He repeated his question about the wall.
“It was before my time,” said Glenmore.
“When did you start working for the firm?”
“Nineteen ninety.”
Which didn’t help Parker much.
“I think there used to be more buildings adjoining this one, but they were damaged in the war,” said Glenmore. “When I came here, the outer wall had holes in it, and was starting to crumble. Ms. Lockwood’s father ordered the restoration, and the holes were made into windows. Mr. Lockwood is dead now.”
“And what lies behind the inner wall?”
“The old rooms, I suppose, but there is no way to get to them.” He pointed to the steel door. “This is the only way to enter or leave.”
“You’re sure?”
“No other doors, and no proper windows.”
“I notice you wear hearing aids,” said Parker. Ordinarily, he would have avoided mentioning it, but it was important.
“Yes.”
“How well do you hear with them?”
“I hear okay.”
Glenmore sounded defensive, and Parker didn’t blame him.
“If sounds came from behind those walls, would you notice?”
Glenmore glanced at the external structures of the old offices, as if to check that they had not undergone some alteration since last he looked.
“No,” he said, “but what might make a sound in there, except rats?”
CHAPTER CXV
On the screen of his laptop, using the live feed from the security camera on the outer wall, Quayle monitored Parker’s movements. He had lost sight of the two men once they entered the building, but could hear them speaking via the two tiny microphones embedded in the mortar. Even had the microphones not been available to him, Quayle would have been aware of the proximity of others: the walls, though thick, did not entirely block out sound at such close quarters.
Which was why Quayle was keeping very still, because Parker was listening for him.
How persistent this man was, how unyielding: to have come so far in pursuit, and now to be so near. Parker suspected these walls hid something, and thought it might even be Quayle himself. Had he been permitted, the investigator might well have taken a sledgehammer to the bricks until he forced his way through.
Quayle breathed deeply of the air in his covert. The ventilation was, of necessity, modest—most of it came from gaps between the walls and roof, along with a series of small, discreet vents—and so the atmosphere remained consistently musty. It smelled of old food, the aging of paper, and a generic slow decay that might, in large part, have been a product of Quayle’s own decline, the olfactory evidence of his half-life. He had been here for so long, but soon he would be gone. If Parker or some other agent did eventually manage to breach the walls, they would find only a furnished mausoleum without its occupant, a tomb without a pharaoh.
Quayle stroked the head of the man seated next to him in an oak chair, a piece of furniture so massive that its feet had remained in permanent contact with the floor since the moment of its delivery, it being easier to push than attempt to lift. The man’s arms and legs were restrained. Heavy tape around his neck and forehead secured his head to the back of the chair, and kept his mouth sealed shut.
Bob Johnston could hear Parker. He was potentially as close to rescue as Quayle was to capture; a single incautious noise, and Parker might have detected their presence. But Quayle was not about to give himself away, and Johnston was incapable of doing so.
Johnston had been lifted from the western side of Gordon Square Garden as he made his way to the British Library. Even in a city as large as London, it was surprising how easily one could find oneself isolated and vulnerable. Johnston had learned this to his cost, although even had anyone witnessed his abduction, it might not have registered as untoward: a man walking; a woman with silver hair approaching from behind; a tap on the shoulder; an embrace, albeit one in which the man is a surprised, even reluctant, participant; a car pulling up alongside; the woman aiding the man in entering it so that he does not stumble, because he is the older party, and slightly unsteady on his feet, even if he had seemed fine just moments before.
Johnston had experienced the journey as though in a dream state. The initial sting of the needle had given way to heaviness in his eyelids and limbs. He had not lost consciousness, but could remember only fragments. He recalled the car drawing to a halt, and his being placed in a wheelchair, a blanket over his knees, before being pushed across cobblestones. He remembered entering an old building, and being yanked to his feet. There was a low, narrow tunnel, and people on either side of him, a man and a woman. His toes dragged along the dusty floor as he was carried along, and the lights his captors wore on their heads bobbed so that the very shadows appeared alive. The woman smelled bad, like death itself, and even though he had never met her before, he knew her for who she was: Mors.
Then stairs, and old rooms, comfortably furnished.
And Quayle.
Two fingers on Johnston’s left hand had been crushed with pliers, the knuckles expertly broken on each, and he was deaf in one ear where Mors had punctured his eardrum with an awl. All this damage had been inflicted upon him before he was even asked a question. Whether it was done as punishment for his temerity in joining the hunt, a taster of what would follow should he endeavor to remain silent, or out of pure sadism, Johnston could not have said, but he believed it might have been some combination of all three. Only when the gag of balled cloth was removed from his mouth did the interrogation begin in earnest, Mors standing over him, the awl poised above his right eye, the point half an inch from the pupil, while Quayle asked the questions. Johnston answered them, with no effort at dissembling. Like all those who love books and reading, he had a particular dread of blindness. It did not matter that the threat, even the likelihood, of death hung over him. Perhaps foolishly, Johnston held on to the hope that he might yet be rescued, but even were it not to be, he did not want to be sightless at the end.
Finally, Mors had departed, leaving only Quayle and the other man. Quayle used his name in addressing him: Sellars. Johnston now knew that Louis and Angel had been correct, and Christopher Sellars was the channel between Quayle and the late Cornelie Gruner.
Sellars had lurched toward the screen when Parker first appeared, his hatred so potent that it altered the musk of him. And when he could not reach Parker, he found another outlet for his rage: he slid a finger into Johnston’s ruptured ear, and probed at the ruined drum until Johnston thought he would pass out from the pain.
The throbbing in Johnston’s left hand was relentless, but it was as nothing compared to the agony of the damage to his ear, now compounded by Sellars’s cruelty. It was as though the awl were still present, pushing deeper and deeper into his brain. One side of his head felt heavier than the other; were it not for the tape holding it in place, he was certain he would have been unable to hold it erect.
He could still hear Parker’s voice. Once again, he tried to scream, but it was to no avail. Quayle took in his distress with interest, until finally the sounds of conversation from the other side of the wall grew fainter, and Parker and the custodian appeared once more on the screen, talking together in the courtyard, their words beyond the power of the microphones to pick up.
Johnston cried, and Quayle used a thumb to wipe away his tears.
CHAPTER CXVI
The security guard had dispensed with his phone, but paid Parker and Glenmore no heed as they approached, his attention now focused on a sparrow pecking at crumbs on the table. The bird was so familiar with its surroundings, and the humans that passed through them, as to be nearly tame. It bobbed within inches of the man’s right hand, which shot out with a speed that surprised Parker, catching the bird. Parker could see its head peeping from the hollow of the fist. The man slipped his thumb beneath the sparrow’s beak, and with a flick of his nail broke its neck. Glenmore’s expression was unreadable as he watched the tiny body be
ing cast into a flower bed.
“A woman used to come here,” he said to Parker. “I had not seen her in many months, but she returned two days ago.”
“What was she like?”
“All white outside—her hair, her skin, even her eyes—and all dead inside.”
Mors.
“What was she doing?”
He shrugged. “Checking.”
“Checking what?”
“This place.” He tapped one of the old bricks. “Maybe you.”
“Does she have a name?”
“She uses many names. They think I don’t hear at all, but I hear more than they know, and I got no troubles with my eyesight.”
“What names?”
“Sorrell, Cobbold, Dyson, North. And I have seen her, away from here.”
“Where?”
“Smithfield. St. Bart’s.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It is a church, very old. My home is near Smithfield meat market. She smells of it, I think—of bad meat.”
“You think she lives nearby?”
Glenmore nodded.
“By the church. Maybe even under the church.”
“Under the church?”
Glenmore made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“Could be I’m joking,” he said. “Could be. But you look up those names, and could be I’m not. If we’re done, I ought to get back to work.”
Parker thanked him, but Glenmore was already walking away, and so Parker did not know if he heard. The guard stood as Parker approached.
“Why did you kill that bird?” said Parker.
“What bird?” the guard answered.
Parker perceived no trace of dissimulation in his face. Some men were so lost, even to themselves, that cruelty became normative, no longer worthy of even the dullest firing of their synapses, and passed without record from the annals of their existence; and when at last their damnation was confirmed to them, they would register only blankness at the judgment, and confusion as they burned.
Parker looked up at the windows of the LDF building. Emily Lockwood stared down at him, and then was gone.
“Never mind,” said Parker. “I’m ready to leave.”
CHAPTER CXVII
Glenmore sat at his table in the dimness of the Old Firm. Usually, he turned the radio up loud for company—he could still discern rhythms, and found comfort in those of music—but not now, not today.
His hands were trembling, and he felt sick to his soul.
The steel door opened wider, and a figure appeared in the gap. It was only the second time that he had ever been alone in Emily Lockwood’s presence, beyond the occasional passing encounter in a corridor or the plaza. The first was the previous day, when she had reminded him of how precarious was his family’s position in this country. The government was cracking down on immigrants, she reminded him. He had come to Britain as a boy, had he not, brought from Jamaica by his father and mother? They must be very old by now. It would be unfortunate if their right to live in Britain were to be questioned. If they were unable to prove continuous residency, they could lose their benefits, and their entitlement to health care. They might even be deported. It was happening all around, every day.
And what about his job? The building sourced janitorial staff from an outside agency, so some might have viewed Glenmore as surplus to requirements. Because of the confidential nature of much of LDF’s business, the partners preferred that it should employ its own custodian with access to otherwise restricted areas, but Lockwood was under pressure to make savings. She would do everything she could to safeguard his position, but…
“All went well?” said Lockwood.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you told him exactly what I instructed you to say?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And not all of it was even a lie. He did live by the market, and had seen in his neighborhood the woman who went by many names—but only once, the night before, when she came to stand under the streetlight by his flat, so that he might perceive her more clearly and know she was there, if not yet the reason for her presence. He had somehow found the courage to go down to the street, although he could not have said why, beyond some vague notion that this woman wished to communicate a message to him. But the woman was gone, and if she had left any tidings, they took the form only of the threat she represented, and the smell of dead things that she left behind.
“Why don’t you go home early today? You’ve worked hard.” Emily Lockwood took a step closer, to be certain that he could see the expression on her face, and understand the import of what she said next. “Spend some time with your family.”
He stared at the table. When he looked up again, she was gone. Glenmore walked to the entrance, checked that the courtyard was empty, and closed the door. It had no internal lock, but lodged firmly in the frame when shut, and only he had the knack of opening it easily. He adjusted the volume on his hearing aids so it was at its highest level before climbing the stairs that led to nowhere, and so familiar was he with them that they made no sound as he ascended.
In the beginning, Glenmore had attributed to rodents the occasional noises from the other side of the wall, just as he had told the American, but the movement of rats did not sound like footsteps, nor did rats listen to music late at night, or engage in conversations in the voices of a man and a woman, one who sounded very much like Ms. Sorrell, or Cobbold, or whatever she chose to call herself when she crawled from whatever hollow she inhabited, as lightless a dwelling as the sealed rooms behind the walls.
But it was none of Glenmore’s business, and he had long ago elected not to mention it to his employers, and Ms. Lockwood in particular, in large part because he was no “foofool,” the word his mother still used to describe a stupid person in the patois of her homeland. Either Ms. Lockwood did not know of a presence in the Old Firm, in which case she, too, was a foofool; or she did know, and maybe others did, too, so no good could come from revealing to them that he had become aware of signs of habitation in a supposedly dead place. Glenmore had been hired because they believed him to be almost entirely deaf, which he was, but with an ear pressed to the wall, and his hearing aids turned up full, he could hear a little.
He could hear enough.
Now he listened, but all was quiet.
The pale woman frightened him. It was not just spoiled meat of which she reeked—or if it was, it was not a consequence of any proximity to a butcher’s market, but from the ongoing festering of her own innards. A “duppy,” his mother would have called her: a bad spirit inhabiting a body that was rotting from the infestation. But with whom would a duppy speak, except the devil himself?
Glenmore gathered his belongings and departed, yet he did not go straight home. Instead he crossed to Lincoln’s Inn, and took a seat by the kitchen at Old Buildings, the odors of the day’s lunch offerings persisting in the warm air. He had glimpsed the duppy here, too, entering the chambers from Old Square when all was quiet, believing herself unobserved. Old Buildings was aptly named: some of its structures dated from early in the sixteenth century, and it had survived the Blitz intact, like most of Lincoln’s Inn. Glenmore had been told by one of the junior clerks at Old Buildings that cellars ran beneath it, some used for storage, others cut off by centuries of renovation and collapses.
“But anyone who knows the full extent of them is long dead,” the clerk had said. “Long, long dead.”
Yet from the top of Old Buildings, Glenmore knew, one could see the offices of LDF, and the Old Firm standing between. Whatever moved through the Old Firm had to leave sometime, and the duppy had to be able to gain access to commune with her devil. Somewhere under Old Buildings, there existed a tunnel.
Glenmore had been raised in the Church of God, and each Sunday he traveled north with his family to the Community Church of God in Tottenham, there to listen to the words of the pastor. Glenmore had been baptized by total immersion, adhered to the ordinances of
foot washing and communion, and believed that the moral image of God was revealed in the actions of good men.
Glenmore knew that Ms. Lockwood wanted Parker to go to St. Bart’s, wanted him to look for the duppy, but Glenmore did not believe he would have to look hard, because the duppy, or some familiar dispatched at her behest, would be waiting for him.
Yet Glenmore had a wife, two grown-up children, and two aged parents, all of whom lived with him in a three-bedroom council flat that would still have been too small with half as many occupants. He had built a life in this country, and now some of those in the British government, men and women who had never worked as hard as he, who had never cleaned another man’s excrement from a bowl or been called “nigger” or “wog,” wanted to deprive him of it, and return him to a land that was his in name only. Ms. Lockwood had promised to protect him, just as long as he did as he was told, and said what she wanted him to say.
And just in case he was tempted to falter, and ignore her wishes, there was the duppy, who had shone like unsheathed steel beneath the streetlight outside his flat, and stank of dying, to remind him that losing one’s livelihood and losing one’s life were not the same thing.
People suffered all the time, and died badly. Many called on God to save them at the end, but if God heard their pleas, He chose not to answer. Maybe the pastor was wrong. Maybe God was imperfect, and men, by acting in their own interests, were reflecting only the reality of His nature.
Glenmore was old, and had married later in life than he might have wished. He did not always understand his children, or his wife, even when he could hear what they were saying. (And the truth was that he sometimes turned off his hearing aids just so he could not.) His bones hurt, and he had not visited a doctor in years for fear of what he might learn. If the duppy came, he would not be able to protect his family from her.
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