The Weaver Fish (16 page)

23

A motley assortment of staff tea mugs, some name-tagged, was scattered on the draining board. Above the sink a glazed cupboard contained fine china presumably reserved for the boardroom. Worse took down two cups and studied their interiors.

‘Have you read my friend's
A Scrutable History of China?'
he asked absently.

‘Has anyone?'

Worse ignored her. ‘Frances Shin Wah. She could hold these like shells to her ear and recite the secrets of the boardroom.' Worse placed them delicately on saucers and poured from a matching teapot. His actions seemed ceremonious.

‘What is your name?'

‘Millie. Millie Misgivingston,' she replied.

Worse was instantly attentive for two reasons. Misgivingston was the name sent in an email introduction from Cambridge. He hadn't yet had the opportunity to follow that matter up. It was also, in an odd sense, a family name. His expression changed with the satisfaction of discovering a connection. Millie misread him.

‘It's not amusing. It's a fine old English name.'

‘I know, I know. The Magnacarts and the Misgivingstons, when they stopped feuding, founded parliamentary democracy.' Worse pronounced it Marnacourts.

Before she could question him on this he added, ‘Millie for Millicent? Mildred? Mildew?'

‘Millie for Emily.'

He pushed one cup across the table, then sat down opposite her. The kitchen was windowless, and he had closed the door and turned on the light. As they tasted the tea, Worse reached for
a discarded newspaper which had been folded to expose a half solved crossword. Taking a pen from his pocket, he wrote in an answer. It amused him to think of his intrusion both adding and subtracting a clue.

Millie had been watching inquisitively. Worse realized that he had hardly looked at her. When he did, her eyes held his for several seconds. She seemed about thirty. He was privately bemused that he had mistaken her for a man.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?' he asked casually.

‘No.'

‘What was it?'

‘Who is it,' she corrected emphatically.

Worse's eyes signalled his interest. He was judging when to indicate that he was more informed than she could have expected.

‘My brother worked here for about three months and then six weeks ago seems to have disappeared without trace.'

‘What does the company say about it?'

‘They claim to know nothing. That Fiendisch character says that Nicholas was a lazy employee and just didn't show for work. He basically said good riddance. And yet they had headhunted him specifically, tracked him down to a research station in Asia where he was a volunteer. He has a superb CV and works like a maniac.'

‘Have you come from the UK looking for him?' asked Worse.

‘Yes. We couldn't get any sense out of Humboldt or the police from over there; just hours of telephone and email frustration. My parents wanted me to come to see what was going on. So far I've achieved nothing. The police don't want to know me. Fiendisch—can you believe that name?—effectively showed me the door.' She hesitated, as if re-experiencing the events, then continued more reflectively.

‘I must say, I had started to wonder if Nicholas was becoming unhappy about his work, but he always kept in touch. We're a close family.'

She had been holding her cup with two hands, elbows resting on the table. Now she lifted it to her lips and sipped distantly.

‘What was your brother's role in the bank?' Worse was not insensitive to his choice of tense.

‘He's a mathematician,' she answered, ‘we both are.'

‘What's his area?' asked Worse immediately.

‘Well, he has several interests, financial modelling—quantitative analytics—being one. That's why he was here.'

‘Go on.'

Millie fixed him briefly with an evaluating stare, and continued. ‘Derivatives pricing, bundle design, adaptive risk management, reinsurance strategies, quite a lot on neural net methods. Very innovative, actually. Then he moved into language studies; did a lot of work on statistical properties of Parsan gaps—it was Nicholas who discovered that you can infer with reasonable accuracy what language people are speaking by analysing their silences. After that, he did another amazing thing, obtaining redundancy bounds for something known as the Syllabine Task, the outstanding problem in computational linguistics, apparently.'

She hesitated. Worse remained attentive, and it seemed that sisterly pride led her to fill the silence with further detail. ‘Once, he found some rate he needed by linking seventeen derivatives, then managed the integration. That's not lazy. They awarded him the highest accolade in mathematics.'

‘A Fields Medal?'

‘A department afternoon tea party. The FM is way second.'

‘Who was that with, the linguistics work?'

‘Rodney Thwistle's group in Cambridge, and Edvard Tøss—'

Worse nodded slightly. Almost suddenly, she wondered what all this might mean to the man across the table. ‘Have you heard of him?'

‘Thwistle? Yes. What's your area?'

‘Stochastic processes. That's amazing, you knowing RT. Are you a mathematician?'

‘No.' He offered no elaboration, but continued looking at her. A black denim jacket was buttoned to the neck, and the beret, skewed forward, shaded her eyes from the ceiling light. She was beautiful.

‘When you say Nicholas kept in touch, was that by email generally?'

Millie nodded.

‘Can you still access them?'

‘I can. Are you offering to help?' She was still holding her cup, amphora-like. Above it, from shadow, her eyes stayed upon him, analytic. He finished his tea.

‘Of course. Actually, extraordinary as it may seem, I've already been asked to help. I'm hardly ever in contact with Thwistle these days but I did get an email recently asking me to look out for Nicholas. What with a paid killer shooting at me, I hadn't given it any attention. My name is Worse, by the way.' He held out his hand across the table.

‘You're Worse! I was told to contact you.' She shook his hand, smiling.

‘Well, you certainly did that, downstairs. Did Nicholas ever mention the name Charles Finistere?'

‘No. I made note of everyone he mentioned in order to contact them for information. Why do you ask?'

‘Oh, last night I researched this company a bit. That was the name of a director.' Worse appeared to lose interest in the subject. He glanced at his watch. ‘How did you get into the building?'

She unbuttoned the top of her jacket, and from an inside pocket removed a credit card. ‘Nicholas is obsessive about backup. He copied his staff swipe card onto this.' She placed it on the table. Nicholas had reprogrammed the chip in an expired Visa card. Worse was impressed. ‘I found it amongst his things, what was left of them. He's done it before so I guessed what it might be.'

‘What do you mean, what was left of them?'

‘His flat had been ransacked when I arrived.'

‘What's happened to the place?'

‘I'm staying there, I've taken over the rental.'

Worse suppressed his immediate concern. He sat back in his chair, one arm stretched out, fingers rotating the empty teacup back and forth on its saucer. She found him looking at her with a new intensity.

‘I have offered to help. Do you want that?' His manner was matter-of-fact. Millie also sat back, meeting Worse's gaze for several seconds.

‘Yes.' It was a measured syllable, and elliptic. ‘But I would like to know more about you.'

Worse acknowledged this with a nod but was otherwise not forthcoming. ‘Then I advise you to move out of Nicholas's flat. Tonight.'

‘Do you really think I'm in danger?' From the tone of disbelief she clearly expected reassurance to the contrary.

‘I do.' He stood up, collected both cups, and washed and dried them thoroughly before replacing them in the cupboard.

‘Apart from that one irresistible vanity,' Worse nodded toward the crossword, ‘my plan was to leave my visit undetectable. Was that yours?' He pushed the Visa card towards her.

‘It was. That is, until a man saw me in the main hall.'

Worse ignored the sarcasm. ‘So you left Fiendisch's office as you found it?'

‘I did.'

‘I need a quick look in there. Since you've done the lock already, you might open it for me. Did you take the videodisks?'

Millie nodded and Worse continued. ‘I think we should leave them and take copies. We'll keep tonight's and put another used one in the drive. Corrupt it. If they don't suspect a break-in, they'll probably just archive or overwrite without ever viewing it. Do you mind doing that?'

They were standing by the door. Worse had his left hand on the door handle, and his right, which now held the torch, was reaching for the light switch on the adjacent architrave.

‘I don't mind, if you don't mind something else.' It was a new voice, lighter than before. Worse turned questioningly, looking at her directly.

‘Do you mind if I carry your backpack in the dark?'

As the light switched, he glimpsed her smiling. There was irony and trust, and playfulness. And like the Whiteley nude, her image persisted into blackness. To Worse, there was little in the moment itself. Its meaning was convolved with everything that had gone before. He had attacked this woman, and beneath the surface of their conversation had found himself distracted by remorse. This voice and smile he took to be the beginning of forgiveness.

Leaving the kitchen door open, and using torches, they quickly checked each upstairs room. Worse wondered when Millie would be curious about how he had gained entry. They were in
the storeroom, Worse waiting by the door, when she said, ‘Is this where you came in?'

‘How did you know?'

‘There's a window, its full of business records but you've shown less interest than in the bathrooms. I wondered if you had already been through it.'

If Worse had a weakness, it was clever women. ‘Time to open the vault,' he said casually, with no hint of a slight nervousness he felt.

Worse searched in Fiendisch's office, then spent about twenty minutes examining the vault security. He estimated it would take about an hour to open, and he couldn't guarantee that the intrusion would go unnoticed. Not wanting to arouse suspicion that might endanger his embedded code, he abandoned the task and sought out Millie.

He found her in an accountant's office off the north side of the hall. Deciding that their search was otherwise complete, they left by the front door, their furtive movements unrecorded on a damaged videodisk.

Richard Magnacart
and
Richard Misgivingston,
both knights of the Crusade, resolved to settle ancient wrongs by way of single combat. Their chosen weapon was the battleaxe. As recorded by
Grant Pontage,
a King's tax collector present on the day, the affair was organized with great pageantry, there being festive tents and ale stands and roasting spits set up across a neutral ground thereafter to be known as Mingle Common. The standards and ancestral colours of both families were on display, and each had a crested dais, musicians, games and falconry, a team of seconds and servants-at-arms, and supporters all shouting ‘Sir Richard!'.

The battle raged for five hours, the two brave knights exactly matched in strength, agility and stamina. As evening came, great torches were fired, their light glinting red on arcs of sharpened blade and the plate and mail of heaving armour.

The people there gathered grew restless and dispersed about their business of the night, children were taken to their beds, and ladies of both houses retired to the tents. The musicians fell silent, and the cheers were few. Still the knights fought.

Then, at the fateful moment, one saw advantage, and the other also. Each swung his axe with such symmetry of speed and force that both were cleanly struck, enough that in the instant of his soul's departing each glimpsed victory in the other's full beheading.

And where their blood mixed on the stirred earth, there was seen a crimson vapour rising, and it shone with such a brilliance that the brightest torch was darkened, and it swirled and ran and billowed now into the face of Christ, now the ramparts of Jerusalem, now the swints of Calvary—whilst to every watcher's thoughts at once there came a prayer for absolution.

According to the Pontage chronicle, such was the power of this vision that all inheritance of hate was drawn within, consumed as in a fire, and the lamentation left beside was turned to celebration. He describes Magnacarts and Misgivingstons of all ages dancing freely on that field, two families joined in blood and faith, in miracle and worldly fortune, and by oath of mutual caring from that night on.

The modern location of
Mingle
(or
Mingler
or
Mingleton) Common
beneath urban London has so far proved untraceable, largely because of unfortunate lacunae in historical Registers of Deed, a dearth of evidence in the cartographic record, and negligible clues in nomenclatural or lexicologic threads. We do know that over the centuries the area variously accommodated the first Mercifuls' Chapel (in which would convene the Brimstone Assizes), a monastery school ‘w swinthrie lofte', a knight's house having a
quadratum cavaedium,
the Priory hospital of St Clement (with ‘an hospis fr thos infirme of bottomical paine w blockige') and, curiously, an ‘Embalmes palas fr Yeomen of't Hoom Cantys', owned by one John Chalmers Esq. This history of built settlement gives reason to hope that excavations might one day uncover crypts or other structures housing reliquaries and similar artifacts dating to events recorded by Pontage. Rather charmingly, there is identified one minor residential square, nowadays very plain, that has attracted some eccentric interest. Amateur historians linked to a London chapter of swint fanciers propose it as the site of Mingle Common, solely on the grounds that swints appear to favour resting in its gardens before their further pilgrimage across the British Isles. Needless to say, this argument has attracted no scholarly attention, and has insufficient substance in itself to justify the granting of an archaeological licence.