The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn glanced at the sprawl of tract housing. She thought of the occupants with their view of the motorway. That, compared with the Rockies, where she’d last seen the Muleskinner. Taryn wanted to apologise to him for what they could see from the A11. England had too many people. Though, of course, people who talked about there being ‘too many people’ never meant themselves and their kind. She said, ‘The somewhere quiet I’m taking you is five hours away. But at least it’s beautiful.’

  It was a dull, turbulent summer of overcast days where noon could look like twilight, but it was still light at 7:30, when they got to that stretch of road and the green tunnel of oaks. Taryn wasn’t certain she’d recognise the exact spot after nearly seven years. And if she didn’t, if the sight didn’t jump out at her like a savage animal, did that disqualify her desire for revenge?

  Then she saw it, the crime scene, undressed now. Police photos from the trial had directional arrows, and those things like place cards at a banquet table, except with numbers instead of names. 1) The bloodstain on the tree trunk. 2) A dropped shoe.

  Taryn pulled in. The road was narrow, but there’d be room to pass. What had Webber been thinking when he’d tried to make out that he’d just wandered a little off course?

  The Muleskinner said, ‘I didn’t realise how close we were till we passed the monument.’

  ‘St Cynog’s Cross,’ Taryn said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

  They got out and shook off their stiffness.

  Taryn said, ‘How did you know Webber was about to be released?’

  ‘You said six years, five with good behaviour. I picked a point between.’ The Muleskinner’s fists were in his pockets though the evening was mild. ‘Don’t ask me for anything,’ he said. ‘Then you can truthfully say “I didn’t ask anyone to . . .”’

  ‘To,’ she echoed, without a tone of query. It wasn’t a prompt.

  ‘You only have to say no if that’s what you’d prefer.’

  Taryn didn’t say anything. Instead she led him across the road to Beatrice’s oak.

  A breeze passed through the forest and the leaves, still tender, made the sound of fluttering fairground pennants. The Muleskinner took one hand from his pocket and put it on the rough bark of the tree trunk. ‘It can be accomplished without you knowing any details.’

  ‘Even when?’

  ‘Even that.’

  ‘And then what?’ She put a hand on the trunk too, beside his.

  ‘Then nothing,’ he said. ‘This will only work if we’ve no further contact. So, I’m in England for family reasons, then I’m back in Canada. And you are the wife of a former client. And that’s all.’

  She removed her hand. ‘I don’t know that I believe you. I feel like you’ve started a count. I’m waiting to hear you call out, “Coming, ready or not.”’

  He shook his head. ‘Do you have any idea what you’re like?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re like a heroine,’ he said.

  She was about to respond, ‘Then who is my hero?’—because she really should make him say it and show his hand—when they were both roused by the sound of hurrying footsteps. Someone was coming from the direction of Princes Gate Magna, walking with strange slapping footfalls.

  The Muleskinner took Taryn by her arm and drew her off the road and into the forest. They leaned on a dry, moss-furred tree trunk, his arm about her waist.

  The person came into sight. A barefoot young man wearing a shapeless, mushroom-brown, home-knitted jersey, too thick for even a chilly summer. His trousers were wool too, a tweed, fawn flecked with white. Homespun hippy clothes, in shades similar to his dark skin, which made him somehow difficult to see.

  The young man had an armful of cardboard parcels. Books, by the look of it.

  Barefoot-with-books hurried past their hiding place. His footfalls receded, then changed as he left the road. The undergrowth rustled.

  The Muleskinner tilted his head to peer around the tree, his motion stealthy.

  It was then that the young man lost control of his burden. Taryn heard a breathy curse and a series of thumps and crackles. One package tumbled through the bracken and landed near her, and Barefoot came to retrieve it. He bounded into view, stooped to seize the errant parcel, straightened, and they came eye to eye. He appeared surprised, but not alarmed. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. He turned and walked away, leaving a palpable bristle of curiosity in his wake. It was disconcerting. If only she and the Muleskinner hadn’t hidden they wouldn’t have looked furtive.

  The Muleskinner moved away from her. He said, ‘I’ll follow him. Find out where he belongs.’

  ‘But he’s already seen us.’

  ‘Not me. I turned my head.’

  For an uncanny moment it was as if this taciturn woodsman became completely transparent to Taryn. She suddenly understood that he liked to stalk people more than animals because people had the habits of people, and he supposed that if he watched the right quarry closely he might come to know what kind of animal he was. He couldn’t get behind himself, but he could follow a civilised, book-buying, strangely camouflaged, creature-swift stranger, and that act of stalking would help to settle some of the things about himself he didn’t understand.

  The Muleskinner melted into the forest. He made less noise moving on his sturdy boots than the young man had unshod.

  Taryn called after him. ‘Why give the guy another opportunity to see you?’

  He ignored her fierce whisper.

  Taryn stayed put. The skin all over her body was stinging as if she were sunburnt. Was this shame? Why should she be ashamed? No passing stranger could read her intentions. And they were so far only intentions.

  Taryn understood that her discomfort was only a small foretaste of what it would be like if the crime she incited with her silence was discovered. She was honest enough to see the trouble coming, but still kept thinking about herself, what she felt and wanted. Not about the Muleskinner, her instrument. She was weighing up the cost to herself, the risk of terrible public shame, but it never crossed her mind that, by doing this, she would break the locks on all the doors to her soul. Taryn Cornick didn’t know she had a soul.

  She was tired and chilled. The bracken hadn’t seen the sun, and its furred roots were silvered by last night’s dew. She stepped back onto the road and shook her feet. In the treetop a bird ruffled its wings, as if in imitation. Taryn looked up, saw a serrated shadow folding back into the darkness of the thick branches of the wounded oak. Jet eyes caught the light. ‘Crow.’ Taryn named the bird, remembering her grandfather, pointing with his stick as they crossed a field hand-in-hand. ‘Crow, Corvus carone’

  The bird shuffled along the branch and made itself visible against a shrinking valve of dark blue sky. It was huge—night in a tree. Taryn saw it was the rarer bird, not often found this far east. Corvus corax. Raven.

  Taryn sat down between the tree roots that had once cradled her sister. She put her head in her hands.

  ‘Och,’ said the raven, in a regretful baritone. This made Taryn laugh, but when she looked up again the raven was already halfway along the darkening tunnel of oaks. Just before it disappeared a second raven flew out of the woods and joined it.

  A moment later the Muleskinner arrived, soundless, beside her. ‘I lost him.’ He looked vexed. He handed Taryn a book. Labyrinth, a novel by Kate Mosse. ‘He didn’t spot me. He was dawdling. Kept arguing with himself, or with someone he could see and I couldn’t. He threw one of the parcels at a tree. It bust open and he just left it. I stopped to pick it up, and he vanished. I climbed an escarpment to look around. Apart from this stand of oaks, all the trees are the same height and in discernible rows. This is a plantation. There isn’t a lot of undergrowth, but the guy still managed to disappear.’

  ‘He must have been taking a shortcut.’

  ‘I couldn’t see where.’

  Taryn said, ‘There’s a dry cave system near here. During the war, treasures from the British Museu
m were stored in the caves so that if England was invaded they wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. My grandfather was involved in the scheme. The cave entrance was on Grandad’s land. This was once our land. Maybe that person is holed up in the cave.’

  The idea that his quarry had literally gone underground seemed to console the Muleskinner, who was usually able to keep track of much shyer animals than fleet but noisy Barefoot.

  They went back to Taryn’s car. The Muleskinner held her hand to keep her steady. It was dusk, and the ground was difficult to see.

  When they’d first arrived at the wounded oak Taryn felt she was sleepwalking into an exceptional state of being—as if the leaves of the trees were the days and days between Beatrice and her, in the same place, almost the last place Beatrice ever was. Taryn had felt she was taking the Muleskinner not so much to the crime scene as to Beatrice herself. ‘Beatrice, this is your avenger.’ But the book-burdened young man blundered along and ruined Taryn’s great moment.

  If Taryn was feeling discouraged and low, the Muleskinner was not. He was moving with his usual competent decision. He opened the passenger’s door for Taryn, and took the wheel himself. ‘It’s a long drive if we’re heading straight back,’ he said.

  Taryn didn’t hear the ‘if ’. She sat, dumb, staring through the windscreen at the road that led on to Princes Gate Magna and the house her mother’s family once owned.

  He put a hand on her arm and said, ‘You can leave it to me.’

  What had felt like a symphonic play of fate now seemed faintly ridiculous. ‘Oh, God, let him,’ she thought in disgust. ‘Just let him.’ Nothing was ever accomplished by anyone with too keen a sense of the ridiculous. She must screw her courage to the sticking place. All she had to do, after all, was endure what she already knew—her own complicity—and what she imagined, Webber damaged and dying. After all, she’d endured her knowledge of what happened to Bea, and in time her true feelings about that would come back and sustain her through whatever else she had to endure. It was all only knowledge.

  A short while after Webber’s release from prison, six months shy of the full six-year sentence, he was found dead in a street in Chepstow, drowned in the silty overflow from a flooded storm drain. He wasn’t drunk and hadn’t fallen. His face had grazes, but his knees and hands did not. It was a suspicious death and of course the police checked the alibis of those closest to his victim—Beatrice’s father, her sister, her former boyfriend, her close friends.

  Basil Cornick was in New Zealand, and Beatrice’s sister and friends were all miles away, together, celebrating the thirtieth birthday of that former boyfriend. This mass alibi was so convenient that the detectives became suspicious. The timing was too perfect, and it seemed plausible that one of them was the opportunist who saw his or her chance when the birthday invitation arrived.

  The police called on Taryn at her London home. There were two of them, a detective inspector who, seven years before, had headed the investigation into Beatrice’s death, and with her a young detective constable.

  The police sat Taryn and Alan down for a quiet chat. It was all very civil, though Taryn was unnerved by the piercing intensity of the young DC’s regard. Throughout the interview, Taryn held Alan’s hand. She was drained and watery, wrapped in a mohair throw, a hot water bottle clutched to her abdomen and the small, still tender wound from a laparoscopy. She was just out of hospital following an ectopic pregnancy.

  Her trouble had begun as niggling discomfort that turned, by degrees, to side-clutching pain. In the emergency room Alan shouted at people. He wanted to see action and urgency. The staff asked him to leave. Then the thing in Taryn’s side flexed its chain-mail body and her fallopian tube ruptured. She had lost herself in moments of mindless agony. There was a gap, and she woke up groggy. Alan was by her bed, his face white, listening to a doctor talk about ‘removing the conceptus’ and ‘repairing the tube’.

  The older detective put her questions very gingerly. ‘You must have gone to hospital straight after the birthday party in Scotland.’

  ‘I didn’t know I was pregnant. I wish I hadn’t gone to Scotland.’

  ‘I was away on business.’ Alan made his excuses, though neither detective had looked at him.

  ‘When did you hear Webber was dead?’

  ‘Only now, from you.’ Taryn said. ‘Our lawyer called a few weeks ago to say he was out of prison. I’ve been trying not to think about it.’

  ‘We’ll check on the timing of that call,’ said the younger detective, which earned a scowl from Alan.

  Taryn then told them she wasn’t ashamed to say that she was glad Webber was dead. ‘It’s the icing on the cake, the cake being five and a half years in prison. It’s not as if I wished he’d die, but I’m not above celebrating a neat stroke of fate.’

  When the police came away from the grand but virtually bookless Palfreyman apartment, the one who had known the family dusted her hands together and said, ‘We’re done, I reckon. That’s Tim Webber’s full ration of me giving a fuck.’

  The young DC, Jacob Berger, who had no previous connection to the case, didn’t contradict his colleague. He only thought, of Taryn, She’s done it somehow. It wasn’t Taryn’s admission of satisfaction that made Berger think it, or even the abashed happiness shining out of her face. It was that look, in the back of her eyes, of pride. Devilish pride, Berger thought. Not that it mattered much. Someone like Taryn Palfreyman only had one revenge. She’d only had one sister. The thing that did trouble Berger was the idea that, although it wasn’t possible for Taryn Palfreyman to have accomplished a murder in person, she was more than rich enough to have paid someone. No self-respecting police officer should be comfortable closing the file on a possible contract killing.

  Part Two

  Fire

  Flowers don’t bloom forever; and as for the moon,

  It never stays the same. The brightness dims.

  Why weary yourself staring into the dark,

  Trying to see what eyes are unable to see?

  —Horace, Odes (Book II)

  3

  Matron of Honour

  The first of the two calls Taryn absolutely had to take was from a journalist writing a feature ahead of her appearance at the Sydney Writers Festival. The ten-hour time difference was always going to be tricky, and she’d had to reschedule to an hour worse for him. ‘Sorry. I’m in hospital,’ she said. ‘The ward has a rule about calls after 9pm.’

  Throughout her explanation the journalist maintained a disconcerting silence.

  It was a blue evening turning black too soon. The hospital had begun to glow and the highway overpass to scintillate.

  It turned out that the journalist’s long pause was just him thinking how not to have to ask about her health. But there was no way around it. ‘Nothing serious, I hope.’ His voice was less expressive than a text-to-speech app.

  What would count as serious? Taryn wondered. Her bloodwork was normal and her CAT scan clear. She was due for more tests once the anticonvulsants had cleared her system. But she had next to no memory of the ten hours preceding her collapse.

  She did recall staring at the ghost of her reflection in a condensation-covered ice bucket, champagne in her mouth, bubbles ticking against her palate. She was in a hotel room with her oldest friend, Carol. It was Carol’s wedding day. Taryn was matron of honour, about which she was uneasy since, strictly speaking, to be matron of honour she should still be married. She and Alan had parted ways seven years before.

  Carol had a few cherished ideas about weddings, one being the slow ceremonial preparation of herself, her matron of honour and her bridesmaids in a posh hotel. Hence the champagne—the bottle that was suddenly empty and upturned, the condensation halfway down the ice bucket, no longer a mist but dribbles.

  Carol was still in her bathrobe, but fully made up. She was staring at Taryn, perplexed. She said, ‘Why are you asking me about the fire in the library at Princes Gate? It was before I knew you. I might be familiar wit
h your family stories, including the fire, but this scroll box is new. I think I’d have remembered a “Firestarter” if you’d mentioned it before.’

  Taryn had only two further memories from Carol’s wedding day. In one she was standing at the mirror in the hotel bathroom—once more recalled to herself by the sight of her own face. She had her eyeliner in hand, and had used it to draw a cat’s whiskers on her cheeks. The bathroom stank of accretions of fermented soap and rotted human skin.

  The last window of recollection opened onto the footpath outside the church, and the sight of the bridesmaids sitting on their heels to make adjustments to the drape of Carol’s dress. Taryn was frozen, icy cold, though sweat was pouring in rivulets under her silk slip dress. She felt as if she’d dropped something and, were she to stoop to retrieve it, things would pass over her head. Things like Edgar Allan Poe’s pendulum, the planes that flew into the Twin Towers, the howling Chelyabinsk meteor, and the angel of death. Stop and tie your shoe, Taryn, said a voice in her head. You have work to do, Taryn. Walk away. Taryn’s shoes were closed-toe, open-waisted sandals with buckles, not laces, so the voice in her head couldn’t see what was on her feet. She scanned the street and churchyard for the threat, for there must be a threat, something she was being warned about.

  Warned, as Beatrice wasn’t.

  The lychgate was covered in climbing roses, still only in bud. The lawn was closely mown and trimmed around the bases of the headstones. The church was suburban, Victorian brick.

  Then—impossibly—it came at her, the smell from inside the church, of beeswax polish, and incense, and prayer book perfume. Taryn’s spine arched as her body became a bent bow, full of pent-up power. Her tongue humped in her mouth, gagging her, and the world tilted downwards as if it meant to tip her off it.

  ‘Let’s just get on,’ Taryn said to the Australian journalist at the other end of the phone.

  For the first five minutes Taryn kept having to prompt him by suggesting questions he might want to ask. It wasn’t until they got on to the subject of the Reading Room in the State Library of New South Wales that he came to life. The library was being refitted, he said, turned into a ‘friendly and less bookish’ space. ‘The plans cite visitor figures. Because most people who visit don’t do so to read books. They come in for the café or to use the internet.’