‘And the fake paper? The white gloves?’

‘Jack will only write on certain kinds of paper. And, yes, we aged some of it to look more plausible when you decided you needed to see them. And of course, at some level, I think Sinan wanted you to see the handwriting, to see how really amazing this guy is. He writes at full speed, Nicholas, it’s beyond incredible. He’s a phenomenon.’

*

This time, when we reached the house on St James’s Square, Malevin answered the door himself. He was wearing a pale linen suit and a lilac shirt. He greeted Hunter with obvious warmth.

‘Sinan, this is what happens when you leave curious people unsupervised,’ Hunter said, embracing him and giving him a bearish back-slap.

Malevin waved us over the threshold.

The opulence of the house seemed even more pronounced on this visit, but the mood was oddly relaxed. Malevin escorted us into the study on the first floor. ‘Happily,’ said Malevin, ‘I am able to offer you coffee on this occasion.’

‘No valuable manuscripts to damage?’ I asked.

Hunter had picked up an auction catalogue from one of the shelves and was flicking through it. ‘I’ll take an espresso, Sinan,’ he said.

‘You are quite correct’, Malevin said, ‘that we have been guilty of some deceptions.’ He leaned towards the intercom on his desk and asked someone to bring in three espressos.

Hunter closed the catalogue and put it back on the shelf. ‘Nicholas, I want you to know that when we embarked on this, we had no notion that we’d end up here. In fact, if we had, I doubt whether we’d have gone ahead with it. Your doggedness has put us in a difficult position. The fact is that the truth of this situation is much stranger and more complex than you can imagine.’

A few moments later, the door opened and both Bykov and Vera Telauga came in. Vera clumped across the room with her stacked heels and stood by the fireplace. Bykov was carrying a tray with four espressos on it. He gave a coffee to each of us, starting with Vera and finishing with his employer. Malevin emptied his in a single gulp and looked at his watch. ‘Vera, is your brother awake?’

She set her cup on down and turned her blank moon-face towards him. ‘He is.’

Malevin stood up. ‘Come, you will see for yourself.’

*

Behind the main staircase was a concealed door leading to a narrow and undistinguished set of stairs into the basement. For a moment, it crossed my mind that I was walking into a trap. While I dismissed the anxiety at the time, hindsight reveals it to have been, in the broadest sense, prescient.

The basement was spacious but devoid of natural light and clearly intended as a kind of servants’ accommodation. It was paved with granite and lit with fluorescent tubes.

Malevin led us all to a door and then stood aside to let Vera Telauga unlock it with a key she carried in a pocket of her dress. ‘It’s better if Hunter and I stand here. The room is not spacious and …’ He tailed off briefly. ‘And Jack has a sensitive disposition.’

*

You always forget the aura a living body has, even a carcass. He sat on a narrow bed along one edge of the room, his body turned away from the door. It was his shoulders I noticed first, rocking protectively over a crumpled sheaf of papers, stirring and twitching, like an animal in a stable. He gave the impression of great mass. He was powerfully built and the confined space exaggerated his physical presence, his slumped muscularity. He was wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a navy blue sweatshirt. He didn’t look up, but from what I could see, there was no family resemblance to Vera Telauga. He had a huge shaved head like a granite boulder and slack grey cheeks. The most astonishing thing of all, of course, I wasn’t aware of – we never are: he had life in him.

Looking at that lump of man, ostensibly Telauga’s brother, I felt a chill come over me. Or is that image, which verges on cliché, simply a proleptic interpolation of mine, knowing as I do that he was not Telauga’s brother, and the man I was then is now dead? I derive no comfort from these awful paradoxes.

The room was brightly lit. The smell, faintly faecal, with an overriding note of disinfectant, is one that I have grown familiar with in the Dangerous Humans Unit. There was a lamp on a low table. A tiny barred window onto an internal courtyard. A chair. A jug of water. An old prayer book. Vera spoke to him in a cheery voice, telling him he had a visitor, but there was a wariness in her movements that spoke more eloquently of some residual fear. I sat opposite him in the chair and greeted him. There was no indication that he’d even heard me.

‘Don’t be offended by his silence, Dr Slopen,’ Vera said. ‘My brother is mute.’

I tried again to talk to him – nonsensical stuff. I said I had heard a lot about him, that we shared an interest in the works of Johnson, but I felt self-conscious and false – as though I were talking to a gerbil or a hat-stand. He continued to rock slightly back and forth, as if he found the motion soothing. The papers were gathered in his left fist. In his right was a bunch of pens – a fountain pen, some biros and a Pentel.

All the while, Vera was busy around the room, pretending to tidy, but clearly listening to our conversation. I asked her if I could be with him alone for a moment. She assented, and pointed out the panic button under the light switch. Then she left the room.

Naturally, I didn’t think the two of us had any real privacy. I was sure we were being eavesdropped on somehow, but I wanted to be with him without the distraction of Vera’s physical presence in the room.

I repeated some of the things I’d said before. Nothing altered in the rhythm of his rocking, or his slow, open-mouthed breathing. I believe it crossed my mind then that he’d been heavily sedated for my visit. The grip he had on the papers was unnaturally tight, as though he was clinging onto them to prevent himself dropping into unconsciousness.

Not a word I said made any impression on him. I tried to think of a poem that he might recognise. The only poem I could summon up at that moment was by Milton:

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

Young Lycidas and hath not left his peer:

Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew

Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme.

He must not float upon his watery bier

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,

Without the meed of some melodious tear.

I don’t know if I remembered it exactly. The poems that mean most to me are from the centuries closer to my own – and tend to be ones that I’ve kept separate from my academic studies. But ‘Lycidas’ has always had a resonance for me because of a friend of mine who drowned in an accident in Cornwall a long time ago. And I’ve always loved the downright eeriness in Milton that disappears from the mainstream of English poetry until the Romantics. Comes the blind fury with the abhorred shears and slits the thin-spun life.

And the truth is that reciting a poem was a restorative for me. There is something talismanic about familiar words. Once or twice, I’ve mumbled a prayer or a poem over my sleeping children as a clumsy form of blessing. I think I wanted to give this poor, broken madman something, even if it was only words. Which, in a way, is exactly what Milton was doing: the meed of some melodious tear isn’t much, in the circumstances, but sometimes it’s all we’ve got.

Of course, Johnson hated ‘Lycidas’. In a story of many ironies, it’s not the biggest, but it’s worth remarking on. He was, pace Boswell, cool on Milton generally, found the Parnassian arrogance unattractive – who doesn’t? – and the republicanism unforgivable; but he singled out ‘Lycidas’ for the big guns of his critical displeasure.

I was about halfway through, stumbling a bit over the words, when I noticed that the man had stopped rocking. I slowed down, because I knew I was reaching the end of what I remembered. As I came to the last line of the passage, he turned his body and stared at me. I was seized by a kind of panic as I saw that he had the haunted and knowing eyes of a caged ape. He opened his mouth and a low, strangulated sound came out. Then he raised his huge body slowly from the bed and moved towards me with his big arms outstretched.


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