On one wall was a blowup from a medieval painting of Hell, with naked sinners being tortured by devils. By its side, a magazine spread of photographs showing a fat naked man cowering in front of an attack dog, and naked people stacked in pyramids, being presided over by soldiers, and again the same attack dogs. The naked people, like the damned in Hell, were doing their best to hide their private parts. Rat had never seen humans look quite so frightened. It looked like pictures from a Nazi concentration camp, but it couldn’t be, because the soldiers were wearing modern camouflage gear and there were women soldiers as well as men. They were grinning.

“What’s that?”

“That’s Abu Ghraib.”

Rat evidently looked blank.

“You know, the prison where U.S. soldiers were torturing Iraqis.”

“Oh.”

“Those are stills from home videos the guards themselves made. Odd, don’t you think, the torturer’s desire to record his crime?”

They both stared at the photographs, until finally Gillem said, “Oh well, let me show you some of my own work.”

He sat her down on a stool with a portfolio of drawings. “These are quite old. I started this series one summer on Exmoor, before Artemio was born.”

The first set of drawings were pastels of horsemen and dogs. They seemed deliberately rough and out-of-scale, with the men bigger than the horses, and the dogs the same size as the men, but the colors were flamboyant—dogs rust red, horses aquamarine or marigold yellow—and they were drawn with an energy Rat enjoyed. When Gillem drew a dog or a hare, you could see it was running flat out. There were more intricate sketches of oak trees, too, that showed you he could draw properly when he chose.

His artwork was bolder, less crabbed than anything Rat would have expected him to produce and she felt relieved by how much she liked it.

The next section of drawings was more sinister. The first set were sketches evidently inspired by the medieval painting of Hell—naked men and women cowering, children curled up hiding. As the drawings continued, these figures were now placed in the same lovely lush green English landscape of hedges and oak trees. There were naked men and women running, and children up a tree. These were hunting scenes, Rat realized, but what the merry horsemen, the lolloping dogs were chasing was humans.

“These were all sketches for a painting,” Gillem explained.

“Can I see the painting?” Rat asked.

“It’s in a warehouse. I don’t have room to keep any of my larger work here. I’m not sure the painting worked out very well. It was for a group exhibition I had a few years ago at a friend’s gallery in Somerset. It was the height of the campaign against blood sports, and everybody thought it was meant to be anti-fox hunting.”

“Was it?”