The rattle of a large collection of keys broke his reverie. The lock turned.
The man who entered the room was dressed immaculately in a fancy white suit, which, Charlie noted, was reassuringly free of bloodstains. Besides, he was an old man with pale skin and grey hair. As he sat down at the table, Charlie’s torture worries evaporated. All he had done was to sneak into the gift shop, after all. They probably wanted to give him a boring lecture and then send him on his way. Piece of cake.
‘So,’ said the old man, his straight nose appearing to point accusingly at Charlie.
‘Uhuh,’ said Charlie.
‘You have come fresh from New York and London?’
Charlie couldn’t place the accent. It didn’t seem to belong anywhere. There was nothing Spanish about it, nor was it American English or pure British English.
‘Er, sure,’ replied Charlie, sniffing his armpit. ‘Not so sure about the fresh thing, though.’
‘You think this is funny? You think this is a joke?’ The old man’s face was drained of expression, devoid of any hint of joie de vivre.
‘If it helps get this over with, I’m real sorry. And it’s not funny. Sir.’
‘Nothing can help you now,’ said the old man. ‘Your illicit entry to our museum was spotted by several of our hidden video cameras. Ever since New York and London we have been expecting you.’
‘You have?’
‘Although I did not think you would be so incompetent. So blatant. So stupid this time.’
‘That’s kinda the way I roll, dude.’
‘What happened to the last one that you stole?’
‘That I stole?’ Charlie tried to think back to when he had last outwitted an assistant in a branch of Dunkin’ Donuts. ‘Oh come on, man, that wasn’t even in this country.’
‘I know that. I just want to know what you did with it.’
‘What do you think I did with it? Stuck it up my ass?’
‘You did that?’
‘No, of course not, dude. I ate it.’
The old man’s skin turned even paler.
***
The texture of the door was a source of endless enthralment. The Patient ran his smooth hands across the cracked oak panels, sensing the embellished edges, tickling the exposed head of a nail, enjoying the looseness of the white porcelain handle. All of which was terribly off-putting for Ratty, who, currently on the other side of the door in question, was unable to convey his preference for privacy due to the unceasing flow of tears that drowned his face and choked his throat.
He had history here. This lavatory had been his frequent refuge in the difficult months he had endured after his mother’s vanishing. He had lined its walls with photographs, water colours and oil portraits of her, and he had maintained this quirky shrine ever since. The servants had pretended not to know he was there, indulging his need to be alone with his misery, his confusion, and his books. He would focus diligently in his efforts to transport his soul to another world, to be absorbed into a fiction in which he could escape the torpor of Stiperstones in mourning. Sucked for hours at a time into stories by Dickens or Wodehouse in particular, he sidestepped the grieving and delayed coming to terms with his situation.
The sight of his mother’s handwriting had triggered a disturbing regression to a state of mind that he had hoped never again to inhabit. The letter reconnected him to the past, a direct line to the moment his world flipped inside-out and ceased to make sense. He tried to zone out, recalling the mental tricks that he had developed as his childhood emergency exit from misery, but with the Patient’s ceaseless fiddling with the door his efforts were fruitless. At length, he gave up, wiped his face, and released the sliding bolt.
‘Come on, old pumpkin,’ snivelled Ratty. ‘Let’s see if we can deduce what meaning Her Ladyship was attempting to impart. Right now, it makes no sense.’ He had been presented with this kind of obscure communication before, and wondered what it was about women that made them want to use literary quotations instead of saying what they meant.
He blew his nose into a piece of toilet roll as he led the Patient along the dark and dusty corridors back to the library, where he laid the letter flat upon the desk and stared blurrily at it. When no meaning jumped off the page he cleared his throat and read the first line aloud.
‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.’
‘Indeed,’ said the Patient. ‘And what does it say on the letter?’
‘I say, that wasn’t … you’re not … I mean, have you discovered a funny bone in that skeleton of yours?’
The Patient exhibited a flawless smile.
‘It is a mirth-inducing formula which I have been meaning for some time to attempt. I hope it triggered within you a detectable degree of merriment.’
‘Well I don’t think Richard Gervais will be overly concerned,’ said Ratty, secretly appreciating this wooden attempt to lift his mood. ‘Now. The quotation. Sounds somewhat on the Sterne side to me; Larry, if I’m not barking up the wrong bird in the bush.’
‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Laurence Sterne.’
‘Agreed. But so what? Is it a code?’
‘A code?’
‘I think this room has an echo,’ said Ratty, vainly attempting to distract himself from the ache in his heart with fake joviality. The Patient regarded him blankly. ‘By a code,’ he continued, ‘I mean, perhaps, taking the first letter of each word and seeing if it says something rather jolly clever. In this case, you could spell L.O.T.S.’
‘Lots?’
‘Well, if you use some of the words and ignore the others. Hmm. Perhaps we should look at the second quotation?’
‘It has turned out fortunate for me today that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn to be my birthplace.’
‘Ah,’ sighed the Patient, ‘the opening line of a tome that is rather uncomfortably close to my own family history.’
‘Mein Kampf, by a familiar fellow who only had one. No obvious clues there, as far as one can tell. Don’t recall Mother ever mentioning a proclivity towards National Socialism. And she hated bratwurst. Let’s try the next one. Appears to have been scribed by an author with many qualities similar to the previous fellow. Strong. Opinionated. Unlikely to win Moustache of the Year competition.
‘Greer?’
Ratty nodded assent and read the quote:
‘It is true that the sex of a person is attested by every cell in his body.’
‘The Female Eunuch,’ confirmed the Patient. ‘An essential manual for comprehending the incomprehensible workings of the female.’
‘Still not enlightening the mysterious matter at hand, however. The next one is clearly from Virginia Woolf.’
‘“Yes of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” said Mrs Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.’
‘To the Lighthouse, of course,’ said the Patient.
‘But we don’t have a lighthouse.’
‘Was that a humorous construct?’ enquired the Patient after a momentary silence.
The two friends stared at each other. Other than establishing the existence of a nascent sense of humour in the Guatemalan and confirming a shared knowledge of literature broad enough to shame a university lecturer, they had not arrived at even the most tenuous interpretation of the letter. Even the infinite wisdom of the Patient had yet to produce a theory. The sheet of paper contained two more quotes. Without optimism, Ratty read out the next lines from his mother’s handwriting.
‘When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared around them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.’
‘Hardy,’ said the Patient.
‘Mayor of Casterbridge?’
‘Far From the Ma
dding Crowd.’
‘Of course. Hardy’s openings often put one in a discombobulatory state. Any clues therein, Patient chappy?’
‘Sometimes it is necessary to look without in order to see within,’ he replied, obtusely.
Ratty glanced at the window before settling his eyes upon the final quotation on the page.
‘At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the preceding pages, he did a thing which, if the whole town was to be believed, was even more hazardous than his trip across the mountains infested with bandits.’
‘A translation, I presume?’
‘Gosh. Not sure. Doesn’t read like an opening sentence.’
‘Are you in possession of a conveniently situated computer?’
Ratty slid an unfashionably bulbous laptop from inside a drawer and placed it on the desk adjacent to the letter. He fussed with cables and sockets and began the lengthy process of booting the machine.
‘Confounded contraption,’ he moaned as he typed the full sentence in his browser’s search box. An antiquated modem made a series of clicks and whirrs that formed a most agreeable tune to the unjaded ears of the Patient. A minute later a connection had been made and a page began slowly to form upon the screen. Pixel by pixel the screen morphed into recognisable words.
‘And we have a match,’ Ratty declared. ‘You were right about the translation thing. Victor Hugo. Les Mis. And it’s not the opening, but Chapter Ten of the first book.’
He closed the lid of the laptop and returned his attention to the letter with the six short quotations. The Patient was staring at the bookshelves, as if no longer interested in the mystery of the letter.
‘So, we have six books,’ said Ratty, starting at the only facts of which he was certain.
‘We do not,’ replied the Patient.
‘I’m pretty sure it was six,’ sighed Ratty. ‘Tristram Shandy, Mein Kampf, The Female Eunuch, To the Lighthouse, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Les Mis. Count them. We have six books.’
‘We do not,’ repeated his irritating friend. The Patient pulled selected volumes from the shelf, matching the list of titles Ratty had just recited, with the exception of one. ‘Five of the six books are present in this library. One is missing. See? Where is The Female Eunuch?’
‘But the clues are inherent in the words, are they not?’ asked Ratty. ‘What use is the actual book anyway?’
‘Until a search is complete a man cannot truly know what he had been searching for.’
Ratty picked up Hitler’s hardback rantings and flicked through its demented pages. There were no markings inside it save for the letter ‘W’, which was inscribed in the margin beside the opening line in a type of calligraphy that matched his mother’s writing style in the letter. His face lit up.
‘Patient chappy, look.’
They flicked open the remaining books in rapid succession. Further inscriptions were located adjacent to the words quoted in Ratty’s mother’s list. They now had a series of letters: ‘E’, ‘R’, ‘W’ and two instances of ‘L’. Without the sixth book, there was no way to know what the final letter would have been. When the Patient enquired as to its fate, Ratty looked sheepish.
‘Jumble sale,’ he mumbled. ‘Church fête last year. A boy scout chap came asking for donations for the book stall. Dib-dib-dib and wotnot. The Female Eunuch was the only tome with which I could bear to part.’
‘We have to find who bought it,’ said the Patient.
‘There are no official records of that sort of thing, don’t you know? A jumble sale is a most unbureaucratic affair. But one does have an inkling of where to begin such a search.’
‘Where?’
‘The only spinster in the village.’
***
‘Follow me,’ warbled Rocco with a nervous vibrato in his voice. He grabbed a length of tattered tow rope from the boot and walked in impatient circles around Ruby’s Volvo, shaking his arms as if limbering up for a sporting event. ‘Hurry, before anyone sees us.’
‘Hold on, Rocco. I need to check the handbrake is working. If the car rolls from here it goes straight over the cliffs into the sea.’
Satisfied that the car was secure, Ruby climbed out of the driving seat and looked around. Cap Creus was a barren outcrop, just a few miles from Dalí’s birthplace at Cadaqués. It was the easternmost end of the Pyrenees mountain range, the point at which sea smashed against granite. No one lived here. This isolated promontory offered spectacular vistas across the Mediterranean, but the price for that clarity of view was the merciless tramontana wind that could blow for days at a time with the strength of a hurricane. It was only thirty minutes’ drive from the Dalí Museum at Figueres, but to Ruby it felt like she had arrived on another world.
‘Come on, Ruby. It’s this way,’ said Rocco, skidding down a steep incline towards what appeared to be a lethal drop onto the rocks of the bay. ‘Be quick. I don’t want to be seen.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want them to kill me, remember?’
‘Oh yes, your conspiracy obsession. I almost forgot about that. Well, there’s no one here.’ She looked around at a landscape devoid of human life. ‘In fact,’ she continued as she tried to follow him, ‘there’s nothing here at all.’
‘On the surface there is nothing. It is what lies beneath that I want to show you.’
‘But this has never been an inhabited area. Conditions are too harsh to form settlements. Communities only form around places of shelter, usually with fresh water and fertile soils. It’s not a good place to start looking for archaeological remains.’
‘I agree. Come on.’
‘I hope you’re not thinking of tying me up with that rope.’
‘Any more silly questions and I might be tempted!’ he replied, with a mischievous grin.
Hiding from Charlie in the Mae West room at the museum had seemed like a good idea to Ruby an hour previously. As soon as she had lost sight of him she had ducked beneath the steps of the room’s viewing platform and waited for him to leave. Her plan backfired immediately. As soon as Charlie left the installation in search of her, Rocco had emerged and lured her away with enticing tales of a buried treasure of such immeasurable value that it was worth abandoning her responsibility to her indifferent students.
As Rocco tied the rope around a lump of rock and started to lower himself over the edge she began to sense an imminent anticlimax.
‘Why did I let you ruin my time at the Dalí museum for this?’ she called.
‘Believe me. It gets boring when you spend the whole night there.’
‘I barely had an hour. And when are you going to tell me why you were hiding out in the museum, Rocco?’
‘Forget the museum,’ said Rocco. ‘It is merely a front.’
‘A front for what?’
‘You’ll see. When I reach that ledge, I want you to take this rope and climb down.’
‘You must be kidding,’ objected Ruby, looking down at the frayed rope from which Rocco was partly suspended. ‘I’ll go back to the car and wait for you.’
‘You have to trust me, Ruby. This cave is important. Its contents will astound you. It could change everything.’
Within his words Ruby detected a suggestion of pride. What he could be proud of she had yet to ascertain. It plainly wasn’t his ability to keep out of trouble. She glanced beneath her. Rocco was now on a ledge about twenty feet below her, and at least twice that distance above a grumbling sea. He released the rope and signalled for her to begin the short descent.
She sat on the edge and studied the terrain. There were hand and foot holds here and there. It looked feasible to make the climb without the rope, and Rocco had only intended to use it as a safety measure. She could do this, she told herself. Her Altberg walking boots could take the strain. Her hands were tough enough to cling to the rocks and the rope. Three points of contact at all times, she reminded herself. Stick to that rule and she would be fine.
Grabbing th
e rope with both hands she eased herself over the edge and utterly failed to find a foothold. She was left dangling in mid-air above a shoreline that threatened to break her into tiny pieces.
‘To your right,’ called Rocco. ‘There’s a place for your foot. And put your left hand in that cavity.’
She found the holds and caught her breath, suppressing the sense of embarrassment at her incompetence. Don’t look down, she told herself. Just find somewhere for a foot or a hand, one inch at a time.
‘That’s good,’ said Rocco. ‘I know it’s a little rough, but it will be worth it, I promise.’
He guided her down the final few feet to the ledge and gave her a moment to compose herself.
‘That wasn’t so bad,’ she said.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘The hard bit is getting back up again.’
She considered whether now might be an appropriate time to slap him, but given their precarious situation she chose to delay retribution. Rocco sidled past her to the inner recess of the ledge and pointed his arm into a vertical fissure in the rock. It scarcely seemed possible that this was the entrance to a cave; from the front it was almost entirely invisible. Turning himself side-on, he breathed in hard and squeezed through the fissure.
Ruby stood alone on the ledge wondering about health and safety. Her head was still sore from the incident with the stone goddess. Should they be wearing protective hardhats in the cave? Was this gap in the mountain stable? Could the sides close in behind them, trapping them for eternity beneath millions of tons of Pyrenean stone? Having to turn sideways to squeeze into a mountain triggered a sense of claustrophobia beyond that of digging in tight trenches –and she had more curves to cram into that space than Rocco – but she felt there was no viable alternative. Sometimes you just have to go for it, she decided, sliding uncomfortably through the fissure and into a cavern.
The Dali Diaries (The Ballashiels Mysteries Book 2) Page 6