32
The man spoke in a friendly but professional way. His round face bobbed in agreement when she in turn spoke, but his eyes remained constant upon her. Throughout their conversation, he sought a comfortable way to sit on the little stool, and with each shift in weight, some curls of hair would emerge from the open neck of his shirt. She had the advantage of a seat on the bench that ran along the pub’s wall, under the window, where the lamp light from the alley beyond twisted in the bottle-bottom glass. Yet she also shifted perpetually and, with each new position, she pulled the hem of her oatmeal knitted skirt over her black-stockinged legs.
The conversation was entirely audible, but completely incomprehensible. A looping, almost familiar language, interspersed with guttural rasps. Occasionally, recognisable words would drop from their sentences: ‘payroll’, ‘human resources’; ‘profit forecast’. With each English addition, the hidden conversation became less alluring. Not a lovers’ tryst then, nor a tale of adventure, but a discussion of offices and work, of bloodless commerce. And yet the throaty depths of the woman’s voice, crunching like snow then swooping like a raven, captivated Fergus. As the all-too comfortable embrace of impending inebriation rose slowly from the nape of his neck and cradled his skull, he had drifted from the conversation at his own table. Will had begun to explain the 1996 Act and its implications for the treatment of treasure in England and Wales. At first, Fergus had simply moved his attention from his beer to the beams above, festooned with china jugs from a hundred different places and times, and then to the carpet, tracing its pattern through red and green and gold curlicues.
But when Will had moved on to discuss the differences between English and Scottish common law, he had capitulated to his fascination with the conversation at the next table. The sound it made was infinitely more appealing than hearing that there was possibly something that could be done within the law, but that it would probably take years. There had been a case in the fifties of a carved porpoise bone found on some Scottish island; eventually, at appeal, it was declared treasure trove. But that had taken five years and, while there was precedent, the fact that the stone had crossed legally into England would complicate matters.
Fergus had wanted to bury his head in his hands and wail, but he knew Will was trying to be helpful. It was clear, however, that recovering the stone legally would take years, if it were possible at all. And Fingal did not have years: the law, therefore, could not help. And so Fergus took temporary solace in the meaninglessness of the couple’s looping sentences twisting over the babble of voices that rose and fell, clashed and collapsed and rose again, like the cries of gulls on a spring tide.
‘I’m sorry, Fergus. But it is worth pursuing – the St Ninian case is encouraging, isn’t it?’
Will had already left for the bar, leaving Jacob with the disconsolate, distracted Fergus. The kindness in Jacob’s voice drew him back.
He wanted to say that it was not encouraging, that St Ninian was a world away from Hinba and that the stone was not some fish bone, but he was interrupted by the in-rushing chill of night air that presaged the arrival of Matt.
‘It’s cold out there. The sky’s like a slab. Anyhow, what have I missed? Has your barrister solved the case?’
Matt indicated Will at the bar, and winked to Fergus.
‘Didn’t think you were coming?’
‘Well, Jake, I was in the neighbourhood. Sort of. Anyhow, I know where he lives, if anyone’s interested. Just over there.’
He looked directly at Fergus as he said this, boyish excitement twitching about his mouth, and he pointed over the shoulder of the Dutch woman, out into the city.
‘Are you sure? I mean, isn’t he off grid?’
Jacob’s calm, dismissive tone betrayed a hint of fear, concern that after he had done so much to re-establish sanity, Matt might just have found a chink through which to re-admit the madness.
‘I just followed him.’
With breathless appreciation for his own ingenuity, Matt described his frenetic chase across London, he on his bike, Maltravers in the taxi that had picked him up from Half Moon Street. He barely paused when Will returned from the bar with three pints, and only briefly when he returned a second time with a fourth, to drink deeply for an instant before ploughing on with his tale, until it reached the gates of Maltravers’ London home. While Matt drained the rest of his beer, even Jacob hung entranced, demanding him to go on, to reveal the location of their quarry. Matt looked over the rim of his pint, eyes twinkling; but when he next spoke, Jacob raised his hands in exasperation. Fergus did not know where the Barbican was, but he gathered it was a rather imprecise location.
‘No, no – I know the exact address, actually. The cab dropped him at Lauderdale Tower, I watched him go in and call a lift. He hit the button for the top floor.’
‘Great, so we know which floor he lives on. What do you propose? Breaking in to all the flats on that floor?’
Will recoiled. He looked from Matt to his friend, and back again, suddenly aware that he might be involved in something more than a theoretical discussion of the law and ancient artefacts. Even the Dutch couple at the next table looked over, hopeful for further intrigue.
‘Hush now, Jake. No-one is talking about breaking in to anywhere, just that we know his address now. I called the concierge and asked if he could confirm that Mr Maltravers lived in number 412, as I needed to get something couriered to him. Good job I checked, because he’s in 411. So now we can send him a Christmas card. Or a writ.’
Pleased with himself once again, Matt winked at the Dutch couple. Disappointed and a little uncomfortable to have been discovered in their eavesdropping, they looked back to their drinks and resumed their own conversation. Fergus rose and offered another round. Will declined, happy to at last be able to escape. He extended his hand to Fergus, and wished him luck, before giving a bloodless hug to Jacob; to Matt, he offered only a nod. And then he was gone, back out into the alley and the cold.
33
All around is pitch blackness, a darkness so deep that it swallows the room and every living thing that could possibly exist. You wonder how something, anything, could ever be so dark and you strain your ears, your useless eyes, for any trace of your friend. Even a whispered memory of his name. But it and he are swallowed too, lost in this endless pitch. You wonder whether, instead of a room, you are in a coffin, buried in the deadening ground. Your friend, lost along with his name, his face, are absent in the world above, where life is still lived.
But you can reach out your arms and touch nothing. You can feel the pull of gravity where your feet push into the floor. The dead stillness that encases you is a room, and you are standing in it. That much is true, even if you can be sure of nothing else. That truth, and the truth that you are alone. Until the yelp. A strangled yelp that struggles across the room. A human yelp and then the soft noise of something heavy, limp, slumping to the floor. You are not alone.
You call out, hoping that your friend will answer, but there is no reply. Just a dragging shuffle that moves towards you.
You feel the cold metal of a pistol in your hand. You do not know how you came to be holding a pistol, but in your gratitude you forget to ask. Instead, you hold its weight out in front of you and you fire, thoughtlessly, in the direction from which the shuffle approaches. In the flash of combustion, you see a beast, bloodied, coming towards you, its fangs curled upwards in its wide-mouthed grimace. You fire again and again, each time seeing more of the thing, until your indiscriminate firing finally finds its mark and the monster drops to the floor.
There is only silence and darkness for a time, and the sticky smell of decay. You edge around the room, feeling the walls until you reach a door frame, then a door knob, with which you wrestle, vainly. Breathless, heavy, you slide down the door with your back until you are sitting on your haunches, sobbing. All hope of finding your way back into daylight is gone. Time passes, slowly or quickly, you cannot tell, but ultimately and with a heavy
clunk, a bright light bursts into the darkness.
In its ferocity, you are blinded still, blank blackness replaced by painful, featureless white. Slowly shapes form and, once your eyes have adjusted, have stopped hurting, you look around, anxious at what you might see. But there is no beast, dead or living, on the floor. And instead of a subterranean cell, you find yourself in a high tower, the surrounding sea visible through the narrow windows. The moonlight dapples its surface.
The lights hum and buzz, fizzing on the close air. Across the room, a door handle turns and the door swings inwards. As the first foot of the visitor appears from behind it, the buzzing from the lights gains intensity, becomes deafening, overwhelming, and the walls, and doors, the unseen man, all fall away, crashing towards the sea.
34
Finally it arrived. The city had been waiting for a day or two, anxious and excited, ever since the weather man had announced that snow was coming. Snow. In April. It was unheard of, in London at least. Growing up in Lancashire, Ruby had seen snow fall at pretty much any time of year. But not down here.
At first, it was simply a light dusting on the empty pavement outside, like icing sugar on a tray bake. But then it had thickened and darkened until greyness filled the spaces between the falling flakes and the sky closed in around the houses, pushing down on the city, leaden. Ruby stared out of the window, her breathing laboured under an ancient fear. As the street disappeared under an immaculate cloak, she decided that today was a day for indoors.
When she had first arrived in the city, it almost never snowed in London. Not really snowed. Sometimes there would be a bit of a scattering in the morning, but it was almost always gone by lunchtime. Older students, who’d been here a while longer, confirmed the scarcity of snow. But then, over the past couple of years, snow had become an annual feature, then a biannual feature. And this was snow in a northern sense, a close-down-the-city-for-days kind of snow. A snowmen-in-the-park, icy streets kind of snow. A shut-the-schools, cancel-the-trains-and-buses snow that came twice a year, once before Christmas, once in the New Year. Almost regular, certainly expected. It was the new normal.
But not this. Not snow in April. This was still abnormal, unnatural. She didn’t understand the science entirely, but Ruby knew that this was one of those freak weather events, a result of global warming. Climate change. Ruby was struck by the power of language, by the smooth elision of ‘global warming’ into ‘climate change’, which had happened about the same time that it became apparent that the effects of steadily rising global temperatures would be snow and storms and floods, not the drought and forest fires she might have presumed. Here at least. In Spain and in Australia of course, droughts and forest fires were exactly what they were getting. But in Britain, and in the city, it was snow. In April.
She had been standing, staring from her bedroom window, for maybe forty minutes before she heard the buzzing of the alarm in the living room. Fergus let it run longer than usual; it had been a late night for the boys and Matt had even left his bike in town rather than risk it in the gathering snow and the fuzzy haze of alcohol. She had stayed up until they returned and had taken them to task for putting Fergus in such a state before herself heading to bed, leaving the men to wrestle with toast and water glasses. She thought back to their faces the night before: Fergus had been a mess. A cup of tea was the very least he would need.
Padding through the living room to the kitchen, her greeting received only a grunt in return. Fergus was otherwise lifeless, forearm draped over his eyes while his other hand brushed the carpet. She looked at the outstretched arm, admired its lean solidity, the lines of muscle and sinew that stretched under his milky soft skin. Her mouth curled to a bud as she recognised her voyeurism and, wary of discovery, she slipped into the kitchen.
Bridget was already late, but was unwilling to leave the half-finished cup of tea cradled in her hands. Even though she spent most of her waking life in her work clothes, they always made her look like someone else: still her, but her in a parallel universe, where dance music had never happened and mothers always did the responsible thing. Only the three small stars tattooed on her left wrist reassured Ruby that she had not woken into a dream.
‘Please, Ruby, can we have the heating back on? It’s fucking snowing. It’s bad enough that I’ve got to go out in the filthy stuff, without having to freeze my nuts off when I’m having a cup of tea.’
She breathed out a tiny laugh and crossed to the boiler, flipping a switch that made the white box stutter into a roar. It was strange that, even though anyone in the house could turn on the heating at any time, they always asked for her permission, left her to operate the machine. With water heating in the radiators, Ruby turned her attention to the kettle, to assembling mugs, teabags and milk in readiness. Absently she asked about what the day had in store for Bridget.
‘Nothing special. I think we’ve got some interviews to sort out, and otherwise… Oh, I think we’re going to advertise for a communications assistant, if you fancy it?’
For all her anti-establishment bluster, Bridget had never quite understood why Ruby would choose to be a full time student when she could get a proper job in an office that paid an actual salary, and still allowed for your hobbies: DJing for her, reading about South East Asian genocides for Ruby. While the water tumbled out of the kettle’s spout, she repeated her disinterest in the world of financial services with as much humour as she could muster on a frozen morning.
Unseen, Bridget stared at the V cut into the back of Ruby’s hair. She was the outsider in the house: Bridget, Matt and Jacob had all been undergraduates together and when Jacob had inherited, it had been a natural development for the three of them to move into this house together. When Ruby, hair aflame, had presented herself at the front door two years later, they had all felt a huge affinity for her and had welcomed her into their household. But she remained, in many ways, a lodger.
Bridget had been most optimistic. Another woman, of course, but also a student, someone who could keep them young. Could keep her young. Matt and Jacob worked for themselves, one designing websites, the other tending to the gardens of London’s wealthy, and they were not so mired in corporate life. Neither of them had to wear a suit.
And yet Ruby had turned out to be the most stable, the most mature, of them all. She took care of paying the bills, making sure that there was milk in the fridge, juice for Lou. She was the most grown up of the four, and yet she refused to grow up, insisted on continuing the pointlessness of study.
‘What are you going to do, Rubes? After you’re done with the PhD? You’re due to finish this autumn, right? Do you get to be a professor then?’
This again. It was like living with her mother, except Ruby’s mother never asked that kind of question, instead willed Ruby to delay settling, conceding, surrendering. It was well meant, of course, Bridget’s curiosity, but she wondered how many more times, how many more ways, she could say that she did not know, did not want to know.
‘And what about you? When do you stop with the DJing? You must be knackered.’
The stamina of Bridget astounded Ruby: that she was able to hold down a proper job, look after a toddler and still manage to run a night at the Old Blue Last was superhuman. And yet she did all of these with dedication, organisation and enthusiasm. She didn’t drink much, and Ruby had never known her use illegal drugs. Aside from the smoking and gallons of tea, she seemed to have few vices.
‘Actually, I am getting a bit old for it. Don’t want to let it go though. It’s all that’s left of me – if I stop DJing, I’m just insurance and Lou. I love Lou, you know that, but I don’t think it’s healthy for him for me to just be a mum, and a corporate drone. How’s he ever going to find who he is, if I don’t know who I am?’
Ruby wanted to say that she would always very definitely be who she was and that Lou’s very particular upbringing meant he’d always be a very particular person. But while she tried make this sound less like an accusation, Bridget rose from her
chair, to check that her son was ready to go to day care. She paused at the door and turned back to her friend.
‘Are you sure you’re not shagging him?’
She nodded back towards the kitchen door that separated them from the living room and Fergus.
‘Duh, no. Anyways, he’s got a fiancée and, if you remember, I’ve got a boyfriend.’
‘Yeah, but neither of them are here are they?’
She winked and swung into the living room, where Fergus was sitting up rubbing his eyes. He looked startled by Bridget’s cheery ‘good morning’ and amused smile, and then the door swung shut. In the momentary silence of the newly sealed room, Ruby was left only with two cups of tea and the fleeting thought of Alex. The distance between them had grown ever greater, even on her visits home, making the relationship more a theoretical construct than a living, breathing thing. Yet even this sepulchre provided an anchor, an explanation for her living so deeply in books.
She slipped into the living room, leaving the ghost behind her, and took tea to the barely functioning Fergus. He accepted it with all the grace he could and sucked in the hot liquid. He had pulled on a t-shirt in the time since Bridget has passed through, but his jeans still hung neatly over a chair-back.
‘Do you mind?’
Ruby was at the window and, once Fergus had grunted his acceptance, she drew back the curtains to reveal the glowing world. She wondered if Fergus was watching her silhouetted there and looked out at the whiteness beyond the window. The sky still hung like a threat over Stepney Green and tiny flakes still meandered through the air. But the snow was definitely thinning, slowing down. Tyre tracks cut through its carpet on the street and unseen walkers had left their trace as well. She peered up into the cloud, trying to ascertain if that was actually it, as if she could read in the flat grey the sky’s intentions. But the flat greyness remained indecipherable, the sky tight-lipped. While Ruby deliberated over the wisdom of venturing out to the library, fatter snowflakes crowded the air once more, snarling and circling, blurring the familiar street: Ruby decided once and for all that indoors was the best place to be.
The Cursing Stone: a gripping mystery and family saga Page 19