'I am glad,' said Kroplik sarcastically, shifting his weight from one thigh to another, disarranging the cushions on the detective's sofa, 'that you are able to find humour in this.'

'On the contrary, I agree with you. They turn us into a pair of comedians, though our lives are essentially tragic, and for that we are the ones who have to say we're sorry. I find no humour in it whatsoever.'

'Good. Then enough's enough. We are gods not clowns, and gods apologise to no one for their crimes, because what a god does can't be called a crime. Nicht wahr?'

'What?'

'Nicht wahr? Wagnerian for don't you agree. I thought you'd know that. I bet even your dog knows that.'

The cat pricked the ear nearest to Kroplik. 'Nicht wahr?' Kroplik shouted into it.

'These days we don't get to hear much German in St Eber,' Gutkind said, as much in defence of the cat as himself.

'Pity. But Gutkind's got a bit of a German ring to it, don't you think? Gut and kinder?

'I suppose it has. Like Krop and lik.'

'You see what the aphid swines have done to us? Now we're fighting on behalf of names that don't even belong to us. What's your actual name? What did the whores call you in the good old days? Mr . . .? Mr What? Or did you let them call you Eugene? Take me, Eugene. Use me, Eugene.'

If Kroplik isn't mistaken, Gutkind blushes.

'Whatever my name was then, I was too young to give it to whores.'

'Your father then . . . your grandfather . . . how did the whores address them?'

These were infractions too far for Detective Inspector Gutkind, Wagner or no Wagner. He was not a man who had ever visited a whore. And nor, he knew in his soul, had any of the men in his family before him. It had always been ideal love they'd longed for. A beautiful woman, smelling of Prague or Vienna, light on their arm, transported into an ecstasy of extinction a the two of them breathing their last together . . . ertrinken . . . versinken . . . unbewut . . . hochste Lust! . . .

Kroplik couldn't go on waiting for him to expire. 'Well mine was Scannlain. Son of the Scannlains of Ludgvennok. And had been for two thousand bloody years. And then for a crime we didn't commit, and not for any of the thousands we did . . . that's the galling part-'

'For a crime no one committed,' Gutkind interjected.

Densdell Kroplik was past caring whether a crime had been committed or not. He held out his glass for another whisky. The high life a downing whisky in St Eber at 11.30 in the morning. The gods drinking to their exemption from the petty cares of mortals. Atop Valhalla, dust or no dust.

Gutkind sploshed whisky into Kroplik's glass. He wanted him drunk and silent. He wanted him a thing of ears. Other than his cat, Eugene Gutkind had no one to talk to. His wife had left him. He had few friends in the force and no friends in St Eber. Who in St Eber did have friends? A few brawling mates and a headless wife to curse comprised happiness in St Eber, and he no longer even had the wife. So he rarely got the opportunity to pour out his heart. A detective inspector, anyway, had to measure his words. But he didn't have to measure anything with Densdell Kroplik, least of all whisky. He wasn't a kindred spirit. Wagner didn't make him a kindred spirit. To Gutkind's eye Kroplik lacked discrimination. Not knowing where to pin the blame he pinned it on everyone. A bad hater, if ever he saw one. A man lacking specificity. But he was still the nearest thing to a kindred spirit there was. 'Drink,' he said. 'Drink to what we believe and know to be true.'

And when Densdell Kroplik was drunk enough not to hear what was being said to him, true or not true, and not to care either way, when he was half asleep on the couch with the icing-sugar cat sitting on his face, Detective Inspector Eugene Gutkind began his exposition . . .

There had been no crime. No Gotterdammerung anyway. No last encounter with the forces of evil, no burning, and no renewal of the world. Those who should have perished had been forewarned by men of tender conscience like Clarence Worthing who, though he longed to wipe the slate clean, could not betray the memory of his fragrant encounter with Ottilie or Naomi or Lieselotte, in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. For what you have done to me, I wish you in hell, they said. But for what you have done to me I also wish you to be spared. Such are the contradictions that enter the hearts of men who know what it is to love and not be loved in return. The irony of it was not lost on Detective Inspector Gutkind. They owed their lives to a conspiracy of the inconsolable and the snubbed, these Ottilies and Lieselottes who had imbibed conspiracy with their mothers' milk. They'd escaped betrayal, they who betrayed as soon as snap a finger.

So WHAT HAPPENED, in his view, was that NOT MUCH HAD. They had got out. Crept away like rats in the dark. That was not just supposition based on his cracking Clarence Worthing's code. It was demonstrable fact. If there'd been a massacre where were the bodies? Where were the pits, where the evidence of funeral pyres and gallows trees, where the photographs or other recorded proof of burned-out houses, streets, entire suburbs? Believe the figures that had once been irresponsibly bandied about and the air should still be stinking with the destruction. They say you can smell extinction for centuries afterwards. Go to the Somme. You can see it in the soil. You can taste it in the potatoes.

He had done the maths, worked it out algebraically, done the measurements geometrically, consulted log tables a so many people killed in so many weeks in so many square metres . . . by whom? It would have taken half the population up in arms, and mightily skilled in the use of them, to have wreaked such destruction in so brief a period of time. No, there had been no Gotterdammerung.

He takes a swig from the bottle and looks at Kroplik with his head thrown back, his mouth open and his legs spread. What the hell is that inside his trousers? He regrets inviting him over. He is ashamed of his own loneliness. But there is so much to say, and no one to say it to.

He feels subtler than any man he knows. No Gotterdammerung does not mean, you fool, that there was no anything. First law of criminal investigation: everyone exaggerates. Second law of criminal investigation: just because everyone exaggerates doesn't mean there's nothing to investigate. In my profession, Mr Kroplik, we don't say there is no smoke without fire. Rumour is also a crime. False accusation a you can go down for that. But that said, there is always a fire. Somewhere, something is forever burning. That's why no accusation is ever entirely wasted. Eventually we will find a culprit for any crime. So yes, WHAT HAPPENED happened in that there was minor disturbance and insignificant destruction. To win another of their propaganda wars they did what they had done for centuries and put on another of their pantomimes of persecution. Allowed the spilling of a little blood to justify their disappearing, while no one was looking, with their accumulated loot. A sacrificial people, my great-grandfather called them, and as one of their sacrifices himself, he knew. But they also sacrifice their own. There's a name for it but I've forgotten it. You'll probably know it, Kroplik, you unedifying piss-ant. Like a caste system. You probably didn't know they had a caste system, but my word they did. This one can't light a candle, that one can't go near a body. Some can't even touch a woman unless they're wearing surgical gloves. And some know it's their job to die when the time comes. It's not as unselfish as it sounds. Their children get looked after and they go straight to heaven. Not to lie with virgins, that's someone else. This lot go straight to heaven and read books. For the honour of which they put themselves in the way of trouble, announce themselves in the street by what they wear, hang identifying objects in the windows of their houses where they wait patiently to be burned alive. Here! Over here!

The shouting doesn't wake Kroplik who sleeps like the dead.

I, my rat-arsed friend, Gutkind continues, am a policeman. I know the difference between right and wrong. Wrong is burning someone alive in his own house, I don't care if he invited you in and handed you the box of matches. You can always say no. Sure, you were provoked. Criminals are always provoked. An open door, a short dress, a handbag left unzipped. Don't get me wrong a I sympathise. I'm not beyond a provocation or two myself. Right this minute I'm provoked into violent thoughts by the sight of you snoring on my sofa. But I restrain myself from cutting off your balls. That's what makes me not a villain.

But keep wrongdoing in proportion is another of my mottos. Not everything is the greatest crime in history.

He rubs his face and drinks.

No sir!

And drinks some more.

You'll have your own favourite greatest crime in history, Mr Historian of the Gods of Ludgvennok, but I can tell you this wasn't it. And why wasn't it?

Because of this! He smites his heart.

Would he have done what Clarence Worthing did had he been in his position? Would he have assisted in their escape? Tears flood his eyes. The sublime music swells in his ears . . . ertrinken . . . versinken . . . unbewut . . . hochste Lust! . . . Yes, he and Clarence Worthing are one, made weak and strong by love.

Finishing off what is left in the bottle, he rejoins Densdell Kroplik on the couch where, exhausted by the intensity of his own emotion, he falls immediately asleep on Kroplik's shoulder, the convulsing cat, heaving up fur balls coated in clay dust, between them.

It's only a shame no family photographer is in attendance.

ii It's Kroplik who wakes first, still drunk. It takes him a moment or two to work out where he is. Though it's only early afternoon it's dark already in St Eber, the shabby pyramids of clay, as though each is lit from within by a small candle, the sole illumination.

Is this Egypt?

Then he notices that the cat has coughed up a puddle of china-clay slime on the lapel of his one smart suit. Or is it Gutkind's doing? It smells as though it's been in Gutkind's stomach. Kroplik clutches his own. He lives on a daily diet of indignity but this is one insult he doesn't have to bear. He has brought his razor along to give the detective inspector a close shave as a token of his friendship and regard. But he is too angry to be a friend. Slime! From Gutkind's poisoned gut! On his one good suit!

He is aware that Gutkind has been ranting at him while he slept. The usual subject a villainy. Was he telling him he knew a teasing him, taunting him with his knowledge. I know the difference between right and wrong Kroplik is sure he heard him say through his stupor. Provocation is no defence. This time . . .

Is this why he was invited over?

It amazes him that Gutkind should have the brains to solve a crime. Yes, he'd as good as laid it out for him a hundred times, but Gutkind had struck him as too dumb to see what was in front of his face.

I've underestimated him, Kroplik decides. I've fatally underestimated the cunt. And laughs appreciatively at his own choice of words. Make a good final chapter heading for the next volume of his history a no, not 'The Cunt', but 'A Fatal Underestimation'.

He thinks about taking out his razor, putting it to Gutkind's throat, and confessing. What would the policeman do then? Throw up some more? Then he has a better idea. He staggers to his feet and closes the curtains. I'll just cut his throat and have done, he has decided.

But it's the cat that gets it first.

SEVEN.

Nussbaum Unbound i ESME NUSSBAUM LAY in what the doctors called a coma for two months after the motorcyclist rode the pavement and knocked her down. To her it was a long and much-needed sleep. A chance to think things over without interruption. Regain perspective. And maybe lose a little weight.

She wasn't joking about the weight. She was done with looking comfortable and unthreatening. It was time to show more bone. Splintered bone, she laughed to herself, causing the screen to bleep, though she didn't doubt the bone would mend eventually. It wasn't that she'd been incapable of causing discomfort when discomfort needed to be caused. She was known to be a woman who sometimes asked troublesome questions. But there'd been no real spike inside her. She could annoy without quite inspiring fear. Now she fancied being someone else. No, now she was someone else. Someone with sharper edges, all spikes. Broken, she was more frightening.

Already her thoughts were unlike any she'd had before. They flew at her. In her previous, comfortable life she would reason her way to a conclusion, which meant that she could be reasoned out of it in time as well. The motorcycle hadn't really been necessary. There were other ways of making her conformable . . .

Comfortable and Conformable a her middle names. Esme C. C. Nussbaum. Always a word-monger, an anagramatiser, a palindromaniac, she now saw words three-dimensionally in her sleep. Comfortable and Conformable cavorted lewdly on the ceiling of her unconsciousness, pressing their podgy bellies together like middle-aged lovers, blowing into each other's ears, two becoming one. She smiled inside herself. It really was a pleasure lying here, waiting for what words would get up to next, what thoughts would come whooshing at her. She liked being the subject of their discussions. It was like listening in to gossip about herself. No, she wasn't as Comfortable or Conformable as she blamed herself for being, was the latest revelation. If she'd been that easy to get on with, what was she doing here, lying in a coma, half dead? She must have put the wind up someone. That was one of the most persistent of her winged thoughts: people frighten easily. Another was: people a ordinary people, people you think you know and like a want to kill you.

She was not herself frightened when such thoughts flew at her. She had once watched an old horror film with her parents about a blonde woman being attacked by birds. They had been terrified as a family. They put their hands over their faces as the birds dive-bombed everyone in the blonde's vicinity. 'Avenging some great but never to be disclosed wrong,' her father said. But lying flat with thoughts flying at her was not like that. She didn't feel assailed. There was no more they could do to her a that partly explained her calm acceptance of their presence, even when they swooped so low she might justifiably have worried for her eyes. But it was more than being beyond terror. She welcomed their violence. It was Conformable with how she felt. They were thoughts, after all, which meant they originated in her. If this was herself massing above her, screeching, well then . . . she extended all the hospitality she had to offer. It was about time. A good time, yes, in that she had bags of it to give; but about time in the sense that she had wasted too much of it thinking thoughts that were less . . . less what? How nice it was having all the time in the world to find the right word. Less . . . less . . . Esme Nussbaum knew more words than was good for her. She had been the school Scrabble champion; she could finish a crossword while others were still on the first clue; she knew words even her teachers thought did not exist. Now she raided her store for a word that had bird in it, that sounded avian, an av word. Avirulent had a ring, but it meant the opposite of what she needed it to mean. She didn't want to lose the virulence, she wanted to store it. Avile was good a to avile, as she'd had to explain to a sceptical Scrabble opponent in the quarter-finals, meaning to make vile, to debase. But there was no adjective to go with it that she knew of. No avilious. And no noun, no aviliousness. Had there been, then aviliousness was exactly the quality her previous, unwinged thoughts had lacked. They had been too moderate. Too sparing. Yes, she had presented a report, for which they'd killed her a in intention, if not in fact a that spoke of the persistent rage she'd found in the course of monitoring the nation's mood. She had not tried to sugar that pill. We cannot, she had argued, glide over the past with an IF. We must confront WHAT HAPPENED, not to apportion blame a it was too late for that, anyway a but to know what it was and why time hadn't healed it. Yes, she had stood her ground, said what had to be said, done her best to persuade the IFFERS with whom she worked, but that best wasn't good enough. She hadn't followed the logic of her own findings. She had been insufficiently avilious. She hadn't made vile, that's to say she hadn't grasped, hadn't penetrated and presented, even to herself, the vileness of what had been done. Not WHAT HAD HAPPENED but WHAT HAD BEEN DONE.

Ah, but had she gone that far they would have had her run over a second and, if need be, a third time.

Were they that ruthless? Ruthless was not the word Esme Nussbaum would have picked. They were acting out of the best motives. They wanted a harmonious society. Their mistake was not to see that she wanted a harmonious society too. The difference was that they saw harmony as something you attained by leaving things out a contrariety and contradiction, argument, variety a and she saw it as something you achieved by keeping everything in.

Though she had limited access to information that others didn't, she had done no original research into the terrible events which those who did not see as she saw wanted to disown. Research, she thought, had not been necessary. She knew the events to have been terrible simply by their effects. Had they been of less consequence then the aftermath would have been of less consequence too. But the aftermath, of which she too, lying here smashed into tiny pieces, was the bloody proof, brooked no controversy. They could mow her down as often as they liked a and she bore them no malice for it; on the contrary she owed this long reflective holiday to them a but the truth remained the truth. Anger and unhappiness seeped out from under every doorway of every house in every town and every village in the country. Housewives threw open their windows each morning to let out the fumes of unmotivated domestic fury that had built up overnight. Men spat bile into their beer glasses, abused strangers, beat their own children, committed acts of medieval violence on their wives, or on women who weren't their wives, that no amount of sexual frustration or jealousy could explain.

Now that she had the leisure to think, Esme Nussbaum was no longer looking for explanations. You only need an explanation where there's a mystery, and there was no mystery. How could it have worked out otherwise? You can't have a poisoned stomach and a sweet breath. You can't lop off a limb and expect you will be whole. You can't rob and not make someone the poorer, and when it's yourself that you rob then it's yourself you impoverish.

Of the thoughts that flew at her, as the weeks passed, this last was the most persistent, skimming her cheek with its quilled wing, as though it wanted to scratch her into waking a we are the poorer by what we took away.

But she was in no rush to come out of her coma where it was warm and silent a she only saw words, she didn't hear them a and declare what she knew. She had no more reports to write just yet. It was good to look at the world slowly and evenly. You don't need to have your eyes open to see things.

ii Her father blamed her.

'She couldn't have been looking where she was going,' he said.

'Esme always looks where she's going,' his wife replied.

'Then if it wasn't an accident . . .'

'It wasn't an accident.'

'OK, if you say so, it wasn't an accident. In that case someone must have had it in for her.'

'You don't say.'

'The question is-'

'I don't want to hear that question.'

'The question is what had she done wrong.'

'Your own daughter! How dare you?'

He gave a foolish, thwarted laugh, that was more like a belch. He was a near-sighted, jeering man with a hiatus hernia. 'It feels as though something's balled-up in my chest all the time,' he complained to his doctor who recommended Mylanta or Lanzaprozole or Maldroxal Plus or Basaljel or Ranitidine. He took them all but felt no better.

'It's your opinions,' his wife told him, watching in distaste as he banged at his thorax in the vain hope of dislodging whatever was stuck inside him. 'It's your hateful nature paying you back. To speak like that, about your own daughter!'

'People don't have it in for you for no reason,' he persisted.

'Not another word,' his wife said. 'Not another word or I swear I'll cut your chest open with a breadknife.'

The Nussbaums had been having this argument all their married lives. Their mangled daughter was just another opportunity for them to rehearse it all again, their understanding of the universe, what they did or did not believe. What Compton Nussbaum believed was that what happened happened for the best of reasons, there was no effect that didn't have a cause, what people suffered they had brought upon themselves. What Rhoda Nussbaum believed was that she was married to a pig.

'Have you never been sorry for anyone?' she asked him.

'What good would my sorrow do them?'

'That's not an answer to my question. Do you never feel another person's pain?'

'I feel satisfied when I see justice done.'

'What about injustice? What about cruelty?'

He banged his chest. 'Sentimentality.'

'So if I go out and get raped . . .?'

'It will be your own fault.'

'How so? For being a woman?'

'Well I won't be going out and getting raped, will I?'

More's the pity, she thought.

You don't see your daughter lying as good as dead and blame her for it, Rhoda Nussbaum believed. If I were to kill my husband for what he has just said I would be cleared by any court in the country. The only argument she could see for not killing her husband was that she'd be proving him right a yes, people do get what they deserve.

He'd been a civil servant. 'Servant gets it,' Rhoda Nussbaum would say when he refused to hear a word against those who employed him. He was proud when his daughter gained early promotion at Ofnow, but turned against her when she turned against it.

'I'm only asking questions,' she would cry in her own defence.

'Then don't,' was his fatherly reply.

She should have found a man and left home for him. But the men she met were like her father. 'Then don't,' they'd say. And the one thing they didn't say no about, she did.

Her mother encouraged her. 'They're all no good,' she said. 'Stay here with me.'

That suited her. She liked her mother and could see that she was lonely. It helped, too, that she was not sentimental about men.

Her father thought she was a lesbian. Many men thought the same. There was something uncanny about her, the seriousness with which she took her work, her obduracy, her pedantry, the size of her vocabulary, the lack of bounce in her hair, the flat shoes she wore, her failure often to get a joke, her unwillingness to play along, her way of overdoing sympathy as though understanding beat snogging. But only her father hated her in his heart. Her being a lesbian was a denial of him. And also, by his own remorseless logic, meant that he was being punished. He didn't know what for, but you don't get a lesbian for a daughter unless you've done something very wrong indeed.

He'd have preferred it had she not come out of the coma.

'You will not tell her she only got what she deserved,' his wife said on the eve of their daughter's removal from the hospital. 'If you want to live an hour longer you will not say it's your own stupid fault.'

He stood at the front door, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. A ball of something even more indigestible than usual was lodged inside his chest.

'Welcome home,' he belched when she was stretchered in. She raised her hand slightly and gave him a faint wave.

I'm doing well, he thought. I'm handling this OK.