Turquoiselle Read online

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” he said.

  “Nor you.”

  Something then – something odd – as if, in this quilted lacuna between the frames of drugged dark and copious alien greeting – anything could seem odd any longer – for a second, she looked familiar. He knew her. But he did not.

  “Did Croft send you?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll be aware, there will be,” he said, “hidden surveillance in this room. Sound, too. They can pump noise, even smells through from the kitchen, for example. So why not the other way with every word intact?”

  “If you say so.”

  “You should know,” he said. “What is it? Get me to fuck you and take pictures? Why –” he said, “why bother. You – they – have got me, haven’t they? Whoever they are. The nameless corporation here, the guards who guard the guards. They’ve got me, though Christ knows why.”

  She moved, fluid as a pelt, a silk cord, on to her spine. Her belly was soft and smooth. Her mouth. Her hair –

  “Come back to me,” she said.

  He went back to her.

  As he leaned over her she said, so softly he barely heard her, “Remember my name, Car. Remember it. An-jee-la,” she whispered. “An-jeela. Mer–” But her voice vanished into his mouth. Instead she put up both her hands, taking hold of his body. Now her touch burned him.

  He ceased to care about the room and the cameras or the mikes, the Third Persons. He had forgotten Croft. Perhaps he had been drugged also to this intensity of mindless lust and strength. Or it was another dream. It was a vehicle – a car at night, driving straight forward into a wall of fire. You did not stop. You crashed through into the flames. And then it was over. There was nothing more to it, nothing at all.

  In the renewal of the darkness she left him. Almost the last of her, her scent, and her voice again, close to his ear,

  “A J,” she whispered. “AJ, MV.” Nonsense, Irrelevant.

  But that was nothing either. Everything was nothing. Nothing was anything. He heard the door shut, quietly. How had she got in, the door had been secured... nothing. Anything. Nothing. He did not sleep, yet a sort of trance fell on him. He lay in the timeless quietness of near-dark, thinking of Nothing.

  About ten minutes after Croft’s pronouncement, the big man had stirred again. As if after a pleasant ordinary interval, a pair of old acquaintances, who had shared a leisure moment in the shade, resumed their everyday procedures. “Let’s walk on round the grounds, shall we? We can have a look at the sea from the south side of the house – and there are the sheds. We’ll take a look at those first.”

  The sheds.

  The sheds, at least from the front, like Russian train carriages.

  Like the shed Carver had maintained back at his house in the village. The shed whose windows, by night, glowed turquoise, the exact mixed tone of green (a bluish emerald) and blue (aquamarine) of the lower Second and Third Level Urgency Alerts at Mantik.

  Without rush or delay they strolled off through the trees and bushes, going east, away from the sun. The building reappeared, the house, if it was. Aside from its small rear terrace and benches, it was very modern, a box-like construction, and of an odd design (some parts built tall, others of only one or two storeys; some of the roofs angled, most flat). Quite unlike, for instance, the college. There was a gravel drive visible from here that curled off round the house walls. Roses grew in terracotta pots. These flowers were all red, and well-groomed, at variance with the ramble of the rest of the “grounds”.

  When the rise appeared, and the outlay of the scene matched with the version he had looked at from higher up, in the corridor outside his allotted room, Carver scrutinised the building. He believed he identified the corridor windows instantly. They lacked blinds for one thing. For another they were in the top and second floor of that section. That there were only two floors made sense, as a stair, not a lift, seemed to operate.

  After one long establishing glance, Carver turned to survey the rise.

  Croft passed no comment. He was already powerfully ambling up the slope between the trees. Carver followed.

  The sun caught the sheds, lightly but firmly coupled, like facets of a necklace. Each copied his own shed. He had purchased that shed. Chosen it. He did not know why he had chosen a shed of that type, but it came ready-assembled. And why should it not be attractive? There. Here. And privacy, he had wanted the shed for that. Outside the house which Donna had had decorated and furnished as she wished, and set with the blaring screens of TVs. Somewhere to store things he stole, too. Naturally. Still a stupid kid. A theave, as Heavy would have called him, (only Heavy had never called Carver that), the same way that, for Heavy, a wolf was a Wolve and wolves were Wolfs – theave, theafs.

  Stop. Concentrate.

  Say something to the man who named himself Croft.

  “What happened,” said Carver quietly, “to Robby Johnston?”

  As Carver had asked before. Or... had he?

  “Who? Ah, yes. The fellow in the diver’s suit, the black face-mask – or was it a balaclava? Can’t remember. I’ll have to check.”

  “He was inside the garden. That night.”

  “Yes, he was, wasn’t he. A bit dottery, apparently. Lucky we could step in.”

  “I believed,” said Carver, “from what’s been said, it was Mantik that had the problem with me. Not Johnston.”

  “Quite. Seems they both did. Not connected, obviously. Had you offended him, this Johnston chap?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes, Car, we can offend without meaning to. Or noticing we have.”

  A warning? They had reached the sheds, were less than two metres away. Sunlight soaked them, maple syrup. They glowed. The windows of each one, polished immaculately, gleamed hard as steel. The gleam helped to disguise – eradicate – anything that might be inside. But sunlight no longer affected Carver’s eyes. He counted the sheds, from left to right. Seven. Seven carriages, halted at some station beyond Moscow. In reality, or on a movie-set. They were even coupled together, in just that sort of way, or realistically enough. No engine (a steam engine, obviously) to pull them on. Stalled? They could travel no farther.

  “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 f
or 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 fridge-freezer.) 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.

  Carver went, (as expected?), up to the bar. It was very clean and well-ordered, frankly clinical in its own manner, as if alcohol had now become available inside a UK NHS hospital.