Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

‘People’s lives go like clockwork,’ she told him. ‘They start out buzzing with energy, and by the time they hit thirty they’ve totally run down. If you don’t act, you’re doomed. You need to introduce some random chaos into your life.’

After she left him, he’d seen those flyers blowing down the street and wondered if that was what he’d been. Something she’d found, an impulse acted on to prove she still could. Random chaos.

The taxi office was a small kiosk that had somehow wormed itself into a crevice between two large buildings. There wasn’t much inside: a wilting plastic pot plant, three plastic chairs scarred by cigarettes and two women sitting behind a window in front of a faded map of Paris. Their faces were so heavily made up that they too might have been plastic. Both wore coats, wool hats and fingerless gloves. Each time the phone rang the woman on the left would answer it, bellow a series of questions, then relay the answers to the woman beside her. She in turn would pick up a radio mike and repeat everything the first woman had just said. It looked like the sort of division of labour that only the French could have dreamed up.

Nick went to the window. ‘Do you speak English?’

The radio woman was still shouting orders into her microphone. The telephone woman glanced at him, then jerked her head at her colleague. Nick waited for her to finish.

‘Anglais,’ the telephone woman barked.

The radio woman scowled. ‘A little.’

‘A friend of mine took a taxi on the fourteenth of December. I want to know where she went.’ He looked around, losing confidence. There was no sign of a computer, not even a filing cabinet. ‘Do you have any records?’

The woman stared at him from turquoise lagoons of eyeshadow. ‘Non.’

If he was honest, he hadn’t expected any more. Hope was painful; he was almost grateful to her for killing it off. He turned away.

‘Nom,’ the woman said behind him again. ‘Sa nom. Her name.’

Nick looked back, sheepish as he realised he’d misunderstood.

‘Gillian Lockhart.’

The ring of a telephone interrupted the exchange. The ritual played itself out between the two women. When it was dispatched, the radio woman looked back at him. Closing her eyes, she recited as if into a microphone, ‘Gillian Lockhart. 14.30. From rue Saint Antoine, she comes here.’

Nick looked around the plastic office. ‘Here? Ici?’

The receptionist pointed across the road to a grand neoclassical building. ‘The station. The Gare de l’Est.’

It extended his quest by a few minutes, so Nick walked across the street and into the station. It smelled of diesel fumes and steel. He stared at the banks of monitors on stalks that sprouted from the walls, reading the destinations. He’d always loved European railway stations: the grandiose architecture dimmed with soot, the sleek trains, the destinations that stretched across a continent rather than just safe commuter suburbs. He read the names off the flickering screens. Bâle; Epernay; Frankfurt; Munich; Salzburg; Strasbourg; Vienna.

Where now?

The tongue of the turnstile rolled over and spat Emily out into the foyer. The information desk was ahead of her in the middle of the room. She searched for Nick but couldn’t see him.

She glanced at the glass wall to her right, through onto the balcony that overlooked the forested courtyard. In summer it became a café, packed with tables and chairs; now it was all but deserted. A short man in a silver puffer jacket leaned against the balustrade smoking a cigarette. Was he looking at her?

He threw his cigarette butt onto the floor and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. Emily went up to the information desk.

‘I had a message in the reading room. Is there a Nick Ash to see-’

‘Right here.’

A hand clamped on her arm so tight she thought the bone would snap. It pulled her away from the nodding receptionist and spun her towards the door, pulling her along. Fear froze her into obedience. Was this what had happened to Gillian? She looked up and saw a heavyset man with a crooked nose and bristling black eyebrows. His left arm reached across his body to hold her; his right jabbed something round and blunt into the small of her back.

‘I have a gun. Do not scream; do not try to run.’

She would never have run. Her legs were jelly; she could barely walk. Her captor almost had to drag her across the carpet. They were halfway to the door already. Outside, the man in the puffer jacket hurried to meet them.

The beep of an alarm cut through her panic. By the entrance, the security guard was patting down a long-haired student whose profusion of chains and studs had set off the metal detector. Emily stared at it. Could you really get a gun through that? Or was he bluffing?

‘Please don’t take me,’ she whispered to her captor. They were almost at the exit. ‘I know what you want. It’s in my bag. You can have it. Just please let me go.’

He paused just shy of the velvet rope that marked the edge of the foyer. At least he was listening. He looked down at her empty hands.

‘Where is your bag?’

She jerked her head at the cloakroom. ‘I had to check it in before I went to the reading room.’

As abruptly as he’d grabbed her, he swivelled her back around and marched her towards the cloakroom. Just before they got there he let her go, pushing her off balance so that she stumbled headlong into the counter. She thrust her ticket at the startled attendant, who came back a moment later with her brown bucket bag. As soon as she had it in her hands she felt the grip back on her elbow.

‘One euro,’ said the attendant.

Emily snapped open the bag and rummaged in the bottom. The vice around her arm tightened; she felt faint with the pain. But she’d found what she was looking for. She pulled out a coin – but she was clumsy. It slipped out of her fingers and dropped onto the carpet.

She smiled a weak apology at the attendant and made to bend down and pick it up. Unsure whether to allow it or not, her captor loosened his grip.

It was enough. She came up faster than he’d expected, knocking him back off balance. That brought her room to turn around. She thrust her hand up towards his face and before he could respond, squeezed hard on the can wrapped in her fist.

A jet of pepper spray erupted from the nozzle, straight into his face. He reeled away clutching his eyes. An alarm bell started to screech; Emily wondered if the spray might have triggered a smoke detector. But it was coming from the door. The man in the puffer jacket had seen what was happening and had burst in, triggering the metal detector. He was reaching inside his bulky coat, then went down as a security guard tackled him to the floor.

Emily picked up her bag and fled.

Strassburg

A paw was taking shape. Just as the mother bear licks unformed flesh into the shape of her young, the chisel’s tongue rasped against the stone to carve the image. I could already see the curve of a haunch bulging out of the block; a sloping back and a knob that would become an ear or a snout.

The stone carver stood over his bench in the square and chipped it out. Behind him loomed the cathedral, where the animal would eventually graze among pillared glades and vaulted branches.

This is how God forms us all, I thought: raining down blows to draw out shapes from the crude stone of our creation. A tap and a crack, a puff of dust, the rattle of fragments falling on the cobbles. Another piece of our imperfection cut away. The smoothest skin is scar tissue.

‘The curve of the knee is too sharp.’

A shadow fell over the bench. Drach had arrived, stealing up behind me in silence. He glanced at the bear, emerging from the stone as if from a forest, then at the drawing pinned to the tabletop.