He took a last look around the room. A balled-up sock sat on the floor where he’d left it three nights ago. A magazine lay open to the article he’d been reading over dinner that night. Two creased shirts he’d meant to iron hung on the closet door. His former life. He remembered an article he’d seen once in National Geographic about a caveman found frozen in the Alps. He’d been perfectly preserved, even down to the bowl of berries still clutched in his hands. The scientists thought he must have fallen asleep next to the glacier, swallowed by the advancing ice. Nick had always wondered about him. Did he realise what was happening? Was there a moment when he woke up, too cold, and found himself trapped? Was the ice clear enough for him to see the sunlit world outside? Did he scream, or had the ice frozen his lungs?
He glanced at the alarm clock by the bed to get his bearings, but even that had fallen victim to the spell in the room. 00:00. 00:00. 00:00. The blue numbers flashed their non-time at him. The police must have unplugged it when they searched the room.
‘C’mon.’ Seth was waiting.
Nick walked slowly to the door, trying to cram in as many memories as he could. That was when he saw the picture of Gillian. She sat on his dresser, watching from behind the bottles and aerosols. Somehow he’d never got round to putting it away. He reached to get a closer look.
‘Don’t,’ said Seth. He waved the passport. ‘You’ve given the police enough help.’
Nick hadn’t used his passport since he came back from Berlin eighteen months ago. He wasn’t even sure if it was still valid. But now that he’d given it away he felt trapped without it, as if he’d handed his jailers the key to his cell. Locked out of his home, locked into the city. Almost.
With nowhere to go, he wandered the streets. The temperature had dropped overnight; the radio was forecasting snow. Gusts of steam billowed out of the manhole covers; Haitian street vendors tried to sell him ice scrapers and black leather gloves. The buildings reflected the concrete sky.
He knew he needed to go to the bank but kept putting it off: he dreaded the thought of another rebuff, more suspicion. He invented other things to do, department-store windows to stare at or bookstores where he could flip through the magazine racks. One had a coffee shop; he searched his bag and dug out enough change for an espresso.
The coffee shop was hot and crowded. Nick couldn’t get a table of his own, but had to share with a young woman who was working her way through a three-inch stack of fashion magazines. She gave him a discouraging scowl when he sat down, and afterwards ignored him completely.
He perched the laptop on the edge of the table and booted it up. He had vague thoughts of doing some work, but most of it was held on the servers at the FBI, and the rest was in the police station on Tenth Street. Inevitably, he went back to the card, scratching a scab he’d already dug raw. Bear is the key. Except it wasn’t. Nor was grizzly, panda, koala, polar, Kodiak, Yogi, brown…
Nick killed the program. His head was beginning to ache. He searched his bag and found a nickel but no painkillers. There were some back in the apartment, but he doubted Royce would let him back to the crime scene for that. He could almost script the conversation. ‘Do you have a painkiller addiction? Did you supply drugs to Ms Lockhart? Why did you keep a photograph of her on your desk when – by your own admission – you broke up six months ago?’
The photograph. He opened a new folder on the screen. In the real world it would have been covered in dust and yellowing at the edges, perhaps blotted with a few dried tears. In the digital realm it was just one among a dozen identical icons, as fresh and sterile as the day he’d created it. Inside were a couple of dozen photographs, perfectly aligned like pinned butterflies, all he had of Gillian. For a woman who could make a date with a stranger on an empty train, she’d been surprisingly self-conscious when it came to cameras. He hit the SLIDESHOW button and let the images segue across the screen. Six months of his life played out in less than a minute.
The photograph from his room came near the end. He remembered exactly when he’d taken it. He’d gone out to lock up and come back into the bedroom to find Gillian curled up on the bed wearing nothing except the old college T-shirt she used as pyjamas. It wasn’t exactly an unusual sight, but something about that moment had captivated him: the low light from the bedside lamp and the shadow between her thighs where the T-shirt rode up, the swell of her breasts under the torn V-neck, the auburn hair tangled around her throat. It caught her perfectly: beautiful, irresistible and his. He’d seen the camera on the bookshelf, grabbed it and squeezed off the photo before she could object. Later, he’d had it printed and framed. Gillian had complained, of course, but he didn’t care. It was the first time he’d felt confident enough to display a trophy of their relationship, and he felt the pride of ownership.
It hadn’t lasted long after that.
But for the first time in months, he didn’t care; he stared at the picture and barely noticed Gillian. He magnified the picture, zooming in on the T-shirt. A dark blue shield filled the screen, the single word BROWN blazoned on it across Gillian’s chest. Behind, wrapping his vast forearms around the shield, loomed an enormous brown bear.
The bookshop had an Internet connection but it was down. Nick ran to the stairwell and checked the store directory. EDUCATION AND CAREERS: BASEMENT. He took the elevator. There was hardly anyone down there: people coming back from Christmas vacation hadn’t yet had time to remember how much they hated their jobs.
He found what he was looking for in a dead-end aisle near the back of the store: Inside the Ivy League by J. B. Morford. He flipped through the photographs of gothic cloisters and blonde girls with too-perfect teeth clutching copies of Shakespeare. He didn’t have to go far.
Brown University Student
Body: 7,740 (approx.)
Mascot: Bruno the Bear
He squatted down on a rubberised grey stool and balanced the laptop on his knee, checking there was no one to see him. The Cryptych program opened at once. Nick clicked on the picture.
Enter Password:
b r u n o
Password incorrect
Enter Password:
B r u n o
Password accepted
XXIV
Paris, 1433
I woke on bare stone. My skin was clammy and cold, my bones stiff as iron. I was naked except for a short cloth around my waist. My head ached, and when I opened my eyes the harsh winter light made me wince.
I heaved myself up. I could not find my clothes, so I pulled a hanging off the wall and wrapped it around my shoulders. It trailed behind me, dragging a broad road in the dust as I walked barefoot through the empty house. When I came to the tower door I paused. The ache in my head pounded to a new intensity. I knew what I would find.
I had not realised how bad the tower had become in those last frenzied weeks. Everything was filthy. Black residues crystallised in jars that I had not washed out; the ghosts of failed experiments congealed where I had abandoned them. Several parts of the table were crusted with bird droppings. On the floor in front of the cold furnace lay our broken egg. Shards of glass glinted like a shattered crown, the fallen sword beside it.
I heard a sound at the door and turned. Tristan stood there wearing a brown cloak, a fresh cup of wine in his hand. Heavy circles rimmed his eyes. Half of me expected him to pick up the sword and slice off my head, like Herod in the painting. Half of me would have welcomed it.