Out of the Sun (38 page)

"Did their relationship seem ... different in any way ... the last time he visited her ... in early September?"

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't there. Athene sent me to Cambridge that day to collect some books she'd ordered. I didn't find out about David's visit until I got back. She said he'd turned up unexpectedly. But that wasn't true either. They'd spoken on the phone only the night before. She wanted me out of the way for some reason. Like now, I suppose. Except that was just for the day. This is for good. Or bad."

"Did David ever mention anyone called .. . Dobermann?"

"What name?" Mace frowned, as if struggling to pin down an errant familiarity.

"Carl Dobermann."

"No. Never. But .. . it's funny. You knowing the name. While Athene was away, some time early in November a man telephoned, asking for her. Long distance. He gave his name as ... Carl Dobermann."

"Highly strung, was he? Unbalanced, maybe?"

"Maybe. Odd, certainly. But we only exchanged a few words. He wanted Athene, not me."

"Did he leave a message?"

"Yes. After a fashion. He asked me to tell her he'd .. . remembered."

"Remembered what?"

"He didn't say. That was all there was to the message. He'd remembered."

"You passed it on?"

"No. As a matter of fact, I didn't. I meant to, of course. But... other things put it out of my mind. I think I may have assumed it was some kind of wrong number."

"But he asked specifically for Athene?"

"Yes. He did."

"Then it can't have been, can it?"

"No. I suppose not."

"What's your Christian name, Mace?"

Thyllida. Why?"

"It's a pretty name."

She blushed. "No-one ever uses it."

That's a pity."

"A pity. But not a tragedy. Sounds like it could be my epitaph."

"Why don't you want me to go to Southwold, Phyllida?"

"For the same reason part of me was glad to leave. Lately, Athene .. ." Mace's eyes fell. Her voice sank close to a whisper. "She frightens me. She used to be ... comforting. Now ... I don't know. Something's changed."

"I have to go."

"Why?"

"For David, I suppose."

"But you never knew him."

That's why I have to go."

"Don't. Please."

"I must."

"I'm pleading with you." She laid her mittened hand on his. "Don't go."

"What harm can it possibly do to visit a little old lady who lives by the sea?"

"More than either of us can imagine." Her grip tightened. "That instinct I had. To phone the hospital the day David died. It's the same feeling I have now. About you. And Athene."

"What feeling?"

"That if you go to see her .. ." Slowly and sadly, Mace shook her head. "You won't come back."

SIXTY-ONE

By the time he had seen Mace off on the next train to London, Harry had missed the 99 bus. But such minor obstacles no longer troubled him. Courtesy of a thirty-six-pound taxi ride, he reached Southwold while the bus must still have been chugging through Saxmundham.

The morning seemed colder and dazzlingly brighter than it had in Ipswich. The low winter sun danced and glinted on the sea, invading and confusing Harry's senses as he made his way from the busy market place down towards the green at the southern end of the town, where Avocet House stood on a minor crest, hedged off and withdrawn from its neighbours.

He marched straight up to the door and tugged at the bell, heard its echo in the hall merge with the chime of a clock striking the half hour and waited for the sound of footsteps or an answering voice. But there was no response. Nor when he rang again. And again. He stood baffled in the porch, rubbing his hands for warmth, aware to his own bemusement that he had been confident Athene would be there because of a subconscious suspicion that she had known he was coming and had sent Mace away to ensure there would be no witness to their encounter.

Unwilling either to leave or merely to wait on the doorstep, he walked round to the rear of the house, past a wind-carved broom hedge and so into the garden, overlooked by the conservatory where she had received him last time. Her wicker chair was empty and there were no walking-sticks propped against the table beside it. He peered in through the window. There was no sign of movement. He tried the door. It was locked. The key was visible on the other side and the way the door yielded at top and bottom implied that the bolts, if there were any, had been left un shot Crouching down to squint beneath the weatherboard, he made out a shrinkage gap above the threshold of nearly half an inch. That, plus the bundle of old newspapers resting on the lid of the dustbin over by the garage, constituted a virtual invitation. He went over and prised one free of the string, glancing in through the garage window as he did so. The bulky shape of a vast old Humber revealed itself through the gloom. Wherever Athene had gone, it was evidently not far. But Harry did not propose to wait for her any longer.

He went back to the conservatory, folded the front few pages of the newspaper flat and slid them beneath the door, then prodded at the keyhole with the nib of his pen until the key plopped out obligingly onto the paper. He smiled at the simplicity of the ploy, recalling how sceptical he had been when seeing it used too many times for plausibility in Hollywood B movies. Then his smile stiffened. Carelessness, after all, could just as easily be deliberation. And Athene Tilson had not struck him as the careless type. As he inched the newspaper back out and saw the key emerge with it, he saw also the close-packed typesetting of the Wall Street Journal. It was the edition for Tuesday 8 November, the edition he had himself bought in Chicago on account of a front-page article reporting a fall in Globescope's share price following Hammel-gaard's sudden and unexplained death in Copenhagen. Harry grabbed the key and whipped the newspaper over to the front page.

And there where the article should have been was instead a neatly clipped rectangular hole.

Athene's possession of the newspaper was suspicious enough, but her meticulous removal of the Globescope article raised suspicion to a pitch of confounded disbelief. Harry wrenched the door open and rushed through the conservatory into the drawing room, pausing only to listen to the stillness of the empty house. She was not there. But she had so often been there that the walls and furnishings the very air itself seemed ingrained with her presence. She was not there. But Harry did not feel entirely alone. He followed his instincts along the hall to the study. It was as he remembered, the desk loaded with papers, the shelves with books. The photograph of Princeton Institute luminaries circa 1953 still hung above the mantelpiece. And the blackboard .. . was blank. Harry goggled at it in a kind of wonder. Where were the equations, the formulae, the jumbled Greek letters? Where was the work in progress? Erased, apparently. But why? What had made erasure necessary?

He rounded the desk and cast aimlessly through the stacks of paper. Here too blankness was the norm. The clutter had more than a hint of contrivance about it. Even the blotter contained fresh unmarked paper. And the desk diary, lying where it could not be missed, was for the old year. Somehow, Harry would have expected such a rigorous thinker as Athene Tilson to have replaced it with a new one promptly on 1 January. Her failure to have done so struck him as a portent, both indefinable and undeniable.

He opened the diary and leafed through it to the date she had given him for Hammelgaard's visit: 20 September. David's friend, she had scribbled. 3.30. He leafed on to his own visit, unsure for the moment of the date. Then it was there, in front of him. But it was not what he was prepared for. Beneath the heading for 25 October was written: David's father 11.45.

He had not told her he was David's father until he had arrived. He had not told her and she could scarcely have guessed. The diary entry was either made after the event which seemed singularly pointless or she had known all along. She had known what Iris had fondly believed no-one could know. She had known even before Harry had known himself.

He wrenched at the drawer beneath the desk, anger adding to his impatience. It was locked and stoutly constructed. But locks were not going to stop him. He strode out into the hall and along to the kitchen, where he hunted down a carving fork and an old butcher's steel that looked as if they would do the job between them.

A strange sensation ran through him as he retraced his steps along the hall. It was as if he had walked into a cobweb; as if a brush had been passed over his head or a razor been slid across his unshaven chin. He pulled up and examined himself in a full-length mirror that hung beside a barometer next to the telephone table. As he reached up to rub his forehead, his hair frizzed out to meet his hand. The telephone tinkled faintly, just once, then fell silent.

He went on, then stopped again. The door to the study stood ajar, whereas he had surely left it wide open. There were no open windows to create a draught. And there was no-one else in the house. Was there?

Hesitantly, he pushed the door away from him and entered the room, turning slowly to look towards the desk. Where Athene Tilson sat smiling expectantly. "Hello, Harry," she said mildly. "Looking for something?" She slid the desk drawer open as she spoke, lifted out half a dozen identical blue cloth-bound notebooks held together with a rubber band and dropped the bundle in front of her on the blotter.

"You know what these are, don't you, Harry? You were asking about them last time you came here. They're David's notebooks. All of them. Just waiting for you."

SIXTY-TWO

At first glance, Athene Tilson was just as she had been ten weeks before. Grey-haired and thin to the point of gauntness, dressed in guernsey, tennis shirt and corduroy trousers, she could easily have been taken for a frail old woman surrendering shabbily to advancing years.

But a second glance told a different story. Gone were the round-shouldered stoop and arthritic stiffness, gone too a clutch of implied weaknesses and suggested failings. She was a woman transformed. Or one revealed, perhaps, for what in truth she had always been. There was nothing cosmetic about it. Artifice had been abandoned. That certainty communicated itself to Harry in the erect ness of her bearing, the intensity of her gaze, the intimidating placidity of her presence. He felt like some bucolic intruder confronting a high priestess. What she knew he could scarcely hope to understand. And what he understood she already knew.

"Sit down, Harry," she said calmly, pointing to a chair. "Let's talk."

Numbly, Harry obeyed, dropping the carving fork and steel onto the carpet beside him. "I didn't .. . hear you come in," he murmured.

"You've done well," she said. "Really. Exceptionally well. I think David's tenacity must have been an inherited trait, don't you?"

"How would I know?" Harry managed to toss back. "I never met him."

"I'm sorrier for that than I can ever say. He asked my advice, after tracking you down in Rhodes. He asked what I thought he should do about you. I recommended him to forget you, to exclude you from his life. I was wrong. I did to you what so many others have done to me. I underestimated you. I mistook the superficial for the substantial. I am so very sorry. It was unforgivable. More so, perhaps, than other more drastic actions I've taken since."

"What actions?"

There's no need for me to tell you, Harry. You already know."

Tell me about Dobermann."

"So that's what brings you here. You made the connection, did you? After all my efforts to prevent you."

"I want the truth."

"Really? Are you sure about that?"

"What was it with you and Dobermann and David?"

"What was it? It was a dream. Their dream and my nightmare."

"You're talking in riddles."

"It is a riddle. But it's no game."

"Dobermann phoned here while you were away in November. Mace took a message."

"She never told me that."

"She told me:

"What was the message?"

"He said he'd remembered. After more than thirty years, he'd remembered."

"My fault," Athene said in an undertone. "Entirely mine."

"What had he remembered?"

"Something he would have done better to forget for ever."

"What?"

The answer to the riddle."

"Just tell me:

"Very well." She reached out and ran her hand across the cover of the topmost notebook. "But it's so difficult to explain. There are no words to describe the structure of the world as it has become apparent to my mind. The range and acuity of my perception have grown with age. Once, all was dazzle and confusion. Now, the clarity is ... incredible. The ability is latent in your mind as well, Harry. And in the mind of every shopper walking the streets of Southwold. If it became actual, you'd be like a blind man given telephoto sight. There's a scale difference a phase shift you literally can't envisage."

"You're talking about higher dimensions."

"I am."

"Hocus-pocus, according to Adam Slade."

"Everything is in the mind of a charlatan. Believe that's what I am, if you wish. It's probably safer. Believe what I'm about to tell you is an old woman's fantasy. But it isn't. I know it isn't."

"Convince me."

"I can't. You're not a mathematician. You don't understand. You never will. Good. I'm glad for you." She smiled. "What did you make of my book?"

"Nothing. It was way over my head."

"Exactly. But the book is where it begins. Numbers are the key. Their nature and behaviour their possession of a level of reality mathematicians learn to use and respect without ever quite comprehending are shadows cast in the four-dimensional world by the forms above and around and within it. We see their shadows, not their shapes. But there cannot be a shadow without a shape. In that book, in the work that went into it, I began to feel my way towards them, as you might feel your way towards the door in a darkened room, slowly and painstakingly. My knowledge has grown exponentially since. It reads to me now like a child's scribbling-pad, even though it contains secrets no twentieth-century mathematician could hope to understand." She paused. When she began again, a tiny inflexion of guilt had entered her voice. "None living, I should say."