Status Updates From Delitto d'inverno

Through the window he saw that the clouds were gone. How strange the sky looked, scoured clean and of a powdery blueness, naked - no, nude, after days of being wrapped in layers of dirty cotton.

By the green glow from the dashboard he saw the young man's eyes in the driving mirror swivel to meet his own. Why is it, he wondered, that people always seem so sinister when they look at you in the mirror like that? It was like being spied at through a letter box.

He accepted the coat and the gloves, but declined the cap with the ear flaps. There were limits, and a deerstalker hat was well beyond them.

He had been to boarding school. His needs were modest.

Frost-laden trees, ghost-white and stark, reared up at him in the headlights, their boughs thrown upwards as if in fright.

There was always the danger, in his job, of seeing things that weren't there, of making a pattern where there wasn't one. The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.

Once, on a bright green summer morning sparkling with dew - she remembered it so clearly - she had disturbed a spider's web that was strung between two heads of cabbage in the kitchen garden, and all the baby spiders had suddenly run out along the threads in all directions[...]. That was how it was with her, [...] all the little black things scurrying away from her were images of herself escaping into the world.

She wore a string of pearls about her pale neck, and an emerald brooch in the shape of a scarab vas pinned to the front of her dress. A small table before her was laid for afternoon tea. There were jugs, silver cruets, bone china cups, little knives, little forks, little spoons. Slices of assorted cakes were arranged on delicate little plates.

As a countryman, Strafford had a healthy respect for Mother Nature, but he had never been able quite to love her. Even in adolescence, when he read Keats and Wordsworth and became a pantheist, he had preferred to watch the grand old lady's cavortings from a safe distance. Nowadays, he saw behind the birdsong and the blossom only the endless and bloody struggle for dominance and survival.

It had snowed continuously for two days, and this morning everything appeared to stand in hushed amazement before the spectacle of such expanses of unbroken whiteness on all sides.

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