The Fear Index

but sufficient even so to appreciate that this must be a collection worth millions. No wonder there were so many smoke detectors dotted around the house. The subjects covered were mostly scientific: sociology, psychology, biology, anthropology – nothing anywhere about money.
    He crossed over to the desk and sat down in Hoffmann’s antique captain’s chair. Occasionally the large screen in front of him rippled slightly as the shimmering expanse of figures changed: -1.06, -78, -4.03%, -$0.95 . He could no more decipher it than he could read the Rosetta Stone. If only I could find the key, he thought, maybe I could be as rich as this fellow. His own investments, which he had been persuaded to make a few years back by some pimply ‘financial adviser’ in order to secure a comfortable old age, were now worth only half what he had paid for them. The way things were going, when he retired he would have to take a part-time job: head of security in a department store, maybe. He would work until he dropped – something not even his father and grandfather had had to do. Thirty years with the police and he couldn’t even afford to live in the town where he was born! And who was buying up all the expensive property? Money-launderers, many of them – the wives and daughters of presidents of the so-called ‘new democracies’, politicians from the central Asian republics, Russian oligarchs, Afghan warlords, arms-dealers – the real criminals of the world, in short, while he spent his time chasing teenage Algerian dope-peddlers hanging round the railway station. He made himself stand up and go into another room in order to take his mind off it.
    In the kitchen he leaned against the granite island and studied the knives. On his instructions they had been bagged and sealed in the hope that they might yield fingerprints. This part of Hoffmann’s story he did not understand. If the intruder had come prepared to kidnap, surely he would have armed himself properly beforehand? And a kidnapper would have needed at least one accomplice, maybe more: Hoffmann was relatively young and fit – he would have put up a struggle. So was the motive robbery? But a simple burglar would have been in and out as quickly as he could, taking as much as he could carry, and there was plenty portable here to steal. Everything therefore seemed to point to the criminal being mentally disturbed. But how would a violent psychopath have known the entry 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