The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Is he there?’ Her voice small, narrowed down to the breadth of a wire.

  ‘Oh no. He’s at home. Hard at work at Erith Reach. His creative work – he hardly ever takes business home, of course.’

  ‘No,’ she says, obscurely hurt. ‘Of course not. I don’t need to see him immediately, anyway, but I do need to interview him again. Do you know how long he’ll be away for?’

  ‘Well, now.’ Terence sighs. ‘That would be hard to say. You’d have to ask him yourself. You’ll have to ask when you see him. The thing is –’ and he leans closer to the receiver, breathily confidential ‘– he left instructions.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘These instructions. If you want to see him, I’m to give you the number for the gates. It’s a daily number, mind you, and I can’t give you tomorrow until tomorrow. I can only give you today today. But if you want to see him today, I can give you the number for today. Alright? Will you be wanting the number? Ready, are you?’

  She drives eastwards, following the Thames through Whitechapel and Poplar. It is noon, and the river tunnels are still sunk in mist. Anna is a good driver, watchful, cautious, not too generous, but today her mind is not in it. She is thinking of the security man behind her and of what lies ahead, and on the Woolwich Road she runs a red light almost without noticing.

  She is thinking of Terence. For someone so apparently conversational, she thinks, he is not a man who says more than he has to. He keeps what he knows to himself. She remembers their first meeting, the room of glass, the code under her feet, and tries to recall what the security man said to her then.

  I trust him. And then almost something else. His face set, holding it back. Anna is a patient thinker, not brilliant, like Lawrence, but sedulous, missing nothing given time. South of the river it occurs to her that the man she met as a receptionist, and who is now Senior Security, could be all kinds of other things to SoftMark. Among other things.

  She is thinking of her destination. Erith Reach. It is more a place than an address, or so it seems to her. If she tries she can remember what it used to be, a muddy district of cement factories, housing schemes and landfills, the dockyards long since gone. A place not in the city nor out of it, cut off from the pace of London by the great muscular arch of the Thames.

  Now there is only the estate of the Cryptographer, three thousand eight hundred and fifty acres of land, seven hundred and sixty-three of water. Anna knows the figures, she is in possession of the facts. She has seen the society photographs, the vicarious images, Homes of the Rich and Famous, Part One. She has heard the rumours that the house has three postcodes, one for each wing, one for the pool. But she has never been inside. She has never even met anyone who has seen inside Erith Reach, so she thinks as she drives, and then realises she is wrong, of course. She has met John Law.

  It is ten years since the Cryptographer bought the parish of Erith from London. Anna has seen the accounts. She knows how it was done. The lawyers authorised to compensate each of twelve thousand residents, the figures astronomical, not to be refused, the landowners and town council offered six times their market price. At the time the media were implacably outraged, Anna recalls, as if Law had got hold of something that should have been beyond the reach of money. As if he had purchased Limehouse or Mayfair. Which in a sense, of course, he had. He had bought up four and a half thousand acres of London.

  Erith, which had meant so little to those beyond it before, became famous overnight. It vindicated those who had always distrusted the looks and celebrity of John Law, and gave a ready excuse to those who hadn’t but were willing to make up for lost time. For months there were aerial photographs of the clearance work, environmental protests at news that the heathland was being forested, the marshes flooded, the tidal mud excavated, the few old buildings damaged in their relocation, brick by brick, to publicly owned areas. There was a venomous campaign for brine shrimps. The river was narrowed, the waters quickened, the embankments planted with promenades of willow and Dutch pollarded limes. And in the end, when the money had done its work, there was nothing left to protest about. There was only the most avid curiosity. A tantalising impression of greenness behind high walls. Of something lush with a river running through it, desirable, unattainable, and hidden at the heart of it, the silent figure of John Law.

  She turns into a street of red-brick warehouses. Stops the car. To one side a peeling hoarding promises Fret Maritime, Fret Arien. Ten feet away the rows of buildings come to an abrupt end. A wall intersects them, unapologetic as a railway embankment. It is contoured, concave at the base, convex at the summit, a wave of chrome poised to break across the pavements below. Threatening, Anna thinks, her hands light on the wheel. She is not so naive as to be surprised. Where the road ends there is a gate, beside it a keypad inlaid with a lens. Anna gets out, types in her code, and drives on through.

  An avenue of elms, their bare branches cross-hatching overhead. The crunch of gravel under the wheels. The hammer-chink of blackbirds complaining, and no sound – she stops again to listen – almost no sound of cars. The city is muted as the sea in a shell. It is the walls, she tells herself, some acoustic quirk or feature of the design, and she goes on, slower now, the gravel begrudging her even that.

  More than once she glances north through the trees. She has done it three times before she realises she is looking for landmarks, the familiarity of the river or the towers of the docklands, and that she can’t find them. There is nothing but an obscuring line of hills, a cupola rising white among cedars, the view – when the elms give way to open land – of unobstructed sky, bright and pale and almost blue; the drive itself, freshly raked, like something from the turn of another century; and beyond the drive no people, no one anywhere, not that Anna can see, the empty greenness as full of possibility as a blank page.

  She comes to a crossroads and stops again. What began as a tree-lined drive has now begun to take on the proportions of a private road. On two sides it continues back into the shadows of woodlands. To the north it descends between slopes of Bermuda grass towards a distant suggestion of water. Anna turns towards that. One of the few things she remembers about Law’s house is that it has a private harbour. She peers forward, looking for the Thames, but there is only an ornamental lake, mist still clinging to its banks. The river is nowhere to be seen. Already she is late for her appointment. She is starting to wish Terence had given her a map, along with his daily code.

  How stupid of me, she thinks. I seem to have lost London. A bubble of laughter rises up in her. It is as if Terence’s numbers have admitted her into another place and time, and she wonders if it is past or future, and what century John Law has chosen for himself. If I really lost my way now, she thinks, and the gate codes changed, I could be trapped for days. Except the walls are designed to keep outsiders out, not insiders in. So then I might escape to find that centuries had passed in my absence. Like in the stories, she thinks, nudging the accelerator, and as she does so two swans come out of the lake mist.

  They fly low over the road, taking no apparent notice of the car below them. Their necks are liquid and flat as spirit levels. The windows are up, Anna can’t hear the beat of their wings; their massive forms pass over her in complete silence. They look like creatures that should have died out long ago, Anna thinks, and also: they’re like omens. And when she finally takes her eyes away from them there is a child in the road ahead of her.

  It is a girl, standing very still, her face a pale O of surprise. She is wearing a buttercup-yellow puffa jacket that somehow serves only to emphasize her frailty. She is thirty feet away, twenty, before Anna can hit the brakes.

  The wheels bite and lose their purchase. The gravel makes a sound like rain, hishhhh. There is a second when time crawls and the machine is utterly beyond her control. The earth rolls on under her. The child puts up one hand as the car reaches her. Anna feels no impact. It is a moment before she realises she has stopped.

  ‘Are you alright?’ she is asking
before the door is open, while she is still struggling with the belt, but the girl only looks at her dumbly through the windscreen. ‘Are you alright?’ she says again, and this time the girl nods.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’ She smiles encouragingly. The expression fades as Anna leans back on the car. ‘No, really. Look,’ and the girl holds out her hands, palms upwards. ‘See? There’s no blood.’

  ‘Oh. God.’ Anna sits down properly. The bonnet is warm under her thighs, the air cold against her skin. The mist is drifting over, and she shivers, watching it come, like a crowd towards an accident.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘What?’ She looks back at the girl, seeing her properly. She is older than she first appeared, slight for her age, perhaps eight going on nine. Her nails are cut too short, painfully neat. Her hair is too pale to be brown, too dull to be blonde, but fine as blonde hair. Strands of it blowing across her inquisitive face.

  ‘What about you? Are you alright?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You look really cold,’ the girl says, too solemnly, and Anna realises that she is, that she is still shivering, and she is suddenly embarrassed by this child, so perceptive and caring for her, and whom she has so nearly harmed.

  ‘Hold on.’ She ducks back into the Revenue car. Her winter coat is in the back, thrown down between the seats with her computer case, and she buttons it over her expensive and inadequate work clothes. ‘That’s better,’ she says, and when she smiles to prove it the girl smiles back, though her eyes are preoccupied.

  ‘I didn’t mean to walk in the road.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, I wasn’t watching. I didn’t think there was anyone around. Are you sure you’re –’

  ‘I’m fine,’ the girl says, matter-of-factly. And then, as if reassured by her own innocence, she begins to talk. ‘When I heard you coming I thought you were a lawnmower. You weren’t saying anything Japanese though. Most of the time no one comes up here except the lawnmowers. Sometimes they get onto the roads and turn over, it’s the gravel, it gets in them, and they start talking Japanese. Do you know any Japanese? I can say thank you, tidal wave and two kinds of raw fish. When they turn over you can help them and they say thank you very much in Japanese. It’s good. I like it. Your car sounded like one of them. Except it wasn’t speaking, of course.’ She pauses momentarily for breath. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘I’m Muriet.’

  ‘Muriet. Where does your name come from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The girl takes her hand away.

  ‘Don’t you like it? It’s lovely.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ the girl says quietly. And then, suddenly shy with envy, ‘I like your hair.’ And part of Anna is glad of the voice and the small face that goes with it. The way they make the child finally childlike, and herself, in contrast, older. Better.

  ‘You shouldn’t. When I wake up it looks like this.’ She raises both hands to her head and draws them outwards, making slow-motion inward serpentine movements with her fingers, until the girl’s face lightens with an edge of laughter.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘But I don’t believe you.’ Now Muriet is looking at her more curiously, her eyes green and bright. ‘You don’t work here, do you? Are you a trespasser?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Nathan met one once. I was away, I was ill, I never saw it.’

  ‘I’m here to see Mister Law,’ Anna says, and the girl nods and glances away, as if Mister Law were the most boring thing in the world.

  ‘What do you want him for?’

  ‘It’s my job. I’m a tax inspector. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Of course. We had one of you here once, too. We get lots of different kinds of people. You don’t look like a tax inspector.’

  ‘What do tax inspectors look like?’

  Muriet makes a face, a combination of pain, pity and amusement. ‘Like Mister Cutler. He’s the head groundsman. He’s not going to be happy when he sees what you did to his lawn, either.’

  They both look round. The tracks dissect the road and verge, twenty feet long. Anna becomes aware of the reek of burnt rubber. She swears under her breath, something vicious and Carl-like, and then wishes herself quieter, acutely aware of the child beside her.

  ‘Nathan says he used to be in the services. He wears a suit all the time, even when he’s burning leaves. We’re trying to find out if he has a Parabellum.’

  ‘A – ?’

  ‘It’s a gun. Like the antrustions have.’ The girl looks her over as if she is coming to doubt her. ‘They’re a kind of bodyguard.’

  ‘You’re a friend of Nathan Law?’ she asks, trying not to think of Mister Cutler and the antrustions, whatever they are, and the girl nods.

  ‘We’re home-schooled. I don’t live here,’ she adds, reluctantly. ‘My parents work at SoftMark. Nathan wanted me to be home-schooled with him. We were friends from way back. We have the best teachers. It’s just us. Except it’s December now, we don’t have tuition in December. Only study time.’ She looks up at Anna. ‘Is your car going to work?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The thought not having crossed Anna’s mind until this moment. And with the one thought comes another, the recollection that she is lost.

  ‘If it does work, will you give me a lift? I’m supposed to find Nathan.’

  ‘If I do, will you do me a favour? Will you show me where the house is?’

  ‘Of course. We have to go there anyway.’ And already she is opening the passenger door, climbing inside. Adjusting the seatbelt, making herself comfortable. Anna gets in beside her.

  ‘Alright. Where are we going?’

  Muriet points ahead. ‘– then around the lake. There’s a kind of beach. You have to turn. I’ll tell you when.’

  The engine starts easily. The skid-marks diminish in the mirror. For a while Muriet is quiet beside Anna, the car steady under her hands, and she feels herself begin to relax into its routine of minimal movement and pressure. It is as if nothing has happened, as if the swans and the imminence of collision were all acts of Anna’s imagination. Except there is the girl in the passenger seat, impatiently playing with the window, the seatbelt, the radio. .

  ‘Sit back,’ Anna says, and Muriet does, leaning her head against the door. Anna thinks, it must be about twenty-five years since I was her age. A cautious girl on a river bank watching skaters. A quarter of a century, she adds to herself, and is surprised by the grandeur of the words in relation to her life. She wonders what she can have done with such a spectacular quantity of time.

  Except she knows. She has become an inspector, a watcher of people. And always other people, never herself. She has spent her life in others’ lives, hundreds of them passing her by. I am old enough to be this girl’s mother, she thinks. And then; I am almost too old. And her heart turns over in its fleshy darkness.

  ‘Here!’

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Here, you’re going to miss it!’ But Anna turns with time to spare onto a smaller road, the gravel less well kept, the trees less formal, almost wild where they reach down to the lakeside. Beside her the radio idles between stations and she leans across and switches it off.

  ‘You’re quite a good driver. ‘

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Better than my dad.’

  ‘Good.’ Anna glances across at the girl. She is sitting up now, straight-backed as a child at its first piano lesson, her eyes on the road ahead. ‘I hope you don’t compliment everyone who almost runs you over.’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s never happened before,’ Muriet says so blandly that Anna almost laughs. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you do. Taxing people.’

  ‘Well,’ Anna says, and as she does so she finds that she
is laughing after all. ‘People do tend to see it that way, yes.’

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing. But funnily enough, you’re the second person to ask me that in a fortnight.’

  ‘You go down here.’ Muriet points as the path forks. A rutted track runs down to a shingle beach bordered by pines. In the distance Anna can see someone standing by the water’s edge. ‘So do you?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’ She turns onto the track. The car leans into its suspension.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just a job.’ Smiling for Muriet as she navigates between potholes. ‘I like meeting people. Like you. I get to find out about them. How they live.’

  ‘How do you do that just from taxes?’

  ‘By learning their secrets,’ Anna says, a little too loud with exertion. A little defensively, if she is honest with herself. She is not used to the clear questions of children. At the bottom of the track is a stony lay-by and she reverses the car and parks uphill.

  ‘If they have secrets,’ Muriet says, as the engine ticks into silence, ‘then they don’t want you to find them.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Anna looks across at the girl, pale and grave in the car’s hooded dimness. ‘But my job is to find them anyway.’

  Muriet nods. ‘I don’t think I’d like to be a tax inspector,’ she says primly.

  ‘What do you want to be, then?’ Anna asks, but the girl doesn’t answer immediately. She is looking out through the windscreen, perhaps at the figure on the beach, her eyes thoughtful and unfocused.

  ‘I want to be rich.’ She says it just as Anna thinks she has not heard. The words soft but decisive, the wind in the pines audible through them. And although Anna believes she understands money, and knows there are as many reasons to want it as there are reasons to keep secrets, the child’s voice still shocks her. As if the need for something that needs to be desired is something she shouldn’t yet understand or feel.

  The sun comes out, uncertain and without warmth. ‘There’s Anneli,’ Muriet adds more conversationally, and opening the car door she starts down the beach, breaking into a scrambling dash. Not looking back at Anna, calling out the name again as she runs, Anneli, Anneli? Anneli!