Well, it’s the same with relationships. I don’t remember the thousand and one good nights I had with Amy, only the handful of bad that seem to define everything about us. That’s certainly how it was in the last few months, anyway, when we could barely speak to each other and all she did was surf black websites trying to understand what had happened. Trying to read between the lines.
The worst thing is that she seemed happier before she disappeared: it was a mystery to me back then, but I understand it now. She had her plan. Her investigation.
She seemed happier, and so I never saw it coming.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The cab took me to Uptown by the north loop. Once through the toll booth (I had to pay the five pounds access fee), it took about five minutes to reach the address on the business card, which turned out to be nominally above Peace of Mind Insurance: one of our direct competitors. Life is full of these little twists, isn’t it?
‘Do you want me to wait?’
I told the cabbie that I didn’t, and gave him slightly more money than the straight fare, which was slightly less than I had in my pocket. I peeled it off through the window, and he took it from me with a quick hand and drove away. He left me at the end of a long gravel drive leading up to a sprawling, two-storey mansion. Between me and the front door was a black metal gate with an intercom beside it. Above all of this was a video camera on a pole, like some kind of severed head on a pike.
I wandered over, my feet crunching across the wet gravel. It was very quiet here, and I guess I could understand the appeal – especially as the sky now seemed to have settled down to an over-reaching blue, smeared with still grey cloud. There was a slight breeze, but it was far from unpleasant. It was like being on a cliff-top.
I held down the red button for a full ten seconds, and then stepped back in time to see the video camera whirring around to focus on me. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the gate jerked into life. A bland voice crackled out of the intercom.
‘Approach the house.’
I made my way up the drive. The gate jittered back across behind me like an old lady crossing the street, and buzzed in celebration when it finally re-established contact. The front door of the house had opened up, and a figure dressed in a black suit – incongruous in the mild sunshine – stepped out onto the spread of the porch and waited for me, his hands clasped almost protectively in front of his groin. I could see his half-bald head gleaming from here, and recognised him as the man with the gun from my house the night before.
‘Mr Klein,’ he said, shaking my hand when I reached him, and looking me over as though I was a series of targets for him to punch.
I returned both compliments. Mentally, I was striking him in the throat, kicking him on the inside of one knee, slamming a punch into his solar plexus.
‘Nice to see you again,’ I said.
‘Mr Hughes will see you immediately.’
He beckoned me inside, and then followed after me, closing the door behind us. I found myself standing at the end of a hallway, which seemed very dark and baroque in comparison to the easy freshness of the outside world. The air smelled of old wood and furniture polish. A grandfather clock was standing to attention halfway along, and there was no reason to believe it was anything other than properly real. Beyond that, there were a handful of ornate doors off to either side, and then red carpeted steps leading up to a windowed half-landing above, where a table was supporting some delicately arranged flowers in a crystal vase. I don’t think they were real. Between the front door and the stairs, there were various pictures hanging on the walls, and a small golden chandelier was suspended above.
The house wasn’t as big as it looked from the outside, which was probably a good thing. I had the other two men from last night pegged down as hired help – probably techies from Hughes’ company, brought in to search for the Schio file without even knowing, really, what they were looking for. I didn’t think they’d be here right now, and the relatively small size of the house made me think the only two people I needed to worry about were Hughes and his main bodyguard-cum-butler.
And, of course, his gun. Nowhere – as yet – in evidence.
‘This way.’
I followed him down the corridor to the last room on the right. On the way, I glanced at some of the pictures on the walls. They were strange to say the least: not so much pictures as some weird form of conceptual art. Each large frame surrounded an almost entirely empty canvas containing – pinned at the centre – a thin strip of paper. On each of these strips, someone had jotted a sentence down in a looping blue freehand. In fact, it was such an untidy scrawl that I couldn’t even make out the words as we went past: just the impression that a busy hand had been at work.
As far as I could tell, all the pictures on the wall were like that.
Sentences: framed and hung.
‘In here, please.’
Well, this was nice: the study, undeniably, was an elegant room, furnished entirely in browns, dark purples and greens, and was edged by several towering bookcases, which, with the shelves crammed from one side to the other, gave the room an impression of pleasing closeness. Of course, in this day and age, there was no guarantee that Hughes had collected the titles himself, but I was actually willing to bet that he had. The only other items in the room were two massive, swollen-hard leather couches, and a flat wooden table, which had a delicate-looking antiquated map pressed like a butterfly beneath the glass surface. On top of this there was a silver platter, with tumblers huddling around a crystal decanter full of what appeared to be whisky or brandy. Beyond, a dozen small windows looked out over a side lawn, and in what little wall space remained there were more of the odd pictures from the hallway. Except these ones were larger – the smallest was a5 – and they seemed to contain a lot more than just one sentence.
‘Mr Hughes will be with you in a moment.’
The bodyguard left.
While I was waiting for Mr Hughes to arrive, I wandered over to have a closer look at one of the pictures.
I was standing outside the Colosseum in Rome, and it had taken me a while to find. It’s not a small thing, of course, and there were occasional streetmaps posted on signs that made it seem easy: a snail shell of rock, curled under the heart of the city like trapped wind. How could you miss it? But I’d wandered the tall streets for what felt like hours without success, and then finally succumbed to the heat, unfolding a curl of Euros to buy a ham cheese panini and a can of Coke. The can had looked out of place: as red as sunburn against the drained, dirty tones of the buildings. Those two things together cost the equivalent of eight pounds. I mean, fuck this city.
Dull traffic lights blinked yes and no as I walked, attempting to regulate the cars and mopeds whooshing past. My rucksack was stuck to my back with sweat, and I ate and drank as I wandered, my head held down over the backpacker’s shuffle. Finally, after an age of walking, the city had unfolded itself like a flower and I’d seen it.
It wasn’t as big as I’d expected. It seemed tall and wide – as though it was something tired that had lain down there rather than been built – but still: not as big as you’d think. For one thing, only half of it was actually complete, with white plaster patches giving only a general illusion of the original form. At the base, shops had been structured into its circumference. There was a McDonald’s, a Disney and a few others I didn’t recognise. They seemed to detract from the size and scale of it. Just another shopping centre. A man in a yellow boiler suit was trawling the sunny square in front of it, picking up litter with electronic clippers.
I watched from above, where the Colosseum seemed very still, like a painting, or maybe a mountain in the distance. There were small people moving around it: tubby tourists in garish outfits, wearing cameras like bulky black medallions; stick-thin, burnt-brown locals swinging around on high-stepping pedal-bikes; couples, merging at the arm; old men, their walnut-textured skin cooking slowly in the sun. The sounds all reached me late, and seemed to come from nowhere: noises abstracted from their source. Behind me, the nasal buzz of a scooter was more located and real.
I tapped my way down the steps and crossed the square.
Closer to, the Colosseum became physically more impressive, but also seemed more brow-beaten and
