The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  She leafs through until she finds them. Eight moneycards sealed in more acetate, credit and currencies, John’s skinprint reproduced on each. The infamous icon of Soft Gold.

  ‘It all costs something. He’d have to go a long way, and it doesn’t come cheap, to get away from the kind of mess he’s left behind. And that’s not helping either. That’s slowed things down right along the line. Crime’s up eighty-two per cent on August. Funds are down. All in all, he couldn’t have planned it better.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’ She looks up. The way he says it makes her. ‘Plan it.’

  He glances at her doubtfully, as if he might have said too much. ‘Well, that remains to be seen. There’s the house, after all. And the family issues.’

  ‘Issues?’

  He smiles for the only time. Prim pleasurable regret. ‘You mean you didn’t know. The Laws divorced four years ago. I’m sorry, I would’ve thought you might have picked it up, during your own investigations … but no one knew, of course. His passport has him married. No one had a clue. Not even the child. Otherwise, well, everyone would have been in on it.’

  She goes dizzy. There is the aftertaste of the tea in her mouth, sweet, like rust. Oh, she thinks, Oh, Nathan. Beside her Mints goes on and on, disappointed, disapproving, querulous.

  ‘Not very admirable, is it? It’s the families who suffer. That’s what I tell the ones I find. Half the time it’s the families they’re running away from, but still. “You should think of your family,” I tell them. But they always are, that’s the funny thing. Mister Law’s no different when it comes down to it. He’s been transferring assets to them for years. The London estate’s in her name. Erith Reach – you might have noticed that. I expect that’s why they divorced. There was something in the son’s name too, wasn’t there? Something a bit improper, if I’m remembering it right.’

  ‘Are there other accounts?’

  ‘Oh, I’d have to assume this is the tip of the iceberg. Wasn’t that why your people got involved? You see, the way I do it is to look at things as an impartial observer. An impartial observer might say he knew something was going to happen. An observer might think Mister Law was putting his house in order. Providing for those he knew he’d have to leave behind. It might seem quite a coincidence, all this. Because why would he have done so much, if he didn’t know what was going to happen?’

  ‘He wasn’t planning it,’ her voice shallow. ‘He was planning against it. He was scared.’ And Mints frowns, doubtfully, understanding nothing.

  ‘Scared. Yes, I suppose he might have been. Anyway, we don’t know anything for certain.’

  ‘Does he know yet?’

  ‘I’m sorry … does who know what?’

  ‘Nathan.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Nathan, the son.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I wouldn’t really know.’ He leans towards her. ‘It’s not your fault. There is so much to know about him, isn’t there? It makes it hard to know where to start. It’s really very hard,’ he says, and leaning back he picks up the tea, finally, and drinks it down.

  Kennedy eyes. She can’t remember where she first heard that of John. It isn’t something that she would have thought of herself, the image of an American President killed two decades before her birth, but it has stayed with her because, once heard, it is exactly right. The lids at their extremities down-turned, wry when he is grave, unsmiling when he is smiling. The corners folding slyly into old mirth. The sockets deep-set, harrowed by exhaustion.

  Now he reminds her of Kennedy again. She remembers where she was the moment she heard his money had been broken, what she was doing as the news came through that he had disappeared. Kennedy moments. And if he is found, then there will be that, too – when, and how. There will be other things she is unable to forget. His life has become as inescapable as her own.

  At Pont Street she looks up and finds herself about to turn head-on into one-way traffic. She has been driving as if in fog, lost in self-doubt, with no idea of where she is going or why.

  She has to stop. Her palms slip on the wheel as she looks for a place. There are double-reds along the roadside and she pulls into an alleyway instead and sits in the soiled space between service entrances. An air vent mutters and chugs overhead. There are cigarettes in her bag and she reaches for them instinctively, as if she has always needed them.

  Divorced. You didn’t know? And she didn’t. In three months of investigation it isn’t something that even crossed her mind. She should have been told. They should have told her. With a little twist of rage she remembers the accountant, Mutevelian, in the halls of SoftMark. Well. They should have sent A1. Mild, as if she was saying nothing at all.

  How could she have missed it, how could she have been so stupid? But she knows how. It is because they lied to her, if only by omission, counting on the burden of facts for concealment. It is because she wanted to trust John, because trust was something he inspired. And most of all it is because she forgot the rules of tax inspection. Chose to forget them. Never believe the client. Information is the inspector’s greatest weapon.

  She shakes her head. The cigarette has burned down to ash in her hand. The trapped air is full of the smell of it, like medicine or insecticide. She starts the engine, lets it warm. Turns again in the narrow space.

  It is a foul night, so cold and wet that there is no room in the house that will stay warm. She works late, not wanting to stop, blinking in the computer’s stale light. Punishing herself, though she is not sorry to do so. In the light of all that has happened she is not sorry for herself.

  She looks for the rumours, weighing them, saving to disk anything that has even a remote resemblance to fact. Already the theories have multiplied and interbred, acquiring depth and detail from one another as they are passed from site to site, professional, amateur, conspiracist.

  Now it is the John in Canada who has died, his remains washed up on the northern shore of the Hudson Strait. Now the John in Japan is alive again, a figure glimpsed in traffic on the bridge across the Inland Sea. The early sightings have already begun to be accorded precedence, as if age has made them legitimate; and the stories which come in their wake make them seem so. Documents and photographs of aliens and celebrities. John Law And Elvis Presley Seen In Sardis, Pennsylvania. John Law And Wife Eat With The Dead. John Law Lives Underground On Mars.

  Nodding off, her eyes closing despite her. Beside her, coffee cooling in an uncleaned glass. She comes awake shivering, sweat cold on her face and breasts, with no sense of how long the night has gone on without her.

  The computer has gone into screen saver. She touches the keys and the Internet reappears. She has fallen asleep in front of an amateur John Law photo-gallery. You’ve found Rick’s Crypt! Knock yourself out. I’m still under construction, so stay tuned and please come again.

  There are only three pictures posted. Anna knows them all by heart. John at fourteen, dour against a social rehab unit background, a foreshadowing of his own son. At twenty, boarding a private flight, sleek and sure as an athlete. At thirty-five, in evening dress against a background of night.

  She clicks the last shot. Sluggishly it fills the screen. It is the most familiar of the three, the image rendered everywhere in headline proportions with the news of the disappearance. It is not something she should need to see again. But it is a good photograph, full of skilled intention. She has always liked it for that. The way it captures John as he turns, unprepared, if only for that second. The sharpness still forming in his eyes.

  And until it does, he looks happy. That is what she likes most of all. It is something she has never seen in the flesh. His face so relaxed in happiness.

  She leans closer for the details. There are the trees, just where she remembers them. The edge of a cloud in a night sky. It is cold, she can see John’s breath hanging in the air. There is the torchlight, ghosted by some trick of photography. Odd, she thinks, that there should be this one flaw in a picture which is otherwise so well composed. The i
llumination is misplaced, discoloured, floating out beyond the trees. The clouds are only visible where the light catches their edge.

  She comes awake. Her scalp contracts. She right-clicks on the photograph, scrolls down through icons to the image of a magnifying glass. The photo flickers and returns, less well resolved but twice as large, the screen framing John’s face and breath. She drags the picture down until nothing of him is visible.

  Almost impenetrable darkness. The cloud is broken only once. Through that the light comes. It is not reflected from below or ghosted by the camera. There is no trick to it. The colours – red bleeding into pink, curtains of faint electric green – are unfocused but not unformed. There are columns of light, huge as clouds, hidden in the overcast sky.

  Rain smatters at the study doors. Her eyes ache in the way she knows will soon spread back into her head. She saves the image on the screen, turns off the power. Leans back.

  She wakes stiff, with the feel of the keyboard a dull throb in her fingertips. For some time she sits on the edge of the bed, propped on her arms, head down, sleep leaving her like a hangover. Outside the world is green under a clear sky, and the lawns and the last leaves on the trees look heavy and lush, as if it is summer again.

  She pads downstairs. She has forgotten to leave the radio on, and for once the house lies in silence. On the kitchen counter last night’s coffee sits where she left it, scummed with a faint iridescence.

  She pours the leavings away, brews a fresh measure, switches on the news. Two experts are discussing Lord Lucan and plastic surgery. Their voices are mild, never raised. They are comforting as shipping news. She doesn’t need to listen to know they will end up talking about John. For days there has been nothing but him, one way or another. In his absence he has become more famous than ever. It is as if half her own life has been given over for public consumption; as if she is watched, somehow, by figures always just out of sight. She has not forgotten – has not let herself forget – that it is what she wanted, once. Knowing no better. Not to watch, but to be watched.

  ‘In other news, the first lawsuits against John Law have been lodged in seven cities across Japan. Civil actions against both Mister Law and SoftMark, the company responsible for Soft Gold, are expected to run into the thousands in the coming weeks, and courts in Britain are preparing themselves –’

  She hasn’t got round to a new fridge. All week she has lived off takeaways, cold in the morning, hot at night, eating the same thing twice a day until the accumulation of tin trays – fragile, rancid – has begun to depress her. Now there is fruit instead, each piece more than she can afford, and surprisingly cheap pastries from a Jewish shop on Lower Marsh. Duck and walnuts, salt fish and green mangos.

  She turns the radio down low, wraps two pies in a paper bag, takes them out with her to the car, and eats them as she drives, east to Westminster and onwards.

  The twin city has changed again. The curious sense of festivity has already begun to fade. One shop in two or three is still shut up behind chain links or grilles. Some look more permanently closed. There are crowds, as there always are, but they are in the wrong places now, as if they have lost some natural instinct for navigation. The high streets are empty, but Hyde Park is crammed with onlookers, grimly patient under the trees. Anna can’t make out what they are waiting for. Someone to say something or something to happen.

  At the Tower she crosses the river. There are traffic warning boards overhead, the first lightless, the second flagging the roads clear to the east. She is thinking, not of those ahead, but of her first days at the Revenue. Shadowing her mentor. Lawrence, teaching her.

  Try to remember that you’re not only dealing with numbers.

  His voice warm beside her. The smell of something on his skin. The sweetness of him, like cologne.

  What else am I dealing with?

  Alright. There is a man in a small country. For nineteen years he puts away everything he can. In the twentieth year there is a run on the national stock market. Suddenly everyone is investing, everyone is an expert. The man’s neighbours become rich overnight. So the man invests his own savings, and immediately the market turns. People lose their homes, their land, every thing goes to the loans they have taken. And our man loses everything he has ever made. What does he do?

  He goes mad? As if it is a question. Lawrence laughing. At the time she didn’t like that. That he would laugh at her. That night she will go home with him for the first time, drink with him into the small hours, falling asleep on the study couch. Waking to find him standing over her. Naked, his cock aching, thick as a bruise.

  Of course he goes mad. Wouldn’t you?

  Maybe. I don’t know. Would you?

  We’re not talking about me, thank God. We’re talking about him. What is he going mad for?

  Money. Shrugging. Just money. And Lawrence shaking his head, so serious that she wishes he would laugh at her again.

  Not just money. Never just money.

  Beside Fret Maritime, Fret Arien she stops the car. Over Erith Reach the sky is a bleached, spent blue. There are perhaps two dozen people waiting in the street. Three police officers stand apart, talking between themselves. No one looks Anna’s way as she gets out, but a woman in a linen suit watches as she approaches.

  The walls are disfigured. There is the outline of writing, faint neon colours, the messages already scrubbed to illegibility. The chemically sweetened smell of urine. A thin, dry gruel of shit. A wide dent in the gate, as if someone has unsuccessfully tried to ram it open. Beside it the keypad has been staved in, the cyclops eye of the camera broken and blind.

  She walks back to where the police wait. They turn together, two men and a woman. They are similar as siblings, their faces professionally benign, giving away nothing. She has already taken out her cards, has begun to explain, when the female officer cuts her off.

  ‘You have reason to be here?’

  ‘Yes – actually, yes. I’m here with the Revenue. I’ve been in touch with Detective Inspector Mints, at New Vine Street –’

  ‘Mints.’ The woman’s voice is scoured, stony, with no connection to her expression. One of the men takes Anna’s papers. ‘You have identification?’

  She hands over her cards. While the woman checks her skinprint against a handheld computer the third officer unhitches his mobile and begins to speak into it, his voice so muted that Anna can’t make out what he says. There is only the sensation of being talked about, instinctual, unpleasant.

  ‘Alright.’ The policewoman holds out Anna’s cards, glancing back at her colleagues as she does so. ‘Problem?’

  The officer with the mobile glances up, shakes his head. ‘She’s expected.’

  ‘We can’t spare anyone to go with you,’ the woman says dourly. ‘And the house is some way from the gate –’

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ Anna says, and the officer raises her eyebrows as if unable to believe she has been interrupted.

  ‘– so try not to get lost. Are they ready?’ she says, and the policeman with the phone nods. ‘You’ll return to your vehicle. When the gate opens drive on through. Go straight on, turn left, third right and straight on again. If any civilians try to follow you in you’ll stop and wait until we’ve dealt with them. Is that all clear?’

  Yes, she says. It is all clear. She walks back to the car, gets in and waits. The two policemen have moved in, clearing the crowd back, but the gate stays shut. The dashboard clock ticks softly. She has never realised it made any sound at all. She shivers in the cold, stale air.

  There is a tap at the driver’s window, so close it makes her jump. She looks up, expecting the policewoman to be there beside her, and finds to her relief that it is the woman in the linen suit.

  She opens the window. The woman’s face is bent close and smiling. ‘Hi,’ she says, East Coast American. ‘You going inside?’

  She says something in reply, not as much as yes, though it is apparently enough.

  ‘Are you a relative?’<
br />
  ‘No.’ She glances back at the policemen, the gate. ‘Excuse me, I have to –’

  ‘Business, then,’ the woman says. It is a statement, not a question. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few things?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I –’

  ‘Just a few things.’ The woman leans closer, still smiling, the edge of her head inside the window. Blocking it. Anna can see her hands now. In one is a mobile, in the other a dictaphone. ‘How long have you known Mister Law?’

  ‘I don’t–’

  ‘You don’t know him. Okay. Are you with the police? No.’ Keen, smiling eyes. ‘The government?’

  ‘No. Yes – look, I have nothing to say. If you could just –’

  ‘Who were you hoping to speak to? Not the Laws, right? What is your reaction to that?’

  ‘No,’ she says, not replying but refusing. Her hand is on the window control. It would only take a second to close. But she has a sudden image of what would happen. The woman not stepping back, but leaning in, still smiling. The glass closing against her neck.

  ‘Anna Moore!’

  The policewoman’s command echoes in the narrow street. The journalist’s smile falters. She withdraws her head and straightens up with an expression, not of guilt, but of wry regret. Beyond her the policewoman waits. Ahead the gate stands open. Anna closes the window, starts the engine, and drives in.

  No one follows her. The figures of the policemen diminish in the rear view. She turns first left, third right. The house is closer than she remembers it, the distances lessened by familiarity, and there are no figures – no Muriet – to help or hinder her. Before she expects it she is passing under the yew hedge, the foliage still cut smooth as moss, the gravel still raked as it opens out into its ultimate crescent.

  The house is closed up, the doors locked, the harbour empty. The glass walls of the upper floors have been polarised, shutting out the light. A helicopter mutters overhead. Anna has been knocking for some time before she notices that there is an intercom to one side of the doorway. A second security lens, unbroken, half concealed by lintel and creepers.