foreheads, blotched in green and purple but for one whose face was made up to look like a skull. Their demand that he choose trick or treat failed to break his silence and he passed them without another glance.
Dora was out. She had driven herself over to Sylvia's to babysit Mary and the house was empty. He poured himself a glass of claret, stood at one of the front windows eyeing the street until his presence attracted first one group of trick-or-treaters, then two boys, combining Halloween with Guy Fawkes Night and wheeling up his path a homemade skeleton in a stroller. He drew the curtains and retreated as fireworks were set off in one of the neighboring gardens, a series of explosions, then the whistle and scream of a rocket. His next-door neighbors' dog began to howl.
He went into the kitchen, took out of the oven the lasagne Dora had left for him, and sat down to eat it at the kitchen table. The doorbell rang and someone pounded on the knocker. He took no notice. When he had finished his meal, he poured a second glass of wine and went to stand at the small window to the right of the front door. From there, with no lights on, he could watch the street unseen. Dora would be back soon. The moment she turned the car into their own drive she would be mobbed by the trick-or-treat throng if he wasn't there to stop them.
The phone ringing called him away. It was Sheila, wanting to talk about plans for The First Heaven film. Fireworks were deafening, both here and outside her Hampstead home. He was saying, “Sorry, my dear, we'll have to carry on with this conversation another time,” when another machine-gun rattle from firecrackers made further speech impossible. Immediately after the explosions, as he put the phone down, there came another knock at the front door. Repeated knocks, in fact, echoing the fireworks' chatter, as if his caller had previously tried the doorbell in vain.
Of course he wasn't going to answer it. It might be an innocent and harmless Halloweener, surfing the place on his own, someone who didn't know that no householder in his street was imprudent enough to open a front door on October 31, but still he wasn't going to answer it. Very softly he made his way back to the little window in the dark. The doorbell rang but it was a rather timid, diffident summons this time. He hadn't realized that only the side wall of the porch was visible from this point and he was on the point of giving up, was walking away, when he turned his head.
The caller who had knocked and rung had made her final attempt and was just closing his gate behind her. Not a teenage boy or girl but a woman. Her head was covered and she was wrapped in a thick dark coat. Could it be Matea? There was nothing to tell him if it was, only the woman's upright carriage and light step. A fire-work, exploding next door without warning, temporarily blinded him, and when he could see again the woman had disappeared.
It took him a moment to find his keys. He fished them out of his raincoat pocket, shut the door behind him, and ran after her up the street, but she had taken a left or a right turning and there was no sign of her.
11
Though it was a sunny morning, the weather forecast predicted heavy showers. Barry Vine hadn't taken his raincoat off its peg since he brought it home from Wales. Unlike most of his contemporaries who preferred various types of waterproof jacket, he possessed a raincoat because he thought it lent him dignity. It made him look like a detective, the sort of detective found in films from the forties. It was the belt that did it, an adjunct he thought suited him because it hid his thickening waistline. Getting into his car, he felt in the pocket, found only a sheet of folded newspaper, and remembered his keys were in his trousers pocket.
He nearly threw the paper away. He would have done if he could have found a recycling bin. Instead he put it, unfolded, on his desk in the office he shared with Hannah Goldsmith and Damon Coleman. Why had he wanted to read it in the first place? Because that uncouth woman Dilys Hughes had been reading it? Surely not. He had just glanced at the headline: “Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father” by Selina Hexham, when he was summoned to Wexford's morning conference. It must have been those words “gone without trace” and that word “lost” that attracted his attention. Everyone at the conference lived, ate, drank, and slept with those words on the tip of their tongues but so far it hadn't got them far.
Wexford canceled the appointment he had made with Maeve Tredown and Claudia Ricardo, and instead of making a new one, decided to surprise the occupants of Athelstan House. As he said to Burden, he had no grounds on which to question Tredown, certainly none on which to arrest him and therefore take him to the police station. All he had was an inner conviction that refused to go away, that Tredown was being protected, hidden, by Claudia and Maeve, who apparently ruled him.
He and Burden had chosen midafternoon for their call. “He can't be hard at work all the time,” Wexford said. “If he writes every morning and part of the afternoon, he must have some sort of respite. About now might be a good time.”
They expected they would have to infiltrate the women's defenses. Maeve would open the door, Claudia would be a few yards inside, and together they would offer one excuse after another why Tredown couldn't be seen. He was resting, he was asleep, he was back at his writing, and it would all be delivered in that jokey way they had, a mixture of zaniness and giggles, apparent frankness and apparent stupidity. Plus a lot of what Burden called off- color remarks from Claudia. Things turned out differently.
The predicted heavy showers had never come. It was one of those early November days when the sky is blue, the sun brilliant, and visibility nearly perfect. From the Kingsmarkham to Flagford road you could see Cheriton Forest spread out, still leafy in colors varying from dark green to pale yellow, and in the pure clarity of the air, the Downs rose smooth but distinct against the mistless horizon. Donaldson drove into the village byway of the road that led past Morella's fruit farm and the church and the long row of Flagford's picturesque but grotesquely uncomfortable cottages. All right if you were no more than five feet three, Wexford remarked to Burden, but the ceilings were far too low for modern man, as he knew to his cost.
In the clear bright light, even Athelstan House seemed attractive, a multicolored Victorian curiosity. As they approached up the drive Wexford spotted a tall, rather stooped figure, walking along the side of the house toward the rear. He told Donaldson to stop where they were and park there. He and Burden would follow the man. He must surely be Owen Tredown. The sun was low in the sky, offering dazzling glimpses of itself through trees which looked black against it. A blackbird sang in one of those trees, sweet as a nightingale. There was so little wind that the leaf fall seemed suspended until a single one, fan-shaped from a chestnut tree, floated gently down past Burden's face.
Tredown it was. They could see him clearly now and Wexford recognized the writer from a photograph on a book jacket. He had crossed the wide lawn and sat down on a wooden seat at the edge of a shrubbery in which rowans and dogwoods were shimmering red among the fading greens. It was a largely uncultivated place where nothing had been pruned and nothing planted. Only the grass had been tended and closely mown. Lengthening shadows stretched out across the lawn, among them those of the two policemen who Tredown must have seen, for he turned to watch them approach. He seemed unsurprised. He smiled.
Without asking who they were-could he tell by looking at them?-he said in one of the most mellifluous voices Wexford had ever heard, “You see me, like the Lord God, walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”
He was smoking a pipe, a habit Wexford hadn't seen anyone indulge in for a long time. The smell was pungent. It wasn't tobacco, but something herbal, something culinary.
He introduced himself and Burden. Without getting up, Tredown shook hands, an action Wexford rather disliked in these circumstances. You never knew how the relationship might deteriorate and in the not too far distant future. It was awkward to find yourself arresting and cautioning someone with whom you had been on matey terms. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
“Perhaps we could sit down?”
“Of course.” Tredown shifted along the seat. “How remiss of me. I hope you don't mind my smoking.”
“Not at all,” said Wexford. “But I'd like to know what it is. It smells like sage.”
“Sage it is. Salvia divinorum, a powerful hallucinogenic.” Tredown looked from one to the other of them, perhaps expecting a reaction and met impassivity. “This is my second pipe of the day, so I had my out-of-body experience this morning. This one expands my mind and makes me sweat, but that is all.”
“Your out-of-body experience?” Wexford's eyebrows went up.
“Oh, yes. Does that surprise you? Sage brings transcendence, not to say hallucinations of the most interesting
