Out of the Sun (40 page)

"Did these "delays" include murdering Dobermann?"

"No. I'm not sure how he met his death. I didn't know he was keeping watch on the house in Maple Place. He must have seen me when I went there to retrieve the remaining notebooks and papers. What effect that had on him I can only imagine. And, to be honest, I'd rather not."

"Oh, you'd rather not, would you?" Harry knew his anger was partly synthetic: a mask for his inability either to accept or deny what Athene had said. But he knew also he had to indulge it. Anger was his last defence. "I thought you claimed to be serving the future, not your own sensibilities."

"And I thought you claimed to want the truth. Have you changed your mind?"

"I haven't heard the truth. If you believe everything you've told me, then you must be mad."

"You know I'm not, though, don't you?"

"I know nothing of the kind."

"Why do you think I let you into the secret?"

"You tell me."

"Because David was your son. You of all people should know the truth about him. His life and his death. That truth lies between us now, literally as well as metaphorically. In his notebooks. And in the knowledge I've shared with you but with no other living person."

"Your possession of the notebooks proves nothing. You didn't need access to higher dimensions to become a thief. And if their contents were as earth-shattering as you say, you'd have destroyed them by now."

"I should have done, certainly. But I too have my weaknesses. The notebooks are a unique record of David's work. His ticket to immortality. If they go into the fire, his memory goes with them. And some part of me goes too."

"What are you saying, then? That you expect me to walk meekly away and keep my mouth shut? While you sit here with my son's discovery rotting in a locked drawer?"

"Hardly. Even if you agreed to do that, the time-bomb would still be here, ticking away, waiting to explode when I died and the drawer was opened."

"What's it to be, then?"

"I have to end this. You do understand, don't you? Much as you'd prefer not to." She gave him a consoling smile. "You should leave now, Harry. You really should."

"Without the notebooks?" Slowly, Harry stood up. He glanced past Athene and out through the window, where the gate leading onto the road and the stone wall beside it and the rooftops opposite and the distant outline of a water tower against the pale-blue Suffolk sky assured him that the familiar physical world still existed, obeying its four-dimensional rules, rebuffing as madness the powers and perceptions this old woman laid claim to. One way or another, madness was the answer. His, if he believed her. Hers, if he did not. "I'm not prepared to do that."

He reached out and touched the notebooks. His fingertips tingled. His scalp contracted. Nervous tension, he told himself.

Nothing more. He hooked his forefinger round the rubber band and slid the bundle towards him.

"Aren't you going to stop me?"

"You want me to?"

"I want you to prove you can."

"I can't let you leave here with the notebooks."

"Then you'd better do something about it. Right now."

"Don't you believe I could if I wanted to?"

"I don't believe anything any more." He picked the bundle up and stepped back from the desk. "Beyond the evidence of my own senses."

They're as treacherous as any other kind of evidence."

They're all I've got." He turned, strode to the door and stopped there, looking back at her over his shoulder. "Well?"

"Well what?"

"I mean to walk out of here with these, you know."

"Oh, I know. Believe me, I know."

Her eyes held his for a compulsive moment, communicating not the slightest doubt that she would have her way. But she made no move. She did not even stir in her chair. Relief flooded over Harry. Hers was the confidence of the utterly mad. It had to be. For it seemed there was nothing she meant to do to stop him. And nothing she thought she needed to do.

"Goodbye, Harry."

"I'll take these to the police," he said, holding up the bundle in triumph as his apprehensions faded. "I'll get them to check their forensic records for some trace of your presence in David's room at the Skyway. A fingerprint. A hair. A fibre. There'll be something."

"You're probably right."

Then they'll come for you."

"No doubt."

"And you'll answer for what you did to him."

"I'm sure I will."

"Do you understand?"

"Completely."

She was staring at him with a strange and compassionate soulfulness that touched him more deeply than he would have been prepared to admit. She seemed to be urging him on even as she was calling him back. Still she did not move.

"Goodbye, Harry."

"Go to hell." He tore himself free of her gaze and plunged through the doorway, aware as he moved of a crackling in the fabric of his clothing and a crawling as of insects across his skin. But even as the sensations reached his mind, the rational part of it flung up its de fences Pay them no heed, it insisted. Just go, while you still can.

A spark of static jolted his fingers as he grasped the handle of the front door and pulled it open. Then he was out, striding through the clear cold air towards the gate, trusting his own judgement yet not daring to look back. As he reached the pavement beyond the gate, he realized he really had thought she was capable of stopping him. But she had not been. Athene Tilson had been bluffing all along. And he had called her bluff.

SIXTY-THREE

Life had often perplexed Harry, but never more so than now. Seated at an alcove table towards the rear of the Lord Nelson as the early lunchtime trade picked up slowly at the bar, he stared at his half-drunk pint of Adnams' Broadside and the six notebooks held together by a rubber band that stood on the table in front of him. He lit a cigarette, watched the first lungful of smoke drift up into the landlord's collection of antique soda syphons and forced himself to consider a question he dearly wished he knew the answer to. Was Athene Tilson a liar or a madwoman or exactly what she claimed to be?

Insanity was his preferred choice. Age, isolation and neglect could have made her so eager for fame and recognition that she had assembled a bizarre confession to fit the undeniably bizarre facts. There was no saying she had stolen the notebooks at all. Harry only had her word for it that David had not left them with her for safe-keeping, as he might well have done if suicide had been in his mind. If so, they were unlikely to contain any startling hyper-dimensional discoveries. Not that Harry would be able to tell if they did. But others would. As Athene well knew. Yet she had let him walk away with them. Presumably for the plainest of reasons: she had not the means to stop him.

This display of her impotence, contradicting the sweeping vigour of her words, had vitiated Harry's threat to go to the police. What would he go to them with? Ten years' worth of his son's inconclusive mathematical jottings were unlikely to have them rushing round to Avocet House with handcuffs at the ready.

But what if those jottings were not inconclusive? What if David really was up there with Euclid and Newton and Einstein? What if the notebooks fixed in Harry's line of sight proved his son was a pioneer of mathematical thought? It all came back to the same point in the end. What did they contain? Gold or dream-dust? Something ... or nothing? Tracing their cloth-bound spines with his fingers, Harry knew he would have to find out soon. The rest hinged on this.

He would take them to Donna. Yes, that was the answer. She would be able to judge whether they were dealing with shadow or substance. She would know if this was the real thing. He peeled the rubber band off and picked up the topmost notebook, assuming it would be the latest of them: the one in which David had reached either an apotheosis or the deadest of dead ends. He toasted the boy's ambivalent memory in beer and flipped open the cover.

A blank page. Then another. And another. And another. They were all blank, Harry saw as he turned them over with mounting anxiety. Every last one. There was not a word, a number an equation, a clue. There was not a single thing. He grabbed up the next book in the pile, fanned through the pages and saw that it was the same. And even as he cast it aside and snatched at the next, the realization burst into his mind. There was nothing here. There never had been. They were not the notebooks. Athene had tricked him.

Harry rushed out empty-handed into the street and turned towards the sea. The esplanade, and the lane linking it with South Green, represented the quickest route back to Avocet House. As he ran, he wondered why Athene had deceived him. What was the point, when it must have been obvious he would discover what she had done before he left Southwold? What did she hope to gain except too little time to be of the slightest use?

He reached the green, lungs straining, heart racing. As he paused to catch his breath, an acrid scent drifted on the air to meet him. Something was burning. Then he heard a distant crackle as of igniting timber. He ran on, glimpsing a reflection of flame in a window on the other side of the road as he neared Athene's gate. Turning, he saw a churning tangle of fire and smoke in the study. The room was ablaze. And was far enough gone for the rest of the house to follow if it was left unchecked. What had happened? What had she done?

A car pulled up behind him at the roadside. Harry looked back at the anxious face within. "Call the Fire Brigade," he bellowed. Then he flung the gate open and raced across the garden to the study window. Inside, fire was encroaching from the corners, as if it had started simultaneously in several different locations. But Athene was sitting exactly where he had left her, staring impassively at the empty blackboard as fire climbed its frame like some vine whose life is compressed into a minute.

Harry hammered on the window and shouted Athene's name. Slowly, with the reluctance of a waking dreamer, she turned and looked at him over her shoulder. On her face was a calm smile of irony and recognition, lit like stained glass by the leaping flames. She shook her head, but went on smiling. It was a warning not to interfere, entwined with a gentle farewell.

There was a trowel propped in a broken flowerpot at Harry's feet. He grabbed it and struck at the window, then again with greater force. The glass splintered and he knocked out the shards. "Quick," he shouted, even as the curtains caught with a whoomph and heat punched into his throat. "Over here." But she made no move.

The window was mullioned. Realizing he would have to open it for anyone to climb in or out, Harry smashed another pane next to the handle and reached in to turn it. But it would not shift. A lock had been fitted, he saw, and the catch closed. There was no sign of the key. She had done this deliberately. She had planned the whole thing. He glanced in at her desperately. As he did so, she looked away and he noticed, stacked on the blotter in front of her, six blue cloth-bound notebooks.

Harry whirled round and made for the side of the house. She had the notebooks, the real notebooks. And he would be damned if he stood by and watched her destroy them along with herself. The conservatory door might still be open. Even if it was not, the conservatory windows were plain glass and too large for locks to keep him out.

He reached the rear and barged at the door. But it did not yield. She had locked it. He retreated to the garage, heaved the dustbin up by its handles and stumbled across to the largest of the conservatory windows, thrusting the base of the bin through it like a battering-ram. The bin crashed down inside amidst a shower of broken glass. Harry clambered in after it, ignoring a cut to his hand as he clasped the frame, then crunched his way past the wicker chairs and table where he and Athene had taken coffee and such unequal stock of each other ten short weeks before.

The smoke was a throat-catching mist in the drawing room, but a choking fog in the hall, pierced by a wavering line of flame that led from a sparking light-switch by the study door up the wall and across the ceiling. Harry ran forward, stooping as he went, his forearm braced in front of him.

Entering the study was like stepping into a furnace. The bookcase had caught as readily as a stand of drought-stricken timber. Fire had consumed the panelling beneath the mantelpiece and was roaring in the chimney. Flames were licking at the legs of the desk. While Athene still sat behind it, motionless as a shop-window mannequin, with the notebooks before her on the blotter. Harry started towards her, but the heat and smoke beat him back. He recoiled into the hall, coughing and blinking. The front door was to his left, offering the swiftest of escapes. But he ran back down the hall to the kitchen, determined not to give up. He would save the notebooks at least. Athene could do as she pleased but not with his son's property.

He grabbed a towel from a rail by the sink, soaked it under the tap, then draped it over his head and returned to the hall. The smoke was thicker now. And there was more than one jagged line of flame flickering through it. Holding a damp end of the towel to his nose and mouth, he closed his eyes, plunged recklessly forward and opened them again to find himself at the study door.

As he entered, the top half of the bookcase, unbalanced by the fire eating at its lower shelves, gave way, spilling books onto the floor, where sparks ignited the rug between him and the desk. Smoke billowed up from the debris of the bookcase, stinging his eyes and singeing his ears. With every breath he swallowed more. Through his tears and heaving coughs, he saw Athene's clothes catch and heard a who of as fire suddenly engulfed her. She stretched forward, her whole right arm ablaze, and laid her hand on the pile of notebooks. Some instinct of preservation some pointless flare of hope drove Harry towards her. But there was another who of of ignition and instantly she and the desk and the notebooks were part of a single flame that jetted to the ceiling.

Harry recoiled, the failure of his attempt releasing fear and confusion in his mind. As he swung towards the door, his foot caught in a curled corner of the rug. He stumbled and fell, the side of his head striking the edge of one of the fallen bookcase shelves as he rolled. There was a moment of dazed disorientation. Then he realized where he was again.