And in the warmth of that relief I slipped quietly out of my body again and out into the light where my sister was already waiting for me.

As I watched Henry disappear along the High Street I paused to look at my watch. It was two in the morning, technically Christmas Eve. I was drenched and, now that I was no longer carrying Effie, I had begun to feel the cold. I decided to give Henry half an hour or so to arrive home-it wouldn’t do to have him walk in on me as I opened up the grave-and began the walk half a mile or so down the road to an old haunt of mine, whose owner had a healthy disrespect for closing-times and where I might be able to catch a quick drink or two to warm that grim night. If I was going to open up that vault again alone I was going to do it with a few drinks inside me.

I know what you’re thinking and in a way you’re right. You see, a thought had come to me as I laid Effie’s lifeless body on the shelf in the vault, a thought I felt I should examine in a less morbid setting. So far I had been thinking only in terms of deceiving Henry into believing Effie was dead; neither Fanny nor I had really thought beyond that. No-one had ever wondered what would become of Effie, invalid that she was, when the charade was over. Now I realized that she would very likely need medical treatment-perhaps hospitalization. She would need a place to stay where she would not be recognized, for if word came to Henry that she was still alive it would not only mean the end of our lucrative plan but very likely arrest. In truth, everything pointed to the fact that Effie…

It was only a thought. A man can think, can’t he? And anyway…I swear I would never have thought of it if I hadn’t half believed she was already dead. Don’t think I didn’t feel a pang for my poor little Effie; I was very fond of her, you know. But you have to admit that her death would have been very convenient for all of us. Almost as if it had been meant, somehow. And so poetic, don’t you think? Like Juliet in the tomb.

Silence shrouded me as I made my way slowly back to Cromwell Square; an immense silence like death. Effie’s pitiless eyes had purged me of all thought and I walked mindlessly through the blank, drifting snow.

Stubbornly, I tried to force myself to suffer: I told myself brutally that I had murdered Effie; imagined her, still alive, inside the vault; waking, screaming, crying, scraping her fingers to bloody bone as she struggled to escape…but my most lurid imaginings failed to rouse the slightest shiver or the smallest stab of remorse. Nothing. And as I walked home I became aware of a kind of resonance in my mind, which gradually resolved itself into a single joyful, one-note anthem vibrating against my eardrum in time to the cadence of my heart: Marta, my black mass; my requiem; my danse macabre. I could feel her calling me through the night, wanting me, wanting my soul, her voice inaudible but close, intimate…

I reached my house and she was already there: her black cloak drawn around her so that I could only see the pale oval of her face as she beckoned me in, wordlessly. Without even stopping to light the lamps I reached for her. Why she had come; how she had entered the house were questions which did not even occur to me: enough to take her in my arms-how light she was, almost insubstantial through the heavy woollen folds of the cloak!-to bury my face in her hair and smell the acrid scent of the night on her skin: something like jasmine and lilac and chocolate…

My lips were burning against hers, but her flesh was searing cold; her fingers traced spirals of cold fire on my skin as she undressed me. She whispered in my ear, and her voice was like the whispering of the cypresses in Highgate cemetery. She slipped the cloak from her shoulders and I realized she was naked beneath it, ghostly in the greenish darkness, with the light from the snow reflected back on to her livid skin…but she was so beautiful for all that.

‘Oh Marta, what I have done for you…what I would do for you…’

When it was over, I remember picking up my clothes and making my way down the passageway to my room. She followed me, still naked, her feet making no sound on the thick carpets. I left my clothes on the floor and slipped between the sheets of my bed: she followed me and we lay together like tired children until, much later, I fell asleep.

When I awoke at eight the following morning she was gone.

All right, all right. I had more than a couple of drinks. Well, it was warm in the Beggar’s Club. I met a few friends who were playing cards and they bought me a drink. I bought a round myself, then we ordered a bite to eat, and with the cold and the walking and the drink, well, I was…delayed. Perhaps not delayed, exactly, but understand that I had been thinking hard as I walked and I had reached a difficult conclusion.

No need to look at me like that. Don’t think it was an easy decision to take. In fact, it was partly to forget what I had been obliged to do that I started on the brandy in the first place, and, well, one thing led to another and I had almost managed to forget her altogether. I remember looking at my watch at five in the morning with something like shock; but by then, of course, it was too late. The decision was out of my hands.

I was too castaway to think of going home at that time; instead I gave the old harpy in charge of the club the last of my money in exchange for a room and crawled into bed in my shirt, intending to sleep until daylight then make my way home, but I had not been between the sheets for five minutes-I was already dozing comfortably-when something jolted me half-awake. I heard it again, a light, almost furtive scratching at the door, as of pointed fingernails just whispering against the uneven surface. Probably another customer, I thought, drunk as a wheelbarrow, wanting to share my room when he found all the others were full. Well, I had no intention of letting him in.

‘Room’s taken,’ I called from beneath the blankets. Silence. Perhaps I had imagined the scratching. I began to drift almost immediately towards sleep again. Then my attention was snagged again by the sound of the doorknob turning. I began to feel annoyed. Damn the fellow, would he never leave me in peace? The door was locked anyway, I thought. Once he realized that I meant what I said he would go away.

‘I said the room’s taken!’ I called loudly. ‘Clear off, like a good chap, and find somewhere else, won’t you?’ That should do it, I decided, and turned over, savouring the warmth of the blankets and the smoothness of the linen.

Then the door opened.

For a second I thought it was the door of the neighbouring room, but as I glanced over my shoulder I saw a wedge of greyish light from the nearby window and, outlined momentarily, a woman’s figure. Before I had time to react the door had closed again and I heard the small sounds of the woman’s footsteps approaching the bed. I was about to say something-my brain was still rather fuddled by all that brandy-when she stopped beside me and I realized that she was undressing.

Well, what do you think I did? Did you expect me to pull the sheets over my head and call for the landlady? Or play the prude and say: ‘Oh, miss, we hardly know each other’? No, I didn’t say anything at all; I just waited: the little I had seen of the girl told me she was young and had a good figure. Maybe she had seen me in the club and thought…You needn’t look so surprised, it’s happened to me before. It also occurred to me that she might have inadvertently come to the wrong room, in which case I would be wiser to hold my tongue; besides which, I wasn’t feeling half as tired as I had a minute previously.