The sky above was virtually pitch dark. The overhanging sycamores and the high banks formed by the gorge blocked out most of the starlight. Leandro began casting, the sound of his fly line swishing to and fro.
Then a glow began to appear in the sky. Dyer watched the nearly full moon climb free of the trees. Moonlight on the water, flash of phosphorescence on the line. The currents made shadows on the surface like the lattice in the confessional box in Nossa Senhora da Candelária. On these banks, he felt that he could tell Leandro how much he loved him, how he would protect him to the death
A small tug. Leandro had something. He reeled it in, too quickly, but still on the line, the rod tip bent and quivering, and Leandro shouting: ‘I’ve got one!’ – and then Dyer noticed a bow wave on the water. The moonlit surface dimpled with the flight of small frightened fish. There was a jarring pull and the rod straightened and the line went slack.
Dejected, Leandro reeled it in over the stones, a small severed parr trailing its spinal cord.
Dyer switched off his torch. ‘A salmon – or a chub, or maybe a wild brown trout …’ he said of whatever parasitic creature had lunged from the dark depths to bite the parr in half. ‘The favourite food of a big trout is a little one.’
But he knew what his son was feeling, and tried to console Leandro by telling of his own despondency after he lost a two-pound trout in the barn pool upstream. How he had brought it in and up over a rock face – ‘I can take you to that bank right now, thirty-five years on’ – and how the line snapped, and he watched the trout slide and judder back down the rock and into the river.
Leandro was not to be consoled.
In silence, they returned to the inn. The lights of the rooms swam weightless through the trees. From the copse above the front lawn came a hoot.
Dyer stopped. He cupped his hand and hooted back. He was never able to imitate a hare in distress, like his father, but once upon a time he could pass muster as an owl.
Soon afterwards, to Leandro’s unlooked-for delight, they heard an answering hoot from deep within the wood. Dyer repeated his call. The other responded, closer now.
Dyer walked, hooting, up the lawn until, with a sudden flutter of leaves, there appeared a large and furious-looking barn owl on a branch twenty yards off, quickly followed by the arrival of another two owls and a chick, all solemnly gazing down on this territorial impostor. At this point Dyer lost his puff and Leandro started giggling.
Not until late on Sunday afternoon did Leandro catch a fish.
He stood in the Hodder beneath the inn, trying for the spring salmon or slob trout that they had heard jumping there the night before.
After forty minutes, Leandro waded ashore, moving further along the bank to where a drainpipe fed into the river. He stood on the grass ledge above the pipe and gave a speculative cast. At once he felt an imperceptible bite.
Something trembled.
The line started to vibrate and slide.
‘Dad!’
‘Keep the tension on the line.’
It was emptying his reel.
‘Hold the rod up.’
He stood by his son’s side.
‘Now bring it in.’
Leandro’s fingers gripped the cork handle. With his left hand, he began turning the reel. On his face, the involuntary expression a child makes when playing the cello.
‘That’s it.’
With tremendous concentration, Leandro wound it in.
Dyer, stumbling over a submerged tree trunk, crouched forward, extending the net. He scooped it over the tail, lifted it sharply up.
‘Got him!’
Not a salmon, but a wild brown trout. And a big one.
Straightening, Dyer stepped out of the water, placed the net on the ground, and reached into it. His fingers undercupped the fish, holding it in his palms as he had held Leandro. Bits of grass and water lily and the smell of protective mucus.
He laid it upside down on the bank to remove the fly. The trout seemed to have grown in the net. It was even larger than he had first thought – about three or four pounds, with a lovely gold belly.
Leandro leaned over. Dyer put an arm around his shoulder and hugged him, wishing that Leandro’s grandfather could have seen this moment. ‘That’s a good fish. You could go your whole life without catching a fish like that.’ He had no idea what he was saying, his voice came from another level of sound. He felt an exultation, for himself, for his eleven-year-old son. ‘I bet if we slit open its belly, you’ll find the rest of your parr inside.’
The expression on Leandro’s face, he doesn’t know whether to smile or burst into tears.
‘What should I do with it?’ he asks in a sheared voice. In Portuguese. His first fish.
‘You can take it back – have it for breakfast, if you like.’
‘What would you do?’
‘What would I do?’ Dyer remembered his father saying, without quite understanding at the time: ‘The first best fishing experience is catching a fish. The second best is letting a fish go free.’ He went on looking at the trout. It was spotted like a leopard, with its gold belly and fins. On the towpath he sometimes stopped and talked to the tench fishermen. Once he had wanted to catch anything. Then he had wanted to catch only the biggest. Now he was like his father. He wanted to release everything, as a proxy, perhaps, for himself.
He said after a pause, ‘What I’d do now is not what I’d have done at your age.’
In rapturous silence, Leandro picked the fish up with both hands, a flashing blade drawn out of the stone. He caressed it, and for a moment Dyer was convinced that his son would opt to keep the trout, but all at once Leandro turned and bent down to the water.
There’s a righting of the tail, a shiver and a kick, and then it flicks off over the stones into the river.
Down the river. A spladoosh! The salmon kelt, or whatever it was, still out there.
Chapter Thirty-two
DARKNESS WAS FALLING AS THEY returned to the inn. Across the river a car’s headlights swept over the trees, painting the topmost branches orange, dipped, and switched off.
Leandro walked beside him, excited to relive the last hour. Catching the trout, letting it go. It was up there with his goal against Horris Hill, suspending all talk of a dog.
A large silver Mercedes was parked on the lawn. They stepped around it, into the lobby, and propped up their rods behind the big oak front door. While Leandro raced upstairs to have a bath, Dyer paused in the hallway to look at the newspapers.
The word Iran was repeated in all the headlines. Haunted as he was by that subject, Dyer took a copy of The Times into the bar. He was about to order a drink when he heard a familiar laugh.
Elongated head, slate-grey hair, jutting jaw. He sat on a stool, dressed in a bottle-green polo-neck, talking to the bearded man.
Dyer hesitated – should he retreat? – when the eyes of ‘our resident predator’, as he remembered Miranda calling him, swivelled in his direction.
‘Jean Dyer.’
‘Gilles Asselin.’
How had Gilles found him? Only Paula knew his whereabouts.
Any pleasure that Dyer had been feeling was numbed by a premonition this was no fluke.
Gilles released himself from the embrace that he had initiated. ‘Craig here has been telling me how to catch hen harriers with a night-vision camera …’
‘You’d better watch out for the RSPB,’ Dyer warned. ‘They’re a powerful lobby.’ He drew up a stool. ‘Silvi and Pierre?’
‘In Oxford.’
‘What brings you to Browsholme – aside from raptor politics?’
Gilles fluttered his fingers as if touching ice. ‘Business interests.’
‘I tried to ring you.’
‘Silvi said. I’ve been away.’
‘You’ve been gone a while.’
‘I have a little problem. Bit of an issue. Hey, what are you drinking?’
Dyer felt at once self-conscious. ‘I was going to order a ginge
r-beer shandy.’
Gilles nodded to the barman, who snapped to attention with a servility not previously on display. Reflectively, Gilles watched him pour the spicy ginger beer slowly into the bitter. ‘You know, I’ve never tasted one of those.’
‘It’s what I drank last time.’
He looked at Dyer. ‘You’ve been to this hotel before?’
‘My father used to bring me here.’
Gilles said to the barman: ‘Make that two.’ Then, after paying for the drinks, and leaving his malt whisky on the counter unfinished, he sprang to his feet straight to his full height: ‘Why don’t we go through there, it’s warmer.’
They stepped up into a side room hung with framed photographs of the local cricket team taken in the 1950s. A fire burning, tables laid for dinner.
Settled in at a small corner table, Gilles did not pick up where they had left off.
‘You were lucky to get a room. Craig said they were booked for a wedding.’
‘Then he’ll have told you the bride’s aunt died on the ferry over from Ireland, and so it was decided to cancel the party, but to go ahead with a small ceremony.’
Gilles nodded. He would like to have stayed here tonight if he wasn’t taking Pierre next morning to a football match. ‘I must say,’ giving an approving look around, ‘this is a magical place to invite someone special. I must bring Silvi,’ his smiling gaze coming to rest on Dyer. ‘And you. Comment va ta petite amour?’
‘With who?’
Dyer sensed a predatory swirl on the surface.
‘Come on, Jean. You needn’t be shy with me. Let’s start with Miranda, pourquoi pas?’
Dyer’s laugh is that of a man who has thought of something else while he is removing the fly from a wild brown trout. ‘I haven’t set eyes on Miranda since your dinner party.’
‘I’m disappointed. That’s too bad.’
‘Though I did send her a list of books.’ Silvi would have told him this anyway.
‘Tiens, is that all?’ Gilles shook his head. ‘You should ask her out. I said to Silvi she was your type. I can see you two getting on. She’s not so, so …’ flicking his fingers.
‘Not so what?’
‘Russian,’ said Gilles, with an unexplained chuckle.
Clever Gilles. But Dyer had to be cleverer.
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘I don’t imagine she is.’
Is that all? Did Gilles know about the package? Dyer pushed back the thought. Gilles was doing what he did instinctively. He was no different from your average witch-doctor, making you believe that he knew everything about you.
Gilles looked at him carnivorously. ‘In Russia, they say if someone smiles, they are either stupid or telling lies.’
‘I’ve not been to Russia.’
They were circling each other.
One evening, Dyer’s father had played a game in which he studied the faces at the bar and imagined if they’d been fish to what species they belonged. Up until this moment, the playing fields of North Oxford had served to camouflage Gilles. A gagged voice somewhere in Dyer had kept trying to tell him: Never trust a grown man who shows pictures of himself on a podium. Yet Pierre’s father for the most part had blended in successfully with the other touchline dads; he was merely one of a shoal of undifferentiated scavengers.
Now in this river valley, Gilles Asselin had swum into view: he had the sharpened head and coiled aggression of Esox lucius. His type was durable, with jaws developed in the Cretacean period. Like the northern pike, he had survived a score of Ice Ages, travelling up becks and streams, from Oxford to Moscow, across the Himalayas to Beijing, and over the oceans to New York and Montreal.
He was looking at Dyer with his pikey eyes. ‘You know, Jean, I wouldn’t go too near the Russians right now.’
Dyer said evenly: ‘Who would you go near – aside from Estonians, naturally?’
Gilles took a sip of shandy and, without commenting on it, put down his glass. ‘Being French-Canadian, the Americans maybe.’
‘What, like Bonnie Cubbage?’
‘Dear Bonnie.’
‘I’m not overly keen on evangelists.’
‘That rules out an Arab then.’
‘An Israeli, too, probably.’
‘Pity. They’re so attractive, straight-backed. All that military service. How about a Persian?’ and kicked his feet together, waiting for Dyer’s reply.
‘What, like Scheherazade?’
‘Peut-être. Peut-être.’ A merciless look had come into his eyes. ‘Or Shula Marvar.’
‘By the way,’ said Dyer undaunted, ‘it was her husband I was ringing you about. I may have been the last person to see him.’
‘Not quite.’
Dyer glanced at Gilles.
‘Silvi didn’t tell you? Someone else saw Marvar after you.’
‘Who was that?’
Gilles picked up a ceramic salt cellar from the table and toyed with it. ‘Moi.’
His morning jog on that Sunday had taken him past the Phoenix. He noticed Marvar sitting by the edge of the sandpit, holding a book. ‘He was wearing a suit, like he might have been going to the service in Hall.’ At the sight of Gilles, Marvar scrambled to his feet and gave a reluctant wave.
Gilles couldn’t say if this had any connection with Marvar’s unannounced arrival, three hours later, at the Asselins’ house. Gilles was not at home, he had stepped out to the Covered Market to buy cheese. Marvar, as Dyer was bound to know, had turned up – unexpectedly early – to collect Samir. ‘He seems to have been in a mighty haste to get to wherever he was going.’
‘What do you think has happened to him?’
Gilles replaced the salt cellar. He stretched out his right hand, and one by one bent back the fingers. ‘The truth is, I don’t have any more idea than you. But I would like to find out. Believe me, Jean, I would like to find out.’
He was not going to insult Dyer by beating around the bush. Friends in the intelligence community, whose investments he looked after, had alerted Gilles to the possibility that Marvar had in his possession information that could benefit Gilles – benefit them all, if Marvar was alive.
‘Business respects no borders, any more than GCHQ.’
The irresistible rumour swirling through safe rooms from Millbank to Riyadh: an unknown young Iranian physicist at the Clarendon had conducted an experiment which stood to recast the future of energy.
‘The dinner party you came to with Miranda. Remember Ralph Cubbage? Well, after you had gone he stayed on, I naturally assumed for my fine old Cuban rum, but no, it was to tell me a story that I found most interesting. I would be curious, Jean, to know if you think it as interesting as I do.’
The incident which Cubbage described had taken place on the day of the Asselins’ dinner party, early in the morning. ‘He couldn’t get it out of his mind,’ Gilles said.
As was his energetic habit, Cubbage had arrived first thing at the Clarendon. He unlocked the door into the laboratory, and immediately was on the alert. ‘It was obvious to his vigilant eyes that someone had carried out an experiment, and left in a hurry.’
Strange particles of sand in the target chamber. A single loose zirconium sample – tiny, white – staring up from the concrete floor.
‘Even as Ralph retrieves the sample, his suspicion is falling on which one of the eight has dropped it. The night before, Professor Whitton had treated the team to dinner at the Magdalen Arms, but the student from Tehran had excused himself.
‘Ralph logs in to the cameras, and sees that they were last operated at 7.32 the previous evening. The details are important.
‘But here’s the intriguing thing. The experimental data has been removed from both.
‘He is suspicious. He switches on the new neutron activation detector, installed at considerable expense only in January, thanks to a last-minute donation from Berkeley. Ralph had set the biometric access code himself, shortly after his arrival here – he has not a big amount of faith in the Clarendon’s secur
ity, he tells me.
‘The results are so strange that he examines the system logs. They show a denied attempt to delete files. The unauthorised user did not possess the administrator privilege to do this.
‘I think we can picture the intruder’s face. Unshaven, panicked – pushing buttons, keys, frenetic to cover up records of his test. Ray’s first thought: “He’s jammed the motherboard – that’s why he took off.” But sorry, it’s not jammed.
‘Ralph takes a longer look at the display panel, the number on it, and his anger is mingled now with a confusion énorme. Because whichever way he tries to explain it, the explanation is the same, and it has preoccupied him ever since.
‘The number gives the count of the radioactive decay, but what the count suggests is impossible, it doesn’t make sense. It does not make sense. “Unless,” Ralph tells me, “the oaf has revised the laws of physics.”’
‘I have only Ralph’s word,’ said Gilles austerely, ‘but I trust him. If it is true what I suspect Ralph is beginning to think, then it would at once render obsolete a number of things in this room – that lamp, that fire, that radiator … and not only in this room.
‘Speaking commercially – my native tongue, you told me once,’ he was counting again on his fingers, ‘it could be worth more than Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple put together and multiplied by at least a million.’
Gilles had spent the past days urgently trying to get hold of Marvar. First, to ascertain if the story of his experiment was true; second, if it was, to offer him a proposal concerning the development of his invention. But despite all his efforts, Gilles had not managed to find him.
‘What is Marvar supposed to have invented?’
Gilles’s laugh floated back. ‘Ah, Jean, ever the curious innocent. The most dangerous challenge to the ambitious businessman is an honest man. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to you. It seems to exist at this moment only in the form of information. But information, from what I understand – pour faire une histoire courte – which could allow its owner to repeat the experiment again and again, and make them rich and powerful. No, no, let me rephrase that. The richest and most powerful person you can imagine.’
The Sandpit Page 22