The Medusa Touch by Peter Van Greenaway

Author:Peter Van Greenaway [Greenaway, Peter Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

The faint tremor caught by a seismograph, the mild trauma engendered by contact with Morlar, and so, Zonfeld knew the climax of the story had still to come.

Listening to the second-hand account at this distance of time, it seemed to the Inspector that Zonfeld again betrayed an almost feverish excitement over a mere domestic disaster.

‘I crossed to the bedroom window, watched Parrish helping her into his bright red two-seater—one of those peculiar vintage models.

‘Pure comedy—the way people deal with decisive moments in their miserably insignificant lives. Her latest mate crouched over the steering wheel like a little boy on his first bicycle.

She turned her head once, as it might be, on impulse, expecting to see me standing there. As I thought of Lot’s wife her carefully made-up expression crumpled into a commonplace pattern of fear and hatred.

‘A moment later he blasted off and they disappeared down the street in a cloud of oily, black smoke . . .

‘Expectancy—or a search for confirmation of what was still to come . . . at any rate I wandered about the flat, simply filling in time—nothing more. Played a record without listening, examined the frightening array of cosmetics on her dressing-table without comprehension, reflected on the workmanship of her tiny Empire desk, but without appreciation. I might have been a dealer reluctant to purchase, no real interest in someone else’s past.

‘I was—filling in time.

‘Sixty-five minutes later the ’phone rang. An artificially sympathetic station sergeant informed me that my wife and an unidentified male companion had been killed in a road crash—somewhere beyond Kingston-on-Thames.’

‘ * *

‘He lapsed into a characteristic silence, his intensity of thought seemed to gather visibly about his head, like a monk’s cowl thrown up to protect meditation. But my thoughts were on that other silence as he watched his wife being driven away by Parrish.’

‘You wanted to know what was passing through his mind at that moment?’ Cherry suggested.

Zonfeld nodded with an elsewhere attention as though he must search for an exact intonation before replying on Morlar’s behalf. ‘I don’t remember.’

Familiar words, echoing down cranial corridors, weaving in and out of incidents that came, always and at last, to the same disastrous conclusion. The pattern inescapable, the design increasingly recognisable, Morlar the enigma, spinning his web with life strands, but where was rhyme or reason when the epilogue to each story was the same? Even for Cherry, Morlar had begun to prove that he had a point to prove.

This was something more than a fate gone rotten. Morlar was no Job driven to despair by a sadistic God who tortured the chosen out of perverse love. A man whose path is bedevilled by obstacles and kicks them into oblivion is another kind of creature. Especially if he cannot remember . . .

The compulsive tapping of that silver pencil began to set his nerve ends at odds, and Cherry wanted to cry out: Tor God’s sake stop!’ demanded instead: ‘And then?’

‘I lost my temper.’

‘ * *

Unworthy of a mind master. Time

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