LITMIR.BIZ

       ELEVEN

       Greenwich, London

       5th January – 1.22 p.m.

      The room hadn’t changed. It only seemed a little emptier without him, as if all the energy had been sucked out of it. The faded brown curtain that he’d refused to open fully, even in the summer, remained drawn. The dark green carpet still bristled with dog hair and ash. The awful 1950s writing desk had not moved from the bay window, while on the mantelpiece the three volcanic rocks that he’d picked up from the slopes of Mount Etna when on honeymoon with her mother many years before, radiated their usual warm glow.

      As she crossed the room, Elena Weissman caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and flinched. Although only forty-five, and a young forty-five at that, she knew the last week had aged her ten years. Her green eyes were puffy and red, her face flushed and tired, the lines across her forehead and around her eyes and mouth had deepened from shallow indentations to small valleys. Her black hair, usually well groomed, was a mess. For the first time since her teens she was wearing no make-up. She hated being this way.

      ‘Here you go, my love –’ Sarah, her best friend, came back into the room with two mugs of tea.

      ‘Thanks.’ Elena took a sip.

      ‘These all need to be boxed up, do they?’ Sarah asked, trying to sound cheerful, though her face betrayed her disgust at the state of the room.

      Stacked up against the walls and fireplace and armchairs, and every other surface that would support them, were precarious towers of books and magazines – hardbacks and paperbacks and periodicals and pamphlets of various shapes and sizes and colours, some old with smooth leather spines stamped with faded gold letters, others new and bright with shiny dust jackets.

      She remembered with a sad smile how the piles used to topple over, to an accompaniment of florid German curses. How her father would then try to stuff them into the overflowing bookcase that ran the length of the right-hand wall, only to admit defeat and arrange them into a fresh tower in a new location. A tower that would itself, in time, tumble to the ground as surely as if it had been built on sand.

      Her grief took hold once again and she felt an arm placed around her shoulders.

      ‘It’s okay,’ Sarah said gently.

      ‘I just can’t believe he’s dead. That he’s really gone.’ Elena’s shoulders shook as she sobbed.

      ‘I know how hard it must be,’ came the comforting reply.

      ‘No one deserves to die like that. After everything he’d been through, all that suffering.’ She looked into Sarah’s eyes for support and found it.

      ‘The world’s gone mad,’ Sarah agreed. ‘To kill an innocent man in his bed and then…’

      Her voice tailed off and Elena knew that she couldn’t bring herself to repeat what she herself had told Sarah only a few days before, although it seemed a lifetime ago now. That her father, a frail old man, had been murdered. That his body had been butchered like a piece of meat. She still couldn’t quite believe it herself.

      ‘It’s like a terrible nightmare,’ she murmured, more to herself than anyone.

      ‘Maybe we should finish this another day,’ Sarah suggested gently.

      ‘No.’ Elena took a deep breath and fought to bring herself under control. ‘It’s got to be done at some stage. Besides, I need to keep busy. It keeps my mind off…things.’

      ‘I’ll go and grab some boxes then, shall I? Why don’t you start with the bookcase?’

      Sarah went off in search of boxes as Elena, clearing a space in the middle of the room, began to empty the shelves on to the floor, sorting the books as she went along. Her father’s taste had been eclectic, but the bulk of his library seemed to be devoted to his twin hobbies of ornithology and trains. There was a vast array of books on each subject, many of them in French or German, and she found herself wishing that she’d kept her languages up so that she would know what was the French for bird and the German for railway.

      Together, they emptied the first set of shelves and were about halfway down the middle set when Elena noticed something strange. One of the books, a leather-bound volume with an indecipherable title in faded black letters, refused to move when she tried to grab it. At first she assumed that it must be glued there, no doubt the result of some careless accident years before. But once she had removed all the other books from the shelf, she could see that there was no sign of anything sticking it down.

      She gave it a firm tug with both hands, but still it wouldn’t come free. Exasperated now, she reached round behind the book and, to her surprise, felt a thin metal rod emerging from it and disappearing into the wall. Further inspection revealed that the pages, if any had ever existed, had been replaced by a solid block of what felt like wood.

      She stepped back and stared at the book pensively. After a few seconds’ hesitation, she stepped forward and with a deep breath, pressed gently against the book’s spine. The book edged forward easily as if on some sort of track and at the same time there was a click as the right-hand edge of the central bookcase shifted about half an inch. Hearing the scrape of wood, Sarah looked up from where she was kneeling on the floor.

      ‘Found something, dear?’

      Elena didn’t reply. Grasping one of the shelves she pulled the bookcase towards her. It swung open noiselessly, skating just above the carpet, until it had folded back on itself.

      ‘Oh my!’ Sarah exclaimed breathlessly, struggling to her feet.

      The bookcase had revealed a section of wall still covered in what looked like the original Victorian wallpaper, an ornate floral pattern painted over with thick brown varnish. In a few places the paper had fallen off, revealing the cracked and crumbling plaster beneath.

      But Elena’s eyes were fixed not on the wall but on the narrow green door set into it. On the hinges glistening with oil. Recently applied oil.