The Fear Index

God’s sake, I didn’t buy it, okay?’
    It had come with no message apart from a Dutch bookseller’s slip: ‘Rosengaarden & Nijenhuise, Antiquarian Scientific & Medical Books. Established 1911. Prinsengracht 227, 1016 HN Amsterdam, The Netherlands.’ Hoffmann had pressed the pedal on the waste bin and retrieved the bubble wrap and thick brown paper. The parcel was correctly addressed, with a printed label: ‘Dr Alexander Hoffmann, Villa Clairmont, 79 Chemin de Ruth, 1223 Cologny, Geneva, Switzerland.’ It had been dispatched by courier from Amsterdam the previous day.
    After they had eaten their supper – a fish pie and green salad prepared by the housekeeper before she went home – Gabrielle had stayed in the kitchen to make a few anxious last-minute phone calls about her exhibition the next day, while Hoffmann had retreated to his study clutching the mysterious book. An hour later, when she put her head round the door to tell him she was going up to bed, he was still reading.
    She said, ‘Try not to be too late, darling. I’ll wait up for you.’
    He did not reply. She paused in the doorway and considered him for a moment. He still looked young for forty-two, and had always been more handsome than he realised – a quality she found attractive in a man as well as rare. It was not that he was modest, she had come to realise. On the contrary: he was supremely indifferent to anything that did not engage him intellectually, a trait that had earned him a reputation among her friends for being downright bloody rude – and she quite liked that as well. His preternaturally boyish American face was bent over the book, his spectacles pushed up and resting on the top of his thick head of light brown hair; catching the firelight, the lenses seemed to flash a warning look back at her. She knew better than to try to interrupt him. She sighed and went upstairs.
    Hoffmann had known for years that The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was one of the first books to be published with photographs, but he had never actually seen them before. Monochrome plates depicted Victorian artists’ models and inmates of the Surrey Lunatic Asylum in various states of emotion – grief, despair, joy, defiance, terror – for this was meant to be a study of Homo sapiens as animal, with an animal’s instinctive responses, stripped of the mask of social graces. Born far enough into the age of science to be photographed, their misaligned eyes and skewed teeth nonetheless gave them the look of crafty, superstitious peasants from the Middle Ages. They reminded Hoffmann of a childish nightmare – of grown-ups from an old-fashioned book of fairy tales who might come and steal you from your bed in the night and carry you off into the woods.
    And there was another thing that unsettled him. The bookseller’s slip had been inserted into the pages devoted to the emotion of fear, as if the sender specifically intended to draw them to his attention:

The frightened man at first stands like a statue motionless or breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to escape observation. The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks against the ribs …

    Hoffmann had a habit when he was thinking of cocking his head to one side and gazing into the middle distance, and he did so now. Was this a coincidence? Yes, he reasoned, it must be. On the other hand, the physiological effects of fear were so directly relevant to VIXAL-4, the project he was presently involved in, that it did strike him as peculiarly pointed. And yet VIXAL-4 was highly secret, known only to his research team, and although he took care to pay them well – $250,000 was the starting salary, with much more on offer in bonuses – it was surely unlikely any of them would have spent $15,000 on an anonymous gift. One person who certainly could afford it, who knew all about the project and who would have seen the joke of it – if that was what this was: an expensive joke – was his business partner, Hugo Quarry, and Hoffmann, without even thinking about the hour, rang him.
    ‘Hello, Alex. How’s it going?’ If Quarry saw anything strange in being disturbed just after midnight, his perfect manners would never have permitted him to show it. Besides, he was accustomed to the ways of Hoffmann, ‘the mad professor’, as he called him – and called him it to his face as well as behind his back, it being part of his charm always to speak to everyone in