Onwards: making no noise against the little steps, no noise on the cut marble landing at the top of the grand staircase, no noise in the corridor that led to the south wing of the Old Friary, he pressed towards the library, holding his breath only as he crept past old Mr Ahmadi’s study – where, perhaps, his son even now sat behind the antique desk, working beneath the countless small cupboards that opened on the wall above, like eyes, in which every odd thing had its home.
Fitz padded softly into the library. His breath was still, his pulse calm, each beat of his heart a syllable. Zenith, nadir. Now, reaching for the wooden steps, he repeated those syllables again. Now, climbing to the top of the steps and turning to the highest of the room’s shelves in the greatest of its fine, carved oak cases, he said them yet once more.
Albatross, the diver.
Fitz ran his index finger along the leather spines of Mr Ahmadi’s ancient library. The top shelf held the smallest volumes, but notwithstanding their size, he knew they were just as precious as the taller, more imposing folios below. Perhaps even more precious. For the last several minutes, climbing, stealing through the house, ascending the steps, drawing through the air with his hand, it was as if Fitz had been making a single motion, extending his body in a long sweep as a dancer might, to this perfected gesture.
His finger stopped.
Beneath it, in a gap that should have held a wider book, leaned a little card-bound volume. Its cover, a faded yellow, was spotted and on its back a little mouldy. Fitz had lighted on it, pulled it from the shelf, and found himself holding it before he meant to. From inside his shirt, buttoned close against his chest, he drew the thin, folded sheet in its plain white envelope, holding it by thumb and forefinger as if it were a snake or spider, or any venomous thing.
He remembered the letter’s short words well enough without reading them.
‘It is now past time. He is not your child. I will come for him.’
Fitz shuddered once, then thrust the letter into the gap, a white shadow cast into a dark recess of ancient, tanned leather. For a moment he watched it, willing it to be still and not to spring back, to fall into his hands as it had that morning. In the shadow between two books, deep within the shelf, he could still make out the simple address on the envelope, the curt and aggressive strokes that were the start of Clare’s name. It had never been meant for him.
He didn’t care. In the silent audience of his own thoughts, his words repeated: zenith, nadir, algorithm, albatross.
He was safe. More importantly, Clare was safe. Very soon he could forget all about it. He could look away, and forget it. It would be over.
Fitz took a deep breath. He turned to the little book in his hands and thought he might borrow something from the library today, after all. It was a thin and a beaten book, a sudden and impulsive and an ignorant choice. That pleased him; but he didn’t stop to open it, to swim as he usually did with big strokes of his eyes across the title and the first pages, taking in those delicious opening words like sugar on the tongue in the late afternoon. He had simply dived in and snatched it; now he clutched it hard to his side, and slipped down the steep wooden steps to the floor. The act was done, the mission nearly ended; now he needed only to cross the landing and the gallery, slide down the drainpipe, and cross the garden, and that letter, those terrible words, would be out of his life for good.
From down the darkening hall came the sound of a muffled voice. Something about its tone made him freeze, straining to hear. It wasn’t anger, but an edge more serious, a tension that stopped only just short of cruelty. He crossed the library to the door, caressing the floor with the pads of his feet as a dancer might, or a cat before pouncing, and listened again. He could almost make out the words: intermittent, animated, punctuated by long pauses. It was Mr Ahmadi Junior, speaking on the telephone.
Fitz wouldn’t remember, later, the delicate steps with which he crept down the hallway. He wouldn’t remember the careful placement of the balls of his feet on the dead and silent centre of every floorboard. He wouldn’t remember the gloom shed by the far window, where the gathering storm outside drizzled in its failing light. He was drawn as if in a dream by a thread, and his gaze lay along that thread focused and intense, ignorant of any other sight or sound, any other touch. He might have floated.
‘I remember very well whose son I am!’ barked Mr Ahmadi. The sudden clarity of his voice, roused with impatience, broke Fitz’s trance. His left hand shot out, by instinct, and gripped the frame of the study door. The door itself, thick and solid, stood firmly shut before his face. No one had heard him. He steadied himself.
‘That’s just the problem,’ Mr Ahmadi continued. ‘That’s just it.’
There was another pause, then some muttered words, too low to make out. Fitz strained his ears, tightening his jaw and leaning towards the door until his forehead nearly rested on its deep-grained panel.
‘I will kill him if I must,’ Mr Ahmadi said. The words hardly carried into the hall, if they did at all, no more than syrup through a cloth.
Fitz started back from the door as if electricity had surged suddenly through it. Had he heard what he thought he had heard? His heart leaped and stuttered.
‘Anything –’ Mr Ahmadi continued – ‘to keep him out of play.’
The hallway whirled in the stillness that followed. Fitz, planted on his feet, felt as if he had
