The Fear Index

portrait of the foetus, lifting each sheet of glass out of its slot on the wooden base, wrapping it in tissue paper and then in bubble wrap, and laying it in a cardboard box. She found herself thinking how strange it was that so much creative energy should have flowed from the black hole of this tragedy. She had lost the baby two years ago, at five and a half months: not the first of her pregnancies that had ended in a miscarriage, but easily the longest and by far the most shattering. The hospital had given her an MRI scan when they began to get concerned, which was unusual. Afterwards, rather than stay on her own in Switzerland, she had gone with Alex on a business trip to Oxford. Wandering round a museum while he was interviewing PhDs in the Randolph Hotel, she had come across a 3D model of the structure of penicillin built up on sheets of Perspex in 1944 by Dorothy Hodgkin, the Nobel laureate for chemistry. An idea had stirred in her mind, and when she got home to Geneva, she had tried the same technique on the MRI scan of her womb, which was all she had left of the baby.
    It had taken a week of trial and error to work out which of the two hundred cross-sectional images to print off, and how to trace them on to glass, what ink to use and how to stop it smearing. She had sliced her hands repeatedly on the sharp edges of the glass sheets. But the afternoon when she first lined them up and the outline had emerged – the clenched fingers, the curled toes – was a miracle she would never forget. Beyond the window of the apartment where they had lived in those days, the sky had turned black as she worked; brilliant yellow flashes of forked lightning had stabbed down over the mountains. She knew nobody would believe it if she told them. It was too theatrical. It had made her feel as if she were tapping into some elemental force: tampering with the dead. When Alex came home from work and saw the portrait, he had sat stunned for ten minutes.
    After that she had become utterly absorbed by the possibilities of marrying science and art to produce images of living forms. Mostly she had acted as her own model, talking the radiographers at the hospital into scanning her from head to toe. The brain was the hardest part of the anatomy to get right. She had to learn which were the best lines to trace – the aqueduct of Sylvius, the cistern of the great cerebral vein, the tentorium cerebellum and the medulla. The simplicity of the form was what appealed to her most, and the paradoxes it carried – clarity and mystery, the impersonal and the intimate, the generic and yet the absolutely unique. Watching Alex going through the CAT scanner that morning had made her want to produce a portrait of him. She wondered if the doctors would let her have his results, or if he would allow her to do it.
    She wrapped up the last of the glass sheets tenderly, and then the base, and sealed the cardboard box with thick brown sticky tape. It had been a painful decision to offer this, of all her works, to the exhibition: if someone bought it, she knew she would probably never see it again. And yet it seemed to her an important thing to do: that this was the whole point of creating it in the first place – to give it a separate existence, to let it go out into the world.
    She picked up the box and carried it out into the passageway as if it were an offering. On the handles of the doors leading off the corridor, and on the wooden panels, were traces of bluish-white powder where the surfaces had been dusted for fingerprints. In the hall, the blood had been cleaned off the floor. The surface was still damp, showing where Alex had been lying when she discovered him. She carefully skirted the spot. A noise came from inside the study and she felt her skin rise into gooseflesh just as a man’s heavy shape loomed in the doorway. She gave a cry of alarm and almost dropped the box.
    She recognised him. It was the security expert, Genoud. He had shown her how to use the alarm system when they first moved in. Another man was with him – heavyset, like a wrestler.
    ‘Madame Hoffmann, forgive us if we startled you.’ Genoud had a grave professional manner. He introduced the other man. ‘Camille has been sent by your husband to look after you for the rest of the day.’
    ‘I don’t need looking after …’ began Gabrielle. But she was too shaken to put up much resistance, and found herself allowing the bodyguard to take the box from her hands and carry it