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certainly have made her a suspect. But there was no proper evidence against her for either crime. The butler in Hampstead saw either two women, or one woman, and was so upset by the disguise, or change, or whatever it was, that he refused to swear to anything. In the case of the secondkilling, the girl was found in a street bleeding to death from a neck wound, at the time where there were plenty of witnesses who saw Jane at a party. They would have pulled it off if the vital ingredient hadn’t vanished into thin air.
    â€˜Meg’s method was to trap her victim in a dialectic of madness. I’d never dreamed fanaticism could be carried to such lengths, and sound so purely and coolly lucid and convincing – once you’d been brainwashed, that is. I asked her if Mr Dalzell was in fact Jane’s father because I worried about her, and about possible repercussions. “I don’t believe for an instant that Jane knows or cares,” Meg said. “This is a paternalistic society. Mr Dalzell was a symbol of the father of all women.” “A symbol?” I said. “How can you see him as that? He’s now a body in a morgue. Doesn’t that make any difference to you?” “His assassination was symbolic,” Meg replied. “It was a ritual killing. The left hand performs the act figuratively, the right hand performs it literally. There is no difference between the two. He was the incarnation of capitalism. We have incarnated our disapproval of him.”
    â€˜I just didn’t know what to say to all this. It’s the modern evil, I believe, this jumble of Marxism and Tantrism and anything else thrown in, which is used to persuade people to kill each other. Meg went on to tell me that women had been defiled and degraded always, and particularly since the seventeenth century when they had been execrated as witches or elevated to virtuous wives. She said something about “taking one of each” and I should have realized Dalzell’s daughter was in danger but I didn’t, for once again Meg confused me, and I thought she was still talking about the “two-women-in-one” which she claimed was the root of the wrongs of society – the suppression of masculinity in women and of femininity in men. Had I thought then, too, that it was the money they wanted, I’d have been quicker.’
    â€˜So Meg told you nothing definite.’ I was determined to get some facts, if I possibly could, but it was becoming clear to me that there was something quite unusual in the case. Iknew I would have to hear more of this woman’s crazy theories – the future, I fear, is on the way to becoming more and more like this, an endless display of a phenomenon I read somewhere described as ‘evaginative pyrotechnics’. However, if only Stephen could remember Meg admitting to – or perhaps boasting – of the murders we could inform the police and mount a full-scale search.
    â€˜No, no, she didn’t say anything definite,’ Stephen said. ‘She said the power of the word would return through women, that it was when belief in the prophecies of witches and sybils ended that the world began to die.’
    â€˜Oh yes,’ I said. I glanced quickly at Stephen. He sounded quite unmoved by Meg’s wild ideas – I suppose he had heard them many times before. I flipped open the file and turned to the photographs of the body of the daughter of Michael Dalzell. They were a horrible sight. She was lying partly under a sheet but you could see her neck was badly torn. Her eyes, unlike her father’s, were closed. She had what looked like a small tiara in her fair hair. ‘So you saw Jane before this – you’ve seen these, I presume? – happened?’ I handed the police photographs over the desk. Stephen flinched and looked away from them. It crossed my mind that he had persuaded himself by now, to such a degree, of some kind of