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By Root 10592 0

so still and quiet, that her motion_ _Blush'd at herself; and she, in spite of nature,_ _Of years, of country, credit, every thing,_ _To fall in love with what she fear'd to look on!_ _Polymus Films_. I didn't see the obvious, that one misplaced letter, until painfully late. _The famous whore Io_. Lempri�: "In the ancient Gothic Io and Gio signified earth, as Isi or Isa signified 'ice' or water in its primordial state; and both were equally titles of the goddess, who represented the productive and nutritive power of the earth." Indian Kali, Syrian Astarte (Ashtaroth), Egyptian Isis and Greek Io were considered one and the same goddess. She had three colours (on the walls in the trial): white, red, and black, the phases of the moon, and also the phases of woman: virgin, mother, and crone. Lily was evidently the goddess in her white, virgin phase; and perhaps in the black, as well. Rose would have stood for the red phase; but then Alison was given that role. _Tartarus_. The more I read, the more I began to reidentify the whole situation at Bourani--or at any rate the final situation--with Tartarus. Tartarus was ruled by a king, Hades (or Conchis); a Queen, Persephone, bringer of destruction (Lily)--who remained "six months with Hades in the infernal regions and spent the rest of the year with her mother Demeter on earth." There was also a supreme judge in Tartarus--Minos (the presiding "doctor" with a beard?); and of course there was Anubis-Cerberus, the black dog with three heads (three roles?). And Tartarus was where Eurydice went when Orpheus lost her. I was aware that in all this I was acting the role I had decided not to act: that of detective, of hunter, and several times I abandoned the chase. But then one, and one of the apparently least promising, of my hits of research bore spectacular results.

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It began, one Monday, with a very long shot, the assumption that Conchis _had_ lived in St. John's Wood as a boy and that there had indeed been an original Lily Montgomery. I went to Marylebone Central Library and asked to look at the street directories for 1912 to 1914. Of course the name Conchis would not appear; I looked for Montgomery. Acacia Road, Prince Albert Road, Henstridge Place, Queen's Grove... with an _A to Z of London_ by my side I worked through all the likely streets on the east of Wellington Road. Suddenly, with a shock of excitement, my eyes jumped a page. _Montgomery, Fredk, 20 Allitsen Road_. The neighbors' names were given as Smith and Manningham, although by 1914 the latter had moved and the name Huckstepp appeared. I wrote down the address, and then went on searching. Almost at once, on the other side of the main artery, I came across another Montgomery; this time in Elm Tree Road. But I no sooner caught sight of it than I was disappointed, because the full name was given as Sir Charles Penn Montgomery; an eminent surgeon, by the look of the trail of initials after his name; and obviously not the man Conchis described. The neighbors' names there were HamiltonDukes and Charlesworth. There was another title among the Elm Tree Road residents; a "desirable" address. I searched on, double-checking everything, but without finding any other Montgomery. I then followed up in later directories the two I had found. The Allitsen Road Montgomery disappeared in 1920. Annoyingly the Elm Tree Road Montgomery went on much longer, though Sir Charles must have died in 1922; after that the owner's name appeared as Lady Florence Montgomery, and continued so right up to 1938. After lunch I drove up to Allitsen Road. As I swung into it, I knew it was no good. The houses were small terrace houses, nothing like the "mansions" Conchis had described. Five minutes later I was in Elm Tree Road. At least it looked more the part: a pretty circumflex of mixed largish houses and early Victorian mews and cottages. It also looked encouragingly unaltered. No. 46 turned out to be one of the largest houses in the road. I parked my car and walked up a drive between banks of dead hydrangeas to a neo-Georgian front door; rang a bell.