Cannonbridge (27 page)

Without complaint, Judd walks on with Mr Keen, beyond the reception to the row of lifts beyond, into the first of them and then up, up in the metal cylinder, the killer smiling by his side, all the way to the top of the building, to the highest level but one.

Their ascent comes to the smoothest of halts, marked by a single discreet chime, and they step out into a thickly-carpeted vestibule. In the distance there can be heard repeated drumming sounds, like hammer blows.

Mr Keen says: “The view from all the way up here is impressive.” He seems almost affable now, Toby thinks, remembering, with a wave of revulsion, Alix’s face just before she went beneath the wheels of the Saab. “This way, please.”

Keen leads the way, out of this antechamber and into the main body of the floor. Here the sound of drumbeats grows louder and more ominous.

If Toby has been expecting anything it is some large and lavish office. The place—this entire penultimate floor—is empty save for scattered pieces of gym equipment—a rowing machine, a cross-trainer, a rack of dumb-bells, a line of contraptions meant to expand the chest or pump up the muscles in the legs. All this, backed by great glass windows which, Keen was quite correct, offer a wonderful view of the city’s skyline. And, right at the end of the room, the source of what Toby had erroneously imagined to be the beating of a drum—a small, plump, balding man in late middle-age, dressed in a plain grey t-shirt and sweat pants, jogging earnestly and heavy-footedly upon a treadmill. The slap of expensive trainer on moving rubber echoes loudly.

Toby and Keen approach, disbelief in the first man’s eyes, something curiously like reverence in those of the second. They reach the running machine and watch for a minute or so as the chubby man finishes his ungainly sprint, his belly wobbling up and down, perspiration heaving on his swollen face. The whole time he pays no heed to his visitors—gives no indication, in fact, that he even cares that they have arrived.

Eventually, the machine beeps officiously, the motor glides to a stop and the treadmill ceases to revolve.

At last the sweating man turns to face them. He steps gingerly off the machine and onto the floor.

“Dr Judd?” he says.

“Yes,” says Toby.

“Pleased to meet you,” the jogger says in a companionable voice, as if he is offering to buy Toby a drink at the golf club bar. “I’m the CEO in these parts. I would offer to shake hands but I’m afraid I’m a trifle moist at present. The name’s Swaine-Taylor. No, don’t look like that. I’m Giles Swaine-Taylor. The original was a very obscure and ancient ancestor of mine. Best to keep money in the family, if one possibly can. Thank you, Mr Keen. As usual, you’ve been most effective. But you can leave Dr Judd and me alone now.”

Keen nods, somewhat doubtfully.

“I’ll see you again soon. At the gala.”

“Yes, sir.”

And like a bad dream dissolving in the morning light, Keen nods once more, casts Toby an indecipherable look and withdraws.

Swaine-Taylor beams. “Now I’ve no doubt you’ve got dozens of questions.”

“Who exactly are you people?” Toby asks. “What the hell has this all been for?”

“Ah. Yes, and that’s two of them. Well, as you surely know—this is a bank.
The
bank. Well, the investment bank. Nothing on the high street but plenty of brand recognition in the industry. So—ha ha—we’re all a bunch of bankers here. As for your other point, as to why this has all been done, well, come with me... I’d like to introduce you to a man who’ll be able to make everything clear to you far more eloquently than I ever could.”

“I see,” says Toby. Were it not for the throbbing pain in his hand, he would wonder if he were dreaming.

“Now if you’ll just come this way, Dr Judd, than I can get you two acquainted and we can make a start.” He pauses suddenly, looks up with bright, mocking intelligence in his eyes. “And just so that we’re both absolutely on the same page, I ought to warn you now that should you make the slightest attempt to cause a fuss or raise an alarm in the course of the next twelve hours I will, with regret but without compunction, have you permanently removed from the board. Is that understood?”

Pain surges as if in sympathy in Toby’s hand. He nods in sullen agreement. “I suppose you’ve been threatening me a while now, haven’t you? The weird phone calls. The message at the cash point.”

Swaine-Taylor looks at him oddly. “Dr Judd, I’m afraid I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Then... Then who or what..?”

“Later, later. Now, come this way. Chip chop.”

And back they go, back along the lines of top-flight fitness gear (none of which, Toby thinks sourly, seem to have done all that much for Swaine-Taylor’s physique), back to the vestibule and the lights, where they step into one of the lifts and wait for the doors to snap shut whilst the executive presses the necessary button.

“Just one more floor,” he murmurs. It doesn’t take long and then the doors are opening again and Toby and Swaine-Taylor are stepping out into another wide space. But this one, unlike the gym beneath, is darkened and gloomy. Only a couple of lights are on very dimly and all of the windows are blocked up with smooth wooden boards. There’s a smell in the air—like decay, Toby realises, like damp earth, like mould.

You would not think, perhaps, that any office in so modern a building could ever seem so eerie as does this.

In the centre of the room there is a kind of nest of computer screens, heaped high on a long low desk. There is a figure sitting behind it on a tall black orthopaedic chair. Toby walks closer to see, a horrible suspicion taking shape in his mind.

It is, he sees now, an old—a very old—man, lank-haired and bearded, with fierce eyes and few teeth and the air of a hermit or a wild man. He grins crookedly at their approach.

“Now, this ought to be interesting,” says Swaine-Taylor, playing the jovial host, limber and witty and almost flirtatious. “Dr Judd, I’d like you to meet a very old friend of the bank’s. This is Professor Anthony Blessborough.”

1900

THE HOTEL D’ALSACE

PARIS

I
N HIS FOURTEEN
and a half years as proprietor of the Hotel d’Alsace, Monsieur André Lachette has grown accustomed to entertaining patrons of the most secretive, eccentric and outré stripe.

His establishment is not, after all, of the first rank nor are its location and décor conducive to those visitors to Paris who wish to circulate and be seen in the city’s most fashionable districts, or particularly attractive to those with a respectable income or any reputation to speak of that they wish to uphold. Indeed, the place has long proved to be something of a magnet for a certain kind of impecunious gentleman or lady in search of privacy or solitude, looking for somewhere inexpensive where they might lie low. In consequence, Monsieur Lachette has become most proficient at passing no comment or judgement, at looking the other way. He is a master of discretion, an adept of selective memory, a titan of benevolent hypocrisy. He has trained himself to be blind to all but the worst human excess. He is, in other words, the ideal hotelier.

And yet, for all of his experience and skill, his attitude of open-handed unshockability, there is something which troubles him—something which troubles him about the man in room sixteen.

Monsieur Lachette knows well, of course—has always known—the precise identity of his guest, for is not Mr Wilde, for all his attempts at disguise, his ludicrous pseudonym of Sebastian Melmoth and his oft-stated desire for solitude, still amongst the most notorious men in Europe?

Not that monsieur judges, of course—this is Paris, after all, and the supposed sins of the poet seem somewhat trifling in such a place as this—yet, in spite of Lachette’s worldly disregard for the tedious prejudices of that rain-soaked little island which God, in his unfathomable wisdom, has placed a few short miles from the coast of his own mighty nation, there is something else concerning that guest, beyond the taint of English scandal, which weighs heavily upon the imagination of the proprietor.

It is this, he decides, as he sits in his little parlour at half past nine on a Friday evening, with a bottle of red wine uncorked before him and the remnants of his supper cooling on its plate: it is the fellow’s scent of mortality. For the man was ill when he first came to the Hotel d’Alsace three weeks previously, pale and unsteady on his feet and possessing a countenance suggestive of intolerable pressures and of accelerated decay. He cannot, Monsieur Lachette concludes, be long for this world and he wonders whether he should count it as a blessing or a curse that the poet’s unhappy twilight should be spent within the walls of his own establishment.

He is about to pour himself a fresh glass and raise it in solitary toast to the dying man who slumbers somewhere overhead when he hears the hectoring tinkle of a bell. It originates, he sees with a lack of surprise which is in itself surprising, from the room which has lately been made the private territory of the man who called himself Melmoth. With a slightly lingering look back at the bottle, Lachette rises stolidly to his feet and moves, with an urgency that he does not wholly comprehend, to answer the summons of Mr Oscar Wilde.

When he reaches the room, Monsieur Lachette discovers it sunk nearly into darkness. The merest stub of a candle provides feeble light to illuminate a place that has been thrown somewhat into disarray as though a struggle has happened here. The hotelier is struck by the paucity of the man’s possessions—a small valise, a handful of favourite books, clothes that are close to rags—little to suggest that their owner was once a legend of the stage, a hero of the salons. The man himself is no more than a shadow upon the narrow single bed, his form rising and falling with horrid irregularity. The voice that emerges from this undignified shape is ragged and uncertain.

“Robbie?” it hisses, “is that you?”

“No, monsieur. It is I—Lachette.” As ever, when in the company of foreign guests the proprietor somewhat overstates his natural accent.

“Of course. Of course. Lachette. Draw nearer would you, my dear fellow?”

The Frenchman does as he is bid and steps with dainty trepidation to the invalid’s side. The air is thick. There is a smell of overspilling drains. “I am here, monsieur,” says Lachette, breathing, as much as is practicable, through his nose. “What do you require?”

“A great cup of bitterness has been pressed against my lips.”

“You are unwell, monsieur?”

“There is... yes... an excitation in my ear... a great ringing sound like the clarion of judgement.”

“You wish me to fetch a physician, monsieur?”

“No. Only Robbie. Only Robbie Ross. He will be quite sufficient for all my needs.”

“Very good, monsieur.” Imagining the interview to be at an end, Lachette begins to creep away from the dying man when, suddenly and quite without warning, Oscar Wilde sits, with a hideous effort, close to bolt upright in bed.

“Monsieur,” he says and his voice is louder now, tinged with something close to madness. “I understand at last. In my dreams I saw him. The undying man. The devil robed in flesh. The evil at the heart of the story. Finally, now I see it at all. And Monsieur...” His voice cracks and gurgles. “Monsieur, I know exactly what he is. The most impossible, terrible thing. Such a leap, such a leap in evolution, you see, such as Mr Darwin could never have foreseen. Not Man at all. Rather—the development of consciousness in something greater than the individual. Greater... but soulless. Inhuman.”

“I fear, monsieur, that you are succumbing to delirium. You must rest.”

“No! No, on the contrary, I doubt I’ve ever been more perspicacious and clear-sighted. It is the date, you see. 1842. The date of institution. Of establishment. Look at the date again, monsieur. You must look at the date again.”

No sooner has the last syllable been spoken than the figure of the ruined writer sinks in a sick, quivering motion back upon the bed.

“Monsieur!” cries the hotelier and hastens back to Melmoth’s side.

Wilde’s eyelids are flickering shut. A thin skein of spittle hangs at one corner of his mouth. He is sweating heavily and wheezing and the smell is worse than ever.

“Oh, monsieur,” says Lachette again and, washed over by compassion, reaches out a hand and soothes the great man’s brow. “I am so sorry, monsieur, that this has been done to you. This gross injustice.”

But the man in the bed does not reply for he is already fading once more into unconsciousness.

After a while, Lachette leaves him there and hurries away, to call the physician and Mr Ross. Before he leaves the sickroom it appears to him, though he knows it to be impossible, that the shadows at the corners of the room, now thicker than before, move—seeming almost to scuttle—of their own, terrible volition.

NOW

“L
ISTEN,
”
SAYS THE
old man in the gloom, in that slice of gothic amid the billionaire sheen of the twenty-first century. “You’ve got to listen to me now.”

Swaine-Taylor has gone—to change, he said, into something smarter—and the two men have been left alone together. Blessborough is behind his desk, Toby to one side of him, perched on a lower seat, his hand aching, his head throbbing, the room’s smell of moist decay heavy in his nostrils, and wishing more than anything else in all the world to just be allowed to
wake up
from this nightmare.

“Listen,” says Blessborough again, his voice a shrill croak from decrepitude and lack of use and possessing the faint tinge of a Yorkshire accent which Judd had somehow not expected, “how old do you think I am? Be honest now. None of your soft-soaping.”

Quickly, adroitly, Toby does the maths. “Well, if you are who you say you are...”

“I am. You know I am.”

“Then you must be ninety-four? Ninety-five?”

“Ninety-five,” the old man confirms with strange, unwarranted pride. “But I don’t look it, do I? Nowhere near. That’s the power, you see. The power of the island.”