Turquoiselle (15 page)

“You’re
wondering,” said Croft, “why they resemble your own shed from that little
suburbanly rural house, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Our
compliment,” said Croft, “to you. They’re all for your use. You can come out
here and be alone, and think. You can store anything here you want to.”

“Like
what,” Carver said without inflexion.

“Things
you take. As before.”

“Things
I stole or steal.”

“If
you prefer to express your activity in that way.”

“It
reflects the fact of my activity.”

“You’ve
done it since childhood, haven’t you, Carver? It started with – what was it,
now? Sweets of some sort, I seem to recollect.”

“Chocolate.”

“Yes,
of course. Chocolate in shiny coloured wrappers. And then later, other things.
Bits and pieces you never used, or if you did, you took them back, didn’t you?”

Carver
said nothing.

Croft
said, “You’re free to do exactly as you want here, Carver. I, we, want you to
understand this.”

Carver
nodded, not speaking, or crediting.

Before
he spoke again, some more empty space ebbed by.

Time
was moving, the sun was moving, even if neither he nor Croft nor the railway
carriages did.

“What’s
happened to my partner, Donna?”

“She’s
fine. She’s with her mother. She thinks you’re on a special assignment. That’s
approximately what Mantik have told her. No cause for alarm, and a nice
increment in pay.”

“She
has never known what the office – what Mantik actually involves.”

“No.
She doesn’t now. She thinks it’s just some big business deal, with you as a
necessary dogsbody. They do know how to play it, Carver. They’re
looking
for you, you
see. They don’t want her in their way. Or, if she knows anything, they’d prefer
she panicked and led them to you, not tried to put them off the scent.”

“And
what will
you
do with her?”

Croft
gave a soft gravel-spill of a laugh.

“Nothing
whatever. She’s of no interest to
us.”

“When
can I see her?” Carver asked sharply.

Croft
went on smiling at him. (No, the hair was not a piece... or if it were, it was
an incredibly convincing one.)

“Are
you saying you really
want
to see her, Car? Are you?”

They
had been watching him then some while, and rather intimately. They knew his
interest in Donna had cooled to clinker.

“I’d
like to be sure she’s OK.”

“I’ll
see if I can arrange that, Car. But I have to warn you, you’re not going to
meet her. That will have to wait.”

“Until
when?”

“Until
our new working relationship has been established.”

“Which
is?”

“I’ve
told you, dear fellow. We all have to wait a little while for that too. London
wasn’t built in a day.”

(
Something
... Something
for sure – the expression was wrong. Croft had said something earlier too that
had not quite been in its normal mode – Carver could not think what. Had noted
it, until now, only subconsciously. But anyway, Croft might simply be
attempting originality.)

Carver
said, “So you want me for some use I have, but won’t tell me what. And Donna is
fine but I can’t see her to decide for myself.”

“You
can’t leave this place,” said Croft. “Not yet. It wouldn’t be safe. Remember,
Mantik want you. They believe you are a traitor and that probably you corrupted
your colleague, Silvia Dusa, so they had to kill her. No, Carver, I’m sorry, but
you must be patient, and settle down. For your own sake. In a few months things
will be ironed out, and then you’ll be free as air. If rather better paid. Give
it time. Relax. Would you like to see the inside of one of the sheds? Choose
which. They’re all alike.”

Carver
felt a wave of cold dark dread. He squashed it at once. “All right.”

Croft
immediately went up the brief steps of the central shed, to the central of the
three doors. Precisely the same as the shed at the house in this too, the
steps, the way the middle door was triple-opened, inward.

Now
Croft came down again, and left the undone door, keys in the last lock, for
Carver to go through, alone. No doubt, if wanted, Croft could then slam the
door triply locked-shut by remote control, and from any reasonable distance
away. Even from inside the up-and-down building. So what? Carver must do as
requested.

He
went up the steps and walked in through the door.

Nothing
had glowed but the woodwork, the flat black roof, the sun on the panes. Within
the shed too, nothing was unusual. The doors with door-windows, and four other
windows: front; four windows only to the rear. It was empty, both of furniture –
and of purloined objects. But Croft, apparently, was quite happy (entirely
determined?) that Carver should pocket objects and bring them here. And would a
turquoise sheen then begin to rise up from them, as in the
other
shed?

The
central door remained open, but when Carver turned back to it and looked out, the
tree-flowered rise was otherwise vacant. Omitting farewell, the urbane Mr Croft
had taken his large and powerful presence off, noiseless as an iron-grey tiger.

Carver
had begun to think about this in the night bed, over and over, the walk, the
talk, the neat vanishment; Croft’s odd relocation of words, so that in Croft’s
take it was
London
, not
Rome
, that was not ‘built
in a day’. Another trick? It was all a sort of trick, surely?

What
had they done to him, that he could no longer feel or recapture, or find
physical clues to, there in that first space of confining and voiceless and then
vocal
dark? How far
off it seemed now, this interlude of void, strapped down, pissing himself,
thirst raging. As if it had not happened in relatively recent time – a week, a
month – even a
year
before – but
many years, two decades. Back
then
, then, when he was thirteen, fifteen,
sixteen years of age –

Mind–fuck.
Let it go. Some portion
of his
brain might still unravel it, if left alone to do so. In its shed of skull.

He
turned over in the bed. He thought instead of the woman who had entered his room
tonight. Anjeela. AJ, MV – The four letters ticked pointlessly in his head. He
let them. Was she his sop, a prize, promise of other goodies to come? If he did
whatever in Christ they thought they wanted – if even he
could
do it, this
obscured and to him unknown thing.

He
thought of Donna. The vague image of her flittered by him like a sulky moth.
She had gone crazy, or Maggie had. So many crazy people in his life. Sara, his
mother. The insane monster that had been his father.

Tick.
A.J. Tick. M.V. The moth had disappeared. Tick.

The bedroom was
not quite a replica of the spare room at his house. Nothing in it was, quite,
either. The bed, for example, was both harder and more flexible, (as
intuitively he had found when Anjeela had joined him – a liaising bed for sex.
How thoughtful
of...
someone,
or other). It also included, the room, a very small en suite bathroom, rather
dissimilar to the bathrooms at his house, but with a shower, lavatory and
basin, these a pristine cream, where the other sets had been Arctic white –
Donna’s decision. (And everything unlike the rabid collection of toilets and
sinks and tubs he had shared with Sara,
their
enamel old or chipped, and stained no
matter how often she scoured and bleached them.)

He
had not noticed the en suite here, when first he came to. He wondered, now very
briefly, if it had even
been
here, or been there but somehow hidden, that initial time. But of course it had
been there, and not hidden. He had only been in the last lingering grip of
whatever drugs they had used.

Was
he still?

The
first day of awakening had passed with bacon and coffee, and a steak he had
eaten in the room later, brought to him with a salad and a pot of more coffee.
And the day had ended, logically in nightfall, and surprisingly in Anjeela’s
warm-cool smoky edible body. And in her hair, which had seemed to be longer –
so he had murmured about it, somewhere in the dark. And had she replied? – he
thought she had – “I grew my hair longer for you.” Then, “Extensions, Car. It’s
simple.”

And
it was all simple, was it not? All this.

The
next
day was very
pleasant, nearly restful, with one more beaming girl knocking on the door at 8
a.m., and asking him if she should bring him anything, as they had his ‘supper’
last night, or would he prefer to go down to the kitchen in this section, (the
kitchen through the arch, with the door-occluding f
ridge-f
reezer.) Having
showered, shaved, dressed, he accordingly went down. There in the kitchen sat
the two men, Van Sedden and Ball, and another man they addressed as
Fiddy
, in a sort of
boiler suit.
She
was not there.
Carver had rather expected that. It fell into place inside the uneasy pattern: Of
course Anjeela, having played her intimate game with him (AJMV), would rather
absent herself. Then she walked in. Looking, as at the beginning, more heavy
than voluptuous, her hair short, her blue eyes uninterested in anything save
the coffee mug and her today’s choice of white toast and Marmite.

She
did not speak to him, he did not speak to her, though he had exchanged brief
flaccid greetings with the three men, lacking awkward inquiries this morning
on why anyone was here. They were engaged anyway in discussion of a football
game, (witnessed on some TV or computer in the building), that seemed to have
taken place in the Czech Republic. Naturally they – whoever, whatever ‘They’
were comprised – would be watching Carver.

He
kept it all toneless, not overly relaxed, not visibly tensed. Taking things as
they came.

Not
much did come of that day at all.

He
left the kitchen after eating and took a walk around the ‘grounds’, (alone,
though doubtless on camera), observing, checking over without much expression,
body-language under control.

The
sea lay beyond the front of the up-and-down building, approximately southward,
with a slight bias to the east. On this side some of the upper storeys bulged
outward, particularly those some distance from the centre. His would be among
those. The bulge would be what had omitted any direct downward view, opening exclusively
on the vista of the sea. The gravel drive skirted much of the house; the pots
of roses stood on it in formal groups. What seemed the main doorway was central
to the sea-facing side. Two large shut wooden doors, behind a shut multi-glazed
glass partition. Bullet-proof? For about five and a half metres stretching out
from the gravel, there was a width of paved stone, closed along its finish
parallel with the house, by a tall blued iron railing. This was the lookout
position, for those who wanted it, the
promenade
, set with the familiar stone,
griffin-armed benches. Over the railing the edge of the cliff tumbled off into
air, and the sea unrolled bellow. There were gulls, again. Why not, they lived
here. One was parading slowly along the railing’s flat top. Aristocratically proprietary,
it ignored him.

Carver
did not investigate to see if there was an easy route by which to descend the
cliff, other than climbing on the rail and diving off, (hoping not to encounter
any juts or outcrops of cliff-work on the rush down). He doubted the sea, or
any beach, would be straightforwardly accessible from here. He looked just long
enough to satisfy a perhaps probable unseen watcher. Then moved off, unfast, through
the rest of the wooded park.

He
spent some hours on this, going back and forth, into, or mostly outward from
the building, now and then sitting on some bench. Aside from the railed sea-view
he met no barriers, that was, no perceived physical ones. How far did the ‘grounds’
stretch? Some distance, apparently.

Though
occasionally he gazed up, or around, at the trees, he could make out no spy-devices,
not even the more subtle ones he had seen demonstrated during his time with
Mantik.

He
did not bother about lunch. He went in later. It was around 5 p.m. A smiling,
friendly, helpful youngish man approached him and explained how he could reach
the bar and canteen on the sixth floor of that section – which was the section
he had, it seemed, entered.