Writ in Water

by Natasha Mostert

  The room itself had a plantation-like feel to it. The cream-coloured walls, dark oiled floorboards and shutters, rattan furniture and ghostly ceiling fan were reminiscent of an interior more likely to be found in some colonial outpost than a house in central London.

  A peacock chair with a very deep seat was flanked by a rickety-looking wicker screen. One wall held a large number of carved African masks. They reminded him of the mask he had seen in Robert Whittington’s apartment. It wouldn’t surprise him if that had originated from this room. Two dark green wing-backed chairs, the leather split and creased, faced each other on either side of a zebra skin that was going bald. A rattan coffee table and several rattan chests covered with magazines flanked an enormous sofa covered in velvet. On the far side of the room were two metal workbenches covered with a variety of objects.

  There were roses everywhere. On top of the chest, on side tables, on the windowsills. Silky, blood-red roses, deep apricot-hued ones and waxy, pink-veined blooms drooping over the rims of alabaster bowls. But no photographs, which was interesting. In his experience, women living alone always surrounded themselves with images of their own likeness and that of loved ones. But except for a crucifixion print of Salvador Dali’s—a beautiful long-limbed Christ hanging eerily suspended in space—there were no other pictures in the room.

  It was an exceptionally large room and obviously used not only as a living room but also as a library and work room. One wall was completely covered in shelves filled to capacity with books, the shelves dipping dangerously in the middle from the weight of so many volumes. There were even books stacked up higgledy-piggledy behind the books in the front rows.

  He turned his head sideways to read some of the titles: De Imaginum, De umbris idearum, Ars notoria, De occulta philosophia, Book of Dzyan, The Hermetic Secret. Not exactly the kind of reading material with which to relax in the bath, you might say. Not that all the books were arcana. There were also many volumes bearing the imprimatur of university presses, written by luminaries in the more austere halls of academia. Stephen Jay Gould. David Gelernter. Daniel Dennett. Freeman Dyson. Roger Penrose. ‘Eclectic’ didn’t even begin to describe this collection.

  But the sisters had obviously kept pace with the electronic age. The bottom two shelves were taken up by stacks of DVDs. He made a quick calculation: ten DVDs to a stack, twenty stacks—there were more than two hundred DVDs all told. He pulled out one of the discs. The sticker on the front held a neat inscription: Human Genome Project. The second disc said World Encyclopaedia Volume I . One point two gigs.

  He lifted his eyebrows in surprise. If all these DVDs were full, then they contained a massive amount of information. It looked as though the sisters had the contents of the entire British Library stored in their living room.

  He turned away from the shelves. He wanted to take a closer look at those two metal workbenches. They were home to some delightfully weird and wonderful things. There were gleaming brass compasses. An astrolabe. The skeletons of birds bleached white, startlingly ethereal, as if the slightest touch would cause the bones to crumble to dust. Bell jars. Dried herbs. Sheets of handmade marbled paper. Real ink pots and fussy nibbed pens.

  What a strange collection. In another house some of these items might have been displayed as whimsical objets d’art—that astrolabe must be worth a pretty penny, for one, and the beads on the abacus appeared to be real ivory—but in this room they looked startlingly utilitarian, as though they were in constant use.

  There were also computers. A desktop and a laptop lined up next to each other. Both were booted up and running. Both shared the same screensaver: a woman with long flowing hair and a swirling cloak holding in her hands a brightly glowing sun, which grew bigger and bigger before slowly shrinking again, the pulsing red mass becoming ever smaller until only a pinpoint of light was left between her palms. The effect of two suns waxing and waning in tandem was oddly mesmerising.

  He sat down on an old-fashioned typist’s chair and tapped a key on the keyboard of the laptop. No password necessary. Actually, the computer was already open on a webpage.

  Great. He’d be able to get into the sisters’ email. Maybe access some old correspondence with Robert Whittington. There had been no computer at Whittington’s apartment, but according to Frankie he used to be the owner of a pretty decent machine until he had decided, shortly before his disappearance, to donate the thing to charity. To Gabriel this was completely off the wall, but Frankie didn’t seem to find the idea of her stepson giving away a £3,000 notebook all that unusual. ‘Robbie did all kinds of inexplicable things when the spirit moved him.’ She shrugged. ‘So today he’s all excited about being a Luddite. Tomorrow it’s something else again.’

  The laptop was used by both sisters, but when he checked their email folders and personal filing cabinets, he was disappointed. The messages were innocuous—friends, business colleagues—and as far as he could determine not one message sent to, or received from, Robert Whittington.

  Perhaps there might be something of more value among their documents. He started accessing files at random. The contents seemed fairly mundane. A file named Accounts was just that, a neat synopsis of household expenses, although the figure at the bottom made him purse his lips in a soundless whistle. Frugality was not an issue in this house.

  He continued scrolling down the list of entries and paused. Diary. Jackpot.

  He centred the mouse on the file name and clicked. But here the easy part ended. The screen cleared and he was asked for a password. Gate barred.

  Passwords, of course, were not necessarily foolproof. If you knew the person you were snooping on, it was sometimes not that difficult to guess a password. Most home users used words related to their everyday life and interests. But he did not know Minnaloushe and Morrighan Monk and had no idea what they were into. So after tapping in the names of the sisters—although how the heck does one spell ‘Minnaloushe’—and receiving no joy, he accepted defeat.

  He leaned back in the chair, his hands cradled behind his head. So that was that. He was stymied. At least for the moment. But the mere fact that this was the only password-protected file he had found in the list must be significant. He would have to consult Isidore and make a plan. They would probably be able to gain access through a Trojan horse virus sent via an email message. Not that this course of action would be plain sailing. Embedded in the taskbar of the machine in front of him was the icon for DDD antivirus software. DDD was the best there was—it put Kaspersky to shame and its ability to sniff out viruses and Trojans was excellent. Isidore was going to have to get creative.

  He swivelled the chair round and faced the desktop. Maybe he’d have better luck with this machine. He tapped the enter key and the screensaver dissolved.

  He paused. This was odd. First, the computer was not connected to the Internet. Second, the computer seemed to be dedicated to the maintenance of one document only. The document was named The Promethean Key.

  This sounded interesting. At Oxford he had done a course in Classical Culture and History and there was a time he had fancied himself a bit of a classics buff. Prometheus, if memory served him, stole a spark of fire from the gods to give to mankind to open their minds to knowledge. He was punished by Zeus and spent his days chained to a rock with a giant eagle feeding on his liver. Tough stuff. Those Greek gods did not mess around.

  He clicked on the file without much hope. As he expected, this file was password-protected as well.

  Two password-protected files. They would certainly warrant a closer look somewhere along the way. Except that where the desktop was concerned, he was faced with a significant added complication. Since the computer was not connected to the Internet, he and Isidore would not be able to access the machine from outside via a convenient broadband connection. In order to crack this thing, he was going to have to return in person. Not exactly a prospect he was looking forward to. He very much preferred surveillance from a distance.

  But for the presen
t there was no use wasting any more time on the computers. Glancing at his watch, he was surprised to see that he had already spent a full forty minutes inside the house.

  But as he got up from his seat, he froze. On the shelf right in front of him, at eye level, was a glass box. Inside the box were stone pebbles, sand, and pieces of rock illuminated by a weak violet light. An eerie little desert landscape. Hovering ghost-like on one of the rocks, its hairy legs delicately poised, was one of the biggest spiders he had ever seen.

  He blinked. The creature seemed not quite real—a phantasm, a monster from a dream. He realised his body was flooded with adrenaline: the sight of the spider had bypassed the analytical side of his brain, and elicited an impulse that came straight from the amygdalae.

  Hesitantly, he brought his head up close to the box. The lavender light made the colour of the spider difficult to fathom and contributed to the thing looking like something from a particularly bad acid trip. The spider’s body alone must have been all of ten centimetres long. The legs seemed to be floating. Massive fangs. He was no expert but he was almost certain he was looking at a tarantula. It should have reassured him. Tarantulas were harmless to humans—that much he knew. He had read somewhere that people even kept them as pets.

  Pets? He stared at the spider in its glass box. It was moving its front legs almost imperceptibly. Feeling slightly queasy, Gabriel recognised the dark splodge lying to one side of the box. A half-eaten cricket.

  Oh, man. This was too much. He had to force himself to step back. He couldn’t spend all his time on this freakish thing. But what the hell else was waiting for him inside the house?

  The next room was the dining room, dark with mahogany, followed by a guest loo designed for pygmies and a rather workmanlike kitchen. He opened the fridge and peered inside. A bottle of Krug champagne shared shelf space with several delectable-looking cartons and trays sporting Harrods Food Hall stickers. He lifted the corner on one of the white boxes. Duck confit. Their taste in literature and decor, not to mention pets, might be odd, but the ladies showed real class when it came to food.

  On the wall on the far side of the room were some rather interesting-looking prints. They were not exactly the still-life type pictures you’d expect to find in a kitchen: no jolly tomatoes or heads of corn. The prints were watercolours and pretty damn weird to say the least. Lots of naked hermaphroditic figures in rural settings dancing next to roaring furnaces. A creepy proliferation of snakes, suns and moons.

  Pushed against the wall was a rustic pine table at least ten feet long. It held an array of copper bowls and, more intriguingly, big-bottomed flasks of the kind you’d find in a chemistry lab. Rounded Florence flasks were clamped to chrome support stands and long-necked filtering flasks shared the space with Bunsen burners and stand-alone hot plates. Neatly lined up on the shallow shelves against the wall was a large variety of brown paper bags labelled in a flowing hand: Juniperus virginiana, dwarf sumac (stem), Trifolium pratense, Viscum album, Rosa canina…

  The shelf below was filled with small plastic tubs. He picked one up and lifted the lid. It was labelled alkaline ash and he had expected the tub to be filled with dust. Instead it was full of a white gooey substance. He took a sniff. Not a bad smell exactly, but he now knew the origin of that acrid scent he had picked up on first entering the house.

  Fascinating as all of this was, though, it did not provide any clues as to what might have happened to Robert Whittington. And so far during his exploration of the house, he hadn’t recognised any of the rooms. They hadn’t figured in his ride. The only thing he recognised was the Monas. The coat of arms was everywhere: it even sat on top of the kitchen door. The sisters must like it a lot. He made another mental note to ask Isidore to check it out.

  The kitchen opened directly into the front hallway, which sported high walls and skirting boards at least a foot tall. The hall was packed with plants in pots: ferns, velvety African violets, a large number of milky orchids sitting ghost-like next to each other on a low windowsill. And even more roses. These women had a thing for roses. He liked plants himself, but this was like hacking your way through a freaking jungle.

  Against the wall, hanging from highly polished hooks, were a number of light raincoats and jackets. As he walked past them he noticed a silky fuchsia scarf that had escaped the grasp of one of the hooks and was lying on the dark timber floor like a pool of melted jewellery. He stooped to pick it up. The scarf was fragrant with perfume. He could smell it even as he carefully draped the oblong of silk over the shoulders of a glittery evening jacket. It stirred a memory inside him. The masked woman in his ride—hadn’t she been wearing the same perfume? For a moment he concentrated hard but then he gave up. The problem was that although smell was evocative, it made for a very tenuous memory byte. He couldn’t be sure.

  He placed his foot on the first step of the staircase, looking upwards to where it unfurled itself in a graceful elliptical spiral. The lacy wrought-iron banisters were quite beautiful. But as he started to climb, he grimaced. The stairs were wooden and they creaked. Loudly. A real problem should he have to visit the house again when the occupants were present.

  The first floor didn’t yield anything much: a blandly decorated room in blue and white which had guest room written all over it, and an adjoining bathroom. The only other room on that floor had been converted into an extremely generous-sized walk-in wardrobe, which was obviously used by both sisters. The differing shoe sizes alone made that clear.

  The walls were lined with rails from which hung dresses draped over padded hangers and shelves holding hatboxes, printed blouses and piles of sweaters. The sisters did not lack for clothes. And they certainly did not shop at H&M. He looked at the label stitched into the neck of a taupe dress suit: Gucci. The shoes to match were Christian Louboutin. He wondered where they got the money from. Frankie had been vague. She hadn’t known what the sisters did for a living. It was probably a case of old money, he thought, running his hand down a silky backless evening dress with a diamond trim. Some people were born under a lucky star. The rest had to make their own luck.

  In normal circumstances he would be delighted to find himself surrounded by fragrant silk and lace, but at that moment, as he looked at all those shelves of feminine lingerie and other accoutrements, he couldn’t help feeling like some sleazy peeping Tom. Actually, to be honest, the house was getting to him. On the one hand he was fascinated by the place—it was certainly not your usual chintz palace—but there was something about it that made him feel uncomfortable. He would be hard put to articulate his unease except to say that it felt as though the house was holding its breath, causing him to hold his breath as well. Which sounded pretty damn ridiculous, he had to admit.

  Anyway, he doubted he was going to find any traces of Robert Whittington here among the Jimmy Choos and Birkin bags. Maybe he’d have better luck upstairs. He turned to the staircase once again.

  When he reached the top landing, he stopped, slightly out of breath. To his right was an arched window. The landing itself was dominated by a high and very beautiful walnut tallboy. On either side of the chest were closed doors. They would probably lead to the bedrooms.

  As he stretched out his hand to turn the knob of the door on his left, something made him pause. Why did he have this feeling of being watched, all of a sudden?

  He turned and looked over his shoulder. The staircase stretched down, empty, behind him. The sun was setting in earnest now and the arched window framed a burnt orange sky hazy with pollution. The window ensured that there was still light up here, but when he stepped away from the closed door to look over the edge of the banister, the hallway down below was almost completely dark. The spidery ferns on the console table and the coats hanging from the hooks threw hardly any shadows.

  Slowly, he straightened. He was being ridiculous. There was no one here. He approached the door once more and turned the knob.

  A streak of black exploded past his ear with a vicious snarl. Something had j
umped off the top of the tallboy behind him and was now disappearing through the half-open door. It was so unexpected, he found himself staring at the door, stupefied. His mind told him it was only a cat but his pulse was racing off the charts and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up.

  Cautiously he pushed the door wider. It creaked on its hinges, setting his teeth on edge. A foot away a coal-black cat was watching him malevolently, tail swishing, one paw lifted expectantly. The cat spat at him and made a harrowing noise at the back of its throat. It sounded like a baby being tortured.

  ‘Here, kitty, kitty…’ He held out his hand placatingly. Anything to stop that unearthly sound.

  The cat moved at lightning speed and the next moment he was looking at four deep scratch marks on his wrist. The amount of blood welling up from the gouges was quite extraordinary.

  Holy shit. He felt suddenly queasy and a little light-headed, which was stupid—it wasn’t as though he was mortally wounded. Taking a handkerchief out of his pocket, he tied it into a clumsy bandage round his hand. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be dripping blood all over the place.

  He flipped the light switch at the door to help him see better: no use giving this spawn from hell an added advantage. The cat’s pupils narrowed. It was still screaming and the noise was excruciating. He moved threateningly towards the animal, which must have sensed what he had in mind because it scrambled up the side of the curtain and onto the top of a wardrobe, where it crouched into a tense ball of fur, staring down at him with an evil expression. But at least it had stopped its caterwauling.