I rang the bell for brandy and when she came up with the tray I slipped her a guinea and gave my most winning smile.

‘Now, Mrs…I’m afraid I don’t know your surname.’ I don’t suppose anyone had called her ‘Mrs’ anything for years and she bridled.

‘Gaunt, sir, but Mr and Mrs Chester-’

‘Mrs Gaunt.’ The smile was at its most charming. ‘I am, as you recall, an old friend of Mr Chester. I am aware of the distress he must be suffering at the moment-’

‘Oh sir,’ she broke in, dabbing her eyes, ‘the poor young lady! We’re so worried some man-’ she broke off, visibly moved. I tried not to chuckle.

‘Quite,’ I said soothingly. ‘But if-God preserve us-the worst has happened,’ I continued piously, ‘then our thoughts must be with the living. Mr Chester needs friends to help him through this. I am aware that he may have instructed you to turn away, or otherwise misinform visitors’-I looked at her reproachfully-‘but you and I both know, Mrs Gaunt, that for his own good…’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ she agreed. ‘I know. Poor Mr Chester; he won’t eat, he hardly sleeps, he spends hours in that studio of his, or just walking about the cemetery. He was that fond of the young lady, sir, that he won’t have her mentioned…and you can see that he’s covered up all of his lovely pictures of her: can’t bear to look at them, he says.’

‘So you don’t know where he is today?’

She shook her head.

‘But you won’t prevent me from giving him what comfort I can if I call again?’

‘Oh, sir!’ Her reproach was apparent. ‘If I’d known, sir…but there are people, you know, who wouldn’t be…’

‘Of course.’

‘Bless you, sir.’

I grinned. ‘I’ll just leave a message, shall I? Then I’ll go. Maybe it would be better if you didn’t mention I was here.’

‘All right, sir.’ She was mystified, but game.

‘I’ll let myself out, Mrs Gaunt.’

When she had disappeared again I opened the parlour door and made my way quietly to Henry’s room. From my pocket I took out Effie’s brooch-the one she had left on the bedstand that night-and pinned it to his pillow. It gleamed in the semi-darkness. Above the bed I saw another shrouded picture and divested it of its shroud. Now Effie floated above the bed like a pale succubus. Henry would sleep well tonight…

When I left Cromwell Square I made my way to Henry’s studio. The light was failing-it was already late afternoon-and by the time I arrived it was dark. The studio was in a block of apartments and Henry’s was on the second floor. The outer door was open, the stairs poorly lit by a single sputtering gas-jet. I had to hold tightly to the banisters to avoid falling on the uneven steps. When I reached the door marked chester it was locked.

I swore. That was that, then. But, as I turned to leave, a sudden curiosity grasped me, a desire to see the inside of that studio, and maybe to leave another calling-card. I inspected the lock; it looked simple enough. A couple of turns of a small-bladed pocket-knife and it clicked open; I lifted the latch and pushed the door. It was dark in the studio; for a few minutes I fumbled with the gas-jet in almost complete obscurity. I could hear the sound of paper crunching beneath my feet as I moved, but could not see the cause. Then, as the light flared, I was able to look around at the room.

My first thought was that I had broken into the wrong studio. I knew Henry to be a meticulously, almost obsessively tidy person: the last time I had been here there had been framed canvasses hung on the walls, unframed canvasses in a large file to the left of the room, a trunk filled with costumes and properties at the back, a few chairs and a table pushed against the wall. Now a manic disorder reigned. The paintings had been torn from the walls-in some cases taking paper and plaster with them-and stacked higgledy-piggledy in front of the fire. Unframed paintings were strewn across the floor in all directions, like a hand of spilled cards. And everywhere, on every available piece of floor or surface, there were sketches, crumpled, torn or whole, sketches on parchment or canvas or wrapping-paper-some breathtaking. I never knew Henry had such talent. The fireplace was choked with them, half-charred, pitiful remnants, and I spent some minutes on my hands and knees exploring the carnage, turning the pictures in my hands, trying to find some reason for the mutilations.

After a while my head began to spin. There were so many pictures of her, pictures in watercolour, in chalks, in pencils, oils, tempera: outlines of unspeakable purity, studies of eyes, lips, cheekbones, hair…profiles, full-face, three-quarter profiles…all stark and poignant and true. I’d been wrong about Henry all these years: the wan decadence of his paintings, the contrived symbolism of all those earlier works had hidden the bleak, almost Oriental purity of his vision. Each stroke of pen or pencil was exquisite: cruelty and tenderness subtly merged…and these masterpieces, every one, discarded with who can guess what rage and love, every one an infanticide…I couldn’t understand it.

In a way I could almost find it in me to envy Henry Chester. I’d always known, of course, that an artist has to suffer to become great. But suffering exquisite enough to produce that…maybe that was worth knowing…this passion which transcends everything.

For a few minutes I sat among the wreckage and mourned like a child. But then my mind turned to more prosaic things and I was myself again. There was still the business of the money.

I stood up for a moment and tried to think logically. Where was the man? I turned over the possible alternatives in my mind…and then I knew. Of course! Thursday. It was Thursday. Marta’s day. I glanced at my watch. Five past seven. Wherever he was now, walking the streets of London in whatever cold circle of hell now possessed him, I knew that at midnight he would be there, in Crook Street, for his tryst with his lady. Whatever the risk, whatever she made him suffer, he’d be there.

For an instant my eyes rested upon the drawing I had picked up at random from the hundreds on the floor: a stiff rough-edged piece of watercolour paper with a blurred outline in brown chalk from which her eyes smouldered endlessly, promising endlessly…A man could fall in love.

I shrugged and dropped the sketch back into the fireplace.

Not me, Henry. Not me.

From the moment I saw the opened present underneath the Christmas tree I understood that Effie had at last come home. I heard her footsteps in the passageway, her breathing in darkened rooms; I smelled her perfume in doorways, found strands of her hair on my coats, her handkerchiefs in my pockets. She was in the air I breathed, the shirts I wore; moving beneath the surface of my paintings like a drowned girl just beneath the water so that at last I had to cover them with sheets to hide her face, her accusing eyes. She was in the chloral bottle, so that however much I took I gained no peace from the drug but only managed to make her image clearer in my mind…And when I slept-and in spite of all my attempts to cheat sleep I sometimes did-then she stalked through my dreams, screaming at me in a voice as shrill and inhuman as a peacock’s: ‘What about my story? What about my story? What about my story?’

She knew all my secrets. Night after night she came to me with gifts: the bottle of jasmine perfume, the blue-and-white doorknob, and once, the little white disc of the Host, marked scarlet by the touch of her lips…

Night after night I awoke drenched in the bitter sweat of terror and remorse. I could not eat: I tasted Effie in every morsel I brought to my mouth and she looked out through my haunted eyes every time I looked in the shaving-mirror. I was aware that I was taking far more chloral than was good for me, but I could not bring myself to reduce the doses.