'Not everything, of course not, but it won't do Ellen any harm.'
'You reckon if you pay someone you buy the right to tell them how to create.'
'Charlotte won't be forcing her, will she? Maybe knowing she's worked for her money will help as well.'
'I'm losing you again. Where have you got to now?'
Hugh had turned under a railway bridge towards the town centre. 'I've something to do,' he said as he passed into the shadow, 'and then I could come and see you this afternoon if you're not too busy creating.'
'Trying to sound mysterious? That's not you.'
'I'm not trying to sound anything,' Hugh said, only to hear his voice grow close to subterranean. 'I just need to do some research.'
'Thought you'd found yourself someone there for a moment. What are you digging into?'
'I've had an idea for Ellen's next book.'
'Want to be like her cousin, do you? Want to tell her what to write.'
'I am her cousin,' Hugh said and felt absurdly obvious. 'You're wrong about the rest of it. I can't tell her what to do.'
'Sounds like you'd like to.'
Hugh almost retreated under the bridge to hide his progressively mottled face. 'I just want to give her my idea.'
'Let's hear it, then. Surprise me.'
'You mustn't tell her. I will when I've looked into it. Promise.'
'You're still the little brother, aren't you, Hugh? All right, promise. Hope to die.'
'I've thought where her thing that changes people's lives could be.'
'Let me guess. Where we all went back for a walk.'
'You still won't tell her, will you?' Hugh pleaded, feeling more obvious than ever. 'If it's no use there's no need for her to know.'
'Your secret's safe with me. Maybe you should tell her before she thinks of it herself.'
'I'll see what I can find out first, and then are we getting together?'
'I'm losing you again. Is who what?'
'Am I coming to see you?' Hugh demanded loud enough to rouse a muffled echo at his back, though he would have assumed he was too far from the bridge.
'Let's skip it this week. I'm best left alone till I've got a new project on the go. Right now I just feel locked up inside myself.'
Hugh might have pointed out that they hadn't met since the weekend of the funeral. He was opening his mouth when Rory said 'Anyway, you've got your own idea to work on. See to that and forget about me.'
'Forget my own brother? I don't think so,' Hugh said, though mostly to himself. He returned the deadened mobile to his pocket as he crossed the road to Cybernet, the closest Internet connection. It was housed in the lobby of the old Empire cinema, the upper storey of which still exhibited sex films in a club. But the doors to Cybernet were locked.
He was registered to use the computers in the central library too. All the same, for a moment he felt robbed of the route he'd planned to follow. On the way into the town the shops grew larger and more expensive, as if striving to be worthy of the old pale stone they occupied. Three headscarved women, Muslims rather than just Yorkshire housewives, were sitting on the library steps to watch two men pore over a giant game of chess on the flagstones outside, to the accompaniment of calypsos performed on a steel drum near a pub. Beyond the doors at the top of the steps another flight divided at a landing to climb both ways to the reference library. Art was stuck to the wall above the stairs – two trails of outsize coloured arrows, one side identified as right, though the other was unnamed. It meant nothing to Hugh, and as he made for the lending room he wondered if it would to Rory. Once a librarian who'd slimmed her accent down had booked him in, he took his place halfway along a line of shallow computer booths. A faint metallic calypso greeted the appearance of the Internet, and he sent Metacrawler in search of Thurstaston.
Which of the references would help Ellen? Thurstaston Rugby Club seemed unlikely to inspire her, and the same went for a yacht club. Thurstaston Bird Hide suggested concealment and secrecy, which she might take further than he felt able to. Thurstaston Country Park, Thurstaston Tea Parties, Thurstaston Gardeners' Association . . . He was beginning to think he'd been too eager to give Ellen ideas until he found a reference to Thor's Stone. He called it up at once.
It described a block of red sandstone twenty-five feet high, twice as wide and almost three times as long, which stood in a stone amphitheatre on Thurstaston Common. Traditions suggested that it had given the area its name and that it was a Scandinavian altar on which animals – perhaps humans too – had been sacrificed. One Victorian commentator described it as 'red as blood'. Less than a hundred years ago children would decorate an adjacent fairy well with flowers, and even now local pagans celebrated the midsummer solstice and other occasions at the stone. Never mind rugby and cups of tea – there was magic in the landscape. Perhaps Ellen should use the common instead of the cliff top, though that was less than a mile from the stone. He returned to the list, on which the next item was Thurstaston Beach.
This brought him a gallery of black and white photographs. While some resembled his memories – yachts bowing to a wind, sandpipers stooping along the shoreline or flocking like a pennant of windblown smoke above the estuary, an elaborate sandcastle defying the waves – the shapes of the cliff were unfamiliar, and the clothes of such people as appeared in the photographs dated them to the early years of the last century. One image had strayed in by mistake or as a cameraman's joke: the stretch of cliff that Hugh and Rory and their cousins had climbed after the funeral. Hugh inched the photograph up the screen to reveal the legend. '
Hugh stared at the picture of a convex stretch of cliff beneath a bloated cloud as dark as a winter midnight and tried to make sense of the caption. If the year referred to the date of the photograph, surely it was misattributed. This section of the cliff could hardly have survived unchanged for eighty years, especially when the other photographs showed such an altered landscape. How useful might Ellen find the notion, though? Perhaps there was more that she could use. He recalled the search engine and typed 'Arthur Pendemon' in the search box. At least, he thought he had until he read 'Stygie Orbswnim'.
He had to laugh, loud enough to earn him a frown from his turbaned neighbour on one side and a grunt from the white-robed greybeard on the other. While the grotesque words suggested a secret name or formula, he'd simply managed to miss every key, hitting adjacent ones instead. He erased the gibberish and set about taking his time until he saw that he'd typed 'Serjyt Owm'. Didn't he care about helping Ellen? He looked for the arrow like a nameless direction sign and held down the key until it swept the parodies of words away, then he ducked to the keyboard, peering about in search of the letters he needed. At last he glanced up for the thirteenth time to see the name in the search box. He clicked on the button to start the search, or rather he tried to. The cursor went nowhere near.
He skated the mouse around its mat to free it from the invisible obstruction and made another snatch at the button on the screen, but the arrow veered aside and did its best to vanish off the edge of the monitor. 'Wrong way,' Hugh muttered and watched the arrow sidle downwards as he tried to raise it. 'Wrong again,' he declared. 'All right, you little rodent, let's see you go left.' Was he losing his way among his words? 'I said left, right,' he exhorted through his teeth and assumed they were keeping his volume down even when he gritted 'Wrong' like a ventriloquist until the librarian with the lurking accent bustled over.
'Excuse me, what's the problem?' she murmured. 'You're disturbing people.'
'This is disturbing me,' Hugh complained as he saw his neighbours staring at him. 'It won't go where I want it to.'
The librarian leaned forwards while staying ostentatiously clear of him. 'You want to search for this, do you?'
For an absurd moment the question sounded like a warning. 'Of course I do.'
'Then there you are.'
She'd clicked on the search button before she finished speaking. 'Thanks,' Hugh said as she returned to the counter, having called up more than a dozen references to Arthur Pendemon. Hugh clicked on the first – at least he did his utmost to, but the mouse had still more ideas of its own.
'Wrong. Wrong. Wrong again, you little swine,' he tried to whisper, but his monologue grew louder and
