The Alembic Valise (19 page)

The next day Joel sat tight. He felt safe here but he would not take the risk of venturing out, or trying to contact his friends in London. Instead he spent the afternoon crying by Buster’s grave.

Sue worked as a dental nurse and he was grateful when her car pulled into the drive. He had decided to try and tell her how he had fetched up here, from the beginning, even the part where he had ended up in the wrong universe. But she stopped him.

“Look I know you are in trouble.” She bit the corner of her lip, and then continued. “And maybe it is better if I don’t know the details.” She had a slight west-country accent; he had not noticed that before.

“You told me that your house had been razed to the ground. That is pretty intense stuff. But you got away, and you are here now and…” She searched for the right words. “And you can stay here so long as you need to.”

Joel had brought the newspaper cutting that Dave had provided downstairs to show her, it was on the kitchen table and she picked it up.

Sue had to work on Saturday morning but she had warned Joel to be ready for when she returned because they were going on an excursion. A week had passed quickly and apart from following the footpath down to the banks of the nearby river every day and watching the ever-changing Lincolnshire sky he had just rested and tried to process what had happened to him. Now he felt ready for a change of scene. He noticed there were bags of provisions on the back seat when, he climbed into the diminutive car. He threw his coat and fleece on top of the hessian bags, and looked at Sue expectantly, but she just gave him a little smile and started the car.

“Why the need for warm clothes, it’s summer, where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

It was quite a drive. They took the M62, sweeping over the Pennines and onto the M6. The motorway was no place to have the hood down but even with it up the wind noise was intrusive and as the miles passed Joel sunk back into a part of himself that he had only discovered since his exit from his old world into the new. A place where he was able to relinquish all responsibility for himself and what may or may not happen.

Eventually they came around yet another hillside and he saw a wide estuary laid out, and beyond the sea. Joel had not been here before but he recognised that they were on the edge of the Lake District. They followed a single-track road that brought them out onto an embankment. The estuary was muddy and grassy in parts, bisected by a long pier and crisscrossed with water filled gullies. It was the Irish Sea. Getting out of the car and stretching Joel discovered that it smelt different to the North Sea.

“Is that Scarfell?” asked he looking across the bay at the peaks.

Sue nodded and indicated that he should carry the shopping bags. The tramped along a track that wove between seawater inlets and grass covered dunes until they reached their destination. Sue had been leading the way and she stopped suddenly causing Joel to bump into her.

“Careful,” she said. Then she stepped aside so he could see past her.

“Wow!” was all he said. “Is that yours?”

It looked like a long lean sailing barge, built from timber, painted deep blue and adorned with polished brass fittings, not sitting in the water but high and dry on a grassy plateau.

“It’s an Admiral’s Barge,” she replied with pleasure in her voice.

“My father sailed her here from Falmouth twenty five years ago. Then spent the next twenty-four years fitting her out; what do you think?”

“If we dig the sides free of the embankment and prop the boat with sleepers we should be able to float her free on the next high tide. It is a risk though. If the swell comes in too fast or we don’t take the props away correctly she could break her back.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked Joel.

“I promised my dad before he died; he hated the idea of her being landlocked forever. He was always talking about ‘being ready for the voyage’ but then he got sick. He practically lived here after we lost mum.”

“Oh right. One man with a spade and six tons of mud, I don’t think so, ducky. No, in the village here, over beyond the pier,” she pointed vaguely in the direction they had come from. He didn’t recall having seen any habitation at all; too busy looking at the scenery.

He stayed on the “Second Chance” all week and worked with, in fact with two men from the village, Joe and his cousin. They did most of the work and Joel had watched as every day at low tide they had started in with their digging and propping until the barge was pronounced ‘floatable’. Getting her along the gully and out to sea was obviously going to be another matter; fraught with it’s own set of imperatives.

High tide was due at eight thirty seven that evening, and as he waited for Sue to arrive a thought began to colonise his mind. Although he was supposed to stay with the boat in case the wind changed and a swell came in behind the concrete pier that bisected the bay the idea was winning. He just had to know.

It was a half hour walk to the village; he ran it in eleven minutes. The grocery store was closed but a light was burning so he rang the bell. After a few moments Maurice, the owner, came to the door; he had a napkin tucked into his shirtfront and was obviously half way through his supper, but he smiled when he saw Joel.

Joel’s hand was trembling as he dialled the number and listened to the clicks. Then there was a short burst of static before the voice..

“Vous êtes bien sur le répondeur de Mai Teillard. Laissez un message après le bip.”

He slowly put the phone back in its cradle and quietly left the shop. And then ran as fast as he could back to the bay. Howling occasionally at the sky. It was a strong breeze coming off the sea and it seemed to be pushing him back; rather than fight it he relaxed and leaned into the wind, finding buoyancy by doing so. When he arrived Sue was waiting.

“Is everything OK?”

“Sure is, let’s go float your boat.”

Over the week a simplified plan had emerged; if the flood tide provided sufficient lift under the keel then they would use the engine to reverse gently off the bank. The sand around the propeller had been cut away and loosened in other key areas. Also, as no grand voyage was scheduled for tonight; they would simply sail out into the bay and around to a deep-water mooring on the southern side of the pier. So once the Perkins diesel had been fired up, and found to be running smoothly, there was nothing to do except wait for the moon and the ocean to decide if tonight they would together embrace or reject the hopes of Joel and Sue, who were by now sitting on the deck drinking fine Islay malt.

Joel raised his glass to the sky. “To la luna,” he said. But it was Venus that flickered above them. The only sound was the lapping of the tide against the bows. After a while they felt a tremor through the timbers. The Second Chance was moving.

The next day his mind was alive with possibilities: Estuaries, coastal waters and inland waterways; all these were navigable for the Second Chance but Joel wanted to sail to London to try and save the Alembic Valise. Sue however was sceptical. They had spent the day checking the boat over for leaks; there were none and now Sue was getting ready to drive back to her house by confluence and leave him here on the newly floated boat.

“It all depends on what side of the river we decide to cast our anchor,” said Joel cryptically, then immediately felt guilty for not trying to at least trying to explain.

“What I mean, Sue is that I have this project that is, has been occupying me for a while and it’s at critical point. The trouble is that there are people who mean to do me harm; I’ve become a beacon for trouble in fact. So firstly I want you to be aware of that and the risk involved of being around me. That’s why I haven’t contacted anyone; I don’t want to put them in danger. Additionally it means that I cannot just breeze into town and pick up the threads of my life and work. I have to, kind of slide in on a rising tide, the river gives me the advantage of stealth; somehow. It isn’t something I fully understand, but I am operating on instinct at this point and it is all I have.”

Sue said she understood that he felt safe on the water; that she did too, and that together they would take that journey to wherever they needed to sail to.

“Tomorrow is Monday and I have to work next week, but I’ll be back.” As Sue stood on the pier the sun was setting behind her shoulder. “I have two weeks holiday coming up; I’ll be back next weekend.”

Joel felt enormously moved by her commitment to something that she had taken entirely on trust. He thought for the hundredth time about Buster dying in her arms.

“Will you wait for me, captain?” she asked, making him smile.

But Joel chose to ignore her question; instead he asked one of his own. “When Buster licked your face and you woke up, do you think that perhaps you awoke into a different world? Does it seem that way at all?”

“Perhaps,” was all she said. Then she turned and walked slowly to the car. He watched as her headlights cut tracers through the dusk and then were lost in the rise of the hills.

Cuthbert knew the way. It was not the only way but he had found over the years that it worked for him, none of that ‘crazy voodoo shit’. Fuck, no. He walked the curve and he stepped lightly between worlds. It was as simple as that: Now here, now there, now someplace else. I must have been born this way, he thought.

He patted the breast pocket of his coat, then reached inside and took out a silver plated cigar tube, extracted a corona, cut the end with his bean cutter, lit up, and with staccato ignition inducing sucking, drew upon the cigar, finally letting out a cloud of white smoke that quickly dispersed in the morning air. Cuthbert then took a drink of coffee and looked across the table at the man sat opposite him.

“Seraphim, my dear man, let me be clear.” He spoke softly but emphatically. “I am retired, and I thought you were too. How’s the pie?”

“Terrific, you should try some. And I’m just giving you the picture of things. And yes I wondered.” He brushed crumbs from his shirtfront. “If you had any, you know, advice.”

Cuthbert was looking around and caught the eye of the waitress. She came over.

“Another espresso and what he had.” He said pointing towards Seraphim’s now empty plate.

Whilst Cuthbert waited neither of them spoke. The outside dining area of the Soho restaurant was busy with media types pretending to be pitching ideas or tweaking their screenplays on their tablets. But they were mainly just checking each other out for kudos gathering or sex. Neither Cuthbert nor Seraphim garnered any points on either count.

“Your Baba is goin nuts,” said Seraphim after Cuthbert’s pie and coffee had arrived. His slice was much larger than the one that had been served to Seraphim.

“He isn’t my Baba,” said Cuthbert

“You know what I mean,” replied Seraphim.

“And anyway it isn’t my area of expertise. It’s expected that things would get a bit War of the Worlds prior to some kind of resolution.”

“Yes of course. He came to see me, a couple of times in fact, I told him about the Blake Organisation trying to frame the writer by dumping that body next to his boat. He didn’t seem entirely convinced at first, then I saw him a year later and by then he was obsessively trying to ‘get to the bottom of this conspiracy’. I remember him saying that. He must be having a tough time with his daughter going missing. Seems like a nice guy, for a cop.”

“You look good Cuthbert, you really do, but our project is under the threat; Baba’s trying to snuff the writer, if he can find him that is.”

“I thought Agim had all that in hand?”

“He does, but he is a little…” Seraphim paused. Cuthbert was unsure if for effect or just to find the right word; one beat, two beats, three beats. “Under resourced,” said Seraphim, completing his sentence finally.

“And?” said Cuthbert following the bait.

“I remember when I was a child my mother telling me about Saint Seraphim of Sarvo. ‘Serpent - we trample on your head’ was his catchphrase apparently. Do you like that?” Cuthbert smiled and nodded. “But to get back to the Detective Z, he’s now just plain Mr Z because he got fired and now he’s been stumbling around trying to find the daughter.”

“So what?” said Cuthbert.

“We have someone close to Baba who has made contact with Mr Z; together I believe they could deliver some firepower to Agim. Because I truly believe that it’s the only thing this sonofabitch understands.”

“You may have a point,” said Cuthbert, standing up and throwing a twenty-pound note on the table. “Let’s walk a while.”

Nobody watched them leave. The young urbanites on the surrounding tables were still too engrossed in their trending, tweeting or face-time to even notice. Seraphim had parked on the top level of a multi-story; they took the lift and then emerged into bright sunlight. They stood by the parapet wall and took in the cityscape.

“Hey I never asked you,” said Seraphim suddenly. Cuthbert looked at him calmly and then nodded imperceptibly. “The suitcase and the ‘mystery benefactor’ thing, what was all that about?”

“It was for Electra,” Cuthbert answered without hesitation.

“How’s that?” asked Seraphim.

“Well, sometimes a loved one can send messages to those still living, I call it angelic intervention; I suppose another way of putting it is that there are voices that must be heard. Very often…” Cuthbert trailed off, then sighed and shook his head. “…Sometimes,” he continued. “Sometimes things are there to be clearly seen but it takes another person’s eye to reveal the truth.”

“Oh,” said Seraphim. “I see.”

“No you don’t. But I will tell you about it one day; I know how you loved her.”

Cuthbert then did an unexpected thing; he reached out and put an arm around Seraphim’s shoulder in a kind of half hug. They stood on the roof of the car park looking out across the rooftops for a while, neither man speaking.