The Deadly Space Between (20 page)

I began to spy on the changing colours in the studio. The surfaces were densely worked as usual, but there was a sharper, glassier finish to the edges. The textures no longer dissolved, whispering to one another. She erased more of the work than she usually did. Smeared blank canvases stood facing the wall, like stupid schoolchildren who had failed to get it right.

She had always drawn figures, in charcoal, pencil, pastel; the nudes in her life-class, or even the self-portraits, which she drew often, staring at the mirror with an obsessive intensity. There were endless sketches of me; watching television, reading, peeling potatoes at the sink, painting the windowsills outside the studio, bending over the daffodils in the garden. But, outside her college projects, she had never, to my certain knowledge, painted figures before. Or at least not with such professional care, not as part of her own work, preparatory for exhibition. This was entirely new.

Something was lurking in the dark blocks of green, a shadow, a hulking shape.

I expected to decipher the massive contours of Roehm.

But when the shape gradually solidified over a period of weeks, I made out, not the white and pale grey face of her lover, but the glowing red eye of the Demon Huntsman. It was Samiel. I did not like the new paintings. They were arresting, but tacky and sensational, like a horror comic. To me, they were simply bizarre. There was also an odd shadowy menace in the pictures which had been entirely absent in the opera. Samiel owned the forests, but he stayed there. If you were looking for trouble and satanic bullets, you could seek him out in the Wolf’s Glen. This demon figure was on the loose, wandering about, seeking whom he might devour. I scrubbed at the green and red stains in the sink in an ostentatious flurry of resentment.

She gave me the first finished painting of the sequence in early February. I had cooked a large lasagne, which would do for two days, and was serving it up when I saw her coming through the studio door angling the painting carefully away from the door frame.

‘Here you are. If you like it, this one’s yours.’

I had spent hours staring at the thing on the previous evening before she came home. So I didn’t even bother to look up, I just went on spooning out the sauce.

‘I don’t like your new work.’

She stood still for a moment and her angry disappointment hit me like a sudden gust of cold. She set the picture up against the fridge, facing away from us, so that all I could see were the wooden struts of the frame. Then she sat down at the table and pulled her plate towards her. After a while she said,

‘Why don’t you like them?’

‘I just don’t. I think they look cheap.’

‘Cheap?’ Her voice rose a bit.

‘Yes. Like a horror film. Cheap and scary.’

We ate in silence. Then she said,

‘Well, it’s not as if I paint in my own blood like this year’s Turner Prize winner.’

I said nothing. We smouldered at one another in a long champing silence. Then she pushed back her empty plate, stood up and stalked off upstairs. I heard the radio in the bathroom. The picture still leaned against the fridge. I ferried it back into the studio without looking at the image and trying not to touch the damp rim. Then I sat on the stairs with my head in my hands listening to her movements on the boards above me. I could not let the anger grow between us.

I followed her upstairs. She had left the bathroom door ajar. She was running the bath and had turned up the radio.

‘Iso?’

She didn’t hear me. I pushed the door slightly open in time to see her slipping her shirt carefully over her shoulders. She had her back to me. I caught my breath.

All across the upper part of her back was a sequence of raised welts, forming a livid red pattern, like crosshatching. The skin was broken and oozing in places. The pattern was perfectly symmetrical, as if she had been sliced open with precision tools.

I rushed back down the stairs and collapsed shaking in the kitchen. My cruelty had appeared in her flesh. I had never touched her, yet my first impulse was to blame myself. Then I remembered Roehm.

I got up and flung open the back door. The cold air, smelling of damp turned earth, hung draped in the doorway. I sicked up the lasagne into the nearest flowerbed and then sat down on the damp back step, shivering and appalled. I had the same unsteady sensation of being paper-thin and unreal that I had had when I stepped inside the uncanny Web site. I waited, paralysed, for the cold air to enter me. My stomach steadied. I glanced back into the kitchen. The soiled plates and the remains of supper still lay upon the table, but the whole thing now looked yellow, ghastly and surreal, like an abandoned travellers’ site following an eviction, a waste space littered with rubbish and the echo of violent acts. My fingers and my face were stinging with winter cold. I shut the back door.

When I looked closely at the kitchen again I knew that I was no longer in control of what happened in the house.

_{*  *  *}

I rang Liberty on the following day from the phone box outside the school gates. It was covered in stencilled obscenities and still smelt faintly of summer urine. My phone card had twenty-eight units, hoarded, stored. For the first time I realized that I never spent anything. I acquired nothing. I gave nothing away. I listened to my mother’s phone calls, but I never made any of my own. Liberty was in her office. She picked up my anxiety at once.

‘Let me ring you back.’

‘What’s put the wind up you so badly, Toby?’

‘A Web site?’ Incredulous.

‘Have you quarrelled with Iso?’

‘Well, you don’t have to like everything she paints.’

‘Don’t take on so. She’ll get over it. I don’t like all of Luce’s work and she gets ratty too.’

‘Whadda you mean? There’s other things. What other things?’

‘Toby – is this anything to do with Roehm? It is? How? . . .’

‘You saw him sitting on another Web site in Egypt??! Toby, love, you’re not making sense. Have you been spending too much time revising?’

‘No. I’m not patronizing you. And I don’t think that you’re going dotty. I just can’t get a handle on what’s going on . . .’

‘Listen, sweetheart, don’t go home. Get on the train and come down into town. You can be here by four. And either Luce or I will drive you back. You’re all wired up and I can’t quite understand what the matter is . . .’

‘OK. I’ll see you very soon.’

I ran for the train.

Liberty had just been taken on as a pupil at 10 Court Steps in the Temple. She had access to a vast iMac G4 and a parking space shared with another junior barrister. She was also part of an informal drinking club called Bar Dykes, which was women only and aimed to advance everyone’s career. I loved going to visit Liberty in chambers. They were lodged in ivy-covered ancient buildings around a garden with the edges of the beds neatly trimmed. Court Steps looked exactly like the Cambridge college where I had been interviewed and appeared to be occupied by many of the same people. Liberty had access to methods and information. I decided to ask for help. Her pupil-master employed two ex-policewomen as private detectives. When they weren’t trailing unfaithful husbands, they bred dogs in Essex.

I imagined the two ex-policewomen pursuing Roehm with a brace of pitbull terriers.

Liberty was watching out for me and had warned the security guards that I was coming. One of them already knew my face so that I had no difficulty entering her courtyard kingdom.

But when I found myself sitting safely in her room, clutching a mug of herb tea, and had begun my narrative it all sounded mad, even to me. I could not bring myself to tell Liberty about the marks I had seen upon my mother’s body. I felt too guilty and ashamed. Instead I begged her to access the Web site.

http://www.hautmontagne.irs.org.ch

While we were waiting for the computer to process our demands Liberty looked at me suspiciously.

‘Toby, is there anything concrete – and by that I mean visible proof – of which you know that would link this Web site to Roehm?’

But before I could answer the screen exploded into life.

So far as I could see it was all there. The images were the same. Here were the forests, the ice peaks. But the language was unintelligible. It was not even a script I recognized. There were strong thick bars across the top of every word, from which hung a sequence of dots and squiggles.

‘Have you read this?’ Liberty demanded.

‘No. It used to be in English and French. I read that.’

‘What language is this?’

‘I don’t know. It isn’t Arabic. It could be an Indian language. Maybe Hindi? Or Urdu?’

‘Urdu!’

We stared at the opaque mass of text. Liberty frowned and ran her hand through her short hair. She looked like an undertaker.

‘Toby, I have no idea what this means, although the pictures suggest that it’s about glaciers and chamois. And you say that it went all gelatinous and seemed to suck you in.’

I crumpled in front of her, suddenly infantile and tearful.

‘You don’t believe me.’

Liberty hugged me and gave me a warm kiss. She smelt of musk and fresh linen.

‘Now listen carefully, and concentrate. I want you to tell me every single thing you can remember about Roehm. No matter how small. How you first knew him. When you first saw him. Everything he did, everything he said. I don’t yet know what’s important. So just talk, Toby. Try to remember. I’ll take notes. Don’t be put off. Imagine I’m your barrister and you’re putting your side of the divorce case. Just tell me everything. Take your time.’

She rang her clerk and her pupil-master. We sat in sealed and legal confidence while I floundered through a swamp of guilt and fear. I left out the key moments: the pub where I had arranged to meet Roehm, my fear that he had assaulted my mother – with her consent. The gaps in my narrative destroyed my credibility, even to myself. But there was one thing I could describe in detail, because it implicated no one else, and that was my journey across the ice. The sheer walls of blue cold were real to me. The peace and immensity of the mountains became steadily more intelligible, and, as each day followed another, closer. When I had finished Liberty gave me a long look. It was as if she guessed the details of what I had not said.

‘I know that something’s horribly wrong and that it’s got something to do with that man. Listen, my dear, I’ll have a word with my head of chambers. Leave it all to me. And don’t be so demoralized. I do believe you.’

She rang me, late in the afternoon on the next day.

‘Toby?’

‘Hello, Liberty.’

‘Your mum there?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Listen. I’ve been making some enquiries. But I don’t want her finding out.’

‘What sort of enquiries?’

But I knew what she was going to say.

‘About Roehm.’

‘You ringing from work?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve rung UCH,’ Liberty continued. ‘They know about the lab, but the people who work there aren’t on their payroll. It’s a government project jointly financed by a Swiss foundation about which I can find out nothing whatsoever. They didn’t know Roehm’s name when I asked if he was the director.’

‘He had his own key. He let himself in.’

‘So he must have had a security key and security clearance.’

I couldn’t remember any security at all.

‘There were animals in the lab. Live animals. Monkeys, rats, birds.’

I remembered the sad and fearful eyes of the creatures that shrank from Roehm’s dark passing.

‘Which is probably why it’s so secret. They’re scared of the animal rights brigade.’

Liberty paused.

‘Could you find the entrance again?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. It was dark. I was a bit drunk.’

We both breathed into our respective mouthpieces.

‘I’ve tried the phones. All the numbers he’s rung from go through the UCH switchboard. The mobile phone is run through Europhone, one of the smaller groups, Plutophones. But he doesn’t have a private number on a fixed line. He’s not even ex-directory.’

‘What about the Web site?’

‘Ah, your famous discovery – www.hautmontagne.irs.org.ch? Look into your computer, little cousin.’

Liberty’s tone was ironic, frustrated.

‘Why?’

‘It’s disappeared. There’s a notice in English. This Web site is under reconstruction. Please call back later.’

‘It wasn’t even in French or English any more. It probably wouldn’t have helped.’

‘But it would have been useful to know what language it was written in when we looked.’

‘It wasn’t a language I recognized. And certainly not one I’ve ever seen on the Net.’

There was a pause between us.

‘Liberty. I’ve got an idea.’

‘What?’

‘Have him followed.’

‘I’ve thought of that. The girls are all ready to go. I rang them up. But I’d have to pay for it. I can’t tell Luce. She’s beginning to come round. She thinks Roehm might be OK after all. And we’d look like right plonkers if he is above board.’