Inoperable, irreversible, pathological. Velina understood the meaning of all these words, but she had to Google the Latin names of the diagnosis before she understood which incurable disease her father was suffering from. Staggered. She looked at the name of the sender, then at the time. She read the opening words again, and realised that dad and the doctor were friends. Please excuse the late reply, Thomas, but the lab report has only just come in, and I'm forwarding it to you immediately. Velina managed to mark the message as unread then, with tears in her eyes. She shut down the computer and got up from the desk. What were you thinking? She berated herself. Bad news is the punishment for reading someone else's mail. Although it was an irony of fate that someone like her father, who was so fastidious about keeping his life and that of his family under control, had to passively watch his own body start to malfunction. Was this something along the lines of poetic justice, perhaps? Maybe the universe, which always sought the greatest degree of chaos, was in its way fighting against the Iago household, whose order could only be described by the word anal. The textbooks placed on the shelves using a spirit level, the keyboard exactly parallel to the monitor, the pens arranged by size on the polished desk. Velina closed the study door behind her, glanced at the dark chunky sofa in the sitting room – its cushions obviously propped upright without any dents – and increasingly felt the urge to smash something. Here in this clinical sterility, which was even worse than in mum's hospital, where Amelia worked as a nurse in the operating theatre, because at least it was supposed to be antiseptic and sterile in Friedberg Hospital, here it was like living on the set of a psychopath who thought it was cosy without having the slightest idea of what that word meant. Whenever Velina came home after a while away, she couldn't help recall the time she'd heard about a house that was as manically tidy as hers. A child murderer lived there.
