by F. G. Cottam
Grayling smiled, grateful for the savoir-faire his years in military intelligence had endowed him with. His experience of espionage had made him an excellent poker player. ‘That’s impossible.’
Rupert Dobb held out his hands in an expression imploring patience and perhaps also faith. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It presupposes medical knowledge of the spread of contagious infection of which the world was quite ignorant in the Middle Ages.’
‘It does more than that, Mr Dobb. It anticipates germ warfare by several centuries, and I do not believe in the possibility of time travel, tempting though that daydream is.’
‘I am not a fantasist, Professor.’
‘I am sure.’
‘I have the deposition in my briefcase. You should read it. Robert de Morey pursued this alchemist relentlessly. He actually went to the land they did not dare name, followed him there with a troop of hand-picked men.’
‘And they found him?’
‘Only de Morey returned. He did so after two years, having found Slee there and finally butchered him.’
‘So he travelled back accompanied by no witnesses, meaning no one to contradict his account. Does that not strike you as convenient?’
‘I’ve had the document I found carbon dated. It is genuine.’
‘So are many accounts of the Grail Quest. It does not mean that King Arthur ever lived or that Camelot was a real location or that the Grail was ever there in the first place. Chroniclers tended to deal in the truth in the times we are discussing, but de Morey’s story could well have been written as a deliberate fiction. The novel form had not been invented then, but the saga had. With television still several centuries away, they enjoyed their stories.’
Dobb sighed. ‘Except for that medical insight of which he would not have been capable. What if Slee was from a place where people had discovered the real cause of bacterial infection? This land de Morey writes of sounds like another world. What if Slee really did come from there and really did deliberately concoct the plague bacillus? We’ve never been able to identify the exact nature of the infection.’
‘We have never been able successfully to identify the viral profile of the Spanish Influenza. What does that prove?’
‘It doesn’t prove anything,’ Dobb said. ‘But it raises an interesting possibility. Perhaps we cannot identify these infections because they are not of our world. They are effective against us, devastatingly so. But they did not originate here. They were manufactured, but are not of our making. They are the work of an enemy foreign to us.’
Grayling pondered on what he had been told. He thought about the York graves, the consequence of mass destruction, death on a mechanized scale with the plague victims packed like items of factory spoil in the earth.
He wanted to get the de Morey deposition out of his visitor’s possession. It was not a proof, but it would be compelling evidence and would certainly prompt press interest and further academic research. Some avenues were best left unexplored and some historic truths much safer avoided. ‘A crime needs a motive,’ he said. ‘What possible motive could Hieronymus Slee have had to inflict murder and suffering of such appalling magnitude?’
‘You know more about the Black Death than I do, about its consequences and repercussions. There comes a tipping point. In the middle of the fourteenth century, humanity almost reached it. That was the motive. Our destruction was the intention.’
‘You can’t discuss this openly, you know. You will be dismissed as a crank and ridiculed. It will greatly damage your career.’
There was a silence then. It was longer and more uncomfortable than Grayling would have liked. He wanted his visitor to think pragmatically. But he knew that Dobb was an egotistical man and suspected a strong streak of stubbornness. He was not used to being told he was wrong and he was a stranger to compromise. Against all that, though, he wasn’t a fool.
‘Speaking to you about it has helped,’ Dobb said, eventually. ‘I had to confide in someone qualified to discuss what I found. I believe you will keep the secret. It is not something I would wish to talk about or even think about again. If you decide to act on the information, that’s your choice. If you choose to disregard what I have told you, you can probably do so with your conscience clear. You get your evidence of what happened in the past, after all, by unearthing relics from the ground.’
He unlatched the briefcase he had brought with him and took out a thick envelope. ‘I’d like you to take this,’ he said.
Grayling took the deposition from him. He tried not to let the relief he felt at doing so show in his expression. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘It lay between the pages of a medieval atlas on a neglected shelf in a library at an old seminary at the foot of the French Alps.’
‘Not catalogued, then.’
Dobb smiled. ‘It was in the appropriate place, I think. It describes a domain missing from the maps drawn elsewhere in that volume.’
Now, twenty-five years on, older, stiffer and each more eminent, the two men sat in opposing armchairs at the fireside under the low oak beams of Sir Rupert’s comfortable hotel lounge. Tourism in Canterbury was strictly seasonal and the city was blissfully free of business conference bookings. So they had the lounge to themselves. They could speak confidentially with freedom. As they started to do so, Grayling realized with surprise that their shared secret of a quarter of a century had made friends of them. And friendship demanded frankness, did it not?
‘You are here to give me a warning,’ Sir Rupert said.
‘You have a lot to lose.’
‘We all do. One man’s everything is much the same as another’s. There’s no stronger instinct than self-preservation.’
‘Yet some people overcome that.’
‘People like you,’ Sir Rupert said. He reached for the poker and lifted logs in the fireplace, rearranging them, increasing at once the fierceness of the flames and the radiant heat expelled from the grate. It was not cold in the room; on the contrary, the day was unseasonably mild. But he simply could not help himself. He was a cause and effect sort of person. More, he was the sort of person who liked personally to cause the effect.
‘How much do you know?’ Grayling asked. ‘How much more do you know now, than you did then?’
Sir Rupert stared into the fire. ‘My wife, Jane’s mother, is one of those people on a constant search for enlightenment, Stuart. The search has deteriorated over time from the study of Van Morrison lyrics, to the reading of self-help books. The oxymoron of the self-help guru has never occurred to her. My wife does not do irony. No one in the fashion world does.’
‘A luxury they can’t afford, I suppose.’ Grayling wished he was drinking something stiffer than coffee from a white china cup.
‘But her quest, its clichéd and limited parameters, set me on mine. The distinction was that I didn’t want affirmation of what I already believed. I wanted what I believed confounded and disproven.’
‘You didn’t find what you were looking for.’
‘I did not. I discovered instead that I was right about de Morey’s account. The deposition was real and his words truthful. And you bloody well knew it. And you are here about my daughter, your pupil, because there is a dynastic element to this struggle, isn’t there? That was in the de Morey too, though I didn’t appreciate its significance all those years ago.’
‘You weren’t a father then.’
‘He was. The scholar warrior de Morey was. And he schooled his only son, Simon, for the fight.’
‘It’s destiny, Rupert,’ Grayling said gently. ‘It is inescapable. I am here to tell you that it cannot be avoided.’
‘How many people know? Globally, I mean?’
‘I doubt more than a hundred.’
‘How many attempts to destroy us have there been?
‘It’s been going on since the dawn of recorded time. The first event written about was the Flood.’
‘Christ.’
‘Christ is not involved.’
‘Nor am I, Stuart. How has my daughter become embroiled?’
‘She is close and I believe growing closer to someone chosen to fight on our behalf. This is a very formidable young man, a man if you like in the mould of de Morey, though he does not know it yet. She saw someone from the land we do not dare name. The confrontation was deliberately engineered by him. That was her challenge, her invitation to join the fray. And I can tell you from experience that there is no rejecting it.’
The fire burned. On the wall above the mantle, a clock with a pendulum in a walnut case ticked implacably. Sir Rupert Dobb put his hand over his eyes and the hand shook visibly. ‘Do what you can to protect my daughter,’ he said. ‘I love her very much.’
Grayling had travelled by train to Canterbury. He walked back towards the railway station. It was no great distance and of course he knew the city. It should have been a relaxed stroll through the twilight descending upon one of the most beautiful urban settlements in a still largely beautiful country.
But it was not. As he walked the route, Grayling felt not just watched and followed, but lethally threatened. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled with impending danger. He knew the feeling, remembered it, and not with any sort of fondness or nostalgia.
He had felt like this before the accord in the Province on the bandit streets of Ulster in the mid-eighties. He had occupied the sights of sniper rifles held by men who were murderous shots. He had escaped death on two certain occasions only by good fortune. The experiences had sharpened his instinct for self-preservation.
He accelerated, weaving through a cluster of students on the pavement and dodging down a narrow alleyway to his right. It led to a street roughly parallel to the one he had been walking down. He hurried back along it in the direction from which he had come and then took another right, bringing him out a block back on his original route.
He saw his pursuer straight away. A man a head taller than the other pedestrians idling along the street was standing fifty feet distant, facing away from him and still. He wore his hair to an extravagant length and even in the limited light of Canterbury’s old streetlamps, he looked powerfully built. Studied, though, he was not standing completely still. He was breathing deeply, sniffing the air, Grayling knew, for the scent of the prey that had slipped from his sight.
It was dark when Adam arrived in Rotterdam. He did so aboard a ferry. He had two hundred Euros in his wallet, money described as necessary expenses and given him the morning of the previous day as he left the Brighton home of Dr McGuire. McGuire had bought the ferry tickets in advance. He would not be punished for his absence from his lectures and seminars, McGuire explained. Grayling was head of department and decided what disciplinary penalties should be imposed. Adam had been granted leave of absence on compassionate grounds. There was a family matter to deal with, a domestic issue to reconcile. It would take as long as it took, McGuire assured him. The college was very sympathetic in such circumstances. There was no hurry.
He had not slept with Jane Dobb the previous night. He had wanted to, and up to a point of course he had tried to do so, because he was only human and she was gorgeous. She was enthusiastic too, but on her terms.
He had not earned her yet, that was the thing. She had not said so in so many words. She had verbalized her feelings though, as they untangled themselves from her sofa, gathering items of clothing to put back on and both struggling to get their breath back and compose themselves.
‘I’m not ready to sleep with you yet. My feelings for you run too deep.’ She frowned. ‘Does that sound like a contradiction?’
‘No. It’s very flattering,’ he said. Then he sat and waited for the erection swelling his underwear to subside so that he could stand up and gather his clothes and dress with something approaching dignity. It took a fairly long time. While he waited, he asked Jane how she had raised the money to buy such a luxurious place in which to live.
She had helped her mother design a clothing range. It had been her idea. She had been looking at some Lycra pieces in the showroom and thinking about how sweaty Lycra was and she started to think about breathable fabrics, the waterproof membranes used in performance clothing. It was a shame, she thought, that they were always used in the dorky designs worn typically by train-spotters and geography teachers.
‘And archaeology students on rainy Scottish digs,’ Adam said.
‘Quite,’ said Jane.
She saw no reason why functional weatherproof clothes should not be stylish. So she came up with the range and gave the collection a name, Roam, which was sexier than hike or ramble and given the cut and detail of the garments, might have greater than average anorak appeal. And it went down very successfully in such storm-challenged locations as Notting Hill and the Fulham Road and became essential wear at the wheels of their Range Rovers among the footballers’ wives of Cheshire.
‘Martin was wearing a Roam jacket in the enrolment queue on the first day of term,’ Jane said. ‘It was how we got talking.’
‘What’s happened to Martin? He seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth.’
‘He’s made himself scarce since I told him about you,’ she said. ‘It’s a surprise, because I thought he was gay.’
‘You think everyone is gay.’
‘Not you, I don’t.’
‘I’m just in serious denial.’ At last, he had been able to get up and put his trousers back on.
‘Ha bloody ha.’
‘It’s uncharacteristic,’ Adam said. ‘He’s a garrulous sort of bloke. He’s forever emailing and texting and suggesting a drink. And I won’t be seeing him now because I’ve got to go away.’
Jane was brushing her hair. ‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’
He looked at her. His caressing fingers were the reason she had to smooth out the tresses he had tangled as they kissed and touched. He still could not quite believe he was with her. He had listened to what she had said and understood it but could still not quite fathom why she had chosen him.
She was staring at his naked torso. ‘I’m shallow,’ she said, as though having read his mind. ‘You’re beautiful.’
Rotterdam was not beautiful. It was bleary in a succession of harbour lights that managed to be garish without illuminating much. Rainbow puddles were slick on the oily ground. A misty and insistent rain leached out of low cloud. The horns of ships were mournful in a distance invisible through the darkness.
And it took Adam longer than it should have to find the address McGuire had given him, a dockside bar with a corrugated roof and steel flanks that looked like it had come ashore on a container vessel. The metal walls were rust splotched. Windows were spyholes crudely cut by a welder’s torch. A neon sign announced it as Delilah’s. The neon fizzed, flashing above a fortified wooden door.
Everything about this ugly destination suggested trouble to Adam. He could not imagine McGuire coming here, sipping a schooner of sherry with his pinkie raised, even armed with his swordstick. It was a dive. It was the kind of bar in which bored losers fought one another for entertainment. It was not the sort of place that would welcome strangers.
He took a breath and pushed open the door.
Three heavily tattooed men sat in a thuggish cluster around a single table. None of them was Adam’s father. Cigarette smoke hung in a pall under the metal ceiling. Perhaps the harbour precincts were beyond the jurisdiction of whatever body enforced the law concerning smoking in public places. Adam thought it more likely that the bar he was in was outside any sort of law beyond its own.
He was aware that each of the inked trio was looking at him. He did not feel particularly threatened by this. He had done nothing more offensive in entering the bar than lighten the general tedium. That said, it was very early days. And he thought getting out likely to be an entirely more challenging proposition than getting in.
His focus was fixed on the woman behind the bar. Like her three customers, she was smoking. Like them, she was tattooed. She wore a white straple
ss dress and some bird of paradise had been etched skilfully into the flesh of her upper arm.
But there the resemblance to her punters ended. The woman behind the bar was pale-skinned with hair that framed her face and draped her shoulders in shiny black coils. Her eyelids were heavy with kohl. Her mouth was full under dark lipstick. Her expression was very difficult to read. That might have been the make-up, Adam thought. Her grey eyes were either cold or appraising, depending on your outlook.
When she plucked her cigarette from where it rested in an ashtray, the painted nails of her hand were almost talon-like in length. Adam could not have begun to guess at her age. He thought her one of the most strikingly attractive women he had ever seen.
‘What’s your pleasure?’ She smiled.
She had guessed correctly at his nationality. And the deliberate ambiguity of the question wasn’t lost on him. One of the regulars grunted something guttural and offensive. Adam ignored it. It wasn’t the odds, and in some circumstances he wasn’t averse to a tear-up. People who provoked a beating to his mind deserved to get one. But it wasn’t what he was here for. He carefully skirted the occupied table and returned the woman’s smile. He ordered a beer.
She spoke as she started to draw it from the tap, her voice no more than a murmur. ‘You look like him.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like the man you’re here to find. You look like your father.’ Her eyes widened, fixed on him. It was a difficult look to hold and return, almost aggressively frank. ‘Tough and shy at the same time, like he said you’d be. It’s a charming contradiction in a young man. I’m Delilah.’
‘Clearly you know my father.’
‘As well as anyone can,’ she said. She had an accent. It was as seductive as everything else about her. Adam did not think it local to Rotterdam. She did not sound Dutch. He could not place it, it was too subtle.
‘It sounds like he knew I was coming.’
‘No one escapes their destiny.’
