Lost in the editing process, a short scene in which Victor breaks into De Vos's hotel room and discovers a Nazi file with his name written all over it.
I was sorry to lose this as it throws forward nicely to future instalments, but it had no reason to be there, so SNIP!
I found it hard not to have a look. It was quite a
comprehensive biography, it even had photos. An 8 X 10 blow up of a picture of
me and my old friend James Daninsky, a little drunk on the streets outside a
Paris nightclub, a Photostat copy of someone’s family portrait containing my
darling Louisa – which I stopped for a good few seconds to look at,
reflectively.
There were other snippets of note: a newspaper cutting in
Arabic recounting an eyewitness testament to having seen a Mummy on board a
luxury cruise ship, a Sûreté police record about the suspicious suicide of a
Count, a post-mortem report on an Oxford student totally drained of blood…
It was not a happy or flattering experience to see ones life
boiled down to a few pages and prints, especially as the key moments of note
all had all seemed to have had such unpleasant connotations for me.
I closed the docket, and re-wound the green string to lock
it closed. It felt strangely satisfying to shut the file on my own life.
