Price returned his mild and superficial gaze to her face. ‘Who is it that calls you every day, in the morning around seven, and the evening around ten? From public phones, moving closer to London each day.’
‘How close now?’ Taryn couldn’t help herself.
‘Answer and ye shall receive.’
‘I’m not sure who it is.’
‘So you’re telling me you’ll be faced with a complete stranger when this caller finally reaches your door?’
‘It’s a private matter,’ said Taryn. MI5 was monitoring her calls because she had been approached by some suspicious Middle Eastern men. And MI5 were talking to Hemms and Berger. She couldn’t even try to talk to the Muleskinner. ‘A private matter I have to postpone dealing with since, if I am discharged today, I’m going to France tomorrow.’
‘Another interesting detail,’ Price said, ‘is that Agile Media, the company Khalef and Tahan visited, have their headquarters in a country house near the Forest of Dean.’
Taryn’s hair prickled.
‘Princes Gate,’ said Price. ‘By the way, no one seems to know where the apostrophe goes. Whether it’s one prince or several.’
‘The locals say it’s several, and that they were fairy princes.’
‘How quaint,’ said Price.
‘My family had to give up Princes Gate in 1999. Though my grandmother stayed on in the gatehouse until 2005.’
‘And in 2003 your sister died very near there. A man called Timothy Webber was tried and sent to prison. On his release Webber met his death in suspicious circumstances.’
‘All right—you know all about that,’ Taryn said, furious. ‘But it has nothing to do with your bloody cyberterrorists.’
‘Ms Cornick, because the men we’ve been watching spoke to you, and visited a house your family once owned—and did nothing else of note—we are naturally very interested in whoever is putting pressure on you.’
‘You’re putting pressure on me. DI Berger and his sidekick are putting pressure on me.’
Price opened the yellow envelope and handed Taryn the photographs it held.
At first the shapes looked like a pile of clothes. But they were two corpses, garments tight on bloated torsos, and puddled around fallen thighs and shins. One man had lost a shoe. His shin was still brown, but his foot looked like a lump of fatty wax. The other photos were close-ups of their faces.
Price said, ‘A hiker discovered the bodies when he sought shelter from a rain shower in the holloway that runs through Lode Wood. You know Lode Wood?’
Taryn could almost hear her sister’s recitation of the names of the woods on the map that burned. She nodded.
‘Khalef and Tahan stopped at the post shop in Princes Gate Magna. They paid postage for a small package, then put their credit cards into it, and dropped it in the mailbox. The proprietor watched them do it. Then he saw them walk off in the rain in their Savile Row suits, having left their rental car in a field proximate to Agile Media. They must have hiked the nine kilometres to the holloway.’
Price stopped speaking. He just sat watching Taryn.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘No. You were being interviewed on BBC Radio 4, and signing books at Foyles. You seem to have a knack for alibis.’
Taryn ignored this last remark. ‘Do you have any idea who killed them?’
‘What appears to have happened is this: Khalef throttled Tahan, who seems to have offered no resistance. Then Khalef bashed his own brains out with a rock. He had two goes at it with several hours intervening. In the coroner’s opinion what happened was the man knocked himself senseless, woke up several hours later and, despite all kinds of possible challenges of bodily coordination, and the discouragement of pain, he finished the job. Poison would have been quicker, and pills kinder,’ Price said. ‘And it’s unlikely they were seeking to punish themselves for failing at something. That doesn’t fit with what we know about these people.’
By ‘these people’ he meant Islamist terrorists. The deaths did seem too secretive, abject, intimate for terrorists—not that Taryn knew much more about terrorism than what films and her one regular newspaper told her. She said, ‘Are you sure that’s what happened?’
‘The coroner is sure. We are confounded,’ Price said.
‘And how did my silent caller coincide with Mr Khalef’s and Mr Tahan’s last hours?’
‘So you’re admitting a link?’
‘I’m just working the angles, like you.’
‘We can help each other,’ he said.
‘I want to help,’ Taryn said. ‘But I’m in the dark.’
Price put the photographs back in the envelope. Its yellow suddenly seemed miraculously clean. He said, ‘I suppose we’re just going to have to wait to see who comes knocking at your door. Good luck, Ms Cornick.’
‘Give me your number.’
Price again favoured her with his mild, well-bred smile. ‘DI Berger has my number. You have his.’
‘I don’t want to talk to DI Berger.’
‘I’d put his number on speed dial if I were you,’ said Price. ‘He strikes me as a man who’d do his very best to get there in time.’
He left the room.
Angela insisted on accompanying Taryn into her flat, where Taryn went straight to her fridge and emptied it of perishables.
Angela sat down. ‘When is your next break?’
‘Tomorrow. It’s why I was so keen for my discharge.’ Taryn had a few days in Aix-en-Provence. A single, tax-deductible, professional commitment, then a drive to a restaurant with a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and a long lunch in the sun.
The collections manager of the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix had written to Taryn after her book came out. He said that he was taken by a passage in the book concerning an eyewitness to the 1731 Cotton Library fire. It mentioned a particular scroll box. Did Ms Cornick know anything more about the box? And would Ms Cornick like to visit him at the Bibliothèque Méjanes—a model of state-of-the-art, climate-controlled manuscript storage?
The only passage in Taryn’s book that fitted the librarian’s description was in the footnotes. An eyewitness account of a smoke-stained collector and his servants carrying to safety the few things they could save after the conflagration in the central reading room of the library. The witness spoke of ‘a gleaming black box’. Probably the silky black of charcoal.
Angela said, ‘And when does your period of luxurious house-minding commence?’
Alan had offered Taryn the use of his Norfolk house. He and his second wife had decided to move to County Cavan. The Norfolk house was on the market, but the market was slow.
Angela was looking a little self-conscious. She and Taryn had the house-minding down as a time when Taryn might give some thought to a next book. Angela was hoping Taryn would produce a proposal she could show to publishers.
Taryn said, ‘Thank you so much for the lift. Can you do me another favour on your way out and drop this bin bag in the basement?’
Angela got up, accepted the bulging bag and took her leave—with admonishments to Taryn that she stay in touch.
Taryn firmly closed her front door and sat down to check her messages. Two were business. People Angela hadn’t managed to field. Three were moments of near silence—muffled traffic noise, a ball bouncing on pavement and children yelling, or rain splatting on the reinforced glass of a phone booth.
Taryn upped the number of times the phone would ring before voicemail kicked in. That would give her more time to get somewhere private and talk to the Muleskinner, in a way that would warn him that someone might be listening. Would that stop him? Probably not. He’d want to talk, like their first talks, when everyone else had gone off to their bunks and she’d come back to the campfire to sit with him discussing happiness, and loneliness, and loyalty.
Taryn packed for Provence in spring. She inscribed a copy of her book for Claude Pujol, the librarian at the Bibliothèque Méjanes. Before she put the book in
her bag, she looked up the passages concerning the 1731 fire that destroyed much of the Cotton collection.
Taryn’s own description used an account printed in The Gentleman’s Quarterly, a report to Parliament on the losses sustained in the fire. That, and several private letters written at the time, and in subsequent years.
The chapter described the hurried removal first of the collection of Alexandrian manuscripts—some of which fire had stalked over several centuries. It spoke of burning presses broken open and books removed; the fire engines sent for but not coming ‘so soon as could be wished’; of books thrown from the windows, books showering into the street, some shedding pages later carried away as souvenirs by the boys of the Westminster School. It described how Dr Bentley escaped the flames in nightgown and wig with the Codex Alexandrinus tucked under his arm. It described the immediate aftermath of the fire—streets full of charred books and loose scorched paper. The rescued manuscripts and vellum scrolls were stored in rooms at the boarding house of the nearby school. The condition of those treasures was terrible. The scrolls were shrunken and gluey—animal fat drawn out of the vellum by heat. Taryn wrote about sodden paper manuscripts, which as soon as possible had someone hired to turn over their leaves, moving back and forth through the book, in front of a hearth fire. Unfortunately the people hired were unskilled and handled the damaged paper with their bare hands. Some of the books were pulled apart and hung up in bunches on lines to dry then put back together later, pages not always in the correct order. Despite all speedy efforts at remedy, the fog of mildew settled on the paper, and the vellum dried brittle. Books with pages burnt on their edges could not be rebound, trimmed as they were by the flames. Taryn wrote about how, later, the committee charged with the recovery recommended that loose pages be collated and kept, stored in as near as possible the same order they were in before the fire. But much of this material was misplaced, tidied away by unskilled helpers who saw a flake of paper or shrivelled lump of vellum only as mess.
Taryn’s book provided a list of the Cotton’s great losses, with something about the provenance of each. Losses that were truly terrible: St Æthelwold’s translation of The Rule of St Benedict; Asser’s Life of King Alfred and his history of the Battle of Maldon; an eighth-century gospel from Northumbria—even two of the four surviving letters of patent where King John recorded the grant of Magna Carta, the text of one letter in some places a mere gleam of carbonated ink, a charred substance composed only a little differently from that of the carbonised surface it was inscribed upon. The king’s great seals, though still attached to the letters, were reduced to shapeless blobs.
There was a particular note reference at the end of Taryn’s passage describing the destroyed great seals. When she read its innocuous number—note 32 of 53 for that chapter—she knew at once that it was what Pujol was interested in.
Taryn turned to her book’s appendix.
Note 32 quoted a letter by a master of Westminster School, who passed from a description of the condition of the seal on King John’s letters to that of another seal on a scroll box. The box was scorched itself, but its seal was somehow intact. The master reported marvelling over the strange appearance of fire-damaged box and untouched seal, and how one librarian told him that the box had already come through the fire in the library at Raglan Castle, set by Thomas Fairfax’s parliamentary forces during the Civil War. And it was said to have come unscathed through two earlier fires: the burning of the Ravy Library in Persia, and of the Library of the Serapeum in Alexandria (that city’s second great library conflagration). It was this schoolmaster who first called the box ‘the Firestarter’.
There it was. Taryn had added her own footnote to note 32: ‘From the Cotton the scorched scroll box went to the British Museum where it remained until, rather astonishingly in character, it survived a bombing raid in World War Two, though the material surrounding it was utterly incinerated. Subsequently evacuated, the box spent the remainder of the War in a dry cave system near the Welsh border, with other treasures.’
Taryn had written about the box, then somehow disregarded it, and forgotten her own family’s connection to it. That cave system had its entrance on Northover land, and, as a young man, her grandfather had helped the British Museum hide their treasures. Taryn knew all this. But, as she read her footnote over, she could sense something in the story eating the story.
Or perhaps it was just the medications she was taking piling up on her.
She stowed the book in her bag, and took herself off to bed.
She was on the escalator, ticket in hand, ready for the nominal checkpoint on the platform, when she saw DI Berger waiting for her. Or rather, she noticed a strikingly handsome man looking expectantly at her, had a little lift of pride and interest, and only then realised he was someone she didn’t want to speak to.
Berger summarily removed her carry-on from her grip and led her back out of the stream of boarding passengers. Then he handed her bag back, but stayed standing between her and the train.
He raised his voice above the booming of the concourse. ‘Your silent phone calls?’
‘Have been dealt with,’ Taryn said. ‘Sometimes you just need to talk to a person.’
‘You’re still getting them.’
‘Please stop monitoring my phone.’
‘We’re not.’
‘Stop talking to MI5 then.’
‘Raymond Price came to see me. He asked about Webber, his crime and conviction, and his mysterious demise. Are you still maintaining that you don’t know who your calls are from?’
‘I do know. I’ve dealt with him. It was an old boyfriend. Like I said, sometimes people just need to talk.’
‘And I said the calls haven’t stopped.’
They were going in circles. Taryn tried being more firm. ‘I talked to him once the doctors cleared me. I had to get my head in the right space.’
‘Does this “old boyfriend” have a name?’
‘You don’t need to know his name. He’s not dangerous. He’s said his piece now.’
‘According to my information he hasn’t said anything.’
‘Any business you ever had with me is all in the past,’ Taryn said. She could feel herself flushing with indignation—as if she had a right to be indignant. ‘As for MI5—my part in their investigation seems to hang entirely on something in my book, believe it or not. A footnote about my grandfather’s involvement in a plan, during World War Two, to preserve treasures from the British Museum by storing them in King Offa’s caves. My mother’s family, the Northovers of Princes Gate, owned the wood where the cave entrance was. During the War various items came to the caves for safekeeping. The men Raymond Price asked about had questions relating to that.’
‘Really?’ Berger looked like someone who has been given ice to eat. ‘Treasures from the British Museum are more present to you than Timothy Webber?’
Taryn glanced at the clock on the concourse. ‘I have to go.’
Berger regarded her, his cold-coloured eyes not as cold as they should be, given what he believed. ‘And what about your seizures?’
‘The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me.’ To have any hope of making the train, she’d have to get on the nearest carriage. ‘Detective Inspector, what prompted you to turn up with all this now?’
‘I read about you in the Guardian. It reminded me how I didn’t like your answers back in 2010.’
‘The woman you once looked at with a doubting gaze got your attention again by being celebrated for something. You thought, “That Taryn Cornick is doing well for herself.”’ Taryn paused, then added. ‘That’s the story I’m going to tell my famous father.’
Berger’s face lost all expression. Then it showed a slight twitch of malice and pleasure. ‘I wouldn’t start broadcasting any stories with MI5 still on your case. They wouldn’t like it.’
Taryn said, ‘If you have any legal cause to stop me leaving the country, do so now.’ She waited a moment, then grabbed her b
ag, and stalked off.
From the Gare du Nord, Taryn caught a taxi to the Gare de Lyon and her train to Aix-en-Provence. When she was settled in the quiet carriage, surrounded by knitting women, she began to feel tender and ill. The smell of the hospital was still coming out of her pores. Her head had left a greasy mark on the train window. Her smell seemed to fill the carriage. But no one looked at her.
She took out her little makeup mirror and assessed herself in pieces. Her skin was pink on her shoulders and yellow at the top of her neck—like her grandfather’s body when he was seventy-nine, old upholstery fading in places, blood and subcutaneous fat showing through. Her flesh was transparent and oleaginous. It was appalling. She was.
It was as if she were assessing herself with someone else’s hateful gaze. Perhaps Jacob Berger’s.
Spring unspooled beyond the window: green poplars and black cypresses, a lime escarpment and a church with an attenuated teardrop dome.
Taryn closed her eyes on the view. She thought, It’s the box. The scroll box stored in the dry cave system, whose entrance was on her grandfather’s land. The box that, for some reason, hadn’t gone back to the British Museum after the War. The box Battle was asking about before he set fire to the library at Princes Gate.
The Firestarter. Where was it now?
Taryn’s Grandma Ruth had James Northover’s papers. Did any of them include a record of the disposition of the library after his death? Where all his books and manuscripts finally fetched up?
6
The Bibliothèque Méjanes
The following morning Taryn set out from her hotel to the Bibliothèque Méjanes, near the margin of the old centre of Aix en Provence.
Her skull felt jarred by each step along the cobbled street, so she moved onto the flagstones that lined the shallow drain in the middle of the road. The soles of her sandals picked up a coating of silt, but the going was smoother.
The leaves on the plane trees sighed in the puffs of sweet wind. She turned into the Allée Jean de la Fontaine, which was sealed rather than paved. She stepped out bolder and stopped watching her feet.
The Absolute Book Page 7
