Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  But you did.

  No, you didn’t see me. I left before you could. Cameron Brown was not at a conference in the States, nor were his wife and children in the country with her sister. No, I didn’t see your face—except in the mirror. But it was you. You were in the hall—just arrived. Susanna, the hostess, was holding the coats you had just taken off—a fawn-coloured coat and a black one. That black one. The one that smells of you around the collar. The one you had put around me just that morning when I climbed out of the bath and asked you to find me a towel. “Put this on,” you said. “Then I can take the smell of your body with me.”

  Sooner or later, Mr. Brown, one has to take sides if one is to remain human.

  From the conservatory I watched you and Sarah talking to Susanna, a tall man in an ill-fitting black suit and a woman. A man and wife. I knew them both, even from the back. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, or you. Sarah was wearing that lovely emerald green dress you bought her in London for her fortieth birthday and the pearl necklace. Your hand on her lower back. Your hand. I watched it. At the base of her back—you touched her there, tenderly, your fingers just stroking the bare skin, up and down. It was all in that gesture—what I could never see because I turned away always, because I couldn’t bear to look at what was there in front of me. Your fingertips on the base of her back told me why you were still there in Over with Sarah—tenderness, mutual dependency, yes, and love. Your hand on her back. Touching her there, skin on skin.

  “Gatwick?” the hostess is saying, her hand on your arm in sympathy. “You’re flying to America tonight, for a conference? How very tedious. You poor, poor man. You’ll miss the fireworks.”

  “We can’t stay long,” you say.

  “Darling,” I can see the side of her face for a moment, as she turns to you, “we’ve got easily an hour before we have to go. It only takes two hours to Gatwick. That’s plenty of time.”

  I climb the stairs behind me to fetch my coat from the pile in the master bedroom; then I make my way carefully back down. But you’ve both gone, drawn into one of the inner rooms. I catch no one’s eyes. There’ll be an explanation, I say to myself. A reason. The lies have always been a kind of protection, a way of making it possible for all three of us to live with this. One of me was reasonable: “So he didn’t leave this afternoon. He’s on a later flight. Sarah is driving him to the airport and she will kiss him good-bye there. He only lied about the time of the flight; he just let you assume that he was going straight to the airport; that the last person he said good-bye to was you at The Studio under the dripping trees.” Not such a crime.

  “Why did you come back, Lydia?” Kit had asked once. “You said you were finished with Cambridge.”

  “Cambridge hasn’t finished with me. I have some business to settle.”

  “Cameron?”

  “No, not Cameron. Christ, no. That was all over years ago.” I laughed, as if the thought was ridiculous. “Why must all matters of importance always be assumed to be matters of the heart?” I lied, of course, but well enough for Kit to believe me.

  I was sitting on the stairs, pulling on my boots hurriedly, when I saw him, through the carved posts of the elegant staircase. At the party, in the beautiful house. The man in red, glimpsed only for a moment through an open doorway, in a mirror in the hallway. No, he was not a figment of alarmed and violent emotion. It was him. White hair, thin and unbrushed, fringing the edge of a long white face, the sneer round the corners of the mouth, brows furrowed as if in concentration or as if he couldn’t quite see sharply. Just for a second, he passed across the mirrored surface, on the wall behind where you had been. Just turned and looked straight at me there, for a second. Framed, like a portrait. His mouth opened slightly as if he had something to say.

  Maria’s voice calls after me from the gate of the house I am fleeing, the house of the daughter of the famous poet.

  “Lyddie, where are you going? What’s up? You OK?”

  My smile is as brittle as glass. “Yeah, I’m OK. Just tell your mum I’ll call later. Not feeling great, that’s all. I need to go home.”

  Home? The Studio was the last place I wanted to go. I was going to the river. Don’t ask me why.

  “Do you want me to come with you? You don’t look very well.”

  “Hey you, don’t fuss,” I said. “You’re just like your mother. Tell her I’ll call later. Enjoy the fireworks.”

  Out into the street, the crowds are all heading in one direction—the river, the common, and the fireworks. Small children clasp sparklers, wide-eyed, unaccustomed to the night. Cambridge in November. The colours stream horizontally as if someone has taken a comb through wet paint.

  Twenty-five

  Lydia. Is that you? Christ. What’s happened? Can you move? Wiggle your toes.”

  It’s Will Burroughs. She’s in black. Everything else is black and blue. I concentrate very hard, try to remember where my feet are. I move my toes. Doesn’t she have another name?

  “OK, try to sit up—slowly.” I can feel a hand behind my head.

  Will winds her scarf around my face. It smells of garlic and patchouli oil. She takes off her jacket and puts it around my shoulders. She rubs my legs with her long fingers. I am sitting upright against a brick wall, among rubbish bins, the acrid smell of blood, rotting food and urine in my nostrils. There’s a box of empty champagne bottles a few feet away. Will rings for a taxi on her mobile phone. “Hello, Panther? Can I have a taxi for Garret Hostel Lane?”

  I see a black panther coming down Garret Hostel Lane, prowling in the shadows by the rubbish bins, swaying slightly, ready to jump. Its coat glistens.

  “Trinity Street?” she says. I remember Trinity Street. “Christ. You can’t get any closer? OK. Outside Hobbs then, ten minutes.” There’s silence for a moment. I hear Will drawing in her breath somewhere close by. Gathering herself for something. “Shit,” she says. “Shit.” Isn’t she supposed to be in

  Leeds? Will Burroughs is Lily Ridler…is violent, is violet, is vile, is—in his bed with her face missing…photographs with no face…

  “Don’t say anything,” she tells me. “I’ll get you home. Can you stand? We’ve got to get up to Trinity Street. The taxi driver won’t come down here. It’s too narrow, he says.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” I say. I would cry if I could, but my face isn’t mine to cry with. Don’t take me back there. There’s too much light. Too many shadows.

  Cameron. Where are you? Why won’t you answer? I’m hurting. I think this is your fault.

  Will’s talking slowly as if I am sick but I’m not sick, am I? I can’t see her properly. I can’t see anything properly. My head feels as if it’s in a vise and someone’s still tightening it.

  I stand very slowly, with Will behind me, or is it Lily, her arms under mine, my eyes closed. I can see stars, brittle white stabs in my eyes. I am sick, down the wall.

  Where are you?

  I see the podium, the woman asking you the question, the slice of brain stem behind you like stained glass. With the taste of vomit in my mouth and more rising, I say to myself: “Might I ask, Mr. Brown, could you tell us your views on…”

  Mr. Brydon, the prosecutor, was very insistent. “Could you tell the court once again, Dr. Brooke, the reasons why you didn’t call the police the night you were attacked? Your nose was broken and your jaw partially fractured. You had three broken ribs. Someone had attacked you with a blunt instrument. You were bleeding.”

  “I was frightened and confused. I think I had also been poisoned. Will offered to take me home. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “But, Dr. Brooke. Was it not possible that Will—Ms. Ridler—might have called the police?”

  “I told her not to.”

  “You told her not to? You had been badly beaten. You told her not to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was that, Dr. Brooke?”

  “Because I didn’t want anyone to know. I was trying to finish a book. I though
t that if the police knew and there was an investigation I wouldn’t be able to finish it. That there would be a lot of fuss.”

  “You didn’t phone the police because you had a book to finish? It must have been a very important book. Perhaps you might be able to tell us what it was about?”

  You bastard. You knew what it was about. You just wanted to sneer.

  “It was a book about alchemy. Isaac Newton. Yes, well, it’s more complicated than that, but essentially yes, that’s how it was. I had to finish the book.”

  “So you didn’t phone the police that night, when it was conceivable that you had been attacked by the same people who had left Mr. Scorsa for dead, because you had a book about Isaac Newton to finish?”

  “Yes, I guess that is about right.”

  “No further questions.”

  How could I have said how it really was? That by then I had become absolutely sure that everything—even lives now—depended upon me finishing Elizabeth’s book. What would the lawyer for the prosecution have said if I had told him that NABED was also part of a coded preface to the young Isaac Newton’s notebook of sins, possibly an alchemical mantra or even a formula of some kind? That there was the seventeenth century and three dead fellows of Trinity College lying in doorways and a drowned boy to consider, as well as the rat farms and the labs and the balaclavas and the slashed bodies in twenty-first-century Cambridge alleyways. Who, Mr. Brydon, was the fifth man in Elizabeth’s sequence? And, most importantly, how much had Ezekiel Foxcroft known?

  The phone rang at midnight. It wasn’t you, it was Kit. Will and I were watching TV—a game show—or at least she was watching; I had closed my eyes. It will be a distraction till you sleep, she said. She switched it off when the phone rang. The arnica bottle was out on the table. She had made me take four of the tiny blue pills cradled in the palm of her hand—for the internal bruising, she’d said. She’d dressed my wounds, soaked my bruises in witch hazel, and given me painkillers.

  “Lyddie. You OK?” Kit asked. “Your voice sounds weird.”

  “Just a cold starting, that’s all.” Christ, you should see my face, Kit. I have bruises across it. I think my nose is broken.

  “You missed the fireworks. And guess who was at the party?”

  I know, I know. I saw him. He was with her. He was supposed to be on a plane to America.

  “Who?” I asked casually.

  “Cameron Brown. He asked after you, but he didn’t stay long. He was flying somewhere, he said.”

  America. He was flying to America. She was driving him. The boys were there too, on the PlayStation with Maria in the front room. They must have all gone to the airport together, en famille. He’ll be on the flight now. She’ll be driving home, the boys playing computer games in the back seat.

  “How did she look?” My voice betrayed me.

  “Sarah? She looked like a woman who’d won, Lyddie. After a long fight. She looked tired.”

  “She did win. She won years ago.”

  Yes, but what kind of victory is that?

  “Did you see him at the party? Is that why you left?”

  “No, I just wasn’t feeling well. I’m getting a cold. I ended up talking to this dreadful man about black holes, and he was going on and on and my head started to spin. I just wanted to get home.”

  “So how come you’ve not been answering the phone?”

  “I took a sleeping pill, that’s all. I can’t keep my eyes open, Kit. Let me go back to sleep, eh?”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said, her voice slightly hesitant, as though she knew there was something not quite right.

  “Yes, please call me tomorrow. Late.”

  Will passed me another large glass of whisky—Laphroaig. Twenty minutes later I fell asleep in Will’s arms on the sofa in front of the late news, despite the ache across my face from the ice pack. The following morning I couldn’t open my eyes at all. I was still on the sofa. Will had laid a blanket over me and a pillow under my head. She had also hung blankets across the windows.

  “Can you identify Exhibit D, Dr. Brooke?” I hated Brydon’s aloofness, that special sneer of contempt he reserved especially for me in the courtroom. He passed me a plastic bag containing two keys on a key fob.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a set of keys to The Studio.”

  “Your set?”

  “No. These are Will’s keys. Her key fob was purple like this.”

  “How long did she have keys to The Studio?”

  “I’m not sure. From when she started working for Elizabeth, which was, I think, in 2001, until Cameron changed the locks in November 2002.”

  “Cameron Brown changed the locks?”

  “He sent a locksmith to change the locks. Yes.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “No sir, he didn’t. He was always preoccupied with safety. He had to be.” Now that I understood that only a fragment of what I knew could be produced in the courtroom, that the fact that a series of seventeenth-century murders which had become entangled with a campaign of violence in the present could not be admitted as an explanation for any of the questions the prosecution would ask, it didn’t seem to matter what I omitted or kept to myself. I might as well omit evidence that would damn Lily if I could. I couldn’t stop what was happening, but I could do my best to slow the accretion of evidence that would end in her sentence.

  “Can you tell the court why these keys were found on the riverbed by police divers?”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps she threw them away when she realised they no longer worked.”

  “Will Burroughs—Lily Ridler—was in possession of keys to The Studio at the time that Elizabeth was found drowned?” Brydon repeated.

  “Yes, she was. But she had nothing to do with Elizabeth’s death.”

  Brydon suddenly turned on his heel and drew very close. He sensed a mistake about to happen. He had taken me off guard. I had shown partiality.

  “Do you know that to be a fact, Dr. Brooke? Do you know that beyond all doubt?”

  “No sir, I don’t.”

  Ask me about Mr. F., Mr. Brydon. Then we might get somewhere. Ask me about the book Elizabeth was writing or about how she knew she was going to die. Ask me, Mr. Brydon, about the goddamned seventeenth century. The keys mean nothing. They lead nowhere. Elizabeth died when she fell down a flight of stairs that no longer exists leading from a riverside glasshouse that was demolished nearly three hundred years ago to a landing stage that has left not even a shadow behind it. She died with a prism of seventeenth-century glass in her hand and a gash on her head. She knew she was going to die; she knew the man in red wouldn’t let her finish assembling that record of seventeenth-century deaths.

  Then again, Mr. Brydon, it would also be true to say that Elizabeth died because the Syndicate chose to make her death a warning to Cameron Brown—the most powerful message of all. But then you don’t know about the Syndicate, do you?

  Yes, both these explanations of Elizabeth Vogelsang’s death are true. So why don’t we start there, with the most difficult question of all: not about Lily or her keys—that is a distraction—but about how both explanations of her death might be true simultaneously. It’s called entanglement, Mr. Brydon; the word describes the snares of love as well as a mystery in quantum physics. It’s not just particles of light or energy that can become entangled; it’s time too. Yes, moments of time can become entangled. The seventeenth century and the present have become entangled; they have become connected across time and space.

  Twenty-six

  What ever happened to Lydia Brooke? Did anyone know? She can’t tell you because she doesn’t know. The people who attacked her didn’t come forward. Never have.

  “Where were you going, Dr. Brooke, on the night of the fifth of November 2002?” The courtroom was hushed. Mr. Brydon wore a green wool suit. His white shirt was slightly grubby around the cuffs.

  “To Trinity College. I had some research to complete.”

  “For your book
? At seven-fifteen in the evening?”

  “Yes, I needed to go to Trinity College.”

  “Despite the fact that you knew that Cambridge was not then a safe place? You knew about the attack on Mr. Scorsa three nights before?”

  “Yes, I knew about Mr. Scorsa. But the city was full of people because of the fireworks. It seemed safe. I guess I didn’t think I would be attacked. I didn’t think there would be any reason why they would…I didn’t think.”

  I had a key to Cameron’s rooms in Trinity, Mr. Brydon. I was going there. I wanted to look in the drawers in his desk. I wanted to look in his computer. I wanted to know everything. Everything he had kept from me. I wanted to know all his secrets.

  “Can you tell us in your own words what you do remember of your walk that night?”

  “I am afraid, sir, that I don’t remember anything very clearly after I turned into Trinity Lane and before I heard Will’s voice. There was nothing unusual until then. The doctors have told me that the memory failure is due to the blow to the head. I’m sorry. I wish I could remember.”

  In my own words, Mr. Brydon? Oh yes, I will tell you in my own words what happened to me, to Lydia Brooke—what she remembers at least, or what she thinks she remembers. She remembers more than she will tell the prosecution at Lily’s trial. Why does she not tell? Not to protect Lily or herself, but because what she remembers will make no sense to anyone there, or at least to anyone but the woman who looks like a boy who sits in the dock and the woman with the tattoo who sits in the gallery. They have already heard it, several times. They have gone through the story piece by piece with her. But otherwise, it is a story that can’t be told. It’s a simple matter of plausibility.

  Did you know, Mr. Brydon, that the way you and I use the word plausibility—you know, to mean reasonable, fairly argued, believable—that that meaning only came about in the seventeenth century? No, I don’t expect you did. Did you know that Jonathan Swift, the satirist, once described an excuse as having “more plausibility than truth”? More plausibility than truth. Yes, that’s something. Your story, the one you are stitching together right now about Lily Ridler and the murders, has more plausibility than truth, I am afraid. But you would never understand that.