David Gilman - Ice Claw

From what Max could see, the lower shelves were mostly astronomical publications. The folders were protected by strong, thick brown paper. He touched his finger along their edges, pulled one from the shelf and placed it on the table.

“Sayid, grab another one of these. From about twenty years ago, just before Zabala left here.”

The folder was heavy, the big pages cumbersome. Max’s hand hovered over the intricate data. A star chart. Lines bisected each other, stars had numbers, some had letters. Magnifications, magnitudes, it was a meaningless panorama of the galaxy as far as Max could tell. He flipped the pages quickly. There was nothing that could even resemble the name Zabala.

“They’re missing,” Sayid said.

“What?” Max moved to where his friend shuffled along the wide shelves, the only places big enough to hold the star charts.

“The folders go way back. Look”-he pointed one out-“1904, all the way up, 1927, and so on. How long would Zabala have worked here?”

“I don’t know,” Max said.

“Well, if he was here for, say, ten or fifteen years, up to twenty years ago there’s a whole batch missing.”

It made sense. If Zabala had tried to prove something and failed, gone public and brought embarrassment and derision on his scientific colleagues, they would have taken anything he had researched and archived it somewhere, or at worst destroyed it.

“See if there’s a book or something that would list any of the scientists that worked here,” Max told Sayid. “I’ve got to check on something.”

Max automatically looked at his wrist, but of course his father’s watch was missing. A twinge of regret, which he pushed aside. “Time, Sayid?”

“Nearly half-four. They close at five.”

Max nodded and walked quickly to the stair landing.

Looking out of the window, he saw that the Germans’ car had gone. He ran to another window, which looked out onto the fields towards the coast. The Frenchman was locking a small garden-type gate that closed off a footpath towards the cliffs.

Max pounded downstairs to the entrance hall and glanced at the office. The man’s scruffy black anorak was on a hook, so that meant he was probably doing his rounds. He’d be back.

Max trundled Sayid’s wheelchair down the corridor into the chapel, then folded the chair and hid it behind the door. Odds were the ticket seller would check inside the chateau before locking up for the night. Even if he went into the chapel he wouldn’t spot the wheelchair.

And if Max was lucky the man would see that the Germans’ car and Sayid’s chair were no longer there and believe that the whole “German family” had left.

Max sprinted upstairs, two at a time, got back to Sayid and moved closer to him so his voice wouldn’t echo.

“Tell me when it’s quarter to five. Anything?”

Sayid had an embossed leather book on the table next to a rolled-up plan. “I found Zabala.” He grinned. “I couldn’t find any kind of register, but I reckoned those scientists wouldn’t want to miss out on their bit of glory, so they wouldn’t chuck anything away with their own pictures in.” Sayid opened the ledger-sized book. “Different photos of the scientists who worked here until the 1970s, then it looks as though the place was closed down.”

Sayid was pointing at a group photograph. The caption was in a small typeface, but Max could read Zabala’s name.

Two rows of men: the front row seated, the others standing. Zabala stood with his arms folded and a briar pipe clamped between his teeth as he smiled for the camera.

“But I saw newspaper cuttings from the 1980s,” Max said.

“Then my guess is he carried on doing his own research here afterwards.”

“There must have been a reason. What’s here in the chateau? Stuff from Africa, different languages, astronomy …” Max remembered the newspaper piece on Zabala. “And astrology. He mixed the two. So there’s a link somewhere, Sayid. The Arabs were major players in astronomy….”

Sayid closed the book.

“Astronomy was OK because that could be used to tell farmers when to rotate crops and what have you, but astrology was unlawful.”

“OK, so perhaps it’s just an astronomy clue. Europeans mixed the two. There’s a load of stuff here about old d’Abbadie’s journey across Africa. Keep looking. And do it quietly. What’s this?”

He unfurled the rolled plans.

“Architect’s drawings of the chateau,” Sayid said.

They held the uncooperative edges of the plan flat. Max scooted his finger around the drawing, tracing the internal layout of the chateau in case there was a hidden room they had missed, or, more likely, that was kept purposefully from the public.

“Here’s where we are now, here’s the observatory …”

“We should look in there,” Sayid said.

“Yeah, I know. I just hoped there would be something in this room that would help us. This is where all the records are kept. The observatory hasn’t been in use for a quarter of a century.”

A footfall scuffed the floor below. The Frenchman was on his rounds. He wheezed and coughed. Lights were going off all the way through the chateau, but were replaced by the softer glow of all-night security lights, small spotlights strategically positioned to throw a cone of illumination across a corner or edge of stairway.

Shadows changed the shapes of the walls, defacing the huge paintings, making an eerie no-man’s-land of the pockets of darkness.

Max needed to get into the office. He’d spotted the control box for the chateau’s alarm system when they had first entered the building, and it needed to be switched off if he and Sayid were going to spend the next few hours hunting for clues.

Max paused and crouched, watching through the banisters. The old man was pulling on his jacket. He moved towards the front door-going through his nightly routine.

A warning creak, like a snapping stick, seemed to thunder down the stairs. Sayid!

Had the old man heard? He turned but didn’t look up, then stepped back into the office, took his cigarettes from the desk, closed the office door and moved towards the main entrance.

Max turned, stepping lightly but rapidly upstairs.

Sayid had frozen, as if his foot had trodden on an antipersonnel mine that would spring up and explode if he moved. He winced when he saw his friend emerge from the staircase void.

The door downstairs clunked closed.

Max gave a thumbs-up to Sayid, who nodded, eased his foot forward and swung himself towards the library. Max peeped out of the window and saw the man hobbling towards the gate pillars at the end of the drive. The office door was unlocked. Max could smell the lingering residue of tobacco in the air as he slipped inside.

He opened the alarm box’s cover. A simple series of switches with the master switch clearly marked.

It was off. The Frenchman must have forgotten to switch the circuit on. Maybe the chateau was so secure no one could get in anyway. Security systems were a nuisance and a curse when one was forever being dragged out of a warm bed for a false alarm. Whatever the reason, the main switch was off, and that was all Max was interested in. Now they could get to work.

Once again he ran quickly back up the stairs, stepping across a darkened corner. Yellow, crinkle-cut moonlight filtered through the stained-glass window. At the top of the staircase the life-sized statue of a young Ethiopian warrior stood silently, a glass lamp held high, guarding the darkness of the stairwell, showing the way. Max murmured, “Thanks, mate.”

The chateau, full of half-light, relics and mysteries, whispered silence. Max could hear the gentle turn of paper rustling in the library. As he left the upper landing, turning into the passageway for the library and Sayid, he had no idea they were not alone.