Hearts of Oak

by Eddie Robson

“Of course—” Iona paused, remembering what had gone through her mind briefly at the funeral—how Weston didn’t quite look like himself. But it had been such a nebulous, easily dismissed feeling. It had been him lying there. “It was definitely him,” she said.

  “You had to think about it.”

  “I didn’t have to think about it, I wanted to.”

  Saori nodded. “Did you witness the incident at the end of the funeral?”

  Iona tensed up even more. Did they know she’d tried to speak to others about the incident?

  “Yes . . .”

  “Describe it to me, please.”

  “One of the mourners stood up, ran down the aisle, and jumped on top of the coffin.”

  “Do you know who he was?”

  “No, do you?”

  “Was the coffin open or closed?”

  “Closed.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, the coffin went into the furnace.”

  “With him on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea why he did that?”

  “Nobody did. I think it was the oddest thing any of us had ever seen.”

  “In your view,” said Saori, interlacing her fingers and leaning forward, “is it possible he could have gotten the coffin open and removed Weston from it—”

  “While they were in the furnace? No.”

  “You seem sure of that.”

  “Both of them would have been overcome by the heat and smoke within seconds.”

  “But you couldn’t see inside.”

  “No, the door to the furnace was closed.”

  “Then you can’t be sure.”

  Iona was about to give a snappish response to this but stopped herself. “I worked on the design for that building. I know the layout. The coffin hits the flames as soon as it’s inside. When the main doors close the heat is intense—and the only way out would be through the stoking hole at the far end. There’s no way a person could cross the flames and get there alive.”

  Saori nodded and made a note. “That’s very useful insight, thank you. Weston also worked on the design for that building, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. But what does that have to do with—”

  Saori shrugged. “I just find it interesting.”

  “You’re suggesting he used that knowledge to escape from the furnace?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, I’m merely gathering facts—and somehow I have to reconcile what I’ve been told about the funeral with the fact his charred body was pulled out of the remains of the newspaper office. Which I understand he also designed. And which is where the accident that allegedly killed him occurred.”

  The way Saori had just arranged the facts made it sound like Weston had come back from the dead and taken fiery revenge on the building that killed him. But Iona wasn’t going to comment on this, because it was insane. Instead she leaned forward and said, “He was dead at the funeral, though. So why would someone steal his body and then put it in a building they were going to burn down? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I agree. Be grateful you’re not the one who has to make sense of it.”

  * * *

  When Iona returned to the school nobody asked her where she’d been or why they’d taken her away. Nobody spoke to her at all. They just spoke to each other in low voices as she passed them in the corridors. She wasn’t sure what to say: she wanted to assure people she wasn’t a suspect but she also didn’t want to spread these bizarre ideas about Weston.

  Iona went back to her office, sat down, and quietly finished the pile of marking that still lay on her desk. Shortly after laying the final exercise book aside she heard a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” she said, reluctantly.

  Carter opened the door and hesitated on the threshold. “Are you—?”

  “It’s fine. Come in.”

  Carter closed the door and sat down opposite. “I took your afternoon class. I’m afraid nobody else was available.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “I had your lesson plan to follow, which made everything very easy.”

  “Teaching’s not hard if the students are good.”

  “They are good students.”

  Here the platitudes ran out.

  “They wanted to ask me about the fire,” said Iona.

  “But nobody thinks . . . I mean, you didn’t—”

  “No, it’s—it’s Weston.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell anyone, please.”

  “Of course, but what do you mean—”

  “His body was found at the site of the fire.”

  “Which . . . is the place where he died.”

  Iona nodded.

  “But we saw his body go into the—”

  “Yes, I know and I told them that. They had some idea that the mad fellow at the funeral smuggled his body out—”

  “That’s impossible too.”

  “I know. I don’t pretend to understand it at all.”

  “So they brought you in—”

  “Because I knew him and we designed the Point together. So they asked how sure I was that he was dead, could he have faked it . . .”

  “Gosh. Glad you’re in the clear, anyway.”

  The phrase in the clear resonated with Iona. She had a vision of a clear space, where she could breathe and move. She did not feel in the clear right now.

  * * *

  It was almost the end of the school day when Carter left, but Iona stayed in her office anyway, pretending to work, waiting until the building was empty so she could leave without having to talk to anyone.

  Only when she was preparing to go home did it occur to Iona that Alyssa was supposed to be here right now for another tutorial. This morning Iona had been torn on whether or not to send that message over to the planning department telling her not to come. She wasn’t sure which would draw more attention to the connection between them—sending the message, or not sending the message and having Alyssa turn up here. She’d come to no conclusions and after the interview at the bureau she’d forgotten about it entirely. But Alyssa hadn’t turned up anyway. Iona wondered where she was.

  * * *

  The king had spent much of his day at the window looking down at the blackened hole that had been punched into the surface of his city. The investigation team from the bureau was examining the site, looking for evidence. The king wished they’d hurry up so the cleaners could come and sweep it away.

  The king dreamed of the day when the city was finished. He wanted to look out from his windows onto an unblemished view, with everything looking as it had been designed to look, and he could feel satisfied at having overseen it, and the citizens would be happy with what he’d done for them. He tolerated the constant presence of building sites across the landscape because they were stages toward achieving this aim. But looking out on the remains of a destroyed building upset him deeply. Everyone else talked about catching who was responsible, and that was fine and important, but the king would rather be talking about what they were going to put in that blackened hole. Would they start again using the same plans, finish the newspaper offices as originally intended? Or should they come up with a new design, push themselves to put an even better and bigger building in that space? He was anxious for these questions to be settled, and for the answers to not derail his plans for a newspaper archive. He was very keen on that.

  The king had been called away from the window a few times for consultations and updates, but kept returning to fixate on the scorch mark on his landscape. In the late afternoon he had gone to his armchair to rest. Overwrought and emotionally exhausted, he’d fallen asleep.

  When he awoke the room was dark: one of his attendants must have come in and closed the shutters. The king stood and marched to the window, hoping the day he’d just experienced had been a dream.

  He opened the shutters: the building was still gone. Of course it was.

  Clarence trotted in,
carrying a letter. He dropped it onto the floor and said, “Ah, you’re awake.”

  “Yeah, sorry, I fell asleep,” the king replied, closing the shutters and turning away from the window.

  “Don’t apologize, it’s been a long day.”

  “So what else has happened?” The king yawned. “What’s going on?”

  Clarence tapped the letter with his paw.

  The king peered at it. “But we’ve already had the letter today.”

  “This is an update.”

  “Do we need an update?”

  “We thought you’d like one.”

  The king picked up the letter, opened it, and paced the room while he skimmed its contents. He was breaking his own rule of reading letters methodically from front to back, but this one didn’t follow the usual format—it was devoted to a bureau report on the investigation. They’d questioned some people, they had some suspects—they’d found a body. They were certain the fire had been started deliberately.

  That part terrified him. Deliberately? Why? He couldn’t imagine what would motivate someone to do that. He felt personally offended. He provided these buildings for the citizens—it was an act of love. And for this gift to be not only refused, but obliterated . . .

  The final pages terrified him more. The bureau had speculated on the potential for a recurrence of the incident. The possibility that the culprit might strike again, or that the same urge might exist in others. The bureau believed the possibility was high.

  “So it could happen again, then,” the king said, the pages of the letter quivering in his hands. “What do we do?”

  “We stop them,” Clarence replied firmly.

  “Yeah. I mean we know everyone in the city, don’t we? So we must be able to work out who did it.”

  “Exactly. And the whole city is keeping an eye out for this kind of suspicious behavior now.”

  “Yeah.” The king looked back down at the letter. “Says here there’s another special edition of the newspaper tomorrow to keep everyone informed.” Ironically they had never needed a bigger newspaper office more than they did now. “Have I got time to do a column?”

  “Yes, if it goes off tonight.”

  The king nodded. “I think I should. Everyone will want to know we’re on the case with this. Something with a big headline, ‘My Promise to You,’ by the king: your safety is my priority, et cetera.”

  “Do you want to write it now?”

  “Er . . .” The king closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, then he shook his head. “I’m still tired. Could you write it for me?”

  “If you like.”

  “You know what sort of thing I want to say, don’t you? I’m just—I need some rest.” The king snapped his fingers and an attendant came to help him get changed for bed. The king looked down at the nightclothes the attendant held.

  “I’m not due for new pajamas, am I?” he asked.

  “Your old ones smelled of smoke, sir,” said the attendant. “I recycled them.”

  “Oh. Good.” The king finished dressing. “Help Clarence write my column, would you?”

  The attendant nodded and left, Clarence trotting after him. “Sleep well,” Clarence said as the attendant closed the door.

  But the king did not sleep well. He dreamed of the tower burning down around him. Every wall was ablaze and there was no way out.

  5

  IONA WOKE UP TOO early and couldn’t get back to sleep. She got up and ate breakfast, as always, with the shutters closed. But even when she finished breakfast she didn’t open them. Today she wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

  She had made a decision never to tell anyone about her tangential part in the arson incident. That was straightforward enough but she was thinking over the ramifications. Even if her secret was never discovered, merely having it separated her from everyone else and it always would. She felt like she had wandered a little farther from home than usual, only for the ground to crack behind her and a tectonic shift to pull her away.

  Tectonic was another dream-word. She grasped its meaning but it related to nothing in the real world. These words seeped into her internal monologue quite often, never to be used in conversation. When she spoke aloud she found other words.

  Nobody knows how strange I really am, thought Iona.

  She finished eating, walked the short distance to work, and went directly to the chancellor’s office. She told the chancellor that Weston’s death had hit her harder than expected and she’d like to take a few more days off. Her request was accepted. Her requests were always accepted.

  Upon leaving the school grounds she walked down to the site of the fire, telling herself there was nothing suspicious in this—lots of people were going there and unlike them she could pass it off as professional interest. Of course she couldn’t get very close: the investigation was still ongoing and a high fence had been hastily erected around the ashes and charred fragments. There were several gaps in the fence and citizens gathered around them to peer morbidly in. Iona stood at the back of one such crowd and waited for those in front of her to drift away.

  When she got her turn at the front there was little to see. The blackened frame of the unfinished building was being dismantled before it fell down and the job was almost complete. A deconstruction team carefully lowered beams and struts to the ground and gathered them in a stack, ready for the furnaces to extract any remaining energy they had to offer. Other workmen filled cart after cart with ash and towed it away to the landfill.

  At the foot of the fence people had laid flowers even though the official story was that nobody had been inside the building when it went up. What they mourned was the building, like it was a newborn child that had never gotten out of the hospital. (Dream-words again.)

  Iona looked up from the flowers. A few meters away on the other side of the fence, watching her, stood Saori.

  Iona met her gaze and nodded, as she would to a colleague in the corridor at the school. After a moment Saori nodded back.

  * * *

  The facts were these: Iona could not tell Saori or anyone else at the bureau about Alyssa, not without incriminating herself. She was also worried that if the bureau’s suspicion did turn on Alyssa, then Alyssa might very well tell them about her association with Iona. But at the moment the bureau seemed to be occupied with investigating Weston. Which gave Iona a chance to track Alyssa down and get some answers for herself.

  To this end Iona arrived at the planning department and went to the front desk. The young woman behind it was called Quinn.

  “Hello,” said Iona. “I’m looking for someone called Alyssa who works here? Where’s her office?”

  Quinn looked puzzled. “I don’t know the name . . .” She reached for the staff directory and started looking through the entries. “How are you spelling that?”

  Iona wasn’t entirely sure—she’d never seen it written down—but gave it her best guess.

  “And you’re sure she’s in planning?” asked Quinn.

  Iona was not sure. Alyssa might have been lying to her. But for Quinn’s benefit she said, “I’m fairly sure . . .”

  Quinn kept on looking through the directory, shaking her head. “Sorry. She might be new? This thing isn’t always up to date. If anyone knows, it’ll be Victor.”

  Iona thanked the young woman for her help and walked up to Victor’s office. She’d had a little contact with Victor—he worked on planning policy and made recommendations to the king, so Iona had read various proposal documents he’d written. He was also responsible for assigning staff to the various planning teams, so he knew everyone who worked here.

  His office was at the top of the building. There was a desk just outside the office door, which was presumably where his secretary worked, but the desk was vacant right now so Iona knocked on the door herself. There was no response. Presumably Victor was in a meeting somewhere. Iona had time on her hands and no other leads on Alyssa’s whereabouts, so she decided to go into the office and wait
for him.

  Victor’s office was on the side of the building that faced away from King’s Tower and had once offered an excellent, 180-degree view across half the city, but the view was now partly blocked by the buildings that had risen around it. Victor’s job meant he needed a good view from his office for reasons beyond his own aesthetic pleasure, so Iona had made sure to provide him with one in the new planning office. Perhaps that was where he was right now, preparing for the big move.

  Iona walked over to the window behind Victor’s chair. She ought to be able to see the site of the fire from here. The sun was bright and as she moved into the light she flinched away from it, looking down—

  And it was then that Iona saw something glinting between the floorboards. The sunlight was catching it in an unusual way. She kneeled down. The glinting came from an object that was wedged between the boards. With the aid of a pencil she pried it out and held it in the palm of her outstretched hand. She barely had any time to consider what the object might possibly be before Victor’s secretary came in and found her kneeling behind the desk.

  “What are you doing here?” said Victor’s secretary, whose name was Lewis.

  As Iona stood up she unobtrusively slipped the object into her jacket pocket. “Waiting for Victor,” she said as innocently as she could manage.

  “He’s not here.”

  “I realized. When will he be back?”

  “He . . . hasn’t come in for two days.”

  “Is he unwell?”

  “We don’t know. He . . . we haven’t heard from him.”

  This was intriguing.

  “What did you want to talk to him about?” said Lewis. “I might be able to help.”

  “I’m looking for someone and I think she works here. Her name’s Alyssa?”

  “No, there’s no Alyssa here,” said Lewis—but then a thought seemed to strike him and he held up a finger. “Hang on.” He left the office and returned to his desk. Iona followed him: he was opening a large-format notebook. At the top of each page a date was marked. It was a diary.

  Lewis found the page with today’s date. It listed all the day’s meetings. They had all been neatly crossed out, a single ruled line obliterating the text. Lewis turned back one page—the days immediately before were the same, all crossed out. Iona counted back the days. There were seven days on which everything had been crossed out. Victor hadn’t been in for two days but he’d been canceling all his meetings for five days before that.