The Sandpit

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  The folder is empty. The float has gone under.

  They were professionals who had known what to look for. While Dyer and Paula ate their chicken burgers and listened to Leandro enthuse about how Nelson’s fleet, sailing perpendicularly, had carved a breach in Villeneuve’s horizontal line of ships, someone had entered the house and gone over it with the finest toothpick.

  Dyer totters, unbalanced, across the orange tiled floor and slumps onto the sofa, causing its cheap wood frame to squeal.

  Not simultaneously, but almost, he experiences a pang for Marvar’s missing overcoat, before relief floods through him. The horrible hook had been yanked out of his mouth. He wasn’t free, yet, but the tension had slackened, he had secured a breathing space.

  For the moment, he and Leandro were safe.

  Because whoever had stolen the coat had also taken one of Marvar’s two spare post-it notes.

  A long time ago, Dyer had read that when being pursued by an elephant you must shed an article of clothing in the hope that the animal will stop in its tracks and attack it. You have then a chance of gaining ground. To throw his anonymous pursuers off the scent, this is what Dyer had done: he had left them another post-it note covered with abracadabra.

  They would have their energies consumed in cracking Dyer’s code. He had concocted his deliberately misleading algorithm out of a verse by Basil Bunting, substituting letters for numbers, and introducing a few capital letters from the two last stanzas of Bunting’s 1932 poem ‘Chomei at Toyama’. Whether or not Dyer believed in Rustum Marvar’s claim for fusion – and the stubbornmost part of him resisted – his own formula, based on a Baconian code picked up during his stint as a postgraduate, was no more nonsensical in his eyes than Marvar’s original. Plus it had the merit of being based on something that Dyer could understand.

  I have renounced the world;

  have a saintly

  appearance.

  I do not enjoy being poor,

  I’ve a passionate nature.

  My tongue

  clacked a few prayers.

  It was the poem he had been reading in Rio when the hand of a young woman touched his shoulder.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH. Walks to school. The streets are sniffing spring.

  In the Bon Croissant, they are sharing scurrilities: ‘Dyer’s carrying on with Katya.’

  ‘He can’t be, her son bullied his son.’

  ‘No kid gets dumped by his mother like that.’

  ‘She’s got twins with someone else who are going to Summer Fields.’

  ‘Did he work for the Daily News?’

  ‘I’ve never read anything he’s written. He once gave me his book when he came for dinner. Forgot to sign it, though. I’ve got it somewhere.’

  ‘I love this ice cream.’

  In the lush littoral of Summertown, conversation turned again to Samir. His father had apparently taken him back to Iran. His mother was ill. An Updark story, something cooked up with Crotty.

  Someone else said, finishing her turmeric latte: ‘Do you think there’s going to be war in the Middle East?’

  The Israeli prime minister in his most outraged attack on Iran had told the BBC that the government in Tehran posed the ‘greatest threat to our world’. He repeated his promise of a fortnight before, that Israel would ‘not allow Iran’s regime to put a noose of terror around our neck’.

  Samantha Puckey, rushing to her appointment at Cannelle Medispa, is more alarmed about the rising sea level. She is thinking of her holiday cottage on the Suffolk coast. ‘Instead of shielding us,’ quoting a new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘the world may turn around and become our enemy.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  IN THE ANXIOUS HOURS AFTER the break-in, Dyer walked down Ward Road, searching for a house number, when a black car pulled up beside him.

  ‘You haven’t been answering your phone.’

  Dyer took a second to recognise the mottled face.

  ‘I’ve been at the library, in fact I’m heading there now.’

  ‘Let me give you a lift,’ putting away his headphones.

  ‘I’d prefer to walk.’

  ‘I don’t care what you want to do,’ Updark said severely. ‘You’re going to come with me now, this minute. Get in.’

  In the back of the car, Updark said forbiddingly: ‘You know, John, people add up the faults of those who keep them waiting,’ and slapped down a book on the seat between them.

  Dyer recognised it at once. He felt his chest heave.

  Updark opened the cover and rotated it so that Dyer could read the inscription.

  ‘Your handwriting?’

  ‘It is.’ Dyer picked up the book. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘The headmaster. Someone found it beside the sandpit, I’m told.’

  Dyer recalled the Audi parked outside Crotty’s house.

  Dully, he read: To Rustum Marvar, who may have solved everything. With his signature. And a date.

  What a flat-footed inscription. Even after drinking all that sauvignon, he had been aware of what Marvar faced losing. Marvar hadn’t solved anything, really.

  ‘Notice the date?’ said Updark.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Which does now – officially – make you the last person to have clapped eyes on him.’

  Dyer closed the book. He was conscious of Updark’s gaze. ‘It was a present,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Not been in touch, I take it?’

  ‘No,’ said Dyer. He has to assume that Updark knows his every email, telephone call.

  ‘What does it mean, “solved everything”?’ Updark pulled out his cuff to cover the plaster on his wrist. ‘What, like the answer to one of Slimy’s fractions? Sounds like he told you something interesting, Basil.’

  ‘It was a metaphor.’

  ‘A metaphor,’ said Updark coolly.

  ‘He’d been having problems with his son and had sorted them out.’

  ‘That,’ Updark snorted, ‘is the biggest load of rocking-horse manure. I could spread it on my allotment for a year.’

  ‘Well, do what you like with it. That’s what he said,’ Dyer insisted.

  ‘You know, John, if there was a degree for stubbornness, you’d get a double-first. You’re irritatingly like Will Ladislaw. Born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.’

  Updark had been listening to Middlemarch on tape. The vinegary effects of those nineteenth-century conversations, like a tennis game in which the stakes were life or death, had served to remind him of the culture that his vocation was dedicated to preserve. He found that the novel nourished his journey to and from work, recalibrated him. ‘It’s taken me a whole year to get through. Interestingly, I’ve just hit the epilogue. There’s a mention of you, Basil – “a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains”.’

  Dyer derived some comfort from Updark’s hostility. It suggested that Updark hadn’t found out more. If his men had taken the fake post-it note, he’d be asking about that, not about the inscription, wouldn’t he?

  Beside him, Updark was still drawing the cork on the conundrum posed by Dyer’s book. ‘I mean, to leave it there, a present from you … Couldn’t have been your prose?’ he said cruelly. Then: ‘What do you suppose he was doing by the sandpit?’

  ‘Building castles. Wishing he was beside the seaside. Wishing he was reading something else.’ He turned, fizzing, to Updark. ‘Why, what do you think he was doing?’

  Updark’s mouth opened like a trout sipping on a fly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think he’s been murdered?’ said Dyer.

  ‘No. At least, I’m not sure.’

  ‘You still suspect the Iranians?’

  Updark’s hard watchful eyes were unreflective. ‘Iran is the obvious culprit. But we’re not picking up any chatter.’

  ‘What about the threats coming out of Tehran?’

  ‘Nothing more than hot
air, steam.’

  ‘Steam powered the “Rocket”,’ said Dyer.

  Updark’s smile was frosty. ‘Do not stir up Lake Camarina, Basil. I don’t need a science lesson—’ He looked about to say more, but his jacket pocket all at once was playing Bach. He pulled out his phone. After identifying the caller – ‘Sorry, I need to take this’ – he listened to the voice at the other end, his gaze never wavering from Dyer, who had to accept that this was not perhaps the right occasion to ask advice about a dog, or even to broach the subject of his son’s friendship with Updark’s daughter.

  After a while, Updark said: ‘No, not a dickybird.’ Then, in a grudging tone: ‘OK, Ralph, you can have his scalp, but you’ll find it covered with one of those spongy hair transplants that needs a monthly visit to the Radcliffe to get rid of the bacteria.’

  He rang off. ‘Friend Cubbage,’ he explained. ‘The Americans want to grill Professor Whitton.’ Dyer did not need to know this; even so, out of some residual sentiment, Updark had confided in him.

  ‘It was Cubbage who overruled Whitton, as no doubt you’ve guessed. Cubbage is adamant that information recorded by the Clarendon’s cutting-edge new detector can’t be faked, any more than it can be deleted – which is what Marvar, I’m told, tried to do.’

  Dyer waited to see if he was going to say more. ‘Could the Americans have information they’re not sharing?’

  Updark twisted his face. ‘There is one respect in which America has changed since the 1950s. They have a great deal of trouble keeping anything secret. Their national character is to tell you everything they know. My overriding impression is that the Americans are still as much in the dark as we are about if, or how, Marvar might have achieved fusion, and also about where he might be even as we speak.’

  Updark slid the phone back into his jacket and from the same pocket brought out his spiral notebook and opened it.

  ‘Oh, I wanted to ask you about this.’

  He read out: ‘“Ordinarily he took the train.” Now what does that sentence mean? Hissop reckons it might be a code.’

  This revelation confirmed what Dyer suspected. While he was eating Lorna’s flapjacks in Eynsham, Updark’s men had indeed been searching his house. But could it have been them also who seized the decoy that Dyer had planted in the green folder? About this, he was still undecided.

  Updark looked fully at Dyer with his cold eyes. ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘It was a dream I had.’

  ‘A dream,’ Updark nodded. ‘A dream,’ he repeated, as if in another context he might like how it sounded.

  Dyer gave him a nudge. ‘Come on, Lionel, you must have had dreams when you imagine you’ve been given the answer to everything. I woke myself up and wrote it down. As you see, it was pitiful nonsense.’ Like the formula based on Basil Bunting’s poem ‘Chomei at Toyama’. And Dyer allows himself another smile. To picture Updark, Hissop and Lorna, that roomful of code-people, crowded around a screen, their frowns.

  The muscles in Updark’s jaw relax. ‘Speaking of dreams. That Russian mother, Katya. See much of her, do you? I gather your sons have got over their spat.’

  ‘They have. And no, I don’t see much of her.’

  Updark looked out of the window as if summer had come to the Parks and he was watching a game of cricket and Dyer’s reply was of no more consequence than the sound of the Audi’s wheels bearing them towards St Giles. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. “It’s quite hard to trust a nation that is prepared to cheat at mixed curling,”’ which sounded familiar, until Dyer realised that Updark was quoting Dyer’s own words back at him, not from a previous conversation they’d had, but from a text that Dyer had sent to Leandro after the bullying resolution. ‘Little piece of Moroccan advice, Basil, that our American friends feel Professor Whitton might also benefit from. He who has fire in his heart has smoke in his head.’ He let the silence linger. ‘And here’s another. A poor man is never believed.’

  The car had stopped. They were outside the Taylorian.

  ‘Off you go to your library,’ Updark said, snapping shut his notebook. ‘Just don’t go planning a trip up the Amazon, that’s all. We need to keep in touch.’

  Dyer’s hand was already on the door handle. He got out, shaken. Why was Updark referring to his Brazilian research? Was Dyer wrong to have put his trust in the librarian, her guarantee? Had Updark discovered Madrugada’s book?

  He closed the car door, and was about to walk away when he stopped and tapped the polarised window.

  Updark’s features unscrolled into view. He pushed his pink face to the light. It appeared still to be suffering from what Dyer’s book dealer in Rio had once referred to as scattered insect damage.

  ‘Thought of something?’

  ‘I forgot to ask,’ said Dyer. ‘How’s the patch-testing? Have they found any suspect agents?’

  Updark, disregarding his tone, answered in a deadpan voice. ‘They wondered if it might be an eczema. They’ve given me a steroid, but as you can see it hasn’t solved it.’

  Chapter Thirty

  OBSERVED ONLY BY THE COUPLE in the painting, Dyer sits down in the French and German reading room, and opens the book. The plunk of his heart.

  Still there.

  Dyer puts Madrugada’s monograph back in the stacks, his faith immediately restored in the system which has promised to look after it for five more days, and returns to Ward Road.

  He walks past the house where he was standing when Updark’s car drew up, as if catching him red-handed with Rougetel on one of their illicit outings into town, until he finds the front door with ‘No. 8’ on it, and rings the bell. He waits, rings again. No answer.

  Desperate to remove Leandro from Oxford, Dyer went home and spent the morning making plans for the exeat. He was not going to let his son out of his sight. He had taken him to school, and was there waiting for him when the bell sounded, signalling the end of lessons.

  The first moments inside the gate were like the first moments in the favela. Dyer noted the activity, of which he was always on the edge, the boys and girls flowing out of their classrooms. The playground acted as a sound-box. Shouts reached his ears, then words – about teachers, prep, games, bun-break. They were exchanges that Dyer knew by heart, like lines from the Phoenix Book of Verse. He was formed in this echo chamber, now it had received him back.

  On this Thursday afternoon, he felt that he was walking into a dream. He saw it and he did not see it. Time passed in a strange way. He noticed details that he never normally recognised, alert to see if whoever had taken the false post-it note had swallowed the lure – and therefore had no need to harass Dyer further about it.

  The head girl was pulling the rope. On the roof of the Rink, the bell rang, ding dong.

  Dyer cast his eyes about for his son. He couldn’t pick him out, and then the crowd thinned, and he saw Leandro standing beside a boy in his class. They were talking to an adult, who lifted his head at Dyer’s approach: a lean Asian man in an ochre suit, with the chiselled features of a minor actor.

  ‘Who’s that?’ taking Leandro by the hand. He glanced back. Something about that face. In a dashboard light.

  ‘Oh, that’s Hui’s bodyguard.’

  Hui was Chinese, a plump, polite boy with the slightly glazed look of someone who is good at maths. Leandro had once brought him back to St Barnabas Street.

  ‘Hui’s invited me to go paintballing.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ Dyer said in a firm voice. ‘I’ve made other plans.’ He had a sudden, chest-tightening recollection that Hui’s father worked for a telecoms giant in Beijing.

  Leandro climbs into the car and says nothing until Dyer turns right on Bardwell Road.

  ‘Why are you going this way?’

  ‘I was trying a shortcut to see whether this is quicker.’ And to shake off the white Renault Clio that might have been tailing them.

  He turns left into St Margaret’s Road,
and the car shoots past.

  His shortcut brings them out near Jamaica Road. Dyer slows down behind a bus. He puts the car into neutral, waiting for the passengers to board, and glances over at Leandro.

  Beside him, his son looks as lost as a dog that runs after birds.

  ‘What?’ says Dyer.

  ‘Dad … you know how you changed your telephone number? I wonder if I should change my password at school …’ And out it comes, how Mr Tanner had sent an email with an attachment, asking Leandro to look at his report, but when Leandro clicked on the attachment it wasn’t what he expected. ‘I’ve been getting messages ever since.’

  ‘What sort of messages?’

  ‘Weird stuff, telling me my device has been hacked, they can see everything on my screen …’

  ‘It must be a malware,’ Dyer tries to reassure him. A similar email had arrived on his laptop from someone claiming to have infected Dyer’s router with a program called Spyware, but he’d ignored it.

  ‘No, no, Dad, you don’t get it. They know the last game I played on Xbox, what I have on my wall, they even … Dad, has someone been using my room?’

  Dyer had not told him about Marvar staying the night. At the time, Leandro hadn’t seemed to notice, all his focus trained on Trafalgar.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s crazy. They want to get hold of this person. They’ll leave me alone if I tell them how. I literally have no idea what they’re talking about.’

  Ahead of them, the bus juddered off.

  ‘It’s just some nerd,’ said Dyer, putting the car into gear. ‘Some sick nerd.’ Yet it was he who felt sick. ‘I’ll ring Mr Tanner when we get home,’ he promised. ‘We’ll ask him to change your password.’

  As Dyer turned left into Jamaica Road, Vasily sprang into view, spinning a yellow football on his finger while he waited for the security gate to open.