Wednesday 1st May 2013
After decades in a shallow grave beneath the croquet lawn, the iron key felt underweight. The corroded shank had lost much of its circumference, but it only had to work one more time. He slid it into the lock: it went in easily, gliding over a lubricating layer of dust and grey webs. The rooms here on the second floor were originally the domain of servants. Many of them now resembled the shadowy interiors of a neglected brocante, smelling of musty leather and horsehair stuffing, but this one was different. It was different because it was locked, and had been in that state since before he was born – four walls, devoid of human contact for seventy-six years.
He thought about how the world had moved on. The room had missed a global war, Kennedy, the Berlin Wall, The Beatles. Science had progressed while society had, from his perspective, regressed. Was he about to enter a cocoon of 1930s England? Would it contain a slice of his ancestors’ life, preserved and forgotten?
He recalled his grandmother’s diary and the stern warnings she had written about this room. It seemed that the burial of the key in 1937 had been quite an occasion. There had been a procession with incense, Latin chants, a rendition of Hark! A Herald Voice is Calling, followed by the Lord’s Prayer. The diary suggested that this little piece of metal had been accorded more pomp and respect at its untimely interment than he recalled seeing at his mother’s sombre memorial service in the family chapel some forty years later. The one question the diary failed to answer was why the room was sealed. What could have been significant enough to justify such eccentric banishment? His mind flitted between various remote possibilities: an autobiographical manuscript exposing a murky family secret; stolen plans for an atomic bomb; a map pointing the way to illicit treasure; the body of a dead celebrity – Amelia Earhart had disappeared in somewhat odd circumstances that year, after all.
The idea that someone would one day find the key had apparently not occurred to those who were present at its burial. A future Earl with a passion for metal detecting was something they had failed to foresee. He hadn’t even been looking for it. The hours he had spent in the grounds dressed in his ludicrous, tasselled leather jacket, with his detecting equipment draped over his shoulders, in search of a hoard of silver coins rumoured to have been buried by his wealthy and forgetful ancestors. No such hoard had yet been identified by the machine, and the key was his consolation.
Lord ‘Ratty’ Ballashiels coiled his freckly fingers around the key, ready to twist it, ready to enter the lost world of his forebears. A cold perspiration loosened his grip. He paused. To unlock this door would be to disobey a direct instruction from his late grandmother. To indulge his curiosity would be to commit the ultimate rebellion and would invite the sinister repercussions his grandmother had mentioned in frustratingly ambiguous terms in her diary.
But it was his house now. There was no one left to whom he had to answer for his actions. His grandmother’s wishes were part of history, and, since the study of history was his greatest passion, he convinced himself that the unlocking of the room was an archaeological procedure. He was Howard Carter, about to step into the tomb of Tutankhamen. He was Hiram Bingham, striding through the clouds towards Machu Picchu.
He closed his eyes and turned the key. His face tightened in anticipation. Resistance gave way to clunks. The bolt eased into its housing. He put his other hand on the white porcelain handle and twisted it. The door swung free with a low groan. He opened his eyes, wiped the sweat from his dyed black hair, and looked into the forbidden room.
It was square, about fifteen feet along each side. The window was almost completely obscured by ill-fitting shutters, which allowed only a vertical slice of light to illuminate the dancing particles of airborne dust. There was a small fireplace to the right, a simple surround of glossed wood with a flat mantelpiece. The grate was piled high with a cocktail of fallen soot and nests. A lone bulb hung from a cloth-covered flex in the ceiling, refusing to be digested by the cobwebs that had engulfed it.
Ratty blinked in disbelief as he entered the stark room. Wide, bare floorboards held his weight in defiance of the labyrinthine perforations made over the centuries by microscopic chomping teeth. Each step he took was marked by a dull echo. He could hear himself breathing. He scratched his long nose in puzzlement that his grandmother could have been sufficiently potty to have locked up an empty chamber and prohibited entry for all eternity.
He folded the shutters into their recesses and the space overflowed with daylight. The walls were covered with a paper that Ratty recognised from other servants’ rooms: an artless floral design that remained valiantly attached to the lath and plaster despite its antiquity. He tapped the architrave around the door and stomped on the floorboards. Nothing gave way. No secret opening appeared.
The beginnings of a smile curled around the corner of his mouth, unveiling several crooked teeth, as he realised that a cheeky sense of humour did not belong exclusively to his generation. Seventy-six years ago, long before he had even been born, his grandmother had set up a wonderful practical joke. The tension and apprehension he had felt moments ago were gone. Now he simply had another space into which the detritus of a once-magnificent stately home could expand.
He forced the reluctant sash window open an inch, inviting a current of air to freshen the space. The draft caused a small rivulet of soot to slide from the fireplace onto the stone hearth. Poking out from near the top of the black pile was a tiny bone, part of a swallow that had once attempted to make its home high up in the chimney. Ratty crouched to look at the skeleton and noticed something else amongst the soot. It was a small, purple piece of paper. He pulled it slowly from the grate and shook the black dust away. ‘Chocolat au lait’ it read in a white, sans serif typeface. Below that it simply said, ‘Lanvin’. There was also a mention of a competition to win a Kodak Instamatic camera. Closing date was 31st October 1975.
This was a sweet wrapper from the Seventies. Four decades after the room had been sealed, someone had eaten a chocolate bar containing a paltry thirty per cent cocoa. He became so deeply bewildered that anyone would want to taste such a vile and sickly culinary concoction that it was some moments before the deeper mystery became apparent to him.
***
‘Hey, Ruby!’ called a voice from the ruins of Château d’Opoul, on a hilltop close to the southern French village of Périllos. The accent was unfamiliar to Ruby: Manhattan crossed with Munich, lacking self-consciousness. ‘Up here!’ the voice crassly continued, tearing coarsely through a gentle Mediterranean soundscape in which it evidently did not belong.
She glanced up and sighed. This must be the notorious Rocco. Her earlier uncertainty at whether to agree to this unusual meeting was already morphing into regret. The man leaned precariously over a crumbling parapet, looking down at her from a position that Ruby knew would once have provided an unusual and revolting military advantage against marauding Visigoths: the castle’s lavatories were positioned such that human waste would fall directly onto an attacking army. She swallowed hard and looked back the way she had come. Her uncommunicative taxi driver was already stirring up the dust with a hasty exit from the parking area at the base of the hill, swerving to avoid a Spanish-plated car creeping hesitantly along the dirt track. She couldn’t slip away now. A full hour with Rocco was unavoidable.
As she entered the grid of tumbled stonework that was once part of a mighty fortress, she could see Rocco was not alone. A dozen or so people were gathered at this isolated spot, and most of them were staring up at the featureless sky. Others were squinting over laptop screens on picnic tables or taking video footage – seemingly of nothin
g – from little, handheld camcorders and smartphones.
Rocco Strauss strode purposefully towards some electronic monitoring equipment on a table, scanned the readouts and stared at the sky. He turned to face Ruby, revealing a shirt that was unbuttoned to a flat and hairy stomach beneath his cream linen suit. She grimaced as she approached him. Rocco flashed an enchanting smile and took her hand to a chivalric lip. With his rather ordinary features and centre-parted hairstyle he wasn’t handsome in her opinion, but he had youth on his side. She guessed his age at about thirty and resented him even more for being younger than her.
‘Ruby Towers, a pleasure to meet you at last. My name is Rocco. I’ve heard much about you. Mountebank talks about you all the time.’
‘He certainly talks a lot, that’s for sure,’ she replied, wiping the back of her hand where he had kissed it and fully aware of her reluctance to return his generous welcome. ‘You know me and Matt are not together any more, don’t you?’
‘You would hardly think so from what he says about you.’
The geographical and emotional separation from her former lover Matt Mountebank had lasted four months. Any feelings towards him were buried as deep as the ancient artefacts she routinely excavated in her day job.
‘I heard nothing from him this year until he e-mailed me about you,’ she said. ‘Something about a new kind of archaeology. You were spearheading the research, Matt told me.’
‘Did he say anything else?’ asked Rocco.
‘Only that I’d be mad not to see you while I’m working just the other side of the Pyrenees.’
‘You are extending the site at Empúries, I understand? I read about it. Fascinating to think you could find a mixture of Greek and Roman archaeology on the Costa Brava.’
‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘So here I am.’
‘And clearly not mad.’ Rocco smiled again. He appeared to like her.
She brushed back her auburn, shoulder-length hair, revealing a neck that was newly tanned. He was studying her features, but not in an intimidating way. She knew she could benefit from losing a few pounds and ought to take more care of her appearance, but experience had proven that men frequently lusted after her raw, unembellished beauty and she had been around for long enough not to give a damn if they didn’t. Her wardrobe had consisted of little more than jeans and cotton shirts for as long as she could remember, and Rocco showed no inclination to disapprove of her choices.
Ruby’s defences were starting to soften. His charms were undeniable, but they were not yet sufficient to convince her that her efforts in coming here today would not be wasted. New ideas and techniques in her line of business were reported in academic journals. It seemed unlikely that Matt Mountebank, a writer of infamous fiction, would learn something new about archaeology before she did.
‘How do you know Matt?’ she asked.
‘He came to one of my lectures. Actually, I don’t think it was his idea. He was on a date and the young lady dragged him to the bar afterwards to meet me.’
‘A date?’ Ruby tried hard to hide her disgust, but sensed her facial muscles were not on her side.
‘Personally I don’t see how he could have eyes for anyone but yourself,’ grinned Rocco.
‘Hmm,’ she growled softly, wishing Matt was with them so that she could slap his stubbly face for getting over her too quickly. ‘Are all these people with you?’
‘Watch this,’ he whispered, stepping away from her. ‘Hey, look, up there! That’s the message!’ screamed Rocco, thrusting his arm in the direction of a lone cloud.
Every head turned frantically towards where he was pointing. A clamour of whooping and hollering replaced any conversations. Cameras and detector devices recorded the sky across full spectrums of light, temperature and radiation. There were calls for hush, for calm, for control. Rocco waited patiently. Then he hit them with the punchline.
‘Hey, guys, I was just kidding!’ he shouted, scuttling away from the hisses and curses that were spitting in his direction. ‘Come on, Ruby. I want to show you something.’
On a plastic table sat a pile of equipment that pinged and beeped with morose regularity. Ruby looked at the item at the top. It had a label attached which said ‘ESA property. Not to be removed from Wachtberg’. A small screen displayed sine waves. A portable radar unit turned unhurriedly. Power came from a generator that droned softly in the background.
‘How come everyone’s so obsessed with the sky?’ Ruby asked.
‘The sky is a mere palette. A canvas that is currently blank. If it fills with words, we’ll be ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
‘I’m a chrononaut,’ explained Rocco, unhelpfully. ‘Not an official one, of course. We’re a sort of splinter group. The original chrononaut guys from Project Chronodrome are down there in a gazebo in the car park. Besides, it’s not my real job. Just a hobby. I’m at the European Space Agency. ESA.’
‘And what do you do there?’ she asked mechanically, her mind drifting from a conversation that already bored her.
‘Been there ever since I left university. They put me in charge of tracking stuff. Anything that gets close to our planet. Asteroids, comets, rogue satellites, aliens.’
‘Aliens?’ she echoed, plucked from her reverie by the unexpected word.
‘OK, not yet. But one day, perhaps? Basically my job is to make sure the world doesn’t end. I became quite high profile last year. I was the first to spot the approach of that thing predicted by those scrolls you found.’
That was a branch of conversation that she was not in the mood to explore. The mere mention of the scrolls she had discovered beneath the Sphinx in Cairo the previous year brought knots to her stomach. The events following their discovery still cast a shadow over her. She had barely escaped with her life.
‘So what’s a “chrononaut”?’ she asked, returning to a subject about which she carried no baggage. ‘You collect watches or something?’
‘Just a minute,’ he replied, adjusting the settings on a radiation detector. ‘You heard of the Keo satellite?’
She shook her head.
Rocco was becoming increasingly agitated, glancing at Ruby, at his watch, at his equipment, at the sky, and back at the machines again.
‘It’s like the Sphinx scrolls you found,’ he said without taking his eyes off one of the screens. He had unknowingly turned on a blender in her gut and failed to notice that she grabbed her belly. ‘They were a message from the past, in a time capsule. The European Space Agency is doing the same thing. We’re sending a capsule into the future. Not using time travel, of course, but by placing it in a high orbit that will take fifty thousand years to decay, at which point it will fall to earth. The capsule contains millions of pages of learning and culture, like a modern library of Alexandria. There is a diamond containing a drop of human blood and the DNA of the human genome. There are samples of air, sea water and soil. Fifty thousand years might seem a long way off, but it has a symbolic aspect. It was five hundred centuries ago that our ancestors began to experiment with cave paintings. So we are mid-way between those first artists and the people who will receive our capsule. And encoded in radiation-resistant glass DVDs – along with instructions on how to build a DVD reader – are personal messages from people all over the world. One of those messages is a simple request that the people of the future acknowledge receipt of the capsule. That’s why we’re here.’
She breathed deeply and calmed her inner turbulence.
‘And when did you launch this time capsule?’ she asked.
‘Oh, not yet. There’s been a few delays.’
She stared at him, looking for a sign that this was the second practical joke he’d pulled since her arrival. Nothing beyond wide-eyed enthusiasm was on display.
‘So let me see if I understand this,’ she sighed. ‘You’re here because you’re looking for an indication that someone who hasn’t yet been born has received something that hasn’t yet been sent?’ Rocco showed no reaction. ‘Ca
n you see one or two potential flaws in that ambition?’
‘No, no, it’s perfectly simple. Backwards time travel isn’t really possible right now,’ explained Rocco, ‘but in fifty thousand years they’ll have all kinds of new technology. Time travel could be feasible. We haven’t asked for a person to be sent back in time. We’re looking for light photons or a radioactive signature in the air. Something that’s a bit easier to work with at a quantum level.’
‘Matt said you were developing a new branch of archaeology, though. Can we talk about that instead?’
‘We are.’
‘Looking for lights in the sky is not archaeology, Rocco.’
‘I like to call it the archaeology of the future, instead of the past.’
‘How is that supposed to make any sense?’ she asked, barely hiding her frustration. ‘This is pseudo-science. Fantasising. Daydreaming.’
To Ruby’s surprise, Rocco nodded in agreement. The dreamy side of his nature often conflicted with the science that defined his usual work at the European Space Agency, but he never regarded it as an obstacle. If men hadn’t dreamed about travelling to the moon, he would tell himself, they wouldn’t have designed the technology and overcome the necessary scientific challenges to get there. Dreams dictate the future, he would say to critics who questioned the dedication with which he would follow peculiar conspiracies and outlandish theories. When accused of having a vivid or overworked imagination he would thank them. There was so much about the world, about humanity and about the universe that was yet to be discovered that he refused to close his mind to anything. All bets were on until proved otherwise. The impossible often turned out to be possible after a few years. He was proud to be a scientist, and equally proud to be a fantasist, and regarded himself as being at the cutting edge of the present, spearheading the way forward into tomorrow.
‘Thank you, Ruby, but there is actually a more pressing question that you have yet to ask.’
If this was the archaeology she had travelled all this way to hear about, she had no desire to ask any more questions. Her instinct had been right. Matt was an idiot, screwing up her life even when he wasn’t in it, sending her on a wild-goose chase to a meeting with a crazy German space scientist. If the taxi driver had waited she would have left that instant, but she knew he wouldn’t be back until her hour was up. She glanced down the hillside at the car park below on the off-chance that he might have changed his mind, but there was only the gazebo containing the official chrononauts and a few cars, plus the driver of the Spanish-registered car she had seen earlier who seemed to be skulking around the other vehicles. Escape was still not an option. She might as well indulge her intellectual curiosity.
The Dali Diaries (The Ballashiels Mysteries Book 2) Page 1