‘Well, Patient chappy, confessing knowledge of the trap door hardly ameliorates your predicament.’
It pained Ratty more to say those words than it did for his friend to receive them. Now he understood why his schoolmasters used to say something similar when about to cane him. It never made sense at the time.
‘I needed only to stall the intruder for some minutes,’ explained the Patient. ‘In that time, I exchanged the number ‘three’ from the door of bedroom twenty-three with the ‘four’ of the adjacent bedroom twenty-four. I watched the intruder force open the wrong bedroom. He spent a while inside, then departed, apparently satisfied. He will not return.’
Whatever regret Ratty had been feeling was now amplified a hundred times. The Patient had not let him down. To have held the merest suspicion of his friend was unforgivable.
‘Gosh, Patient chappy,’ burbled Ratty, emerging from behind his bruised conscience. ‘Machiavellian artfulness topped with a generous dollop of derring-do.’
‘We should apologise to the Patient,’ said Ruby. ‘Sorry.’ She kicked Ratty gently in the shin.
‘Quite, yes. Sincerest contrition and all that, Patient chappy. I never doubted you, of course.’
‘So panic over,’ said Ruby. ‘I’ll try to get on the night ferry and hope I can make it to Spain before my hungover students arrive. The university has just placed a generous grant in my bank account to cover the costs of the dig. It might look dodgy if I disappear with all that money!’ She hugged Ratty. He glowed. ‘And merry Christmas for tomorrow. You too, Mr Patient.’
With Ruby gone, the two men approached the locked room.
‘Ingenious, moving the numbers, Patient chappy. But if Mr Intruder had already withdrawn, why the urgency for my return?’
‘Timing,’ replied the Patient. ‘The break-in and the Myanmar meteorite were almost simultaneous.’
‘Burma. But you had already phoned Ruby before they announced that cosmic kerfuffle on Sky News.’
‘That is because I knew about it before any of the news agencies.’
‘Gosh. How?’
‘How is not important. Why is perhaps significant. When is, however, deserving of primary consideration.’
‘When? I fear you lost me at why, old chap.’
‘I refer to the timing of the break-in here at Stiperstones relative to the incident at Myanmar.’
‘Burma.’
‘I have reason to suspect they might be linked. We must open the door.’
‘You think granny secreted something connected to the doomsday prophesy?’
‘It is a possibility we cannot dismiss. The prophesy talked of the importance of the ruby tower. It is a close match to the name of your friend, and of the ruby-red brick Elizabethan turret here at Stiperstones, which I believe was in antiquity known as the ruby tower.’
‘Quite. That was why I got to know Ruby at Cambridge. The coincidence with her name was rather delicious.’
‘It may only be a distant possibility, but there is a chance that your grandmother took something significant from your turret and placed it in this room. Open it now.’
‘How?’
‘The intruder seemed to find his right foot of sufficient fortitude to achieve his objective.’
Ratty tentatively raised a puny leg, then lowered it.
‘No, I should use the key. Granny’s curse and wotnot.’
‘But she buried it in 1937. How will you find it in a hundred acres of garden?’
‘She didn’t expect her grandson to be a whiz with a thingy detector.’
‘Even so, I may be wrong about the intruder not returning, and there may be others with an interest in the contents of this room, so we cannot rule out the likelihood of a further incursion while your focus is on matters subterranean. I do not think you should waste your time attempting to preserve the integrity of the door frame.’
‘You’re right. But I think for the sake of the curse that I should attempt the break-in alone. Be a good sort and tootle off to the cottage to keep an eye out for uninvited rum dubbers and beetle-browed, chicken-hammed dromedaries.’
It mattered little to the Patient that his friend exhibited a preference for archaic phrases over any comprehensible form of the English language. His intention was usually discernible, even if the words belonged in a museum. The Patient meandered towards his cottage on the boundary of the estate. He suspected Ratty had no intention of forcibly entering the sealed room but would instead power up his metal detector and start scanning the lifeless winter gardens, and was not surprised when he glimpsed Ratty crunching across the frozen croquet lawn, staring at the dials on his detector.
He watched with calm curiosity as Ratty danced with excitement around a spot that seemed to indicate something metal beneath the grass. He smiled as Ratty hacked at the unyielding soil until he produced a wooden box. He was certain that within the box was the key his friend sought. There was now nothing to stop him opening the mysterious room.
The earl placed the rusty find in his pocket and walked to bedroom twenty-three. He paused at the door and grasped the key, raising it slowly to the height of the lock. The key oscillated in his hand as if repelled by a force field. The task of unlocking and opening the door could not be simpler. Insert. Twist. Pull. Walk in. He had rehearsed it in his mind. But this locked room symbolised the darkest moments of his life. It represented rejection and confusion and fear, negative emotions that towered monolithically, high above the stone turrets of the manor. He stepped back, away from the shadows of his memories, and returned to the kitchen for a reassuring cup of tea.
Half an hour later, he stood up and puffed out his chest. It was time to confront his past, he told himself. Time to defy his grandmother. Time to open that door and deal with the consequences.
It might have been the tea talking. He didn’t care. He marched up the stairs to bedroom twenty-three and held forth the key, once again. He now possessed the fortitude to insert the key in its intended orifice. The past ended now. He was ready for the future.
‘Ratty!’
He looked around and saw the Patient whooshing towards him like a cricket ball hit for six. Ratty doubted that his friend had the necessary braking power to stop without slamming into the suit of armour at the far end of the corridor.
‘What ho! Eager to be present at the grand opening in spite of the old curse?’
‘Forget the room, Ratty! Come quickly! I fear for Ruby’s life and liberty.’
Ratty replaced the key in his pocket with a sense of guilty relief. The Patient had already ceased his exertions in Ratty’s direction and was now gusting back towards the stairs.
‘Are we still talking about that ne’er-do-well servant?’ puffed Ratty. ‘The one suffering from an acute case of disgruntlement?’
‘It is impossible to deduce with any certainty the causal agent,’ replied the Patient. ‘I chanced upon Ruby’s Volvo at the exit to the estate. It was in a state of abandonment. Its angle relative to your driveway suggested it had been hastily parked. The driver’s door was wide open. A bag containing her mobile phone and wallet was on the passenger seat.’
‘Cripes! Any sign of, you know, anything of a crimson hue?’ asked Ratty, starting to look as if he could benefit from a transfusion of the stuff.
The Patient shook his head without looking back. Pausing only for the colour to return to his cheek, Ratty followed the Patient through the main entrance of the manor towards Ratty’s antique Land Rover. At the third attempt the vehicle came to life, wheezing like an asthmatic hound. Ratty put it into gear and chugged the half mile along his driveway towards the scene of Ruby’s disappearance.
The Volvo was exactly as the Patient had described it. Undamaged, despite having been partly driven into a hedge. Ratty jumped out, shouting Ruby’s name.
‘We are wasting time,’ said the Patient. ‘She has clearly been forced off the road and taken away in another vehicle.’
‘But why?’ asked Ratty, climbing back in
and heading out of the estate towards the village. ‘I mean, she was a tad naughty at Sky News this morning, but she hasn’t done anything to warrant kidnapping.’
‘I said earlier that I believed events in Myanmar and in your manor may be connected.’
‘Burma. Right. And that is because?’
‘Ruby was not taken for what she has done. She was taken for what she is capable of doing.’
‘Of course. No archaeologist holds a trowel quite like she.’
‘I refer,’ corrected the Patient, ‘to the scrolls. No one has a fuller understanding of that ancient language than Ruby. Should a mummified person from that lost civilisation ever undergo a successful reversal of their preservation – as we now know to be possible – no one would be better placed to communicate with their resurrected soul than me, you or Ruby.’
‘Poor Ruby! You think some bounder took her to Burma to talk to that antediluvian villain, Halford, as soon as he defrosts?’
‘It is no use continuing our journey to the village. Ruby is destined for a far longer journey, and we must consider our options carefully.’
‘Indeed,’ said Ratty. ‘This calls for an urgent cup of tea.’
***
‘What have we ascertained so far from the television news?’ asked Ratty, striding into his library with a mug of steaming tea in his hand and a small bag on his shoulder containing his passport, toothbrush and clean underwear.
‘Only that something exploded into the sea off the Burmese coast this morning. A meteorite was the official explanation.’
Ratty walked towards a wooden globe and span it theatrically.
‘Guatemala is here,’ he said, stopping the world from spinning with his finger. ‘Launch site. About fifteen degrees’ latitude.’ He turned the globe slowly, keeping his finger on the same latitude until it landed on Myanmar. ‘Also fifteen degrees. Could it be? No, surely not.’
‘You have a theory?’ asked the Patient.
‘Great-great uncle Bilbo. Or great-great-great, I forget. Mentioned something in his diary about this latitude. Some jolly megaliths on a Burmese hill, overlooking the sea.’ He fumbled through some piles of books until he produced the inky diary of Lord Bilbo Ballashiels, the fearless Victorian explorer to whom Ratty felt he never quite managed to live up. Fanning through the pages, he paused at a blotchy passage surrounded by colourful stains and the greyed and flattened remains of a mosquito. ‘Here. It says the central American native types told him – presumably during a rare moment of sobriety on the part of the ancestor – that the alignment of the megaliths pointed to a spot in the sea where the end of the world would begin. Gosh. What do we make of that, Patient chappy?’
‘We know from the scrolls that a rocket was launched in the final days of the ancient civilisation in Central America,’ said the Patient. ‘We think the instigator of the wars that led to the destruction of that advanced society twelve millennia ago attempted to escape on that rocket. And this rocket was intended to be a gift to our society, containing nothing but a body, preserved in such a way that its mummification was reversible. A human time capsule, capable of enlightening us, answering questions, guiding our spiritual and moral paths, educating us about our lost history.’
‘Quite. But instead of the intended gift, this cad, Halford, sent himself on a twelve thousand year journey to the outer solar system and back, preserved in that frightful goo that makes him reek of elephants’ toe clippings. If he took off in an equatorial orbit and retained that trajectory, that would explain his landing on the same latitude.’
‘Actually, the earth’s precessional wobble would complicate that.’
‘The point is that the explosion near Burma has to be a sign of Halford returning from his little interstellar perambulation. The timing and location can’t be mere coincidences. If the explosion was truly at the site pointed to by the megaliths...’ Ratty paused and considered matters. ‘Contrary to the stout-hearted bravado I displayed in this morning’s interview, I confess to feeling more than a modicum of distress, old friend. Ruby would appear to be rushing towards the epicentre of a disagreeable scenario.’
‘I doubt that the danger will be immediate,’ said the Patient. ‘We know from the scrolls that Halford’s pod is dead. As is Halford. It’s designed to be nothing more than a ballistic comet. It has no need to decelerate because a dead human can withstand the enormous g-forces of re-entry and the high-speed impact with the sea. The pod is presumably designed to disintegrate upon hitting the water, thus releasing the coffin in which Halford is embalmed. And we also know from the scrolls that the chemical formulation needed to reverse the mummification is found in seawater. The genesis procedure, as they called it. The ocean is where life began, and the ancients realised its constituent chemicals are the perfect ingredients to enable life to begin again. Halford will begin to emerge from stasis when submerged in seawater, but he may drown if left in uncontrolled conditions. So the first priority of Ruby’s kidnappers must be to find his coffin, which may be on the seabed or may be floating amid the wreckage of the pod, and then to bring it ashore to attempt revivification under laboratory conditions before beginning the process of communicating with Halford using Ruby as an intermediary. The whole world knows about the scrolls, so they know about Halford. But do they know the purpose of the megaliths in Myanmar?’
‘Burma. I have the only copy of Bilbo’s diary,’ said Ratty. ‘Apart from the copy that Ruby typed up into her word blender. She may have shown the text to her museum chums, but it’s not public knowledge. No one is going to be able to pinpoint Halford’s location very easily.’
‘But assuming he is eventually found, we have to ask who wants to exploit his return? I conject that it could be any country on the planet,’ said the Patient.
‘Well, that narrows the field somewhat.’
‘I also believe the balance of probability points not only towards many states taking an interest, but also to businesses and criminal gangs.’
‘Dashed privateers?’
‘Anyone with the motivation and capacity to exploit Halford for profit. I suspect the world contains a great number of such people. And one of these groups or individuals may have had a connection with the attempted break-in to bedroom twenty-three.’
A door slammed. Its echo bounced through the grand hallway towards the library. Footsteps clomped through the manor. Ratty’s eyes met the Patient’s. The Patient inclined his head towards the window. Ratty placed his tea silently on a writing desk and opened the window. By the time the footsteps arrived at the library the two men were in the Land Rover and driving at perilous speed back to the boundary of the estate.
‘A gentleman should not have to endure such a close shave beyond the confines of a barber’s emporium, Patient chappy.’
‘We must not delay our pursuit of Ruby,’ said the Patient. ‘They could have been coming for us, too, for we are also of potential value in any communications with Halford.’
‘Did you catch a glimpse of the blighter?’
‘There was no time to look back. We must only look ahead.’
‘But surely the situation is hopeless? Ruby could be anywhere on the planet, with any frightful types.’
‘No. Not anywhere. And not with anyone. We must start with Halford. Wherever he is, that is where she will be found. Wherever he is taken, so will she be taken.’
‘Then we must race to Burma,’ said Ratty. ‘If Halford is on the sea floor, it will not be an easy process for anyone to locate and retrieve the blighter. Their ships will be bobbing around for ages. Easy for us to spot. And if the legend of the megaliths is true, we will know immediately where to begin our search.’
‘Yes. And the difficulty they will have in retrieving Halford’s body would give us time to find them. And hence Ruby. We need a plane and a boat.’
‘I have only an arthritic Land Rover and a leaky punt.’
‘Stop the car.’
They had reached the boundary of the estate where Ruby’s
car sat, abandoned.
‘Do I detect the aroma of an idea brewing in your noodle, Patient chappy?’
The Patient jumped out of the Land Rover and reached into Ruby’s Volvo. He pulled out her bag and produced a set of keys and a wallet.
‘Surely not?’ asked Ratty. ‘Seems a bit rummy.’
‘You and I have no funds. Ruby told us she has just received university funding for an archaeological dig in Spain. We can use her money to initiate her rescue.’ He opened the wallet and withdrew a selection of credit and debit cards.
‘What about pins and needles and wotnot?’
‘Assuming she is too smart to write down her pin, we must use our knowledge of her life and character to calculate it. And we must do so while you drive us to the airport.’
‘But the Land Rover is slow. We’ll miss all of today’s flights. It’ll be Christmas by the time we get there.’
‘The Land Rover is, indeed, slow. But not the Volvo. Get in. Hurry. They may catch us at any moment.’
Ratty fiddled with unfamiliar, futuristic controls in Ruby’s car until he found a button that started the engine.
‘Right. Where’s the nearest airport?’ asked Ratty, pulling away and heading towards the village.
‘The proximity of the departure airport will not be the deciding factor. We must consider the availability of direct flights.’
The Patient spent some time researching flight options on Ruby’s phone.
‘There are no scheduled direct flights to our preferred destination this evening.’
‘So how is Ruby getting there?’
‘Her passport is still in her bag. That rules out scheduled airlines. She can only travel by private means.’
‘You think they have their own aeroplane?’
The Patient searched more websites on Ruby’s phone. He then programmed a destination into the satnav.
‘I am certain they do, and so will we,’ said the Patient.
The Genesis Glitch Page 2
