by Sam Leith
The fire had long gone out, doused in cold rain. But the smell of burning came through, wet burned wood. Droplets stood on melted plastic. The shack was gone – a black stain on the ground, a couple of jutting teeth of carbonised wood. Across the wet grass to either side were wisps and fragments of cinderated paper, the odd rag of sodden yellow in the fingers of the green.
The Calor canister under the wall of the shack had obviously gone. Half of it was there, its skin twisted and blackened. Its shrapnel had half dug turves out of the ground, and the grass was radially scorched on that side. The wooden floor of the shack was gone from the centre, where the fire seemed to have started. There were threads of rug towards the outside – where the stump of a piling emerged from poured concrete foundations. A stick of table leg was there.
The wind had blown the fire away up the hill, drying and burning the grass in patches up behind the shack. The beanstalks, the ones nearest the hut, were scorched but those towards Isla were intact, if more overgrown than when she had been here. The leaves were blowsy, the season long gone. Isla walked closer.
Too late, she thought. She had run out of time. He was gone.
She twisted a pod off one of the beanstalks, and thumbed it open. Inside, a broad bean – the only one full-size – sat in its velvety white cushion like a ring in a jeweller’s box.
She walked round the shack, looking for him. She thought of calling for him, but it felt wrong, somehow, to raise her voice. He was gone. She knew that. Not dead – she didn’t know why she was so sure of that, but she somehow felt confident of it – but gone. Beyond her help. Nobody could help him.
Her good Gore-Tex boots kept the wet out. She remembered him drawing his diagram: ‘And here is the map of Nicolas Banacharski in the world. And here is the map of Miss Isla Holderness in the world.’ She understood now why this was strangely comforting.
In among the bean shoots the chickens picked, pecking morosely at the wet grass, shivering their wings. Had he left them? Their henhouse was intact. She peeked into it. There was straw in there, and the hopper was dry, and full of grain.
Isla walked back down into town, and caused the police to be called. They came up, took a statement – Isla struggling a little with her French – filed a missing persons report, and late that evening told her she was free to go home. She spent the night in an auberge, and set off the following morning, early, resolute, sad: telling herself she had done everything she could and not believing it for a second.
When she arrived back in Cambridge, she came home to find that she had been burgled. Her laptop had gone, as well as her video recorder, the contents of her underwear drawer and medicine cabinet, and the nearly full bottle of vodka she had kept on the dresser. A pane of the front bay window had been smashed. A creditable but, finally, unsuccessful attempt had been made to remove the television.
Also, her jewellery box was gone – and with it, which somehow at that moment felt more important to her than even her own christening presents, Ana’s ring. Isla had sat down on her living-room floor and, before she called the police, cried for a long time.
Three days later, Isla’s house was burgled again. This time, it was Banacharski’s letters to her that went. It happened during the day, while she was at the library preparing a lecture. No glass was broken. Nothing of value was taken. Nobody was spotted at the scene.
Chapter 14
Isla Holderness never saw Ana’s ring again. Her laptop, having been sold in a grimy pub on the outskirts of town, was eventually recovered by the police.
Its thief was seventeen-year-old Ben Collings, who was picked up not two weeks later while attempting to prise open the back door of the Co-op at 4 a.m., in the mindset of exuberant criminal incompetence that a gram and a half of his brother’s home-made amphetamine sulphate and a litre of white cider could be relied upon to produce. His fingerprints matched the ones he had left on the door of Isla’s fridge, and his teeth – as the Cambridgeshire Constabulary’s equivalent of the CSI lab was proud to report – precisely matched the profile of the two-thirds of a miniature Melton Mowbray pork pie that he had not stolen from inside it.
Mr Collings, as the PC who returned Isla’s laptop to her explained, was ‘a worthless little toerag’ of precisely the sort who formed the cop shop’s most loyal client base.
Collings had offloaded most of Isla’s possessions onto his big brother – a toerag of some seniority – who had in turn dispersed them among the pawn shops and market stalls of the town. Ana’s ring had ended up in an antique shop the quality of whose merchandise was belied by the tweeness of its name. Herbert Owse’s Antiquarian Omnium Gatherum stood on Burleigh Street, and was manned by a rubicund numismatist with a wild beard and a liking for checked shirts and moleskin waistcoats. His socks, though this is of scant relevance here, were held up with suspenders. His name was not Herbert Owse.
It was into this shop, however, that Alex Smart ducked while cutting down Burleigh Street one afternoon on his way from the cinema – where he had been spending the afternoon not working on his PhD and not thinking about the fact that he wasn’t working on his PhD – to the pub where he was meeting a friend in order to continue doing same.
Alex, who was not in the habit of browsing in antique shops and would not have been able to afford antiques even if he had, had gone in to escape a sudden shower of rain. The shower of rain proving unusually persistent, he was obliged to make a furious pretence at interest in the shop’s contents. Away he browsed, under the jovial eye of the proprietor, occasionally asking questions.
‘This piece,’ he said. ‘Eighteenth century, is it?’
‘Art deco,’ the proprietor replied.
‘Hm,’ said Alex, opening and closing a cabinet door. ‘Very good… hinges, it’s got. Are they original?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very good. I was thinking of something like that for my mum. Likes hinges, she does. How much is it?’
‘Eight hundred and seventy-five pounds.’
‘Oh. Oh my. Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – bit more, you know. Embarrassing, but a bit more than I was actually thinking of, you know. Spending.’
The supposed Owse made brisk play of returning his attention to the notes he was making in a ledger with a stubby pencil. Alex walked the shop’s narrow aisles, keeping one eye on the rain through the bow window. The shop exuded a considerable aura of brownness: wooden floorboards, patches of curly-cornered carpet, brown cabinets and brown bookshelves and brown leather books.
Alex inspected an umbrella stand in which a number of pawky specimens shuffled their spokes. He read the spines of some of the old books, most of which were the sorts of things you might expect to be bought and sold by the yard rather than for their titles – volumes 4 to 8 of something called The Cyclopedia of Practical Agronomy; the second volume of a Victorian translation of Don Quixote, with illustrated plates.
Then, peering into a glass display cabinet at a selection of silver-black necklaces and brooches with topaz and coral in dented settings, he saw the ring. As he looked at it he thought – in a way that felt light and easy – that perhaps he would ask Carey to marry him, and that this was the ring that he would present to her.
It was sitting upright in a cheap jewellery box. He liked the design, the antique look, the silvery sheen. The ring set his chain of thought in motion, there, while he waited for the rain to stop. But once he had thought it, it seemed right and natural. It was a thought that had been waiting for a thought-shaped slot in his head to occupy, and there it was. They would get married. He would get a cheap flight to the States, and he would go to San Francisco and surprise her with a ring.
The ring was two hundred pounds. Alex could find that. Just. He’d be eating pasta with butter for a bit, but he could find it. He asked the supposed Owse to put the ring aside for him. Wrote his name and mobile phone number, promised to come back the following day. And by the time he stepped out of the shop into the lane, the bell
above the door dinging sweetly, shaking a few drops of rain onto Alex’s head, the sun was just breaking through the clouds.
And so to Jones, and to Bree – our two supernatural detectives – hot on the heels of this fugitive device. Jones was driving, and Bree was eating.
Bree had worried about Jones driving. The worry started not long after they had gone over a large and tricky interchange through a just-red light that Bree wouldn’t have risked. She had read the cross traffic – three lanes of impatient metal, a terminal moraine of shining chrome, pregnant with the intention of surging over their carriageway at the first click of their light to green. They had seemed to heave. Jones had piloted their car serenely through.
‘Jones,’ she had said, her thigh cramping with the effort of pumping an imaginary brake, ‘with your condition…’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jones had said.
‘How good are you at anticipating things?’
‘Not very,’ Jones had said. The speedo had been nudging eighty.
‘Things like cars pulling out suddenly, or appearing from dips in the road while you’re overtaking…’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jones had said. He had appeared to have no idea of the drift that the conversation was taking.
‘Are you good at anticipating those?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jones had said. ‘I don’t think so. Which cars are you talking about?’ He had looked around, scanning the road, meerkatted into the rear-view mirror, peered ahead down the road, as if to see what Bree was referring to.
‘Not actual cars here,’ Bree had said. ‘I mean, any cars. Cars you might anticipate. Cars that might pull out or appear from nowhere.’
‘Cars that don’t exist?’
Bree had realised the problem, and fallen silent. Jones’s relationship with time was not, she remembered, the easiest thing to navigate. Nor his relationship with notional cars.
‘Jones, your head is a strange thing.’
‘It is the only head I have,’ Jones had said. ‘I have nothing to compare it with.’
Bree had thought of a better way of putting it. She had asked: ‘Have you ever crashed a car?’
‘I have fast reactions,’ Jones had said.
‘That’s not answering the question,’ Bree had said.
‘Yes,’ Jones had said.
Bree had shrugged. She had let it go. Someone believed Jones could drive. Someone had given him a licence. They hadn’t crashed. And Bree hated to drive.
So here they were. Jones driving – slowly, at Bree’s insistence – and Bree eating an egg-salad sandwich and a big bag of Doritos. It was a beautiful morning. Everything felt light and good. It was one of those mornings when Bree felt a lightness. The weird thing with the crying had shifted Jones in the way she thought about him. She had thought, at first, that he was handsome. But Bree reckoned she thought everyone was handsome. She hadn’t been with anyone for a long time. Then she had thought he was freaky, which he was. But now she felt maternal towards him – and she was surprised to find that feeling warmed her.
‘Look at that,’ she said, holding up a Dorito. ‘That orange. Nothing in nature is that orange.’
Jones looked at her Dorito.
‘An orange is that orange,’ he said.
Bree ignored him. She put her feet on the dashboard. ‘Damn,’ she said, munching happily. ‘What did they do before Doritos?’
Bree and Jones continued west, stopping to use landlines, where they could, to contact Red Queen. Data points came back: here, a probable sighting; there, a CCTV image of the Smart boy in a gas station forecourt. They were going in the right direction, feeling their way half blind after their quarry. They discovered, only twelve hours afterwards, that he’d been in the same motel in Tupelo.
Bree did most of the talking. Jones almost never originated conversation, but Bree poked and prodded. Bree had become curious about Jones. She asked him what he did when he wasn’t doing what they were doing.
‘I’m not usually a field agent,’ said Jones. ‘I work in a small department in Washington. I go through data.’
Bree raised an eyebrow. ‘Most of the Directorate’s desk work is in New York,’ she said.
‘I work for different agencies,’ said Jones. ‘I work in a small department. My condition is useful to agencies looking at data. I can find inconsistencies. I don’t suffer confirmation bias.’
‘What’s confirmation bias?’ Bree asked. Bree was smart, but Bree couldn’t fill out a tax return. When she’d been at school, statistics and math had swum before her on the page. They’d role-played a business class when she’d been a teenager, and when presented with a pretend balance sheet she had gone red and found herself giggling with fright and embarrassment.
‘People see patterns that aren’t there,’ said Jones. ‘They see what they want to see. I don’t. I see only what’s there.’
‘Is that rare?’
‘They say so. Much of the work I do is with tax. But also climate data. I check the algorithms used to identify terror suspects.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ said Bree, thinking otherwise. Sifting data. Jeezus. ‘You get bored?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘Never.’ Bree had lost the ability to be surprised by this.
His tone was light and his eyebrows remained in position.
‘What do you do to relax?’ Bree said.
‘I smoke. I do Sudoku. I cook.’
‘You cook?’ Bree said. Her interest was piqued. She couldn’t imagine Jones cooking. Bree loved to cook. She cooked a lot. It was one of the things she did to pass the time when otherwise she would have been drinking.
‘I was told I needed a hobby,’ Jones replied. ‘ “Take your mind off things.” I cook every evening and on weekends I cook twice a day. I like food.’
‘What you can taste of it through all those cigarettes…’ Bree interjected.
Jones didn’t sound in the slightest defensive. ‘I have a good sense of taste.’
‘What do you like to cook, then?’
‘I’ve cooked all of Julia Child and Larousse Gastronomique and Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World and Delia Smith’s Summer Collection. I am on number 467 of Marguerite Patten’s Cookery in Colour.’
Bree had an image of Jones, solemn and methodical, dressed in an apron and a chef’s hat, in the kitchenette of some anonymous and undecorated apartment in which he would be entirely at home. She imagined him holding a burger flipper. He would look like an illustration.
‘Black Cap Pudding,’ said Jones. ‘Put a good layer of stoned prunes or blackcurrant jam at the bottom of the basin.’
Bree burst out laughing. ‘What?’
‘That is one of “More Steamed Puddings”. After that I will cook “Castle Puddings”.’ Jones looked almost happy.
‘Castle puddings, eh? Whatever floats your boat, I guess. You a good cook, then?’
‘No. My food is not always good. The instructions have to be exact. I am not good at guessing. I know a “lug” and a “pinch”. But what is a “good layer”?’ Bree resisted cracking wise. ‘I have been finding Marguerite Patten difficult. Delia Smith is very good. I like Delia Smith.’
‘My favourite food,’ said Bree, apropos of nothing, ‘is…’
And then she started to think about what her favourite food was. Once again it had eluded her. Every time she played this game – usually imagining herself on Death Row – it changed, but never that much. She had once looked online at a list of actual last-meal requests, and she realised that she had all the same favourite foods as most prisoners on Death Row. Gray’s Papaya hot dogs. White Castle sliders. Fried chicken. Pancakes with bacon. A pint of vanilla ice cream with cookie dough. Cold toast thickly spread with salted butter. Banana cake.
She let her sentence trail off. Time and landscape passed.
‘You cook for friends, then, Jones?’ Bree said a little later. Picking up a conversation with Jones was easy. It was as if you could put him on pause, like a VHS. ‘Throw parties?’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
She almost said: ‘Got a girlfriend?’ but then had second thoughts. Of course he didn’t. But did he have sex? Even thinking about Jones’s sexual needs, if he had any, creeped her out. She had started to think of him as a child, almost. The idea of him as a sexual being repulsed her. But presumably he did – well… something. Everybody did. But sex without imagination; without fantasy; without thinking about what the other person was thinking…
Bree pushed that aside, and pictured Jones’s life, and felt a little sad. His half-life. That unfurnished apartment – clean, drab, anonymous – in which he would be at home. The bedroom in which he would do his crying, the kitchenette in which he would do his cooking, the shoes by the door each morning waiting for him to step into them and go out into the world without fear or expectation.
That was how it had felt to her, the first months sober. I’ll be your friend, Jones, she thought.
And so, across country, the three cars proceeded. There were Bree and Jones, making shift with each other. There was Alex, making lonely time – thinking, driving, enjoying the pleasurable melancholy of the road, listening to the Pixies and Talking Heads over and over again, wondering how he would remember this journey, how he would describe it to his children.
And there were Sherman and Davidoff, making no progress, wondering why their iPods didn’t work.
‘My name is Bree, and -’
Bree had liked drinking. She had been a good drunk. A happy drunk. When she took the first beer of the afternoon – never before noon; never, at least not till towards the end – and felt its coldness scald her throat, its warmth blossom in her chest, she had been suffused with… what? A sense of generosity, of well-being, of peace with the universe.
