detachment as the security guard stepped forward and laid a hand on the arm of the man who had just hit his wife, his face reproving but not angry. The woman on the floor continued to gather the dropped contents and put them back in the tray. In the strangeness of all this, Liv’s anger began to slip, the force of the whispering lessened and the word started to drift away. She snapped to attention, jamming her hand into her bag, burrowing through the jumbled contents in her frantic search for a pen. She feared the word would be lost, carried away down to the dark place in her head where her conscious mind seemingly could not follow. She found a pen and wrote feverishly on her hand in the absence of paper. But even as she did this the pen took on a motion of its own and instead of a phonetic approximation of the word she had heard, she inscribed a series of jagged symbols instead, looking like no language she had ever seen.
She studied what she had written and it shifted in her mind, first to the sound she had heard: KuShiKaam then to the meaning at its centre: The Key
Liv looked up. The woman had now gathered her things and passed through the metal detector to join her husband. The security guards waved them through, ushering things back to normal as quickly as they could. They probably saw incidents like this every day, casual acts of domestic violence fuelled by stress and fatigue. Even so, they had stood by and watched a man hit a pregnant woman and done nothing about it. It made Liv sick to think of it, but there was nothing she could do. Starting a fight with a bunch of sexist pigs wasn’t going to help keep her profile low. Even so the hissing noise in her head would not go away and she felt a surprising and intense violence towards the man who had struck his wife. She wanted to hurt him and humiliate him in front of everyone. She wanted to kill him even, grab a gun from one of the ineffectual guards and shoot him in the head. The intensity of her hatred surprised her. It seemed to feed into the sound in her head until it whistled like a boiling kettle. Her skin tingled too, pricking all over with pins and needles. It frightened her that she felt this way. It was as if there was something dangerous inside her that she didn’t understand and couldn’t control. She looked up and discovered people in the line were staring at her. A woman in front said something but she couldn’t hear what it was through the noise in her head. She dumped her things in a plastic tray and stared in front of her, avoiding further eye contact as the line moved forward. What the hell was happening to her? She seemed to be losing her mind.
She passed through the metal detector and out into the concourse. It was bad enough she couldn’t remember anything, now she was hearing voices too. It annoyed her — Liv Adamsen the razor-sharp reporter, the ultra rationalist, the cynical disbeliever of anything remotely New Agey — that something so ‘out there’ was now happening to her. She didn’t like it and she didn’t want it. She was still convinced she’d been drugged in the hospital and all of this was some hideous side effect that would pass as soon as she got some sleep and a couple of gallons of coffee inside her.
She glanced up at the departure board. Her flight was already boarding but she hesitated. Her instinct whenever anything didn’t add up was to come at the problem from every angle until she had managed to make sense of it. Right now, her rational mind was telling her that the word she had scrawled on her hand must be something her scrambled mind had dredged up, some language she could verify and explain. She scanned the duty- free shops lining the walls of the terminal building and saw what she needed. It was in the opposite direction to her boarding gate. She hoisted her bag on to her shoulder and headed over. She’d have to be quick.
28
Gabriel glanced at the iPhone, the display bright in the dimness of the bar. He was in the mezzanine of the Sahnesi, the former theatre and opera house built for the European aristocracy who started arriving in Ruin en masse in the eighteenth century after it became a destination on the Grand Tour. These days it was a popular cinema and bar complex, and it had free Wi-Fi, which was the reason Gabriel had come here.
He pressed the browser icon on the screen and tapped HOSPITAL RUIN into the search window. Ajda had bought the phone from a secondhand tech store in the Lost Quarter specializing in all the stuff boosted from tourists. It had been expensive, but it came with a SIM card that could not be traced and gave him all the processing power of a laptop. The search came back with a phone number for the main reception which he dialled.
‘Davlat Hastenesi Hospital.’
‘Yes, I have some flowers to send to a couple of patients and am trying to find their room numbers.’
‘Do you have the names?’
‘The first is Mrs Kathryn Mann, the second, Liv Adamsen.’
He heard the tapping of fingers on a keyboard. ‘Mrs Mann is being kept in room 410 in the secure psychiatric building. Miss Adamsen is in room 406 of the same building — no, wait a second. Actually Miss Adamsen was discharged today.’
‘When?’
‘It doesn’t say. Only that her room is now vacant.’
‘Did she have any visitors?’
There was a pause. ‘What has this got to do with delivering flowers?’
‘They have already been sent. I’m just checking to see if they got to her before she left.’
More tapping.
‘The only thing on the system is a police visit this afternoon.’
‘Thank you.’
Gabriel hung up, his mind racing with the implications of this new information. He switched back to the browser and typed RUIN POLICE FORCE into the search window. There was a hot-linked phone number under the first entry. He tapped it and returned the phone to his ear.
‘Ruin Police Division.’
‘Hello, could you please put me through to Inspector Arkadian in Homicide.’
‘Inspector Arkadian is on leave at present.’
‘Then could you patch me through to his mobile phone?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Is there another member of the Homicide team who could help you?’
‘No. I need to speak to Inspector Arkadian specifically. It’s extremely urgent.’ He cast around for anything that would give him some leverage. ‘Tell him Gabriel Mann wants to talk. I escaped from police custody earlier today and I want to give myself up — but I’m only prepared to do it to him, and only if he calls me back within the next five minutes.’
29
The airport bookshop was filled with all the usual things catering for the average bored airline traveller. Liv made her way to a shelf of phrasebooks by the checkout desk and scanned the titles, picking out any with an unusual alphabet. She wanted to prove to herself that the word she had heard in her head was merely an echo of something she must have picked out in amongst the babble of voices. If she could just find out what language it was in then she could board her flight without worrying the whole way home that she was hearing voices and going nuts. By the time she reached the bottom shelf she had eight books in her hand. She opened the first, an Arabic phrasebook, and turned to the K section, looking for the word ‘key’. She found it and compared the translation to the symbols on her hand. It wasn’t even close. She did the same with the other seven books, working her way through Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese. None of them matched.
Dammit.
She jammed the books back and turned to go then stopped as something caught her eye on the next shelf. It was a book with a picture of a tablet on its cover with faint markings on its surface. They were not the same as the symbols Liv had written on her hand, but they were close. She took it down and opened it, only to discover that it was not a phrasebook — it was a history book. The inside flap provided a second shock. The photograph on the cover was of a five-thousand-year-old Sumerian tablet inscribed with a long-dead language. So she couldn’t have overheard it in the departure hall. She flipped through the book in search of pictures of other ancient texts. She was
