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convince them I can’t carry it anymore—they’ll just give it to someone else. Someone inexperienced. It was inactive for years before they gave it to me. Starving and in hibernation. It’s awake now. And the stars are right.”
    This is why I have to keep calm and carry Lecter. Until someone better qualified comes along, I’m where the buck stops. And the chances of someone coming along who is more able than I—an agent with eight years’ experience of holding my course and not being swayed by the blandishments of the bone violin—are slim. I hope Bob can understand this. It’s not really any different from the Eater of Souls thing: now that Angleton’s gone, Bob’s next in the firing line.
    â€œWhat are we going to do? It wants me dead,” he says dolefully.
    I talk myself through to the bitter end, as much for my own benefit as for his. “If I let go of it a lot of other people will die, Bob. I’m the only thing holding it back. Do you want that? Do you really want to take responsibility for letting it off the leash with an inexperienced handler?”
    I meet his gaze. My heart breaks as he says the inevitable words.
    â€œI’m going to have to move out.”

3.
    THE FOURTH WALL

    I reassemble the violin case on the kitchen table while Bob moves around upstairs, assembling his go-bag and adding an extra supply of necessities. His footsteps are heavy and drag as if he’s drunk. My hands are shaking and I have to sortie to the bathroom for sticking plasters a couple of times, but I finally succeed in fitting the case back together again. I retrieve the bow and violin, then fetch the cleaning kit: then I focus on the fingerboard so intently that the sound of the front door closing takes me by surprise. I realize with a start that my husband has left me without saying good-bye.
    I shut the case and leave it on the kitchen table. To my mild surprise, I feel numb and distant. It feels
wrong
: I should be angry, bitter and burning and full of rage and resentment. I ought to be furious with the violin, which is sleeping smug and satiated in its bone-white coffin-case, having finally gotten its way. I should be pissed off at Mhari for having injected herself back into Bob’s life like some kind of vile parasitic worm. (At least Ramona has the decency to stay away and lead a life of her own.) I should be having a screaming jealousy fit at my husband for fucking that bitch, or worse, for
not
fucking herand for being so oblivious to the possibility and to what it might mean to me that he didn’t realize offering her crash space in our living room while I was away
without telling me
might be open to misinterpretation. I should be mourning Angleton, the scary old coffin-dodger. I should be having a screaming breakdown fit right now, shouting imprecations at the setting moon and throwing toiletries out of the window. But I’m not; I’m just icily over-controlled, methodically going through the motions.
    How very
grown-up
of me.
    Around six o’clock I realize I’m yawning uncontrollably. My emotional state is freewheeling downhill with burned-out brakes: I’ll be unable to put up a fight if Lecter tries to romance me in my dreams. Also, my mobile phone is down to about 30 percent of battery charge—which is bad, if I’m even potentially on-call. So I take precautions. I lock and bolt the front door, arm the burglar alarm, check and then power up the protective grids on all the windows, and prepare for a siege. (The living room window, it turns out, is both intact and closed: Bob must have seen to it on his way out. Damn him for his consideration.)
    I pick up the violin case and carry it upstairs. We have a big old wardrobe in the bedroom, and there’s a lock on its door. I bed Lecter down between Bob’s mothballed funeral suit and a random selection of dresses left over from the last decade of wedding invitations, lock the