Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

‘In here?’ asked Ben sceptically.

‘What did you expect?’ snapped Sheere. ‘A Persian carpet?’

Ben scanned the inside of the sewage tunnel and sniffed.

‘Divine,’ he concluded, turning to Sheere. ‘You first.’

They emerged from the tunnel beneath a small wooden bridge that arched over the lake, a dark velvety mantle of murky water stretching in front of Chandra Chatterghee’s house. Sheere led the two boys along a narrow bank, their feet sinking into the clay, until they reached the other end of the lake. There she stopped to gaze at the building she had dreamed about all her life. Ian and Ben stood quietly by her side.

The two-storey building was flanked by two towers, one on either side. It featured a mix of architectural styles, from Edwardian lines to Palladian extravaganzas and features that looked as if they belonged to some castle tucked away in the mountains of Bavaria. The overall effect, however, was elegant and serene, challenging the critical eye of the spectator. The house seemed to possess a bewitching charm, so that although the first impression was one of bewilderment you then had the feeling that the impossible jumble of styles and forms had been chosen on purpose to create a harmonious whole.

‘Is this how your father described it?’ asked Ian.

Sheere nodded in amazement and walked towards the steps leading to the front door. Ben and Ian watched her hesitantly, wondering how she thought she was going to enter such a fortress. But Sheere seemed to move about the mysterious surroundings as if they had been her childhood home. The ease with which she dodged obstacles, almost invisible in the dark, made the two boys feel like trespassers in the dream Sheere had nurtured during her nomadic years. As they watched her walk up the steps, Ben and Ian realised that this deserted place was the only real home the girl had ever had.

‘Are you going to stay there all night?’ Sheere called from the top of the stairs.

‘We were wondering how to get in,’ Ben pointed out. Ian nodded in agreement.

‘I have the key.’

‘The key?’ asked Ben. ‘Where?’

‘Here,’ Sheere replied, pointing to her head with her forefinger. ‘You don’t open the locks in this house with a normal key. There’s a code.’

Intrigued, Ben and Ian came up the steps to join her. When they reached the door, they saw that at its centre was a set of four wheels on a single axle. Each wheel was smaller than the one behind it, and different symbols were carved on the metal rim of each, like the hours on the face of a clock.

‘What do these symbols mean?’ asked Ian, trying to decipher them in the dark.

Ben pulled a match from the box he always carried with him and struck it in front of the lock mechanism. The metal shone in the light of the flame.

‘Alphabets!’ cried Ben. ‘Each wheel has an alphabet carved on it. Greek, Latin, Arab and Sanskrit.’

‘Fantastic,’ sighed Ian. ‘Piece of cake …’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Sheere. ‘The code is simple. All you have to do is make a four-letter word using the different alphabets.’

Ben looked at her intently.

‘What is the word?’

‘Dido,’ replied Sheere.

‘Dido?’ asked Ian. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s the name of a mythological Phoenician queen,’ Ben explained.

Sheere smiled approvingly and Ian was momentarily jealous of the spark that seemed to exist between the two siblings.

‘I still don’t understand,’ Ian objected. ‘What have the Phoenicians got to do with Calcutta?’

‘Queen Dido threw herself on a funeral pyre to appease the anger of the gods in Carthage,’ Sheere explained. ‘It’s the purifying power of fire. The Egyptians also had their own myth, about the phoenix.’

‘The myth of the firebird,’ Ben added.

‘Isn’t that the name of the military project Seth told us about?’ asked Ian.

His friend nodded.

‘This whole thing is starting to give me goosebumps,’ said Ian. ‘You aren’t seriously thinking of going inside? What are we going to do?’

Ben and Sheere exchanged a determined glance.

‘It’s very simple,’ Ben replied. ‘We’re going to open this door.’

The librarian’s eyelids were beginning to feel like slabs of marble as he faced the hundreds of documents in front of him. The vast sea of words and figures he had retrieved from Chandra Chatterghee’s files seemed to be performing a sinuous dance and murmuring a lullaby that was sending him to sleep.

‘I think we’d better leave this until tomorrow morning, lads,’ Mr de Rozio began.

Seth, who had been afraid he would say this for some time, surfaced immediately from his jumble of folders and gave him a pious smile.

‘Leave it, Mr de Rozio?’ he objected in a light-hearted tone. ‘Impossible! We can’t abandon this now.’

‘I’m only a few seconds away from collapsing over this table, son,’ replied Mr de Rozio. ‘And Shiva, in his infinite goodness, has granted me a weight, which, the last time I checked it, in February, was somewhere between two hundred and fifty and two hundred and sixty pounds. Do you know how much that is?’

Seth smiled jovially.

‘About a hundred and twenty kilos,’ he calculated.

‘Exactly,’ de Rozio confirmed. ‘Have you ever tried moving an adult who weighs a hundred and twenty kilos?’

Seth thought about it.

‘I have no recollection of such a thing, but-’

‘Just a minute!’ cried Michael from some invisible point behind the ring binders, boxes and piles of yellowing paper that filled the room. ‘I’ve found something.’

‘I hope it’s a pillow,’ protested de Rozio, raising his bulk.

Michael appeared from behind a column of dusty shelves carrying a box full of papers and stamped documents that had been discoloured by time. Seth raised his eyebrows, praying that the discovery would be worthwhile.

‘I think these are the court records for a murder trial,’ said Michael. ‘They were underneath a summons addressed to Chandra Chatterghee, the engineer.’

‘Jawahal’s trial?’ cried Seth excitedly.

‘Let me have a look,’ said de Rozio.

Michael deposited the box on the librarian’s desk, raising a cloud of dust that choked the cone of golden light projected by the electric lamp. The librarian’s plump fingers carefully flicked through the documents, his tiny eyes examining their contents. Seth watched de Rozio’s face, his heart in his mouth, waiting for some word or sign. De Rozio paused at a page that seemed to have a number of stamps on it and brought it closer to the light.

‘Well, well,’ he mumbled to himself.

‘What is it?’ begged Seth.

De Rozio looked up and gave a broad feline smile.

‘I have in my hands a document signed by Colonel Sir Arthur Llewelyn. In it, citing reasons of state security and military secrecy, he is ordering the discontinuance of trial number 089861/A in court number four of the Calcutta High Court, in which a citizen named Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee, an engineer by profession, is charged with alleged involvement and withholding and/or concealment of evidence in a murder investigation, and he instructs the transfer of the case to the Supreme Military Court of His Majesty’s Armed Forces. All previous rulings are therefore overturned and all evidence provided by the defence and the prosecution during the hearing is declared null and void. It’s dated 14 September 1911.’

Michael and Seth stared at Mr de Rozio in amazement, unable to utter a single word.

‘So, you two,’ the librarian concluded, ‘which of you knows how to make coffee? This could be a very long night …’