The space between the door and the counter is cluttered with bargain bins full of assorted paraphernalia: wireless mouses, external hard drives, video cards in boxes depicting bare-chested gods and lightning bolts. The counter extends across the store, before making a ninety-degree turn to the right. The ‘scarvery’ begins, occupying its own small corner, maybe a quarter of the floor space. Glass cabinets display cravats, gloves and handkerchiefs. Ties, scarves and shawls hang, artfully presented, from racks. Umbrellas, hats and walking sticks adorn a pair of hatstands. A row of vintage opera glasses complete the setting, their steam-punk aesthetic at odds with the glistening computer peripherals dominating the rest of the store.
Behind the barrier, a young man wearing a scruffy white lab coat is working on the innards of a computer. Roof-high racks crammed with cartons and plastic storage bins extend behind him to the back wall. He has long white hair, dead straight. He’s wearing jewellers’ glasses and is wielding a soldering iron.
‘Can you fix it?’ asks Martin.
‘Nah, just mucking about, mate.’ The accent is as broad as the continent itself. ‘Cheaper to gut it; cheaper to chuck it.’ He looks up, smiles at Martin. His eyes are pale and red-tinged, his eyebrows like they’ve been dusted with snow. An albino. ‘It’s like dissecting frogs,’ he continues. ‘You can’t bring ’em back to life, but it’s fun seeing what makes ’em tick.’ He puts the soldering iron down, removes the jeweller’s eyepiece. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’m looking for a new laptop. My last one got stolen.’
‘What sort? It might have turned up in the back there.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘You never know.’
‘Last couple of hours? A Mac?’ Martin knows the request is futile; his computer is off being dissected.
‘No. Have you tried tracking it?’
‘You can do that?’
‘Maybe. You have an iPhone?’
‘I do.’
‘Give us a look then.’
Martin unlocks his phone and hands it over, but the young man takes no more than a minute before handing it back. ‘No good. You haven’t got it turned on.’ He shakes his head, as if pitying the technological ineptitude of older generations. ‘So what are you after? Anything special? Gaming? Video production? Another Mac?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t need anything fancy. Internet, email, word processing. That’s it.’
‘Right. Let’s see what I’ve got.’ The man checks his inventory on an ancient beige monitor on the counter. ‘Here we go. Second-hand MacBook Pro. Two years old. Five hundred bucks. Interested?’ ‘Sounds perfect.’
‘Goodo. I’ll clean up the hard drive, reinstall the operating system and throw in a copy of Word. You can pick it up tomorrow. Cash in hand.’
‘Deal.’ They shake hands. ‘I’m Martin.’
‘Yevgeny.’
The rain has stopped again. He’s just leaving when his phone rings. It’s Mandy.
Mandy ends the call and stands shell-shocked amid the wreckage of Martin’s apartment. The derro downstairs had tried to warn her. ‘No,’ he’d mumbled, waving his hands like a drunken conductor. She’d ignored him, refusing to make eye contact. Instead, she’d pushed past and through the door, dismissive. She should have listened.
A deep conviction comes upon her: it’s the past again. It has tracked her into the present, like a pack of hounds, baying at her guilt. What else could have visited this level of destruction upon them, if not the past? It isn’t just Zelda, it isn’t just the police, it isn’t just the people who have trashed the apartment; they are only the physical manifestation, like the city’s fickle weather. Something larger, something more intangible, more malevolent has her scent. What was it the fake policeman, Henry Livingstone, said, his cigarette voice wheezing? ‘Don’t get mixed up in this thing. It’s going to get ugly.’ But she is mixed up in it. The past knows it; it knows her and it knows where to find her.
Port Silver is nothing, she realises, their sixteen months there a mirage, a faux reality, seducing her into false assumptions of wellbeing, the future spreading out to the horizon like the ocean viewed from her clifftop. Now she sees it for what it is: an illusion. For there can be no future if the past forbids it.
A memory of Tarquin comes to her. The night they met, that mad evening at the casino. Billy the bass player’s desperate ploy, so simple it almost worked, inspired by a random find in a charity bin: a cocktail dress, sequined, short at the hemline and plunging at the neckline. They’d hatched the plan, drinking to give themselves the courage to carry it off. She’d dolled herself up, spent an eternity on her face and hair, before striding into the casino like a catwalk model, full of alcohol and nerves. And yet it wasn’t hard, it was easy. She stood there and they came to her, the drunken gamblers, and all she had to do was smile and flirt and flash her dimples, distracting them while Billy, dressed in anonymous black, surreptitiously pocketed their chips. The scam was spectacularly lucrative while it lasted, all of fifteen minutes. Then the security men moved in, well muscled and well dressed, guffawing at their stupidity, detaining them even as they ridiculed them. And that was when Tarquin stepped in and rescued her. Tarquin, dressed in his elegant black suit, smooth and imperious, the consummate performer. The security men believed him immediately, his claim that the two of them were there together, convinced by the cut of his clothes and his utter confidence. And
