Amsterdam

V

1

There were moments in the early morning, after the mild excitement of dawn, with London already heading noisily for work and his creative turmoil finally smothered by exhaustion, when Clive stood from the piano and shuffled to the doorway to turn out the studio lights and looked back at the rich, the beautiful chaos that surrounded his toils, and had once more a passing thought, the minuscule fragment of a suspicion that he would not have shared with a single person in the world, would not even have committed to his journal, and whose key word he shaped in his mind only with reluctance; the thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going too far to say that he was … a genius. A genius. Though he sounded it guiltily on his i

He woke in the late afternoon, pulled on his shoes, and went down to the kitchen to eat the cold plate the housekeeper had left for him. He opened a bottle of wine and took it with him up to the studio, where he would find a full coffee flask and begin a new journey into the night. Somewhere at his back, stalking him like a beast and closing in, was the deadline. In just over a week he must confront Giulio Bo and the British Symphony Orchestra in Amsterdam for two days of rehearsal and, two days after that, the premiere in the Birmingham Free Trade Hall. Given that the mille

And it was almost done. Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Clive revised and perfected the diminuendo. All that was required now was to go back several pages in the score to the clamorous restatement and vary the harmonies perhaps, or even the melody itself, or devise some form of rhythmic undertow, a syncopation that cut into the leading edge of the notes. To Clive, this variation had become a crucial feature of the work’s conclusion; it needed to suggest the future’s unknowability. When that by now familiar melody returned for the very last time, altered in a small and significant way, it should prompt insecurity in the listener; it was a caution against clinging too tightly to what we knew.

On Thursday morning he was in bed, thinking about this and falling asleep, when Vernon phoned. The call was reassuring. Clive had been meaning to get in touch since he returned, but his work had swept him away, and Garmony, the photographs, and the Judge seemed to him like subplots in a barely remembered movie. All he knew was that he did not wish to be quarreling with anyone, least of all one of his oldest friends. When Vernon cut the conversation short and suggested coming by for a drink the following evening, it occurred to Clive that he might have finished by then. He would have written in that important change to the restatement, for it would surely take him no more than one all-night session. The last pages would have been taken away and he might ask in a few friends to make up a celebration party. These were his happy thoughts as he plunged into sleep. It was disorienting, then, to wake what seemed like two minutes later into Vernon’s bullying interrogation.

“I want you to go to the police now and tell them what you saw.”

This was the sentence that jolted Clive into the truth. He emerged from a tu