Cannonbridge (17 page)

When I returned I found him in a violent delirium, resisting the efforts of two nurses to keep him in bed. This state continued until Saturday evening (he was admitted on Wednesday) when he commenced calling for one “Reynolds”, which he did through the night up to three on Sunday morning. At this time a very decided change began to affect him. Having become enfeebled from exertion he became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time, then gently moving his head he said, “Lord help my poor Soul” and expired.

This, Madam, is as faithful an account as I am able to furnish from the Record of his case. I have, thus, complied with your request, Madam, and therefore subscribe myself respectfully yours,

J. J. Moran, Resident Physician

By the time that Mrs Clemm has finished this sad message, her cheeks are damp with tears. There have been few surprises in the nature of her son-in-law’s demise for she had always known that it would be liquor which would destroy him in the end, that and his own weakness of will. Nonetheless, some of the details seem to her to be troublingly odd.

What had Eddy been doing in Baltimore? The last time that she had heard from him he had been talking only of going to New York. Why was he wearing another man’s clothes?

And there is something else, something more, which worries her greatly, a name which will return to her for the rest of her largely unhappy life, coming back in the small hours of the morning when she cannot sleep and the shadows and their horrors crowd greedily around her.

She reads the letter again, twice, three times, and still she wonders, still she asks about “Reynolds”. Why should that name and that name in particular—which is now and shall forever remain quite unknown to her—have been the last upon the lips of her poor, benighted Eddy?

NOW

W
HEN
T
OBY
J
UDD
comes skittering pell-mell back into the lobby of the erstwhile hotel ten minutes after his conversation began with the man with the glasses and the neatly-parted hair, running faster than he has in twenty years or more, there are three simultaneous assaults on his senses, two auditory and one visual.

The auditory elements are these—the whining clangour of the alarm sounding even shriller and more demented here than it had been in the archive room and the echoing noise of boots pounding along the corridors nearby. The visual element is this: that the security guard whom they had met on arrival and for whose benefit they had feigned matrimony, now lies sprawled out on the floor, unconscious but breathing.

Toby stops for a sliver of a second to take all of this in, casting round wildly for sight of Gabriela.

Save for the man on the floor, the atrium is empty, although Toby suspects that very soon now the place is going to be filled with men who wish to do him harm.

Then, to his relief, above the cacophony, he hears the honking of the Fiat’s horn. Dashing outside, he sees that the car is waiting, its passenger door open, its engine running. He hurls himself towards it, his slight little body complaining at every step, and plunges gratefully into his seat, pulling the door awkwardly shut behind him.

Gabriela looks excited, keyed-up. Her pupils are dilated and she is breathing too quickly.

“Well?” she asks but Toby—heart racing, head thumping, nausea seething in his gut—is too short of puff to answer her. Instead he manages a kind of elongated gasp, equal parts thank you and exhortation to move, and Gabriela, needing no further encouragement, urges the car to move at speed back down the driveway and away from the Cannonbridge Collection, leaving their pursuers with only tire tracks and dust.

When the archive is a mile behind them and once they are as certain that they can be that they are not being pursued, Gabriela says again: “Well?”

Toby, still wheezing and shuddering, like a man in a public information film about the dangers of coronary disease, manages a slightly longer, if scarcely more detailed response than before.

“It’s worse,” he says, each syllable a struggle. “God, it’s worse than I thought. Whatever the hell it is, it’s more than a hoax. More than just a confidence trick.”

Gabriela just nods grimly, as if she were somehow expecting his answer.

Neither of them notices the dark car, the Saab, which dogs their movements at a clever distance. Gabriela checks the rear-view mirror with some diligence but she never spots it, nor does Toby, slumped in his seat, his heart accelerating at least as much at his discovery as at his recent exertions. A little way behind them the man with the earplugs chews his toffees and watches his targets with a warped species of tolerant affection which, to the objects of it, generally proves more dangerous even than his violent ire.

They are back in Edinburgh proper now, heading Leith-wards and cruising past a dejected gang of students, a troupe of Ukrainian knights (‘the Camelot of Kiev’ reads the sign that has been pasted to the back of the stoutest of them) and a few disgruntled locals looking as though they are wondering whether it can ever truly be said to be too early in the day for a fight, when the woman speaks again.

“Tell me what happened,” she says.

Toby, calmer now and almost stable, replies: “Yes. Yes, I will. But I have to thank you first.”

Gabriela waves away his gratitude.

“That guard, you must have...”

“What happened?” she repeats, with a hint of some strange conviction in her eyes which ought, perhaps, to concern Toby rather more than it does at present, distracted as he is by the hectic dramas of the day.

As they pass a group of teenagers bad-temperedly carrying along the pavement a large inflatable whale, and whilst, behind them, the dark car prowls, Toby tells his peculiar story.

“There was a man,” says Judd. “A librarian. An archivist. Something of that sort. It was so strange—like he’d been waiting for me. He was dapper and neat. But he seemed weighed down. Melancholic.”

Gabriela nods, steers the car expertly down a side street so as to avoid the most choked and clotted thoroughfares, and waits for her passenger to get on with it.

“We only had a very few minutes together. He began by asking me a question...”

“Hmm,” says Gabriela, negotiating a line of speed bumps with finesse. “And what was that, then?”

“He wanted to know...” Toby passes the back of his right hand across his forehead. Hot now. “What I thought would come after humanity. What I thought the next stage of evolution would be.”

Past the bumps and gathering speed, hand on gear stick, moving up. “And did you have an answer?”

“No. Not really. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it. It seemed like such a non sequitur, you know?” The hand across the forehead once again. “And after he’d asked me that, as if in explanation, he pulled open one of the cabinet drawers. And showed me the papers inside.”

“And? What did you see?”

“I’m... not sure. I’m still not sure.”

“You don’t seem certain of much.”

Toby doesn’t seem to have heard her. “At times,” he murmurs, hunkering back in his seat now, like a child being told a cautionary tale, “each page seemed full. Absolutely stuffed with texts, images, photographs. A long life mapped meticulously. But at others, when I blinked, when I rubbed my eyes and looked again... It was as though every sheet was entirely blank.”

Curiously, Gabriela does not sound too surprised at this surely remarkable disclosure. “Hallucination?” she suggests. “Brain fart of some description?”

“Perhaps,” Toby says, though he doesn’t sound at all persuaded. “And, then, at the end, just before the alarm went off, there was one more thing. The librarian bowed his head, as if damning himself for the rest of time, and he said. ‘Blessborough. Remember Blessborough. Look at his dedication again.’”

They are deep now into Leith itself. The crowds have subsided and the flat is almost in sight.

“What on earth did he mean by that?”

“Blessborough. Professor Anthony Blessborough. Dead now. He wrote the first critical appreciation of Matthew Cannonbridge. Just after the war.”

“I know that. Actually, I think I’ve got a copy somewhere. But what did he mean about the dedication?”

“No idea. No idea at all.”

The car pulls into the side of the pavement, beside the flat.

Engine switched off, the soft burr of the city. No other sound. The two of them secure for now in the bubble of the Fiat’s front seats.

“Well, looks like we got away with it,” Gabriela says and grins.

Toby snorts, in pleasure and relief and from the delayed effects of his adrenaline surge.

“Let’s go inside,” she says. “See if we can’t figure this latest thing out.”

Toby, grateful, agrees. They step out of the car together and, still casting anxious glances behind them as they go, walk up to the steps to the flat’s front door.

Neither of them has the slightest presentiment that this will be the last time that they shall ever do so.

I
NTO THE SITTING
room and the flat is silent but somehow uneasily so, as if a party had been abruptly wound up as soon as its participants heard the sound of the key in the lock. Toby and Gabriela look at one another for a moment—and it’s a bit odd, a little bit awkward—neither of them choosing to articulate what they’re both thinking about the freighted silence.

Toby, who has not taken a woman who is not his wife out to dinner or to the pictures for fifteen years, reflects, nostalgically, that it feels a little like coming home for the first time after a date, both parties in a state of skittish expectation.

“Kara and Sam must’ve gone out,” she says, sounding a little worried at the prospect. “Help yourself to a cup of tea or something. I’ll see if I can dig out that book.” Toby nods and thanks her. As the girl disappears into the bedroom, she calls over her shoulder: “Milk’s in the fridge if you want it.”

Toby watches her go—notices, in a way, that he accepts is entirely inappropriate, the sway of her bottom in her tight blue jeans—but he makes no move towards the kitchen or the fridge. Instead, he treads towards the window and gazes pensively out onto the street below, expecting, although he cannot say quite why, a dark figure watching him, staring back up with implacable malice in his eyes. But the street is empty. Of course it is. Cars pass by but none stops here. The world churns on, seemingly with scant regard for the troubles of Toby Judd.

As he watches, he thinks of that strange question the librarian had used.
What will come after humanity?

He looks and thinks a while longer before, skin prickling in a most unpleasant way, he becomes aware that he is being watched. He turns slowly, as if wary of making any sudden moves.

Two women—Kara and Sam—have emerged, presumably from one of the bedrooms and are standing close together, watching him from the edge of the room.

“Hello,” Toby says. “Hope we didn’t disturb you.”

They only look at him, wide-eyed and fretful.

Toby is at a loss as to how best to respond when Gabriela walks noisily back into the room, a bulky paperback under one arm, its cover emblazoned with a familiar face.

She stops, takes in the scene: “What’s going on here?”

Nobody speaks until eventually one of the girls (Kara? Sam? Toby can’t be sure) shuffles forward and says: “I’m sorry, Gabs.”

The other one echoes the sentiment. “We’re both sorry.”

“Why?” Gabriela snaps. “What have you done?”

Again: “We’re really, really sorry.”

Toby hears a sound—distant but drawing swiftly closer—which starts to make a horrible sense of this strange tableau.

“We’ve been watching the news,” says one of the women. “We’ve been hearing what he’s done. About that man Spicer. And then the copper—Angeyo.”

“I don’t believe any of it,” Gabriela says. “I think it’s all lies.”

“We’re not so sure,” says one flatmate.

“We didn’t want to take the risk,” says the other.

The sound is closer now.

Toby swallows hard. “Gabriela...”

She holds up a hand to silence him. “Wait. This is important.” She turns back to the others. “Well?”

“We were worried about you. We just wanted you to be safe. So we decided to call them.”

“Call who?” Gabriela asks but Toby already knows the answer. He knows now what they have done.

He touches Gabriela gently on the arm and together they listen to the approaching sound, its insistent, condemnatory wail.

Sirens. Sirens almost at their door.

1853

HAMPSTEAD HEATH

LONDON

A
STRANGE INTERSECTION
of country and city, eight hundred acres of well-tended green. “Heath” seems somehow too modest a name for this proud sprawl of grass and tree, of undergrowth and gentle, wooded hill. It is rather as if a piece of rural England has been carved from its bucolic homeland and set down, with little mind for the incongruity of the act, as a parkland at the heart of the greatest metropolis on Earth.

Yet the city has not allowed this rustic space to flourish unchallenged. Rather, it has peopled it with Londoners, who swarm on this bright, sunny day in June, along its paths and up its inclines, who linger by its lake and stroll amiably beneath its trees. All here is variation and diversity: grand ladies and gentlemen arm in arm, families on happy expeditions, working people, on a rare few hours of rest, slouched, squinting miserably up at the sky. There is a darker, more sorrowful element also—itinerants and beggars, homeless children scouting for change, broken-down old soldiers pleading for alms—as well as a class of person who are brazenly criminal in their demeanour and deportment (pickpockets, cut-throats, ladies of the night) together with that breed of indefinable person which is altogether timeless: sad-faced women of no detectable class or occupation, ruddy-faced single men who exist perpetually on the knife-edge between eye-bulging joviality and unchecked aggression, glimpsed figures moving between the tree-trunks, strange faces at the edge of the crowd, sombre outsiders, who might just as well be an incognito lord or a Clapham bachelor, watching the mêlée with expressions of such weird intensity that those who venture near them are compelled at once to move discreetly away. It is, in other words, the city that has won this battle in the interminable, doomed war with the countryside. It has placed five hundred individuals upon this shard of meadow, stamped without compunction on the sod, filled the woodlands with refuse and spoiled food, chased the birds away with screams and sounds of unthinking entertainment.