Furnace by Muriel Gray

Author:Muriel Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007582051
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-10-26T11:14:01.161000+00:00

23

He’d thought it had been enough when Samuel died. Thus far and no further. He’d mouthed those very words under his breath when the body had been carefully wrapped and carried to the funeral parlour as though Sam had died innocently in his sleep. He remembered watching limply, impotent like some prurient bystander at a street shooting.

But he had gone further, hadn’t he? He’d gone all the way with it until now. After all, Samuel had had his throat cut open like a gutted fish exactly twenty-one years ago, and that was a pretty long time to still be making up your mind. Three opportunities since then to stop taking part in this madness, and every one rejected. And for what? Security? Money? New homes for both his mother and Rachel’s parents in North Carolina? Or was it the secret hope and prayer that it was somehow right, somehow good?

John Pace opened the top of a set of four office drawers with a small silver key, and lifting some papers aside, slid out a postcard. He expelled a breath he’d held too long, and held up the card to look at the picture.

It was a glossy black-and-white gallery postcard, a detail from an engraving from a Dutch museum.

His eye roamed over the picture, then he placed it gently on the desk top, running a finger around its edges as though trying to define its shape.

The typed caption was on the plain side of the postcard, printed discreetly along the top left-hand corner, leaving space for the purchaser’s message. But John Pace didn’t need to turn the card over to remind himself of that. He knew it well enough. It would tell him it was by a fifteenth-century German engraver called Israhel van Meckenem, and the subject matter was the Temptation of St Anthony.

The picture showed the saint being borne in the air by a collection of terrifying demons, monstrosities that defied nature with their grotesquely deformed bodies, their gaping, fang-filled mouths screaming as they tore and clawed at the weary man caught in their talons.

Pace’s finger lightly traced a demon’s hooked beak and spined head before he turned the card over and looked at the elegant handwriting on the back.

It was addressed to him at the sheriff’s office where a lot of eyes could read it before it ended up on his desk, and it had been sent seven years ago. The last time he had doubts. The time he thought those Government men shouldn’t have died. Not the way they did. He closed his eyes briefly, as he remembered their screams, then swallowed as he looked again, turning the card to read the words he’d read a hundred times before.

‘John,’ it began, in a cheerful open hand of blue ink. ‘Knowing your interest in such things I thought you might find this fascinating. The extraordinary thing is I become more and more convinced that van Meckenem, like Brueghel the Elder and Bosch after him, was such a master draughtsman he can only have been drawing from life.

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