudden, not losing a step.

Gregory didn’t know what to say. He could feel the alcohol in him and took a deep drag on the cigarette as if tobacco smoke would restore his sobriety.

“You’ll be on your own,” Sheppard continued in a decisive tone of voice. Still pacing back and forth, he glanced obliquely at the figure seated in the circle of light next to the lamp.

“Don’t think I picked you because you have any special ability as an investigator, because you don’t. Furthermore, your methods are completely unsystematic. But it doesn’t make any difference. You have a great personal interest in this case, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Gregory answered. He sensed that an uncomplicated affirmative reply would be best.

“Do you have any theories of your own about it? Something personal that you didn’t want to mention in my office today?”

“No. That is…” Gregory hesitated.

“Go on.”

“This is just an impression. It’s not based on anything,” said Gregory. He spoke with some reluctance. “But it seems to me that this case really isn’t about bodies. I mean, they play a definite role, but not in this thing.”

“In what thing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Really?”

The Chief Inspector sounded almost cheerful. Gregory wished he could see his face. This was a completely different Sheppard from the one he’d occasionally met at the Yard.

“In my opinion this is a lousy case,” Gregory suddenly blurted out as if talking to a friend. “There’s something about it… something peculiar. It’s not that it’s difficult, but there are details that don’t fit… not for material reasons but because the only connecting links are all psychological nonsense. It all builds up to nothing and leads to a dead end…”

“Yes, go on,” Sheppard chimed in attentively, still pacing back and forth. Gregory was no longer watching him. Unable to tear his eyes from the papers on the desk, he began speaking excitedly.

“The idea that this whole case is based on some kind of insanity, mania, or psychopathology is almost irresistible. No matter where you start, no matter how anxious you are to avoid it, everything leads you back to it. But as a matter of fact that’s our out, because it only seems that way. All right, let’s say it was a maniac. But everything was so carefully planned and methodical… I don’t know, do you see what I mean? If you went into a house and found that all the tables and chairs had only one leg, you’d probably tell yourself that it was the work of a madman, that some maniac had decided to furnish his house that way. But if you went from house to house and found the same thing all over town? I don’t know what any of this means, but it just couldn’t be… this is not the work of a madman. I think we have to go to the other extreme. Someone very intelligent who is using his intellect for a purpose we don’t understand yet.”

“What else?” Sheppard asked quietly, as if he didn’t want to do anything to intrude on the fervor which had quite obviously seized Gregory. Sitting behind the desk, still staring blindly at the papers, the younger man was silent for a moment, then answered.

“What else?… Nothing very good. Nothing very good at all. A series of acts without a single slipup, that’s pretty bad… In fact it appalls me, it’s absolutely inhuman. Human beings don’t work that way. Human beings make mistakes, it’s in the nature of things that they miscalculate from time to time, make mistakes, leave clues behind, change their plans in the middle of everything. But from the very beginning these bodies… the ones that were moved… if that’s the right word for it… I don’t agree with Farquart that the perpetrator ran away because he was frightened. It wasn’t anything like that. At the time all he wanted was to move them. Just a little at first. Then a little more. Then, still more… until finally a body disappeared altogether. That’s the way it had to be, that’s the way he wanted to do it. I thought… I’m always thinking about it, why he… but I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Are you familiar with the Lapeyrot case?” Sheppard asked. Standing in the back of the room he was almost invisible.

“Lapeyrot? The Frenchman who—”

“Yes. In 1909. Do you know the case?”

“It sounds familiar, but I can’t remember. What was it about?”

“About too much evidence. At least that’s what they said at the time, unfortunately. On a beach along the Seine River, for a certain period, they kept finding buttons of various kinds arranged in geometric patterns, as well as belt buckles, suspender clasps, and small coins. Always arranged in polygons, circles, or other shapes. There were also handkerchiefs knotted together.”

“Wait a minute. I remember something now. I must have read about it somewhere. Two old guys in a garret who… right?”

“Right. That’s the very case I’m talking about…”

“They used to search out young people who were trying to kill themselves — they’d bring them home, revive them, cheer them up, and have them tell what it was that had driven them to attempt suicide. That’s the way it was, right? And after all that… they strangled them to death. Right?”

“More or less. One of the pair was a pharmacist. After the murders they got rid of their victims with the aid of some acid and a fireplace; then they’d amuse themselves by playing a little game with the police with the buttons, buckles, coins, and other odds and ends that were left over.”

“I don’t see the connection. One of the Lapeyrot murderers was insane. He completely dominated his accomplice, who was regarded as a victim of folie à deux. The two of them devoted most of their energy to the button puzzles because that’s what really excited them. The case may have been hard to crack, but basically it was quite commonplace: there were murderers and victims, there were clues. What difference does it make if the crime was committed with a few theatrical flourishes—”

Gregory stopped short, an incomprehensible smile suddenly appearing on his lips. He looked at the Chief Inspector, trying to get a glimpse of him in the dim light.

“Wait, I think I see…” he said, his tone indicating that he had just made a startling discovery. “So that’s it.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly,” Sheppard answered, resuming his pacing.

Gregory bowed his head, tapping on the edge of the desk with his fingers.

“Theatrical,” he whispered. “An imitation… but an imitation of what?” he said, raising his voice. “A sham, but to cover what? Insanity? No, it can’t be anything like that. The circle is closing again.”

“It’s closing because you’re going in the wrong direction. When you talk about shammed insanity you’re looking for a close analogy to the Lapeyrot case, in which the murderers, if I may put it this way, had a particular audience in mind all along: they purposely left clues to give the police a puzzle to solve. In our case there’s nothing to indicate that any of this is aimed at the police. In fact, I doubt it very much.”

“Yes, well in that…” said Gregory. He felt downhearted and stifled. “So we’re back where we started. The motive.”

“No, not at all. Look over here, please.”

Sheppard pointed to the wall, at a small circle of light that Gregory hadn’t noticed before. Where was it coming from, he wondered. Glancing at the desk, he saw a cut-glass paperweight standing next to the reflector of the desk lamp; a narrow beam of light, refracted in its crystalline depths, was escaping into the room’s dark interior to shine on the wall.

“What do you see here?” asked Sheppard, moving to the side.

Gregory leaned over to escape the lamp’s blinding glare. There was a picture hanging on the wall, almost invisible in the darkness expept for one of its corners, which was lit by the single beam of light. Within this tiny space, not much larger than two coins placed side by side, he saw a dark spot enclosed by a pale gray, slightly curved border.

“That spot?” he asked. “A profile of some kind? No, I can’t make it out… wait a minute…”

Intrigued by the shape, Gregory studied it more and more carefully, his eyes squinting. The more he studied it the more anxious he became. Although he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was looking at, his anxiety began to increase.

“It looks as if it’s alive…” he said involuntarily in a low voice. “Is it a burned-out window in a gutted house?”

Sheppard moved closer to the wall and blocked the area with his body. The irregular spot of light now shined on his chest.

“You can’t figure it out because all you can see is a tiny part of the whole,” he said, “right?”

“So that’s it! You think these disappearing body incidents are only a part — let’s say the beginning — of something bigger.”

“That’s it exactly.”

Sheppard was pacing again. Gregory returned his gaze to the spot on the wall.

“It may even be the beginning of something with criminal and political implications that go beyond the boundaries of this country. What comes next, of course, will depend on what has already taken place, and naturally it could all work out differently. Maybe everything that’s happened so far is only a diversion, or camouflage for some other operation…”

Deeply engrossed in the dark, nerve-wracking shape, Gregory hardly heard him.

“Excuse me, Chief Inspector,” he interrupted. “What is that thing?”

“What? Oh, that.”

Sheppard switched on the ceiling light and the room was filled with brightness. A second or so later he switched it off again, but during the few instants of light Gregory finally managed to catch a glimpse of what he had been staring at so fruitlessly: it was a woman’s head thrown backward at an angle, the whites of her eyes staring straight ahead, her neck scarred by the mark of a noose. There wasn’t enough time for him to see all the details, but even so, with a peculiar kind of delayed action, the expression of horror in the dead face got to him, and he turned to Sheppard, who was still pacing back and forth.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Gregory, blinking his eyes, “but I don’t know if that’s the most important thing about it. Do you really believe that a man alone in a darkened mortuary in the middle of the night would tear apart a cloth curtain with his teeth?”

“Don’t you?” Sheppard interrupted.

“Yes, of course, if he did it because he was nervous or afraid, or if there weren’t any other tools available… but you know as well as I do why he did it. That damned ironclad consistency that we’ve seen throughout this whole series. After all, he did everything to make it look like the bodies had come back to life. He planned everything to achieve that effect, even studied the weather reports. But how could he possibly predict that the police would be ready to believe in miracles? And that’s exactly what makes the whole thing so insane!”

“The kind of criminal you’re talking about doesn’t exist and couldn’t possibly exist,” Sheppard observed indifferently. He pushed the drapes to the side and looked out a dark window.

After a long interval Gregory asked, “Why did you bring up the Lapeyrot case?”

“Because it began childishly, with buttons arranged in patterns. But that isn’t the only reason. Tell me something: exactly what is contrary to human nature?”

“I don’t understand…” Gregory mumbled. He was beginning to get a splitting headache.

“A person manifests his individuality by his actions,” the Chief Inspector explained quietly. “Naturally this holds true for criminal acts also. But the pattern that emerges from our series of incidents is impersonal. Impersonal, like a natural law of some kind. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so,” said Gregory. His voice was hoarse. He leaned over to one side, very slowly, until he was completely out of the blinding glare of the desk lamp. Thanks to this movement his eyes were soon able to see better in the darkness. There were several other pictures hanging next to the photograph of the woman, all showing the faces of dead people. Meanwhile, Sheppard had resumed his pacing across the room, moving back and forth against a background of nightmarish faces as if he were in the middle of some kind of weird stage setting; no… more as if he were among very ordinary, familiar things. He paused opposite the desk.

“The mathematical perfection of this series suggests that there is no culprit. That may astound you, Gregory, but it’s true…”

“What… what are you…” the lieutenant gasped in a barely audible voice, recoiling involuntarily.

Sheppard stood absolutely still, his face unseen. Suddenly Gregory heard a short, quavering sound. The Chief Inspector was laughing.

“Did I shock you?” the Chief Inspector asked in a more serious tone. “Do you think I’m talking nonsense?

“Who makes day and night?” he continued. There was derision in his voice.

Suddenly Gregory stood up, pushing his chair backward.

“I understand,” he said. “Of course. The series has something to do with the creation of a new myth. An imitation of one of the laws of nature. A synthetic, impersonal, invisible, obviously all-powerful criminal. Oh, it’s perfect! An imitation of infinity…”

Gregory laughed, but not very happily. Then, breathing deeply, he became quiet.

“Why are you laughing?” the Chief Inspector asked gravely, perhaps even a bit sadly. “Isn’t it because you were already thinking along the same lines but rejected the idea? Imitation? Of course. But a perfect imitation, Gregory, so perfect that you’ll come back to me with your hands empty.”

“Maybe,” Gregory said coldly. “And in that case I’ll be replaced by someone else. If necessary I could manage to explain every detail right now. Even the dissecting laboratory. The window can be opened from the outside with the aid of a nylon thread looped around the lock beforehand. I tried it, and it works. But to think that the creator of a new religion of some kind, an imitator of miracles, had to begin this way…”

Gregory shrugged his shoulders.

“No, it can’t be that simple,” the Chief Inspector said. “You keep repeating the word ‘imitation.’ A wax doll is an imitation of a human being, isn’t it? What if someone made a doll that could walk and talk, wouldn’t that be an excellent imitation? And if he made a doll that could bleed? A doll that could experience unhappiness and death, what then?”

“And what does any of this have to… after all, even the most perfect imitation — even the doll you were just talking about — has to have a creator, and the creator can be held responsible!” Gregory shouted, overcome with anger. “He’s only playing with me” suddenly flashed through his mind, and he said, “Chief Inspector, please answer one question for me.”

Sheppard looked at him.

“You don’t really think this case can be solved, do you?”

“Certainly not. I don’t want to hear that kind of talk anymore. Of course there is a possibility that the solution —” The Chief Inspector broke off in mid-sentence.

“Please, sir, tell me everything.”

“I don’t know if I have the right,” Sheppard said dryly, as if displeased by Gregory’s insistence. “You might not like the solution.”

“Why? Please, explain it to me a little more clearly.”

Sheppard shook his head.

“I can’t.”

He walked over to the desk, opened the drawer, and removed a small package.

“Let’s work on the part that pertains to us,” he said, handing it to Gregory.

The package contained photographs of three men and one woman. Commonplace, banal faces, indifferent to everything, stared at Gregory from the shiny little cardboards.

“That’s them,” he said, recognizing two of the photos.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have any pictures taken after death?”

“I managed to get two.” Sheppard reached into the drawer. They had been taken at the hospital at the request of the families.

Both photographs were pictures of men. And it was a strange thing: death seemed to give a new dignity to their rather ordinary features, bestowing a kind of motionless gravity upon them. Dead they looked more expressive than they had while living, as if they finally had something to hide!

Gregory looked up at Sheppard. To his surprise, the Chief Inspector was hunched over, suddenly looking much older than before. He was clenching his lips as if in pain.

“Chief Inspector?” he said softly, with unexpected timidity.

“I would prefer not to give this case to you… but I have no one else,” said Sheppard in a quiet voice. He placed his hand on Gregory’s shoulder. “Please keep in touch with me. I’d like to help you, although I have no idea whether my experience will have much value in a case like this.”

Gregory drew back and the Chief Inspector’s hand dropped. Both men were now standing outside the circle of light made by the lamp, and in the darkness the faces on the wall stared down at them. The lieutenant felt more drunk than he had all evening.

“Please sir…” he said, “you know more than you’re willing to tell me, don’t you?” He was a bit breathless, as if he’d been exerting himself strenuously.

“Sir… are you unwilling to tell me, or unable?” Gregory asked. He wasn’t even shocked at his own audacity.

Sheppard shook his head in denial, watching Gregory with a look of immeasurable patience. Or was it irony?

Gregory glanced down at his hands and noticed that he was still holding the photographs, the ones of the live subjects in his left hands, the dead ones in his right. And again he was inspired by the same mysterious compulsion that had made him direct such an odd question to the Chief Inspector. It was as if an invisible hand was touching him.

“Which of these are… more important?” he asked in a barely audible voice. It was only possible to hear him because the room was absolutely still.

A tight-lipped expression on his face, Sheppard made a discouraging gesture and went over to the light switch. The room was flooded with brightness, everything became ordinary and natural. Gregory slowly hid the photographs in his pocket.

The visit was obviously coming to an end. During the remainder of their conversation, which concentrated on such concrete matters as the number and posting of the constables guarding the mortuaries, the organization of a cordon around the areas mentioned by Sciss, and the details of the lieutenant’s actual powers, there remained the shadow of something left unsaid.

Again and again the Chief Inspector would fall silent and look at Gregory anxiously, as if uncertain whether to leave these businesslike considerations and resume the previous conversation. But he left well enough alone and didn’t say anything.

Gregory was halfway down the stairs when the lights went out. He managed to feel his way to the door. Suddenly he heard his name.

“Good luck!” the Chief Inspector shouted after him.

The lieutenant walked out into the wind and closed the door.

It was terribly cold. The puddles had all solidified; frozen mud crunched underfoot; in the onrushing wind the drizzling rain was being changed into a blizzard of icy needles that pricked Gregory’s face painfully and made a sharp, paperlike rustle as they bounced off the stiff fabric of his coat.

Gregory tried to review the details of the evening, but he might just as well have tried to classify the invisible clouds that the wind was driving around over his head. Remembered snatches of this and that struggled in his mind, spilling over into images unconnected with anything except a poignant feeling of depression and being lost. The walls of the room had been covered with posthumous photographs, the desk with open books, and he vehemently regretted now that he hadn’t taken a good look at any of them, or at the papers spread out next to the books. It never even occurred to him that such actions would have been indiscreet. Gregory began to feel that he was standing on the boundary between the definite and the indefinite. Each of his thoughts seemed about to reveal one of many possible meanings, then vanished, melting away with every desperate effort he made to grasp it fully. And he, pursuing understanding, seemed about to plunge into a sea of ambiguous details in which he would drown, comprehending nothing even at the end.

Whom was he supposed to catch for Sheppard — the creator of some new religion? Although able to function smoothly and efficiently in routine cases, the machinery of investigation was now beginning to turn against itself. The more meticulously the facts were measured, photographed, recorded, and assembled, the more the whole structure seemed to be nonsensical.

If he’d been asked to track down a completely obscure and unknown murderer, Gregory wouldn’t have felt so helpless. What, he wondered, was that confused anxiety he had seen in the eyes of the old Chief Inspector, who wanted to help him but couldn’t?

Furthermore, why had the Chief, who seemed to think the case was unsolvable, picked him, a beginner, to take it over? And was that really the reason Sheppard had invited him to his house in the middle of the night?

With his fists clenched in his pockets, Gregory walked along the deserted street, not seeing anything in the darkness, not feeling the raindrops trickling down his face, not remembering where he was headed for. He gulped in some of the cold, damp air and again saw Sheppard’s face before him, the little shadows at the corner of his mouth twitching.

How long was it since he had left the Europa? He began to calculate. It was now 10:30, so nearly three hours had gone by. “I’m not drunk anymore,” he said to himself. Stopping in the circle of light around a lamp post, he read the street sign to get his bearings, figured out the location of the nearest subway station, and headed toward it.

The streets became more crowded, brightened now by neon signs and by blinking red and green traffic signals. Once inside the revolving doors at the subway entrance, Gregory was met by a blast of warm, dry air from the heating ducts. He rode downward on the escalator, slowly sinking into the noisy rumbling below.

It was even warmer on the station platform than it had been upstairs. Gregory let the Islington train pass, watching the triangular red light on the last car until it disappeared in the distance. Circling around a newsstand, he leaned against an iron support beam and lit a cigarette.

After a while his train arrived. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Gregory took a corner seat. The car jerked and pulled out, the station lights flicking by more and more quickly, then disappearing; the train was soon moving so fast that the lights in the tunnel couldn’t be distinguished from each other as they shot past.

Staring blankly at the row of accidental faces sitting opposite him, Gregory again reviewed the meeting with Sheppard. There was more to it than he yet understood, he felt, but he’d only be able to figure out its real meaning if he concentrated.

Gradually he became aware of an uneasy feeling circulating in his consciousness, and finally it formed itself into words: “There’s trouble. Something terrible and irreversible happened this evening… or was it today?” As if cut off by some outside force, this line of thought suddenly came to a dead end.

Gregory closed his eyes for a moment. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had recognized a man sitting at the opposite end of the car, near the door. He took another look. Yes, the face was familiar all right. It seemed eager to tell him something. Gregory tried to concentrate. It was an old man’s face: flabby, with vague, spongy features.

The man was fast asleep, his head propped up against a partition, his hat slowly slipping downward and casting a deep shadow across his face. His body rocked back and forth with the movements of the speeding train, the rhythm intensifying on the curves. After one particularly sharp jolt, the man’s big, pale, swollen hand slipped out of his lap, as if it were a bundle, and dangled lifelessly at his side.

Gregory was sure he knew the sleeping man, but as much as he tried he couldn’t place him. The train moved faster and faster, the jolting increased, and finally the man’s lower jaw dropped open. The lips fell apart…

“He’s sleeping as soundly as a corpse,” flashed through Gregory’s mind. At the same moment he was overcome by a cold, terrifying sensation. For an instant he couldn’t catch his breath. He knew. The sleeping man was the subject of one of the posthumous photographs in his coat pocket.

The train came to a stop. Cross Row. A few people got on. The platform lights started to flicker, seemed to move, then whisked away backward. The train sped on.

Brilliantly lit signs and advertising posters were soon flashing by again. Although it was nearly time for him to get off, Gregory didn’t even bother to glance at the station sign. He sat absolutely still, as if concentrating deeply, his eyes focused on the sleeping man. The doors closed with a hiss; outside the windows a horizontal row of shining fluorescent lights flowed smoothly backward, suddenly disappearing as if slashed away. Steadily picking up speed, the train raced into the dark tunnel.

Gregory’s head began to throb. Oblivious to the noisy clatter of the wheels, he began to feel as if he was looking at the sleeping man’s head through a long, gray funnel filled with flashing sparks. The dark, gaping mouth hypnotized him; he stared so steadily, so unmovingly, so fixedly, that the swollen gray face seemed to transform itself into a circle of iridescent light. Keeping his eyes fixed on the old man, Gregory reached into his coat, unbuttoning it to pull out the photograph. The train hissed to a stop. Where were they? Camberwell already?

Several people rose to get off. A soldier, making his way to the door of the car, tripped over the extended leg of the sleeping man, who suddenly woke up and, without a word, adjusted his hat, arose from his seat, and joined the exiting crowd.

Gregory jumped up, attracting attention by his haste. Several faces turned in his direction. The doors began to close. Forcibly holding them open, Gregory leaped onto the platform from the moving train. Running along the platform, he caught a glimpse of an angry face against the background of the moving cars. “Hey you!” the train dispatcher shouted after him.

A cool breeze met Gregory’s nostrils. He stopped abruptly, his heart beating with excitement. Along with the rest of the crowd, the man was making his way toward a tall iron exit gate. Gregory drew back and waited. Behind him was a newsstand lit by the strong light of a single naked bulb.

The old man had a game leg. He was limping along slightly behind the crowd of passengers. With the brim of his hat soaking wet and flopping about soggily, his creased coat frayed around the pockets, he looked like the last of the old-time panhandlers. Gregory glanced at the photograph hidden in his palm. There was no resemblance.

He lost his head completely. Was this just an accidental case of mistaken identity, or was it due to his confused state of mind? The dead man was much too young; he couldn’t possibly be the person he’d followed off the train.

Confused and feeling somewhat nearsighted, his cheeks twitching, Gregory looked alternately at the photo and at the old man, whose unshaven gray face sagged over his collar. Finally sensing that he was being watched, the old man turned toward the detective. Having no idea why the latter was so interested in him, his face took on an empty-headed, listless expression, his slack jaw dropped slightly, his slobbering lips parted, and as a result he suddenly seemed to resemble the man in the photograph again.

Gregory extended his hand as if to touch the old man’s shoulder. The old man, terrified, cried out — or, more accurately, uttered a hoarse, frightened sound — and hurried onto the escalator.

Just as Gregory set off in pursuit, a family with two children stepped between him and the old man, blocking his way. Seeing this, the old man slipped through the other passengers and was carried farther and farther upward.

Gregory shoved his way through the crowd of people blocking his path, paying no attention when an indignant woman said something nasty and a few other angry remarks were directed his way. On the street-exit level the crowd was so thick that he couldn’t get through and finally had to give up, letting himself be carried along at the slow pace imposed by the others. There wasn’t a sign of the old man when he finally reached the street. Looking helplessly in all directions, Gregory berated himself for that split second of hesitation — due either to surprise or to fear — in which the old man had made his escape.

The traffic was heavy on both sides of the safety island where he had emerged from the subway. Blinded by the headlights every time he tried to cross, Gregory stood helplessly at the curb. Before long a taxi pulled up, the driver assuming that he was waiting for a cab. The door opened. Gregory got in and mechanically uttered his address. When the taxi began moving he noticed that he was still clutching the photograph in his hand.

About ten minutes later the taxi came to a stop at the corner of a small street just off Odd Square. Gregory got out, already half-convinced that he had experienced a hallucination of some kind. Sighing, he stuck a hand in his pocket and fumbled for his keys.

The house in which he lived was owned by the Fenshawes. It was an old, two-story building, with an entrance portal almost monumental enough for a cathedral; a steep, gabled roof; thick, dark walls; long hallways abounding in sudden turns and hidden alcoves; and rooms so high they seemed to have been designed for some kind of flying creature. This suggestion was reinforced by the extraordinary wealth of ornamentation on the ceilings. With its high gilded vaults in a constant state of semidarkness due to an effort to save electricity, its broad marble staircases, wide-columned terrace, mirrored drawing room with chandeliers copied from those of Versailles, and its huge bathroom (which was probably once a parlor) — the house had a strange splendor, and it was this that had fired Gregory’s imagination when, accompanied by his new colleague, Kinsey, he had first seen it.

And since the Fenshawes had made a good impression on him, he decided to take his colleague’s advice and rent the room, which Kinsey was giving up, or so he said, for personal reasons.

Unfortunately, the Victorian architects who designed the house hadn’t known anything about modern home appliances, and as a result the place presented a number of inconveniences. To get to the bathroom Gregory had to walk the length of a long hallway and through a glassed-in gallery; to get to his room from the stairs he had to pass through a six-doored drawing room which was almost unfurnished, not counting a few blackening bas-reliefs on the peeling walls, a crystal chandelier, and the mirrors in each of its six corners. After a while, though, the house’s defects didn’t seem too serious.

Since he led a very busy life, returning home late at night and spending the whole day at work, it was a long time before Gregory noticed how peculiar his new residence was; nor did he realize, at first, how much he was being drawn into its orbit.

The Fenshawes were well on in years, but growing old gracefully. Pale and thin, with colorless, slightly graying hair, Mr. Fenshawe was a melancholy man who, because his nose looked as if it had been borrowed from a different, considerably more fleshy face, gave the impression of being in disguise. He favored old-fashioned clothing, usually wore brilliantly polished shoes and a gray frock coat, and, even at home, always carried a long cane. His wife was a dumpy woman with small, dark, shining eyes. She walked around in dark dresses that bulged strangely (after a while Gregory began to suspect that she was puffing herself out on purpose), and she was so taciturn that it was difficult to remember the sound of her voice. When Gregory asked Kinsey about the owners, the answer had been, “Don’t worry, you’ll get along with them,” followed, a moment later, by, “They’re such riffraff.” At the time Gregory had only wanted some support for his decision to move into the big, old house, so he didn’t pay much attention to this mysterious remark, the more so because he was accustomed to Kinsey’s penchant for bizarre expressions.

The morning after he moved in Gregory encountered Mrs. Fenshawe for the first time. It was quite early. Striding along on his way to the bathroom, he came upon her in the drawing room. She was sitting on a low stool that looked as if it had been made for a child, a rag clutched in one hand, some kind of sharpened metal implement in the other. Using her feet to hold back a section of carpet, she was buffing the parquet flooring, working her way along the length of the room, but making such slow progress that she had moved less than two feet by the time Gregory came back from the bathroom, finding her as busy and preoccupied as before. In the middle of the huge drawing room, she looked like the black head of a slowly contracting caterpillar whose body was formed by the patterned rug. When Gregory asked if he could help with anything, Mrs. Fenshawe turned her leathery face in his direction for a moment but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, on his way out of the house, Gregory tripped over her as she was moving from step to step on her little stool (the lights were off), nearly knocking her down the stairs. From time to time thereafter he ran into her in the most unlikely and unexpected places, and when he was working in his room he sometimes heard the slow, measured creaking of her stool as she made her way along the hall. Once, when the creaking stopped just opposite his door, he assumed, with some distaste, that his landlady was spying on him through the keyhole. He quickly stepped into the hall, but Mrs. Fenshawe, who was fastidiously polishing the parquet under the window, ignored him completely.

Gregory concluded from all this that Mrs. Fenshawe was trying to save money by cutting down on domestic help; she used the stool because it was uncomfortable for her to bend over. This explanation, though presumably correct, did not eliminate the problem, however, because the constant sight of Mrs. Fenshawe creeping along on her stool, and the perpetual creaking from dawn to dusk, soon took on a demonic character in Gregory’s mind. He began to yearn for the moment when the creaking would stop; sometimes he had to wait an hour or two to get some peace. Moreover, Mrs. Fenshawe was usually accompanied by two black cats, which to all appearances she took care of, and Gregory, for no apparent reason, couldn’t stand either of them. At least a dozen times he told himself that none of this was any of his business, and in fact if it hadn’t been for Mr. Fenshawe he would have been able to ignore everything that went on outside his room.

Although the old man’s room was right next door to his and shared the same beautiful terrace, Gregory never heard a sound from Mr. Fenshawe in the daytime. The nights were a different story. Well after ten o’clock, sometimes not until after eleven, Gregory would hear a rhythmic knocking from behind the wall separating the two rooms. Sometimes it was a rich, sonorous sound; sometimes hollow and dull, like someone tapping on a wooden wall with a hammer. This was usually followed by several other acoustical phenomena. At first it seemed to Gregory as if these came in an infinite number of variations, but he was wrong, and within a month he was able to recognize the eight most frequent sounds.

The initial knocking behind the wall was usually followed by a dull, empty noise, rather like the sound of a small barrel or a piece of wooden pipe being rolled along a bare floor. Sometimes there were some quick vigorous thumps on the floor, as if someone were walking barefoot with his full weight on his heels. Other times there was clapping — heavy, mean-sounding slaps like those an empty hand might make against a moist balloon-like surface filled with air. There was an intermittent hissing sound also and, finally, some faint noises that were difficult to describe. A persistent scraping, interrupted by a metallic rapping, then by a sharp flat whack like the sound of a fly swatter, or like the tightly wound string of a musical instrument being snapped.

These sounds followed each other in no particular order, and, with the exception of the soft thumps, which Gregory characterized to himself as barefoot stomping, some of them might even be missing for several evenings in a row. Always performed with a certain amount of technical finesse, the sounds increased steadily in tempo, and once they began one could always look forward to a serenade of the most unusual richness and pitch. The sounds and murmurs were usually not very powerful, but to Gregory, lying under his cover in a dark room and staring at a high, invisible ceiling, it sometimes seemed as if they were loud enough to shatter his brain, and in time his interest in the sounds changed from simple curiosity to an almost pathological obsession, although, since he didn’t go in for self-analysis, he would have been hard put to say just when this change took place. It may be that Mrs. Fenshawe’s peculiar behavior during the daytime made him oversensitive to the miseries he had to endure every night. At the beginning, though, he was so busy with a case that he couldn’t worry very much about all this, and in any event, because he was so busy he slept well and hardly heard anything. After several nights of the noises, however, his dark room began to feel like an echo chamber. Gregory tried to convince himself that Mr. Fenshawe’s nocturnal activities were none of his business, but by then it was too late.

Next Gregory tried rationalizing. Faced with a collection of weird, incomprehensible sounds that no one ever mentioned, he attempted to work out a logical explanation of some kind that would cover everything. This, he soon discovered, was impossible.

Where once he had always slept like a log, dropping off as soon as he hit the sheets, and listening to the complaints of insomniacs with a polite attitude that verged on disbelief, now, in the Fenshawe house, he began to take sleeping pills.

Every week, Gregory had Sunday dinner with his landlords. The invitation was always extended to him on the preceding Saturday. On one of these occasions he managed to sneak a look into Mr. Fenshawe’s bedroom, but he regretted this immediately because what he saw exploded his elaborately constructed theory that his landlord was conducting a complicated scientific experiment. Except for a huge bed, a chest of drawers, a night table, a sink, and two chairs, the bright triangular room was empty. There wasn’t a sign of tools, wooden boards, balloons, metal containers, or kegs. There weren’t even any books.

The Sunday dinners were usually quite dull. The Fenshawes were conventional people who lifted their convictions and opinions from the pages of the Daily Chronicle; they rarely had anything original to say, and their conversation generally centered on repairs the old house needed and the difficulty of raising money to pay for these, along with a few anecdotes about some distant relatives in India who apparently comprised the more exciting branch of the family. All this was so trite and commonplace that any mention of the night sounds, or of Mrs. Fenshawe’s processions around the house on her stool, would have been out of place; in any event, whether or not this was actually so, Gregory could never quite manage to say anything about these matters.

Afterward, Gregory would tell himself that it was a waste of time to worry about any of this: if he could only think the matter through, or at least formulate a reasonable theory about what his neighbor was doing behind their mutual wall in the middle of the night, he told himself, he would finally be free from the agonizing hours of tossing sleeplessly in a dark, lonely room.

But the idea of making sense out of a series of weird, disjointed sounds floated around in Gregory’s head as if in a void. Once, somewhat groggy from a sleeping pill which had made him drowsy without bringing rest, he quietly slipped out of bed and went out on the terrace, but the glass doors to Mr. Fenshawe’s room were covered from the inside with a heavy, nontransparent curtain. Gregory returned to his room shivering from the cold and, feeling like a whipped dog, he slipped under the covers, overcome with gloom because he had tried to do something for which he would always be ashamed.

Gregory’s work kept him so busy that he rarely thought about the noises during the daytime. At most, he was reminded of them once or twice when he bumped into Kinsey at Headquarters. On these occasions Kinsey always eyed him expectantly, with an air of cautious curiosity, but Gregory decided not to bother him about it. After all, in the long run the problem was trivial. In time, perhaps without even realizing it, Gregory gradually began to change his routine: he brought official reports home and brooded over them until midnight, sometimes even later. This enabled him to lie to himself about the ultimate disgrace that was already so close, for during his long hours of sleeplessness, the most extraordinary ideas were coming into his head, and several times he had conceived a desperate desire to just give up and take refuge in a hotel or a boardinghouse.

This evening more than ever, returning from Sheppard’s, Gregory needed peace and quiet. The alcohol had worked its way out of his system long before, although he still felt angry and had a pungent taste in his mouth, and his eyes smarted painfully as if there were sand beneath the lids. The staircase, immersed in darkness, was deserted. Gregory passed quickly through the drawing room, where the dark mirrors glistened coldly in the corners, and closed the door of his room with a sigh of relief. Out of habit — it had already become almost a reflex — he stood perfectly still for a moment, listening. At such times he didn’t think; his behavior was instinctive. The house was as still as death. Gregory turned on a lamp, noticed that the air in the room was heavy and stuffy and flung open the door to the terrace, then set about making coffee in his little electric pot. He had a splitting headache. Earlier in the evening other things had distracted him, but now the pain came up to the surface of his consciousness and demanded his full attention. He sat down on a chair next to the bubbling pot, but the feeling that he had just gone through a lousy, unlucky day was so inescapable that he had to stand up. Relax, he told himself, nothing really awful had happened. He’d been given the slip by a man on the subway who vaguely resembled one of the missing corpses. Sheppard had put him in charge of the very investigation he wanted to command. True, the Chief had babbled strangely for a while, but in the end it was all only words, and Sheppard was certainly entitled to carry on if he wanted to. Maybe he was getting religious in his old age. What else had happened? Gregory reminded himself of the incident in the dead-end arcade — the meeting with himself — and laughed involuntarily. “That’s the detective in me… Ultimately, even if I bungle this case, nothing will happen,” he thought. He took a thick notebook out of his drawer, turned to a blank page, and began writing: “MOTIVES: Greed. Religious Fervor. Sex. Politics. Insanity.”

Glancing back at what he had written, Gregory crossed out each item on the list except “Religious Fervor.” What a ridiculous idea! He threw the notebook aside and leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. The pot was bubbling viciously now. Maybe his silly little list of motives wasn’t so stupid after all, he reflected. A frightening idea began to work its way to the surface. Gregory waited passively, gloomily beginning to feel like a struggling, helpless insect trapped in an incomprehensible darkness.

Shivering, he got up, walked over to his desk, and opened a bulky volume entitled Forensic Medicine to a place indicated by a bookmark stuck between the pages. The chapter heading read, “The Decomposition and Decay of the Corpse.”

He began reading, but after a while, although his eyes obediently continued to follow the text, his mind began to visualize Sheppard’s room with its gallery of dead faces. He pictured the scene: Sheppard pacing back and forth in an empty house, stopping occasionally to take a look at the pictures on the wall. Shivering again, Gregory made a decision: Sheppard was a prime suspect. Suddenly he heard a shrill whistle and realized that the coffee was ready.

Closing the book, Gregory got up, poured himself a cup, and gulped it down while standing at the open door of the terrace, not even noticing that the hot coffee was burning his throat. A hazy glow hung over the city. He could see far-off cars shooting along the nighttime streets, looking, in the distance, like white flashes disappearing into a black abyss. From inside the house there was a faint rustling. It sounded a little like a mouse eating its way through the wall, but Gregory knew it wasn’t. Feeling as if he had lost even before the game really started, Gregory ran out on the terrace. Supporting himself on the stone balustrade, he raised his eyes upward. The sky was full of stars.