Satisfied, she stood, and the deep blue silk of the dressing gown puddled at her feet. She stepped in and sank into the water, Aphrodite returning from whence she came, razor in hand.

Victoria McClellan lifted her hands from the keyboard, took a breath, and shook herself What in hell had just happened to her? She was a biographer, for Christ’s sake, not a novelist, and she’d never experienced anything like this, certainly never written anything like this. She had felt the water slide against her skin, had known the seductive terror of the razor.

She shivered. It was all absolute rubbish, of course. The whole passage would have to go. It was full of supposition, conjecture, and the loss of objectivity that was fatal to a good biography. Swiftly, she blocked the text, then hesitated with her finger poised over the delete key. And yet… maybe the more rational light of morning would reveal something salvageable. Rubbing her stinging eyes, she tried to focus on the clock above her desk. Almost midnight. The central heating in her drafty Cambridgeshire cottage had shut off almost an hour ago and she suddenly realized she was achingly cold. She flexed her stiff fingers and looked about her, seeking reassurance in familiarity.

The small room overflowed with the flotsam of Lydia Brooke’s life, and Vic, tidy by nature, sometimes felt powerless before the onslaught of paper-letters, journals, photographs, manuscript pages, and her own index cards-all of which defied organization. But biography was an unavoidably messy job, and Brooke had seemed a biographer’s dream, tailor-made to advance Vic’s position in the English Faculty. A poet whose brilliance was surpassed only by the havoc of a personal life strewn with difficult relationships and frequent suicide attempts, Brooke survived the late-sixties episode in the bath for more than twenty years. Then, having completed her finest work, she died quietly from an overdose of heart medication.