The Uninvited (15 page)
At this point Mazoor shakes his head and the corners of his mouth turn down. The demographer who called herself Ingrid had this expression on her face at the airport. Kaitlin wore it often.
I have disappointed him.
In my head I make a lotus flower, a frog, a pelican, a basic water-bomb, an ox, a fish, a swan and five
ozuru.
I drink some water from the plastic bottle. It tastes very bland, like it’s missing something. I long for the island. For the smell of burning logs and the sound of gulls and crashing waves and the squeak of my swivel chair.
‘That second piece of poetry you quoted,’ says Mazoor, after a long silence.
‘Ozymandias.’
‘Is that a comment on Dubai?’
‘Dubai is very special. It is like a body on life support,’ I tell him. ‘Or a honeybee. Serviced by a million drones and producing royal jelly.’
He laughs. ‘A good comparison,’ he says. ‘This place is the future.’
‘That’s what de Vries said just before his elegant vault,’ I tell him.
And his face changes again.
After Mazoor has finished with me I am allowed to call Ashok Sharma who says, ‘OK. Being witness to a suicide, that’s beyond the call of duty, man. You’re getting backup.’
‘I don’t need it. I’m fine.’
‘Too late. No argument. The client’s requested it. Oh, and listen: the chemical analysis on the sample from Taiwan: get this. Human blood. Bits of insects. Legs and wings. Plus mineral deposits.’
‘Whose human blood?’
‘I don’t think the machine’s that sophisticated, bud.’
‘What kind of mineral deposits?’
‘Trace elements. Salt. It’s dirt. So who cares?’
‘I do.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know yet. What does Svensson’s autopsy show?’
‘It’s in Swedish. But I spoke to the guy who did it. He said there was nothing chemical that would’ve provoked mental disturbance. He had an eye infection that wasn’t responding to treatment. Some pressure problem. And abnormal kidneys. Congenital anomaly, he said.’
‘What kind of congenital anomaly?’
Ashok chuckles. ‘Seems he had an extra one. Quite rare, though it’s on the increase in some parts of the world. Remember that story not so long ago? Some guy in Ohio discovers he’s got four kidneys, decides to sell two of them. Easy bucks for Johnny Multi-Organ, and everyone’s happy.’
He’s waiting for me to react, but I’m thinking. The kidneys process salt. I remember seeing pictures of Orumieh in Iran: the country’s biggest lake turned to salt. A boat marooned on a shelf of whiteness that twinkled like hot, hard snow. Pyjama Girl dreamed about
a beautiful white desert that sparkled.
‘Ashok, Ashok, Ashok. Listen. I asked Belinda for de Vries’ autopsy report. Well I need Farooq’s too.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Can you get me a kidney expert and an ophthalmologist to consult?’
‘Whoa, slow down. Is this developing into some medical theory?’
‘Again, I don’t know yet. I need more evidence. Can you do it?’
‘Hey. Glad to. Anything beats little people. So finish with the police, then go back to the hotel and wait for our guy. By the way, Old Man Whybray?’
‘Professor. Professor Whybray. That’s his name. Professor Victor Whybray FRS. What about him?’
‘You’ll never guess what he’s doing for the Home Office.’
‘Yes. I can. He’s researching the epidemic of child violence.’
‘So you also know we’ve been sub-contracted, and he wants a meeting as soon as you’re back in town?’
This day has not been a good one so far. But it has just got better by several thousand per cent. I remember a young student thumping a table in a Cambridge pub for joy. He has just got his PhD. Next to him sits the white-haired man who handed him ‘the keys to the castle’. Not long after that, the professor’s wife Helena became very ill and I sat with him in waiting rooms. He asked me to. He never said why. He had many other students, all of whom had better conversational and social skills. But I was glad to help. Over the weeks, we jointly completed 271
Times
crosswords.
After my phone call, it’s Eastern Horizons’ turn to question me. This is a more bureaucratic affair, and it also involves a statement, though of a more legalistic kind. Ashok has hired a Phipps & Wexman ‘associate’ lawyer to take me through this process. Rachid Omar is quiet and soft-spoken. His features are indistinct, as though molten. You see this on antique plastic dolls. Plastic is in fact a very dense liquid: this shows with the passing of decades. It’s a problem for Barbie doll collectors. I tick the boxes he tells me to tick and I don’t mention the little girl to him, the little girl whom de Vries and I and the others all saw, whose presence filled the Afrikaner with a lurid fear, a fear that had the face of a threatened chimpanzee. The work with Rachid Omar takes four hours and eight minutes. By the time a woman called Angela Monroe from the British Embassy comes to escort me back to my hotel, it’s late evening.
‘I’m afraid it won’t be possible to return to London just yet,’ she says. ‘But maybe by tomorrow. There’s a lot more paperwork to be cleared. But you can relax now, Mr Lock.’
Of course I can’t relax, I tell her. Relaxing is inconceivable under these circumstances. For one, I am concerned about the hermit crab. I’ve left the model in the cottage untouched for too long.
‘Origami paper is susceptible to damp. It can suffer.’
She pats my arm. ‘The good news is that your colleague from Phipps & Wexman managed to get the midday flight out of London. She should be here soon.’
‘She?’ I ask. ‘Did you say she?’
‘Yes,’ she says, consulting her iPhone. ‘It says here Stephanie Mulligan.’
Wait for our guy
, Ashok said. Did he not even know who he was sending?
A piece of paper crumples inside me.
There is an explanation for everything. But it is not always apparent at the time.
In Meno’s paradox Plato asked,
And how will you inquire into a thing when you are wholly ignorant of what it is? Even if you happen to bump right into it, how will you know it is the thing you didn’t know?
In 1783, people believed the world was coming to an end when Europe was smothered beneath an oppressive and unchanging lid of black cloud. The resulting social upheavals lasted the best part of a year, from late winter into the following autumn. Crops were ruined and many were driven to madness and self-harm. Religious mania exploded. Slowly, the climate returned to normal and the sun’s brightness returned. But it was over a hundred years before the ‘summer without end’ was fully explained. Meteorologists confirmed that a conjunction of volcanic eruptions near Iceland and Japan had dimmed the stratosphere, stifling Europe with an eiderdown of ash.
At the time though, there was no convincing explanation.
Just superstition and the terror it gave birth to.
Stephanie Mulligan has left me a message suggesting a drink in the Aldeberon Lounge at eight o’clock. I order room service and go online. Ashok has sent me a PDF of Svensson’s autopsy report, along with the names of a renal specialist and an ophthalmologist who have agreed to be consulted. I glance through the autopsy report, then forward it to each of them, with a request for an assessment. There’s also a mail from Annika Svensson.
Dear Hesketh,
You had some questions about salt. When I showed your email to my son Erik he told me that one day he borrowed Jonas’ car. There was a plastic water bottle in there. Erik said he took a gulp but had to spit it out. It was salty. Like seawater, he said. Why would Jonas keep seawater in a drinking bottle? Can you also explain why the garden shed is full of seaweed and jars and sacks of grain and bottles of Coca-Cola? In the last week of his life my husband was not my husband any more. I think he was under the influence of an idea which frightened him and which he could not share. He said children were trying to get inside him. As you can imagine the worst burden is not knowing why this change in him happened. So I pray that your admirable focus will shed light on this darkness.
Many greetings,
Annika.
There’s no hotel Bible, which is perhaps not surprising in Muslim Dubai. So I go online to look up a reference from the book of Genesis in the King James version. Lot and his wife and daughters have been hastened away from the iniquity of the city of Sodom.
And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life: look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord of Heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
I search for the Japanese words
toko
and
loshi
.
Toko
can mean endless or barber shop or floor or bed.
Loshi
doesn’t seem to mean anything.
In any case, where’s the logic in an Afrikaner speaking Japanese? The words he’d reach in a crisis would be in his own tongue, the guttural Afrikaans spoken by descendants of God-fearing Dutch colonialists. I do another search.
But I’m wrong there too.
I try again, spelling it not as two words but as one.
Tokoloshi.
This brings success. A
tokoloshi
is a figure from Bantu tradition. This is something de Vries himself could have told me, had he lived. I should have known all along. It wasn’t Afrikaans that came to Jan de Vries’ lips just before he died. It was Xhosa, a language spoken by many tribes of Africa. He’d have grown up hearing it. And very possibly speaking it too. It involves throat clicks which sound like delicate machinery changing gear. In Zulu the word is
uthikoloshe.
It means demon dwarf.
Tokoloshi
are small and humanoid. They live near pools and springs. They like to kidnap. They hide under beds and grab you. If you are asleep, they will bite off your toes. If you are female they will rape you.
So this is what de Vries believed he saw.
He was scared into suicide not by a little girl in rags, but by something he identified as a demon dwarf.
The Aldeberon Lounge has a Thousand and One Nights theme with tiny halogen stars recessed into the ceiling. Stephanie Mulligan is already seated at a corner table in a booth. I count seven other customers, all of them men. Five are sitting alone, the other two are together. All of them are looking at her, some openly, others furtively. Men tend to do this around her. Stephanie is slim and in her early thirties, with blonde hair. Her face is narrow and symmetrical and she is wearing an Azure blue dress and an unusual white necklace – bold and jagged – which looks familiar: I have to drag my eyes away from it. Or perhaps it’s her neck that preoccupies me, that has always preoccupied me. Her skin is very pale, as though she never goes out in the sun. It seems to glow.
Is she beautiful? Most of my male colleagues think so, emphatically. They also claim to like her ‘as a person’.
The men stare as I walk over, and answer her hello with a hello of my own. Forcing myself to concentrate on the fact that we have a specific job to do, I settle opposite her on a leather banquette and I begin the mental reconstruction of the praying mantis I made for Sunny Chen. It is fiddly and it might just see me through this. Between us is a shiny lacquered table overlooking the blue neon of the waterfront thirty-seven floors below. Stephanie has the reputation of being a good and tactful listener. People who feel the need to talk a great deal about themselves might find themselves drawn to that aspect of her. I’m not one of those people. I intend to be in charge of this meeting.
‘Eastern fairy tales are often about young men who sit around doing very little until huge fortunes unexpectedly fall into their laps,’ I tell Stephanie. ‘Aladdin’s an example. Fate decrees that whatever shall be shall be. Destiny versus free will is a recurring motif. You’ll also find that—’
She interrupts. ‘Hesketh. Before we begin, we need to talk about a personal issue.’
Where is her professionalism? ‘No.’
‘I’m sorry, Hesketh. I don’t want to open old wounds, but there really is something I need to tell you.’ She clears her throat. ‘Something you should know.’
Stephanie puts her pale, slim hand on top of mine, but I pull it away. I say, ‘Whatever it is, now is not the time.’ If it comes out bluntly, I don’t care. I signal to the waiter. I’m not as in charge as I had intended. ‘You and I are going to have to co-operate. We’re here for one thing. To find the pattern, and work out what’s happening and why. So we should behave like colleagues. Let’s just do that, OK?’
I stare at her necklace. I often fixate on the wrong thing, and I only realise it afterwards, when it’s too late. The waiter is heading towards us. He is a Filipino with skin the colour of Dulux’s 2010 Cointreau. I begin rocking. We order. Double Scotch for me. Chardonnay for her. Classic gender-based choices. I abandon the praying mantis and get to work on a basic water-bomb.