The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  ‘Anna,’ he says. ‘Come on.’ He is chiding, smiling as if he has seen her for the first time: and she has trailed off, knowing already that she is wrong, that Carl’s story was never more than it seemed, the grossest public apocryphon, she is a fool to have thought otherwise even for a second. She is ashamed of the way it reveals her. ‘I could help,’ she adds, pointlessly, and Law laughs low in his chest, the sound feline, almost leonine. When he answers his voice is quieter, quizzical with thought.

  ‘Are you my enemy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Greta says so. And Terence.’

  ‘Terence? I thought –’

  ‘Are you my enemy, Anna, do you think?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She pauses only for a second. It is audible and definite as a rest in music. He sits back up, away from her. ‘Nor am I.’

  ‘I can help,’ she says again, her ordinary voice sounding louder than she means it, and Law makes a sound, almost kissing his teeth, frustrated and dismissive.

  ‘No. All you can do for me is ask me your questions. And all I can do for you is answer them.’

  ‘Alright,’ she says, and then stops, the voice sinking in. So suddenly, unexpectedly insulting, it makes her feel nauseous. He gets up, stretching, walking stiff-legged to the nearest panoramic wall of glass. Looking out at the cedars, the tiered planes of their green boughs.

  ‘You don’t really believe in God, do you, Anna?’ And again, she can’t tell if he is deriding her or only asking her a question. She feels the hurt begin to rise up in her again, and with it its immediate antidote, anger.

  ‘Why, do you?’

  He doesn’t turn round. “The best mathematicians always believe in God.’

  ‘Why can you never simply answer my questions?’

  ‘Because they’re not simply yours. You’re only paid to ask them.’

  ‘I see. Alright. Mister Law, why did you divert four million soft into an account in the name of your eleven-year-old son?’

  ‘Ask me another.’

  ‘With pleasure. What were you working on last night?’

  He grunts an acknowledgement. ‘It’s not something I can readily explain –’

  ‘Do you think you might find it easier in court?’

  He lets his hand fall limply, and then simply stands, the glass behind him, the trees beyond the glass. ‘I was working on a general problem in cryptography. A theoretical issue.’

  ‘In the past thirteen years, have you neglected to disclose any personal income, or have you avoided paying British tax on any amount of personal income, besides that held in the Depository of the Gulf of Tartary in the name of your son, Nathan Law?’

  He pauses, only for a second. ‘No.’

  ‘No.’ She types, a tiny rhythm of percussion in the sparely furnished room. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I don’t need to give sureties to the Revenue. Only my dues.’

  She stops typing. Looks up, waits until he turns back to her. ‘Then give one to me.’

  ‘I’m sure. There are no more hidden accounts.’

  She feels the anger go out of her all at once. For a moment it is as if it leaves her diminished. ‘Lawrence was sure there would be,’ she says dully.

  ‘Then Lawrence was wrong. I don’t need to hide my money from anyone.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘Once,’ he says, quietly. And in the quietness Anna hears, quite clearly, that it would not have been his choice to conceal anything, if the choice had been his alone. ‘Do you think I’m a liar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People do.’

  ‘People don’t hate you.’

  ‘I’m not saying that. I’m saying they look at me and at their own lives, the things they work so hard to achieve. And they wonder how it can be possible, to honestly live such a different life.’ He stops, as if giving Anna time to contradict him. When she doesn’t he goes on, his voice harsher. ‘They look for the means by which anyone could do it. The lucky fluke, the trick of it. They look for the lie. Perhaps you do too.’

  ‘Not everyone wants to be you.’

  ‘No. You don’t, do you?’ He comes back, sits beside her. ‘I knew that the first time I saw you.’ And then nothing. He watches Anna, taking her in. Her skin sheer from ear to collarbone, the hair coiled back. The curve of her neck, smooth and muscular, as if with some effort of containment. She is reading the computer screen in her hands, the volumes of information it contains. As if they could explain anything to her, anything at all.

  ‘I don’t have any more questions,’ she says finally, and looking up at him she smiles, as if she means to apologise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and because he means it she smiles again, and he is glad for her, even if he can no longer be glad for himself.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No one’s sorry to see the back of the Revenue.’

  ‘But I am. We’re done, then,’ John says, and Anna nods. ‘You’ve made your assessment. Can I ask what it is?’

  ‘My official assessment is that you’ve repaid the Revenue, including the full figure of punitive interest, and that to the best of my knowledge there are no more debts outstanding. That’s all I have the authority to investigate.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  Without answering she powers down the computer. Its ight fades gradually under her hands. She doesn’t reach for the case.

  ‘Anna?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you satisfied?’

  ‘You know I’m not.’

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’

  She sits back, sighing long and openly. ‘I’m going to go home, order a delivery dinner and open a bottle of wine. While I drink it I’m going to try and forget that I know you’ve done something wrong, and that I may never find out what it is. What else can I do?’

  ‘You could see me again.’

  She turns to meet his gaze steadily. ‘And that would help, would it?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ He stops. As if he is taken aback, Anna thinks, ashamed, even, and she is surprised.

  ‘Then what did you mean?’

  ‘I meant,’ he says, spacing the words, just as they come to him. ‘That I would be sorry not to see you again.’

  ‘Why?’ Anna asks, but already she knows the answer, perhaps better than John does himself.

  ‘Why do you always have to know why?’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘This isn’t your job any more.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought you said you had no more questions.’

  ‘I lied.’ She reaches for the briefcase.

  ‘See me again.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘New Year’s Day. New Year’s Day’s night. The Winter Ball. It’s not as formal as it sounds. Come. If you get here and change your mind, you won’t even have to find me. Terence can send you an invitation.’

  ‘Can he?’

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘I promised my family.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Terence thinks I’m your enemy.’

  ‘Anna.’

  She stands. Feeling his eyes on her, not meeting them. Checking her coat, her case, absently involving herself in the mechanics of departure. ‘Anna,’ he says, for a third time.

  ‘Alright,’ she says. And she looks down at him, very still, as he takes her hand.

  Afterwards, when she looks back at the investigation, it is at first relentlessly, exhaustively, as if her recollections of what was said and done can be made to render up what was left unspoken. It is only as the days pass that she realises the case is over for her, just as it is for John himself. His repayment of debt has left her impotent. There is nothing more she can investigate.

  As if it matters. As if what she ever wanted of him was money, or the promotion her prominent and rapid success might eventually bring. When she thinks of him Anna imagines she
feels as her clients must have felt, the ones who have been most guilty, the frauds. He is a married man, a father. She knows how it feels when a family falls apart. But she wants to see him again, and not only him but the life he has surrounded himself with. The house sheltered in the trees. Nathan’s laughter, and his echo at the shore, laughing back. Anneli. Even Anneli. It is him she wants, but not only him. She wants the people who have him in them.

  Other things linger. There is a sensation of resistance she doesn’t recall feeling at the time, a powerful resentment. As if she could never belong in a place like Erith Reach, a place and family so apart, and wishes them both destroyed. She has to catch herself, to remind herself that she doesn’t hate John or the money he creates. She isn’t sure if she will ever see him again. The invitation comes and lies unopened on the mantelpiece, an envelope of watered paper, rare and archaic.

  And still, sometimes she stops whatever she is doing, working on new clients or talking or alone with herself, the memory of the Laws coming to her as something desirable, painfully clear. When that happens it is often their grace that strikes her most. Their troubling beauty. Sometimes she dreams that she is there with them again, but always comprehending nothing, or not enough, always a sentence behind. Then it is all she wants, to understand their conversations and silences. It is a simple desire, not like love, nothing so complicated as that. Or perhaps it is like a first love. Like an obsession.

  At nights she is restless, and in the days tired. She works late and achieves less than enough, her face sallow in the computer’s faint light. Nothing is said, though the Revenue is aware: she is aware of its awareness. She falls behind, nods off over the lives of freelancers and industrialists.

  Her life draws her back like gravity. It fills her with a vague dread, as if she is falling through the routine of days towards something not quite foreseen and terrible. She dreams of leaving, of walking out of her life into that of another, John’s or her mother’s. Greener grasses. One night, reading her father’s boxed books, she turns a page to find no more writing, only blankness, an error in the printing, and feels a spur of joy at that most open-ended of open endings.

  She cancels her monthly meeting with Martha, citing work, as one or the other of them will regularly do. Her computer fills up with the tiny icons of unopened messages. A monstrous haul of junk mail washes up from the Internet sites she has examined, even those she has never visited – A Message from the Masters of Reverse Engineering! – so that she angrily clicks them away. Eve sends unanswered communications which Anna’s computer appends with urgent red flags. Lawrence sends flowers and a dinner invitation on a small white card.

  She remembers no other dreams. The inspectors leave at six-thirty as the cleaners come in, the city closing down around them. A radio starts up somewhere. Music drifts out through the Revenue windows. The sounds of sirens, distant and inconstant, drifting in.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘First you extract seven figures out of him. Then you won’t leave him alone even after he’s paid. And now you’re saying he wants to see you again?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘All that money, and you’re saying he wants to see you? Why? You must be his worst nightmare. Unless there’s something else.’

  ‘Carl –’

  ‘Maybe he likes it. Maybe he likes punishment. What did you do, tie him up with red tape? Whip him lightly with his primary records?’

  ‘Leave her alone, Carl. She asked for advice.’

  ‘And that’s what I’m giving her. I’m telling her it’s Freudian. What he really wants to do is fuck the Revenue over. He does want to fuck you, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Carl.’ Sullivan raises her head ominously from her drink, hands closed around its warmth like vices.

  ‘Alright. I’m just expressing my surprise.’

  ‘Surprise? Jealousy, more like.’

  ‘Surprise. And suspicion. Excuse me if I’m blunt as a cunt about it.’

  ‘Mister Caunt, I am trying to eat my breakfast.’

  ‘No, Mister Hermanubis, you’re trying to eat my breakfast, as it happens. So does he? Anna.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course he does.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s why he wants to see me again.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ Sullivan asks, softly curious, her voice weightless as the motes of snow that have begun to fall around them.

  ‘I think,’ Anna says, eventually, ‘that he wants a witness.’

  She comes bearing gifts. It is a white Christmas, the first in decades, the depth of the sky plotted out in snowflakes. All the way across London the streets are full of onlookers and distracted drivers, upturned faces.

  She parks in a street off Belgrave Square and sits while the motor ticks down into silence. All morning she has been remembering the first days of winter, its onset, the time just before she met John Law. The recollections nag at her. The car in the frost. The train between stations. It is as if she can remember everything she has seen, everything she has said and thought, but not what she has known. She is not there yet. She doesn’t know yet what she knows.

  Martha’s house is as she remembers it. It has been a while. The stone facade is the colour of fossils. There is a wreath on the door, the kind Martha might have desired as a child and might buy now she is not, a great lifebelt of holly with extravagant berries and unnaturally engendered clusters of sharp, perfumed flowers. The petals draw a bead of blood from Anna’s hand as she reaches for the bell. She is still sucking her finger when the door opens.

  ‘There she is!’ says Eve, accusing and celebratory, as if Anna is a long-awaited means of transport who has arrived two at once. ‘The most beautiful tax inspector in the world. Fashionably late as always.’

  ‘Feel free to ignore her,’ says Martha. ‘She’s been drinking since lunch. What have you done to your hand?’

  ‘Nothing. Your guard-wreath attacked me.’

  ‘Bad wreath. Show me? You’ll survive. Do you still cook? I need to borrow you. Your mother can get you a drink, can’t you, mother? What would you like?’

  ‘Whatever you two are having,’ Anna says, though her voice, in contrast to those of her mother and sister, seems small and distant even in her own ears. They are both done up to the nines, all smiles, reflections of one another and therefore of Anna herself; and in their eyes Anna can see herself reflected. Not as herself – not as she imagines herself, at least – but as they know her. Sister and daughter. It is like being three people at once, Anna has time to think, and then Eve is retreating into the warmth, and Martha is taking her hand, leading her inside.

  From the dining room comes the sound of music, masculine laughter. The kitchen is a microclimate of steam. Anna steps into it with the cold of the street still on her cheeks. The air has acquired flavour, as if its elements have been adulterated by trace elements of white wine, white fish, sweet herbs. Her sister has moved to the far counter, sorting through heaped vegetables. On the stove between them sits a kite-shaped copper pan broad as a dustbin. The lid trembles.

  ‘It’s turbot,’ Martha calls. ‘Whole. I thought to hell with it all, we’ll have something special. Hope you’re hungry.’

  ‘Can I see it?’ She is already reaching for the lid.

  ‘Not yet, don’t touch! It needs to cook through. It’s a monster, actually. Huge, flat and ugly. Fish doormat.’

  ‘Loch Ness roadkill?’

  ‘Exactly. I’ve spent all day with it. You’re an improvement. Here, can you do something with the salad? Take it away from me. You were always the better cook.’

  ‘That’s rather obviously not true.’ Anna inches past Martha, takes up a knife, begins to cut. The steam is heavier at the counter, the taste of it more powerful. She closes her eyes for a second, the knife poised, comfortably stunned by heat
and scent. Behind her at the stove her sister is talking, talking, just as she always has, saying nothing and everything.

  ‘I found the recipe in George Sala, it’s a hundred and twenty-four years old, isn’t that amazing? He dressed the fish with capers. They’re on the prohibited foods list now. They say the humble caper is dying out in its natural habitats. They’re going to clone them, apparently, like world leaders and elephants. Mum flew them in for us. Not the elephants. She hid them in her washbag. Now she’s complaining all her scent smells of vinegar. How are you? I missed our Friday. It’s been too long, hasn’t it? Why was that?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ she says, and at this still moment – John Law behind her, the dinner still waiting to begin – she can’t, or doesn’t care to. She grates the zest of limes, presses the juices into a bowl of oil, peels the frail skin from garlic. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was your fault.’ Martha lifts the lid from the turbotière with both hands. Peers tentatively in. ‘Mum said you’ve been busy.’

  ‘She means I’ve been ignoring her.’

  ‘I know,’ Martha says, and then, ‘What’s happening with John Law, by the way?’

  ‘I’m done with him.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘You do work fast. What a shame, there was I thinking you’d grill him mercilessly for months on end. Slow-roasted Cryptographer, Revenue-style, complete with much dragging and many coals.’

  ‘That’s not what I do,’ she says. ‘That’s not my job.’ She is surprised by the bitterness in Martha’s voice. She is not a bitter woman, though she is a surprising one, after all. Anna separates the pale cloves, crushes the fullest under the heel of her hand, the wet sulphurous pulp clinging to her skin. Takes up the knife. ‘I don’t eat billionaires for breakfast, either.’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe you should,’ Martha says, turning casually from the stove, wiping her hands down on a towel. ‘You know, I’ve got colleagues just like him. Mister and Missus Justices. The kind of people who think Fortnum and Mason is a convenience store. There are days when I think I’d like to live like that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not? Don’t you?’