I pushed away the question. The chilly air braced me. My racing heart began to slow, and after a few minutes I relaxed my grip on Gryffin’s arm. The sidewalk became a path of beaten earth that skirted the edge of the Heath. From the high street, headlights shone through the trees, the murky globes of streetlamps. I heard a dull rumble of traffic, the rush of wind in the trees. Still no sirens.
“What if we’re on CCTV?” asked Gryffin.
“Nothing we can do about it. But we’re innocent.”
“Not of stealing the book.”
“We’re not stealing it. We’re protecting it.” I tried to remain calm. “You’ve never been arrested here, right? Me neither. As long as they don’t have our fingerprints or faces in their database, we’re good. That’s why you don’t want to go to the police. One reason, anyway,” I added. “I can think of more.”
Because once the cops got hold of me, they’d know I was in the country illegally, using a stolen passport. Maybe the police back in the U.S. no longer wanted to question me, but I was connected to a trail of other killings that stretched from Helsinki to Reykjavík to London. As the line of headlights drew closer, Gryffin steered us onto another path, crashing through knee-high brush.
“Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.
“No,” he said, panting. “But I think the big meadow’s down there, the one that overlooks Parliament Hill.”
He paused to catch his breath. Enough gray light leaked from the sky that I could see his face was streaked with tears.
“What happened?” He tore off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “Why would someone do that?”
“You tell me.”
He didn’t reply, or move. I reached into my bag for the bottle of Lagavulin, took a long pull, and handed it to him. He stared at me like I’d offered him a live chicken, but recovered enough to knock back a healthy mouthful.
“Better?”
He nodded. I capped the bottle and dropped it in my bag. “How could you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Take pictures of someone dead.”
“It’s what I do.” The whiskey had loosened the fear coiled in my chest. “It’s what all photographers do, unless you’re just shooting landscapes. Weddings, birthday parties, selfies—sooner or later, they’re all photos of the dead. That’s what photography is. A massive necropolis. The dead, we carry them with us everywhere we go.”
“You’re crazy. No photographer thinks like that.”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
He pushed past me and began to run, stumbling through the gorse. I caught up with him at the edge of the woods. The sound of grass rippling in the wind might have been that of the sea. Flickers of light indicated where people made their way across a vast field, like winter fireflies. Overhead, a dark fragment broke away from the trees and arrowed toward us. Gryffin stared at it, frowning.
“Is that a bird?”
My reply died in my throat. It wasn’t a bird, but an object with two sets of whirring propeller blades and a squat rounded body, so compact I could have held it in my hands. It stopped, hovering in the air above us, and I saw its single black eye and glowing red light. A drone.
Chapter 9
I turned to race back into the woods, but a figure blocked my way.
“Hang on there,” a woman’s voice said. Casually offhand, as though we were in a subway car. “Tommy, can you get her? Watch your head.”
Someone else grasped my shoulder—a man, his hand large enough it could have circled my thigh with ease. When I tried to move, his grip tightened. I gasped, hearing my neck pop.
“Don’t do that,” he murmured. He shared the woman’s East End accent, a trace of Caribbean uplift. His other hand grasped Gryffin’s shoulder, holding the two of us as though we were ill-behaved children.
“Hey, this is how you bring it down, right?” The woman stared at the remote in her hands, then at the man, then me. “You don’t know how these work, do you?”
“No. But you’ve made a mistake, me and my boyfriend were just—”
“Shhh.” The man shook me the way a terrier shakes a rat. “The button on the right—near the top, Ly—yeah, that one. Slowly. Wait till it’s on the ground, then you can grab it.”
With a soft thump, the drone fell onto the grass. The woman swept it up, depositing it in a backpack. She was stocky, a few inches shorter than me, wearing a black anorak, black pants, lace-up black leather boots. A constellation of freckles on her dark skin. Around her neck hung a pair of night-vision goggles.
“Don’t hurt them.” She gave the man a scolding look, turned to me, and shrugged. “Steroids. Tommy, I’ll take over with her.”
The man released me. He was dressed identically to the woman and shared her freckled skin and light brown eyes. Like her, he was a bit shorter than I was. They looked so much alike that they must be twins, I realized, though where she was stocky, he was massive, with broad shoulders and the chiseled, impassive features of an Easter Island monolith. Former military or maybe a onetime cop. A sinuous line of Arabic script was tattooed around his neck. He smelled of vitamins and beer.
“Good enough,” he said.
He retained his hold on Gryffin, who, despite having a good six inches on him, stood rigidly at his side, gazing at the ground. I stared at him, willing him to look at me. After a few seconds he raised his head and shot me a look of utter loathing. I quickly turned away, and the woman slid an arm companionably around my neck.
“Car’s over there.” She gestured toward a break in the trees.
“I really think there’s a mistake,” I said.
“I really think you should shut up.” Her tone was good-natured, but her gloved hand slipped under the collar of my leather jacket, trailing along my neck until it stopped. One finger traced a line from my temple. “That’s your external carotid artery. It supplies blood to the brain. If I do this—”
She gradually exerted pressure, and fiery pain streamed from my neck to my eyes. The air turned red. “After a minute or two, you start to suffer brain damage. A little longer and it affects your executive function. Painless, though, relatively speaking. I was premed at King’s College London, but I had to drop out. No dosh. Also, Tommy there has a gun.”
She released my throat and I fought to breathe again.
“You’ll make a great doctor, Lyla.” The huge man shook his head. “Fucking Tories. We’ll get you back to school.”
“That’s the plan,” she said. “All right, here we go.”
They led us to a side street where an SUV with tinted windows was parked. An approaching couple lifted their heads when they saw us.
“Now give me your keys, mate, you know you’re in no state,” Tommy said loudly, for the couple’s benefit. He slid a hand into Gryffin’s pocket and mimed pulling something from it, opened the back door, and pushed Gryffin into the SUV. “There you go!”
Lyla held the door for me. “After you.”
“Fuck you.” I tried to twist away, but Lyla shoved me inside, then closed the door. I heard the click of locks engaging as I pressed my face against the dark window and saw Tommy shrug apologetically to the couple hurrying past the car.
“Some people just don’t know when they’ve had enough,” he said, and mimed raising a glass.
He and Lyla slid into the front of the SUV. Lyla took the driver’s seat, and moments later the car pulled away from the curb.
Gryffin slumped against his door, messenger bag between his knees. “Where are you taking us?”
“Relax.” Tommy pulled off his gloves and dropped them on the seat. He reached into a pocket for a small blue box. “Gum?”
“No, thank you,” said Gryffin as Tommy helped himself to a piece.
I dug into my bag for the slipcased volume. “Is this what you want?” I said, holding it up. “Because—”
Lyla raised a hand. “Talk to Tindra.”
We left Hampstead’s posh puzzle of Georgian blocks and mid-Vi
ctorian mansions and headed into an unfamiliar part of the city. Lyla wove in and out of traffic, shooting occasional glances into the back seat. After a while she put the radio on. A newscaster reported the latest news about the terrorist car attack and the new virus in China, then segued into a piece on a planned gathering by English and European nationalists. Tommy scowled.
“Fucking Nazis,” he said, and switched the radio off.
I stared out the window, looking for familiar landmarks. After thirty minutes we passed Westminster and the towers of hierarchic London. Lines of black-clad police stood in front of barriers, some in riot gear. I desperately wanted a drink but was afraid Gog and Magog would confiscate my bottle. I licked my cracked lips, watching the play of light on black water as we crossed Westminster Bridge, winding our way around Waterloo and past more barriers where police stood guard as crowds walked to and from the station.
About fifteen minutes later, we passed another Tube station. A small group stood on the sidewalk across the street, taking selfies in front of a mural: David Bowie as Aladdin Sane, lightning bolt splitting his face. We were in Brixton.
Another few minutes and the SUV made a sharp turn, then another. At last it came to a stop on a block of nondescript midcentury houses. Behind a security gate, a short driveway led to a garage below street level.
“Home again, home again,” said Lyla. She glanced into the back seat at Gryffin, and shook her head. “Ah, it’s not so bad. First-world problems. We’ll get this all straightened out.”
Tommy tapped the SUV’s touch screen. The security gate swung open. The telltale emerald thread of a laser snapped from sight as the car rolled forward and the gate closed behind us. Three miniature boxtree topiaries lined the driveway: Ms. Pac-Man, Mario, Donkey Kong. Tommy tapped the touch screen again. The garage door opened, and we drove inside.
I clutched my bag with The Book of Lamps and Banners inside it. I tried to summon Quinn’s voice in my head, telling me to run or play dead or fight. I felt numb, the need for a drink like a drill to my temple.
I couldn’t stand it anymore: I opened my bag and gulped down a few mouthfuls of Lagavulin. The SUV came to a halt. I heard the door locks disengage. Lyla hopped out, opened the door, waited as I extricated myself. She gestured at my bag.
“Open that, please.”
I no longer cared what happened. I held it out to her.
Lyla barely looked inside. She flicked at my rolled-up clothes, her nose wrinkling at the bottle of whiskey. She shot me a look, reached to touch the star-shaped scar beside my eye.
“Hurts, does it?” she said as I flinched. She glanced at the bottle. “That’ll kill you good as cancer. You set, Tommy?”
A few feet away, her brother cursorily inspected Gryffin’s bag, nodded. “All good. Tindra wants to see you,” he said, tapping Gryffin’s shoulder. “Both of you. This way.”
They steered us through the garage, past a bicycle and some flattened cardboard boxes, to a door with a security screen. Lyla pressed her hand against it. The door opened onto a corridor lit by a line of LEDs on the floor, like an airplane’s safety lights. The corridor was empty, save for a metal bookcase crammed with old paperbacks.
At the end of the corridor, a second door led into a large, windowless room with tiled floors. A small open kitchen occupied one corner; ten-gallon jugs of water filled another, along with some free weights. The red eyes of CCTV cameras blinked from the ceiling, and I heard the hum of a filtration system. Two Ikea armchairs, a couch, a coffee table. Everything white, except for the vintage video-arcade consoles lined against one wall. Gorgar, Missile Command, Space Invaders. The place looked like a bomb shelter built for a computer whiz kid in 1984.
I checked out Space Invaders—an original Bally, the first pinball machine inspired by one of the video-arcade games that would soon eclipse them all. I hadn’t seen one since 1980.
“You like that game?”
I glanced over my shoulder to see a young white woman with dark buzz-cut hair and a single long blue dreadlock studded with sequins. She held a chain leash attached to a black-and-white Staffordshire terrier that looked like the convict twin of the dog from The Little Rascals: spiked choke collar, black lips pulled back to show white teeth and pink gums.
I shrugged. “Been a while.”
The girl handed the leash to Lyla, walked toward the console, and slapped it. Lights flashed, and a silver ball dropped into the charger as the machine chirred awake. She worked the table with the nearly immobile stance of the longtime player, leaning slightly into the machine, fingers tapping the controls ceaselessly.
It doesn’t take much to score big on Space Invaders. After a few minutes with the first ball still in play, the girl seemed to lose interest. She lifted her hands, watched the ball spin into the gutter, and turned to me.
“Where’s my fucking book?” she said.
Chapter 10
Gryffin was right. Tindra Bergstrand wasn’t a rich chick lugging a crocodile Birkin with a hamster-sized dog inside it. She looked like she could crack walnuts in the crook of her elbow. Not tall but solidly built and square shouldered, wearing a white T-shirt, black cargo pants, white thick-soled Vans. Muscular arms, no tattoos or piercings that I could see. Other than the spangled dreadlock, her only concession to ornament was a single earring—a flattened disk of amber the size of a quarter. She had a wide, unsmiling mouth, sharp nose, uptilted fawn-colored eyes beneath a high forehead. Swedish accent. I pegged her as twenty-five or thereabouts.
She didn’t offer her hand or return my gaze. After a moment she repeated her question. “Where’s my book?”
I pulled the slipcase from my bag and handed it to her. Without a glance at me, she opened the slipcase and removed the book, letting the case fall to the floor with a dull crack. She stared at the book’s cover, opened it, and flipped the pages. Then she turned and threw it at me.
“What the fuck is this?”
I caught the book, confused. A volume somewhat larger than The Book of Lamps and Banners, with light green boards and the title stamped in gilt:
Youth
I opened to the title page—Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad—and swiftly turned to the table of contents:
Youth: A Narrative
Heart of Darkness
The End of the Tether
“Shit.” I handed Gryffin the volume. “They had a sense of humor, anyway.”
“Where’s my fucking book?”
Tindra snatched up the Conrad and smashed it on the edge of the Space Invaders game. Gryffin cringed as the book’s spine exploded. The air filled with white pages, like scores of moths, as Tindra turned to the twins.
“Check their bags.”
Lyla handed the dog’s leash back to Tindra, took Gryffin’s bag, and rifled through it. Tommy did the same to mine. He looked at Gryffin, then me. “Where’s her book?”
“I don’t know,” said Gryffin. “I delivered it to Harold, we were there, we saw him—”
Tindra cut him off. “I know what happened.”
She pulled out a mobile, held it up so we could see shaky time-stamped footage of the two of us exiting Harold’s house.
“Then you know it wasn’t us.” Gryffin sounded far more calm than he looked. “If you were actually watching us with that drone, you know we didn’t kill him.”
“I wasn’t watching. I was waiting. No one’s looked at anything.” Tindra turned to Lyla. “Kill him? What’s he saying? You didn’t…”
She began to scroll frantically at her mobile. Lyla looked at me. “What’re you on about?”
Gryffin groaned. Tindra’s dog whined softly.
“Who got killed?” Tindra suddenly sounded much younger. “Where’s Harold? He was supposed to call me.”
I said, “Harold’s dead. If your two friends here had been paying attention, they’d’ve known that.”
“Who else was there?” asked Tindra.
“No one. Just us,” Gryffin insisted.
“It was my book, I—”
“Your book?” Tindra turned to Lyla. “Who are these people?”
“I told you, we saw them leave his house.” Lyla’s voice cracked. “After you texted me. You said you hadn’t heard from your book bloke. I thought he’d scammed you, him and these two.”
Tindra raised a hand to silence her. The dog whined louder, tugging at its leash.
“Listen,” I said. “We didn’t kill him. You know that, you—”
Tindra gave a low whistle. The leash slithered to the floor, and the snarling dog was at my side. I froze.
“Bunny, down,” Tindra said without raising her voice.
The dog dropped as though tased. After several seconds it scrambled onto its haunches and I heard its low growl, like the hum of an old tube radio warming up.
“I’ll transfer your money back,” said Gryffin. “I don’t even know if it’s gone through, I haven’t—”
“I don’t want my money back,” she said. “I want my book.”
She walked up to Gryffin and jabbed him with her finger. “Who are you?”
“Gryffin Haselton. A bookdealer. The book belonged to me, I was selling it to Harold. He’s one of my oldest friends.”
Tindra glanced at me. “You his girlfriend?”
“No,” said Gryffin.
“We just met,” I said. “I’m a photographer. I never heard of this book until a few hours ago. He’s telling the truth, far as I know.”
Tindra shoved her mobile into a pocket, eyes half closed as though listening to music. The room fell silent, except for the air system and the dog’s panting. Finally Tindra spoke.
“I want someone to tell me what the fuck happened. You—” She pointed at Gryffin.
He recounted everything, from the two of us arriving at Harold’s house to discovering his body in the chair. He left out the part about us having sex in the liquor closet. When he finished, Tindra pointed at me.
“Do you have anything to add?”
“No.”
“You should call the police,” said Gryffin.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 6