Fearful Symmetry

by C F Dunn

  Furious at the long-held deceit and alarmed by the ramifications, Emma confronts Guy at the conference. They arrange to meet at her home after the conference dinner that evening. Wracked by anxiety, Emma forewarns Matthew.

  Guy holds a deep-seated grudge against Emma and her grandfather for thwarting his career early on. He shakes her belief in her own academic prowess, hinting that the only reason she gained a place at Cambridge was because he gave her preferential treatment. Not only that, but the Dean has offered him Emma’s position at Howard’s Lake college. Just when Emma thinks it can’t get any worse, Guy tells her that he knows that Matthew is not all he seems. Petrified, Emma panics. She dashes from the room to get Matthew’s sword, and is only prevented from going back to kill Guy when Matthew intercepts, saying that he will kill him himself. She comes to her senses and prevents him, but on returning to the study finds not only Guy gone, but photographs of Matthew as well.

  Emma suspects he might have located the journal. It is now early morning. Matthew has left to find Ellie, and Emma hurries to the college where she indeed finds the journal missing. All it would take is the time for Guy to read the journal to discover Matthew’s true identity and gain all the evidence he needs.

  As a summer storm approaches, Emma races to Guy’s hotel in an attempt to retrieve the photograph and journal, but Guy is one step ahead. She realizes she is running out of time and options. Guy says he is a speaker at the conference, but will give her the journal in exchange for her sleeping with him. She has no intention of doing so, but is prepared to do something much worse. As she readies herself, a mobile call saves her from taking the ultimate step. Buying time, she tells Guy that she will leave her husband and go with him, but that Matthew is looking for her and will kill him if he finds them together.

  Offering to drive him to the conference, they set out, but the storm breaks, forcing them onto another route. As they drive, Guy tells her that he knows who Matthew is and that he intends to reveal his identity at the conference. Emma believes she has no choice, but in the split second before she makes the decision to take his life, the car is forced off the narrow bridge by an oncoming truck, sending them into the torrent below. Matthew has been following them, and is able to free Emma from the submerging car, but Guy has been fatally injured in the crash.

  Confused and ridden with guilt, Emma tries to come to terms with Guy’s death and her part in it. To complicate matters, Ellie reveals that she is pregnant.

  Matthew reassures Emma that all will be well and, as the book draws to an uneasy but positive conclusion, he and Emma place the journal in a secret place where it will remain – for the time being – hidden.

  PART

  1

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand dare seize the fire?

  And what shoulder, & what art,

  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

  And when thy heart began to beat,

  What dread hand? & what dread feet?

  What the hammer? What the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? What dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  When the stars threw down their spears

  And water’d heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  William Blake

  The technician leaned in, squinting at the screen. “Can you improve the resolution?”

  Her colleague tapped in a few adjustments and leaned back to let her get a closer look. “Well, what d’ya think?”

  “Looks similar, doesn’t it? Been doctored, perhaps?”

  The young man shrugged. “Dunno. Don’t think so. Looks kosher to me.”

  “Bring up the first image again, Steve. Magnify…” He did as asked and she tilted her head, her brown hair swaying, and narrowed her eyes. “They’re good frontal images – clear. You know, they are very alike. If it wasn’t for the difference in age of the photos, I’d say you’ve got a match. Have you run it through photogrammetry to check? Where did you get them?”

  He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Found the memory stick at the bottom of the filing cabinet. Been there years by the looks of it; must have fallen free of its file. Thought I’d take a look. There’s a couple of documents on there with lecture notes for a conference or something, and these two photos.”

  “No dates on the images?”

  “That first pic looks like it was taken in the thirties – look at their wedding kit and hair – taken with a Graflex Speed Graphic, four by five-inch plate, by the looks of it – American job – very popular with photojournalists in the 1930s. The other’s contemporary; taken with a really sharp, quality lens. The only names I could find were in the lecture notes. A bloke named Hilliard – Guy Hilliard – wrote ’em…”

  “And the other?” she asked, reaching for the phone.

  Steve sifted the loose-leaf papers on his desk and found the hurriedly scrawled notes in blue biro he’d made earlier. “Yeah, here it is. The other bloke’s name was…” He pulled at his lip as he tried to decipher his own scrawl. “Lynes. Dr Matthew Lynes.”

  CHAPTER

  1

  Aftermath

  “She’s still not talking.” Caught by the stiff breeze from the mountains, the kitchen door slammed shut behind me, echoing Ellie’s action of a moment before. Her rejection compounded my guilt. “I don’t know what else to do; I can’t find any other way of saying I’m sorry.” I slumped onto a chair by the table, and fanned myself with the pad of fine paper on which Matthew had been writing when I interrupted him. His pen lid sighed and clicked as he replaced it.

  “It’s early days yet – it’s to be expected. Ellie didn’t have the opportunity to come to terms with Guy’s death, and sudden bereavement is doubly traumatic because of its very nature.” He laid the pen in front of him, quietly, and at odds with my own mood. I slapped the pad down on the table.

  “You don’t need to remind me. If I could change what happened I would.”

  Matthew rose and pushed his chair back. “I know you would.” He came and stood behind me, putting his arms around me and kissing the top of my head. “Time will help heal Ellie. She has a baby to think about and, when he is born, she will focus all her love on her child rather than embellishing her grief for his aberrant father.”

  I bent my head back until I could see him. “Are you speaking as a doctor or as her great-grandfather?”

  “Both,” he smiled. “Yes, time will heal Ellie. And you.”

  I wish I could be so sure. Now August, weeks had elapsed since the crash that had taken Guy’s life, but Ellie’s resentment of me still burned as fiercely as my guilt. The police investigated the accident thoroughly, of course, and I had been interviewed; but whether as a consequence of my remorse or because Ellie’s brother, Joel, had some hand in moving the investigation on, they found me blameless. I wish I felt so. His death left matters unresolved in more ways than one.

  I avoided campus. Banned by the Dean’s decree, I wallowed at home unable to shake myself free of the accident and the part I played in it until, one day, Matthew came home from the med centre and found me listlessly scanning the internet in his study. With a disconsolate wave of my hand, I indicated the laptop on a small table.

  “I can’t find any work on here. Shotter has been as good as his word and I’m under investigation by both Cambridge and the college for falsification of qualifications. No other institution will touch me now. I’m going to end up
doing nothing more than providing specialist editorial advice for academic publications and marking undergraduate essays for correspondence courses over the internet.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “I miss my students and I want my reputation back.”

  “Emma, I think you should go and talk to the Dean.”

  I prodded the keyboard in frustration, barely looking at him. “What’s the point? Shotter won’t give me my job back – Guy made sure of that.” A stab of anger was followed by a twang of contrition. “I don’t know if I have the heart to fight any more, Matthew.”

  Pushing the laptop to one side, he crouched down in front of me, forcing me to look at him, and cradled my hands. “Sweetheart, I’m worried that if you carry on like this for much longer, you’ll find it difficult to pull yourself out of this despondency…”

  I snatched my hands from his. “You said it will take time.”

  He captured them again, and this time held on firmly. “Yes, it will, but you have to make an effort to help yourself – nobody else can do it for you. Guy was the author of his own doom; if he hadn’t died that day, we would have had to ensure it on another. He would have exposed us, Emma, and we wouldn’t be sitting here now, debating it.” He bent his head and I watched as the crimson air around him, which mirrored his emotional state, gradually turned mauve, then blue as he controlled his temper. “Guy took your job. Guy scuttled your career. Guy made Ellie pregnant. Guy is dead, Emma – and nothing is going to change that fact, including your self-flagellation.”

  We had spoken about this before – around and around endlessly – and he listened with utmost patience until I talked myself to a standstill, yet found no resolution. But how could I find healing when I held myself responsible? How could I absolve myself when I could barely look at my image in the mirror, let alone my conscience? On the night Guy took the photographs and revealed his motives for destroying me and all that I loved, Matthew had warned me. He warned me as I removed his rapier from its scabbard and went in search of Guy with the express purpose of killing him. He warned me, as he took the sword from my hand, that I could never reverse the taking of a life, and in doing so, made ready to take it himself as he had done many times before in his long past. But the events of the following day rendered his entreaty pointless, and Guy still died by my hand.

  Several days after the crash I could bear it no longer. One morning I woke to see the triptych on my bedside table next to me. I sat up, lifted it from its place and closed the doors over the image of Christ. I secured the gilt hook and carefully laid it in its bed of faded purple silk in the old rosewood box and hid it in my chest of drawers.

  Matthew did not comment when he noticed it missing, but I saw the look of swift disappointment and the flash of concern. Now, weeks on, here we were again, head-to-head with my obduracy.

  He held my fingers more lightly now, sensing a shift in my reasoning. “Emma, the Dean wants to see you. There are things you need to discuss.”

  “Well I don’t want to see him.”

  “Please…” he insisted, and I saw that this represented a small concession in the circumstances.

  Two days later, I screwed up my courage and hobbled my pride enough to make an appointment to see the Dean. I hadn’t been back to the campus since the day of the accident, but it had changed. Or I had.

  Matthew kept me company to the atrium and there left me outside the Dean’s office. The last time I stood here I had been in a position of power as I faced Shotter down. That had been before Guy resurfaced from the dregs of my past in an attempt to steal my future. I raised my hand to knock. The door opened.

  “Come in, come in.” Rather than Shotter’s portly figure ensconced in his kingdom of intrigue and tradition, Siggie Gerhard greeted me in a lightweight floral two-piece, plump-armed and benevolent as always. I scanned the office for the Dean, but she was alone.

  “Where’s Shotter?” I asked cautiously, once I had returned her warm embrace.

  “He’s not here,” she replied with her gentle Germanic inflection. “Come and sit down by the window; there is a bit of a breeze and we need that in this heat, no?” She pulled Shotter’s chair from behind his desk and jerked it over the frayed edge of the rugs and across the smooth planks to the open window.

  “I’ll stand, thanks. I want to get this over with as quickly as I can and I grovel better on my feet. Where is the bloated toad, anyway? I thought he would be eagerly waiting to rub my face in it.”

  Siggie took a hanky from her pocket and dabbed at the perspiration at her greyed hairline. She sat next to the open sash, leaning her elbow on the sill to catch the breeze.

  “As I said, he is not here. Now, come, sit down and tell me what you have been up to. We have much to discuss.” She patted the chair next to hers but I continued to stand. Across the room on the opposite wall, the row of photographic portraits of the current academic staff served as a sharp reminder that I was no longer one of them. Siggie saw me looking.

  “There have been a few changes here over the last few weeks.” She passed the desk on which stood a tubby vase full of vibrant sunflowers on her way to study the pictures, stopping when she came to the newest face in the line-up where mine should have been. Guy’s derisive gaze challenged the camera and I felt my gut twist.

  “Ah, yes – I met him only briefly. His death is a tragedy for some, but not for others, perhaps?” She lifted the photograph from the wall and examined it closely, then put it face down on the side table next to her. I twitched. She went over to Shotter’s desk and opened the left-hand drawer.

  “Siggie!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing?”

  She removed a framed photo and took it over to the now empty place on the wall and hung it there. I recognized it instantly as my own. I gave a nervous glance at the door, outside of which I could now hear the low rumble of male voices. “For goodness sake, Siggie, the Dean will have your guts for garters!” She leaned back to check the angle, and straightened the frame.

  “No, Emma, I do not think so. Stephen Shotter has no say in the matter. There,” she said, admiring the result. “I think that is an improvement, don’t you?”

  I sat down with a bump. “Why?” I asked, as she joined me by the window again and lowered herself onto the chair, arranging her blowsy skirt in such a way that it didn’t catch under her legs.

  “Eh? Oh, Shotter, do you mean, Emma? He is one of the changes I referred to. He… overstepped the mark, I think you would say. I do not know the details, but there have been questions about his integrity and his suitability to lead the college.”

  “Why?” I asked again, but bewildered this time.

  “I think you should ask Matthew. I believe he knows more about it than I do. Meanwhile, for some reason I have been asked to be Dean, although why a professor of psychology is considered suitable for the role I am not certain, but… there you have it.” Her soft, plump hands rose and then fell with a gesture of resigned acceptance. “Now, one of my first tasks is to ensure continuity of staffing and I find we are short of a professor of history for the fall semester. I wish to offer this position to you, Emma – if you have not already found alternative employment, that is?”

  Siggie would know I had nothing planned for the autumn term, as indeed I suspected she knew a great deal more about my situation than she let on. Outside on the lawns sweeping around this side of the college, a few research students sprawled in the shade of the trees, oblivious to the internal wrangling in my mind.

  “And the investigation, Siggie? How can you justify the employment of someone suspected of falsifying her qualifications?” I had not intended the note of resentment that coloured my voice to make itself known, but it did. She sat back and took a moment to survey me.

  “It has been brought to my attention that Guy Hilliard might have had a reason to discredit you, and his activities could be said to have been – how shall I put it? – not worthy of a man of his supposed reputation. Are you aware that he took one of
the college’s most unique and valuable documents? Yes, that is so,” she said as my head shot up. “He took a seventeenth-century diary from the library shortly before his death. We have found no trace of it and must assume he took it with him on the morning of the accident and it is lost to the river.”

  So they thought the journal lost and Guy the one who had taken it. The irony was so delicious, so tart, it stung my eyes, and then I saw her looking oddly at me and I realized that my breathing had changed, becoming shallow and halting because I couldn’t draw enough air into my lungs as I tried to laugh but found myself crying instead. I covered my face with my hands.

  “There, there,” she said quietly, and put her arm around me in much the same way my mother would. “There are two types of monsters: those like Staahl, who can be locked away, and those in your mind. You cannot escape the mind-monsters, Emma, you can only face them and deal with them one by one. You are not yourself at the moment; take some more time off. My advice is that you and Matthew get away from here for a little and sort out whatever is bothering you.” I hunted for a tissue and, failing to find one, dragged my hand across my eyes instead.

  “Siggie, the fall semester starts in a few weeks…”

  “Don’t worry about that; your students will wait until your return, and you will return, won’t you, Emma? You will accept the position?”

  I looked into her kind, shrewd eyes, then away in case she could read mine. “Yes. Thank you, Siggie, I will.”