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codes? It was a mystery. Perhaps there was some other way into the house that had been left unlocked.
    Leclerc went back out into the corridor and turned left. The rear of the house opened into a large Victorian-style conservatory, which was being used as an artist’s studio, although it was not exactly art as the inspector understood that term. It looked more like a radiographic unit, or possibly a glazier’s workshop. On the original exterior wall of the house was a vast collage of electronic images of the human body – digital, infrared, X-ray – along with anatomical drawings of various organs, limbs and muscles.
    Sheets of non-reflecting glass and Perspex, of various sizes and thicknesses, were stored in wooden racks. In a tin trunk were dozens of files, bulging with computer images, carefully labelled: ‘MRI head scans, 1–14 Sagittal, Axial, Coronal’; ‘Man, slices, Virtual Hospital, Sagittal & Coronal’. On a bench were a light box, a small vice and a clutter of inkpots, engraving tools and paint brushes. There was a hand drill in a black rubber stand, with a dark blue tin next to it – ‘Taylor’s of Harrogate, Earl Grey Tea’ – crammed full of drill heads, and a pile of glossy brochures for an exhibition entitled ‘Human Contours’ due to begin that very day at a gallery on the Plaine de Plainpalais. There was a biographical note inside: ‘Gabrielle Hoffmann was born in Yorkshire, England. She took a joint honours degree in art and French from the University of Salford, and received an MA from the Royal College of Art, London. For several years she worked for the United Nations in Geneva.’ He rolled the brochure into a cylinder and stuffed it into his pocket.
    Next to the bench, mounted on a pair of trestles, was one of her works: a 3D scanned image of a foetus composed of about twenty sections drawn on sheets of very clear glass. Leclerc bent to examine it. Its head was disproportionately large for its body, its spindly legs drawn up and tucked beneath it. Viewed from the side it had depth, but as one shifted one’s perspective to the front it seemed to dwindle, then vanish entirely. He could not make out whether it was finished or not. It had a certain power, he was forced to concede, but he couldn’t have lived with it himself. It looked too much like a fossilised reptile suspended in an aquarium. His wife would have thought it disgusting.
    A door from the conservatory led out to the garden. It was locked and bolted; no key nearby that he could find. Beyond the thick glass, the lights of Geneva wavered across the lake. A solitary pair of headlights made its way along the Quai du Mont-Blanc.
    Leclerc left the conservatory and returned to the passage. Two more doors led off it. One turned out to be a lavatory containing a big old-fashioned water closet, into which Leclerc took the opportunity to relieve himself, and the other a storage room filled with what appeared to be detritus from the Hoffmanns’ last house: rolls of carpet tied with twine, a bread-making machine, deckchairs, a croquet set, and, at the far end, in pristine condition, a baby’s cot, a changing table, and a clockwork mobile of stars and moons.

3

    Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals .

    CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man (1871)

    ACCORDING TO THE records subsequently released by the Geneva medical service, the ambulance radioed to report that it was leaving the Hoffmanns’ residence at 5.22. At that hour it was only a five-minute drive through the empty streets of central Geneva to the hospital.
    In the back of the ambulance Hoffmann maintained his refusal to obey regulations and lie down on the bed, but instead sat upright with his legs over the side, brooding and defiant. He was a brilliant man, a rich man, accustomed to being listened to with respect. But now suddenly he found he had been deported to some poorer and less-favoured land: the kingdom of the sick, where