Chapter Sixty-Seven

KATRIN AND JULIET had both gone to bed. Tim sank down on the sofa in the sitting room, having poured himself a large Scotch. The glass screens had been erected all around the room. Tim noticed that many more details had been added to them. He’d have to make sure that the van came back to collect the screens in the morning, in time for the next briefing meeting.

There was a sheaf of multi-coloured papers on the coffee table in front of him, torn from a pad that Katrin used for shopping lists. Each of the slips bore handwriting, mostly Katrin’s, with some shaky additions by Juliet. (He remembered that it was her right hand that had been bandaged.) He picked them up. Along the top of each a name had been written in block capitals, with a sentence or just a few words in longhand beneath it.

HELENA / HELEN. Zeus’s mortal daughter. Abducted by Paris.

ARIADNE? Means ‘she knows’.

PHILIPPA. Lover of horses.

GRUMMETT. Common Lincolnshire name. Of seafaring origin. Naval rating of low status. Sometimes described as a ‘workhorse’ because served as a skivvy to the higher ranks.

CASSANDRA. Means ‘doomed’.

KNIPES Scottish name for a hill. As a family name, used in the North of England, Ireland. Diaspora in Australia. Site of a famous long barrow.

Tim sipped his whisky. He was half asleep, but his interest was piqued, nevertheless. He could see where Katrin and Juliet were going with this, or at least had some inkling. But were they solving word games that gave them insight into a disturbed mind, or just muddying the picture with a too-ingenious theory?

He mulled over this question, eventually falling into a disturbed sleep. He woke up a couple of hours later to discover that he had spilt what remained of the whisky down the front of his shirt. It was two days since he’d showered and the mixture of smells rising from his body disgusted him. Rousing himself, he staggered upstairs to the bathroom, where he peeled off his clothes and dumped them on the floor. With some relief, he stepped into the shower and put gel and water to work. Finally, he rolled into bed beside Katrin. She stirred slightly.

“Is that you, Tim?” she murmured, not really waking.

“Yes, it’s me,” he said tenderly. “Who else would it be?”