The Mechanical Music Cabinet of Siegfried Eberhard I had only recently returned from my brief and, if the truth

be told, fruitless trip to Lichtenfels when I received Brunner's message. Lichtenfels had promised a great deal the initial surveys had suggested the recently uncovered vault was of great significance but damp had got in and it was in such a state of degredation that there was little I could do but take some photos and make the long journey home, where I promised myself a holiday Norfolk, perhaps before the excitement of the new term and all its attendant distractions. The message was characteristic of Erhard: terse, slightly over-formal and quite unlike the man himself; but he requested that, if the time be available to me (he never could quite shake the habit of transferring German datives to English) I join him in a small but very promising project in a little town on the Rhein. He gave a few more details, yet I must admit to mixed feelings, as after the disappointment of Lichtenfels I wasn't greatly keen on another long drive straight back to Germany, but I enjoyed Erhard's company and he was a fascinating man to work with, a true master of his field, who also took great delight in mechanical devices of all forms and sizes. Rdesheim turned out to be a pretty enough place: a smallish collection of half-timbered houses clustered close to the Rhein, where in summer the tourists queue for hours to float over the grapes (or so the rather badly translated sign describes the little cable-car ride to Assmanshausen; such points have always irritated me) but in January it keeps itself to itself. The alleys are free of the riot of Ramsch and tat that spoils them and the vines, bare of leaves, seem like the rows of Echion's men before flesh covered their bones. I was glad to get inside the Wirtshaus and out of the driving rain to find Erhard at a corner table. He greeted me warmly and for some time we talked fo anything but what he called 'real work.' His son had recently graduated (to Erhard's limitless disappointment he had become a lawyer) and his wife's sister (a sulky lady who ran a nasty restaurant in Hirschaid near Nuremberg) had lost her dog to a passing Mercedes, which amused him no end, almost as much as the anecdote about his detested colleague who had set fire to his coat while using a blowtorch to strip paint at home. Eventually, though, we both felt obliged to discuss his reasons for calling me to Rdesheim. 'It's nothing, really,' he said, although as he spoke I could not help but notice how often and with what apparent nervous agitation he flicked the ash from his cigarette. For as long as I had known him he had been a man of extraordinary delicacy and skill in brushwork never had I seen such a steady hand and equally broad, expansive gestures over a glass of red wine. But now his motions were cramped and agitated, and I noticed, too, that the ash-tray contained a great many cigarette-butts. 'You'll like ths room, I think,' he went on. 'It's in a nice state, and the vault is in surprisingly good condition, listed in the archive as the result of work in 1563, although the maker's name wasn't recorded. Lovely, though, and yielding some fascinating material for study. What struck me is that whoever mixed the base layer of plaster used some very odd ingredient indeed. It's quite unlike anything I've seen: perhaps you'll make more of it than I've managed to.'

'And what's the house like?' 'Now, my friend,' (and at this he brightened) 'is part of the fun for me. It houses the most remarkable collection of music boxes and the like, mechanical musical instruments, and so on. All sorts, really: there are some delightful clocks fascinating mechanisms gramophones, barrel organs. All manner of little wonders.' As he described this, his old ebullience returned, and we spent the rest of the eventing working our way through the excellent local Sptburgunder, Erhard describing with lively enthusiasm the intricacies of barrel organ construction and the various theories about how early twentieth century piano rolls were recorded. 'At least,' he remarked, 'we will have Schnabel and von Sauer to accompany our work.' The following morning brought brighter weather and I took the opportunity to take an early walk before breakfast, not least to clear a slightly fuzzy head. As a rule I do not drink while away on a project trembling hands are undesirable in my line of work but Erhard has a constitution that seems impervious to the effects of alcohol, and I had let myself be swept along past my bedtime. The coffee at breakfast was less poisonous than what one usually encounters in hotels such as mine, and the landlady kindly provided a boiled egg that I might be spared the horrors of cold ham for breakfast. I asked after Erhard, but he had, it was reported, gone on ahead of me while I was out taking the air, so I gathered my case and found the Mechanisches Musikkabinett a short walk from the hotel, at the head of a narrow street that ran down, across the railway tracks, to the river. The place was as extraordinary as Erhard had given me to believe. A sullen cleaning lady let me in (through the horrors of her accent (somewhere between Hessisch and Plattdeutsch) I discerned that the building was otherwise deserted, the Betriebsleitung being away until the museum reopened in March) and I found myself wandering rather aimlessly, Erhard not answering my calls. From every corner gleamed mirrors mottled with age, surrounded by frames of gaudy bouquets of carved flowers. One great instrument filled a whole wall of a large room and, in the half-light that filtered through the shuttered windows, I could make out 'Webers Wundersymphonie. gebaut 1910', next to which stood a glass cabinet containing dozens of dusty boxes labelled with the names of Beethoven, Widor and Strauss; the paper rols, I assumed, to feed into the machine to bring it to life. Through a heavy set of double doors I passed into a cellar where a turbaned sultan grinned from the shadows of an ancient fairground organ. I paused for a moment to let my eyes accustom themselves to the dark, and, in the stillness, was surprised to hear a squeaking noise. Fearing a rat (I have no head for such things) I whirled round, to find a little puppet swinging on a seat on a miniature carousel. I assumed I must have brushed against it as I came in, but to my relief it did not seem damaged, for that would certainly have brought the wrath of the cleaner upon my head. I made my way through the house, pausing at times to admire an interesting window or suchlike. It was a good not wonderful example of a patrician's house, one of those places that grew over time, and I wondered how much of the old building was left, as the rooms through which I had passed all bore the stamp of many renovations in many tastes. Everywhere, though, there were musical instruments of all kinds. I was drawn to a beautiful old gramophone; to me it was a mystery how anyone could derive sound from the thing, although to Erhard it was a beautiful

mechanism to be pored over and analysed as a distraction from plaster dust and old pigments. I sat for a moment on an unprepossessing chair, ugly enough to be intended only for staff, I thought, which gave me a terrible fright when it started playing Die Lorelei on a little musical box inside the seat. Another room contained a collection of mechanical accordions, faintly grotesque, I thought. I found Erhard working in a room that was strikingly different to its predecessors, and it confirmed my hopes to find some remnant of the original house. It was almost square, about ten feet across, and with a heavy vault apparently of the local sandstone (not unlike the church at Bingen in colour, it occurred to me at the time) with some very well preserved frescoes. A temptation and expulsion from Eden flanked the doorway, and Samson and Delilah were exchanging hair-care tips to my right. It was mostly Old Testament scenes, painted rather charmingly, and Erhard was working on a small scaffold on the opposite side of the room, concentrating intently on a large panel dominated by a writhing, open-mouthed fish which was clearly in the middle of making a meal of Jonah. In this painting, Nineveh was a many-towered place, where bits of Nuremberg, Eichstatt and Cologne provided the immediately recognisable features. 'Wonderful, isn't it?' 'I should say so. You've made a real find here.' 'Have you seen the tiles? I'm regretting not getting someone who knows a thing or two about ceramics to have a look.' He had a point. I registered that the floor must easily predate the vault by four hundred years, and it struck me that I'd seen a similar pattern in the pilgrimage church of St Walpurgus in Leudsdorf while working there a few years back. In the corner of the room, and more recent than the vault by about the same age as the floor predated it, stood a grand piano, to which Erhard directed my attention. 'There's Schnabel for you. Shall we listen to his Chopin? There's something rather magical about listening to the piano roll, much more than a recording. It's as if he were in the room, but just that we cannot see him.' I must admit that, to my ears Schnabel was on pretty poor form, the tempo lurching around and the chords decidedly lumpily struck, but Erhard took evident delight in watching the fragile roll work through the mechanism. Together we examined Jonah as Schnabel struggled with the Waterfall etude, and Erhard hummed the bass line quietly under his breath. The scene was even more rewarding from close to: the city was realised in great detail, and I could see why Erhard was so keen to understand the techniques of the plastering, as I had never seen anything quite like this in this region. He was it was right that it was unusual, and I looked forward to the challenge of uncovering its provenance. 'It's a wonderful piece. Tell me about the discoveries you've made.' 'It was fabulous. The room has barely been opened for a hundred years: it's only when they brought that piano in that they decided to make it available to the public. There's not much light the window over there looks north, but the vines coming so close to it keep the worst of the

weather away. The plaster was a little cracked but that's easily enough fixed, and someone tried a century or so ago to touch up one or two of the details. They didn't do a bad job, and I've been able to take their additions off without too many problems. 'Whoever painted this city, though, seems to have paid more attention to that than the fish. Just look at the crudeness fo the colouring of its scales, and compare that to the way he's drawn the crowd on the shore. The odd thing is, I found this fellow in the middle very crudely painted over, with no attempt to disguise what had been done, but with great, thick strokes, as if they wanted to erase him entirely. They came away easily, but he's an odd-looking fellow, don't you think?' Erhard was right, the figure was striking, even among the lively characters gathered on the seafront. They were a typical gaggle of yokels, but he wore the dark robes of a Lutheran minister and, even though he was little more than two inches high, I could clearly see he wore an expression of extreme, ferocious hate, and his right hand was raised to point directly to the viewer. What struck me most was the distinctiveness of the features: a strong, almost aquiline nose and dark brows. It gave the impression of having been painted from life. 'What do you think of him?' I asked. 'I don't remember any mention of this chap in the legend. Do you think there's some local significance in him?' 'There may be. There were plenty of fiery preachers in this region, some of whom came to quite sticky ends. It was the usual diet of millenialist blood and thunder, denouncing earthly pleasures and whatnot.' 'That might ruffle some feathers here.' 'It got to the point where there was a church pulled down after the preacher refused to stop calling for a peasants' uprising. It wasn't far from here, just over in Assmanshausen. There's a lovely record of the trial in the archive there, but nothing remains of the church itself. Everything of value was grabbed and sold off, much to the ire of the locals, who saw him as something of a saint.' We talked a little longer, but, as was our habit, fell to working silently, each absorbed in his own little patch. Every now and then Erhard would put a little music on the piano, and a jerky rendition of Brahms broke the stillness for a little while. I couldn't quite say why, but Erhard seemed to relax a little when the music played, and I noticed that my hand moved more steadily. I'm not sure how long we worked for, but the weak light eventually got the better of me, and when I suggested that we pause for coffee, Erhard did not argue. Instead, he positively sprang down from the scaffold and, after a swig from a Thermos, insisted that I follow him through the door on the opposite side of the room to that through which I had entered. It lead into a room longer and narrower, but with the same low, heavy vault. This was plainly decorated, but there was a very interesting crucifixion scene painted on the west wall. While by no means of the same quality as the Isenheim altar, it possessed the same sensibility of agonised suffering, blood oozing from around the nails, and the crown of thorns digging into Christ's brow. There were donors along the bottom, looking fervently upon their redeemer. This room had once been the chapel, and I noticed the floor continued the deep red tiles with their distinctive herringbone pattern. There were cabinets on either wall, mostly containing little musical boxes, but my attention was drawn to a nice medieval crucifix, gold with pretty filigree. The cabinet was unlocked, so I inspected the piece, finding a small inscription, an odd mixture of old German and

fragments of Latin. I could make out the name of the saint Sebald, but little more, and asked Erhard to translate it for me. 'Funny you should pick this,' he said. 'It seems to be from Assmanshausen see where it is dedicated to mejne Kircke Sankt Seb. Asmanshn.' I wouldn't be at all surprised if this didn't make its way here after the destruction of their church. But, my friend, take a look at this. It's a beautiful piece of work, Bohemian, from about 1780. There's no mark, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it came from Murau's workshop. I'd dearly love to open it up and have a look, but the work is so fine I'm terrified I'd break it.' In his hand he held a small brass box, in length and breadth about the size of a cigarette packet, but about two inches deep. He flicked a small clasp, and the lid opened to reveal a tiny bird, no more than an inch high, which, worked by clockwork, flapped its little wings and sang quite wonderfully. So remarkably lifelike was the effect that I asked Erhard if I could look at it, but, as he passed the box to me, he suddenly withdrew his hand, and, had I not been ready to take it from him, the bird would certainly have fallen. 'The blasted thing's cut me!' he exclaimed, and there was quite a nasty-looking wound in his thumb. It was already bleeding, but not so severely that a tissue pressed to it would not stem the flow. 'I think I've had enough of that little thing,' he went on. 'Just the other day it scratched me nastily while I was inspecting the maker's mark. I'll mention it to the management: there must be a problem with the spring.' After this, we continued working, but Erhard was not happy. He played more music than usual, and even though we had electric lights with us, insisted on downing tools as soon as it began to get dark outside, which was well before five. I was expecting to work late into the night, as we had often done together before, but he packed his things and left almost without a word to me. I must admit, I was glad to be back in the hotel, even just for the banal conversation with the landlady about the weather prospects (which did not bode well). We ate, and after supper sat with a glass of wine, talking about the day's work. At around ten I mentioned I might like to go to bed, as I wanted to make progress on the plaster the next day, but Erhard suddenly became agitated, as he had been the previous night. 'Don't go to bed yet, old sport,' he said. 'Stay and talk a little longer. It's not late, and I do enjoy having your company.' I was tired, but I would not leave a friend who was clearly lonely. What struck me more, though, was that he seemed frightened. He would not talk of it though, and I did not want to intrude, so we played a quiet hand of cards and, eventually went our separate ways to bed. The next couple of days passed without any incident worth recalling here. Erhard and I made good progress on the painting, and only once did we run into the formidable Putzfrau, whose broom and evil temper we took pains to avoid. We kept to a regular schedule, starting work early and finishing as soon as it began to grow dark outside, and our evenings were full of good companionship and excellent wine. The third day of my stay in Rudesheim was beautiful, and it felt like a shame to spend one's vacation indoors when the sun was shining and a crisp, cool wind was blowing. As the chair-lift

was out of action, I resolved to take a walk over to Assmanshausen, which was little more than a mile away through the vineyards. Erhard would not join me, as he was in the middle of some delicate work, but was pleased when I told him I did not intend being out much beyond the early afternoon. The walking was easy, thanks to the fine, gravelly soil, and I soon found myself in the narrow lanes of the village. It was dominated by a baroque church, a rather nasty sixteenthcentury thing full of bad italianate paintings and leaflets about the mother-children charitable dog walk. The village had made its fortune from wine, and there were some impressively substantial dwellings on its fringes, including a fine Schloss, replete with a slightly unconvincing tower that would look more at home on stage in Bayreuth. That, unfortunately was closed, but the little museum in the Rathaus was open, and I was reminded that this stretch of land had once been the frontier of the Roman empire, the wall beyond which only savages were to be found. There was a section devoted to the religious upheavals of the early sixteenth century, and from this I gleaned that the trial had been a truly vicious affair, even for those troubled times. Torture was routine, and they even fetched a specialist from Nuremberg who brought with him a selection of vile machines, which were put to use on whole families, children being forced to sit on spikes while their mothers watched. The pastor was named as a certain Glasl, whose body, so the legend had it, did not decompose after his hanging, but was kept in secret by the villagers until it was stolen (or, to my mind, became too unpleasant to keep in one's house). There being little else to detain me, I made my way back across the fields to Rudesheim, enjoying the watery sunshine and looking forward to sharing my findings with Erhard. I found him in the room, quietly working on Belshazzar's feast, although he gave something of a start when I came in. I told him of what I'd read in Assmanshausen, to which he expressed deep disdain, calling the villagers 'buffoons' for stubbornly holding on to their 'ridiculous' faith. The story of the 'unverweslicher Korper' of Pastor Glasl amused him greatly, and he roared at the idea of people shuffling it from one place to another. I was keen, though, to have another look at the painting of the crowd, as, although I knew there could be no final verification of the identity of the man in the pastor's robes, I couldn't help a certain childish curiosity. What struck me, though, was that the crowd was different to the one I had inspected a few days before. There was a particularly ugly farrier whom I had not seen before, and there seemed to be more children milling about. 'Have you been working on this section again, Erhard?' I asked, as it seemed like many of the faces in the crowd had been very recently retouched. 'No, I've been working over here. Why do you ask?' 'It's just that the crowd seems different from the other day. Oh, I must have overlooked them when I was examining this fellow in the centre. They're in lovely condition, though.' With this Erhard agreed, and remarked that they did look very fresh, almost, in one or two cases, as if the paint were barely dry, but we attributed this to the a trick of the light, which was brighter than we had grown used to. We worked on, falling back straight away into our old routines, and Erhard put music on every now and then, extolling to me the virtues of Schnabel's performances of Beethoven. However, when he got up to change a roll at the end of one sonata, he paused, and asked me to listen. Quite clearly we could hear one of the organs playing down in the cellar, immediately recognisable as Fuk's Entry of the Gladiators, a piece which I had always detested. Erhard was

very angry, and cursed the Putzfrau for her carelessness in knocking one of the fine old organs so hard that it started playing, and resolved to speak to her about it in the morning.

The following day I again breakfasted alone, the landlady telling me that Erhard had again gone on ahead, mentioning something about making the most of the light. I hurried after him, to find him already in the room, his hands shaking as he unpacked his brushes and tools. I had never seen him so agitated, and his voice quavered with anger. 'The stupid Putzfrau! Dumme Sau! How dare she? She knows full well that I leave this place locked when I leave. This is eine Schande. Ich hab' die Nase voll, I tell you.' 'But Erhard,' I sought to placate him, 'what has she done? She's not touched the painting has she?' 'Oh I don't care for that. The woman's accused me of leaving one of the barrel organs switched on overnight; she says she heard it playing at god-knows-when-o'clock this morning, because she lives just over the road. Stupid woman! And that, after she had the nerve to lie about turning one of the things on yesterday afternoon' 'But we heard nothing as we left, and I saw you lock the door to the courtyard.' 'Well, she swears by it. She says she knows the one, too: it's a foul thing a couple of rooms away from here. Built for an American circus owner, and covered in puppets and monkeys and that sort of muck.' He shook as he said this, and, slamming his case down on the piano lid, he strode from the room. I followed, almost at a run, as we swept through the chapel where yesterday's accident had happened, and into an adjoining room, half of which was given over to a workshop of some kind. The instruments in here were a far cry from the beautiful workmanship of the other rooms: they were festooned with cheap puppets, little dolls in shabby pink frocks, and evil-looking monkeys with leering eyes and gaping mouths, grasping at violins and cymbals. Erhard turned when he got to the largest of them, frantically directing my attention to the pile of paper on the floor before it. 'The stupid woman's left this in a terrible state, and look how it's all fouled up in the mechanism there!' I barely recognised him from the man with whom I had spent years in almost monastic stillness, for he was now desperately trying to rearrange the tangled folds into their original order. 'Look at how it's all fouled up in the mechanism there,' he cried, and I would have been hard pressed to deny that there were tears in his eyes as he tried to pry loose the torn and twisted paper from the guide-pins. 'Erhard, my friend, I think it's best left as it is. We'll call Feldkirchner (for such was the manager's name) and let him know what's happened. He'll sort it out. Let's go and find somewhere quiet for coffee.' 'No, this won't take me a moment. I just need to lift this lever here, and I'll be able to free up the pins in the back.' I was worried. Inside the machine I could see rows of evil-looking pins that meshed into the holes of the paper and I was worried Erhard would catch himself on one. They looked none too clean, and I feared that even he, with his preternatural ability to keep a steady hand, would find himself struggling in his work. 'It's won't take long now. There's one last pin which seems to have snagged two layers of card, but I'll free it directly.'

Erhard seemed to have calmed a little now; perhaps it was the fact he could concentrate on a technical problem that took his mind off his confrontation with the Putzfrau. I took to inspecting the marionettes on the top of the instrument, horrid little things. The girls faces were, I supposed, intended to be full of the flush of youthful beauty, but the sickly pink paint on their lips gave them the air of some cheap tart, and the monkeys, I could not help but think, could have been members of a black and white minstrel band. The inscription on a small label explained this: the organ had been built for an American in the early twenties, and it had lost none of the vicious excess of that era. The inscription was faded, and I had to peer closely at it to make out the dates of the instruments manufacture, but I was interrupted by a shout from Erhard, calling me an ass and an idiot for knocking the power switch and turning the machine on. I assured him I hadnt, but he was right, for the organs bellows began to wheeze and I could hear the clanking of the mechanism. I got my hand out just in time, no thanks to your stupidity, muttered Erhard. That would have torn my fingers off if I hadnt been quicker about it. This angered me, for I had at no stage touched the switch, which was in any case clearly visible on the far side of the instrument. Erhard, however, was not to be placated, and stormed at me that I should take more care, and that I was an incompetent fool. I felt it better to remain silent, and I turned and went quietly back to the scaffold, feeling it better to say nothing than to inflame Erhards temper any more. He sulked, making a great show of not looking in my direction, and of making a great noise whenever he wished to find another tool or to move about on the scaffold. After a while I could stand it no longer and, making the pretence of taking some of the plaster away to examine in more detail, I left him to his work. He did not even acknowledge my leaving, and I returned to the hotel where I found the small desk in my room was entirely adequate to look over the sample. It was fascinating work, and I got quite lost in my analysis, for when I looked up at the clock it was early afternoon. I took lunch in the bar, although the pork filet swimming in grease did little to settle my stomach, and returned to my desk. Despite all the mornings work, I was still no closer to ascertaining exactly what it was that leant the plaster such remarkable smoothness, or caused it to take the paint quite so well. Whoever had mixed it was a skilled craftsmen, and the materials were fine, but I could not account for its extraordinary whiteness. So I worked on, spending some time writing up my thoughts, and did not notice that, by the time I set my pen down, it was quite dark outside. That Erhard had not called for me was no great surprise, but I hoped to find him in the bar with a drink and an apology ready for me. He was not, however, there. The landlady had not seen him, nor had any of the other staff, so I resolved to return to the Musikkabinett and get him to end this stupid disagreement. It was a foul evening, colder and wetter even than the last, and I was glad to get inside the house, despite its darkness and unpleasantly cold atmosphere. The lights were all off, and I made my way tentatively upstairs, careful not to bump into any precious or fragile object. The gramophone glowed eerily in the darkness, and I caught twisted reflections of myself in the mirrors that covered so many old the old cabinets. I expected to hear the piano playing, but it was silent, and my footsteps sounded unpleasantly loud. I was sure Erhard would hear my opening the door to the vaulted room, but if he did so he gave no sign, and sat cross-legged in front of the crowd scene in the Jonah scene. This, too, surprised me, for he had been concentrating on a detail on an

adjacent panel, but the greatest shock came when I saw that he had a brush in his hand and was daubing great thick layers of paint over the robed man. Good God! I cried, what the devil are you up to? He hates us being here, so Im putting him away. Erhards voice was quite calm, and he did not turn to look at me, but continued, putting layer after layer of thick, white paint over the figure. Its him that made the bird sing, you know. Its been singing all afternoon. I tried to stop it, but it pecked me. He held out his hand, a mess of bloody pin-pricks, but pulled it away when I tried to examine the cuts. He hates these things. But Ill cover him up and he wont know, so I can work in peace. He terrified me. His eyes were entirely vacant, and his hand moved with a dull repetitiveness from paint to wall and back again. I tried to talk him out of it, but he merely mumbled incoherent sentences about having to complete the work, and I resorted to trying to hold his wrist, if only to stop him from further damaging the painting. At this, though, he snatched it away, only to pause for a moment and to look in the direction of the next room. Faintly, but quite distinctly, I could hear the sound of bird calls, and I rushed in, looking around frantically for the little musical box. Before I could find it, though, I saw through the other door that the awful monster which had nearly taken Erhards hand off this morning was now a wreck: the front was shattered and splintered, and the puppets lay strewn across the floor. With a start I turned and found Erhard standing beside me. I didnt want it to play again, he said, quite calmly, so I stopped those nasty little apes with their cymbals and violins. They wont trouble me now. While he spoke I found myself frozen in horror. He had picked up the little musical box with the singing bird, and was cradling it in his hand. The bird, which when first I saw it had gently fluttered its wings, was now moving with wild agitation, swinging around on its little brass peg to get at Erhards hands. To attempt to close the lid was clearly foolish, for the sharp little beak would snap at any finger that came close. He held it away from his body, arms outstretched, rather in the manner of a priest at the elevation, and began to wander towards the door. I tried to stop him but he shrugged me off, and began to walk faster, breaking into a run as I shouted for him to stop. I chased after him, but found myself impeded at every step by a cabinet or some obscene contraption. By the time I gained the room with the gramophone, I heard the front door slam shut. It took an age to open the shutters, and even then I could not open the window, which seemed to have jammed, and I could just make out Erhard running headlong down the alley which led to the river. The weather had not abated and the driving rain obscured him from my sight with astonishing rapidity; I could only hope he had seen the lights of the train which was racing towards the level crossing. Needless to say, I stayed no longer in that cabinet of horrors. Even as I left, I heard the terrible wheeze of cracked leather bellows, and I slammed shut the front door and ran to the hotel, intending to call the police as soon as I was there. Of this, however, there proved to be no need, for I was met by a young man in drab uniform, who asked me to sit down. It did not take long for it to become clear that Erhard had not seen the train, and that the fact he carried his Personalausweis in his wallet made the task of identifying a beheaded corpse rather easier. I enquired of the musical box, but nothing had been seen. I can only assume he threw it into the river.

I returned to England, not wishing to stay any longer in Rdesheim, but took with me the sample of plaster for my colleague, Stevens to look at. It was a few weeks later that we managed to discuss his chemical analysis of the compound. You know, he said, as we walked across the quad, there seemed to be all manner of extraordinary things mixed in with that plaster. All the usual stuff, but even bits of metal gold, silver and the like. Quite how it held together, I dont know, but I think it might have something to do with something rather nastier that I was able to isolate: the whiteness you remarked on comes from the fact theres a good deal of bone in the compound, and I couldnt help but think the quantities of iron suggest blood had been used at some stage as a binding agent. The oddest thing is, that the bone may well have been human.