I felt like an idiot — the papers he had given me were still sitting in my suitcase. In the excitement of leaving for India I hadn’t given them a thought, and it had certainly not occurred to me that they might be useful to tell me what was going on inside my head.

“D’yer read the papers out there?” Sir Westcott’s voice had taken on a new tone. “I don’t think this would be in ’em anyway. I hate to say it, but I owe you an apology. Remember you told me about somebody called Valnora Warren?”

“What about her?”

“She’s dead. They fished her out of the Cherwell four days ago — dead a couple of weeks. An’ she’d been beaten to death before she was put in the water. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you. Do they know who did it?”

“If they do, they’re not telling.” Sir Westcott sounded grim. “Watch your step out there — I’ve put in too much work on you to have it buggered up by some bunch of gangsters.”

“I’ll be careful.” I had just got the closest I would ever get to an expression of concern for my welfare from Sir Westcott.

“Another thing while we’re at it. Remember tellin’ me that your thug friends thought you were carrying Nymphs?”

“I’ll never forget it.”

“Well, I did a bit more checking with the police here about where the drug is coming from. It gets to England from Athens , like I told Tess. But it’s manufactured a lot further East — somewhere like India . An’ Calcutta is one of the biggest centers for use of Nymphs. So keep your eyes peeled for that while you’re there.”

I didn’t say anything — it seemed to me I had more than enough problems, without throwing Nymphs into the act.

“Anyway, are you ready to come on back home yet?” he went on. “Tess seems to have been worrying about you. Beats me why.”

“Tell her I’m fine.” I drew in a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you another thing — not about me this time, and not about Nymphs either. There’s somebody here with an eye problem, and I think it’s caused by childhood ulcers that have scarred the cornea. Can it be operated on?”

“If you’re right about the cause of the problem, it should be easy enough. How old is the patient?”

“A teenager. A girl.”

I don’t think that I imagined the sniff over the phone. It was easy to visualize him, scowling into the set on his desk. He seemed to be a thought reader for my guilty conscience.

“Aye. A girl, you say? Well, a patient is a patient. If you bring her here, I’d see what we could do for her. But watch what you’re playing at. No point in fixing up her eyes if the next thing you know Tess is scratching ’em out. Behave yourself out there — you know damn well Tess is too good for you. Don’t you try—”

The line chose that moment to die completely. I was left standing sweating in the cool of the dark pantry, cursing India in general and its telephone company in particular. Upstairs, the gong was sounding. Ahead lay another evening with Ameera, and whatever went with that thought.

Damnation.

I climbed slowly up the stairs. Leo had got me into all this, completely against my will. It seemed only fair that he ought to be doing a lot more to get me out of it, and I had no doubt at all that the secret of the Belur Package lay in the city of Cuttack. But although Leo’s notes and Ameera’s recollection both pointed in that direction, together with a deep instinctive feeling that perhaps came from my brother, I had no sensation of accomplishment or progress.

What I felt, like a tightness in my gut, was powerful foreboding.

- 11 -

When the brain tissue is cut, as for example in the separation of the hemispheres via severing of the corpus callosum, the damaged nerve cells will not normally regenerate. Although the axons of each cell can produce new sprouts, which could in principle connect anew to the target cells, this sprouting is short-lived. It lasts for only a few days, and it does not produce the needed links to the neuron target cells.

Instead, glial cells proliferate in the damaged region, producing a tangle that blocks neurons as they seek to regenerate axons. The solution to this problem, developed first by Madrill in his groundbreaking work at the turn of the century, is via the Schwann cells — the nonneuronal cells that are present and which can serve to direct axon regrowth in peripheral nerves.

The Madrill treatment inhibits the growth of glial cells in the damaged area, and stimulates the growth of Schwann cells that normally will not be present in the brain. It is the later atrophy and disappearance of the Schwann cells that causes the patient considerable early discomfort, though later possible side effects of the tissue regeneration process are in fact far more serious in their potential consequences…

I rubbed at my tired eyes and leaned back in my seat. This was supposed to be an air-conditioned first-class carriage, but I was sweltering, perspiration running down my forehead. The countryside outside was flying by at more than a hundred and fifty miles an hour, a dizzying blur of green in the long cutting; but the more substantial dizziness was inside my head.

And what I was going through, if the paper in front of me was to be believed, was a mild foretaste of what I had coming in another week or two. That was a depressing thought. Already I seemed to be absorbing words from the page one at a time, poked into my head through a small hole using a rusty nail end. I forced myself to read on — hard going as it was, this was the first paper from Sir Westcott where I could understand even a fraction of what the author was trying to say.

Following the full growth of the axons, and their attachment to the target cells within the brain, the final and most sensitive phase of the Madrill treatment begins. With the mechanical connection complete, it is now necessary for the brain to resume its information processing functions. Although these might appear to be routine, it has been observed that in over thirty percent of the cases where the Madrill treatment has been used, an unstable feedback in the regrown area leads to a variety of psychoses, many of them leading to terminal dysfunctions…

Very nice. The bad bit was still to come, and there was a one in three chance that I wouldn’t come out of the other side. “Terminal dysfunction” — pleasant medical double-talk for madness and death. The odds were a lot worse than Sir Westcott had led me to believe.

So what could I do about it?

Not a thing.

I gave up my efforts to understand the next section of the paper, which was a long discussion of methods used with enzyme injections by the Armenian Academy of Sciences. Instead I looked across the carriage table.

Ameera was painting her nails there, calmly and contentedly. The heat in the compartment didn’t seem to trouble her at all. I couldn’t see how she could fix her nails without being able to see what she was up to, but the purple-red lacquer went on steadily and smoothly. Her sense of the position of one hand relative to the other was almost beyond belief.

Somehow — perhaps I moved in my seat — she knew that my eyes were on her.

“How much longer, Lee-yo-nel?”

“Half an hour, if the train is on time.”

She nodded happily. To Ameera, this whole trip was nothing but pleasure and excitement, an extended school picnic. For the tenth time in two days, I wondered just what sort of friend Chandra thought he was. Instead of agreeing with me that Ameera’s presence in Cuttack would be a total disaster, he had sided with her from the beginning.

“How will you talk to people if you are alone there?” he asked. ” Cuttack is not like Calcutta , where many people speak English.”

(As I later discovered, Chandra was not telling the truth — many people spoke English in each place. But he was being at his most Indian, helping Ameera to get her way from pure perversity.)