weeks. If you’d like to contact him, I suggest you send an email to his secretary – would you like the address?”
“Any idea where he’s gone?”
“No, Mr Rieley, sorry.”
She didn’t sound very sorry, but I couldn’t really blame her. “Thank you very much, ma’am, you’ve been most helpful.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be of…”
“It’s fine. Thank you.” I hung up and went in search of my satchel.
Harris Simmons lived in that elusive part of London to the north of Marylebone station that doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to be, and ends up being a bit of everything – old, new, rich, poor, sprawled and compressed all at once, so that the most expensive fish and chip shops in the world can find themselves between a council estate, with its police witness-appeal signs, and a walled-off, high-gated mansion. In the midnight-dimmed shops between the area’s quiet mews and its wide thoroughfares, parmesan cheeses the size of chubby babies were displayed, and Italian and Greek flags drooped from windows here and there. From the pubs a polite buzz of thick-carpeted gentility rolled out from half-open doors and warmly lit interiors.
The house I was looking for, directed by Sinclair’s immaculate notes, sat behind a high wall fronting onto a broad avenue that rose up from the end of the Westway towards the long bank of hills that encased north London, whose names – Gospel Oak, Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill – promised leafy parks, and steep streets furnished with coffee shops.
There was an electric intercom on the gate; I buzzed it and waited. There was no answer. There was nothing so crude as a keyhole, and shards of broken bottles were cemented onto the top of the brick wall. I walked round the block until I found a cul-de-sac that led to the rear wall of the house. Here there was a smaller gate, also with an electronic buzzer, and a CCTV camera peering down at it. When I approached, a single bright light flicked on automatically next to the gate. I dragged the light and warmth out of it and curled them into the palm of my hand, immersing the gateway area in darkness again, except for the trapped glow between my fingers. Once again, I tried the electric buzzer, and got no answer. I ran my finger over the wood of the gateway, feeling the polished sheen on the black paint, until a faint, cool buzz beneath my fingers murmured tantalising hints of electricity not too far away. In place of a keyhole, Simmons had substituted an electromagnetic lock. I pressed my hand against the door and pulled gently at the electricity in the lock. It sparked into my fingers with an angry pop, burning a small hole through the wood of the gate; then wriggled its way into the earth at my feet as I chucked it aside. The gate swung open.
Inside the high walls, there was no light; so I let some of the trapped white glow from the outside lamp slip from my fingers. It rolled across heavy flagstones, over shallow curving walls planted out with blooming purple and yellow bulbs; it swept round the trunk, and tangled in the leaves of a weeping willow; and displaced the shadows around a hulking concrete-pretending-to-be-stone griffin which crouched outside the back patio doors, its black eyes staring angrily at the garden gate, its tongue licking the air in front of its-nose. A dry yellow and brown crust had settled over part of it, like skeletal moss, and on either side of it was a low wooden bench looking onto a scorched area of brick that had the dismal semblance of somewhere you held barbecues. I found the whole tableau – the well-maintained garden, the bright flowering bulbs, the civilised layout of the place – slightly unsettling. It would be all too easy to imagine Simmons, the illustrious middle-class wealthy host, serving sausages to the congregation at the local Anglican church on a Sunday, while a wife (who he didn’t have) chatted nicely to the vicar. As a semblance of what normality was meant to be, we found it disturbing. Uninspiring.
I scurried past the frozen griffin as quickly as possible and went to the back patio door. The lights were all out in the house, and a burglar alarm clung to the second-floor wall above the sloping roof of what looked like a dining room, glassed round on three sides with windows onto the garden. Throwing the last of my light ahead of me in a buzzing sphere of white neon, I felt the surface of the back door until I found the keyhole – at last, a keyhole! I rummaged in my bag for the set of blank keys I’d bought almost on my first day of new life, fumbling through them until one fell into my fingers that looked of the right make. Having put it into the lock, I was pleased at how quickly it assumed the appropriate shape – far easier to unlock things using tools, I was reminded, than when it was just you, murmuring gentle placations by yourself. I twisted, and opened the door.
The alarm immediately sounded – but not in the angry, distressed manner of a security system faced with an intruder; merely the low warning bell of a timer counting down to an emergency. I hurried down the corridor until I found the controller for the alarm – a keypad set into the wall. A numeric keypad was the last thing I really wanted, since the kind of magics that can predict the numbers embedded in a circuit tend to require preparation, consideration and a lot of time in execution, being of a subtler nature than the usual fistfuls of power magicians like to throw around. I found myself wishing I had the kind of equipment that all spies seemed to be assigned in prime- time BBC drama – number-breakers, silenced pistols, safe-cracking devices, fingerprint scanners or even a plastic sonic bloody screwdriver. In the event, I fell back on guesswork. Hoping for the best, I rubbed my hands together, feeling the friction build up between them. When the resulting warmth began to buzz, I caught it in the palm of my hand, feeling the hairs stand up all the way along my arm from the static around my fingers, and slammed my palm as hard as I could into the keypad. The static jumped from my fingers into the piece of machinery, which gave a loud electric pop, and fell silent.
A wisp of embarrassed black smoke curled out from under the panel. The alarm stopped wailing. Feeling pleased with myself, I felt my way down the corridor until I found a light switch. Turning it on, I saw that the corridor was bare, apart from the alarm keypad and a small wooden table below it. Not a painting, not a book, not a mouldy tax demand; not a thing. I walked into what I guessed, by the empty brick fireplace, was the living room; and there, too, was nothing. The shelves were bare, the walls bare, and only the faintest indent in the cream- coloured carpet remained to suggest that a scrap of furniture had ever sat on it. The bedroom showed the same rough outline of a bed that had once been present, and the odd faded patch on the wall where a picture had hung; but other than those hints, there was nothing to suggest that the house was anything other than a hollow frame. The cupboards in the kitchen were bare and spotlessly white; the bathroom smelt of bleach. Only when I went upstairs did I find anything – the one object left in the house.
It sat on the floor of what had probably been the master bedroom, a spacious, irregularly shaped area with a window onto a west-facing balcony. It was propped up on the floor by its own open shape, by the sturdiness of its expensive, thick paper. On the side facing the door someone had written in familiar handwriting:
I sat down with it on the floor of an alcove away from the windows, wary of deceit. It read:
My dear Matthew,
If you truly wish to continue with this course of events, I cannot prevent you. But I hope you will at least give me the opportunity to speak with you and talk about why you have returned so full of the determination to be my enemy, when I have never meant anything but the best towards you. If you would be interested, I am attending this event and hope you receive this note in time to join me.
With ever the best regards,
Robert
P.S. Out of concern for his safety, I have removed Mr Simmons from the country and hope you will respect his innocence in anything that may lie between us enough to not endanger him as you did Mr Lee and Mr Khay by your actions.
Between the pages of the note was a small piece of yellow paper. I read it, folded it back up, put it in my pocket and, leaving the note behind, went downstairs.
What did I feel? A mixture of anger and disappointment, certainly; nothing else could explain the tension in my back and the sudden ache in my eyes. Curious, maybe? And perhaps, somewhere at the back of my mind, perhaps just a moment of uncertainty, perhaps if you stopped and thought, perhaps just…
Keep moving, that was the rule. Stop and think too long and you might never move again.
Simmons’s house had clearly been emptied out by someone who understood that it wasn’t enough for
