The Flanders Panel

However, as she walked amongst the colours of the night, Julia was quite incapable of considering her present feeling an academic question. She had, of course, experienced other minor manifestations of the same thing. The speedometer needle pushing up beyond the limit, whilst the landscape glides rapidly by to left and right and the intermittent white line down the middle of the road looks like a swift succession of tracer bullets, as in war films, being swallowed up by the voracious belly of the car. Or the sense of emptiness, of bottomless blue depths when you dive off the deck of a boat into the deep sea and swim, feeling the water slip over your bare skin and knowing with unpleasant certainty that your feet are far from any kind of terra firma. Even those intangible fears that form part of oneself during sleep and set up capricious duels between reason and the imagination, fears which a single act of will is almost always enough to reduce to memory or forgetting merely by opening one’s eyes to the familiar shadows of the bedroom.

But this new fear, which Julia had only just discovered, was different. New, unfamiliar, unknown until now, touched by the shadow of Evil with a capital E, the initial letter of everything that lies at the root of suffering and pain. The kind of Evil that was capable of turning on a shower tap over the face of a murdered man. The Evil that can only be painted in the dark colours of black night, black shadows and black solitude. Evil with a capital E, Fear with a capital F and Murder with a capital M.

Murder. It was only a hypothesis, she said to herself as she watched her shadow. People do slip in bathtubs, fall downstairs, jump traffic lights and die. Pathologists and policemen were sometimes too clever’t)v half; it was an occupational hazard. Yes, that was all true. But it was also true that someone had sent her Alvaro’s report when he’d already been dead for twenty-four hours. That was no hypothesis; the documents were in her apartment, in a drawer. And that was real.

She shuddered and looked behind to see if anyone was following her. And although she didn’t really expect to, she did in fact see someone. It was hard to ascertain whether he was following her or not, but someone was walking along some fifty yards behind her, a silhouette illuminated at intervals as it crossed the pools of light that spilled through the leaves of the trees and blazed on the museum facade.

Julia looked straight ahead as she continued on her way. Every muscle was filled by the imperious need to run, the feeling she had as a child when she crossed the dark entryway of her building, before bounding up the stairs and ringing the doorbell. But the logic of a mind accustomed to normality intervened. Running away simply because someone was walking in the same direction, fifty yards behind her, was not only unreasonable, but ridiculous. Even so, she thought, walking calmly along a badly lit street with, at her back, a potential assassin, however hypothetical, was not just unreasonable; it was suicidal. The debate between these ideas occupied her mind for a few moments, during which she relegated fear to a reasonable place in the middle distance and decided that her imagination might be playing tricks on her. She breathed deeply, looking back out of the corner of her eye and making fun of her own fear. And at that moment she saw that the distance between her and the stranger had grown a few yards shorter. She felt afraid again. Perhaps Alvaro really had been murdered, and it was the person who killed him who had later sent her the documents on the painting. That would establish a link between The Game of Chess, Alvaro, Julia and the presumed or possible killer. You’re up to your neck in this, she said to herself, and could no longer find any reason to laugh at her own disquiet. She looked about for someone she could approach for help, or simply link arms with and ask him to take her away from there. She also considered going back to the police station, but that Presented a problem: the stranger stood in her way. A taxi, perhaps.

But no little green for-hire sign, no green of hope, appeared. She noticed how dry her mouth was, so dry her tongue kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. Keep calm, she told herself, keep calm, you idiot, or you really will be in trouble. And she did manage to regain some composure, just enough to start running.