Ghostwalk (30 page)

Thirty-one

W
ill Burroughs did not visit Emmanuel or say good-bye to her friend. She was in hiding. You didn’t visit him again either; you were out of the country—somewhere overseas. Emmanuel Scorsa was attacked on the night of November 2nd and died on November 9th in the intensive care unit of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Like James Valentine, 336 years earlier, it had taken him exactly seven days to die. Unlike James Valentine, he died under bright halogen lights in a hospital room when his parents, Maria and Marco Scorsa, advised by solicitous doctors, asked for his life-support system to be switched off. He had been murdered, they said, with rat poison—his organs had failed. James Valentine, the professor of Greek, died in his rooms in Trinity, alone in the dark.

Somewhere in the Parkside Police Station an office had already been set aside for a murder enquiry. Forensic scientists had taken samples from underneath Emmanuel’s nails and collected evidence and blood samples from his coat and trousers and around his wounds. When the forensic officers had finished working on the murder scene in St. Edward’s Passage, police officers took down the white sheeting and the red tape. Bicycles—only a few to start with—began to make their way down the passage and down King’s Parade; students making their way to the library, books piled up in their bike baskets; tourists, admiring the crisp morning light and the frost on the grass, stopping to take photographs. Underneath the bridge the punt chauffeurs cleaned and polished the sides of their boats, ready for winter storage.

Everything changed almost overnight, as if a switch had been thrown. A gearshift manoeuvred into place and a foot pressed down aggressively upon an accelerator. The police launched a murder enquiry. Somebody rang you in the States; you changed your ticket and took a plane from wherever you were back across the sea. “Emmanuel died this morning,” you texted me. “I’m on my way back.” Members of the Scotland Yard Special Unit investigating animal-liberation groups reserved rooms in Cambridge hotels. Files were pulled from filing cabinets, computer databases searched, suspects identified and prioritised. Their names were written down on a whiteboard: Samuel Phelps, Roma Smith, Sarah Drabble, Peter McEwen, Lily Ridler.

The police, the papers said, were looking for members of an animal-liberation group called NABED. For weeks everyone with an opinion seemed to be talking about animal rights and animal ethics. The
Sun
began calling all animal activists “monsters.” Radio 4’s
Moral Maze
instantly reran an old recording of a discussion programme in which leading animal-rights theorists argued and cross-questioned each other. Cambridge was full of reporters and photographers, and everywhere Emmanuel Scorsa was portrayed, in different ways, as a martyr for scientific truth. No one had yet discovered his membership in the Animal Liberation Army. No one would, not even during Lily’s trial.

When you came back from America (or wherever you had been), it was impossible for us to see each other. Plenty of time for my face to heal. Plenty of time for the message my face was supposed to carry to you not to be passed on. I saw you photographed at Emmanuel’s funeral, his mother, dressed in black, leaning blank-faced on your arm. I heard your speeches and interviews. I heard you on the morning radio. I saw you once on the national evening news. You were passionate, reasonable, and fair-minded. You spoke about Emmanuel’s brilliance, about his sense of humour and his kindness. You made a direct appeal to anyone who knew anything about the murder, asking them to come forward. You announced a reward. And from committee rooms and enquiry rooms and police stations and recording studios, you continued to send me text messages—tender and beguiling—and I continued to answer. “Lydia, when this has all calmed down, I want us to go away.” “Lydia, I have some questions I want you to answer.” “Lydia, I can’t live like this anymore. We have to face some things.”

“I know,” I texted back. “I know.” All through November I answered your texts and your e-mails, uneasily, trying not to give away anything of what I now knew, not in my tone or in my silences. I was trying in the midst of all this fragility to keep an open mind. I resolved to wait to see what would unravel. You were in London for most of November; you e-mailed me from your hotel room or from Internet cafés. Sometimes there would be silence for several days. I was afraid for you, of what might be happening in those silences and in those invisible corridors of power you walked down, or in the dark alleyways around your hotel. I imagined you in those labyrinths like Foxcroft, or those alchemists hunted down in alleyways in London or Antwerp or Pisa, carrying all that dangerous knowledge, the wolves closing in. And while I waited, trusting my future and yours to whatever puppet masters held our strings, I rewrote
The Alchemist.
I neutralised it.

No testimony, said Mr. Foxcroft. And I understood. You see, Cameron, I made a deal with Mr. Ezekiel Foxcroft, robed in red, my ghostwalker, that I would exchange Elizabeth’s chapter, “The Crimson Room,” the record of his guilt, I would exchange that chapter for the laying of ghosts, for the end of the deus ex machina. It had to stop. He, I thought, agreed.

On the 11th of November, I watched the local evening news. There was still a good deal of coverage of Emmanuel’s death. But there were no new deaths. Not a single death reported. It had to mean something. Foxcroft’s pledge would hold.

In the hope and expectation of that disentanglement, I also burned all the written evidence—Elizabeth’s copy of “The Crimson Room,” her notes, Dilys’s notes, the file she had left for me. On Elizabeth’s bonfire I watched the edges of all that paper curl and twist and char in flames that burned blue, green, and orange. I began a new final chapter for
The Alchemist
and rewrote several earlier chapters, so that there would be absolutely no ambiguity or inference, no trace of Elizabeth’s accusation. No innuendo about Newton having benefited from those unexplained deaths, no reference to Foxcroft or the poisonings—just the usual kind of end chapter to a biography of the great man: Newton, the genius. I finished it in a couple of weeks. It was a short final chapter and easy to write.

The Alchemist,
as I ghostwrote it, was a good book, but it was not Elizabeth’s book. It
is
a good book. Reviewers applauded Elizabeth Vogelsang for her scholarship, for her knowledge of the complex European networks and Newton’s connections to them, but also for her understanding of how little, in the end, Newton depended on alchemy for his science—how once and for all the idea of Newton the sorcerer had been laid to rest. A few months ago the book was nominated for the Whitbread Biography prize. It didn’t win, though the publishers used the nomination for dust-jacket publicity just the same. I didn’t know all of that in November 2002. In November I was just closing things down. I had no choice.

Thirty-two

A
nd then in December you sent me the text I had dreaded. “I’m in

Cambridge,” it said. “Meet me. I have to see you.”

“I’m in Norfolk. By the sea,” I texted back, once I’d examined my face and decided it wasn’t safe yet. You’d see the scars. I couldn’t cover them up.

Another text from you followed mine: “You’re at the sea? I don’t believe you. Show me. Send me a picture of the sea on your mobile.”

There was a picture of an old boathouse on some Norfolk beach on Elizabeth’s noticeboard. I photographed the picture of the boathouse framed against the sea and sent it to you. A few minutes later I heard your voice speaking into the answering machine: “I know where that is,” you said, laughing. “That’s the place my mother used to go to at Heacham. They knocked it down last summer to build a hotel. Nice try. Meet me tomorrow? Lydia—pick up. I know you’re there.”

I picked up the phone. “I’m afraid,” I said.

“It’s safe for the moment,” you answered, tenderly. “You just have to trust me. Everything’s gone quiet. I’ve seen to it.”

“I’ve forgotten what your voice sounds like,” I said. “It’s been five weeks.”

“They wouldn’t let me phone you. I told you. It’s been killing me, Lydia, not to be able to see you. I’m so tired. I’ve never needed you like this before. Meet me. Just for an hour. Please.”
And why will they let you see me now? What does that mean?

“The Green Dragon,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Meet me tomorrow night at the Green Dragon in Chesterton. I’ll buy you a pint. There’s a mummified cat—”

“A mummified what?”

“Cat—a mummified cat—bricked into the fireplace there. To keep off evil spirits.”

“It’s going to take more than a mummified cat…”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a joke. Green Dragon at eight? I can’t wait to see you. It’s been weeks, far too long.”

You’d taken the leather sofa near the log fire by the time I arrived. I had counted on the light in there being too dim for you to notice the last visible scar, a raised red gash, on my cheekbone. But you did. It was the first thing you saw. You drew close as I sat down, unwinding my scarf and unbuttoning my coat. You ran your fingertips over the wound. Slowly. As if I were a hurt child.

“Cold hands,” I said.

“What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your face—looks like you’ve been in a fight.”

“Yes,” I said. “A street brawl. You know me. Can’t keep out of trouble. No. Just a bad gash from a branch of one of the trees in The Studio garden. I was walking down to the river after dark and slammed straight into it. It’s not as bad as it looks. What an idiot, eh?”

“No, you’re no idiot.”

What did that comment betray? I watched you closely, your face near mine, watched your eyes narrow, reading me. Did you know? Had someone in the Syndicate told you? Sent you a photograph, perhaps? You looked away.

“Adnams?” you asked.

“I thought I was buying this round,” I said lightly. “Christ, you said you were tired. You look a hundred years old. And you’ve lost weight. What have you been doing?” This elaborate game of innocence and ignorance, I thought. How long can we sustain it?

“Thanks. Just working. The usual. Wish I could pack it all in now. But there’s too much at stake.”

I watched you walk to the bar, surveyed you: the tall, familiar shape, the blue shirt over the worn red T-shirt, the cream trousers, the brown shoes that needed polishing. You were at the end of a very long telescope. I saw that I no longer knew anything. Anything was possible. If someone had told me that you had issued an order for me to be attacked to frighten me into leaving Cambridge so that I would no longer be your Achilles’ heel, if they had said that you wanted me out of the way at any price, I might have believed them. And then if someone had said that you would protect me above all else, sacrifice everything for me, that you loved me above all else, yes, I would have believed that too.

We were both embroiled in your network, its surveillance, its cameras and phone-tracking devices, its satellites and computer systems. There was no separating from it or cutting ourselves out from what we knew, no escape to some safe future. There would be consequences to the knowing, casualties. A price to be paid. One of us
has
to find a way out, I thought.
There must be a way out.

Morazapine, the formula you had made and that only you could develop, whatever you had wanted it to be, had, under your dark husbandry, bloomed into a paralysing drug, a chemical weapon. Yes, whatever you had meant it to be, it now had the strength to paralyse armies, prepare them for slaughter. It could take out whole cities: Tehran, Basra, Baghdad. It would. There
was
a great deal at stake. They couldn’t let you go. You were their Daedalus—you carried the secrets to the labyrinth in your head. They couldn’t let you just walk away.

“Have you seen the plaque on the wall?” you said, putting two pints down on the table. “To the man who disappeared? Over there, under the shelf in the corner. It’s famous.”

“I can’t read it from here,” I said. “My eyes are not so good.”

“Some bloke who was a ferryman here. On the shelf just there over the plaque there’s a single boot, a hat, and a wicker basket with a tea can and a drinking bottle. Underneath it says, ‘1896—All that is left in memory of Alfie Basset, who mysteriously disappeared after leaving the Green Dragon and crossing the river in his own boat.’”

“Poor Alfie,” I said. “And they never found his body. How was America?”
Tell me.

“Dull. I wasn’t there for very long. I had to come back to deal with the press after Emmanuel died. There’s been a lot of political fallout. Meetings and negotiations and deals. It’s not good.”
You’ll never tell me. These evasions between us. Great rifts in the landscape.

“I saw you on the television.”

“And the book? How’s
The Alchemist
?”

“It’s finished. I’ve finished it.”

“Are you ready to pull out the stopper?”

“What’s that?”

“The hand grenade. You said
The Alchemist
was going to be controversial. You said you’d be pulling out the stopper.”

I smiled. “Hand grenades don’t have stoppers; they have pins. I was wrong. It’s a good book, an important book in terms of the history of alchemy, but there’s nothing very controversial about it. No grenades.”

“Shame. It would have been good to see some ruffled feathers among the historians of science. Lydia, how brave are you?”

“Not very. I was. I’m not so brave now. Why?”

“I want to sit by an open window with a view over water. A room with you in it and silence. A marble bath. Away from here. Right away from here. And then there are things I want to tell you. Will you come? Just for a few days? I want you to know some things. And I can make it safe. I have a few favours left to call in.”

“Yes,” I said slowly, finishing my pint. “I will. But now I have to go. Really. I’m sorry. I’m not feeling very well.”
And I have things to tell you. About the end of your mother’s story and a man in red. And I’m not sure I care about safety anymore, not mine at least. Yes, I will come and we will tell each other some things. It’s time.

“You’ll come?” you said. “Venice? Will you come to Venice?”

“Yes,” I said. Just that. Just yes.

I addressed the envelope to you—Dr. Cameron Brown, Trinity College, Cambridge—and slid a copy of Elizabeth’s “The Crimson Room” inside. I had made the photocopy the night before I’d burned Elizabeth’s original copy of the chapter and all the related papers. The stamps on the envelope were Christmas stamps, a seventeenth-century Madonna and child, in bright, oil-paint colours, the child holding a red pomegranate. I mailed it that night, slipping it into a postbox on the corner of Union Lane. A gift. Your mother’s lost words, returned to you. This was what she had been looking for. This was what she had found. Elizabeth Vogelsang’s goddamned seventeenth century—the dark history buried beneath the myth of a great man. A history that would now have to be reburied. But first you had to see it—the end of your mother’s story. Another of the blackbird’s circles.