“Oh, Harper,” he said sadly, grinning at her all the while. “Oh, Harper.”

And the wind rose again, hard this time, moaning. The moon went out. The mist condensed between them. Harper saw Iago’s figure obscured, almost spectral, as the fog gathered, as the wind blew and blew. In another moment, the thickening night, the thickening mist, cut her off from him completely. She could not see him, could not tell where he was. She raised her stick uncertainly in a feeble gesture of self-defense.

The wind blew on, and the mist blew on, and the moonlight shone down on her once more.

And Iago was gone.

EPILOGUE

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Bernard leaned wearily against the corner of Belham Grange. He watched through hooded eyes as the stretcher-men carried Sir Michael’s body out the front door and to the waiting ambulance. It was all red light before the house: police cars parked at odd angles, their red flashers whipping the thin mist. Constables and detectives moved about busily, their faces expressionless whenever the red beams crossed them.

A little way off the drive, on the grass, in the deeper darkness, Bernard could make out Storm and Sophia. They were standing together, his arm around her shoulder, and they watched the covered stretcher pass as well.

And Bernard watched it. Until it was slid into the back of the ambulance with a heavy metal bang. Until the stretcher-men climbed in after it. Until the doors were clapped shut, and locked.

The tires of the ambulance rattled on the drive’s pebbles. The vehicle turned and headed away from the house, under the canopy of the double row of trees. Storm and Sophia turned too, Bernard saw. Turned and walked away, into the misty field, their heads held down.

Bernard heaved a sigh and shifted uncomfortably in the cool night air. He wondered bitterly if, by careful examination, he might discover some small part of his body that didn’t hurt or throb or ache. He doubted it. He felt he could use a stretcher himself. And an ambulance. Maybe even a body bag. A body bag stuffed with a lot of recreational narcotics. It seemed to him just then a good place to spend the rest of one’s semi-natural life.