Sphinx (35 page)

Instinctively, I shifted my shoulder so the bag holding the astrarium slipped further behind my back. I looked the plain-clothes officer squarely in the face.

‘None at all. I don’t even keep a safety box on the premises. ’

‘I see. Your neighbour told us you work in the oil business. Could they have been after something of corporate significance, information of some kind?’

‘Anything like that - survey reports, maps and so on - are kept at my employer’s offices. Like I said, there’s nothing here of much value other than sentimental.’

‘I know this is a distressing possibility, sir, but is there any reason someone might want to harm you?’ the detective asked, lowering his voice as if it were an impolite question.

Who
wasn’t
out to harm me seemed like a more accurate query. I fought the impulse to touch the bag slung over my shoulder to reassure myself that the astrarium was safe.

‘No reason at all,’ I said, keeping my gaze steady and direct.

‘Then it’s a real mystery,’ he said, studying my expression.

‘Indeed.’

His gaze travelled back to the photograph. ‘An attractive woman, your wife. You must miss her very much.’

 

The police team left an hour later. I sat on an upturned wooden crate in the centre of the living room and stared at the scratched walls, the ripped posters, the torn curtains and cushions, and tried to imagine the fury of the intruders when they’d realised the astrarium wasn’t there; how angry they must have been to destroy wantonly the objects around them and risk being caught. Somehow the violation seemed apt, as if they’d deliberately smashed this section of my life firmly into the past tense.

A knock came at the front door. I kicked aside a torn book and a pillow to open it. The twins looked up at me.

‘We’ve got some information for yer,’ Stanley declared in a whisper as Alfred scanned the empty hall behind them, as if looking for spies.

‘Private information,’ Alfred added, before slipping under my arm and into the flat.

 

They sat on the edge of the slashed couch, swinging their legs. Alfred, eyes wide, couldn’t stop staring at the broken furniture now propped up against the wall. ‘Mum said Isabella was taken by angels,’ he said gravely.

‘Underwater,’ his brother added, failing to hide the suspicion in his voice, ‘’cept they don’t ’ave angels underwater.’

‘Mermaids, then,’ Alfred contributed hopefully.

Stanley snorted. ‘Alfred believes everything. I know better.’

‘We loved Issy - she was an angel ’erself.’

‘Shut up, Alfred.’ Stanley swung back to me, shoulders hunched. ‘This information, it’ll cost yer,’ he announced.

‘What’s the information about?’ I asked, wondering why I was taking a couple of eight-year-olds so seriously.

Stanley’s eyes grew to the size of saucers and his voice lowered to a croak. ‘We saw them, didn’t we, Alf?’

‘Yeah, but we’re not tellin’ you till we get our price.’ Alfred kicked his feet against the couch, triumphantly assertive.

‘What’s your price?’ I asked.

‘We want a piece of her,’ Alfred pointed to the cracked wedding photograph, ‘so we can remember.’

‘Done,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what you saw.’

‘There was two of ’em,’ Stanley said. ‘Big geezers with big ugly heads. We saw ’em come over the wall and past our bedroom window, isn’t that right, Alf?’

‘And we saw the getaway car outside,’ Alfred elaborated. Then he nudged his brother excitedly.

‘And that man who was driving, he was the ugliest of them all.’

‘Yeah, he had these funny bits down the side of his head - like caterpillars, they were.’

‘Ugly red caterpillars hanging upside down,’ Stanley concluded helpfully.

 

The twins left, Alfred clutching a photograph of Isabella. Alone again, I slid down the wall and sat on the floor. If I really thought about it, it was a miracle that Hugh Wollington and his cohorts hadn’t broken into the flat before. Trying to convince myself that I was being paranoid I’d felt nonetheless as if I was being hunted down slowly, systematically, as if my pursurers were always one step ahead of me. What did Wollington want with the astrarium? Fame? To claim he’d discovered the astrarium would give him an international reputation overnight. A feasible motivation, but I was more worried by the connection to Majeed that both Wollington and Silvio had mentioned. Was it possible that he was now linked to the sinister face I’d seen with Omar? I felt as if I was now really descending into paranoia, the sense of being squeezed between two factions all-consuming.

I glanced around. The room was a maelstrom of debris. I couldn’t possibly spend the night here. Pulling the rucksack over to me I lifted out the astrarium - at least I’d kept that safe. I left it on the floor while I gathered some clothes to pack into the rucksack underneath it.

As I sorted through the chaos, I heard a small thud. I spun around. A metal cigarette lighter on the floor had fastened itself to the astrarium. I pulled it off, placed it back on the floor some distance from the mechanism, and watched it slide across the carpet to stick to the device’s side again. The astrarium had become magnetised.

What could have activated the change? Me turning the key after thousands of years? I tried to apply a scientist’s logic to the problem. The curious alloys - was there a way of analysing their components without damaging the device? I turned the question this way and that, racking my brains. The jumble of information seemed to mirror the tumult around me, bewildering, disorientating and overwhelming. I no longer knew what I believed in. Had Gareth’s recovery been simple coincidence? Had Isabella died in vain?

Staring at the device I suddenly lost my temper, exhaustion and fear catching up with me. ‘Damn you! If you have any kind of power, show me! Do your worst, you bloody heap of ancient tin!’

Trembling with frustration, I set the dials to my own birth date, grasped the key and turned it. Again the magnets began to whirl, the cogs clicking over each individual bronze tooth, crossing the centuries. Part of me was terrified that the death pointer would spring up; another part of me defiantly dared the machine to challenge me.

The death pointer didn’t appear.

‘Just as I thought - a glorified wind-up toy!’

As if in response, a short burst of clicking sounded from the mechanism. Fighting the impulse to kick it, I began searching for the telephone instead. I finally found it under the couch next to a pile of broken wooden chess pieces. To my surprise it still worked.

‘Hello? Yes, I need to reserve a room for tonight.’

 

It was evening, the sky a soft blue, the heat of the day prickling up from under the tarmac. Rush hour had passed and the roads were quiet, but there were people everywhere, enjoying the summer evening. Fleetingly I thought I saw Hugh Wollington’s distinctive figure amongst a group of tourists. My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I swung around and just then the man turned fully towards the car. It wasn’t Wollington. Worried, I glanced in the rear-view mirror - there was no one behind me. I accelerated anyway.

As I roared past Green Park, something smashed into the windscreen. I swerved, ran the car up onto the kerb and came to a halt. Shaking, I sat with my hands still on the steering wheel. The window had fragmented, transforming the skyline into a thousand pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Blood rolled down the glass in lazy drips.

I wrapped my fist in a handkerchief and punched a hole through the shattered glass so I could see through the window. The sound of evening birdsong flooded into the car. Climbing out, I began searching for whatever had hit the windscreen. A few yards down the road I found a sparrowhawk, wings spread, head lolling on a broken neck.

Shocked, I kneeled and looked for the band around its leg. The only way a sparrowhawk could be patrolling the London skies was if it belonged to some eccentric falconer practising his craft from the safety of a nearby park. As a child, I’d sometimes found the corpses of such birds on the Cumbria Fens. But there was no band. The creature’s black claw lay limp in my hand.

Around me, the sky shifted imperceptibly, like a glass prism that had just been jolted, and I wondered whether I wasn’t still dreaming.

The rooms in good hotels have a soundless vacuum-like quality that I found myself craving now: the sealed-off luxury of an anonymous refuge that brought nothing with it - no past associations, no memories - merely the comfort of being one of many to sleep within its four walls, secure in the promiscuity of transition. It is the womb that men like me seek, the place we know we can safely return to during our travels. I had discovered a small discreet hotel tucked into the back of Mayfair. I’d checked in under a false name, but there seemed to be few guests and most of them were not English.

I walked through the hotel room I’d booked, marking out my territory in short paces - past the Louis XVI desk and chair, the gold and blue silk curtains, the canopied bed - then made my way straight into the bathroom and ran a bath.

The waxy white marble tiles jolted me back to the morgue and Barry Douglas’s corpse lying on the slab. The Australian would have loved the irony of my setting the astrarium to my own birth date. I could hear his voice cajoling me into an admission that perhaps, finally, my cynicism and deep-seated belief in scientific rationalism were breaking down. The device hadn’t set a death date yet, so I might end up regretting my rash impulse.

‘We’ll see if the damn thing has any power over my life,’ I said out loud, answering Barry’s grinning ghost.

After the bath, I called to book a flight back to Egypt. Sitting there in the hermetic silence, it struck me that only hours earlier Gareth had still been in his coma. The morning seemed to have receded as if it had been months ago rather than hours.

Wrapped in a bathrobe, I sat down at the small desk that doubled as a dressing table. The curtains were still open; below, cars wound their way through Mayfair. The night was alive. The thin moon pressed against the black sky as delicately as a porcelain fragment, unchanging, eternal. I gazed out, thinking about Isabella, Gareth, the people I loved in my life, working out a strategy that might allow me to regain control of events.

It wasn’t just Gareth’s carelessness that terrified me but also his vulnerability. His youth gave him that illusory sense that life stretched out for ever, that one never had to be responsible for one’s actions. I knew the illusion well: it was how I’d lived for my first twenty years, fallible in my spontaneity, culpable in my impulses. Gareth had survived, but how would he live now?

And what about Isabella, who had lived so much more intensely than I did, despite all my adventures? Her passion and vivacity had sometimes created a gulf between us. Was it my innate trait of stepping back and observing rather than being fully present in a situation that had enforced this final, fatal separation? I didn’t know. Perhaps I’d become caught up in a growing obsession with the astrarium as a way of trying to undo past wrongs; an unconscious bid to win her back. Did I think that by solving the enigma of the astrarium I could put to rest all those unresolved arguments? Put her to rest?

Pulling the curtains closed, I shut out the city and the moon, now janglingly bright.

 

Hours later I was still awake, lying in the bed and staring up at the ceiling. I checked the bedside clock - it showed six a.m. already. It would be seven a.m. in Egypt, and I knew that Moustafa would have already been at the oilfield site for an hour or so. I decided to distract myself by checking on the progress of the well. I rang him on his field phone. The line was bad but in the background I could hear the distant thudding of the drill. The sound swept me right back and suddenly I found myself missing the reality of the field - the frenetic activity, the pungent smells, the shouts and sounds; the physical world I knew.

‘Moustafa, it’s Oliver. How’s it going?’

‘Oliver! Fantastic - you are the man I have been trying to reach for days. Du Voor told me you had gone underground . . .’

‘It’s complicated. How’s the drilling going?’

‘Wait, I will find some privacy to talk in.’

The shouts of the roughnecks faded as he walked away from the field. A minute later he was back on the phone. ‘Oliver, I have exciting news. We have encountered oil-bearing sandstone, and we haven’t even reached the main target. But there’s more - there seems to have been substantial subsurface movement since the seismic data, and nothing is matching up. You must come back to the Sinai, Oliver. I think we should run another couple of seismic lines.’ His words tumbled over each other in his eagerness.

‘Moustafa, slow down - this could be bad news, not good news.’

‘I don’t think it’s bad news. We have at least two hundred feet of net oil pay and I believe this new structure could extend a long way to the east, well into the new block. From the helicopter, it seemed to me—’