Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

He tried exploring the site. There was the billboard, where other users could post the usual banalities, rants and badly spelled insults that passed for wit on the Web. It was blank. He flipped to another part of the site, a photo album. There were a few pictures: Gillian swigging beer at a party wearing an enormous sombrero; Gillian sprawled over a rock in Central Park pretending to hug it while she smiled coyly at the camera; Gillian standing outside a boulangerie with baguette tucked under her arm. She’d gone blonde by then, the same face as on the library card. He wondered who’d taken the picture. Atheldene?

There were none of Gillian with Nick. He told himself he hadn’t expected any, and wondered who he was really looking for.

Before he left he checked the news sites for anything about himself. He’d assumed it would have made headlines somewhere: SUSPECTED MURDERER FLEES COUNTRY. He found a

couple of stories about Bret’s murder, but nothing in the last forty-eight hours. Didn’t they know he’d fled? Had they come to their senses and realised he was innocent? He thought of Detective Royce and decided it was unlikely.

It reminded him of something Gillian had said. He’d caught her one day looking out of the apartment window, peering between the blinds at the empty street. He’d pointed out there was nobody there; she’d answered in a fake-deep voice: ‘Just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they can’t see you.’

He’d thought it was a joke, a line from a movie, one of the personas she shrugged on and off all the time. He’d gone to fix a sandwich. But when he looked back through the kitchen door she’d still been on the windowsill, watching.

Once, the alarm had been a black Bakelite telephone connected to a switchboard, with black cables hanging off it like chains on a dungeon wall. Later, it had become a pager; later still, a succession of ever smaller and smarter cellphones. Through all those incarnations one thing had remained constant: it almost never rang. Months would pass in silence, sometimes whole years.

Now it was ringing for the second time in three weeks. Father Michel Renais, latest in a long line of men who had held that phone, stared at the screen. The last time it had rung he had broken out into a sweat and almost dropped it; this time he was ready.

‘Oui?’

‘One of our flags has come up. Bibliothèque Nationale, garden level, seat N48.’

‘Bien.’

Technology made it too easy, Father Michel thought. Once they’d have had to sift through paper request slips, cross-reference university records, scramble to make even the most basic enquiries. Now they knew even before the readers found their seats.

He dialled the number the cardinal had given him. ‘At the Bibliothèque Nationale. The same book as before. And the same name. Gillian Lockhart.’

He heard a dry laugh on the other end of the phone. ‘I very much doubt it is Gillian Lockhart.’

It was like entering a spaceship, or a medieval dungeon reimagined by a future civilisation. Emily rode a long escalator down through the cavernous hall that formed the outer shell of the complex. An underground moat surrounding the underground castle. The outside walls were solid concrete, while the inside was protected by huge curtains of steel rings like sheets of chain mail. At the bottom, another machine checked her card before admitting her through the final pair of doors. Here, she was back inside the castle: desks, carpets, polished wood.

Emily found the seat that the computer had assigned her and waited. She stared out of the windows at the forested courtyard. It was like something out of legend: thick evergreens bristling among the leafless birches and oaks, with thin icings of snow on the branches. Even in winter, she could hardly see the other side of the courtyard beyond the trees.

A red light above the desk summoned Emily to the issue counter. A bored librarian held out her hand.

‘Votre carte?’

Emily smiled to hide her anxiety. She held up the card, keeping her thumb over the top half of Gillian’s face to hide it. The librarian barely glanced at it before reaching into a cubbyhole behind her and depositing two books on the counter.

‘I ordered three,’ Emily said in French.

The librarian narrowed her heavily made-up eyes. Before Emily could protest, she swept the card out of her hand and slapped it down on the reader by her computer. She studied the monitor.

‘Anonymous, Physiologus. This book is missing.’ She scrolled down. ‘You have requested this book before?’

‘Um, yes. In December.’

‘And it was missing then, also.’

Was that a question? Emily opted for what she hoped was a suitably French grunt, accompanied by a vague twitch of the shoulders.

‘There is a note on the system that we could not find this book the last time you asked for it.’

Emily rested a hand on the counter to steady herself. ‘I… I just wondered if it might have turned up.’

‘Non.’

‘The online catalogue still shows it as available,’ Emily persisted.

‘Then there is a mistake with the catalogue. I will make another note.’ She lifted her gaze over Emily’s shoulder to the person waiting in line behind her. Emily took the hint.

She went back to her desk with the two books that had come: Studies on the Physiologus and Lost Books of the Bible. Nothing to do with Gillian Lockhart was clear. All she ever saw were distant shadows flitting out of view, uncertain whether they were real or just tricks of the light. She almost felt sorry for Nick.

But she could only work with what she had. She started with Studies on the Physiologus, kneading new facts in with what she already knew. The term ‘physiologus’ had fallen out of use during the Middle Ages, but then revived when new-fangled printers wanted to give their books an old-fashioned stamp of authenticity. The book that hadn’t come was listed in the online catalogue as fifteenth century. Emily flipped to the appendix. There were eleven printed editions of the Physiologus known before 1500. None of them was the one listed in the catalogue.

A dead end. She turned to the other book, the Lost Books of the Bible. This was more of a struggle: she found it hard to engage with the text without knowing what she was looking for. She turned through the pages looking for any pencil marks that Gillian might have made in the margins, any words she might have underlined. She scanned for references to animals, bestiaries or cards; all she got were prophets, ancient kings and angry gods.

She heard a cough behind her and looked round. It was the librarian.

Her heart beat faster. ‘Have you found it?’

The librarian shook her head. ‘There is a message. You must go to the information desk on the upper level. There is a man there to see you – Monsieur Ash. He says it is an emergency.’

The last number Gillian had called from her cellphone was a taxi company. Nick could have rung, but that would have been too quick. This was his last lead; once it was done, he’d have nothing left. So he got the address off the Internet and walked, trying to fool himself for a little while longer that he was achieving something.

He hated the feeling of not knowing what would happen next. Gillian used to tease him that he wanted all life to be like school. ‘If God handed you a schedule for the rest of your life – three periods of work, a half-hour for lunch, forty minutes online, an hour extra-curricular sex – you’d be happy.’ He hadn’t denied it.

Gillian, on the other hand, was spontaneous. Sometimes, when he was too tired to keep up, Nick thought it was almost a neurosis. She’d find a flyer for a concert or an exhibition lying in the gutter and go that night; friends he’d never heard of would call at midnight, just arrived in New York, and she’d scoot out to Penn Station to bring them back to the apartment. She’d meet a guy on a train and be in his apartment at two the next morning playing canasta.