The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Jacob suspended his breathing.

  The unhealthy specimen stopped near the auto door, then tucked himself closer to the building, beside the bike rack.

  A moment later Taryn appeared, walking in the shallow drain of the dry street, moving right to left. She wore a cotton tunic dress, white with a pale blue stripe, and a light cardigan. Her legs were bare and her feet in strappy sandals. Her red hair was arranged in a loose, artfully messy bun. She paused adjacent to the library entrance, stamped her heels to clean her sandals, then lifted her phone—which she’d had in her hand—to frame a shot of the sculpture.

  ‘I’d like to see Taryn’s photos. She’d have a clear shot of that loitering person,’ Jacob said. To sound helpful.

  ‘Nothing yet uploaded to her cloud account,’ Price said.

  ‘I’m surprised you got a judge to sign off on that,’ Jacob said.

  ‘The year we’re having, you shouldn’t be surprised.’

  Taryn Cornick lowered her phone. She averted her face. Then turned her whole body, but tilted her face back. It looked like a competing compulsion—not to be caught staring, and to keep her eye on something that frightened her.

  The stumping, solid figure started towards her.

  The driver’s door of the Koleos flew open and Jacob Berger emerged. He hurried towards the lurker, meaning to intercept him before he got to Taryn. Behind the auto doors a pale, stooped man appeared. Taryn Cornick saw the man and waved.

  ‘Claude Pujol,’ said Price. ‘And then we lose it for fifty-one seconds.’

  Jacob fervently wished the video had stopped before his appearance. Why hadn’t he waited to see it before telling his story? Okay. He’d watch it to its end and make adjustments.

  The image dissolved into bands of violent static. It came in ripples and pulses and was not a lost signal, but interference.

  Jacob’s scrubbing finger had moved towards the video’s slider when the static came, but he didn’t touch it.

  There was a final burst of white, then the image of the street blinked back into existence.

  A thin veil of gun smoke hung in the still morning air. Only Claude Pujol remained in the frame. He was pacing back and forth in front of the library. Several times he rushed back through the doors, waving his key card at the lock. He’d go in, stop and come back out. It was as if he were looking for something immediately beyond the doors but was unable to find it.

  There was blood on the cobbles. The enamelled steel of the statuesque book nearest the door had a starburst dent. The door to the Koleos remained open.

  Pujol stopped pacing. For a moment he was absolutely motionless. Then he began to claw at his own face. Not in the manner of one stricken by grief. There was no sense in which his violence was a gesture. His nails dug into his lower eyelids and dragged them down. On a third pass they tore. His hands moved repeatedly from the crown of his head downwards, drawing torn hair through the blood until his chin and neck were bearded with it. He staggered off to the left, still tearing at himself.

  ‘God in Heaven!’ said Jacob.

  ‘Twelve minutes later, witnesses saw Pujol scale the barrier on the overbridge above the on-ramp to the autoroute,’ Price said.

  ‘I tried to get Taryn into my car,’ Jacob said. ‘She walked away from me and I followed her.’

  ‘It was the discharge of a shotgun that damaged the sculpture. Surely you heard it?’

  Jacob shook his head.

  ‘We have Ms Cornick on several cameras, earlier, walking from her hotel to the library. But neither of you after that.’

  ‘And the big guy?’

  ‘He made off into a nearby parking garage, where the cameras lost him. We’ve checked the ownership of all the vehicles that left the garage in the next two hours. No leads.’

  Jacob felt blank. He hoped he looked it. He moved the slider back to the moment before the eruption of static.

  The shapeless man lumbered towards the poetically beautiful and uncertain Taryn Cornick. Jacob flung open the door of the Koleos. Claude Pujol appeared behind the glass, and Taryn waved to him. There was a flicker from the right. The body of a bird briefly between the camera and the road. Like the earlier pigeons, but closer to the camera. To be that big, it must be close. Only another bird, fleet, moving into the field of view.

  Jacob once again moved the slider a fraction back.

  The proved but unbaked man moved towards Taryn Cornick. She shrank back. The door of the SUV swung open and Jacob moved to her rescue. Pujol reared whitely behind the glass, already a ghost of himself. Taryn Cornick collected herself and waved. A bird dropped to land on the street to the far left of the screen. It was too big to be that far from the camera, landing, but landing it was, because shadow and bird came together. Something flashed at its throat. A gleam of gold.

  Static.

  Jacob scrubbed back once more.

  A bird much bigger than a pigeon came in to land. Bigger than a hawk. Some kind of raptor. Something bright haloed its head. Something hanging around its neck. It shook its wings and closed them.

  Static.

  Price said, ‘I presume Palfreyman turned off his Norfolk security system because his wife asked him to. He is clearly still fond of wife number one. Positively uxorious. We’ve found a note on some of Mr Palfreyman’s elegant personal stationery.’ Price quoted from memory, and his memory was superb, ‘“Just to remind you that the uncomfortable object in your pocket is an OtterBox, containing a phone, fully charged, its charger and portable battery. Don’t open the box—Box!—till you’re on the other side. I know you won’t be able to call until you come out again, but how about taking photos and video for me?”’

  Jacob wished he’d put his note inside the OtterBox, rather than attaching it to the outside with a rubber band. He waited a moment then said, ‘Was this note found in the abandoned vehicle?’

  ‘Yes. The Land Rover belonging to Palfreyman’s head of security, Gavin Stuart. You wouldn’t happen to have any idea what “other side” is being referred to in this friendly communication?’

  ‘The other side of the English Channel?’

  ‘And why the emphatic “Box”?’

  ‘Pass,’ said Jacob. He wondered how long it would be until Price figured out the handwriting was his. Price must know Palfreyman was in Ireland. But Price had nothing further to say until they left the A11 just before Newmarket, when he told Jacob that there was also blood in the Land Rover. Then he was silent for the next three hours and 175 miles.

  A couple of minutes after they went by the stone cross, they turned off from a road that ran along the edge of the Forest of Dean into a narrow lane. The lane took them between a hawthorn hedge and the nettle-clothed stone wall that bordered the grounds of Princes Gate. Jacob recognised the wall because he’d climbed over it in the dark and hadn’t avoided the depredations of nettles.

  Jacob reminded himself that, in speaking to Price, he must remember to refer to the property as Agile Media, the games company, not Princes Gate.

  Price drove faster than Jacob would have driven with such poor visibility and only very occasional passing bays. But of course Price knew the lane was closed. They eventually came to the fluorescent cones and police tape, to the constables in high-visibility gear holding glowsticks in their fists. Several squad cars filled the lane, and a police towtruck. Behind the towtruck was a fire appliance. It stood across an entrance to a field of rye, the grain showing blueish in the evening light.

  The vegetation in the hedges on either side of the lane was shrunken and discoloured, not scorched, but wilted and darkened, like weeds that have had boiling water poured on them.

  Price stopped behind the police vehicles, and they got out. Price paused to speak to an officer while Jacob walked on. He put out his hands to take the gloves someone offered. He stood still while someone else slipped paper booties on over his shoes.

  It took Jacob a moment to recognise the remains of Stuart’s Land Rover. The vehicle didn’t even resemble
a wreck. It was distorted, but not skewed or collapsed as cars are by crashes. The doors had come off and the roof was bowed outwards, as if someone had inflated the whole car. Its tough automotive paint had crazed, like mud in a dry lakebed. The doorposts were bent and the roof had separated from them. All the windows were missing, and the windscreen was lying in a single whitened piece on the road in front of the vehicle. The hood was depressed, the engine pushed out of its housing and down onto the road, as if something huge and heavy had stepped on it. The fog lights were cockeyed, and the headlights had popped right out of their sockets and were lying some distance up the lane.

  Jacob walked around the car, keeping out of the way of the people taking photos and samples. Then he made another circuit, this time counting the doors.

  ‘Yes,’ said one of police forensic team. ‘There is one door missing.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘The driver and passenger. We have the passenger’s identity, but not that of the driver.’ The man paused. ‘You’ll be with the Security Services, like some of these other fellows.’

  Jacob produced his ID, and the technician carried on in a more friendly manner. ‘You see, Detective Inspector, there’s what they’re calling “the wave”—CCTV on the blink, in a kind of path passing through the country all the way from Norwich to here.’

  Jacob nodded.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem very surprised.’

  ‘I’ve heard about it.’

  ‘What did this, though?’ said the man. ‘Some kind of weapon?’

  ‘A vehicle-bursting weapon?’ Jacob said and then, hearing the silence, looked at the technician and realised he was being taken at his word. ‘Mate, seriously, what would anyone want with a vehicle-bursting weapon that wrecks the car but doesn’t kill the occupants?’

  ‘We don’t know they’re not dead. Only that they’re missing.’ The technician was defensive. ‘And the fact remains I have never in my life seen a car that has come apart without a high-impact collision, or the assistance of explosives, or the jaws of life, or the equipment in a car wrecker’s yard. And those wrecks look nothing like this. Also—when it comes to explosions—there’s no chemical residue.’

  ‘But that’s not quite true, is it?’ said Raymond Price, who had joined them. ‘Other than the blood and tissue samples there is something else you all agree is a “chemical residue” and also probably bodily.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the technician, all business again. ‘There is silicone gel splattered about.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to know whether Ms Cornick had silicone breast implants, Jacob?’

  Jacob shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure? On close examination it’s quite easy to tell.’

  Jacob gritted his teeth.

  ‘The driver might have had silicone implants, I suppose,’ Price said, offhand.

  ‘The car was at a standstill when the silicone—vessel—ruptured,’ the technician said. ‘Both the driver and Ms Cornick were in the back seat.’

  Jacob said, ‘Taryn was ill. Perhaps she had some kind of crisis, and the driver pulled over to see to her.’

  ‘And her implants,’ Price said.

  ‘I mean, that’s why the driver was in the back seat. He was trying to help her.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘It’s Stuart’s car.’

  ‘We’ve accounted for Stuart. He returned to London with the doctor. The doctor who arrived when you were there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With his portable X-ray machine. For Taryn, who you told Rosemary had a urinary tract infection.’

  ‘One so bad it was obstructive,’ Jacob said, feeling proud of himself. ‘The doctor was sent for discreetly because Alan Palfreyman thinks his wife is a fugitive.’

  ‘You’re telling me that Palfreyman didn’t know you were there? That the police had caught up with his ex?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have known till Stuart arrived, and reported to him.’

  ‘You must understand why I’m pushing you on what you know, Jacob. About Ms Cornick. About Agile Media. About “the wave”. You were with Ms Cornick for hours. Your movements are peculiar, Jacob, and your account of them is far from satisfactory. And now you’re looking at this’—Price gestured at the wreck—‘more close-mouthed than stumped. Plus, you flushed with annoyance when I implied that Ms Cornick might be doing the usual thing with her friend in the back seat of the Land Rover.’

  The forensic team were all watching Jacob and Price with rapt attention. Price shot them an impatient glance. He grabbed the tender place on the inside of Jacob’s elbow in a pinching grip and led him further along the hedgerow. Its plants were blanched and pasted to the stone walls like seaweed drying on a rocky shore.

  Jacob dug in his heels and forcefully extracted his arm.

  ‘I’m your ride, Jacob,’ Price said, sweetly.

  Jacob tilted his head down to eye Price. He had a good four inches on the agent. ‘And I’m surrounded by my fellow police officers. Are we finished here?’

  Price looked around at the wilted vegetation, the forensic team in their bridal jumpsuits and the clustered emergency vehicles.

  Jacob said, ‘I promised Rosemary I’d be there.’

  ‘Rosemary knows you made the effort. Please, Jacob, spare me your indignation and explain this. Explain the wave. Explain how you know to say “he” of the driver.’

  ‘I say “he” because it’s generally men who carry off women. And because, unlike you, I hadn’t established that it wasn’t Stuart.’

  ‘It wasn’t. We’ve spoken to Stuart. He’s not at all helpful. But from the little he said I gathered that you were still at the Norfolk house when he and the doctor departed.’

  ‘Stuart might have come back after I left, for all I know. And why are we talking about an abduction anyway? We don’t know that Ms Cornick was an unwilling passenger.’

  ‘Safely back to “Ms Cornick”, then?’

  ‘I use her first name because I’m worried about her. Because she has a stalker, and now she’s vanished.’

  ‘And what about the snow machines? What’s your take on them?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue. Low-headroom snowboarding sounds good to me. You people employ experts who spend all their time figuring out the innovations of cyberterrorists. So you tell me about the wave.’

  Price gazed at Jacob, his head tilted back. Jacob felt as if he were being sniffed all over. ‘What would you say if I told you that the twenty or so coders recruited by Dynamic Systems are, in fact, thirteen coders and seven cryptographers?’

  At the word ‘cryptographer’ Jacob experienced an electric connection in his mind, a leap of intuition that spanned chasms and categories and felt almost physical. But Jacob’s leap was aborted. His intuition came down somewhere spongy. He tried to retrace his mental steps. Cryptographers. Demons who were looking for a box—

  ‘Jacob?’ Price said.

  Jacob blinked.

  ‘You were in a bit of a fugue there.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Jacob said, but he thought, The raven was right. There’s a thing I literally cannot consider. It was most annoying.

  Price decided they must adjourn to a pub. They drove into the village of Princes Gate Magna and stopped at the Pale Lady. Jacob bought a pint, and a pie with onion gravy and, on the side, a little furball of pea shoots in a pool of vinaigrette. He put on his listening face, which was pretty much identical to his I-don’t-care-whether-you-live-or-die face.

  Price was unperturbed or, Jacob suspected, pleased to have some company, anyone he could casually sharpen his claws on.

  It began to rain after they arrived, and before long the pub stank of wet wool and damp shoes. The moisture activated all the other smells in the carpet—spilled beer, deodorising carpet cleaner, and dog. Jacob had mistaken the blurry pelt in front of the fire for a bearskin, but it was a Newfoundland, elderly, overweight, and determined to stay put. Jacob only identified it as a dog when
it lifted its head to scan the room as if making a calculation like, ‘Do we have enough salt and vinegar crisps for this lot?’

  Price polished off his ploughman’s sandwich and produced his phone. He looked at it, pursed his lips and put it back. He got up abruptly and walked off through a set of brass and glass swing doors. They juddered closed. Jacob stared at their oscillating reflection of the bar: time-blackened oak, greasy red leather booths, old men in tweed caps and green wellingtons. His fingers touched his jacket, itching for a phone. He should just borrow one and make a call to Hemms at the hospital. He turned to the booth nearest his table and asked the wwoofers sitting there if he could borrow a phone.

  A girl with pink dreadlocks picked hers up and showed it to Jacob. ‘We had bars before, but not for the last half hour.’ She sounded aggrieved.

  Jacob stiffened, and made a more careful examination of the room. And the hard-to-see figure leapt into focus. Shift gave Jacob a dazzling, eager smile, picked up his glass, came over and slipped into Price’s seat.

  Shift didn’t look like someone who’d had an operation within the last thirty hours. He looked well. ‘I was hanging about waiting for ravens,’ he said. ‘But then I saw you in the lane and followed you here. I thought you might want to know how Taryn is.’ He didn’t wait for a sign of assent. ‘She’s taken a battering. But soon we’ll carry her to the hot springs at Forsha where she can recuperate.’

  ‘The demon harmed her?’

  ‘I hoped my presence would put a dampener on it,’ Shift said.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re lying to me?’

  Shift was quiet a moment, then he beamed. ‘Because you have a knack for knowing when I’m lying.’ Then something else occurred to him and he looked disappointed. ‘Unless it’s not especially me. You’re just good at spotting the holes in a story.’ He glanced up through his eyelashes and said, ‘I was hoping it was especially me.’

  Jacob ignored this. ‘So, Taryn is going to be all right?’