‘She died? Your wife died, I presume?’

‘Louisa had such pretty, delicate hands. The doctors tried to prevent the spread by amputation. First the hand was removed, but the cancer revealed itself in the radius bone. So then her forearm was amputated, all the way up to the elbow. But it was not a success. The cancer was found to have entered the humerus already. They next amputated at the shoulder, though by now without much hope. And so when I say that I have seen the end, I mean it literally. I have seen what fate awaits me. I have declined the proffered amputations.’

‘Why has it affected you, if your experiments were conducted on your wife?’

‘Your father and I both blamed ourselves for Louisa’s death. His response, we know. There. You have the explanation of his suicide. Your mother thought that he had squandered the family fortune on gambling and God knows what other depravities, but in truth, he had used it to fund our experiments. And to kill Louisa. It was then that I realized how deeply he had been in love with her. I looked back at their dealings with each other, and it became clear to me that they had conducted an affair right under my nose. But I forgave him, because he had loved her. And I forgave her, because – well, had she not suffered enough? Had she not been punished far more severely than her crime warranted? And what crime had she committed, really? She had followed her heart, that was all. I never truly believed that I deserved her, you know. I always thought that our time together was temporary, fortuitous, provisional – and therefore all the more precious. That does not mean that I was ready to give her up. But even though she was unfaithful to me, I remain grateful to her for our time together. I have never loved anyone else. I still love her.’

Grant-Sissons’s hands stirred under the blanket. The bandaged right hand emerged. ‘And this … I inflicted this on her.’ With his other hand, he worked away at the bandage and began to unwind.

‘Father, no.’

But Grant-Sissons was deaf to his son’s entreaties. ‘To punish myself, for not loving her enough, for allowing her to take part in our work, I exposed my own hand to the same levels of radiation that she had received. It should have been me in the first place, after all.’

He continued to peel away the bandage, which was now discoloured with the seepages from his wounds. And now the bandage fell away together. A horrible discoloured dressing was revealed, clinging to his flesh. Grant-Sissons winced and teased the dressing away, discarding it on the floor.

He held up his hand as if it was a trophy, or a prize vegetable in the county fair. In the glimmering of the oil lamp, Quinn could see a glistening, misshapen mess of raw flesh. The skin was entirely missing. A number of angry, ugly tumours erupted from the surface, moist, suppurating yellowish clumps of mutated cells.

‘Look at it! Look at it, Inspector! Do you really believe that I could do what you accuse me of with this hand?’

The hand in question dropped. Grant-Sissons fell back on to his camp bed and closed his eyes. But he was still conscious, and he had more to say to Quinn. ‘If I were not determined to suffer everything that she suffered, I would ask you one remaining favour, Inspector.’

‘What?’

‘I would ask you to kill me. I know you have a reputation for being somewhat trigger-happy. I might have used your suspicions against me to provoke you to shoot me. But I have decided against that. It is a recourse that is not available to me. It would be an evasion on my part. A terrible act of cowardice and weakness. I must see this through to the end.’

‘I would do it, if you wish.’

‘I know you would. But I do not wish it. I do not deserve it. I do not deserve release. It would only serve to complicate your investigation, I fear. And I could not lay another death on your conscience. So I will ask you a different favour.’

‘Yes?’

‘After I am gone, will you look out for Malcolm? Keep an eye on him, for me. A brotherly eye, I might almost say.’

‘What do you mean? What is he to me?’

But Grant-Sissons’s face was twisted into a sharp grimace. He was lost in his pain. And nothing other than his pain reached him or had any meaning for him.

Quinn turned to regard the young man whose care Grant-Sissons had apparently entrusted to him. They both seemed aware of the complications of the relationship that existed between them. At the very least, if what Grant-Sissons had said was true, Quinn’s father had been in love with the younger man’s mother. But with that ‘brotherly’, Grant-Sissons seemed to be hinting at even more.

‘If you have any compassion in you, you would kill him now, while he sleeps.’

‘He asked me not to do it.’

‘But what about me? He wasn’t thinking of me. Of what I will have to go through, seeing him suffer the torments of a horrible death.’

‘I cannot do it.’

‘That’s cruel, you know.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you believe what he said?’

‘I’m not sure what he said.’

‘That we are brothers. Half-brothers. I think his meaning was clear enough.’

‘Has he said anything of this to you before?’

‘He has hinted at it. In all honesty, he wasn’t much of a father. But that was not because he didn’t acknowledge me as his own. I even believed he loved me, in his own way. There was rather too much of duty in it. And he was always a little distracted, shall we say. But I believe he fought his battles on my behalf, to leave something for me. It all came to nothing, alas.’

‘I had never thought of myself as having a brother.’

‘That need not change. I don’t require looking after. I’m not a child.’

‘What will you do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When he’s dead.’

‘Carry on his work, of course. I have been working with him on a method of producing three-dimensional motion pictures. We have a patent pending.’

Quinn closed his eyes briefly, blocking out the chaos of the workshop. He imagined himself holding his gun to Grant-Sissons’s temple and pulling the trigger. ‘I wish you luck,’ he said.

FORTY-NINE

Oskar Hartmann held the monocle up to his eye and squinted through it. He closed his other eye to hold it in place. The room flickered and darkened. The glass lens was coated with a layer of translucent grey tinting, as if it had been held in the smoke of a charcoal fire.

He took the monocle away from his eye and examined it. It was now that he noticed the hairline crack running through it.

Why would anyone send him such an object? A cracked monocle. It was possible that it had been damaged in transit. He examined the padded envelope it had been sent in. His name was written clearly in green ink. There was no note, or invoice enclosed. The sender’s address was not given on the outside.

He looked through it again. The glass disk had no refractive effect on what was observed through it; that is to say, it was not a functioning lens, just plain glass, apart from the colour. So the purpose of it was presumably to protect a single sensitive eye from the effects of bright sunlight? Hartmann himself suffered from no such condition, and could say with certainty that he had not ordered the object on his own account.

And yet there was something satisfying about squinting at the world through it. The layer of colour softened the harshness of existence somewhat, provided a barrier between the observer and the observed. Today, of all days, he felt the need for such a boundary.

He wondered if it were something Waechter had ordered. Perhaps he was thinking of exchanging his eye patch for a shaded monocle? Was that a lesser or a greater affectation? Hartmann could not decide.

Hartmann did not object to Waechter using the Visionary Productions’ office as a postal address, but the use of his name, without having first asked, caused him some mild annoyance. Did this now mean that Hartmann could expect a bill for the article in the next post?