Ancient Images (33 page)

    

    

    So she had to go to Redfield after all. If necessary, she would have to block the road where it descended into the copse. She felt spiky with anger and frustration, but all the same, she had to be grateful to the police: at least Roger ought to be in no danger while they were near. Surely he was in no danger anyway; surely if he was suspected he would have been dropped by now. He must have realized that he needed to avoid sounding like her. She turned the car and drove south, feeling more watched than ever, even when the police were well over the horizon. At least she would be able to tell Roger when they next met that she had Giles Spence's film.

    She found a phone box in a village so small it could barely have freckled the map, and called Norman Ross's son. "I'm in your part of the country earlier than I expected. I'm sorry it's such short notice, but I wondered…"

    "I assure you, the sooner you relieve us of this legacy the happier I'll be. When had you in mind?"

    "Would today be inconvenient?"

    "Not unbearably. If you can be here at least half an hour before the bank closes, that will be appreciated."

    "I'll do my best."

    "Then that must suffice." As soon as he had told her how to find him he broke the connection, presumably to start her on her way. The weeks-old comments in the
Daily
Friend
must have made him nervous about the film, she thought, but there was no longer any reason for them to trouble her.

    She drove northwest to Lincoln. The cathedral rose over the horizon like a stone crown for the fields of wheat. Soon she saw a ruined Norman castle above steep streets the color of the fields. There were Roman ruins too, and the sight of them beyond the wheat reminded her uncomfortably of the Roman account of the history of Redfield. She would be there ahead of Roger, she vowed, and just now she was here on his behalf as much as on her own.

    She drove across a bridge above clattering trains and turned toward the river. A side street almost choked with students slowed her down. The river flashed in her mirror, and ahead of her she saw the insurance broker's she was looking for. As she parked, her tires bumping the curb, a tall potbellied man with a long face whose mouth drooped toward his pointed chin darted out of the broker's. "You mustn't park there," he announced.

    "I'm picking someone up from your office."

    "Miss Allan? In that case, ignore the line." He called "I'll be an hour or less" to a colleague, and sidled into the passenger seat. "Please, drive. I'll tell you where."

    He directed her through Lincoln, past cobbled streets of houses that looked old as the Redfield chapel. "I was sorry to hear about your father," Sandy said.

    "Ah, well. He'd about run his course. He still had his imagination, but not the use of his hands. The industry had put him out to pasture in favor of younger technicians such as yourself. I haven't inherited his imagination, and I won't pretend I wish I had."

    "That's obvious."

    "Turn left here. I wouldn't care to die as he did."

    Another cobbled street drifted by like a steep shadow full of houses carved with symbols secretive with age. "How was that?" Sandy said, wishing that he wouldn't make her ask while she was driving.

    "Of his nerves. I can only conclude he felt guilty about possessing this film but couldn't bring himself to destroy what might be the sole surviving copy. Once he'd gone I considered destroying it myself. I would have if it hadn't been for his express wish that you should be told."

    "I'm sorry I couldn't have taken the film away sooner."

    "So am I," he said, so coldly he seemed to be blaming her rather than himself. "He spent his last days in a panic convinced he was being watched. Here, park here."

    Sandy drove into the car park and backed into a space, her hands nervous on the wheel. "Watched by whom, do you know?"

    "By his own doubts, I imagine. Possibly by his memories. He claimed he'd felt spied on while he was helping edit the film, though I don't know how much credence that warrants. My wife had to ask him to keep his fears to himself, because he was upsetting our small daughter. Toward the end he wouldn't have her pet dog anywhere near him. We had to stop the child from going in his room, because he started saying that a dog or some such thing came into the room at night and watched him, stood at the foot of the bed all night with its paws on the rail. I'm afraid his imagination was quite out of control. During the last week, for some reason, he wouldn't even have flowers in the room. This is the bank."

    The interior of the building was so much newer than the exterior that it felt intrusive and unreal. Ross marched to an information window and thumbed a button while Sandy followed him, trailing questions which she could hardly ask him in the bank and which made her uneasy about framing them at all. An official came to the window and recognized Ross and the key in his hand. When the official opened a security door Sandy started forward, but Ross frowned curtly at her. "We won't be long."

    Sandy sat on a straight chair at a table with a blotter, on which someone had doodled a rudimentary face almost buried in a tangle of scribbling. A queue shuffled forward as tellers lit up their signs, a typewriter clacked like impatient claws. Sooner than she expected, Ross appeared beyond the thick glass door, his arms laden with a cardboard carton. As she stood up, his companion glanced toward her. For a moment she thought he was looking behind her, or at something she had dropped under the table, but all she could see there was a deep rectangular shadow. She hurried forward as the door buzzed open. "We'll go straight to your car," Ross muttered.

    He mustn't want to be seen with the film. His secretiveness made her peer warily about the car park. He trudged to the rear of the car and waited truculently for her to unlock the boot. As soon as he'd dumped the carton into it he wiped his hands on a handkerchief. His palms must be damp with exertion, of course.

    Sandy gazed at the squat square carton sealed with heavy tape. It was big enough to contain two cans of film, but she had a sudden grotesque thought: what if after all her searching the carton proved to be empty, or full of something else entirely? She would have opened it there and then if Ross hadn't been drumming one heel nervously on the concrete. She slammed the lid of the boot and climbed into her seat and eased the car forward, anxious not to run over the stray animal which had just dodged behind the vehicles next to hers. "I'll drop you at your office, shall I?" she said.

    "I thought you might want to make sure this film is what it's claimed to be."

    He sounded resentful. "I will as soon as I can," Sandy assured him.

    "Then assuming you've nothing better to do, it may as well be now. A friend of my late father's is renovating a cinema and used to let him watch films there. I spoke to him after you called. He'll put on the film for you."

    "I thought nobody outside your family knew about it except me."

    "Apparently my late father let him into the secret, and he's been hungry for a viewing ever since. Of course he was sworn to secrecy, but I made him renew the vow, on your behalf, you understand. I shan't be watching. Cross the bridge."

    His directions grew more irritable as he maneuvered her toward the far edge of the town, where the architecture entered the twentieth century, and she sensed that his nervousness was increasing. Without warning he fumbled at his safety belt and sent it fleeing into the body of the car. "Slow down. We're here."

    The cinema formed the rounded corner of two streets. With its strip of cataracted windows paralleling the wraparound marquee, the building made her think of a helmet too old to see out of. Beneath the marquee, at the top of three tiled steps, were three glass doors obscured by torn posters for circuses, concerts, some kind of festival. Ross knocked on the festival poster, in a rhythm that seemed to want to sound like a secret code.

    An old clown with dusty hair and an ordinary mouth opened the door into the unlit foyer. "This is Miss Allan," Ross said, already retreating. "I must get back to the office."

    The clown rubbed his hands on his baggy suit, through which the elbows of his shirt gleamed like bone, and came out quickly, closing the door on sounds of scraping and dragging. "He didn't tell me you would be this early. I've some work being done just at the moment. I'll turf them out as soon as I decently can. Would you like to sit in the office if I can get the kettle going?"

    "Do you mind if I bring the film in with me?"

    "I'd rather they didn't know about it, in case-well, in case."

    His cautiousness was understandable, but his vagueness was as disconcerting as the sight of him had been, even though she could see that he was clownish with plaster dust     that emphasized the wrinkles of his face. "I'd better stay in the car, then," she said.

    She sat in it for a while and tried to listen to the radio, but some kind of interference made the broadcast voices decay, sink into a mass of static and then lurch at her. She spent half an hour leaning on the boot lid and watching the street as idly as she could, seeing the first children race out of a nearby school like hares started by the bell before the rest of the pupils crowded after them. Eventually she lost patience. Nothing could happen to the film so long as she kept the car in sight, she told herself. She dug in her handbag for Toby's new number, which he'd left at Metropolitan for her, and called him from a phone box outside a pet shop where a puppy kept leaping up inside the window. "How are you doing?" she said.

    "Getting on with life and being loved." He sounded drowsy, as if she'd just wakened him, but happy. "And yourself?"

    "Both of those, I think, and something I wanted you to know but to keep to yourself until I make it public. I've found Graham's film."

    "Good for you, Sandy. I knew you would if anyone could. Thanks, love, and I mean that from Graham too."

    When her change ran out she paced back and forth past houses and neighborhood shops, several hundred yards each way, feeling as though she were on a leash or in a cage. People were coming home from work and taking dogs for walks. She began to regret having lingered, though she wouldn't want to arrive at Redfield too far in advance of the convoy. As muddy shadows oozed from under the buildings and spread, two whitened men peered out of the gloom beyond the glass doors of the cinema. They stood on the steps, dusting themselves and gossiping, until a third livid man emerged from the gloom. All three drove away in a builder's van, and the man who had opened the door to Ross came out to find her.

    He'd washed himself as best he could but had overlooked a line of dust at his temples, which made him appear to be wearing a wig. A few traces of plaster had lodged in cracks of his jovial face, which looked as if it had once been even plumper. "I didn't introduce myself," he said, giving her hand a soft loose shake. "I'm Bill Barclay, which sounds like something you'd say to a bank, doesn't it? Welcome to the Coliseum."

    "Shall I bring the film in now?"

    "Oh, please do, yes. The projectors are all set. So have I been, for weeks. I won't pretend conditions are luxurious, but I hope you'll be reasonably comfortable. I've a few seats I cleaned up for friends until I can open to the public."

    "I'll be on my own, won't I?"

    "Heavens yes, never fear. This is just our secret, as it was poor Norman's." He stood close to her while she unlocked the boot, and lifted the carton before she could. As he hurried stumbling toward the glass doors he said rather plaintively, "I hope you'll come and see my picture house again when it's done up."

    He bumped a door open and leaned on it to let her in. Dusk was spreading down the steps beneath the marquee. She was able to see the foyer almost as soon as she smelled it, plaster dust and the turned-earth smell of old brick. Plaster had been hacked off a yard-high strip of the walls, obviously in preparation for injecting an insulating layer. A mound of broken plaster lay on the bare floorboards near the walls, surrounding a box office so dusty she couldn't see through the glass. The mound was interrupted by the double doors that led to the auditorium and by a corridor along which an open door poked a wedge of harsh light. "Come in here for a tick," Barclay said.

    The open door led to his office, where an unshaded bulb glared above a desk onto which he lowered the carton, puffing and smearing his forehead with the back of his hand. He picked up a flashlight from the top of a rusty filing cabinet, and shook it hard. "That should do it," he said. "I'll show you to your seat whenever you're ready."

    He was already in the corridor, beckoning her with a haste that stopped just short of rudeness. Either he was anxious to see the film or not to leave it unattended, or both. He chased his shadow into the foyer and eased the double doors open. Fallen plaster gnashed beneath them. As Sandy followed him, he swept the flashlight beam around the auditorium.

    A red carpet that looked muddily sodden had been rolled back from the walls, and was heaped against the outer ends of the rows of seats. Between the carpet and the exposed bricks of the walls lay another long mound of plaster. Beneath the screen, which was flanked by two pale giants, it formed a dim border to the flashlight beam as Barclay ushered her along the central aisle to a row of seats covered with a whitish plastic sheet, which he folded back for her. He stamped on the carpet and grunted. "Didn't think the dust would reach this far, but I wasn't taking any chances. Stay here and light my way back, would you? Enjoy the film."

    She spread a carpet of dimness for him as he ran up the slope to the foyer. He was eager to start the film, of course, not afraid the light would fail. The double doors clapped together clumsily, leaving her alone with a trail of grayish footprints, and she swung the flashlight beam around her. Shadows darted from behind the rolled carpet and slithered over the heap of plaster. When Barclay had shone the beam into the auditorium she'd thought at first that he intended to scare away some animal, but surely he would have told her if there were rats.