Exiting the barrier with a yawn, and to the obvious relief of the guard, he waited at the rear of the room for Ruby to satisfy her curiosity about the view from the top of the steps. His ennui with the mind-mangling visual anarchy of Dalí’s surrealism gave him a yearning to sit again, but other than the apparently out-of-bounds sofa there was nowhere suitable. In his peripheral vision, he sensed a dark table behind him in a far corner, an original Dalí work, out of sight of the security man. With a surreptitious wriggle, he reversed himself onto it, then jumped off immediately in a state of guilty panic. The table was bent down the centre, a shallow valley with its nadir precisely where he had sat. Convinced that he had cracked a priceless museum piece he sidled silently to the side, forced once again to stand in discomfort. It was as if the museum was determined to torture any visitor who lacked an appreciation of the works of this twentieth-century eccentric.
‘It really does look like her,’ called Ruby from the top of the steps, having waited patiently for her turn.
‘Like who?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Charlie, who do you think? I can see a perfect likeness of Mae West through the lens up here. There’s her hair, lips, nose, eyes. It’s amazing.’
Charlie was ready to climb the steps after Ruby to see what the fuss was all about, but was distracted from doing so by something clamping itself around his ankle. He looked down and saw a human hand. Was it part of the installation? Was he being seduced by another portion of this representation of Mae West? Perhaps this Dalí guy was cooler than he’d originally thought. Might even be worth delaying that drink for a few more minutes.
The hand pulled harder. Then a man’s face appeared from behind a black door in a black wall. Charlie assumed the face and the hand were connected and concluded that this was not good. His attempt to kick the face with his free leg was thwarted by a second hand and the frustrated momentum of his defensive action almost toppled him.
‘Don’t move,’ said the face.
‘Rocco?’ asked Charlie.
The door swished and in a moment Charlie found himself on the other side, blinking at a brightly lit, emerald paradise of plastic ivy and fake palms entwined around a double bed in which Rocco had plainly spent the night.
‘Is anyone following you?’ Rocco whispered, scrambling to his feet.
‘You owe Ruby ten Euros, dude.’
‘Huh?’
‘She picked up your tab at the English pub last night. After you swam off in the marina.’
‘I think I know who is after me,’ Rocco rasped, signalling for Charlie to come closer while he produced some cash from his pocket.
‘Don’t worry about the tip.’
‘I only have a twenty.’
‘No problem. Anyone tell you your brakes were cut?’
Charlie pocketed the money.
The furrows in Rocco’s usual paranoid expression stretched to valleys of dumbfounded horror.
‘Don’t look like that,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s not that bad. I’m sure Ruby will give you change.’
‘No, it is not the money. Someone has tried to kill me.’
‘Yes, I know. I thought you knew that when you ran into the marina.’
‘I believed it, but I didn’t know it. They are different things. All my life I’ve believed in conspiracies, investigated mysteries, assumed everyone was out to get me. Most of it was fantasy. I guess I’m built that way. I need to feel there’s a subtext to my life. I need to read between the lines, make two and two equal five.’
‘Didn’t think you could get a science doctorate with math like that, dude.’
‘No, you’re not understanding me. The conspiracy is real. There’s a threat to my life. You think I swam off into the night for fun? I had to make sure no one knew where I was heading.’
‘Which was where, dude?’
‘Here. To the Dalí museum, of course, Charlie. I broke in and spent the night looking for answers.’
‘Why here? There’s not even a bar in this place.’
‘I don’t know yet, but somehow Salvador Dalí is connected to all this.’
‘All this what?’ asked Charlie.
‘Project Keo. The Chronodrome experiment. I know it’s impossible. Dalí died years before the project was even conceived. And yet there’s something linking him. I looked all over the place last night. Didn’t get the answers I needed. Just got more questions.’
‘So you’re saying you’re scared of a dead painter?’
‘I’m serious, Charlie. Someone is targeting me. And you and Ruby could be on the hit list too.’
‘But I’ve got nothing to do with anything. Nor has Rubes.’
‘I was there on the hill with Ruby at the Chronodrome experiment. Looking for the sign from the future. Waiting for the acknowledgement that the Keo time capsule was safely received and opened by our descendants. And you’ve been seen with us since. You’re in it as deep as me. And it’s going to get deeper.’
‘How come?’
‘Keo is the reason we’re all at risk.’
‘I still don’t get it. Why are me and Rubes involved?’
‘Trust me. You’re both in this. Your lives are in danger.’
‘Huh?’
The ensuing clarification triggered a bout of unsympathetic mirth that made Charlie’s fat wobble uncontrollably.
‘Don’t you see, Charlie? Someone from the future is trying to kill us.’
***
The Regency teacup rattled on its saucer as if the library at Stiperstones Manor were experiencing a mild earthquake. Warm Darjeeling spilled down the cup’s hand-painted sides. Rather than fulfilling its intended function as an alleviator of distress, the beverage played the unwelcome role of reminding its holder of just how shaken he was.
‘I don’t frighten easily,’ lied Ratty. He put down the chattering cup and stretched his arms as if to banish the tremors from his soul. He wanted to recover, to show the Patient he possessed inner strength, to prove to them both that he was not beaten.
‘Yes you do.’
Ratty grabbed the cup – this time with two hands – and took a slurp. The chemicals in the tea instantly soothed him. He was now slightly less annoyed with his friend.
‘Tosh and splosh,’ he said, showing the Patient a steadier hand than the one he had moments ago possessed. ‘Perhaps we could move on from this discussion of the limitations of my anatomy and address the rather more exigent matter of the failure of the braking system of my poor upturned Land Rover?’
‘I noticed a patch of oily fluid on the ground beneath the vehicle,’ said the Patient.
‘Amongst all those weeds in the ditch?’
‘No. I mean the ground upon which it was parked outside the house.’
‘You saw leaking brake fluid before we tootled off? And you didn’t care to impart this factual nugget?’ Ratty didn’t do angry, but his mild displeasure was obvious.
‘I told you the journey was unwise.’
‘A two-thousand-year-old quotation from Marcus Tullius Cicero can hardly be regarded as a succinct warning of our impending catastrophe.’
‘Again, I have to tell you that you are deviating from that which is significant,’ said the Patient.
‘I conject that your knowledge that we were going to crash was not entirely lacking in significance.’
‘What mattered then matters not now. What matters now matters now.’
‘Well I’m so relieved that you have cleared that up for me, Patient chappy.’
‘What matters now is why the braking system failed. The Land Rover is of an age that puts into question its mechanical reliability, but the presence last night of uninvited guests in the estate is a coincidence that cannot be ignored.’
‘You think someone performed an impromptu vasectomy on the old brake pipes?’
‘It is a conclusion supported by the circumstantial evidence, and a brief inspection of the chassis will be sufficient to confirm the hypothesis. I have already called for a mobile
mechanic to assess the damage and repair the vehicle for you. He says it will be mended this morning. A clean cut of the pipes is quicker to fix than a hidden leak, he told me. Whether this vandalism is linked to the theft of the collection of Timothy Lea novels from the gamekeeper’s cottage is, however, a matter of conjecture.’
‘Timothy Lea?’ asked Ratty. ‘The Confessions of a wotnot and all that? You didn’t mention that before.’
‘They were absent this morning,’ replied the Patient. ‘That is all I know.’
Ratty picked up the teacup and saucer again, irritated to note that the two items appeared to be vibrating. He drank quickly, finishing the tea.
‘Perhaps another cup?’ he mumbled, placing the items back on the coffee table in embarrassment before unsteadily pouring a refill from the pot. ‘I’ve done nothing,’ he bemoaned. ‘Nothing to trigger anyone’s disquietude. Nothing to niggle the neighbours. Nothing to incommode the commoners.’ He realised he was talking drivel, once again smothering his fears with a mouthful of poetic nonsense. He stopped talking and took a measured breath.
‘No man is without sin,’ said the Patient.
‘Well quite,’ replied Ratty, attempting to choose words that might be considered more or less normal. ‘But all I’ve done recently is open grandmother’s empty room.’
‘Against her strict instructions.’
‘More of a taboo, really. She did warn in rather stringent terms against anyone opening it, it has to be said, but the waffle and wotnot about the dark consequences of breaking the taboo was a mere theatrical flourish.’ Ratty sounded unconvinced by his own disregard for the warnings.
‘No one besides you and I know about it,’ said the Patient, ‘apart from anyone with whom you may have communicated during your visit to the house of Edward James at West Dean. If there is a connection between your entry to the forbidden room, the intruders last night, the theft of those books and the failure of the Land Rover’s brakes, it might logically emanate from your visit to West Dean. Your visit may have triggered a response from parties unknown.’
‘Goodness.’
‘And if we accept all the foregoing linked theories, then your quest to understand more about your grandmother’s connections with Dalí could be more important than you realise.’
‘Heavens.’
‘And that brings me to the subject of the chocolate wrapper. Prior to the arrival of our uninvited guests last night we established that the item may have been left there as a deliberate message referring to Dalí, contemporaneous with your mother’s vanishing. So we have two possible links with Dalí. What publications do you have in this library relating to Dalí? I’m only interested in those that have been here since before 1975.’
‘That would be all of them,’ Ratty answered, standing up and pointing to a section of shelf that featured books relating to artists of the twentieth century. The five volumes of Dalí materials sat together. ‘I’ve read them all, over the years. There’s nothing in them about my family.’
‘Reading one book at a time cannot always give the full picture,’ said the Patient, proceeding to remove all five. He placed them on Ratty’s desk and returned to the shelf which now sported a noticeable gap. He looked closely at the space, and invited a confused Ratty to do likewise.
‘I say, what’s that?’ Ratty asked.
‘That,’ replied the Patient, is what you miss when you only remove one book at a time. Take out the collection and a section of wall is revealed. In this case, there appears to be an envelope taped to it.’
Ratty ran his fingers across the yellowed Sellotape that held the envelope vertically to the wall. It peeled away easily. He extracted the envelope and was disgusted to notice that his hands had assumed an involuntary tremble once again. Looking into the Patient’s eyes he expected to see a spark of enthusiasm willing him to open it, but there was nothing but calm indifference.
‘If this is anything to do with Grandmother and her Dalínian sense of humour, it’s probably a blank piece of paper inside,’ Ratty said.
Still no sign of encouragement from his friend. It was as if he had served his purpose in making the deductive connections necessary to find the envelope and had since lost interest in the subject. Ratty sat at his desk and toyed with his discovery. The desire to open it pecked at him from within, restrained only by his dread of the information it might contain. If this was his grandmother’s explanation for the empty room, then he would be fine with that, it might even help him understand the peculiar events of the past night. But if it were his mother’s final goodbye to him, how would he react to that? His gut feeling told him that it was more likely to date from his mother’s era than his grandmother’s, owing to the relatively modern design of the envelope and the use of sticky tape. Plus, of course, the possibility that the chocolate wrapper was indeed a clue intended to point its discoverer to this spot. A lump lodged itself in his throat; his eyes filled with moisture, blurring his vision. He fumbled for his letter-opening knife and cut a neat slit across the top.
Inside was a single sheet of paper. He pulled it out and unfolded it. The page had been written by hand in an elegant, but hurried, calligraphy. He wiped his eyes in order to focus on the words. Reading the entire document took only a few seconds. He glanced at the Patient.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Not again.’
***
Charlie emerged from Rocco’s hideout at the rear of the Mae West installation. Very little that Rocco had told him made any sense, and he instantly discarded the revelations from his mind. The German scientist refused to show his paranoid face in public, so Charlie left him behind and went in search of Ruby.
There was no sign of her in the vicinity. Charlie puffed his way through long, curving corridors lined with priceless paintings. He trudged up and down stairs between the different levels of the museum. Phoning her was not an option: she was sensible enough never to have given him her number. Such information in his possession, he knew, would be abused. The price he now had to pay for her wise caution was an exhausting search on foot.
Back at the vestibule that marked the museum entrance, Charlie nipped out to check if Ruby was hanging around in the plaza outside the museum. Hundreds of people were still waiting in line to get in, but Ruby was nowhere. He looked up at the geodesic cupola that capped the Dalí museum’s roof – the grand architectural feature had gone unnoticed by him when he had arrived with Ruby; in her presence he only had eyes for her. He looked at the wall studded with representations of bread loaves and topped with giant eggs – equally new to him. This place was just as bizarre on the outside as within. He overheard an American tourist reading aloud from a leaflet that the building was the town’s former theatre, originally constructed in the nineteenth century and destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. It had lain in ruins for decades until Dalí converted it into his personal museum and shrine in the Seventies. With a yawn, Charlie returned to the entrance.
The main door through which he had slipped outside was blocked by a lady official asking to see his ticket. He tapped his pockets and recalled that Ruby had paid to get him and her students inside. The tickets were somewhere inside her leather satchel, he realised, hanging from her kissable shoulder. The woman pointed at the line of people behind Charlie. It snaked across the square and out of sight around the corner. Hundreds of tourists were fanning themselves in the warmth of the morning and admiring – during the hour or more it had so far taken them to queue for tickets – a peculiar statue erected by Dalí for just such a purpose.
Charlie was morally opposed to queuing. He scouted for the main exit, which he found in a nearby side street.
Security at the museum’s back door consisted of a bespectacled guard whose extremes of height and girth gave him a menacing aura. He wore a white shirt with badges and logos sewn on to its short sleeves. Around his waist was a sturdy belt that carried the weight not only of his black trousers but also a pistol, a walkie-talkie and a baton.
Behind thi
s sole official was a set of glass doors which could only be opened from within. Hardly Fort Knox, Charlie told himself. He retreated to a doorway further along the street from which he could observe the exit. Tourists walked out through the glass doors in an almost continuous trickle, carrying bags of souvenir books that would never be read. Some acknowledged the guard as they passed; most ignored him. Finally, a tired family laden with Dalí-branded carrier bags stopped and asked the guard to take a photo of them together. Charlie edged closer. The guard struggled to connect his bulbous fingers with the delicate controls of the camera. His distraction from his duty was total. Charlie strolled past, unnoticed, and approached the glass doors, inserting his arm as they opened to allow a pair of tourists to exit.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘left something inside.’ He squeezed through and moments later stood in the museum’s gift shop. Dalí trinkets and gifts of all varieties surrounded him in a surreal nightmare of complex juxtaposition. He felt like he had stepped into one of the weird paintings for which the museum was famous. But at least he had entered the building: no queuing; no paying. Exactly the way things ought to be.
Unlike the hand of authority he now felt upon his shoulder.
It was a weighty, bloated hand. Its tubular fingers were not unlike Charlie’s own. With nowhere to run, not to mention a complete inability to propel himself at more than a waddle, Charlie turned round to face the consequences of his cheeky disdain for waiting in line.
The guard was taller, rounder, hairier, sweatier, and angrier than Charlie. The specifics of the guard’s verbal torrent eluded the American, but the gist was clear: Charlie was in trouble. His offer of a stale donut to the arresting official was not taken in a manner that seemed likely to help his situation: the grim expression fixed upon the guard’s curvaceous face did not crack. The humourless man shoved Charlie down a staircase and into a corridor beyond the reach of the public, where the walls were entirely devoid of Dalínian artistry. No one will hear me scream down here, thought Charlie.
The official unlocked an unmarked door and nudged his captive inside, confiscating his bag of donuts before swiftly securing the room once more from without. Charlie was alone in a small, windowless, basement meeting room. The floor and walls were tiled with white marble, creating a sense of cold sterility that made Charlie think of abattoirs and morgues. He shivered, and wondered if he was about to experience mind games and physical torture in a prison cell deep beneath the bowels of the building.
The Dali Diaries (The Ballashiels Mysteries Book 2) Page 5