The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘The Gatemaker’s glove,’ Neve said. ‘I do have it.’ She shook her sleeve and it dropped onto her hand, then into place on her fingers, as if it knew where to go. ‘Where were you when Shift took you?’

  ‘Aix-en-Provence,’ said Berger.

  ‘The gate has swung back to where it belongs. It’s always open in its usual place to anyone invited. I’ll send you there. Put you through, and rescind your invitation.’

  Taryn released Berger’s arm and Neve put out a hand to him.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. His muscles seemed to grow dense. He bristled like an angry dog.

  Neve said, ‘Come on then.’ And, as he started forward, ‘You’ll want to hold your breath.’

  8

  Norfolk

  Nearly a week later, Jacob Berger was on leave and at home nursing his arm and side when he got a call from Taryn. She told him she was safe. She thought he’d want to know.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m making my way to my former husband’s house in Norfolk.’

  ‘Where in Norfolk?’

  ‘Goodness.’ She sounded amused. ‘Something you don’t know.’

  ‘I feel as if I know nothing.’

  ‘Which is why you should step out now. Lack of result in the Webber case isn’t a good enough reason for you to stay involved.’

  ‘Is that something you think about, Taryn—what is enough? Because I think about that all the time.’

  ‘I’ve had a hole in my world since I was nineteen and my sister was killed. I don’t think about my life in terms of sufficiency and insufficiency.’

  ‘I’m not going to give up any of this,’ Jacob said. This was the first thing that had happened in his life which felt the right size for him.

  ‘In that case Alan’s house is the last on Soult Head before the shore reserve.’ She gave him the door code.

  Jacob repeated the code back to her. ‘I’ll come at once.’

  Three hours later, past midnight, Jacob reached Alan Palfreyman’s house on the Norfolk shore. He used the code and let himself in.

  He didn’t know whether Taryn was close or still hours away. He wandered around the open-plan living area, peering at ceramic artworks and signatures on paintings.

  A mist rolled in off the Channel, obliterating his view of the rampart of dune grasses and sand-blasted cement. It bandaged and muffled the house until the only animated thing in his field of vision was a tiny red pulse on the sideboard under the stairs. A message alert on the landline phone. Beside the phone was a note, welcoming Taryn, giving her the password for the Wi-Fi, the PIN for the landline’s voicemail, and letting her know the fridge was full. It was signed ‘Alan’.

  Jacob checked over his shoulder and saw nothing but milky, motionless vapour in all the room’s expanses of glass. He picked up the receiver and used the PIN for the voicemail. The first message was a realtor who got partway through her update on a market appraisal, then said, ‘You know what, Mr Palfreyman? I’ll email the report.’

  The second was Alan Palfreyman himself. ‘Taryn. I tried your cell. I had a call from a Detective Sergeant Hemms, who is working with a Detective Inspector Berger. If you remember Berger was with the Bristol Police CID—one of the two detectives who talked to us after Webber died. He’s a DI in London now, which suggests he’s a clever fellow. Hemms asked when I’d last seen you. I didn’t tell her you were expected at Norfolk. I did tell her I’d sent you a congratulatory card after I finished reading your book, but hadn’t seen you for months. Hemms then informed me you’re missing.’

  A short silence followed, then a placid question. ‘Are you missing?’

  Palfreyman didn’t sound like a man who’d had the venom-tipped spear of worry plunged into his chest. He appeared to be prompting Taryn to pick up if she was present and auditing calls.

  Jacob told himself to stop trying to work out how much Taryn’s former husband still cared for her and just listen.

  ‘Hemms said you booked for three nights at a hotel in Aix, arriving on the sixteenth of April. You had breakfast at your hotel on the seventeenth and might not have been missed until checkout on the nineteenth if the Aix police hadn’t come looking for you in connection with a suicide. One Claude Pujol. But I should let Hemms tell you about that.’ Another silence, then, ‘Taryn?’

  Eight seconds later the message ended.

  Jacob decided that Palfreyman was a cool customer, but was probably still in love with his first wife.

  A couple of hours after that Jacob felt himself watched. He’d had his back to the big tilt windows that looked out over the shore. He turned and saw Taryn Cornick beyond the glass, wet to the bone, her red hair blackened by rain.

  Jacob altered the clever window’s axis of tilt and let her in. She set her fingers against his left cheek, rose on her toes and kissed his right ear. Her mouth was cold too.

  A social kisser, thought Jacob, who was not of that class.

  Taryn wasn’t alone. The unprepossessing, slight young man followed her in, and further in, and stood dripping on Alan Palfreyman’s yak-skin rug.

  Taryn and Shift were wearing the same clothes, more or less. Oversized jerseys of rain-silvered wool a few shades darker than olive drab, pale suede trousers, and sodden embroidered wool felt boots. They both made squelching noises when they moved.

  Shift seemed bewitched by Palfreyman’s Stanley Spencer. It wasn’t one of the grand allegorical paintings with British villagers as biblical personages. It was just a view out someone’s window of cabbages and cauliflowers in allotments beside a railway line.

  The air beyond the living-room windows was fuming white. The sea was invisible. The fog would have helped Taryn and Shift with the security cameras. Jacob was concerned about the cameras. Palfreyman’s home security system was no doubt monitored. Now that Taryn was here she should call her ex-husband’s security contractors and tell them that everything was fine.

  He took out his phone and passed it to her.

  Taryn frowned. ‘Who am I calling?’

  Jacob explained the benefit of reassuring certain people.

  ‘Oh yes, Stuart,’ said Taryn. ‘Better to use the house phone.’ She went to the machine and Jacob watched her narrowly as she checked the messages. Partway through Palfreyman’s she turned fully away from Jacob and leaned over the sideboard, the crown of her head pressed to the wall.

  Jacob joined her and put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t react, other than to pause the message. Under Jacob’s hand her wet jersey sizzled. ‘You’ll be wanting to get out of those clothes,’ he said.

  There was a splat as Shift stripped off his jersey and dropped it on the marble floor. He wasn’t wearing anything under it. He gleamed like a young seal, sleek, but for the stippling of bruises and scabbed wounds from the centre of his chest up to his right shoulder. He was lean and muscled but had an unfashionable farmer’s tan, his dark skin darker on his face, neck and forearms. The rose gold plate-mail claws of the Gatemaker’s glove gleamed against his bruise-mottled chest. He was wearing them around his neck, strung on a leather thong. He stood on the backs of his boots and pulled his feet free with sucking noises, kicking one towards the hearth and the other under a sofa.

  ‘Shift, you are not planning to take all your clothes off, are you?’ Taryn said.

  ‘I am.’ Shift tilted his pelvis to wrestle with the soaked leather ties at the top of his baggy-seated pants. ‘People used to think nothing of nudity. Well—even “nudity” is a late adoption, for politeness, of a word from the French. I’d say “bare”, like Shakespeare’s Anglo-Saxon “poor bare forked thing”. British warriors would go into battle naked, which is of course why the Romans made such short work of them.’

  Jacob met Taryn’s eyes. She shook her head. He said he’d find them each a robe and then try to make coffee and see about some food. Something warm and hearty.

  Taryn said she’d find food. She knew her way around Alan’s kitchen.

  Shift paused in h
is knot-tackling and said, ‘I don’t eat meat.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you do,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Or grain,’ Shift said.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Jacob.

  ‘But I do eat fish.’

  ‘I’ll go bait my hook,’ said Jacob, and went to find something for them to wear, leaving Shift’s dietary demands to Taryn.

  In the kitchen Taryn discovered a top-of-the-line Nespresso machine. She fired it up and located its bullets. She set cups on a tray, foraged for crackers and cut a wedge off the big wheel of Brie in the refrigerator dedicated solely to cheeses. It was an updated model of the one they’d had when she lived here. Taryn wondered how much the kitchen’s changes owed to Alan’s second wife. The bench tops had been refitted in white granite. The floor was freshly resurfaced and looked like a Bakelite dance floor in a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film: slick, but not quite smooth, so that Taryn’s reflected form had the appearance of a shrouded body suspended upside down in light-splashed darkness.

  Alan’s Norfolk house had predated Taryn. She had brought nothing to it but clothes and toiletries, books and papers, and had taken everything away with her when she left, as if she had been Alan’s tenant. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t asked her about additions and refurbishment. He had, but she would only say, ‘The place is in such good nick, Alan. Why change it?’ To which he’d reply fondly that she didn’t understand the necessity of display. But he left things as they were, for her.

  The Nespresso machine concluded its throat clearing. Taryn put everything on a tray and carried it back to the others. Jacob had found a robe for her and she put it on over her damp clothes.

  Shift ate the cheese and walnuts but gazed with distaste at the oat crackers and perplexity at the coffee, which he left half finished. Then he went to sleep on the sofa farthest from the window and seemed to shrink, like a young animal in a nest of grass.

  Taryn sat rubbing her own feet and trying to collect her thoughts. ‘The first thing I should do is call Alan and persuade him to have Stuart find a doctor who can remove the remaining iron shot from him.’ She waved a hand in the direction of the recumbent form on the far side of the cavernous room. ‘But I do have work I want to get on with. Even while having to help with his stuff.’ She heaved a sigh. ‘Whatever his stuff is, and I’m not even sure he knows.’

  ‘What is it with him? Vitamin B12 deficiency?’

  ‘Come on, Jacob. Try “not human”.’

  He pulled a face, fastidious, as if reacting to a bad smell.

  ‘Please don’t disappoint me now. You’re the only person who passed through that gate with me.’ She needed him to talk to her about it. The dislocations—Aix, the roaring stars, dawn in a different world, people who moved with gentle deliberation and made her feel heavy, and clumsy, and provisional. And Shift, who wasn’t as alarming as Neve and the others, wasn’t what they were, but whom she somehow kept losing sight of, even when he was standing right beside her. ‘We just caught a train and a bus and walked along a dyke across the fens all the way to the sea,’ she told Jacob, to prompt him.

  ‘From the Wye Valley,’ Jacob said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I went through I came out under a body of water in the dark of night,’ Jacob said. ‘I surfaced and swam to shore, only to discover I was on a small island. An island with a folly—a mini marble pagan temple—in the middle of an ornamental lake. I got back in the water and swam in the direction of a lighted building I could see. I didn’t know what I’d find there, so I decided to avoid it. I hiked across fields and into a forest. Eventually I hit a nettle-covered stone wall, and a country lane.’ He looked at Taryn. ‘You know where that lane took me, don’t you?’

  ‘Either Alnwinton or Princes Gate Magna.’

  Jacob continued, ‘I walked right through Alnwinton and hitched a ride from Ross-on-Wye all the way to London. There I took myself to a Boots, got disinfectant, dressings, tweezers and a good magnifying mirror. I went home, removed the buckshot myself, drank quite a bit of whisky and crashed.’

  Taryn was wondering whether her grandfather had had any knowledge of the portal to fairyland beneath the lake at Princes Gate. She suspected he did. She should probably tell Jacob what she knew about those things—the Firestarter and fairy hounds. She wasn’t ready to talk about Webber and the Muleskinner, but she should do that too, because lives had been lost. But, if she was right that her actions seven years ago had made her a target for possession, then those lives were already lost. The Saudi gentlemen had, like her, somehow fatally weakened their spiritual immune systems. They were dead. For them, there was no avenue for atonement. But perhaps it was different for her. Perhaps she would be able to figure out what she could do for the Muleskinner, hopefully without inviting him any further into her life. It might be possible to assist or appease him. Handing him over to the police would only be another injury.

  God. She had been so careless.

  Taryn said, ‘Even if I’d broken a leg, I’d probably still think I should make my scheduled appearances at those festivals in New Zealand and Australia.’

  ‘Demonic possession is only as bad as a broken leg?’

  ‘I’d like to continue with my bloody hard-won career.’

  Jacob pointed at Shift. ‘And him?’

  ‘We have to get the iron out of his system before he can do anything effective. Whatever he means by “effective”.’

  ‘And my cold case?’

  Taryn sat for a moment feeling sad and inward, then glanced, as if for reassurance, at her strange protector.

  Shift was awake and looking at her.

  She asked him how he felt.

  ‘Severely weakened.’

  ‘You look in the pink to me,’ Jacob said.

  Taryn said, ‘I’ll arrange for a doctor to come and get the rest of the iron out.’ Then she faced Jacob. ‘Can your investigation wait for a time?’

  ‘It can, if you’re sure Hemms and I are the only ones interested in it.’

  Taryn didn’t respond to that. She returned to the landline. There was no need for her to listen to the rest of Alan’s message. Of course Jacob had listened to it, had thought nothing of her privacy or Alan’s. She called her ex’s personal number.

  Shift stirred, stretched and got up. He smiled at Jacob, made a big falsely prudish show of fastening his robe more firmly, and came over to Taryn.

  She held up a finger. Alan had answered.

  It was a matter of some twenty minutes to reassure Alan and inveigle him into finding a doctor and sending said doctor their way. Alan wanted to know more than she was prepared to tell him, but once she gave in to his reasonable request that she explain the nature of the medical problem, his can-do self took over. They’d need a surgeon. Maybe even a portable X-ray machine. Yes, that was all doable, he said, clearly enjoying his rich man’s ability to ignore norms and bend the law.

  ‘Thank you,’ Taryn said, then, feeling she should reward him a little for his willingness to help, she asked what DS Hemms had said about Claude Pujol.

  ‘Apparently, in the weeks prior to your visit, Pujol wasn’t himself. He kept wandering off, and had a minor car accident when he fell asleep at the wheel. He took some sick days, but insisted on keeping your appointment.’

  Taryn turned her face up to Shift’s. He might have little idea what she and Alan were discussing, but he responded to her mute appeal. ‘Once the iron is out I can ask questions in the right places.’

  Taryn returned her attention to Alan. She asked him to get word to her father that she was okay. ‘Tell him I’ll meet him for lunch sometime soon and have a proper catch-up.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alan said, unconvinced but compliant. ‘And if there’s anything else you need.’

  ‘Thank you for the place to stay. It’s a lifesaver.’

  She put down the phone. Jacob Berger was beside her, having replaced Shift. They were both horribly stealthy and inclined to stand too close. Jacob’s eyes were bright, and tir
ed, and searching.

  Taryn raised her shoulder, slipped past him and hurried upstairs. She got herself dressed in Alan’s T-shirt, boxers and thick cotton socks. She found Shift some of Alan’s sweats. They fitted perfectly. Alan was lean, mid-height, and Shift turned out to be less insubstantial than her estimate. His air of wispiness was personality-based.

  Once he was dressed Shift folded gracefully onto the yak-skin rug as if settling for a pow-wow.

  ‘How is the buckshot? Jacob asked.

  ‘Ninety percent gone,’ Shift said.

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  Shift’s wispiness momentarily dissolved. He looked pleased, and present. ‘You’ve worked out that means something?’

  ‘You’re allergic to iron.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Because—’ Berger clenched his jaw, held his breath and flushed.

  ‘Never mind about that,’ Taryn said. ‘Where does Hemms think you are, Jacob? And what did she make of what happened in Aix?’

  ‘But Taryn, what Jacob has worked out isn’t what you think. He’s shrewder than that,’ Shift said.

  ‘You’re playing someone,’ Berger said to Shift.

  ‘Are you sure he’s not your Valravn, Taryn?’

  ‘That I looked up,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s from Danish mythology. A Valravn is a bewitched man transformed into a hero by a sacrifice—traditionally of a child’s heart.’

  Taryn’s ears started ringing. ‘A child’s heart?’ she repeated. Then, ‘A child’s life?’ She put her hands over her face. That was what had happened. Webber had died, and what would have been her and Alan’s child never reached her womb, but grew in her fallopian tube until the tube ruptured. A tiny curled creature, its heart only a shadow. And the knight, the ‘bewitched man’, was the Muleskinner.

  ‘Look,’ Jacob said, ‘Raymond Price of MI5 is chasing cyberterrorists—but that’s not what this is.’