‘We might.’
‘Then now I think of it, there’s something you should see.’ It had come to him suddenly, with the force of a revelation. Ignoring the protests of the ambulance people that he should lie down, he turned and walked back along the hall to his study. The Bloomberg terminal on his desk was still switched on. Out of the corner of his eye he registered a red glow. Almost every price was down. The Far Eastern markets must be haemorrhaging. He switched on the light and searched along the shelf until he found The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His hands were trembling with excitement. He flicked through the pages.
‘There,’ he said, turning to show his discovery to Leclerc and Gabrielle. He tapped his finger on the page. ‘That’s the man who attacked me.’
It was the illustration for the emotion of terror – an old man, his eyes wide, his toothless mouth agape. Electric calipers were being applied to his facial muscles by the great French doctor Duchenne, an expert in galvanism, in order to stimulate the required expression.
Hoffmann could sense the others’ scepticism – no, worse: their dismay.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Leclerc, puzzled. ‘You’re telling us that this is the man who was in your house tonight?’
‘Oh, Alex,’ said Gabrielle.
‘Obviously I’m not saying it’s literally him – he’s been dead more than a century – I’m saying it looks like him.’ They were both staring at him intently. They believe I have gone mad, he thought. He took a breath. ‘Okay. Now this book,’ he explained carefully to Leclerc, ‘arrived yesterday without any explanation. I didn’t order it, right? I don’t know who sent it. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But you’ve got to agree it’s odd that a few hours after this arrives, a man – who actually looks as though he’s just stepped out of its pages – turns up to attack us.’ They were silent. ‘Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘all I’m saying is, if you want to make an artist’s impression of the guy, you should start with this.’
‘Thank you,’ said Leclerc. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
There was a pause.
‘Right,’ said Gabrielle brightly. ‘Let’s get you to the hospital.’
Leclerc saw them off from the front door.
The moon had disappeared behind the clouds. There was barely any light in the sky, even though there was only half an hour until dawn. The American physicist, with his bandaged head and his black raincoat and his thin pink ankles poking out beneath his expensive pyjamas, was helped into the back of the ambulance by one of the attendants. Since his gabbling remarks about the Victorian photograph, he had fallen silent; Leclerc thought he seemed embarrassed. He had taken the book with him. His wife followed, clutching a bag full of his clothes. They looked like a pair of refugees. The doors were banged shut and the ambulance pulled away, a patrol car behind it.
Leclerc watched until the two vehicles reached the curve of the drive leading to the main road. Brake lights briefly gleamed crimson and then they were gone.
He turned back into the house.
‘Big place for two people,’ muttered one of the gendarmes standing just inside the doorway.
Leclerc grunted. ‘Big place for ten people.’
He went on a solitary expedition to try to get a feel of what he was dealing with. Five, six – no, seven bedrooms upstairs, each with an en suite bathroom, none apparently ever used; the master bedroom huge, with a big dressing room next to it lined by mirrored doors and drawers; a plasma TV in the bathroom; his-and-hers basins; a space-age shower with a dozen nozzles. Across the landing, a gym, with an exercise bike, a rowing machine, a cross-trainer, weights, another big TV. No toys. No evidence of children anywhere, in fact, not even in the framed photographs scattered around, which were mostly of the Hoffmanns on expensive holidays – skiing, of course, and crewing a yacht, and holding hands on some veranda that seemed to be built on stilts above a coral lagoon of improbable blueness.
Leclerc went downstairs, imagining how it must have felt to be Hoffmann, an hour and a half earlier, descending to face the unknown. He skirted the bloodstains and passed through into the study. An entire wall was given over to books. He took down one at random and looked at the spine: Die Traumdeutung by Sigmund Freud. He opened it. Published Leipzig and Vienna, 1900. A first edition. He took down another. La psychologie des foules by Gustave le Bon. Paris, 1895. And another: L’homme machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Leiden, 1747. Also a first edition. Leclerc knew little about rare books, but sufficient even so to appreciate that this must be a collection worth millions. No wonder there were so many smoke detectors dotted around the house. The subjects covered were mostly scientific: sociology, psychology, biology, anthropology – nothing anywhere about money.
He crossed over to the desk and sat down in Hoffmann’s antique captain’s chair. Occasionally the large screen in front of him rippled slightly as the shimmering expanse of figures changed: -1.06, -78, -4.03%, -$0.95. He could no more decipher it than he could read the Rosetta Stone. If only I could find the key, he thought, maybe I could be as rich as this fellow. His own investments, which he had been persuaded to make a few years back by some pimply ‘financial adviser’ in order to secure a comfortable old age, were now worth only half what he had paid for them. The way things were going, when he retired he would have to take a part-time job: head of security in a department store, maybe. He would work until he dropped – something not even his father and grandfather had had to do. Thirty years with the police and he couldn’t even afford to live in the town where he was born! And who was buying up all the expensive property? Money-launderers, many of them – the wives and daughters of presidents of the so-called ‘new democracies’, politicians from the central Asian republics, Russian oligarchs, Afghan warlords, arms-dealers – the real criminals of the world, in short, while he spent his time chasing teenage Algerian dope- peddlers hanging round the railway station. He made himself stand up and go into another room in order to take his mind off it.
In the kitchen he leaned against the granite island and studied the knives. On his instructions they had been bagged and sealed in the hope that they might yield fingerprints. This part of Hoffmann’s story he did not understand. If the intruder had come prepared to kidnap, surely he would have armed himself properly beforehand? And a kidnapper would have needed at least one accomplice, maybe more: Hoffmann was relatively young and fit – he would have put up a struggle. So was the motive robbery? But a simple burglar would have been in and out as quickly as he could, taking as much as he could carry, and there was plenty portable here to steal. Everything therefore seemed to point to the criminal being mentally disturbed. But how would a violent psychopath have known the entry codes? It was a mystery. Perhaps there was some other way into the house that had been left unlocked.
Leclerc went back out into the corridor and turned left. The rear of the house opened into a large Victorian- style conservatory, which was being used as an artist’s studio, although it was not exactly art as the inspector understood that term. It looked more like a radiographic unit, or possibly a glazier’s workshop. On the original exterior wall of the house was a vast collage of electronic images of the human body – digital, infrared, X-ray – along with anatomical drawings of various organs, limbs and muscles.
Sheets of non-reflecting glass and Perspex, of various sizes and thicknesses, were stored in wooden racks. In a tin trunk were dozens of files, bulging with computer images, carefully labelled: ‘MRI head scans, 1-14 Sagittal, Axial, Coronal’; ‘Man, slices, Virtual Hospital, Sagittal amp; Coronal’. On a bench were a light box, a small vice and a clutter of inkpots, engraving tools and paint brushes. There was a hand drill in a black rubber stand, with a dark blue tin next to it – ‘Taylor’s of Harrogate, Earl Grey Tea’ – crammed full of drill heads, and a pile of glossy brochures for an exhibition entitled ‘Human Contours’ due to begin that very day at a gallery on the Plaine de Plainpalais. There was a biographical note inside: ‘Gabrielle Hoffmann was born in Yorkshire, England. She took a joint honours degree in art and French from the University of Salford, and received an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. For several years she worked for the United Nations in Geneva.’ He rolled the brochure into a cylinder and stuffed it into his pocket.
Next to the bench, mounted on a pair of trestles, was one of her works: a 3D scanned image of a foetus composed of about twenty sections drawn on sheets of very clear glass. Leclerc bent to examine it. Its head was disproportionately large for its body, its spindly legs drawn up and tucked beneath it. Viewed from the side it had depth, but as one shifted one’s perspective to the front it seemed to dwindle, then vanish entirely. He could not make out whether it was finished or not. It had a certain power, he was forced to concede, but he couldn’t have lived with it himself. It looked too much like a fossilised reptile suspended in an aquarium. His wife would have thought it disgusting.
A door from the conservatory led out to the garden. It was locked and bolted; no key nearby that he could
