Alchemist (96 page)

Israel. Monday 12 December, 1994

A bird twittered.

Slowly he forced his eyelids open. Beyond the outside entrance to the cave Conor could see a pink dawn sky. He lifted his face up off the floor and the movement was painful. His face felt puffy and his nose hurt. His mouth was parched.

He staggered to his feet and swayed, one shoe on, one shoe off. The cave felt warm, quiet; it seemed to be filled with a deep, welcoming glow.

The stone chair on which Rorke had sat had shattered and lay in pieces across the floor. There was a stain on one part of the wall, dark red like dried blood. Near it was a smaller stain. He saw a Rolex watch, the face smashed and twisted almost in half. A solitary sand-caked shoe lay upside down on the far side of the cave. Rorke's. There was more blood beside it and what looked like a piece of splintered bone with skin attached. He saw a ragged strip of pin-striped cloth. Another strip of skin.

Then he saw Rorke's holdall close to the steps where he had been lying. He looked inside. There were two canteens, one full. He drank deeply, then stopped, knowing that he must ration himself for the walk back.

His body, although aching and sore, now surged with energy. He looked around, up into the darkness, at the walls, down at the shattered throne. He was alone, but he did not feel
lonely. The forces that yesterday had awed him and scared him now fuelled him and gave him strength. He was wanted here now. He belonged here. He looked up at the symbols on the walls, looked at the steps, then something caught his eye on the floor and he walked over to it.

It was a gold pendant, in the shape of a frog's head, on a chain. Conor picked it up and examined it. There was something rather vulgar about gold, he thought, dangling it by its chain.

Everything depends on how you look at it, Molloy. You look at me and you see a monster; I look in the mirror and I see a gentleman
.

No, Rorke
, he thought,
no way. No gentleman would ever wear this
. He carried it out through the cave, past the stake wedged into the crack in the rocks and threw the pendant hard out into the valley. He turned away before it had even dropped from sight, walked back towards the Cave of Demons.

His cave, now.

He saw his shoe just inside the entrance, slipped it on and tied the laces. Then he strode confidently into the cave. At first he kept outside the pentagram, then he shrugged, stepped over its outer circumference and walked slowly to the centre, and stood there in silence.

Rorke's words came back to him.

…
everyone thinks they can handle this thing – this power that you're trying to wrest from me here, tonight … But there's no longer good versus evil in this world. Good versus evil has become bad versus evil. You try to change, but in the end it's you who gets changed, Molloy. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
…

He walked out of the pentagram, feeling uncomfortable suddenly. It was dawn outside and the air would be cool. There were a good couple of hours before the sun reached its full heat. He should start now, he thought. Right now.

There was a car waiting where the taxi should have been and Conor felt a beat of apprehension. It was a white Mercedes but it did not look like a taxi.

When he was still a good quarter of a mile off, the driver's door opened and a man in a brown suit with short hair and
aviator glasses got out and hailed him with a formal, business-like wave. It was Major Gunn, he saw, as he came closer.

Gunn opened the rear door of the car and held it for him, subserviently. ‘I thought there might be a problem, sir – if the taxi that brought you here dropped off two people, and only one returned …'

‘And you didn't know which one it would be?'

‘No, sir.' Gunn allowed the trace of a smile.

Conor slumped on to the back seat. The door closed. Gunn started the engine and the cold air of the air-conditioning filled the interior. Conor lay back, absorbing it gratefully, then took the cold bottle of mineral water that Gunn passed him and drank until it was almost drained.

Gunn drove for some minutes in silence. Then he said, quietly, ‘I'm glad, Mr Molloy. I'm very glad.'

‘I'm pretty glad too,' Conor said, wryly. He lay back in the seat and closed his eyes.

Rorke was wrong. It was possible to change things. If you were determined enough.

He glanced through his lashes at Gunn's face in the mirror. The test lay ahead. Was it possible for bad people to become good? Or for good to become bad?

Grief lay ahead also. He needed to allow himself the time and the space to grieve properly for his mother. And then, some time after that, he was going to sweep Monty up in his arms and carry her off to a quiet corner some place and tell her they were going to marry. It wasn't going to be a question, it was going to be a statement.

He finished the bottle of mineral water and started on another, which Gunn passed him automatically. He cradled it in his hands, pressed it to his cheeks, rolled it around his face, trying to chill off some of the heat from the sun.

His eyes were raw from the glare and his hands were sunburned and hurt badly. He looked down at his clothes: his jacket was ripped in several places, three of his shirt buttons were missing and there was blood on his tie.
Have to get a new suit
, he thought and wondered, with sudden irrational concern, how they would find a decent men's outfitter.

Glancing out of the window again and back at the mountains, he remembered a line from a poem he had read years before. It was from Shelley, he thought. Yes, Shelley.

Sometimes
,

The Devil is a gentleman
.

He smiled.

Saturday 27 June, 2002

‘Mack, time to go, we're outta here!'

Mack Molloy looked up for a moment at the sound of his father's voice, then, his face screwed up tight in concentration, he stuck the crayon in his mouth and sucked on it as though it were a pretend cigarette, before adding some touches to his drawing with it.

Monty smiled. Mack was forever making her smile. She watched him in his tracksuit bottoms, sweatshirt, mop of blond hair flopped forward, his face and hands smeared with crayon. He seemed to spend most of his time in a world of his own, quietly observing, drawing, thinking. Sometimes she worried that he thought too much, too deeply for a five-year-old. He bombarded her with questions about how things worked, about who God was, and about death. He was particularly interested in death.

‘Mack! C'mon, fella, got to get ready, got Alec's birthday party to go to!' Conor shouted.

Mack grimaced and continued with his drawing. Monty glanced at her watch. ‘Darling,' she said quietly, ‘Daddy's calling you. You have to get ready. Go and wash and I'll come and help you dress.'

He shrugged, uninterested.

‘Don't you want to go to the party? It's Alec, your friend, you like him.'

Deaf ears.

Hurriedly Monty dunked her paint brushes into the chipped coffee mug of turps, wiped them and laid them on the lip of her easel.

It was a fine summer day. The distant sloping field which she could see from her studio window was flecked with puffs of white, and the air was alive with the buzzing of bees and the distant bleating of sheep. Through the reek of turpentine and
linseed oil, she could smell the garden, flowers and freshly mown grass.

She liked the dilapidated old barn Conor had had converted into a studio for her. It was her retreat, her sanctuary. The door opened and Conor came in looking livid. ‘Mack! Come
on
!' His voice sounded short and fractious, a sign that one of his black moods was approaching.

He had the moods every once in a while and they would last for several days. His temper would be ferocious, frightening her sometimes with its venom, and always they would be followed by several days in which he would be quiet and deeply gloomy.

They had started after his return from Israel. He had never talked about what had happened in the Cave of Demons. Sometimes she wondered quite how much he kept from her. There was a secretive side to his nature, but that had been part of his attraction for her, right from the beginning.

Mack would be six in a couple of months' time, and she was four months' pregnant now. She had miscarried twice in the intervening years and Conor, on the advice of the obstetrician, was insistent that this time she did nothing other than rest and paint until she was safely through the danger period. During the past few months he had been even kinder and more attentive than she had ever known him.

He slipped an arm around her shoulder now and eyed the unfinished painting on the easel in front of her. ‘You have the sky good,' he said.

‘Thanks. I don't think the colour of the water's right, though. It's too green.'

‘It's too flat. You got those clouds overhead, it means there would be wind, a squall. The water should be whipped up into waves.'

She nodded; he was right. He usually was. ‘You won't forget the necklace, darling?' she reminded him.

‘Nope.'

They were going to the christening the next day of Katy Sterling, her god-daughter. Anna and Mark Sterling's first child. The necklace was being inscribed with Katy's initials. A pretty sterling silver chain with a locket. She had wanted to get
gold, but Conor had insisted on silver, he had a thing about gold, an intense dislike that she had never understood, but she accepted it.

She turned and gave him a spontaneous kiss. ‘Love you,' she said.

He squeezed her harder. ‘Love you too.'

Conor was a good man, she thought gratefully. He was kind, and a tireless worker and although he was Chairman and Chief Executive of Bendix Schere he concentrated much of his energies on charitable work, and on helping struggling research scientists. He earned warmth and respect from everyone who knew him.

Monty had had a huge struggle with her conscience when it came to determining the future of Bendix Schere. In the end she had been persuaded by Conor to accept the shares thus guaranteeing the company's survival. First and foremost was the freedom that the money would give her father for his research. Then there was the vast funding at their disposal to hand out to other research foundations and charities who were in the same position she and her father had been in. And, as Conor pointed out, they knew the truth about Bendix Schere. Could they be sure any other pharmaceutical company they went to for funding would have any more integrity, or any fewer skeletons in the closet? Wasn't it better to stay with the devil you knew?

Her father and Conor had reached an uneasy compromise. Dick Bannerman accepted his one third of the company stock, and the role of Director of Research and Development, on the one condition that none of his work was ever patented. For a man whose career was patent law it was a tough one for Conor, but he accepted it. In seven years Bendix Schere had not filed a single patent. The company was still in the world's top ten league.

Following Sir Neil Rorke's mysterious disappearance, Monty had joined the Board of Bendix Schere as Director of Human Resources, a post she held for three years, with only a short period of maternity leave for Mack. She did the best she could for the sick security guards and the other members of staff who had been held captive by their ailments, and Gunn
had been remarkably efficient in helping her to weed out Rorke's erstwhile playmates.

Eight of the remaining nine women who were still pregnant as a result of the doctored Maternox miscarried. The ninth, whose baby was the most imminent, died in a car accident which, Conor insisted, was a genuine accident.

But even now the babies in the basement lab preyed on Monty's mind. Within twenty-four hours of Conor's return from Israel they had disappeared. She wondered sometimes whether Conor was right and she had been hallucinating from the drug she had been given and had imagined them. But she didn't really believe that.

Monty did not, however, regret Levine's demise. The Detective Superintendent had been found in his bedroom, dressed in ladies' underwear, hanging from an electric light flex. The story made all the national headlines, every single one. She had seen to that personally, had drafted the anonymous tip-off herself and faxed and eMailed it to every news editor. She liked to think that Hubert Wentworth would have approved.

The bitterest irony was that Conor had had a plaque put up in the atrium commemorating the deaths of Dr Crowe, Dr Seligman, Dr Farmer, and the other woman, Dr Baines, in a tragic accident brought about by a fire in a laboratory. He had insisted it was important for appearances. At least, she supposed, she did get some measure of satisfaction each time she went into Bendix Schere and saw the plaque. It reminded her of something her husband had become increasingly fond of saying over the years:

Sometimes
,

The Devil is a gentleman
.

Conor squeezed her again, as if he were frightened of something and did not want to leave her. Maybe, she thought, he was afraid of the dark mood that was looming.

‘OK, Mack! That's it! Let's go!' he said.

Startled, Mack jumped up. ‘OK,' he said. ‘Going. I'm going!' And he scampered out of the room.

Monty and Conor grinned at each other.

‘What's he drawing?' Conor asked.

‘I don't know – he's been busy on it all morning.'

Conor walked over to Mack's little table and looked down. He stood, motionless, for some moments, the colour draining from his face.

‘What's the matter?' she said.

He continued staring at the drawing in silence. She walked over to him.

Mack's drawings always took a while to decipher. This was of a huge black creature that looked half-bird, half-human. It seemed to be falling out of the sky, plummeting towards the jaws of a monster that was lurking in the entrance of a cave.