‘Pity.’ Atheldene fixed his gaze back on the road. The speedometer needle edged slightly higher.

‘Nick said you mentioned the Bedford Hours on the phone,’ said Emily from the back. ‘What’s the connection?’

‘As I’m sure you know, Emily, a book of hours is a prayer book that offered lay people a series of prayers to use through the different hours of the day. It’s based on the idea of the monastic schedule. The Bedford Hours is one of these books, commissioned for the marriage in 1423 of the Duke of Bedford. The Bedford Hours is an enormously elaborate and richly decorated book produced in Paris. We don’t know the name of the artist who commissioned it, so we call him the Master of the Bedford Hours.’

‘Like the Master of the Playing Cards,’ said Nick. ‘Don’t any of these guys have names?’

‘Almost none,’ said Atheldene. ‘Not until the end of the fifteenth century. Until then, the medieval ethos of anonymity prevails. Art wasn’t seen as a way to show off your own genius, but God’s. All inspiration came from God, so the thinking went, and the artist or craftsman was merely a channel. It was only with the Renaissance that art becomes egocentric again. You can draw a straight line from da Vinci right through to Picasso, the ghastly Mr Hirst and all the rest of that gang.’

‘It’s an attractive way of thinking,’ said Emily.

‘But not terribly helpful when it comes to determining the origins of a piece. All we can do is try to identify work on stylistic grounds. Which is where the Bedford Master comes in. So far as we can tell, he must have kept a studio in Paris and employed a number of journeymen and assistants to execute the work. Various people have studied the books attributed to the workshop; what they noticed is that several of the motifs from your playing cards also occur in these books. Birds and animals that look very similar, sometimes absolutely identical, to the ones on the cards. I suspect the point Gillian was trying to make, ever so obliquely, is that the pictures in the bestiary she found are closely related to the images on the cards.’

Nick digested that. ‘So you think the playing card Master might be the same as the Bedford Master?’

‘Probably not.’ Atheldene reminded Nick of one of the professors he’d had at college, a pompous man who’d loved nothing more than displaying his learning like a peacock – especially when it came to pretty female undergraduates. Had Gillian been impressed by it?

‘He could have worked in the studio as an apprentice. He might just have seen the pictures and decided to copy them. Or there might have been a common model book.’

‘A model book?’

Atheldene didn’t let Nick’s question divert him. ‘Europe in the fifteenth century is really in the twilight of the medieval and the pre-dawn of the modern age. Everything’s changing – and nowhere more so than in the diffusion of ideas. People are waking up to the fact that they need to communicate far more widely, but they don’t have the tools. Model books are one response to this. You make up a book with examples of a whole set of different pictures, and then anyone who gets hold of the book can create a more-or-less exact copy of the picture. Some of them come with step-by-step instructions of exactly how to draw the picture and colour it in. Painting by numbers. The Master of the Playing Cards takes this to its logical conclusion by inventing copper-engraved printing: mass production.’ He blew air through his nose. ‘And a few years later, of course, Gutenberg blows the whole thing open with the printing press.’

The car roared on up the empty highway.

Heloise Duvalier was a smoker. That made it easier. ‘Don’t call from the office,’ they’d warned her. ‘Use the payphone down the street.’ They’d even given her a phonecard so she wouldn’t need change.

‘If Monsieur Atheldene goes on a trip to Brussels, you must tell us at once,’ the priest had said. And two days later, Atheldene had come striding out of his office, pulling on his overcoat and shouting to his secretary that he was off to the warehouse in Brussels. Heloise had been polishing the glass partition on the next-door office at the time – she’d been giving it a lot of attention that week.

How did the priest know Atheldene would go to Brussels?

He was a priest: he knew the mysteries of the world. He had promised her five hundred euros if she told him. It was more than she made in a month cleaning the Stevens Mathison offices, where men would pay that much for a bottle of wine over lunch.

She decided to wait fifteen minutes, just to be safe. After ten she decided it was enough. Delay might cost her. She had six sisters in Abidjan who relied on the money she sent back: with five hundred euros, she might even have a little left to spend on herself. She mimed a cigarette to her supervisor, who tapped his watch and held up three fingers. Three minutes. He was a real con about time. The security guard buzzed her out of the building.

A girl in a short skirt and a pink coat with fake-fur trim was using the phone. Heloise waited in the cold, shivering, listening to the little princess complain to whoever was listening. Probably a boyfriend. One minute ticked by, then two. She tapped the side of the phone booth and got a dismissive glare. She’d have to go soon: she couldn’t afford to lose the job. Not even for five hundred euros.

The girl hung up. Heloise pushed in past her even before she’d left the booth. She picked up the phone and dialled the number she’d been given. The priest answered on the first ring.

‘Oui?’

‘He is en route.’

Strassburg

What had I done?

I stumbled out of the house in a daze. Across the street, two porters used staves to manhandle a hogshead of wine into an open cellar. I wanted to throw myself in after it and break my neck, or drown head first in the barrel. To my right, the river flowed swiftly past the wharf at the end of the alley. That would serve. It would sweep me down to the Rhine; past Mainz, where my brother or my sister might look up from their work and notice a small piece of flotsam in the stream; then on out into the great ocean.

Gold was my undoing. From the moment my child’s fist closed around the stolen coin, dreams of gold and perfection had possessed me as surely as the demon. They were inseparable. Gold was perfect. Perfection was expensive. I, with all my imperfections, had sold myself for two hundred gulden.

Madness held me like a fever. I wandered the streets of Strassburg not knowing where I went, not caring. Night fell; a filthy rage blossomed in my heart. The worm who possessed me swelled into a monstrous dragon; he took flight and scorched fire in my soul. For years I had held that desire in check; now I let it own me. I wanted flesh, to claw and scratch, to bite and squeeze. To dominate.

I knew there were places where such things could be had, as there are in every city. Ever since I came to Strassburg I had avoided them. Now I charged in. It was near the cathedral – for vice envies virtue and is never far away. Down a lane where tawdry women shouted offers of pleasures I did not want; along a backstreet where the propositions grew more outlandish; into an alley that was little more than an open sewer between the backs of houses.

I was surprised by how crowded it was. I had nursed the demon so close to me so long I thought it only existed in me. Here there was a whole congregation. Men dressed as women with red paint smeared on their stubbled cheeks; muscle-bound men with arms covered in scars; gaunt men with sharp faces who stared at me hungrily; scrawny boys in tunics that barely covered the soft skin of their thighs.

I suppose I might have felt a sense of kinship with them but I did not. I resented them: simply by their existence they diminished me. Jealousy fanned my anger and banished my doubts. I strode deeper into the lane. Hands pawed at me and tugged the sleeve of my borrowed coat; men whistled and shouted proposals, prices. I ignored them.