Turquoiselle Read online

  “It doesn’t make much sense,” said Carver.

  “No,” mused Latham. “What I thought too. But with that set of directors – what can you expect.” And the greedy mask popped back.

  Their speech followed its formulas, but no one could overhear. Not only obscured by the canned music but the turgid scrambled egg of other voices and cutlery. Besides that, the two recording/listening devices (Third Persons), Carver’s and Latham’s, were both on reverse, creating a mostly inaudible but interfering flit and flux of white noise. Enough to muddle most eavesdroppers whether human or electronic.

  The meal came, the steaks – Latham’s double – with fries, salads and various dips.

  Carver had considered if Latham would ask him anything about Dusa’s outburst in the park. Did they know? You assumed they always must, to some extent. Particularly if she had done what Carver warned her she must, and gone to Jack Stuart to confess. But Latham’s main concern seemed to be to eat.

  “Know what there’s a whole lot of round here?” Latham asked as he studied the dessert menu. “Full of lamas.”

  It had been autumn then too, but the leaves had turned and many were down, coating the pavements of the side streets in crisply rustling tides that the wind blew high or low.

  He was walking home from school, one of the first schools, when he was about eight and still bothered with lessons. He was alone, as he usually was. A solitary child, for his own assorted and unanalysed reasons.

  He paused outside the shop that had one window all sweets, to look in. Everything was in glamorous reds and purples tinselled gold and silver. The wrappers alone looked eatable. And some had free gifts with them – model figures that moved.

  The door flew wide and someone stamped out in a hurry, some oldishly grown-up woman, who knocked against him and snapped “Watch out, can’t you?” as though he, not she, had done the barging.

  His face did not alter. He was used generally to a bad press. It never occurred to him that in ten years time he would be taller and stronger than she, and she ten years older. It would take Heavy, who he would meet when he, Carver, was eleven, to come out with funny speculations like that.

  Carver, once the angry woman was gone, walked on slowly up the road, passing the Co-Op and the greengrocers, and the ‘Lovely’ Laundrette. He was in no hurry. It was getting on towards five o’clock, but that would make no difference. No one would be home, unless his father was, but he as a rule would be out again by this time of day.

  The sun was dipping, going west, smoky and golden as if chocolate foil had been pinned up there then fumed with smoke.

  Carver turned the corner and walked up the hill where the bigger houses stood, with proper gardens, and you had enough spilled leaves to scuff.

  He was passing one of the low long brick walls that guarded the posh front patches of trees, lawns and paving, when a man pulled up at the curb in a dark blue shiny car that Carver knew was a BMW. The man immediately threw open the car door, sprang out, slammed the door shut, rushed across Carver’s path and up the gravel to the front door of the house. This too opened before him, as if anticipating his wishes. Nor did it close at his back.

  Such an extreme example of irrationally adult bossy speed and urgency had arrested Carver. He stood idling on the pavement, possibly waiting, with unconscious prudence, for the crazy man to express-train out again and dive back in the car.

  But minutes passed, or Carver reckoned they were minutes, ticking off there in his mind, and nothing happened. Natural boredom then perhaps next made him both remain where he was – but also glance in at the car window. On the front passenger seat was a large cardboard carton, undone at the top. Inside smouldered the smoky gold of late afternoon sky, and cutting-edges of deep dark red and indigo.

  Chocolate bars. The box – he peered closer – was filled with them, some of popular well-known makes, and others more exotic, at least to Carver. Yet all of them beaming there, radiant with sweetness and joy.

  The car door had been left unlocked. The man, all hysterical adult hurry, nearly knocking the boy over in a blind rush to get into the house, had not stopped to secure anything.

  Maybe Carver thought he only opened the car door in order to smell the honey of the chocolate, which, the door once opened, he could. He leaned into the car, maybe also simply further to take pleasure in the smell. Did he even reach out and snatch up two of the topmost bars solely to gaze at them, inhale them, for a few precious seconds longer?

  When the human express returned to his vehicle, about nine minutes after desertion, it was apparently just as he had left it, door unlocked but closed, the cardboard box bulging with its goodies, (most of them) and seeming, to a careless eye, untouched.

  A woman waved the man and the car off as they shot away up the steep road.

  Carver had already been climbing up it, and he did not bother to look round. He kept the chocolate close in his two jacket pockets, only occasionally reaching in to skim its metallically slippery papered surfaces.

  He hid the prize in ‘his’ corner of the box room, where his mother slept on the narrow bed, and he on the narrower put-you-up under the window.

  After two more days he secretly ate one of the bars. But then, not the second bar. He never ate that. Only kept it.

  The excitement and contained exultation of the theft he would, when he was in his teens, and had undergone his first full sexual experience, technically equate with the sexual act.

  Not in type, or extent of pleasure, that was, but in the straightforward subterfuge, the ultimate extraordinary meant-to-be ease, this epilogue of slight embarrassment – potential danger – diluted almost shame. (The sense of achievement too, of finding out.)

  As if – though in each case a different one – he had fallen through a loose floorboard into a treasure cave. It was all there. All available. Not just accessible cars then, or chaste denial. The world too had magic doorways. And you had to, of course you did, undo them, and then undo them again.

  “I’m not kidding,” Latham resumed, as he tucked into the Choc-O-Four with raspberry sauce. “I saw an entire herd of white ones. And later two or three brown and white.”

  Carver said, “Yes, I think I have, once or twice.”

  “What do they breed them for? Milk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Kids’ rides, probably. Or pulling a carriage in someone’s stately grounds.”

  Lamas. Latham seemed to have more to say about lamas than Scar. Was Latham trying something out on Carver, because of Silvia Dusa, trying to see if Carver would mention her, or debate aloud if he himself should inform Stuart? On the other hand one deduced they were always testing, trying you. Even Latham’s even more than usual greed tonight might be some sort of test of Carver’s reactions.

  Latham had cleared his plate – his second dessert – drained his glass, and now squinted at his Rolex. “Getting on for ten. My car’ll be along in a minute. Got to make Canterbury before lights out. God, bloody bore, can’t stand Chaucer, can you? But better than the Bard, I suppose. Probably sleep this off on the way. Well...” He rose, reached across and patted Carver on the shoulder, like an amiable uncle with a nephew several times removed. “Give that file another check, Carver, by the way The old method, yeah? Might yield results.”

  “Yes, of course. Good night, Mr Latham. Good journey.”

  “Oh, I always look on the sunny side. Like that old fart in the poem, what is it? Lying in the gutter but wiping his arse on the stars. That’s the one.”

  He did not look, or enunciate, as if the two bottles of red wine, the bulk of which he had consumed, had affected him, but sometimes he came out with oddities after a few drinks. The bill had already been paid, and he sauntered to the glass doors, observing the night outside in an amused, innocuous way. The chauffeured car was already swimming on to the forecourt.

  Carver had another fifteen minutes to wait for his, which would appear like an ordinary cab, the driver dressed in denim and ponytai
l.

  Had she done it? Carver thought. Told Stuart?

  Sometimes these rogue events took place; it never really worked, to re-examine them too much. Instead he thought of Donna, what emotion she would be dressed in tonight, and where, sleeping or awake, she would be lying in wait for him.

  When he reached and entered the house, the lower hall and kitchen were lit up, and above, the hall lamps were on, but dimmed down.

  The main bedroom he had seen from outside was in darkness, and he guessed, and would later note, the door was shut.

  Carver made himself another coffee. It never kept him awake, though other things might do that.

  In the kitchen, having put out the lights, he sat, staring down through the garden. They were quite high, those walls, six and a half feet. Who would have thought it, that skinny dark-haired kid who stole the chocolate bars by the posh house with the low outer wall. Now, his own walls, all his. And enough chocolate in the fridge – even if it was for Donna – to coat those walls with. The night was overcast by huge troop-movements of cloud, that were slowly rolling their tanks in from the southeast. From in here you could not see the lights of the village, the flutter of late TV and computer screens. The woods took over out there, at the garden’s end, and after that swallowed up the lane, just Robby Johnston’s cottage netted in them, and tied to them by ropes of ivy and chains of unlopped briar. (“Only things that keep the old place standing,” said Johnston.) Carver’s garden – he supposed he must call it ‘his’ – had no substance to it in the dark. Or it was all substance, the three smaller trees and the huge old pear, the weedy lawn, and the benches Donna had bought in a fit of gardenicity, everything amalgamated and amorphous. But at the garden’s far end, almost invisible, and then more visible, and more, the faint shimmer of greenish-bluish illumination, trapped there, or poised there, like a living entity. And casting out from itself those slender streaks, to paint the trunks of the birch trees beyond the wall.

  The shed.

  Having crossed the cloud-blackened nocturnal garden, passed between the fruit trees, stepped by or over the bushes, he reached the rectangular concreted space left for a shed, where the shed, ready-constructed, had, a while back, been set. Parked and anchored, it was taller, longer and more wide than most such outbuildings; reinforced and fully weather-proofed. Two stone steps elevated before the middle door, which, once unlocked, opened inward.

  There were three doors, each with a window, and four other windows between and to either side. In the strange glow of these seven front-facing panes, one could make out easily the flat black roof, the wooden walls that, by night and by glow were a greenish, bluish, greyish brown. The window-glass imperviously shone. Inside the shed, a sort of snow seemed to have fallen, and then formed into slopes, mounds, things which resembled other things, but were not such other things.

  Carver mounted the steps and undid the shed’s central door. It required three keys.

  He went inside and the door was shut, and locked three times.

  The interior of the shed, seen still from outside, did not exactly darken then – yet a kind of obscuration fell there. Carver’s shadow, perhaps.

  Or only one more vagary of the advancing enemy cloud.

  Three

  During the last three days of that schedule Carver left his car at the office, and took the train into London either from Lynchoak or Maidstone, reaching the stations and coming back by cab.

  On Thursday evening he drove himself back in the repaired car, but using another, more time-consuming route, which sent him via Croydon.

  It did not matter in the least about Donna’s opinion of return times, since she was no longer at the house.

  She had said, quietly, the morning after his dinner with Latham, that she thought she would go over and see her mother for a week. She had done this now and then in the past. There was no reason she should not, and the journey was hardly taxing, taking only about three quarters of an hour. Donna did not drive of course, but Maggie did, and came to pick her up on the arranged evening.

  Carver had got home early enough to see the departure. Donna seemed fine, and Maggie, as ever, glamorous and optimistic, in her sensibly-dieted and reasonably self-indulgent fifty-year-old way. Not cabbing, she had brought her car. He had wondered if Maggie would, once Donna was safely installed in the bold red vessel, whisk back to have a last word with him. Something friendly and casual, but also some version of a last minute attentive scrutiny of his reactions, his mood. Maggie was always very civil to Carver, somewhat over-appreciative, and slightly flirtatious in a carefully non-predatory way. It was her set method of dealing with men, he thought; it had paid off in her own personal relationships. However, Maggie simply waved, and then drove away.

  No mention had been made by Maggie, nor by Donna, of a mooted pregnancy. He had been aware that Donna, since the prior dramatic demonstration, had stopped vomiting. Or at least, she had stopped doing so audibly when he was in the house. The magazine on kid-suitable room-changing had also gone.

  After the departure, and the dark having fully settled on the lane, a film of silence formed. It was only the silence of the modern English countryside and imbued by distant blurs of sound – traffic far off, the passage of planes, unspecified electronic, or other, outlying mechanisms. Nevertheless.

  Nevertheless.

  Next morning, routinely, he tried the games key Icon on his iPhone. It said: Clue up: One down. Carver had seen this message a handful of times, and in many forms, during his service with Mantik. Seldom without a twist of the gut. He waited a moment before touching the screen for the 2nd Clue. Which read: Always Justified Marketable Value.

  Carver struck the clue back into nothingness.

  Working from the current code-series, Always Justified Marketable Value gave him the initials S.D.

  He switched on all the house radios, and the kitchen TV and the enormous TV in the front room, and caught the various news bulletins through the morning, across different channels. Nothing relevant was mentioned. Almost certainly it would not be or at least not yet.

  Carver was more than glad now Donna was not in the house. He paced about, not properly thinking, trying to remember, mentally to order things.

  At last he went up to what Donna called his ‘playroom’, across the landing from the spare bedroom. There was only one lock, but this was ‘faulty’. It would only ever let Carver in.

  His second phone was where he always left it, ready-charged .

  “Yes, Carver,” said Latham’s voice, in a rich, mournfully appropriate tone. Carver had not needed to speak. “Better come in. We all need to look at the new deal, don’t we? About six, OK?”

  She had been missing, or at least not visible to him, since they separated in the park. He had noted her absence, inevitably, from the day after his dinner of misquotes, steak and lamas with Latham. But people were not always at the building in Whitehall. There were three other Mantik venues alone, subsidiaries, to which you might get sent at twenty minutes notice, or less. He had been aware, therefore, alert, but concluded that doubtless his was an overreaction, and as such he had mostly quashed it.

  As he drove into London against the outrush of early escapee evening traffic, he kept feeling again the burning warmth of her tawny hands against his chest, and the pallor of the cold patches that seemed, each time, to replace them.

  Silvia Dusa, (S.D.). Had he even taken her seriously?

  No? Decidedly no. If yes, then undeniably he should and would have gone to Stuart – not, obviously, in her company, or on her behalf, but in order to protect whatever project she might, however slightly and inadvertently, have jeopardised. And partly to protect and cover himself, it went without saying, since she had hinted at her mistake to him. To stay dumb was to be complicitous with the adversary, whatever was out there that must be worked against.

  What had she said? He had been trying all morning, after seeing that One Down clue, to recall precisely.

  “I have done something stup
id... I have given something to someone.”

  Was that what she had said? Her actual words? He had not, as she had accused him of doing, recorded their dialogue. He had had no grounds, surely, to feel that might be necessary.

  The weather had stayed stormy and overcast. London began to loom up, a mass of thickly dark, and yet already luridly lighted shapes. The river lay like polished lead under its welter of neons and lasers. Ten or so years ago it had resembled a Science Fiction city, as New York had done years before that. But terror and catastrophe had fractured New York’s architectural mountains, while the exhaustion of financial downfall was putting out London’s inner fires.

  Ken Lesley was tonight’s Reception. His office nickname was, predictably, Kill, but several, Carver included, knew him as “Ken”.

  He checked Carver’s ID fleetly, they exchanged a taciturn acknowledgement, and Carver took the lift to the fifth floor.

  “Death occurred between approximately 11 and 12 p.m. on the date given. The body was found about 6 a.m. the following morning, when a cleaner went into the lavatory. The pub is a quiet one, with a steady inflow of generally regular customers. Dusa was noticed on the previous evening, being a stranger, and also attractive. No one saw her leave since she did not leave, at least in any physical way. Usually, they say, the facilities are checked just before, and again just after the pub doors are shut for the night. But were not on this particular occasion. One senses that happens quite often. The means was a man’s razor blade stuck into a cork – the old-fashioned sort of cork that isn’t plastic. Dusa appears to have cut the veins of her left wrist lengthways, rather than across or diagonally. It’s the most efficient method, and it worked, but not many people can manage it; it takes a steady hand. Nor were there any preliminary ‘practice’ cuts. She had drunk, according to the bar staff, only two glasses of red wine, house variety, nothing special, which she bought directly from the bar. She was on her own. If she was waiting for anyone, no one showed up. The bar people thought, in fact, she had left by the garden exit – the garden is kept open for smokers even if the weather is unsettled. The cleaner who found the body has been unwell since then, and her questioning has been minimal. No helpful DNA or other identification seems to be in the picture. No alien substances were found in Dusa’s stomach. No other significant marks were on her body. The cork carries evidence only of Dusa’s own handling. She did not find the cork at the pub, and seems to have brought the weapon with her, ready-assembled. At present, there we have all the information ceded to us.”