His Dark Lady

Jonathan Barnes is the writer of The Somnambulist (Gollancz, 2008) and The Domino Men (Gollancz,2009). Both novels are a mix of the grotesque and evoke a creepy sense of dread, particularly The Domino Men, the eponymous psychotic killers in the service of the nebulous 'Directorate', a secret cabal in control of modern-day London. As his latest short story, 'His Dark Lady', shows, Barnes is very adept at evoking characters who are at once both compellingly ordinary, yet disturbingly impenetrable in their motivation. The unnamed narrator of 'His Dark Lady' runs into an former school acqua