A Fatal Inversion Read Online Free PDF

sweat standing on his face, on his upper lip, and forehead. Wiping it away with his handkerchief, he closed his eyes, opened them, and looked around the room, then back at the newsprint in front of him, as if he might have been dreaming or have imagined it. The paragraph, of course, was still there.
    There was no reason, Shiva thought after the first shock had subsided, to suppose any connection between this find and Ecalpemos. Suffolk was the only link, and he could remember quite distinctly, on first going to Nunes, how there had been some dispute as to whether it was in Suffolk or Essex. The blurring of boundaries, which took place at about that time, had created such anomalies as a householder having an Essex postal address while paying his taxes to the Suffolk County Council. This, surely, was what had actually happened to Adam Verne-Smith.
    It was not quite true that this was the only connecting link. The other, of course, was the body, the young woman’s body. Shiva thought, I must wait for more news, I must bear it and wait.
    His patient was close to fifty, a handsome, tall woman, very well-dressed. Her expensive clothes—Jasper Conran, he guessed—she had put on again and, while behind the screen, a little more lipstick. He had just done a smear test on her.
    “You have a very nice inside,” he told her, smiling.
    The nurse smiled too. She could afford to, being twenty years younger and with her gynecological problems, if any, taken care of by Dr. Fletcher for free.
    Mrs. Strawson said she was very glad to hear it. She looked happy and relaxed. Rufus gave her a cigarette. One of the many aspects of his personality which endeared him to his patients—the others being good looks, charm, youth, boyishness, and treating them like equals—was his inability to give up smoking.
    “I am that monstrous sinner,” he would say to them, “the doctor that smokes. Each one of us is said to be worth fifty thousand pounds of advertising per year to the tobacco companies.”
    And the patient, especially if she didn’t smoke, would feel empathy for him and maternal toward him. Poor boy, with all that stress, he works so hard, it’s only natural he needs something to keep him going. Mrs. Strawson inhaled gratefully. This was her first visit to Rufus Fletcher in Wimpole Street, and she was already delighted to have taken up her friend’s recommendation.
    “Now, how about contraception? Do you mind telling me what method you’re using?”
    After that implication that she was still in the prime of her fertile years, Mrs. Strawson wouldn’t have minded telling him anything. An account of an ancient intrauterine device, implanted twenty years before and never since then disturbed, made them all laugh once more. Rufus, however, suggested he should take a look, just to be on the safe side.
    The Jasper Conran dress removed once more, Mrs. Strawson got back on the table. Rufus had a probe around. It was impossible to tell whether the thing that she had surprisingly described as being shaped like a Greek alpha was still there or not. His thoughts wandered to the Standard, which he had folded up and stuffed into the top drawer of his desk when Mrs. Strawson was announced. It could not refer to the events of ten years past, of course it couldn’t. If it had been the house and the body, it would surely have referred not to digging a woodland grave but to digging in an animal cemetery. They would not have gotten that wrong. Rufus had forgotten how often he castigated the press for inaccuracy, how constantly he said to Marigold that you couldn’t believe a word you read. He told—or, rather, politely asked—Mrs. Strawson to get dressed again.
    “If we attempted to remove it,” he said to her, “it would have to be done under anaesthetic. I don’t suppose you want that, do you? It’s not harming you. Rather the reverse, I should say. It seems to have done you proud. Why not let it continue with the good work?”
    He sometimes