He had had other clients to worry about, and the strange woman had only been giving him a tip-off anyway, a suggestion as to how he might piece together extra facts in his search for her husband. Baron was a moderately able private investigator, but was most able when it came to sniffing out men of his own class, criminals who might have welched on a deal, or informed on a gang. At the tracing of dissident ganglanders he was second to none; at tracking down errant husbands he was as good as he needed to be; but the crazy American woman, who would only deal with him indirectly, had given him a case that was totally beyond his ability.

  He had got nowhere in his search for her husband and son. He had done his best, but patience was not one of Baron's great virtues, whereas easy money was one of his great vices. The woman had been 'filed'; he had made a renewed effort when she had told him of a similar disappearance, and had come up with nothing. Now she had told him that soon the occupant of Brook's Corner would be returning home, and for some reason - perhaps conscience, perhaps slight intrigue - he had decided on one last look, one last scout around the deserted house.

  After all, he had nothing to lose; and every piece of information he had so far gathered added up to Absolute Zero.

  Baron walked quickly round to the french windows and stood for a moment, surveying the garden area. The door to the woodshed was slightly open, which unnerved him; he hated half-open doors. The garden was half in dawn-shadow, the places beneath the trees, and the high wall that ran beyond them, in darkness. His breath frosted slightly. It was late March, but there was a cold front over England and it felt, at times, like winter.

  Baron was suddenly aware that his heart was racing. His life on the streets of East London had taught him many things, and one was that he didn't scare easily; a second lesson was that he always took note of his acute sixth sense, and he felt distinctly that he was not alone.

  The garden was still, quiet and deserted. He peered through the windows into the gloom of the lounge, and could see only the shadowy features of furniture, light fittings, and a doorway.

  After a moment the frisson of unease had left him; he wiped his hand across his mouth, glancing around once more, then tackled the entry problem.

  He was surprised to find that the alarm system was the same as before - which was the system the owner had placed in himself. He would have thought that the caretaker brother-in-law would have had the system changed for a more efficient one. It was the sort of laziness that at once appalled and delighted Baron; it made his job easier, but if he had been a criminal he would have been irritated by the lackadaisical attitude.

  As he opened the french windows he again felt the stirrings of unease. It manifested as a prickling on his neck, a breath of air on his face as if a sudden breeze had sprung up. He checked the door to the woodshed, but it was motionless. Zipping his jacket up to the neck, and reaching into his pocket for the secure coldness of a metal cosh, he stepped into the lounge and gently closed the doors behind him.

  In the half light, in the cold, he registered a number of things.

  The room had been painted brightly; there was still - if he sought for it - the hint of the smell of gloss paint in the air.

  A new suite had been brought in; tasteless and uncomfortable looking, the main settee had been positioned on the spot where Brady's comatose body had been found. The last time Baron had been here that particular spot had been marked with tape in the shape of a corpse, just as if the man had been dead.

  A vase of flowers stood on the mantelpiece, next to a row of sealed envelopes: welcome home cards, no doubt.

  By the door to the hallway, and by the french doors themselves, were two small piles of grey ash, each on a strip of silver-foil paper. Baron stooped and touched the ash with his index finger, smelling it, then touching it cautiously to his tongue. It was bitter, not at all smokey like wood-ash or paper-ash.

  But the thing he noticed most of all was the smell, a smell almost powerful enough to block out the odour of paint, though not quite ... yet potent, nauseating, disgusting nonetheless.

  Baron's first impulse was to look for a dead animal, a cat, or rabbit, or something like that, some beast that had been killed in the room a few weeks back and left here. The smell was so putrid that he gagged repeatedly, but he swallowed his gorge and searched behind the furniture, and in the cupboards, but to no avail.

  The last time he had experienced such an odour had been some years back when he had discovered the body of a gangland informer. The man had been coated in cement and laid across the joists of an attic, hidden by plasterboard below and layers of insulation above. But the cement had been poorly made, had cracked as the body had expanded, and when the corpse had begun to deliquesce the plasterboard ceiling below had rotted, letting through a thin trickle of almost lethally foetid liquor into the occupied flat below.

  Baron's second impulse, then, was to assume the presence of a corpse below the floors. The carpets were not fitted, merely laid on the polished parquet. He was on the point of moving furniture so that he could roll the carpet back and sniff a little harder, when to his astonishment the smell went away.

  One second it had been a cloying presence in his nostrils; the next there was only its memory, and the fainter, sweeter smell of paint abounded. Baron straightened and looked around him. The doors were closed, preventing the room from effectively airing; the chimney was open, he supposed. Indeed, the leaf-matter that had been piled into the grate, on top of several green-edged logs, was shifting and stirring as if in a breeze.

  Baron shrugged, assumed that his entry into the room had cleared the residuum of some earlier decay, and began a proper patrol.

  He worked systematically, rarely bothering with the contents of drawers and cupboards, always looking behind and below them, for documents, photographs or any other material that may have been taped to them. He tackled the lounge, then the small study-library. There were too many books here to search inside them all. He opened a few at random, then forced the locked desk-drawers for the second time and skimmed the contents.

  He never knew what he was looking for, but like all reasonably successful private investigators he had confidence in his ability to "spot it" when it came up. A torn photograph, not quite fully destroyed for sentimental reasons ... a phone number, divided up through the pages of a book so that no one, at a glance, would recognize it for what it was ... a letter tucked away in the sheets of boring looking reports. Very few people were such masters (or mistresses) of deception that they could tolerate having no presence at all in the house of whatever it was they were hoping to keep from their partner. And if the disappearance had in any way been planned, by either Brady or his wife, then there would be something around to hint at it.

  It was simply a question of finding it.

  As he searched, as he worked, he chuckled to himself, remembering what had happened the week before this: investigating a certain business man - on wife's instruction - for infidelity, he had made a routine, covert search of the home, and had thought to look up the open chimney (which was never used). The husband had clearly spent months hollowing out the interior of that chimney to create shelving for what Baron discovered to be the most amazing collection of hard-core pornographic material it had ever been his pleasure to leaf through. The vision that reduced him to helpless mirth was of the balding husband, invisible save for his feet and calves as he stood up the flue of the chimney, trousers round his ankles, just the eerie sound of moaning drifting from the fireplace . . .

  There were a limited number of hiding places in any house, but the sheer achievement of that had earned Baron's heartfelt admiration. He gave up on the study, thought briefly of the chimney (which he had checked three months before) but first trotted silently upstairs, and searched the bathroom, bedroom and children's rooms.

  He had been in the house for about half an hour, and that was too long. The rooms had been tidied, and quite clearly everything had been searched many times over by the police. Had there been anything to connect anyone in the family with occultism, Black Magic, Satanism, or whatever the chosen term was, it had either been removed, or had never been here.

  The only thing that vaguely intrigued Baron had been in the library, and he went back there, now, and stared at the bookshelves.

  There were several books on African Mythology, and even more on the occult as practiced by tribes and primitives the world over. Each of these books had Alison Brady's name in them. Inside one, entitled In the Beginning: Early Man and his Gods, he had earlier found three thin published papers by Alison Brady herself, all of them from the Journal of Tropical Agriculture, and all dealing with the problem of 'landscape, industrial development, and supernatural associations with sites'. That sentence, in fact, was all he scribbled down in his notebook, the papers' contents being completely beyond him. But he was intrigued by Alison's connection with Africa and 'supernatural', even though the papers had been written several years before.

  If, as his client would have him believe, the disappearances were due to something like witchcraft (and he could scarcely bring himself to think seriously about such a ludicrous idea) then he now had tangible links with the occult from both destroyed families: the Brady woman had worked in Africa, or at least had studied African occultism; and the screwy American who had hired him 'just to try' (her words) and find her husband and son had, in fact, worked for the Ennean Institute of Paranormal Research.

  On impulse, Baron pocketed the three papers, checked the room for anything else African that he might have missed, then returned to the lounge. It was time to go. The day was well advanced, and he didn't want to risk running into the brother-in-law, who might just decide to come in before work and check over the house, ready for Brady's return.

  As he was walking to the french doors, he again smelled the foetid odour of corruption. He stopped. The leaves in the fire-grate rustled and stirred. He glanced at them, then around the room.

  It occurred to him, then, that for all his thoroughness the one place he hadn't looked for some evidence of a dead bird, or cat, was up the chimney. It would be intriguing to know if something had been slaughtered in some ritual way . . .

  He advanced on the fire-grate, stopped, and turned to peer up into the dark shaft. For a second he could see nothing, although a fine dust made him blink. Then, just as his eyes adjusted to the light so that he could begin to distinguish features of brick further up the flue, the wood and leaf litter in the grate exploded into flame.

  With an anguished cry Baron staggered back from the roaring fire, striking his head very badly on the brick chimney. He brushed frantically at his clothes and hair, feeling the stinging of burn marks on his neck and chin.

  'Christ all fucking mighty!' he yelled, and stared in both bemusement and anger at the leaping flames.

  What in God's name could have caused that to light, he thought, and advanced on the fire, watching with a doomed fascination.

  The fire leapt higher, licking out of the grate and into the room, driving the investigator back. The flames grew and Baron realized that they were no longer confined to the chimney area. They advanced into the room, swelling and roaring before him, the heat making sweat break out on his face. He felt rigidly held to the spot, unable to turn or run, unable even to cry as he watched, horrified, fascinated. . .

  The flame formed into the shape of a giant man, its head broad, leaning down towards him, and in the brilliant yellow of the fire he could sense eyes, a leering mouth, a licking tongue that stabbed at his eyes, half blinding him.

  Now he found the energy to turn and run, but the flames were all around him, scorching his clothes and his flesh. He felt his hair ignite and he slapped his hands uselessly at his scalp, screaming all the time. Roasting, burning fire went up inside his jeans, blistering the skin on his legs, burning his genitals, speading upwards inside his clothes until fingers of flame licked out from his leather jacket, joining the conflagration that gathered about the staring, grinning skull of a man more dead than alive, a man unable, now, to do anything to prevent his agonizing consumption by fire.

  7

  * * *

  At three in the morning, two days after Baron's final investigation, Dan Brady awoke abruptly from a sleep that was tormented by nightmare visions of fire and his family. He had made no sound, of that he was sure, but the anguish he felt at the mind's eye image of Marianna, consumed by flame and crying soundlessly for help, had left him shaken, alert, and saturated with cold, clammy sweat. And for a few moments, as he sat bolt upright in his hospital bed, Brady allowed his body to rack with the sobs that surfaced instantly, exorcising the dream-anguish from his body.

  Dim light spilled into his private room from the corridor outside. The hospital was silent, save for a low vibration: machinery gently thrumming out its business deeper in the bowels of the building.

  And Brady knew that this was the time to leave.

  For a reason more to do with convenience than fear he lay back in his bed as he heard the young Irish nurse walking along the corridor, doing her rounds. The door to his room was opened and Brady feigned sleep. He felt his wrist gently touched, the pulse taken. He breathed easily and deeply, his head turned away from the girl. The moment the door closed behind her he swung his legs out of bed and stood up.

  He would have been discharged tomorrow, he knew that. There was nothing keeping him here save doctor's advice. And the police were happy for him to return home too. Sutherland had been in yesterday to interview him again, this time in the presence of a gaunt-looking CID man from Scotland Yard, and a jovial, rather bemused Home Office Official. The interview had taken place in one of the doctor's offices, and in the two hours of close questioning Brady relived the terror and the anguish of the fatal night several times more. He described everything he could remember, sketched the face he had seen, and the hideous amulet. He listed every friend, colleague and relative he could think of, discussed his work, and Alison's work, and her sabbatical in Africa. Eventually, quite exhausted, he had given all he had to give. And now the only thing keeping him here was the medical opinion that after one good night's sleep he would be almost ready to return to active service.

  But that dream, and his sudden sedative-free alertness, had left him burningly certain of only one thing:

  He had to go home. And he had to go now.

  He crouched and emptied the locker by his bed. Bill had brought him in some clothes the day before, ready for his official discharge. Jeans, light shoes, heavy check shirt, a short mock-leather windcheater. There was money in one of the pockets: twenty pounds. He hadn't asked for that, but was glad Bill had had the foresight to include it.

  He walked to the window as he dressed, opened the blinds, and stared at the lights of the town spread out beyond the hospital.

  Out there, he thought. Among them.

  And the anger that suddenly surfaced made him smash his fist against the window, causing it to buckle and boom with pressure.

  Out there, among the lights, among the people, among the innocents . . . out there was his family, three ordinary people malevolently abused and kept from him.

  And he would get them back!

  He would get them back, he swore so in the Name of the Father, the Good God, and in all the names of Heaven and Hell, and no matter that those names might be on the side of those who had perpetrated the crime... he would draw upon all the powers in the known world, and on powers beyond, and he would find Alison, and Marianna, and Dom, and return them to their home, and behind them he would leave lives wasted, and a force of evil crushed . . .

  All this he articulated softly, as he leaned, forehead against the cold glass, and stared at the lights of the town, and at the primeval darkness of the countryside beyond.

  Out there. . . somewhere out there... in the darkness. . .

  He realized, almost without thinking it, that he had cried his last tear, shed the last sorrow in the gentle memory of Marianna. There would be no tears, now, until those he shed with joy, and relief, when at last - when at last - his daughter flung herself back into his arms, and Alison's embrace hugged them both, and shy Dominick eagerly grabbed the three of them, and joined in the celebration.

  For the moment, all that Brady could feel was bitterness, a knot of anger and hate that had swollen to fill every gap in his body and skull. He had refused sedatives and allowed all emotion to surface and express itself, from violence to hysteria, from melancholy to panic . . . everything; he had tasted everything. He had cried for hours, and screamed for hours, and had thrashed out at anyone who visited, and had sat silently and mournfully and brooded on the past. He knew, now, the depth of his commitment to his family, and to their return. There would never be a moment, not even a second, during which his life would waver from its dedication to the return of those three people.

  He loved them too much.

  And he hated the bastards who had taken them too much to simply live with his agony, and his grief.

  Possessed by love, obsessed with hate. Brady was a child neither of the Moon nor of Mars, but was torn by these irreconcilable elementals, and out of the pain of that tearing came an awesome power.

  It gave him strength. It gave him direction. It gave him a concern for three lives which was so potent that it reduced totally all concern for his own.

  It gave him, thus, an invulnerability of mind that would prove to be his greatest weapon, a sense of immortality that would eventually free him from ordinary fear.

  *

  At ten past midnight he was fully dressed, and finished with that last moment of sad, bitter reflection. Bill Suchock had told him to arrive at their house at any time he liked, and Brady was thinking, vaguely, that he might indeed go to his sister's. But while the thought of the house at Brook's Corner was terrifying, because of its memories, it also called to him, and he acknowledged the need to go there.