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By Root 818 0

statements taken from his circle by the police. Patrick had been drinking. Well, Patrick was always drinking, wasn’t he? They’d all retired to a pub on Parliament Hill for a couple in the heat of the late afternoon and then gone back into the ponds for a last dip. This according to an account given the police by Mike. There were lifeguards at the ponds. And they were vigilant. But the pond they swam in was deep and surrounded by trees bowed out over the water in full summer leaf. And Patrick had suffered cramp and drowned. There were no injuries. None if you discounted death, at least. His body had been found partially snagged in weeds two feet under the surface, sunk by the negative buoyancy of his waterlogged lungs. What had he said to Mike? The ponds at Hampstead were for strong swimmers. But Patrick had been broad-shouldered, strong as a bear, the most formidable in the water of the whole lot of them.

Bob Halliwell called him. He had no idea how Bob had acquired his home number. Their number certainly wasn’t in the book. He might have got it from Mike Whitehall, or Tim Cooper, or Terry Messenger. Or he might have got it from none of them.

After offering commiserations, he asked if Seaton still had any interest in seeing Pandora’s stored valuables.

‘I don’t think so, Bob. I’m finished with all that.’

Halliwell paused on the other end of the line. ‘I’ll tell you this anyway, Paul.’

Bob Halliwell had never called him Paul before.

‘I think she was murdered. I think she was cut and put into the river. The police surgeon who carried out the autopsy was a drinker and a locum. And there’s something not right, something too pat and hasty about the coroner’s report.’

‘You pursuing any suspects, Bob?’

‘One character witness at the coroner’s inquiry who laboured the point about her being depressed.’

‘Edwin Poole.’

‘Right. Her cousin. A Lloyds underwriter. Murder is almost always committed by a family member. That counts for all classes of society. Though I don’t think he did the deed himself. She was cut once, deeply, fatally. And, in my humble view, professionally. And then she was put into the water.’

Poole. Poole who had written Pandora’s anodyne monograph. Poole, who had introduced her to Wheatley in the first place at that glittering long-ago ball.

Bob’s voice came on the line again. ‘Edwin Poole never committed a recorded crime in his life. I should state that he had no criminal record and was never at any time officially suspected of involvement in his cousin’s death. But he was known to be a man of dubious character. That’s what he was referred to as, confidentially, in the phraseology of the time. No form to speak of. But in my considered opinion, if you’re looking for a prime suspect, he’s in the frame.’

‘Poole was a satanist, wasn’t he, Bob?’

‘Yes, Paul. Yes, he was.’

Seaton was crying. Not about Poole or Pandora. He tried to do it silently, but he thought perhaps Bob Halliwell could tell.

‘Take care of yourself, mate. Let’s not bother about that Scotch.’ Halliwell cleared his throat. ‘You drink it. You drink it for me.’

He knew what he had seen now in his dreams, in his imaginings in recent weeks, all that spectral stuff he thought he’d seen and heard at the edge of what was really there on the neighbouring streets outside. He’d seen scenes from Pandora’s funeral, organised and paid for by Edwin Poole, her murderer; her body interred by a bogus priest after much ironic pomp in unconsecrated ground.

Patrick’s body was released and he travelled to Ireland for his brother’s burial. He was grateful for the rain. He did not think he could have endured seeing his brother go into a grave in sunshine. But the lowering sky wept with them and the strength of his family was a small consolation to him at the edge of an abyss of loss he could not really begin seriously to contemplate. Paul Seaton loved his younger brother very much. I love you so much, Patrick. He did not yet possess the necessary strength even to put his thoughts and feelings about his lost sibling into the past tense.

He got back and carried