The Burning Library, page 15
All this will be worth it, I told myself, if it means she gets what she needs. I took a deep breath and accepted the video call.
“Hi, love,” she said. “How are you?” Her face popped up on my screen. She looked much better than I was expecting. I sat on a low wall in front of a tree so she couldn’t tell where I was.
“I’m good,” I said. “Down in London for a couple of days for work. What about you? You look great.”
In the background, on her end, I heard a strange noise.
“Is that Viv?” I asked.
“Viv is whooping! I’ve had some amazing news.”
He couldn’t have made this happen so soon, could he? “What news?”
“Somebody called from the oncology unit to say that a clinical trial in America is recruiting new patients for a trial with that drug, the one they said wasn’t available here because it was too expensive. Anyway, I’m eligible! I’m in! All expenses paid. Apparently, I’m perfect for it.”
I choked up. “That’s brilliant, Mum!”
“I know! I can’t believe it.”
Had it really been that easy for my father to buy Mum the chance of more life, of a cure even? It was breathtaking. I tried to think what I would ask, if this truly was news to me.
“Who’s running the trial?”
“Oh, I can’t remember. I wasn’t listening properly once they gave me the news. They’re going to email me, so I’ll forward it to you. I think they said it was a private clinic.”
“It’s spectacular news, Mum. I’m so happy for you.”
Viv poked her head into the frame, a smile wrapped around her face. She waved and gave a thumbs-up before disappearing again.
I chatted to Mum a little longer. She was so upbeat, I forgot where I was for a few blissful minutes. I kissed my fingers and put them to the screen as we said goodbye. She was still connected when bells began to ring. The clock on the college tower was chiming, and it was very distinctive.
I jabbed at the button to end the call. She’d lived in Cambridge with my dad. I was afraid she’d recognize the sound. For a few moments I stared at the phone screen, afraid she’d call back and ask where I was, but she didn’t and I relaxed fractionally.
While we’d been speaking, the sun had moved, and the shadow of the library was reaching across the pavement, almost touching the tips of my shoes. I checked the time. My father would be waiting for me.
Chapter Nine
Sid
Sid watched Paul closely. The fear in his eyes intensified as he changed the subject brusquely.
“What are you up to this morning, mate?” he asked. “Do you fancy a short hike? I could show you Maiden Rock. It’s not a challenging route, your grandma could do it, but it’s a cool rock formation.”
“Sure,” Sid said. “That’d be nice.” He wasn’t dressed for it, and the weather looked unreliable, but somehow, he didn’t think the hike was the point. He felt a growing sense of dread. If he hadn’t had the conversation with Mel next door, the self-styled private investigator, he would have thought Paul was behaving weirdly. If Paul was presenting more normally he could have written her off as a nut. For them both to be like this, Sid had to believe something bad was really happening.
They left the house and crossed a wooden pedestrian bridge onto East Sands Beach under a mackerel sky. The tide was half in and half out. Waves rushed and pounded the shore, throwing up a light mist. The sun was a dim halo behind the clouds. Where the waves dragged the beach they left a mirrored sheen on the sand, blending light, water, sea, sky, and sun. Paul and Sid walked where the sand was dry and powdery, scattered with pebbles and shells. There were just a few other souls out, most with dogs. Sid couldn’t enjoy it. His body felt tight with anxiety.
Paul, head down, remained silent until they passed the university’s Institute of Oceanography. At the far end of the beach they took an empty footpath leading over the cliffs. Away from people, Paul relaxed fractionally.
“You got the note,” he said.
“I did. Why not just talk to me? Or leave it at the cottage?”
“Because they’re watching your place and they’re listening to everything we say. Did you look Minxu up?”
“‘They’?”
“The Institute.”
“Why would they do that?” Sid’s heart began to pound the back of his ribs.
“Control,” Paul said, as if it were obvious. “Did you look up Minxu?”
“I looked, but I didn’t find much.” Sid wasn’t ready to share what Mel had told him yet. First, he wanted to know what Paul would say.
“I thought you might be able to find more than me because you’re a computer person. I want to know if she’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t she be?”
Paul shook his head. A dog walker was approaching from the other direction, almost close enough to overhear them. They passed him in silence. To the right of the path was a holiday park, multiple tidy units, mostly empty, facing the sea. Just beyond, the path narrowed, and it was no longer surfaced. The mottled clouds were gathering into darker, heavier masses.
Atop the cliff, they reached an empty bench, angled for the view back toward St. Andrews. Sid hoped they might sit there and talk, but Paul said, “It’s this way.” Sid followed him reluctantly down a rutted track. Gorse scratched his arms, and he had to keep his distance from Paul to avoid the thorny shoots that whipped back as Paul pushed past them. A squall whipped over the open water and drenched them when it hit land.
“Should we turn back?” Sid shouted into the wind. The path was steep now, and fast becoming more liquid than solid. His feet were wet. His sneakers had poor grip.
“We can shelter at the rock.” Paul forged on, and Sid followed unhappily.
Maiden Rock was a solitary sandstone outcrop on a deserted rocky beach, tall and looming, eroded into an otherworldly silhouette. It reminded Sid of the weather-beaten cathedral ruins. They leaned against it, poorly sheltered, until the rain ceased.
Paul pulled his hood back. Sid did the same, and his stomach curled when he realized that Paul had been crying. Paul stared grimly at the ocean as he talked.
“I’m so fucking scared. All the time, I’m scared. I wake up with my heart pounding. My dreams are nightmares. I feel like I should know what to do, but I don’t. It never stops, and I’m so fucking sick of it.”
Sid put a hand on Paul’s shoulder. The man was shaking. “Why are you so scared?”
“Because people disappear from the Institute. Min wasn’t the first.”
“Who else?” Sid’s fear level went up a notch.
“She was called Zofia. She disappeared four months before Min. They hired her from Poland. She was an expert in Renaissance textiles. Giulia and I got friendly with her.” He wiped his eyes roughly with the back of his hand, but the tears kept coming and the shaking didn’t stop.
“What happened to Zofia?”
“She went hiking one day last November and didn’t come back. They found her car parked at the train station local to the hike. It was locked, with no personal effects left inside it. There was no CCTV, it was too remote. The Institute said Zofia went back to Poland. Basically, the same story they told about Min. But the thing is, I know she didn’t go back to Poland.”
“How?”
“I’m not proud of this, but we’d been getting closer emotionally during her first year at the Institute. And I know, I’m a heel. But Giulia spends all hours at the Institute, and it’s all small talk when she gets home. It had been dead between us for a while. I was fucking lonely.”
“I’m sorry,” Sid said.
“I was with Zofia the day she disappeared. Nobody knows that except you, but we went hiking together. We had a beautiful day. We walked and talked and decided we wanted to be together. I was going to tell Giulia about me and Zofia that night, but Zofia never came back. She’d suggested we drive to the hiking spot separately, and I wish we hadn’t, God, how I wish I could go back to that day and be braver. I was just so scared of Giulia finding out before I had the chance to tell her. I know Zofia didn’t have her passport with her because I went to the cottage to look for her when she didn’t come home that night, and it was there. All her things were. The police took everything away a few days later but I saw it with my own eyes that first night. Something happened to her, I know it did. I felt it. She was my soulmate.”
“God, mate, I’m sorry. This is awful. Did you talk to the police?”
“I was thinking about it, but I’ve got to be honest, I bottled out of it. I didn’t want anyone to know about our relationship.” Paul paused, then said, “Maybe that was bad. But I’m scared. I can’t stop being scared. Giulia is one of them.”
Sid felt so far in over his head it was terrifying. “Does Zofia have family?” he asked, thinking of what his neighbor had said about Min’s parents, how desperate they were to find their daughter.
“She was estranged from them. I thought about trying to find them, but I didn’t know how to start.”
“So what do you think happened to her?”
“Something bad.” Paul seemed to notice just then that his hands were shaking. He shoved them into his pockets. He wasn’t on the edge, Sid thought, but already over it.
Paul said, “Don’t mention this to Anya, will you? You can’t tell anyone. We must be careful, so, so careful.”
“I won’t,” Sid lied.
“The thing is, I don’t know what to do about any of it.” Paul looked ashen, broken.
Sid felt jolted. How was he supposed to know? He said, “I’m not sure, either. But we’re going to keep talking to each other, okay?”
“It’s been heavy, carrying this. It’s been this massive weight on my shoulders.”
Had Giulia noticed a change in him? Sid wondered. He needed a timeline. One woman disappearing was extremely worrying; for two to disappear from the same workplace was surely something no one could ignore, even the most incompetent police force. How high up did this go? He was beginning to wonder, though he didn’t want to fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole. He wondered if his neighbor knew about Zofia and assumed she didn’t. He needed to tell her.
Far out to sea, more sheets of rain had materialized and were sweeping across the ocean toward them. They needed to get out of there soon or the path would be impossible to climb, but this moment felt fragile. If he didn’t handle it right, Sid wasn’t sure if Paul would confide in him again.
“Are you and Giulia okay now?” he asked. He thought about when he’d first met them. He’d only spent a couple of hours with them, and they’d seemed happy, but of course he hadn’t really paid much attention. He’d been dazzled by what was on offer for him and Anya.
“After Zofia happened, I still wanted to leave Giulia. I kept thinking maybe Zofia would get in touch and I could go join her, but I never heard from her again. I had a breakdown, lost my job as a climbing instructor. Giulia looked after me, and the Institute offered me work and I took it. I doubted myself, mate. I hit rock bottom. And then it started to seem like it hadn’t happened the way I thought it had, and I started to believe maybe I got it wrong, that Zofia never loved me, and I convinced myself to believe that until Min went just four months later.”
“I’m sorry,” Sid said. Could there be an innocent explanation for any of this? He was worried there couldn’t.
Paul wiped his eyes with his sleeve, roughly, and seemed to regain awareness of their surroundings. “There’s more rain coming. And the tide’s rising. We should head up.”
The sky was a mess of fluid cloud, the sheets of rain closer than ever, the ocean restless and oily. Sid slipped and cursed as they climbed.
He was glad to see the bench when they reached the top, but two women stood by it, blocking the way, their heads bent over a laminated map. They were young and fit, wearing walking boots and leggings that revealed the muscled contours of their legs. Both wore baseball caps and had their hair tied in ponytails. Walking poles hung from their wrists. Serious hikers, Sid thought.
They were close to the women now, but neither looked up or moved out of the way as they approached.
“Ladies,” Paul said. “Morning.”
Unsmiling, they stepped out of the way. One of them nodded curtly. Sid met her eyes and instantly recoiled at the flinty coldness in them. As he and Paul walked on, Sid looked back over his shoulder, as drawn to that gaze as he’d been repelled by it, because it felt as if it was personal somehow. The women stood shoulder to shoulder, staring back. Blatantly. If they’d been men, it would have been threatening.
Sid told himself not to let Paul’s paranoia infect him. They were just hikers.
It was vital he keep his own head together if he was going to work out what was happening and what to do.
Anya
My father’s house in Cambridge was a mansion distinguished enough to have its own Wikipedia page. His family had owned it for three generations. It occupied a spacious and very private end lot on a beautiful wide street just a ten-minute walk from the library site.
The street was lined with mature beech trees, grown so large their roots had forced up paving stones; their trunks were thick and gnarled. The leaves were starting to turn, from acid green into copper. Beechnuts fell around me, plinking onto the roofs of the high-end vehicles parked along the verges and crunching beneath my shoes.
I walked through a set of open gates onto a wide, paved driveway. A perfectly shiny Ferrari was parked in front of a large garage. The home looked to be Victorian, and Gothic in style, though it was hard to see much evidence of its age in the fabric of the building. Every inch had been restored and maintained. Window frames gleamed with white paint; the stonework was pristine, the yew globes in the front garden immaculately clipped. There wasn’t a stray leaf on the ground. Beneath it all, I wondered if the old bones of the house could breathe.
Your father’s a control freak.
Evidence of Magnus’s obsession with legacy was here, too, in the family motto chipped into stone above the door, the cuts, appropriately enough, surgically clean. The motto: Ingenio et industria. By wit and industry. So squeaky clean.
He opened the door himself and let me in. I rubbernecked shamelessly. My greedy eyes didn’t want to miss a thing. I’d had to imagine his family home for so many years; seeing it for myself felt unreal. It was a riot of rich Victorian architecture: a finely etched glass porch door, original, beautifully tiled floors, molded ceilings, brass hardware on the doors, William Morris wallpaper, glass lanterns, intricately carved banisters, unfeasibly large bouquets of fresh flowers spraying from urns on polished side tables. There were family portraits, too. My father and, presumably, my grandfather and great-grandfather beside him.
“I made some calls,” he said. “For your mother.”
“I heard from her. It seems like you got her on the trial. Thank you.”
Dust motes spiraled in a shaft of sunshine that crept through a doorway from a room I couldn’t see into. This place was impressive, but lugubrious. It was hard to imagine Mum here; she must have found it stifling.
I was kicking myself for not approaching Magnus for help earlier. I’d been so passive where he was concerned, so eager not to upset Mum. Why did I buy into her invective so wholly that I didn’t even think to ask one of the most medically well-connected men in the country to help us? Why didn’t I make my own mind up about that as she got sicker? Perhaps I needed to grow up. In answer, I heard her.
Don’t deal with the devil.
I tried to ignore her, but she was persistent.
If you give your father an inch, he’ll take a thousand miles.
“This way,” he said, and I followed him.
I was alert for any sign of my half siblings, even though they were surely at school. It was hard to believe I was in the family home, the place I might have grown up in if things had been different.
It was also hard to believe it was a family home. It was more like a museum.
At the end of one wing of the house, in a room with tall, arched windows, designed to make the most of its garden views, he invited me to sit down.
I took a seat opposite the windows. I felt buzzed but edgy, too. I’d been running on adrenaline for too many hours. I’d taken painkillers for my foot, but they were wearing off.
There were four professional archival boxes on the table in front of me and two empty book stands. I inched forward to look at the boxes but didn’t touch. They were plain and unlabeled, cream colored, not a fingerprint on them. Magnus hit a button on the wall and semi-sheer blinds rose from the base of each window to the top. The light in the room dimmed to a pearly gray and the air felt soupy.
“Which would you like to open first?” he asked, and I flinched, because the question had echoes of my childhood birthday parties. At every single one, I’d fantasized that he would turn up to surprise me.
“You choose,” I said.
He opened the one closest to him and extracted a white bag, which he handed to me. I loosened its drawstring and removed a book. Written in Latin and exquisitely illustrated, it was a medical encyclopedia.
“Fifteenth century?” I asked.
My father nodded.
“German,” I said.
“Yes.” He looked lit up, as if he’d been waiting for this, for me to prove my expertise, and it delighted him. I didn’t want that to mean something to me, but it did.
I turned the pages. Here was a Tree of Life, a Zodiac man, a Tower of Wisdom. There were astrological diagrams, recipes for remedies, and instructions for bloodletting. The illustrations were of exceptional quality, the colors so fresh on the page it was as if they’d just been mixed, as if the scribe’s brush were sitting to the side, still wet with paint.
He had more to show me: an extremely rare and very early Bible with fascinating riddles, manicules, and annotations in the margins, a Celtic codex not dissimilar to the mind-blowing Book of Kells, Ireland’s national treasure. A gorgeous little book of hours. Treasures, all of them. He watched me intently as I examined them.
