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looked up at them. Modern, he thought, maybe nineteen sixties. Featureless, compared to the Art Deco buildings flanking them. Venn climbed the steps and peered at the front door. Not an especially complicated-looking locking mechanism. The alarm system would be the problem, if there was one.
    He fished a set of picks out of his jacket pocket, a set he’d once taken off a master burglar he’d busted in his detective days and which he’d always thought might come in useful at some point. The locks gave, and as Venn pushed the door open he paused, holding his breath, waiting for the blare of the alarm, or the sixth sense that might – might – tell him he’d triggered some silent mechanism.
    There came none.
    That meant either that Lomax’s kidnappers had snatched him from his house and had quite reasonably neglected to set the alarm on their way out, or that Lomax himself had forgotten to do so when he’d left the house. It told Venn nothing, in effect.
    He stepped into a darkened hallway, and made his way stealthily toward the living room. There, he slipped a flashlight from another pocket and looked about.
    The room had been tossed. Expertly, systematically, with no consideration to the damage that might be done.
    Drawers had been pulled out and their contents dumped on the floor. Vases and pot plants lay spilled and shattered on the carpet. Art prints had been torn from the walls. The place was – had been – tastefully decorated, and held a lot of antique furniture which Venn didn’t care for. The furniture’s upholstery had been ripped with savage slashes, as though somebody had been searching for something hidden in the material. Books, which Venn did like as a rule, would have lined almost every wall, if they hadn’t been yanked out of their bookcases and hurled all over the floor.
    Venn prowled through the rest of the house. It had likewise been ransacked. Every room, every corridor, was strewn with bric a brac and papers. He half-expected to find a lab somewhere, with the guy being a neurochemistry professor, but there was none. The basement was the only place not littered with debris, and held a washing machine and dryer, some sacks of cement, and a couple of mice that scurried away from his torch beam.
    In the one bedroom that seemed to be in use, Venn found the bed overturned, its mattress and blankets dumped on the floor. The closet doors stood open and the carpet was covered with carelessly tossed day-to-day academic’s clothes: plain shirts, jackets with those damned elbow patches these guys seemed to love, and penny loafers. The en suite bathroom had a used towel in it, but the sink and shower were dry, suggesting they hadn’t been used for a day at least.
    Which fit in with the timing of Lomax’s disappearance.
    Venn found what had to be the man’s study. The mess was greater than in all the rest of the rooms put together. A big cherrywood desk with a grand-looking chair stood at the window. Books, scientific journals and newspapers carpeted every surface like a New England forest floor in October.
    This looked like the room where Professor Lomax spent the bulk of his time at home.
    Venn took a risk and flipped on the anglepoise lamp standing on the desk, bathing the surface in a soft yellow light. He roved around the study, peering at the shelves for clues. Then he tried the drawers in the desk. They were all unlocked, and crammed with papers, some of which were half-sticking out. It looked like whoever searched the place had had a cursory rummage through the drawers but found not much of interest.
    There was no computer on the desk. No PC, no laptop. Venn presumed whoever had been here had taken them. In fact, he hadn’t seen any kind of IT equipment anywhere in the house. There was, however, an antique-looking telephone with a wheel-dial perched on the desk.
    Inside one of the drawers he found an old-fashioned Filofax. At least, Venn thought they were old-fashioned now. Didn’t everybody