‘It didn’t end up very romantic.’
As quickly as she could, she fed him the scraps that had come back to her. Waking up in the night; hearing a noise; going out to the pool terrace.
‘Michael was fighting with the other man.’ She paused. All she had were fragments, glimpses and moments. Norris wanted a coherent story. ‘The house was full of antiques. I suppose he was a burglar. Michael must have heard him and surprised him. I tried to help. He –’ She broke off. With everything she was desperate to remember, that was one image she wished she could forget. ‘He pushed Michael over the cliff. Then he came after me.’
‘Did you get a look at him?’
She tried to think, but it was like a dream. The harder she interrogated it, the more it receded. She peered into faces and saw only blurry blanks.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And you’re sure no one else was there?’
‘I don’t remember anyone.’ She read the disbelief on his face. ‘Should I?’
‘Somebody rang the police.’
‘Maybe it was a neighbour.’ But she knew that wasn’t right. She could remember the darkness – no lights for miles around. And Norris was shaking his head.
‘The call came from the villa. That’s how they knew where you were.’ Norris put down his pen. ‘You must have done it. You were too weak to talk: you didn’t say anything. Just left the phone off the hook and crawled away.’
The effort of remembering was giving her a headache. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temples. ‘I don’t remember that at all.’
She opened her eyes, hoping Norris might have disappeared. Instead, he’d turned to a vinyl pocket at the back of his folder and was pulling something out, a sealed plastic bag, with gold in it. He held it up for her to see the necklace inside: an intricate labyrinth woven around a monogram, the shape of a P with the loop continued back left across the stroke. It looked old.
‘Do you recognise this?’
‘It’s mine,’ she said. ‘I was wearing it that night.’
‘What’s the design?’
Was he testing her – a trap?
… and something connected. A spark leapt between the necklace and the crucifix, bridging the gaps in her mind with a bolt of understanding so sharp it hurt.
‘Michael gave it to me. It’s an old Christian symbol.’
She tried to stretch out, as if the old metal might still retain some memory of Michael that she could touch. The bandages and strappings held her down.
Norris dropped the necklace into the folder. Abby felt an ache of loss, her last fragment of Michael slipping out of reach again.
‘The police found it in the pool at the villa. They thought it might be connected to your attacker.’
He snapped the folder shut and stood. ‘I think that covers it. Unless there’s anything else you can remember?’ He moved towards the door.
‘Wait,’ Abby called. She could feel the panic returning. ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’
Norris paused in the doorway.
‘You’re going home.’
IV
EVERY TIME I open a door in this city it’s like entering a forgotten storeroom in a vast mansion. Everything’s covered in dust. Every footstep leaves a print, every touch leaves a smear. You’d think the city had been lost for centuries. But this isn’t the hallowed dust of antiquity – it’s the dust of a craftsman’s workshop, the dust of creation. And it’s still settling. Every day it casts a haze over the city. I can taste it on my tongue as I walk to the library: the brittle flavour of cut stone, the sweetness of sawn timber, the tartness of the quicklime they mix into the cement. Much longer and I’ll become a connoisseur, able to recognise every note of Athenian marble or Egyptian porphyry or Italian granite in the atmosphere.
But dust never settles on memories. The longer I live, the cleaner they become: each one buffed and scraped and chiselled into glossy, hard perfection. Extraneous details are ground out and smoothed over. All that remains is my story.
* * *
I know the library by the Academy, though I’ve never been inside. Two black sphinxes crouch either side of the door, riddling passers-by: people call it the Egyptian Library. The sphinxes aren’t new, even Constantine can’t manufacture his new city from whole cloth. When you’re in a hurry, you have to work with what you’ve got. He’s ransacked the empire to fill his city with antique treasures: statues, columns, stones, even roof tiles.
And books. As I push through the door, past the crowd who’ve gathered on the stairs, I can see hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts, neat scrolls tied and stacked in their criss-crossed shelving like bones in an ossuary. The unfamiliar smell hits me a second later: the must of old parchment and the rotting-grass scent of papyrus, distilled
