Cannonbridge (16 page)

The only clue to what lies at the end of the drive is a discreet silver plaque mounted respectfully by the mouth of the driveway. So sombre is the scene and so discreetly mournful the plaque that one might be forgiven for expecting it to read ‘Crematorium’ or ‘Hospice’ or ‘Rest Home for the Incurably Insane’.

What it actually reads, of course, and the man in the Saab notes this without surprise, is: THE CANNONBRIDGE COLLECTION.

Beneath it there is a curious symbol—a stylised, art deco representation of a snake eating its own tail. At this he gazes respectfully for almost exactly two minutes.

This done, he tugs gently, precisely at the foam plug in his left ear, wincing, almost imperceptibly as it is removed, at the sound of the traffic and the roar of the world.

He pulls a sleek and slender mobile phone from his pocket, strokes the screen in three decisive motions and places the thing to his ear. After a moment he speaks.

He says “Yes” and “As you thought” and “No surprises”. After that, he is silent for a while as his interlocutor talks.

During this time he seems professional, smooth-faced, almost expressionless.

One would have to have known him very well indeed—and there is no one left alive who can claim that honour any longer—to notice the look of pure frustration and annoyance which crosses his face in response, one presumes, to the general drift of the conversation.

“Very well,” he says at last. “Then I’ll wait. Let’s see how far he gets.”

And so the man terminates the phone call, replaces the plug in his ear and does as he has been told. Three minutes pass before he takes out another toffee, unwraps it with a single, brisk motion and pops it into his mouth whereupon, with quiet intensity, he grinds the thing to paste.

I
N THE NORMAL
run of things, Toby thinks, arriving at a private collection of papers—at this expensive personal library—should be just about the furthest thing on Earth away from danger.

He has been to such places before of course, to certain sections of the British Library, to the Bodleian, a trip, once, to an American university which had paid out for a collection of letters and drafts by a middle-ranking English poet and were regretting their investment. He’d been to rich men’s collections too—storehouses of material which ought by rights to belong to the nation but which had been bought up by millionaires out of curiosity or enthusiasm or, most likely, in the hope of profit.

Yes, he had spent hours in such places. Not here, of course—though Salazar had, he thinks, yes, J J had drawn heavily on the contents of this building in the course of the composition of his book. Toby wonders if his wife’s lover had felt it too when he arrived—the prickling sense of unease and peril which had flickered up and down his spine when they had turned into the long lane which led to the Collection. Probably not, Judd concludes—doubtless his mind was focused on other matters.

As they reach the end of the drive, the building comes into view—a large, distinguished building that has stood here for more than three hundred years and has, in its time, been a modest stately home (to an Englishman whose fortune had been secured through what may as well have been called armed robbery in the course of fighting various foreign wars), a home for recovering servicemen at the start of the twentieth century and an overpriced and somewhat inconveniently-situated hotel in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the millennium it has been given over to its new purpose.

Gabriela drives the car to a small parking area (with not more than five or six other vehicles, all unobtrusively expensive), putting him in a mind of a discreet five-star establishment, more of an overpriced hideaway or a smilingly extortionate bolthole than a holiday destination or a place to take the kids.

The entrance, a few yards away, is darkened and has presumably been designed to look as uninviting as possible. Only experts welcome here, it seems to say. Only the cognoscenti, only high priests in the cult of Cannonbridge.

Gabriela switches off the engine and they go through the plan that they have devised during their journey one more time.

“Are you sure it will work?” Toby asks again.

“Not at all,” says the girl, and smiles. “But unless you’ve got any better ideas it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

And, as has already been decided, they both thrust their hands deep into their pockets and saunter inside.

Within the building it is surprisingly cool and modern, with its wood-panelled walls, its top-flight air-conditioning system working soundlessly away. It’s not so like a hotel in here, Toby thinks, nor any library either but rather...

He thinks for a moment. Yes—like a health club. Like a private gym.

There is a reception desk in the atrium and a man sitting behind it. To the left of the desk is a closed green door. Toby half expects to be given a towel and a key for a locker but, drawing closer, he sees that the man, powerfully built, is dressed in the uniform of a private security firm.

At the top right-hand side of the wide wooden desk at which the man with the biceps is enthroned, he sees again something which had snagged at the back of his mind when they’d passed the sign, at the top of the driveway—the snake that eats its tail, Ouroboros drawn as a kind of corporate logo.

“Can I help you?” The guard has an English accent, unsympathetic estuary. His gaze is unfriendly when examining Toby, perhaps a shade more forgiving when passing over Gabriela’s form. “Are you lost?” A touch of sarcasm.

Toby smiles as guilelessly as he can. “Not exactly, no.”

The guard stares back, sceptical, waiting.

Toby wonders whether he’s armed, if there’s a weapon behind the desk as in some late-night Glasgow liquor store. “My wife and I got engaged here—back when this place was a hotel. And were in Scotland again and we found ourselves passing and we were wondering if, well, for old time’s sake, whether we could take a look around?”

The man behind the desk gives them a hard, professional look.

The hands of Toby and Gabriela remain firmly in their pockets. No wedding rings. Fingers out of sight. No possibility for the asking of awkward questions.

“I’m afraid this is private property, sir. Technically, you’re trespassing. You’re breaking the law.” A humourless smile.

“Yes,” Gabriela says brightly. “It’s something literary now, isn’t it, this place?”

“We’ve got the biggest collection of Cannonbridge papers in the world.” There is an odd, unexpected note of pride in the man’s voice although, Toby thinks, he doesn’t look like all that much of a reader.

“Wonderful.” Gabriela again. “Might we take a look at them?”

“Not without an appointment, ma’am, no. Not without permission.”

“Then how do we get that?”

The guard grimaces. “With considerable difficulty. Trust me.”

Toby now: “How come? I mean, who owns it all?”

“It’s in private hands, sir. Private.”

“Ah. But surely you wouldn’t mind if a couple of sentimental fools took a walk down memory lane? We shan’t be long.”

“Sorry, sir.” He doesn’t sound sorry. “Can’t be done. Besides...”

Toby knows what is coming, the old cliché.

“It’d be more than my job’s worth.”

Nothing for it now.

Toby and Gabriela swap glances and the girl goes, expertly, to work. She turns out to be a better actor than Toby had dared to hope. The performance is exact, persuasive and does not give way to the temptation of melodrama. The eyes roll back in their sockets, her limbs start to shake, her mouth dribbles and gurns. Within seconds, she is on the floor, convulsing wildly, shaking and palsied.

The guard looks up, astonished. Out of his depth, Toby thinks, experiencing a little spike of pleasure at the thought. Out of his comfort zone.

He meets the man’s gaze and says coolly, as though this has happened to him many time before: “My wife’s having an epileptic fit. Stay with her. Hold her head upright. I’ve what we need in the car. I’ll fetch it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Christ. Sorry.”

The guard does as he’s been asked. He goes to her and cradles her head. Toby steps towards the door and opens it. As he does so, Gabriela begins to make a peculiar, strangulated noise, like a creature in pain, at which Toby is put in mind of a time he heard a nest of baby sparrows attacked by a crow, and at which the guard leans in, trying to help. Toby lets the door slam shut but doesn’t leave the building. Instead, he doubles back and passes swiftly and, he hopes, wholly unnoticed through the green door beyond.

He will not, he knows, have long before their stratagem is uncovered. He knows he has to hurry now.

He is in a long corridor with a series of rooms on either side. Each has a sign outside with two letters for the alphabet, A-D, E-H etc. Distantly, he hears Gabriela’s wail. All the rooms are closed, all look empty.

He picks the third possibility—I-L—pushes open the door and steps inside. He sees filing cabinets now—big, solid wooden cabinets. A treasure chest, he thinks—the very lodestone of Cannonbridge studies.

Surging with adrenaline, he pulls open a cabinet at random. Sheets of paper are inside, all neatly ordered and arranged with dividers and markers. He riffles through them, as quickly as he can, and what he sees then, at least what he thinks he sees then, brings him up short, makes him gasp. He peers closer, unbelieving.

It is at that moment, when he hears a dry cough from nearby. He stiffens and turns slowly around to be confronted by a bespectacled man in late middle-age, dressed in an Italian suit which seems rather too smart for him, wiry dark hair neatly parted. He looks anxious and panicked, like a spy taken out of the queue of the airport.

“Do you know,” begins the stranger, in a soft, educated Scots voice, “I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a long time...”

1849

THE BRONX

NEW YORK

S
HE IS NOT
yet sixty yet she looks very much older. Frail, she walks with a stoop and her every step is tentative, filled with aching and beset by sorrow. Yet there is a certain resilience to her, a kind of hopeless indefatigability which comes from outliving everyone whom she has ever loved or cared for and which will sustain her—barely—for what lies ahead: for ignominy, for poverty, for the quiet horrors of the poor house.

When we see her first, she is advancing slowly down a long, dark hallway in answer to a brusque knocking that she heard but a few moments ago. Evidently impatient, the caller raps again.

“Coming,” she says, although her voice is high and thin and bird-like and she suspects that there is little hope of whoever it is having heard her, not on the other side of that thick portcullis.

She moves, perhaps just a little faster but not so one would really notice. If it’s important, she thinks, then they’ll wait.

Finally, she is at the door and with far more exertion than such an action should take, tugs it gloomily open.

She blinks in the sudden rush of bright New York sunlight, her pinched, pale face screwed up against the glare.

There is a young man outside. Blond and tall and brawny. Once she would have thought him handsome, once she would have giggled and flirted and fluttered her eyelashes. But all that was long ago. Now she sees only a boy.

“Mrs Clemm?” he asks and his voice is serious and concerned almost as if (she will wonder later), as if he is aware of the weight and nature of his mission.

There is something in his hands, a fat cream envelope held out before him like an offering.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s me.”

“I’ve got a letter for you, ma’am.”

Again that note of earnestness and—does she imagine it? Surely not. Condolence.

“Thank you,” she says. “Do I...”

She tails off, hopefully.

“No, ma’am. ’Tis all paid for.”

“Thank you,” she says and she must look confused as her visitor feels the need to add: “I was told to make sure that it was put directly into your hands.”

He passes it to her and she accepts it, feeling the dreadful heft of it.

For an instant, at the thought that it might be from Eddy, she experiences an exhausting kaleidoscope of emotions. Might it, she wonders, be some final, desperate epistle, full of forgiveness and love, some heartfelt apologia sent just before his death?

But no, the handwriting is quite unfamiliar.

Neat, she thinks. Neat and official. Quite unlike Eddy, then, in every way.

“Thank you,” she says again.

The brawny, handsome man nods—“ma’am”—and is gone. She closes the door again, against the stranger and the light, and moves dolefully back down the hallway and into her parlour, her sad prize clasped in one wrinkled, claw-like hand.

Shortly afterwards, with a cup of something restorative by her side (and how dear Eddy might have approved of that!), hunched in her frayed and threadbare armchair, her face furrowed in awful, anxious concentration, she reads the following words:

Presuming, madam, that you are already aware of the malady of which Mr. Poe died I need only state concisely the particulars of his circumstances from his entrance until the time of his death. When brought to the Hospital he was unconscious of his condition, of who brought him or with whom he had been associating. He remained in this condition from five o’clock in the afternoon (the hour of his admission) until three the next morning. This was on the 3rd October. To this state succeeded tremor of the limbs, and at first a busy, but not violent or active delirium and vacant conversation with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls. His face was pale and his whole person drenched in perspiration.

I questioned him in reference to his family, place of residence, relatives &c. But his answers were incoherent and unsatisfactory. He told me, however, he had a wife in Richmond (which, I have since learned was not the fact) that he did not know when he left that city or what had become of his trunk of clothing. Wishing to rally and sustain his now fast sinking hopes I told him I hoped, that in a few days he would be able to enjoy the society of his friends here, and I would be most happy to contribute in every possible way to his ease and comfort. At this he broke out with much energy, and said the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol—that when he beheld his degradation he was ready to sink in the earth. Shortly after giving expression to these words Mr. Poe seemed to doze and I left him for a short time.