Glenmore sat in the fading sunlight, and wished he were a wiser man.
CHAPTER CXVIII
Hynes and Gackowska reached Manchester without incident. They stopped for coffee along the way, but Gackowska was pleased—and not a little relieved—to note that Hynes did not scour the surrounding tables for stray receipts he could claim as his own. They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band’s best record, and how Sgt. Pepper’s wasn’t really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.
Carenor’s main depot was located in an industrial park not far from the Etihad Stadium, and differed from the neighboring businesses only in the degree of security that had to be negotiated in order to enter, and the presence of temperature-controlled vaults in the warehouses, which were pointed out to Hynes and Gackowska as they were escorted to the main building. They were offered coffee, which they declined, and the use of the bathrooms, which they accepted, before being shown to Dylan Lynskey’s office.
Lynskey was dressed in a blue-and-white-striped shirt with a wide white collar, and a pink tie that Hynes wouldn’t have worn as a bet. A navy suit jacket dangled from a coat hanger on the back of the office door, and the walls were mostly decorated with the kind of artwork that Hynes suspected was just expensive enough to impress a certain type of visitor, but not expensive enough to excite anyone who actually knew anything about art. Since Hynes didn’t fall into either category, he didn’t care much either way, with the exception of a small framed sketch that he thought might have been a Lowry. He didn’t want to ask, though, just in case it wasn’t, and he made himself look stupid as a consequence.
Everything about Lynskey was slick, and he was on the defensive from the off, reminding them that Carenor was a high-end operation, noted for its probity and discretion, and had never been found guilty of any illegality. This, as Hynes and Gackowska well knew, differed from actively avoiding illegal behavior, or not being accused of it; and the more Lynskey spoke, the clearer it became that only a guilty man would be so concerned about stressing his innocence. Gackowska had done some research before they left the northeast, and in between listening to Beatles tracks, and Hynes’s complaints about the depths of the younger generation’s ignorance, she had enlightened him about the avarice, mendacity, and downright crookedness of much of the art world. By the time they got to Manchester, Hynes was ready to arrest anyone in possession of a paintbrush and an easel.
Lynskey went through Sellars’s employment record, noting that he traveled not only around Britain, but also abroad, and his handling of consignments was always scrupulous. During the fifteen years he had worked for the company, he had not been responsible for a single breakage, or even minor damage.
“Does he work alone?” asked Hynes.
“Some jobs require a two-person crew, but rarely more than that,” said Lynskey. “On those occasions, a driver might be assigned a partner, but for the most part we use single-operator vehicles. That’s fairly typical of the courier business, even in our niche.”
“Does he get on with everyone?”
“Not even Christ got along with everyone,” said Lynskey, which was a fair point.
“In general.”
“In general, yes. I’m curious as to what all this is about, by the way. Is Mr. Sellars suspected of some crime?”
Lynskey might have been oleaginous, but he wasn’t dim. Hynes knew that he’d probably googled Gary Holmby’s name after their initial phone conversation, if he hadn’t immediately recalled it from the news reports, but there was no point in rushing to confirm his suspicions.
“This is linked to an ongoing investigation,” said Gackowska, “but we’re really just trying to eliminate people from our inquiries. It means a lot of dead ends, but it has to be done.”
Lynskey smiled at her. She might have been delivering boilerplate, but she was easy on the eye. His wedding ring flashed briefly in the sunlight and he blinked hard, as though his absent wife had somehow detected his interest in another woman and found a way to remind him of his obligations. His smile faded.
Hynes and Gackowska listened to a brief history of the company, and further claims of probity, before deciding to cut to the chase.
“Has Mr. Sellars ever been in trouble with the police?” said Hynes.
“Outside the company? I couldn’t possibly say. He’s had one or two speeding fines over the years, which hardly makes him unique among couriers. They’re always racing against the clock, but he’s never been in danger of losing his license.”
“And within the company?”
Lynskey shifted in his chair.
“Not so much ‘trouble,’ no.”
“But?”
Lynskey’s discomfort increased. Either he was inordinately fond—or wary—of Sellars, and disliked being put in a position where he might have to betray confidences, or whatever he was being asked to reveal didn’t just reflect badly on his employee.
“We had a problem, a few years ago.”
“What kind of problem?”
“A potentially embarrassing one. The seemingly endless search for artworks looted by the Nazis created some backwash that landed on our doorstep. A Dutch investigator named Yvette Visser believed that Carenor, either knowingly or inadvertently, might have been responsible for transporting certain disputed pieces across international borders.”
“And was she right?”
“No proof was ever offered, so I would dispute it.”
Hynes tried to figure out exactly what this might mean, but parked the problem for later consideration after his confusion grew too great.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Visser came to England, and promptly disappeared.”
“ ‘Promptly’?” said Gackowska.
It was an odd choice of word, but Lynskey simply shrugged.
“Promptly,” he confirmed. “I think she’d only been in the country for a short while before she vanished.”
“And how does Sellars fit into this?”
“Well,” said Lynskey, “he was the last person to see her alive.”
CHAPTER CXIX
Parker returned to Hazlitt’s to find an envelope on his bed, with his name written on the front in Bob Johnston’s handwriting. He opened it to discover a copy of Selected Poems by John Dryden, in the Penguin edition. Earlier in the week, Johnston had informed Parker that Dryden had once lived only minutes from Hazlitt’s, only for Parker to confess that he’d never heard of the poet. Johnston had done his best to hide his distress, but it had been a struggle. On the title page, he had written:
“The Souls of Friends, like Kings in Progress are…”
Thank you, my friend, for this journey.
Bob.
* * *
BOB JOHNSTON WAS ALONE. Mors was long gone, and now Sellars also. The latter had left soon after Parker, taking with him the stink of testosterone, and the turmoil of his rage.
Johnston remained bound and gagged. He had been given nothing to eat or drink since his abduction, and Quayle had not spoken a word to him after Sellars’s departure. Since his surroundings were deprived of natural light, or a clock, Johnston had no idea of the hour. His nostrils kept blocking, making it difficult to breathe. At times he had come close enough to suffocation, or so it felt, that only the greatest effort of will had prevented him from panicking, or blacking out.
Quayle was elsewhere, although Johnston could hear sounds of movement from one of the nearby rooms, even if they were rendered strange by the damage to his ear; and while Quayle’s living quarters were cramped and opaque, and should have been claustrophobic, Johnston was experiencing, by contrast, a sensation closer to agoraphobia, as though the space he occupied were merely an adjunct to a greater volume that was just barely concealed,
an anteroom to a monumental hall so vast that were it to be revealed, its walls and ceiling, perhaps even the floor itself, would be lost to darkness. Perhaps, he suspected, he was experiencing some premonition of his own death.
The room was very warm, and smelled of burning, although the fireplace was empty and cold. For how long, Johnston wondered, had Quayle been occupying this space, or some version of it? It seemed impossible that it could be centuries, but even brief exposure had convinced Johnston that Quayle was beyond any conception of normality. Yet that he was insane seemed certain; no one could hide behind these windowless walls and not go mad, and no man could live so long without losing his reason.
Quayle reappeared, and added two small books to a pile on his desk. He seemed to be engaged in some winnowing of his library, separating the grain from the chaff. He spoke without turning toward Johnston.
“We’re almost at the end,” said Quayle, but he seemed to be talking as much to the shadows as to Johnston. “I’ll have done what I agreed to do, and soon my part will be over. I don’t know what will happen to me after. Perhaps I’ll just crumble to dust.”
Now he looked at Johnston and grinned, but his eyes were pools of desolation. Quayle, he saw, was frightened; it came of striking bargains with forces that had a habit of reneging on their side of the deal, or finding ways to manipulate language as easily as men’s souls. But Quayle was a lawyer, and familiar with raveling and unraveling tangled threads of legalese. He had probably convinced himself that the agreement was ironclad, and could not be turned against him. What had he been promised in return for his services? Longevity and prosperity, probably, or some variation on the same, because that was what most men sought. The rest—women, power—would follow naturally.
And he had received long life, longer than he could ever have wished for, or imagined possible, so that it had, in the end, become an intolerable burden; and prosperity, but with nothing on which to spend his wealth beyond the search for an artifact that would bring his own existence to a conclusion, until he was reduced to hiding from the world in a windowless box, a taste of the final resting place to come. For female company, he had Mors; as power, the infliction of misery. The bargain had probably not been to his liking after all, Johnston thought.
Quayle checked the feed from the camera, and confirmed that the courtyard was unoccupied. The custodian, Glenmore, had locked up the Old Firm before leaving, and the canteen in the main building was shuttered and dark. Smoking was forbidden within its precincts, and so anyone desiring a cigarette would have to go elsewhere for the pleasure. No one would be coming near the Old Firm again until morning.
Quayle picked up a sharp letter opener and stepped behind Johnston, who was more conscious than ever of his exposed neck. But Quayle used the blade only to sever the tape holding Johnston’s head and neck in place. He also pulled aside the tape sealing Johnston’s mouth, but did not remove it entirely, just in case someone did come and he was forced to muzzle him again. A glass of water was produced, then a second. Johnston drank both down before Quayle fed him cold chicken with his fingers.
“I need the bathroom,” said Johnston, when he was finished.
“That won’t be possible.”
“I have to pee. This isn’t some trick.”
“I know it isn’t, but smell yourself. I think the damage has already been done, don’t you?”
And so another humiliation was added to the sum of Johnston’s pain and misery for that day. It would not be the last; of that much, Johnston was sure.
“What now?” he said.
“For you?”
“I guess. And for everything.”
“It ends. For you, for everything. You should have stayed in America, with your own books. You should not have followed a man like Parker here, to inquire into the nature of mine. But curiously, you’ve helped me.”
“What do you mean?”
Quayle stopped what he was doing.
“Your notes,” he said. “Your researches. After all these years, your scholarship enabled me to discover why the Atlas was incomplete, and perhaps might have remained so. That it should all come down to one Dutch word, panelen, and a deliberate mistranslation by Couvret so many years ago.”
Quayle seemed both baffled and amused by his own blindness.
“De panelen zijn de laatste pagina,” he said. “Not ‘the panels are the last page,’ but ‘the panes.’ I had always wondered why so many of the figures that haunt the Atlas, including the ones known to manifest themselves in the Rackham illustrations, resembled those depicted in the windows at Fairford, and especially their representation of the Last Judgment. What was the reason for it? Yes, some of the Fairford glaziers traveled from the Low Countries, where the Atlas was discovered again at the end of the sixteenth century, after being lost for so long. It was possible that, as it lay hidden in the ground, its influence infected some among these men, who came from generations of artisans. It found expression in their glasswork, just as I expect its visions haunted their nightmares, and the nightmares of their fathers, and their grandfathers, and all those who had spent their lives with the Atlas buried beneath their feet. It was simply one more manifestation of the Atlas’s power, or so I thought.
“But what if it was more than that? What if the Atlas was waiting beneath the ground, and sensed that it would soon be found? It was already incomplete when it was first recovered, and Couvret, when he brought it to England, commenced a process of further dispersal, before hiding entirely what was left, all to keep it from me. And he succeeded, for a time: centuries passed until Maulding, aided by the Dunwidges and Maggs, secured the bulk of it. But the Atlas’s consummation was never meant to come about through vellum alone.”
Almost without his noticing, Quayle had moved closer to Johnston as he spoke, so that he was now once again standing over the American.
“I think,” said Quayle, “that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Atlas created its own final illustration, distinct from the book itself, and it did so in glass, through the efforts of men.”
He placed his hands on Johnston’s cheeks, like a priest praying over a penitent.
“The window is the last page,” Quayle whispered into Johnston’s good ear. “The window is the Apocalypse.”
His hands moved, his thumbs now searching his captive’s face.
“I’m glad you came,” said Quayle. “I had need of fresh eyes.”
CHAPTER CXX
Gackowska and Hynes were still in Dylan Lynskey’s office, carefully examining the inventory of Christopher Sellars’s movements in recent weeks. Lynskey had explained to them, in as much detail as he could recall, the circumstances surrounding the visit of the Dutch investigator Hendricksen, and the two detectives from Scotland Yard’s Antiques Unit, Hamill and Mount. Hynes hadn’t even known that there was an Antiques Unit at Scotland Yard. He thought he might apply. It sounded like an easy number that would involve drinking copious amounts of tea, so he was already overqualified.
Carenor used GPS tracking on its fleet, with a geo-fence facility that alerted the company when a driver left a designated area. The system also stored a full history of the route taken by each vehicle, which could be replicated on a series of onscreen maps. Unfortunately, as Lynskey admitted, the system was checked only when a problem arose, such as when a vehicle was delayed—or in a worst-case scenario, went missing—or if concerns were expressed about how efficiently a driver might be spending his working hours. Since Carenor’s employees were carefully vetted, and many had been with the company for years, such checks were rarely necessary. In addition, none of its fleet had ever been stolen, although attempts had been made to break into them on occasion, people being what they were.
When Hynes and Gackowska accessed Sellars’s records via Lynskey’s computer, they found gaps. Not all of them corresponded directly with women going missing, but some did. In addition, they discovered journeys recorded on the system that bore no relation to where Sellars was suppos
ed to have been on certain given days, despite the fact that he had clearly made deliveries, or received consignments, on his scheduled routes. In one case, the system showed him as being in Cardiff at the precise moment that he was picking up two paintings from a gallery in Glasgow, because the gallery owner had signed off on the pickup time.
“Maybe there was a problem with the device,” said Lynskey, “or the system.”
“Is there a way you can find out?” said Hynes.
“I can call the monitoring company and ask, I suppose.”
“Would Sellars always have used the same van?”
“The drivers have their own preferences and peculiarities when it comes to the fleet, but no, that wouldn’t be possible.”
“Can you take a look at the records of the other drivers, and see if any of them have encountered similar problems during that period?”
“Certainly.”
They left him to it. Hynes used the excuse of a cigarette break to invite Gackowska to step outside, so they could speak without being overheard.
“Well?” said Hynes.
“If he was using the same vehicle all the time, I could buy the dodgy sat nav theory,” said Gackowska. “But unless he’s Magneto, I think Sellars has been blocking the signal.”
“I think so, too. He could be using a jammer, but brass mesh, or a lead-lined bag like the ones that protect camera film from X-rays, would do the job just as well.”
“Or a Faraday pouch,” said Gackowska. “They shield phone signals, so they’d do the same for sat nav. What I don’t understand is how the system showed Sellars as being in Wales when he was clearly in Scotland, unless he paid someone to do his rounds for him.”
A Book of Bones Page 59
