‘I’m guessing you two are feeling a bit of Geborgenheit right now,’ Agnes said – swiftly severing yet another strand of conversation.
When it came to settling the bill, Boucher flashed a wallet stuffed with an indecent amount of cash. ‘I don’t trust credit cards,’ he said to Cat with a wink, and laid out a generous tip, adding, ‘The food might be rich, but that doesn’t mean the waiters are.’
As they headed for the exit other patrons seemed still to be glancing at them; in particular Cat noticed an aquiline gentleman in the shadows of the bar area.
‘Absalón Salazar,’ Agnes said at her side. ‘The owner.’
‘Who?’
‘Absalón Salazar – you know, from the conclave?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Cat said, vaguely remembering the angular face. ‘Absalón Salazar. He owns this place?’
‘You know he does. That’s why I recommended it.’
It was another curious moment in an altogether curious evening. Despite Boucher’s obvious and effortless charm, Cat had the sneaking suspicion that everything – from the overspiced food to Agnes’s salacious drunkenness – had been prearranged for a specific purpose. But as to what that purpose was – she and Boucher had still to get home, after all – she didn’t care to contemplate.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
When they parted a few doors up from the restaurant, a by-now thoroughly plastered Agnes assailed them with yet more unsolicited encouragement: ‘Oh well, don’t want to stand in your way any longer than necessary, eh?’ Giving a sordid wink to Boucher. ‘Just a warning, though – Cat doesn’t enjoy being submissive.’
‘Really, Agnes.’
‘It’s true. She had a traumatic experience in her youth that she doesn’t like talking about. That’s the real reason she moved to Edinburgh, you know.’
‘Agnes . . .’
‘But you’ll know she’s ripe when she starts babbling.’
Cat shot her the daggered look she’d been suppressing all eve-ning.
‘Uh oh! Better stop or she’ll want me dead too!’
And with that Agnes headed off in the general direction of Newington, her laughter echoing fiendishly around the Cowgate.
Cat and Boucher themselves turned back past the restaurant – other patrons seemed to be retreating self-consciously from the window – and headed under the gloomy arches of the South and George IV Bridges. When she judged a suitable distance had been covered, Cat coughed and said, ‘I really should apologise for Agnes, I guess. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.’
‘She’s a character,’ Boucher said. ‘And I’m fond of characters.’
‘There are limits, though.’
‘She’s a good laugh, and not at all malignant.’
‘That stuff she said about trauma,’ Cat went on. ‘I’m not exactly sure what she’s talking about. One night, possibly when I’d had a little too much to drink – and I don’t normally drink – I must have mumbled about something that happened in my youth. She’s seized upon it for some reason and blown it up into something earth-shattering.’
‘She sounded genuinely concerned for you, for what it’s worth.’
‘Well, she has no reason to be. What happened is . . . irrelevant. I’ve been very disciplined about that. I never talk about it. I shouldn’t be talking about it now. I think there was something in that drink. It had a strange taste.’
‘Tejuinos can have added alcohol.’
‘Yeah.’ She felt surprisingly light-headed. ‘I’ve noticed, by the way, that people are always looking for sinister psychological reasons to account for others who don’t fit the mould. Self-reliance is seen as abnormal – threatening, somehow.’
‘I think Agnes admires you more than anything. But it’s true. People in general have puerile imaginations. Look at this bunch.’ Approaching them was a cluster of middle-aged theatregoers. ‘I guarantee that there are corners of their minds that are festering with malice, spite, sexual perversity . . . everything. Not that they’d never admit it, of course.’
‘My mother was deeply religious,’ Cat heard herself saying.
‘Ahh.’
‘And she used to compare the dark and light sides of the mind to two rooms side by side. She said that an unlit room would always become brighter by throwing open the door to a brightly lit room, but a brightly lit room would never become darker by opening the door to an unlit one.’
‘An interesting metaphor,’ Boucher said. ‘Your mother’s way of suggesting that the faithful should have no fear about peering into the dark?’
‘I think’ – and here Cat experienced an unsettling flashback to Aileanach Castle – ‘she was trying to say that good is always more powerful than evil. But I prefer to interpret it as you’ve suggested. If you’re confident of your own rationality, then you should have no fear about confronting your inner darkness. It won’t harm you to throw open the door – and the door should always be open anyway.’
‘So there’s more room for the mind to wander, apart from anything else . . .’
‘Exactly. I guess I was molested.’
Boucher looked at her for a moment, clearly doubting his ears. ‘I’m sorry, Cat?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, not sure why she was suddenly admitting it. ‘That thing that Agnes was referring to. It was in Philadelphia. I’m not sure how old I was. Nine, actually. My mother was ill and my father was in financial distress and we had some cousins who agreed to take me in. And their son – he was twenty-one at the time – cornered me in the garden shed one day and . . . you know.’
‘My God, Cat . . . you don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to.’
‘No, no, it’s all right. I knew it was sick. But I’m not sure it surprised me. Angered me – really infuriated me – but it didn’t surprise me. And there were circumstances – it’s difficult to explain – that meant I didn’t speak out, and neither did my father, and we both felt guilty about that.’
‘Guilty? What on earth do you feel guilty about?’
‘He – the cousin – went on to assault others, you see. And I could have saved them. Could have done something. But I didn’t, and that haunted me.’
‘Cat . . . you were a child.’
‘Yeah, I know. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. It’s all in the past. I was pretty messed up, but I’ve found my calling now. I’ve got a mission. I’m not “carrying any baggage”, or whatever they say. I haven’t been “running away” from anything. I’m a happy person. I’m not a victim. Not a victim, believe me.’
‘It’s all right to be a victim, Cat.’
‘Of course it is. But I’m not a victim.’
They passed awkwardly through the open space of the Grassmarket, erstwhile scene of public hangings, where currently a group of aggressive hoons was chanting a football anthem. For a moment a confrontation seemed inevitable – some of the men were eyeing Cat suggestively – but Boucher swelled out – a remarkable physical transformation – and the hoons wilted, separating around them like flustered pigeons and reassembling only when they were well behind.
The incident sparked an oblique acknowledgment from Boucher. ‘Just let me know if I can help you, Cat – any time at all. I’m always there for you.’
‘No, no – I’m OK.’
‘Any sort of trouble – personal or professional. Trust me, I know how to deal with such things.’
She wanted to ask him to elaborate. Had he been threatened over his chess playing? But she was feeling unusually woozy. They passed under the Castle Terrace Bridge and she stumbled briefly on the flagstones. He shot out a hand to prevent her falling.
‘You might be right about those tejuinos,’ she said, thinking for some reason of Absalón Salazar. ‘I was confronted a couple of weeks ago, you know.’ She was disentangling herself from his grip. ‘By a friend of the guy who died upstairs. For a moment it looked like it might turn nasty.’
‘Did he threaten you?’
‘Not real
ly. He swore at me and then ran off. It was very strange.’
‘Strange or not, I wish I’d been there to deal with it.’ Which seemed to Cat, even through her haze, to be a very awkward denial.
They climbed King’s Stables Road towards the stately bulk of the Caledonian Hotel. At one of the windows a well-dressed couple seemed to be peering down at them with what looked like opera glasses.
‘People really do seem to be staring at us around here,’ Boucher noted, pausing at the corner to flip a coin to a rough sleeper.
‘Good of you,’ said Cat.
‘Just paying the ferryman before the passage to Paradise.’
She tried to pretend she hadn’t heard him. In Shandwick Place she stumbled again, on the tram tracks this time, and Boucher again seized her by the arm. By the time they entered Queensferry Street she was feeling fully inebriated and apologised for losing control.
‘Losing control is good for you sometimes,’ he said, and for the first time – she must have been in furious denial – she had a vision of what he must have had in mind. But surely, she thought, he wouldn’t try anything tonight? After all the barbed wire she had just spun out?
To distract herself, she said, ‘I think you were going to say something about negative energy . . .’
‘I was?’
‘Back at the restaurant, before the meals arrived.’
‘Well, yes. Negative energy, mind viruses, the real nature of evil. I’d love to discuss it further, but I don’t think tonight is the night.’
‘I’m not shy . . .’
‘Glad to hear it. But we’ve better things to do, have we not?’
They were passing under an amber streetlight and his eyes were flashing with reflected glow. His teeth, his dimples, his permanently amused expression – she thought he looked demonic. And what happened next would continue to disturb her for days afterwards.
When they took the Belford Road stairs deep into Dean Village a mist rose up and seemed to swallow them. She felt Boucher’s arm slide around her, but she was too weak to resist. Then they were gliding – literally, it seemed to Cat, as though they were gliding – across the footbridge, over the rustling river, as darkly garbed people (tourists? even this late?) seemed to supplicate before them. They swept soundlessly up to their building and round and round the stairway and Cat saw her own red-painted door staring back at her with the number 5 pulsing in the sickly yellow light.
But did she go through that door? With Boucher?
Or did Boucher carry her higher into Number Six?
Whatever. Only fragments of dreamlike imagery would later survive. She was taking off her clothes. She was having a shower. She was drying herself. She was entering the bedroom, completely naked. She was heading for her bed – or his? – and reaching for the duvet, to peel it back, when muscled arms closed around her. Fur bristled against her back. Hot breath scorched the nape of her neck. And she was not resisting. She was losing control. She was being lifted off her feet and deposited on the bed. She was atop the duvet and her legs were being prised apart. She was staring, astonished, at Boucher, who beneath his luxuriant body hair had pronounced abs, pecs, deltoids, the works – even the sort of defined obliques you usually see only on body builders. But how could that be? This plainly was not the physique of a chess player. He seldom left his flat. And she’d never heard him doing exercise of any kind.
Then he was swinging himself onto the bed. He was positioning himself over her. His manhood looked as big as a rolling pin. And, without any sort of foreplay, he was guiding himself into her. He was thrusting in and out. It was excruciating. It was extraordinary. She heard herself moaning, squealing, and tried to stifle the sound lest it be heard by Michael and Maxine downstairs. Or Boucher upstairs. Then it occurred to her that the stranger was Boucher. But it still seemed impossible.
She heard the voice of Agnes Sampson:
‘If you’d been had by him, you’d know, girl, you’d know.’
And then the impossibly deep voice of Boucher himself:
‘Everything is going to be all right.’
His hands closed around her throat and his deep-flecked eyes were staring at her hypnotically. His nostrils were flared and his lips were curled back on wickedly sharp teeth. Her unstifled moans and gasps were now so loud that she feared she might wake the entire neighbourhood. At one point she heard herself shriek – either in agony or ecstasy, or possibly both.
And this might have been exactly what woke her up. Or maybe it was the sound of her phone purring. For when she came to her senses she saw her mobile illuminated on the bedside chest. The wind was moaning. Tree shadows were swirling across the ceiling. She reached over, plucked up the phone and found a message from Maxine.
That a nightmare you’re having? You okay?
Cat felt obliged to answer promptly.
It was a nightmare, yeah. Thanks for ending it.
But it still made no sense. As dreams go it wasn’t unwelcome, as distressingly debauched as it had been, and she wasn’t sure she had really wanted it to end.
She switched on the beside light, pulled down the blind, and, exactly as she had after returning from the conclave, examined herself thoroughly. But there were no signs that Boucher, or anyone else, had had his way with her. She scolded herself for even imagining it. And decided to blame everything on the tejuinos.
She cracked open her bottle of sleeping tablets – untouched since Moyle had been permanently silenced – and swallowed two pills, washing them down with tap water. Then she dived under the duvet, waiting for sleep to overcome her again. But for the life of her all she could think about was Boucher’s godlike physique, at least in her imagination . . . and his extraordinary prowess . . . at least in her imagination . . . and the flames of devilish lust in his eyes . . . at least in her imagination . . . and the unruly emotions that his physique had invoked in her through its very bestial magnificence. But in the end she consoled herself with the thought – indeed, the indisputable logic – that his real body would be considerably paunchier, droopier and unthreatening . . . and all the more comforting for that.
Assuming she ever got to see it, of course.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
At the aquarium on monday morning, with Bellamy at the mandatory interdepartmental briefing, Cat got on the line to the liaison officer at Cosmos’s UK head office in London. Since she preferred not to be overheard, she was using Agnes’s figurine-cluttered office.
‘You don’t know me,’ she told the officer, who was called Peggy and had a cut-glass accent, ‘but I’d like to hit you with a hypothetical. And all I want you to do is to tell me if it’s possible.’
She proceeded to outline Boucher’s theory about rewards points being activated on corporate accounts by disabling the backend inhibitors and redirecting the proceeds.
‘It’s certainly plausible,’ Peggy said in her precise tone. ‘We had a very similar case at a regional bank in Kent recently. A staff member in their IT department was funnelling rewards points from a storage company.’
‘Is it possible on a much larger scale, though? Across many different accounts?’
‘It would require high-level corruption. Why? Are you suggesting something?’
‘I don’t know what I’m suggesting,’ Cat admitted, glancing at Agnes. ‘But tell me, how are corporate accounts monitored? How would you know if an account was fraudulently accruing points?’
‘To be perfectly honest, it’s difficult for us to monitor such things from London. We’re as chronically understaffed as you are. And the multitude of new banks, regional banks, foreign banks, credit unions and so on makes it doubly difficult. We’re largely reliant on the integrity of our partners.’
‘There’s a liability-versus-legality calculation as well?’
‘Of course, though that’s officially off the record. But if you have anything at all – especially if it’s large scale – we’d be more than happy to discuss it with you.’
�
��Then I might get back to you,’ said Cat, hanging up.
Agnes said, ‘He’s on the money, isn’t he?’
‘Who’s on the money?’
‘You know exactly who I mean. He’s on to something with those rewards points, isn’t he?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Of course he is. He’s as sharp as a tack, Cat. As sharp as you – up top, I mean.’
‘Sharp, maybe, but does he ever tell the truth? I couldn’t find his name anywhere on the chess websites, you know.’
Agnes smirked. ‘Oh?’
‘The World Chess Federation publishes an annual list of the world’s top two hundred players. But there’s no mention of anyone called Robin Boucher. There’s hardly anyone from Britain, period.’
‘He said he wasn’t into tournaments.’
‘But he claimed that he made a good living out of it. And how would anyone but a grandmaster profit out of playing chess online?’
‘Maybe he uses his “twinkling amber eyes”?’
Cat ignored her. ‘Do you mind if I make another call?’
‘Make it snappy, will you? Wing Commander is overdue.’
Cat called Carter Carterius at Credit Cards, only to be told that he was unavailable.
‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed. ‘Can I call back later?’
‘Mr Carterius is absent from the office today,’ a stern secretary told her. ‘Can I take your details? Or get someone else to assist you?’
‘That won’t be necessary.’
Cat’s discomfort must have been evident because when she hung up Agnes said, ‘Shit – you look like you swallowed an ashtray.’
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