Hawks moor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first care upon a corpse, all the surrounding objects wavered for an instant and became unreal-the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like a hallucination.

Hawksmoor