The Dying Light (14 page)
‘Books are like shoes and spectacles,’ Russell observed quietly. ‘They carry something of the person long after their owner has gone.’
‘Or make the void more obvious.’ She folded her arms against her sadness. ‘It’s my impression he’s got more books than he had before.’
‘That’s how he spent most of his time during the winter evenings. I never knew anyone who read so widely or retained so much from what he read.’
When they had toured all the upstairs and the kitchen he asked, ‘What are you going to do with it all?’
‘God knows. I can’t possibly live here. I mean, what would I do in the English countryside?’ She stopped. ‘I guess I’ll have to sell it.’ Her eyes came to rest on a desk and computer in the sitting room. ‘And you say that doesn’t work - that he had to use your laptop?’
‘Er . . . yes. It kept on losing stuff, apparently.’
She darted a look at him. He ignored her and picked up a ringbinder file that was lying on the desk. ‘In this you’ve got all the details about the man who services the boiler, the heating engineer, the broadband connection, et cetera. The cleaner’s wages. It’s all here, together with the service and council tax bills. You will need to reimburse me on some of them, and the cleaner’s and Nock’s money.’
‘Yes, the man Nock.’
‘Sean Nock. He lives in Nestor, a sort of hippy encampment a mile or so from here. He has a mobile if you need anything. In fact I’ll try to get him down here to meet you. He’s kept the car battery charged and has given the car what he calls a service, though I don’t know what that entails. By the way, you will need to register the transfer of ownership: my secretary can arrange temporary motor insurance for you today.’
He left her and went to make a call from a spot at the end of the garden where he knew his cell phone worked. Remembering one of Eyam’s obsessions, she went into the kitchen, searched for and found an unopened bag of Blue Mountain Grade One coffee beans. She shook them into the grinder, in her mind hearing Eyam descant on the difference between Blue Mountain Grade One and Blue Mountain ‘Triage’ which apparently included three smaller grades of beans. ‘It’s altogether like drinking bark,’ he pronounced.
She made them a cup of black coffee each and sat down at a pine table to wait for Russell. Her eyes travelled around the room imagining Eyam eating alone in the kitchen with a book propped up in front of him. And then she froze and had to stop herself springing up to go through the open door of the utility room, where her subconscious had been registering a particular arrangement for some time, because she heard Russell coming down the passageway.
But it was not Russell. A tall man with blonde hair and stubble, wide cheekbones and grey eyes appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was wearing a checked shirt worn over several others, baggy denims and boots. ‘Ah,’ he said rather stupidly. ‘Mr Russell here?’
‘He’s making a phone call out in the garden. Are you Sean Nock?’
‘Yes, Nock from Nestor.’ He came across the flagstones leaving wet imprints of his boots and offered her a hand, which he then withdrew and wiped on his jeans because it was covered in oil.
‘Nock of Nestor - that sounds like something out of the medieval England that Mr Russell talked about on the way here.’
‘Did he tell you about the battle in the valley?’
‘No.’
‘It was down at the brook. A whole lot of soldiers were slaughtered here before they could join up with the House of York forces at High Castle. The man at Dove Farm still digs up bits of equipment, most of it rusted.’
‘So you’ve been looking after things here. Thank you.’
‘And now it’s yours. Mr Russell told me you’d be over. It’s a sweet place to have as your own.’
‘Despite the association with bloodshed and death,’ she said, still smiling.
‘You’ll soon be able to smell the blossom from the orchard and there’s nowhere quieter.’
‘Yes,’ she said, her eyes travelling back to the arrangement in the utility room. ‘Did you work for David full time?’
‘On and off. We installed the turbine on the stream above the house together and we were working on wind generation. I’m an engineer by training. Well, sort of.’ He looked out of the window.
‘Coffee? It’s just made.’
‘No, better be going. Got an appointment. When you need me to go over everything, my number’s on the board.’
Hugh Russell came in wearing his default expression of fretful distraction, and after more of the routine English awkwardness - the muttering, unfinished sentences and hesitant body language that Kate had become so aware of on her return from the United States, Nock loped off leaving Russell standing there patting down his hair.
‘What would you say if I stayed here tonight?’ she asked brightly.
Russell looked in the direction of Nock’s departure as if to ask whether it was Nock who’d changed her mind.
‘I’ve got all my luggage with me. Are you OK to drive back to High Castle without me?’
‘Sure. That’s a very good idea indeed. It would be wrong to give The Dove up without really getting the feel of the place. And tomorrow you can always phone for a taxi.’
They sat down with the coffee. She laid a hand on his and felt the instinctive withdrawal but kept it there. ‘Hugh, I need to know what you read in those papers.’
He shook his head.
‘Tell me what you saw,’ she said softly.
‘Well, there wasn’t much - an executive summary like the beginning of an official report. I thought it was a government paper of some sort at first. I read the first few paragraphs and stopped at that.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They outlined what he claimed to be a kind of takeover of British government by big business; the influence of these corporations was distorting government and they were secretly running the things that would normally be left to the civil service. Really there’s nothing new in that. The newspapers have been saying it for a long time.’
‘And?’ she said, revolving her hand and smiling.
‘There was some kind of system - ASCAM or ASCAN. It monitors people.’
‘What else?’
‘He talked about the inquiry of a parliamentary committee; I forget which one: ASCAM - or whatever it was - was formally denied by the government. A lie had been told. David was misled and in turn he had misled the committee and now he was setting the record straight.’ He stopped. ‘That’s the gist of it.’
‘Did he specify which corporations?’
‘No, I didn’t see any names I recognised.’
‘How did he couch this? As one corporation, or many?’
Russell held up his hands in defence. ‘I’m sorry, I . . .’ He looked round doubtfully, as though to ask whether they should be talking in Dove Cottage.
‘I think we’re OK here,’ she said. ‘Eyam is dead. They’ve obviously been over every inch of the place and cleaned everything out.’
Russell didn’t look reassured.
‘Was there a table of contents in the report?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
She let go of his hand. He sprang up and she followed him outside and removed her luggage from the Audi. He caressed Eyam’s car affectionately and told her that the temporary cover had been fixed for her to drive it. ‘She’s a beautiful old thing.’
Kate nodded, wondering why cars were always female. ‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive back?’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Look, let’s keep the conversation we had in there to ourselves.’
‘Of course! Drive carefully. We’ll speak tomorrow.’
He got into the Audi and smiled before the worry returned to his face and he drove away with a wave.
The three items she’d spotted stood alone on a shelf in the utility room, above two recycling bins: a bottle of Puligny Montrachet 2001, a box of dog biscuits and a cylindrical container of Italian cheese sticks. Propped up behind them was a postcard of a sunset. She took out Eyam’s letter to her and read the last part aloud: ‘
I write on a patch of gravel garden in front of the cottage resting on an old metal table, which I inherited when I bought the place. I have a glass of Puligny Montrachet at my side; a neighbour’s dog is making eyes at a bowl of cheese sticks. It has been a very hot day. The sun has set and the sky is bruising a gentle purple in the west. It is just past eight o’clock.’
I write on a patch of gravel garden in front of the cottage resting on an old metal table, which I inherited when I bought the place. I have a glass of Puligny Montrachet at my side; a neighbour’s dog is making eyes at a bowl of cheese sticks. It has been a very hot day. The sun has set and the sky is bruising a gentle purple in the west. It is just past eight o’clock.’
She picked up the containers in turn and examined each one - there was nothing unusual about any of them - then returned them to the shelf in their original order and looked at the postcard of a sunset over Skye, which she held up to the light. Nothing was written on the back and there was not the slightest indentation on the card’s surface. The image itself seemed to hold no particular significance. She stood back to ponder the configuration, then looked into the recycling bins below, where Eyam had separated plastic and paper. Nothing. What the hell was he playing at? She poked around behind the boiler, felt beneath the shelf and searched along a skirting board but found nothing. Deciding to let the problem settle in her mind, she withdrew to look over the rest of the house.
Upstairs she lay on the clean white bedspread and gazed across the valley, propped up on one arm. She wondered what it would be like to wake to the reflected light on the ceiling each morning with Eyam beside her. The sense of him in the room was so strong that suddenly she could not think of him as dead but merely absent, and that overwhelmed her with a sudden sense of present love, which she tried to dismiss by again telling herself that Eyam was a selfish prig. A sweater and a pair of trousers were folded over the back of a chair; pairs of shoes were lined up by a wardrobe; a book lay on the bedside table. She swung her legs from the bed and went to the bathroom, where she laid out a few of her things and looked at herself in a shaving mirror that was fixed to the wall on a concertina bracket. Her skin was still firm and healthy but the magnification of the mirror showed the lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. When did she get to look so tough? She grimaced at the effect and pushed the mirror away angrily. It sprang back and the disc spun round to reveal three photographs wedged into the rim of the flip side. She remembered the occasion immediately. They had been celebrating Eyam’s award of the John Hicks Economics prize, a large group that started out with three punts on the Cherwell and moved to a sprawling picnic amongst the cow’s parsley on Christ Church Meadow. Later just the three of them posed on a bench in front of the evergreen oak in the medieval cloisters of New College - her, Eyam and a tipsy-looking Darsh, and for some reason all wearing caps. She pulled the picture from the rim and the two others that were lodged behind it fell into the sink. One was of a group standing and sitting along a felled tree in a clearing in a wood. On the back was written, ‘Some bell ringers’. She recognised five faces from the wake, including Alice Scudamore and Chris Mooney. Why had he given these people £125,000 in his will?
The third showed Eyam and Kilmartin at a reception in a garden. A modern brick building was in the background. Kilmartin did not smile but acknowledged the camera with a tolerant reserve that somehow reduced his presence to that of an onlooker without association to either photographer or fellow subject. The caption on the back read,
With ‘Emile’ - Peter Kilmartin, the man for every problem - Dinner at St Antony’s College, Oxford, July 1999.
With ‘Emile’ - Peter Kilmartin, the man for every problem - Dinner at St Antony’s College, Oxford, July 1999.
The freshness of the colour of the first print suggested the photographs had not been wedged in the mirror for very long. Clearly Eyam was telling her something - maybe that all these people could be trusted. She took the photographs down to the computer in the sitting room with an idea that she might find the images on the screen, or maybe even determine when he had printed them off.
She turned the machine on with a vague feeling of trespass, but remembered what he had said.
All my earthly goods are now yours: my secrets too. Think of nothing as too private for your eyes. I am opening myself to you
. There was very little on the desktop, no files in the hard disk and a quick search of the email folders showed that nothing had been sent, received or deleted for a very long time. But since Eyam’s broadband service still appeared to be working, she went online and typed in the word ASCAM. One reference on an American security website told her that ASCAMS stood for Automatic Selection Correlation and Monitoring System. That would tie in with what Russell had told her.
All my earthly goods are now yours: my secrets too. Think of nothing as too private for your eyes. I am opening myself to you
. There was very little on the desktop, no files in the hard disk and a quick search of the email folders showed that nothing had been sent, received or deleted for a very long time. But since Eyam’s broadband service still appeared to be working, she went online and typed in the word ASCAM. One reference on an American security website told her that ASCAMS stood for Automatic Selection Correlation and Monitoring System. That would tie in with what Russell had told her.
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