The Lazarus Vault Part 10

'What are you thinking about?'

'Things I wish I could change.'

I shift, trying to make myself comfortable on the hard ground. The rush of the chase is still in my veins. It makes me say things I normally wouldn't dare.

'Do I really look at you like something that fell down the chimney?'

I'm not prepared for how furious she looks. I thought I was the wounded party. Now I feel compelled to defend myself.

'I was pa.s.sing the door.'

'You don't understand. And you do look at me like that.' I think she's sobbing. The cloak's slipped off her shoulders, but when I try to rearrange it she almost slaps me away.

'You treat me like a criminal.'

'You treat me like a serf.'

'Each time you look at me, I feel I've done something unforgiveable.'

'Then what do you want me to do?'

She hesitates, closes her eyes. I think: she's going to say something so terrible it will change everything between us.

She reaches across, ever so gently, and kisses me on the lips.

I'm lying propped on my elbows. I'm so stunned I lose my balance, sliding backwards. Her eyes widen: she thinks I'm recoiling in disgust or loathing, and I reach out an arm to keep her from pulling away. I only mean to rea.s.sure her, to make her understand, but my clumsy movement brings her down on top of me. Or perhaps she comes willingly. I feel the weight of her body against mine, her flesh stiff through the sodden fabric.

After that, I hardly know what happens. She's kissing my face, my lips, my neck; she's pressing me into the damp ground; she's running her hands through my hair. She unlaces her bodice and I bury my face in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I roll on top of her, sc.r.a.ping my back against the low-lying rock. I fumble with her skirts, and she guides me gently inside her.

Thunder rolls its warning across the sky, but we don't heed it. The rain curtains off the world and hides us from the day. I smell rock and wood and wet earth; I feel her damp skin against mine. I imagine I hear a hunting horn and pull back, but Ada says it's only the trees creaking in the wind. She draws me back in.

At last I understand what the poets' songs mean. The walls of the world seem to melt away. All we know is each other.

XVII.

London 'Where were you last night?'

Doug's voice, like water dripping down the back of her neck.

'I went to the opera.'

Ellie stood in the check-in queue and endured Doug's surprise, the obvious questions and the false answers she'd prepared. She knew she should feel guilty, but against the enormous act of betrayal these subsidiary lies simply irritated her.

'Just a client. It was pretty boring, actually. Went on for five hours. I forgot to turn on my phone when I came out.'

A tannoy announcement shouted down the rest of her story, as if the airport itself were ashamed of her.

'They're sending me to Brussels. I'll probably stay the weekend, meet a few people.'

She waited while the tannoy repeated its announcement.

'They're calling my flight.' Another lie. 'I'll call when I get there.

'You too.'

Somewhere in the depths of the night, Ellie had woken and crept to the bathroom. She splashed water on her face and stared at her body in the mirror. Moonlight flooded the room, so that her naked skin became like the marble on the walls. She felt devastated, her limbs like wax. Blanchard's love-making had been an all-out a.s.sault not physically, but on her very being. Tenderly, delicately, he had stripped her defences until she was reduced to pure sensation, utterly in his power. It had been terrifying, but also ecstatic, a sense of utter abandonment. Even the memory made her shiver.

The light was on when she went back into the bedroom. Blanchard was sitting up in bed, his head tipped back against the pillows. His eyes slid onto her as she crossed the room, admiring her nakedness. She was surprised to find she enjoyed it, the sense of power it gave. She curled up under the duvet beside him and rested her head on his shoulder, running her fingers through the wool of white hair on his chest.

A small gold key hung on a chain around his neck. He'd stripped off everything, but not that. Ellie lifted it up and examined it. The teeth were so intricate they looked as if they'd snap off if they touched a lock; the handle was in the shape of a cross, set with a red stone.

'What does that open?'

'My heart.' Gentle but firm, Blanchard prised the key out of her grip and relocated her hand onto his stomach. He stroked her hair and said, 'You have to go away tomorrow.'

Ellie pulled back and stared at him. She tugged the duvet up to her shoulders.

'This is not because of what happened between us tonight. That changes nothing. Nothing at work,' he corrected himself. 'Between us, everything. If you want.'

Ellie no longer knew what she wanted. But Blanchard was waiting, and it seemed to matter to him. She nodded.

'I need you, Ellie. You are an extraordinary person. Together ...' He blew air out of his mouth, as if smoking an imaginary cigar. 'We are right together. We can accomplish so many things.'

He gripped her arm and pulled her around so that she was inches from his face.

'Perhaps you think I do this every night, bring back a beautiful young woman to my bedroom. Perhaps you think it is nothing to me or that it is too much, that I am embarra.s.sed or ashamed. This is not the case. I am in love with you, Ellie. If others talk at the bank, it means nothing to me. But you are young and new: if your colleagues are jealous, it will hurt you.'

He leaned forward and kissed her, pressing her against the mattress, pinning her down with his body. Ellie put her palms against his chest and pushed him back. The key dangled on its chain, tickling the skin between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

'What about ...?' She pulled a face, mock sensible. Blanchard understood.

'I'm clean.'

'I didn't mean you see I'm not on the pill.' Two weeks earlier she'd been so busy she'd forgotten to take it three days running. After that, she just hadn't bothered. She hadn't needed it with Doug.

'You do not need any protection with me.'

He spread her hands and buried her beneath him.

Brussels It was Joseph Conrad who described Brussels as a whited sepulchre of a city, Ellie remembered. After two days there, digging through the accounts of a minor industrial concern, she felt she'd stepped into a grave herself. The narrow streets and imposing houses with their blinded windows; the silence; the low cloud and constant smell of rain; the Belgians themselves, every face a locked door. She would have given anything to go home for the weekend. But home meant Doug, confrontation and farewell, and she couldn't deal with that yet. She had to do it face to face, she told herself. He hadn't said anything when she stopped signing off their conversations with 'I love you'; she wondered if he'd noticed.

On Sat.u.r.day morning she ordered breakfast from room service and decided to spend the day in bed with a book. If she couldn't escape Belgium, at least she could pretend it didn't exist.

She'd just got out of the shower when she heard a knock from outside. She pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door, realising how hungry she was. But there was no breakfast, and the corridor was empty. All she found was a complimentary newspaper she hadn't ordered. She picked it up; she was about to throw it straight in the bin when she felt something surprisingly solid inside.

She tipped the newspaper over. A book slid out from the central fold, a guidebook to Brussels. She wondered if it might be a free gift. But the spine was already broken, and she could see the irregular edge of a pink Post-it note poking out of the pages.

With rising anxiety, she opened the book to the marked page. A piece of paper, a folded sheet of yellowing newsprint, sat tucked into the crease. Feeling as if she was delving into some strange kind of Chinese box, Ellie opened it.

It was a single page from the Evening Standard dated 19 February 1988. Among the antiquated news, a small column at the bottom of the page had been asterisked.

BIZARRE DEATH IN TUBE TUNNEL.

Central Line Underground services suffered severe disruptions this morning after a man was struck by a train in the deep tunnel between Bank and Liverpool Street stations.

London Underground officials expressed surprise that the man could have wandered so far, given overnight cleaning works and regular services pa.s.sing through the tunnel earlier in the morning. CCTV images from the stations gave no indication of how he had managed to evade platform security and enter the tunnel.

A spokesman for London Underground said: 'Thankfully, incidents like this remain astonishingly rare. The tunnels on the Underground network are dangerous places. No member of the public should ever attempt to enter them on foot. This tragic accident only serves to ill.u.s.trate the perils.'

The deceased has been identified as John Herrin, 38, of Reading, Berkshire.

Ellie sat down on the bed, trembling. There was nothing shocking in the article, beyond the faded tragedy. She had never heard the name John Herrin. It was simply the date. A date she had seen so often, gold lettering in black granite on a damp hillside near Newport.

In loving memory

ANEURIN STANTON.

12th May 1949 19th February 1988

She flipped through the rest of the guidebook, looking for any clue to who had sent it. Various sights had been highlighted in fluorescent marker, or tagged with asterisks in the margin. The marks looked fresh.

All thoughts of reading in bed were forgotten. She pulled back the curtains, letting in the dirty autumn light, and dressed quickly. Then she went sightseeing.

'Any tour of Brussels should start with the Grand Place.' That line of the guidebook was highlighted and starred, so Ellie began there. She dutifully admired the fifteenth-century Hotel de Ville with its needle spire; the baroque guildhouses with their allegorical carvings of Prudence, Faith, Justice and other virtues that the burghers had arrogated to themselves. She saw the House of the Swan, where Karl Marx had written The Communist Manifesto, and which was now a restaurant where you could pay thirty euros for a starter.

She spent an hour wandering through the Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts, lingering particularly in the Bosch and Breugel rooms which had drawn marks in the guidebook. Several times she spotted a man in a fawn trenchcoat behind her, always just turning away, as if a painting had suddenly interested him. By the time she reached Magritte she had almost persuaded herself to approach him, ask if he was the source of the book. But by then he'd evidently grown bored of the art and she couldn't find him.

She ate lunch in a cafe that the book highlighted, wondering if the whole thing was insane. She watched the other patrons carefully, waiting for one of them to pull up a chair and introduce himself, offer an explanation. None did. There was one more site marked in the book and it was the furthest away: she almost decided not to bother. But she'd come this far, so she got on the tram and rode out down the long, tree-lined avenue to the quiet suburb of Tervuren.

The Royal Museum of Central Africa stood in an imposing, lead-domed building that looked like a mausoleum. It was a place out of time, an anomaly in the fabric of history. Built as a monument to King Leopold's vanity, it had opened the year his vicious reign in the Congo finally became too much even for his countrymen to stomach. In the 1960s the winds of change had blown in just enough to shake loose the 'Congo' from its name, but not enough to disturb the dust on the old collections. Lions and elephants stood rigorously stiff in gla.s.s cases, poised as their killers had posed them. The only reference Ellie found to the savagery of the Belgian occupation was in a brief display in a gallery at the far end of the building, an apologetic footnote tucked at the bottom of the page. She thought of Conrad again, and wondered how many of those profits had poured into accounts at Monsalvat.

The horror, she murmured to herself.

'We meet again.'

She spun around. A short, tubby man with tousled hair and an apologetic expression was watching her from across a cabinet of ivory tusks. Perhaps she'd half expected him, but she was still shocked. It occurred to her that he'd bided his time, waiting until she reached the furthest, emptiest place in this distant, empty building. There were no guards here. The whole long corridor leading away from the room was deserted.

'I'll scream,' she warned him.

'Please don't.' He stepped away, holding up his hands, as if she were pointing a gun at him. It unnerved her.

'Why did you send me that newspaper article?'

He looked out of the window, at the green lawns and grey sky. 'Let's go for a walk.'

London There was nothing special about the building at No. 46 Lombard Street, unless you looked at the roof. On four floors it housed an insurance company, a firm of headhunters who preferred the term 'executive search', a commodities trader and a small consultancy. But on the roof, unseen and unnoticed, there grew a forest of antennae, dishes, aerials and masts. They twitched in the wind, feeling out the least ghost of information.

If you could have followed your way through the tangle of holding companies and blind trusts that owned the building, you would eventually arrive by way of Liechtenstein, Monaco, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands almost back where you started. And if you could have followed your way through the tangle of electrical cables coiled up in the bas.e.m.e.nt, they too would have led to the same place: out of the building, a hundred metres underground along Lombard Street, and up into a dark room on the fifth floor of an old building behind King William Street, filled with the hum of electronics. In that room, if you could have peered through one of the many screens that lit it, you would have seen two men staring at a map overlaid with red lines like a child's scribble.

'It's too easy,' said Destrier. 'In the old days we'd have needed six men to keep tabs on her backup vehicles, disguises, the lot. Now her phone tells us every step she takes and it's not even illegal.'

Blanchard examined the map. 'She's been busy.'

'All the tourist sites.' Destrier made a gesture on the touch-screen and the map zoomed out. Now the red lines looked a tangled ball of string, with a single thread trailing off the end. 'Right now, she's at the Congo Museum.'

'Show me the time profile.'

Destrier pushed a b.u.t.ton. The lines changed again, swelling or contracting so that the thickness showed the length of time spent in any given place. Stringy veins where she'd been travelling, broad pools where she'd lingered in the museums. It made the overlay look like a giant blood splatter.

'She's spending a long time at the Musee d'Afrique.'

'Maybe she likes dead animals.'

Blanchard stared at the screen. 'Do you have watchers?'

'Two guys followed her for a couple of hours this morning at the art gallery. Saw a thousand pictures of fat women and nothing else, then b.u.g.g.e.red off. Not very cultured, my guys. Koenig's in town; Saint-Lazare said he was a higher priority.'

'Of course. How about phone calls?'

'Not many.'

'Any to Oxford?'