"I wanted to believe it, Mr. Wexford. I desperately wanted to believe it. You see, I thought that if it was mine to do with as I liked I would rewrite it myself, keeping the story, the characters, the essence or spirit of it, but improving it; I thought I could improve it, make it perfect. I'd make it mine."

"You saw the letter Mrs. Tredown had from him?"

"I saw it. It was typed. It was signed."

Wexford would hardly have believed that any more blood could drain from Tredown's face, but this is what seemed to have happened. He turned his head to one side, subsiding, slipping down the cushions of the chair.

"It was actually signed Samuel Miller?"

There was no answer. Wexford got up and rang the bell. The nurse came in, lifted Tredown's wrist, and felt his pulse. "Better go now," he said. "He's very tired."

"Please come back tomorrow," Tredown whispered.

The call to the police station was put through to Karen Malahyde. But she had gone after paying a routine visit to the Imrans and it was Hannah who took the call. Two hours before she had come back from questioning two hospice visitors who might have, but evidently had not, witnessed Maeve Tredown's murder attempt. The day had been a long one and she had her usual drive ahead of her to home and Bal. It had been a dull, heavy day and at six in the evening was pitch dark. A premonition that it would delay her made her very unwilling to take this call, but Burden had already left, Wexford was not yet back from visiting Tredown, and Barry Vine had begun his annual leave. A slightly tentative voice speaking fluent English but with a strong accent came on the line.

"My name is Iman Dirir. I have come from the home of the Imran family. I think-no, I know-something is going to happen in their flat-tonight. Yes, tonight. Please can you come?"

"Our child protection officer isn't available," Hannah began. She hesitated, said, "Of course I'll come, I'll come now-but wait. Will I get in?"

"I'll be there," Mrs. Dirir said. "They trust me." Her tone was bitter. "They never will again, but-never mind."

"Would you do something for me? Would you phone this number and tell the child care officer. She's called Sylvia Fairfax."

Karen and Sylvia had called at that flat two or three times a week and found nothing but an apparently happy family entertaining a middle-aged relative from Somalia. Shamis had been like any normal European child, free, playful, mischievous. If she had been circ.u.mcised she would have been confined to a chair with her legs bound together from ankles to hips. Driving out of the police station car park, her lights on, Hannah reminded herself of the commentary on female life Sylvia had repeated to her as coming from an elderly Somali woman she had met. "The three sorrows of a woman come to her on the day she is cut, on her wedding night, and the day she gives birth." It made her shudder to think of it.

The block was brightly lit but as Hannah came to the top of the stairs and out onto the external walkway where the Imrans' flat was, she saw that it was in darkness. It was as if no one was at home. Sylvia Fairfax stepped out of the shadows to meet her.

"Dr. Akande is on his way," she said. "I daren't ring the bell, and there's no need. Iman Dirir will open the door at seven sharp."

"And Shamis?"

"The woman they call auntie is a circ.u.mciser. Iman says she has seen the tools she uses, a razor, a knife, and some special scissors."

Hannah bit her lip. "It doesn't bear thinking of, but we have to think of it."

"We have to stop it," Sylvia said.

They stood outside the front door. There was no sound from inside. Next door they had a window open and music pounded out, the kind that has a steady regular beat, thump, thump, thump. Hannah's watch told her it was ten minutes to seven.

"It's horrible to think of," she said, "but will Iman let her begin? I mean, for G.o.d's sake, will this woman start on the child?"

"I don't know. I hope not, but if she doesn't . . . Here's Dr. Akande."

He came running along the walkway. "This can't be allowed to happen," he said breathlessly. "Even if it means failing to catch them, we can't let them cut this child when we're able to stop it."

"She'll open the door," Hannah said, "the moment this woman picks up her razor."

"That's too late. You don't know how fast a practiced circ.u.mciser can do this-this atrocity. I do."

"But surely they'll give Shamis some sort of anesthetic?"

"I doubt it, I very much doubt it," Akande said and with that he put his finger to the bell push, holding it there so that the chimes it made rang loudly above the thumps of the music.

The door flew open. Iman Dirir shouted in a loud clear voice, "Come in, all of you, come in. In here!"

Akande went first, Sylvia behind him. The hallway was dark; the only light was in the kitchen at the end of the pa.s.sage, showing around the edges of the door. They ran toward the closed door and, thinking it locked, the doctor kicked at it. But it flew open and he almost fell into the little room. The woman in a long black robe who had been bending over the child, a cutthroat razor in her ungloved hand, took a step backward, exposing to their view a small girl, entirely naked, lying on a spread towel on the kitchen table. Reeta Imran, the child's mother, made a shocked sound and flung a sheet over her. As Hannah said afterward to Wexford, she was more affronted by a male, even though a doctor, seeing her little daughter without clothes than she was by the rite that the circ.u.mciser had been on the point of performing.

Totally covered, face and all, by the sheet, Shamis began to scream and struggle. She fought her way out and threw herself into her mother's arms. Mrs. Imran once more grabbed the sheet and swathed her in it. Hannah walked up to the table and eyed the circ.u.mciser's other tools that lay there, a knife and a pair of scissors. There was no sterilization equipment to be seen, no medication of any kind. A length from the reel of sewing thread would be used, she supposed, to st.i.tch the raw edges of the wound together, a length from the ball of garden twine to bind Shamis's legs together once the deed had been done. The circ.u.mciser, a woman of perhaps no more than fifty, though she looked seventy, her face brown and wrinkled, most of her front teeth missing, fixed on Hannah a stare of absolute impa.s.sivity. She laid the razor on the table and said something to Mrs. Imran in Somali.

I ought to arrest her, Hannah thought. Or Reeta, or both of them. But charge them with what? They've done nothing and I can't wish they'd begun what they were going to do for the sake of charging them. But I can't leave them here with the child either. All she could think of was that this woman had been in possession of an offensive weapon-could she arrest them on suspicion of intending to perform an illegal act? Hardly knowing what she was doing or the consequences, she s.n.a.t.c.hed Shamis out of her mother's arms and pulled off the sheet. There was blood on it. And a long streak of blood across Shamis's left thigh where the razor had just touched her. They had got there just in time.

"You do not have to say anything in answer to the charge," she began, and glancing at Sylvia, saw tears running down her face.

Chapter Twenty-six.

Wexford went back to the hospice in the morning, feeling he had had a lucky escape. If he had gone ahead and Amara Ali and Reeta Imran had appeared in court, the case would have been dismissed and contumely heaped upon him for racism, s.e.xism, and jumping to unjustifiable conclusions. Anger against Hannah had been strong at first. Karen wouldn't have done it, but Karen hadn't been there. Hadn't it occurred to Hannah that the women would say Shamis was sitting on the table after a shampoo and prior to having the hair on the nape of her neck shaved? The trace of blood? The shock of three people bursting into the flat had made Amara Ali's hand slip. Halfway home on the previous evening, he had answered his phone to be told that the two women were in custody and he had turned around and gone back, letting them both go with scarcely a word.

Now as he waited to be admitted to Tredown's room, he thought of things that had hardly occurred to him before. Naively, he had supposed he could prevent the mutilation of girls and so perhaps he could, but only after a number of them had already been mutilated, for in order for a prosecution to succeed a circ.u.mciser would have to be caught either in the act or when it was in the recent past and the poor little child crippled, her legs bound together. Later he would read through the Act of Parliament and see if there was provision for a charge of intention to commit mutilation, though, without going any further, he could see all the problems and pitfalls this would entail.

Tredown had had his shower, been shaved, and was propped up in his bed this time. A drip had been inserted in the back of his hand. Surely pointless at this stage? But no, perhaps it was a painkiller that traveled down that tube to make his last days more bearable. Tredown's greenish pallor was even more marked today and his sad smile more revealing of the skull beneath the skin. This time he noticed the cast on Wexford's arm and remarked on it.

So no one had told him. The last thing Wexford wanted was to tell him that his wife had been charged with attempted murder. "A fall," he said. "It's just a simple fracture."

This satisfied him. "I was telling you about the letter," he began. "I told you it said I could have the ma.n.u.script to do what I liked with. I took that to mean I could-well, make it mine."

"But he'd taken the copy away with him, hadn't he? If he meant to give it to you why would he do that?"

"He took it out of my-the room where I work. That was where we'd talked. That evening my wife brought it to me. He'd given it to her before he left."

"Mr. Tredown, do you mean he'd given it to her, or she said he'd given it to her?"

Tredown frowned. "It's the same thing."

"Not always," Wexford said.

"I hear what you're saying. And, yes, I'll tell you now that I did have doubts. Oh, more than that, more than that." The agonized note in his voice came from mental, not physical, pain. "I did write to him-that is, I got Maeve to write to him, saying it was too enormous a gift and telling him again how good it was and how very likely it was to be published and perhaps make a lot of money."

"You never saw him again?"

"Not in the flesh." The words and the way in which they were spoken brought Wexford an unpleasant feeling that someone or something was watching them. Tredown shivered. "It was just my fancy," he said. "In the evenings-when I was alone upstairs-if there was a heavy rainfall-but this is pointless, I mustn't go on like this."

Indeed you must not, Wexford thought, or I shall begin to think you not quite sane. "So you went to work on the ma.n.u.script?"

Tredown nodded. "Yes, I did. I cut it. I gave some scenes more weight and others less. I took out a lot of technical stuff about the prehistoric creatures and early men. There were episodes in it I thought weren't consistent with Homer and Ovid, I . . . But why go on? I made it mine, as you say. Maeve was enthusiastic and so was Claudia. Maeve spent hours typing for me-I'm not much of a typist. She transcribed my handwriting and the changes I made to the original ma.n.u.script."

Wexford was anxious not to sound judgmental. The man was at death's door. He was a wreck of what he had been and, in spite of the palliative drip, he was no doubt in pain. But, if he wasn't precisely shocked by what he had heard, he was astonished at what he saw as villainy. Tredown had been so set on money, urged on by wife and ex-wife, so desperate for fame that it meant nothing to him that the celebrity he achieved would not be his own but stolen from another. "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise . . ." but it wasn't only the clear spirit that was raised by that prospect but sometimes greed and theft. For, of course, Tredown had known there had been theft and perhaps worse than theft, but it hadn't stopped him making The First Heaven The First Heaven his own work. Wexford heard his own voice cold and condemning. his own work. Wexford heard his own voice cold and condemning.

"Didn't you wonder when you never heard from him again?"

"Maeve told me he'd said he wanted to put the whole thing behind him. Maybe he'd read the book when it came out, but he had no wish for it to be acclaimed as his own."

"Perhaps we can leave Samuel Miller for the time being and talk about the man you found to be your researcher. I take his job was to deal with the pa.s.sages that weren't consistent with Homer and Ovid and with the prehistoric detail."

Tredown's frown was back. "What do you mean? I did my own research and I don't know any Samuel Miller. I think we're at cross purposes here."

"I think so too." Wexford got up, stiff and aching. He stumbled, clutched the back of the chair with his left hand. "Thank you for your help," he said. "I won't take up any more of your time."

The death's-head smile came again. "No, it isn't as if I've much of it left."

"That was when things fell into place," Wexford said. He had already pa.s.sed his discoveries on to the a.s.sistant chief constable and was talking to Burden in his office; Hannah and Barry had been sent for. "As in most cases when the truth becomes clear you wonder how you could ever have seen things differently."

"But for matching the rings," said Burden, "would we ever have known it?"

"Maybe not."

Wexford moved behind his desk as Hannah came into the room. It was the first time she had seen the plaster and the sling. "Please may I write something on your cast, guv?"

"I'm afraid not. It's strictly for persons under twelve."

The chances were that she'd have written something along the lines of "Best wishes to the guv." He'd have had to carry that "guv" about with him for the next five weeks. He watched her settle herself into the chair next to Burden's, leaving the remaining one to Barry. "I'll start at the beginning," he said, and then added as Barry hurried in, "I'd say 'good of you to join us' except that I know where you've been."

"Claudia Ricardo is in Interview Room One with Lyn, sir. I asked her about Alan Hexham and she said, 'Don't be ridiculous. I never laid a finger on him.' "

"If laying a finger on someone was a prerequisite for a murder conviction," Wexford said, "we'd have a lot more room in our prisons. We wouldn't have eighty thousand banged up." His sigh was inaudible. "Now for the beginning. It begins, of course, with Alan Hexham living in that house in Barnes with his wife and his two small daughters. For they were still small when he started writing the novel we now know as The First Heaven. The First Heaven. He wrote it secretly up in that tiny room of his where everyone else in the household had learned to respect his absolute privacy." He wrote it secretly up in that tiny room of his where everyone else in the household had learned to respect his absolute privacy."

"Why did he do it in secret, guv?"

"Some people have secretive natures. We have plenty of evidence for that. Acting in secret satisfies something in their temperament and adds a spice to what they do. On a more practical level, if no one knows they won't ask the sort of questions that may be very damaging to the project. And I imagine there's always the fear of being scoffed at-even laughed at. They may ask what's going on behind the closed door. But they can be fobbed off with tales of marking homework, filling in forms, preparing lessons. I don't think Hexham did much of that. He wanted it to be thought that he was doing research for authors, advising them, but again his wife must have wondered when he earned nothing by it. Maybe he told her he'd tried and failed."

"What did you mean about 'damaging to the project?' " Burden asked.

"Some writers thrive on making the people close to them aware of exactly what they're doing, reading their latest chapter to them, discussing it in detail, but there are others for whom the whole creative process is ruined if it's-well, brought out into the light of day. I had a writer say to me once that she'd written ten chapters of a novel when her boyfriend found it and read it. He was delighted, loved every word, could quote from it at length, but it ruined it for her. She had to abandon it and start afresh."

"Abandoned the boyfriend too, I should think," said Hannah.

"I believe she did. Anyway, this seems to have been Hexham's att.i.tude, too. It's part shyness, part dread of ridicule, and part a fear that the person who reads it will begin with high hopes and be disappointed. Hexham seems to have had a happy marriage, but we don't know-his daughters certainly don't know-what the precise relations between the two of them were when they were alone. Isn't it possible that Diana Hexham wouldn't have understood what he was getting at? They were never very well off and she didn't work until after he disappeared. We know he took on the occasional tutoring job. Perhaps if she'd known about The First Heaven The First Heaven she'd have wondered why he was wasting his evenings playing at writing a novel which might never be published rather than taking on more coaching for exams. Whatever the answer to that is, he did keep it secret, kept it entirely to himself until it was finished and beyond." she'd have wondered why he was wasting his evenings playing at writing a novel which might never be published rather than taking on more coaching for exams. Whatever the answer to that is, he did keep it secret, kept it entirely to himself until it was finished and beyond."

Burden said, "A pity he chose Owen Tredown to send that ma.n.u.script to. Why did he? Why choose Tredown?"

"We're never going to know that. Tredown says Hexham had heard him speak on the radio. That may or may not be true. Possibly he just liked Tredown's books-he had two of them in his house-or he may have read an article in a newspaper about Tredown saying that unlike many authors, he read the ma.n.u.scripts which were sent to him. Anyway, he did send it. He'd have been wiser and safer if he'd thrown it on a bonfire."

"Put it in the recycling, guv," said Hannah in a reproving tone.

"Or put it in the recycling as you say, Hannah." In a few words, he thought, she wiped away centuries in which the only way to get rid of paper was to burn it. Was she aware there was life before modern planet-saving measures? He almost laughed. "Tredown read it and thought it wonderful. He told me he was envious. He was jealous of someone who could write that, but I don't believe he had any idea of plagiarism, of stealing someone else's work, at that stage. He wrote to Hexham, praising the book and asking him to come and see him. Or, rather, he got his wife to write. Apparently, she did all his secretarial work. What exactly she said in that letter-or, come to that, subsequent letters-we don't yet know. We may never know.

"The date Hexham got this letter was in late May. He might then have told his wife, but he didn't. I imagine he was waiting to surprise her with a fait accompli. His old friend Maurice Davidson died and his funeral was fixed for the fifteenth of June. This, incidentally, was three days after John Grimble was refused permission to build more than one house on his deceased father's land. The trench for the main drainage had been dug and now there was no option but to fill it in again.

"Hexham wrote to say he would be in Suss.e.x on the fifteenth and could he come to see Tredown at about three in the afternoon."

Here Barry Vine broke in with, "Why wasn't any of this done by phone, sir?"

"Presumably, because of maintaining the secrecy. Diana Hexham might have taken the call. Besides, then Tredown would have spoken to Hexham and Maeve would have had no control over what he said. You have to remember too that a lot more letters were written eleven years ago than are today in the e-mail age. Be that as it may, Hexham was told that would be fine and in that letter, written of course by Maeve, he was asked to bring the other copy of the ma.n.u.script he had with him. She must have asked and been told he had just the two copies. Remember too it had been typed on an old-fashioned electric typewriter, so unless Hexham possessed a photocopier, which we know he didn't, the number of copies would have been limited."

"Wouldn't Hexham have asked why they wanted a second copy, guv?"

"Probably, but there are answers to that. Such as, so that Tredown could send ma.n.u.scripts to two publishers or to an agent and a publisher. Anyway, Hexham was satisfied and he brought the second ma.n.u.script with him in his briefcase, taking it with him first of all to the funeral and then to the Davidsons' house. He left that house later and caught the 2:20 train to Kingsmarkham. It was pouring with rain. There was no bus for an hour so he took a taxi, which brought him to Athelstan House at a few minutes to three."

Burden, who had been fidgeting, took this opportunity to break in. "While all this letter writing was going on there must have been a good deal of discussion between Tredown and his wife-Claudia, too, I expect-as to what line they were to take with Hexham. I mean, I suppose there was a point where Tredown acknowledged to himself and maybe to the two of them that he wanted to pa.s.s it off as his own work."

"This is one of the things we have to find out," said Wexford. "If we can. The trouble is that two vital witnesses are dead and another one soon will be. However, decide they did. Not, I think, to murder Hexham, not then. At that point they seem to have had some plan to try and buy the ma.n.u.script from him and have him relinquish all rights to it."

"They'd never have been safe then, sir. When the book came out, what would there have been to stop him telling some news-paper Tredown had stolen it from him?"

"Nothing, probably, Barry. Nothing to stop him saying that, but with both copies gone and no member of his family knowing he'd written anything, what evidence would he have had? Anyway, even if they did plan that, it came to nothing. Hexham came and apparently saw Tredown alone. At first. Again we don't know and probably won't know what they said to each other, but it appears that Hexham took the second ma.n.u.script away with him, having learned all he wanted to learn, that his novel was good and very likely worth publishing. The rest, he probably thought, he could handle himself.

"It seems he was given tea by Maeve and Claudia and, as it was still raining, promised a lift to Kingsmarkham station. Not in a taxi this time, but in the Tredowns' own car, that same vehicle Maeve used as a lethal weapon on me. Only it wasn't as lethal as she hoped."

"Was it lethal to Hexham?" Barry asked.

"You'll have to wait awhile for that. To be continued in our next installment, as magazines that ran serials used to say. Inspector Burden and I have an engagement with Miss Ricardo in Interview Room One."

Chapter Twenty-seven.

"I never laid a finger on him," Claudia Ricardo said again. "Funny, that phrase, isn't it? As if touching someone would kill him. The touch of death." She laughed musical peals. "Be useful, wouldn't it? Like a ray shooting out of one's forehead you get in those films about aliens. Noli me tangere Noli me tangere would have some real meaning." would have some real meaning."

Priscilla Daventry, her solicitor, was looking grim. One's clients were not supposed to behave like this. One's clients should be rude or truculent or abusive or frightened, in need of rea.s.surance or comfort, preferably silent, though that was rare, but not lighthearted and speculative as this woman was.

"Who drove Mr. Hexham to Kingsmarkham station?" Wexford asked her.