1981. One person alone. He gets up late that day, weary in his bones, and he struggles to clean the lower rooms of the house, ready for Adeline’s visit. He has prepared a few of the older dresses for her, in their favoured locations. He really is looking forward to seeing her. Every so often, he stops to catch his breath. The appointed hour comes, but his granddaughter has not yet arrived. Can she have forgotten? No matter, he must continue: the spirit must be roused. He lays out a new dress on the floor of the living room, in front of the fireplace. He has already torn it at the midriff, the spot he knows so well, the site of the first ever wound. But something takes him over: perhaps a feeling of loneliness, or a sense of futility. He takes a razor blade to his arm, and allows the droplets of blood to fall on the blue cloth and the yellow flowers. This will be Leonard’s last ritual. The years weigh heavy. A sticking plaster stops the flow of blood; he would hate his best white shirt to be ruined. His blazer fits as it did ten years ago. Yes, something to be proud of. He has kept himself trim. And then he sits at the kitchen table, drinking vodka and swallowing sleeping pills: one, two, three, and then a handful. The note to Adeline is safe in his pocket. I’m so sorry. For everything. In other words, for allowing all this to happen. The curse of the family.

I have tried my best to serve you, but can do no more.

Leonard sprays his wife’s favourite perfume on to one of her handkerchiefs, and revels in the scent. He remembers so well when they first met, in the foyer of the Palace Theatre. April 1917. They were married within a month! He smiles at this. But now the darkness is taking hold. Perhaps he recites Prospero’s lines of farewell from The Tempest, speaking them quietly: These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air. How gentle it all seems. These moments. Her name. Yes, he would like her name to be the final word spoken. Adeline.

And then silence.

SLOW MOTION GHOSTS

Jeff Noon

A vicious murder.

A curious clue left on the body.

The soundtrack to the murder still playing …

It is 1981 and DI Henry Hobbes is still reeling in the aftermath of the fire and fury of the Brixton riots. The battle lines of society – and the police force – are being redrawn on a daily basis.

With the certainties of his life already sorely tested, a brutal murder will shake his beliefs to their very core once more. The staged circumstances of the victim pose many questions to which there are no obvious answers.

To track the murderer, Hobbes must cross boundaries into a subculture hidden beneath the everyday world he thought he knew. His investigation takes him into a twisted reality, which is both seductive and devastating, and asks him the one question he has been dreading: how far will he go in pursuit of the truth?