by Tom Harper
She nodded good morning to the receptionist and crossed to the lift. And stopped.
There were no buttons.
‘You have to use your card.’
A suited sleeve with gleaming gold cufflinks reached past her and slid a card into a discreet recess beside the lift. Ellie half turned.
‘Are you the new girl?’
‘Ellie.’
‘Delamere.’
She’d already noticed that nobody used first names at Monsalvat – though Delamere looked too young to have picked up the habit. He had sallow skin and dark eyes, with a mouth that tended naturally towards a certain hangdog grin, as if he was embarrassed about something. His dark hair was flecked with grey at the sides, though he couldn’t be much older than Ellie.
‘Do you work in Mr Blanchard’s department?’
He gave a conspiratorial laugh. ‘Everyone here works for Blanchard. I’m on the legal side. Very boring.’
They got into the lift together. Delamere pressed the button for the second floor and then, unprompted, the fifth floor for Ellie. She looked at the button above and remembered what Destrier had said. Stay away from the sixth floor. It’s off limits.
‘Who works on the sixth floor?’ she asked, trying to be casual.
Delamere seemed to flinch slightly. He fiddled with his tie. ‘Monsalvat’s a very devolved sort of place. Half the time you’ve no idea who’s doing what, even the man next to you. Drives us mad, but Blanchard insists. Says it’s good for security.’
The lift chimed its arrival. He swiped his card again to open the lift doors.
‘Security seems to be a big thing here,’ Ellie said. ‘Are they scared of bank robbers?’
‘Blanchard likes to say you can steal more from a bank than its money. An old place like this has plenty worth hiding. Plenty of secrets.’ The door was closing. He stuck his arm out to hold it and looked at her, with a strange sadness behind his involuntary grin.
‘You don’t seem like the sort of girl they usually go for.’
The words hit Ellie like a punch. She felt tears pricking around her eyes, and prayed she wouldn’t start crying. That would really finish her. Delamere seemed to realise he’d said something wrong.
‘I’m sure you’ll do fine,’ he said. ‘Fine,’ he repeated. ‘Just – be careful.’
He looked like he wanted to say something else, but the closing doors cut him off. He didn’t try to stop them this time.
By the time the lift reached the fifth floor, Ellie had recovered enough composure to believe she wouldn’t start sobbing at the first colleague she saw. Idiot, she told herself. Of course you’re not like them.
She still needed another minute before she faced Blanchard. She crossed the empty hall and leaned against the windowsill. The building stood around a central courtyard, like a school or a prison: from the internal window, she could look right down into it. A dove preened itself on the rooftop opposite.
It made her realise something. Pushing her nose against the glass to see down, she counted the floors of the bank. Ground, first, second, third, fourth, fifth – but when she looked up, there was only a flat roof.
No sixth floor.
She shook her head to clear the confusion. An old place like this has plenty to hide. She found a tissue in her bag and dabbed her eyes, just to make sure no rogue tears had crept out to betray her. Then she went to find Blanchard.
Blanchard was out. He’d left a note on her desk apologising: a cream notecard with the bank’s crest stamped into it. His handwriting was a quaint, Victorian cursive that slanted across the page in spidery lines. The paper had absorbed his scent: when Ellie picked it up to read it she caught a breath of something floral, and a darker, bitter note underneath. Overnight, the stack of files on her desk had grown several inches higher.
She tapped her passcode into the laptop and opened it. Locked, the seam between the lid and the body was all but invisible. There was no brand or manufacturer’s mark on the anthracite-black shell – only the smudges of her own fingerprints. She opened the e-mail program, the way Destrier had shown her.
93 new messages.
But I only just started. Apart from Blanchard, she didn’t recognise any of the senders.
The door blew open without a knock. A man in a blue suit and a pink shirt barged through and deposited three more inch-thick files on the front of her desk. His eyes were puffy, his cheeks raw-veined from drink. His hair was parted down the middle and swept back, clustered into fronds by the gel.
‘Lockthwaite,’ he barked. ‘I need two copies of each by lunchtime.’
Without elaborating, he spun on his heel and walked out.
Ellie stared at what he’d left, at the wall of folders already barricading her desk, then back to her computer screen.
99 new messages.
She felt the blood rising in her cheeks again. Calm down, she told herself. But her pulse only raced faster. Think.
The photocopier had its own room down the corridor. It didn’t seem to be on; Ellie wasted several vital minutes trying to open it, until she noticed the slot just under the rim. She slid her card in. Red lights flashed on the console; a green glow seeped out from under the lid as the machine growled into life, like a dragon woken in its cave.
Whoever put the file together hadn’t meant it to be copied. Most of the papers were stapled together; many were irregular sizes, small notes or flimsy carbons that blew off the copier if Ellie so much as breathed. She had her laptop balanced on the edge of the machine to work on her e-mails, but it was impossible. The copier devoured the paper and spat it out faster than she could keep feeding it. After twenty minutes she’d hardly dented the first file, while rereading the same paragraph of the same e-mail three times over.
‘What are you doing here?’
Blanchard stood in the doorway. He had a cigar in his mouth; a small mound of ash at his feet suggested he’d been watching her for some moments. He looked angry.
‘Who told you to do this?’
‘I think his name was Lockthwaite.’
‘Sachervell. Lockthwaite is the client. Can’t you read?’ Blanchard pointed to the label on the front of the folder. He swept it up one-handed and stormed out of the room. By the time Ellie had grabbed her laptop and followed, he was in an office halfway down the corridor delivering a furious lecture about the proper use of resources. Ellie hung back. A minute later, Blanchard reappeared.
‘Come with me.’
Through the open door, she saw the man whose name wasn’t Lockthwaite standing behind his desk. His face had grown several shades redder. He shot her a murderous look as she passed.
Blanchard marched her to the lift.
‘Many things have changed in our profession, but some unenlightened attitudes persist. They will make things difficult for you; they will see you are a woman and assume you must be a secretary. They are conditioned to think that way: you cannot change it, any more than the mouse can charm a cat. So you must resist them. Force them to accept that they cannot dictate to you. Power is the only language they understand.’
They’d come out in the lobby. Blanchard’s car sat waiting outside.
‘We’re late for the meeting.’ He saw Ellie’s blank look and gave an exasperated click of his tongue. ‘Didn’t you read your e-mails?’
Luxembourg
Once, the city had been called the Gibraltar of northern Europe. From the moment in the dark ages when Count Siegfried built his castle on the cliffs above two dizzy ravines, eight centuries of human ingenuity had made it impregnable. Now most of the walls were gone; tourists manned what was left. The city’s best defences were the invisible ramparts that protected its banks, complex laws and absolute discretion, hoarding the riches safe inside.
But the ravines remained. Pleasure parks filled the bottom, while traffic thundered overhead across the high Romanesque spans of the Viaduc and the Pont Adolphe. Which was where, on a wet evening in early September, two men walked and argued.
> One was a tall man, in a long black coat and a black homburg hat that, even in Luxembourg, was at least forty years out of date. It cast a deep shadow over his face. The other was shorter and rounder, in a shapeless blue mackintosh that did nothing for his figure. He had no hat, and had forgotten his umbrella. The rain slicked his hair against his scalp and ran down the side of his nose like sweat.
‘Why did you change the meeting?’ the tall man asked.
Lemmy Maartens wiped water from his eyes. He was trembling.
‘I thought I was being followed.’
The tall man glanced up and down the long pavement. They were walking with the flow of traffic, so that the headlights of the passing cars only shone on their backs. A hundred metres back a man was straggling behind them, his face hunched over a sodden map. He wore a white plastic poncho, the sort that tourists buy if they get caught out by the weather. It made him look like a ghost. About twenty metres ahead, a homeless man sat on a piece of cardboard wrapped in a blanket. Otherwise, the bridge was empty.
Lemmy gestured to the man with the map. ‘Do you think he’s watching us?’
‘Don’t worry about him.’ The tall man quickened his pace. Lemmy glanced over his shoulder again, almost as if he was expecting someone.
‘What did you find?’
The question was urgent, verging on desperate. Lemmy, a keen student of human weakness, saw his opportunity.
‘The money first.’
The tall man didn’t try to argue. He pulled a packet from inside his coat and passed it to Lemmy. A brown envelope – Jesus, Lemmy thought, these people had no imagination. He rubbed it between finger and thumb, feeling the thickness of the wad inside.
As a rule, Lemmy preferred electronic transfers. With the Internet, he could conjure money in and out of sight in seconds. Cash was more substantial. But for this amount, it was worth the effort.
They’d come to within a couple of metres of the homeless man. Lemmy stopped and tore open the envelope. If he felt any shame counting so much money in front of a man whose entire wealth sat in a Styrofoam cup by his feet, he didn’t show it.
‘It’s all there,’ his companion said. ‘Keep moving.’ He glanced back. A hundred metres behind, the figure in the white poncho had stopped to study his map under a streetlight.
‘You didn’t have to risk your career going into that place,’ Lemmy grumbled.
A black minivan with a taxi-company number on the side drew up and stopped on the kerb.
‘You look wet,’ the driver shouted through the open passenger window. ‘You need a ride somewhere?’
‘We’re fine,’ said the man in the hat.
But he wasn’t. In the second he was distracted, the van’s rear door slid open. Three men in black sweatshirts and black jeans leaped out, straight for him, while a fourth stayed inside and held a gun.
The tall man saw them and acted instantly. He didn’t think of trying to fight: he ran straight to the rail and tried to heave himself over the edge. But this had been predicted. Before the man could get over the rail, the tramp had sprung up and wrapped himself around his legs. He clung on; the man kicked and flailed, but it was too late. The men from the van piled in and pulled him down. One took a needle and jabbed it into the side of his neck. He slumped and lay still.
Two of the men carried their victim into the van. Through the open door, Lemmy saw a pair of slim, feminine legs and bright red shoes sitting on the back seat.
The third man picked up the homburg hat off the pavement and tossed it into the car. Then, for the first time, he looked at Lemmy.
‘Well done,’ he said.
Lemmy stared at him in utter terror. He had a terrifying face, broken in so many places, with a tattoo curling up the back of his neck. A gold stud gleamed in his ear.
‘Of course, you didn’t see anything.’
Lemmy nodded. He realised he was still holding the open envelope.
‘Can I keep this?’
The man shrugged. ‘Sure.’
Without warning, strong arms grabbed Lemmy from behind and hugged him tight, pinning his hands to his sides. Before he could draw breath to scream, they dragged him to the edge of the parapet, lifted him up and dropped him over the rail. He fell fifty metres and landed in the concrete canal that was all that remained of the Pétrusse river. The men, including the tramp, drove away in their minivan. The tourist in the white raincape had vanished.
Lemmy’s body was discovered half an hour later, by a French businessman jogging through the park. It didn’t take long for the police to gather the basic facts: his name, his address, his occupation and the envelope stuffed with five-hundred-euro bills still clutched in his hand. Further investigation added the information that he drove a high-specification German sedan and held documentation for a number of bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The fact that he had visited the Monsalvat bank the day before was noted but not thought relevant. There were no next of kin.
A passing driver came forward to say he might have seen a taxi pulled up, and a gang of men in a brawl on the pavement. But the taxi company in question could prove that none of its drivers had been nearby at the time, and the descriptions of the men were so vague as to be meaningless.
Two days later a small notice in the newspapers reported that Lemmy Maartens, a respected civil servant in the Ministry of Finance, had leaped to his death off the Pont Adolphe. He left no note. The police speculated that he had been under a lot of stress, brought on by the financial crisis and the recent wave of bank failures. Perhaps he felt responsible. He was, his colleagues all agreed, devoted to his work.
VI
Wales, 1128
YOU CAN CONQUER the Welsh, but you can’t defeat them. My father says it’s because of the land: mounted knights can’t pursue the rebels up mountains and through forests, or into the deep marshes. My mother also says it’s because of the land – but she doesn’t mean it the same way.
My mother is a Breton – which, she says, makes her a cousin to the Britons who plough fields and cut wood for my father. She says Brittany is like Wales, a wild realm on the rim of the world. In these places, the borders between worlds grow thin and permeable; we scuttle across the surface like a spider on a pond. In England and Normandy, rocks are rocks and trees are trees, or they are iron and firewood. In Wales, every rock and tree might hide the door to an enchanted land. Once, when I was playing on the mudflats by the river estuary, I saw a shimmering wall of air, as you get over a fire. Another time, I put my ear to a crack in the rocks and heard laughter far below.
Last August, three of my father’s hayricks burned in the field. In October, someone broke into the stable and cut the hamstrings on his warhorse. My father had to slit its throat himself: when he came out of the stable, up to his elbows in blood, it was the only time I ever saw him cry. He blames brigands, but behind his back the servants whisper about the faerie people.
My mother knows many stories of the faeries. Sometimes, when the fire has burned low in the hall and my father has drunk his fill, she takes out her little harp and sings the tale, while I sit by the fire and the dogs lick fat off the hearth. Sometimes we sit together on the grassy bank under the willow by the river. All the ones I like best begin the same way: ‘A long time ago, when Arthur was king …’
I ask my mother when Arthur was king, but she just frowns and repeats that it was a long time ago. I ask Brother Oswald, who has been teaching me history. Was it before Duke William? Before Alexander? Before King Solomon? I think he will cuff me and tell me another story about Jesus or Saint David, but he chews his reed pen and tells me how Arthur was descended from Aeneas and Brutus; how he lived some six hundred years ago in the time of Saint David, when the Romans had gone and the Normans hadn’t yet come. He says he killed a giant on Saint Michael’s mount, and grew so powerful he even overthrew Rome. Some men, he whispers, say he is not dead but merely sleeping in a cave, and will come again in Britain’s deepest hour of need.
A light comes into Brother Oswald’s eyes as he tells this. Then he remembers himself, and sends me back to my declensions.
I sit in the sun and listen to my mother.
‘A long time ago, when Arthur was king, a knight went hunting. He spied a white stag and gave chase, following it until he found himself deep in the forest.
‘Suddenly, on the evening air, he heard a scream that made his horse rear up in fright. He spurred through the trees, and presently came out in a leafy glade. A hawthorn grew there, and tied to it stood a maiden, the loveliest he had ever seen. She wore a plain white shift and a plain white dress, nothing else. Her golden hair was so fair even Isolde the Blonde would have looked like a Moor beside her.’
I stir. ‘Who was Isolde the Blonde?’
My mother shushes me. ‘I will tell you that story another day. When you’re older.
‘The knight drew his sword to cut her free. But the moment he dismounted, the ground trembled with the approach of rushing hooves. The lady groaned. “Now you must flee,” she warned him. “That noise is Sir Maliant, the wicked knight who holds me prisoner. If he finds you here he will surely kill you.”
‘“Upon my honour, I have never fled from any man,” said the knight. He remounted his horse and spurred towards his enemy. Their lances bent like bows and shattered; they drew their swords, laying about each other with such fury that wood splintered, iron split and both horses were killed. The knight pummelled his opponent until every lace of his armour was broken. At last, he struck off his helmet and knocked him to the ground.
‘“Mercy,” his enemy pleaded.
‘But the damsel demanded his head, and the knight obeyed. His blow fell hard; the head flew out onto the heath and the body crumpled.
‘Heedless of his wounds, the knight approached and cut the cord that bound the lady.
‘“Thank you, Sir Knight,” she said. “You have saved me from a grievous fate. What reward would you have?”
‘“Only a token, and perhaps a kiss.”
‘She laughed. “I will give you better than that.” She took his hand and led him around the back of the tree. “This is what the wicked knight sought from me.”
