The Malice Box Page 2

  … you will find a second puzzle to be solved. Certain magic words are to be found, noted down and brought back with you. Then you are to fulfil a secret wish. To win the prize, you must return with the correct answers and solve a third riddle. Special honours will go to the most imaginative or scandalous adventures en route. Flirting is encouraged. Unwelcome groping is not. True identities will be revealed at 10 p.m.

  ‘Let’s get to the clues,’ Katherine said.

  Robert unsealed his envelope and removed two cards. On one was written: ‘Clue: I am an echo of the Holy City.’ On the back, it added: ‘Suggestion: She has a secret wish involving this place. Once there, do the first thing she tells you to do. Remember you must not speak.’

  The second card showed an array of dots and lines, and was marked: ‘Save this for later.’ He showed her the dotted card and the clue. Katherine took a letter-opener from the desk and slit her envelope open. ‘Clue: Seen from the sky, I am an eye…’ She thought about it and turned the card over.

  ‘Mmm.’ She did not share what it said on the back. Her envelope contained a second note, sealed with red wax, which she tucked into her dress. It was marked: ‘Only to be opened at the location you seek.’

  She drew an eye on a pad of paper and held it up to him. ‘Mean anything to you?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What is the Holy City? Jerusalem. Al-Quds. Christian, Muslim and Jew. There must be others, but…’

  Katherine took down from a bookshelf an illustrated guide to Cambridge and riffled the pages back and forth. ‘An eye. Seen from the sky. An echo of the Holy City…’

  Robert signalled to her to hand him the notepad and jotted down: ‘Irises and pupils are round. What about the Round Church?’ Cambridge’s Round Church, built in Norman times, was less than ten minutes’ walk away.

  She looked it up in the guidebook and gave a squeak of delight. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You are clever! It says the Round Church is a copy of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. All the round churches in the world are. It was a Templar thing.’

  She grabbed her broom. ‘Let’s go!’

  New York, August 25, 2004

  Late-summer heat stood in the streets, trapped by metal and glass. It was humid. A storm wanted to come.

  Robert stopped without thinking at a shop window on Fifth Avenue. It was one of those stores that sold tacky New York souvenirs: the World Trade Center buildings in a snow globe, plastic Empire State Buildings with King Kong hanging from the top, Statue of Liberty lighters. Inexplicably, he was fascinated by them. He kept buying them. Little Chrysler Buildings. Tiny Flatirons. Katherine said it was a sickness.

  He went into the store, feeling faintly guilty.

  Katherine had her weakness for food porn: glossy colour cooking magazines, the Food Channel on cable, an unhealthy obsession with Mario Batali. But he had developed his own weaknesses: walking tours, coffee-table books on city architecture, crappy models of significant buildings.

  A cheap silver-painted paperweight caught his eye. It crammed twenty-odd notable sights on to an oval base: the United Nations, Chrysler, Empire State, Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty. He decided to buy it when he saw it had a Rockefeller Center and Washington Square Park Arch he could perhaps chisel off. You couldn’t find those on their own.

  He made the purchase. He was sweating, and slightly dizzy. Dehydrated, maybe.

  As he walked to Times Square and west along 42nd Street to the Port Authority bus station, his thoughts dwelled on Katherine, and on the gulf that had opened up between them. It had been eight months since the miscarriage. He didn’t know how to fix it.

  Katherine looked tired when he got home. His purchase amused her to a degree, until he took out the chisel.

  ‘Now you’re going to destroy it. Wow.’

  ‘It’s hard to find a miniature of anything to do with Rockefeller Center.’

  She lacked sympathy. ‘Feed your habit, if you must.’

  ‘How was your day, Kat?’

  She gave a dry laugh. ‘I feel eighty years old.’

  In his study was a map of Manhattan on a table. He had been putting his small souvenir buildings on it, as though building a scale model of the island in three dimensions. The Rockefeller Center building would fit perfectly.

  Katherine observed him sadly from the doorway. ‘Robert, no good will come of this. Truly.’

  ‘Just… one… minute.’

  She came over to see more closely what he was doing. The paperweight cracked, and part of the United Nations and the Brooklyn Bridge came flying off. The torch arm of the Statue of Liberty narrowly missed hitting Katherine in the eye. The Rockefeller Center’s GE Building came off more or less intact.

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘OK. OK.’

  Katherine eyed him with exasperation. ‘So when are you going to open the mystery package?’ she asked.

  A parcel had arrived in the mail that morning, addressed only to ‘Rickles’. Postmarked New York, no return address. She’d called him about it, knowing who it was from, concerned it might be important.

  Only one person had ever called him ‘Rickles’.

  Robert’s first thought had been to suggest she put it in a bucket of water outside the back door. Adam Hale’s little gifts and games were like that. Instead she’d left it sitting on the desk in his home office, next to all the intractable crap that he kept in his ‘too hard’ file.

  ‘It might be from someone else,’ she offered.

  But no.

  The package was a cube of roughly three inches by three by three.

  He pointed to the door. ‘Would you go into the next room for a moment? One of us will need to be around to sue him if it explodes.’

  She laughed absently and stepped away.

  He held the package on the desk with one hand and started to slice the brown wrapping paper with a box cutter. His right hand, nonsensically, was trembling. Robert took a deep breathto calm himself. Adam’s games could be self-serving and irritating, even downright upsetting. But this time it felt different – as though they might all have been merely dress rehearsals for the one that was about to begin.

  He carefully finished slicing the paper and peeled it off to reveal a stout cardboard box, taped shut across the top. He punctured the seal of Scotch tape and let the blade run smoothly along the crack between the top flaps.

  He opened the box.

  Inside was an envelope and a mysterious object sheathed in bubble-wrap and tissue paper. He gently took the box cutter to the bubble-wrap. Still his hand shook.

  He stopped and took a breath. Then he cut it free.

  It was a round metallic box, platinum-gold in colour, about two and a half inches in diameter. It reminded him of a pillbox, or a small drum. Concentric rings ridged its top. It seemed remarkably lightweight.

  The envelope contained a handwritten note, in careful capital letters, that said simply: ‘PLEASE HELP ME.’ On the back, in a more rushed hand, had been added: ‘Out of time.’ There was no signature, but Robert recognized Adam’s handwriting. He closed his eyes.

  One day you’ll be called upon. He could hear Adam’s words even now, more than two decades on. An acrid taste filled his mouth. He dropped the note in a drawer.

  The pillbox had geometric motifs on its sides. There was no obvious way to open it. He turned it every which way, pressing and pulling and looking for cracks into which he could insert a fingernail. Nothing. The longer he held it, the more frustrated he got. After a while it even seemed heavier, and so he put it down and summoned Katherine.

  ‘Typical Adam. Take a look at this, would you? It’s a bastard,’ he said. ‘It’s sealed tight.’

  Katherine took it from him and gazed at it, holding it under his desk lamp and then close to her eyes. ‘This is some kind of metal? It’s almost like glass. Do you think Adam’s starting another one of his games?’

  She put it down on his desk. He smiled wryly at her.

  ‘I hop
e not. I’m not sure our insurance would cover it.’

  She surveyed him for a moment. ‘You don’t like being called Rickles, do you?’

  The box sat on his desk like a toad. Now it looked more reddishgold.

  ‘It always irritated me, yes.’

  ‘Was there anything else with it?’

  ‘No,’ he lied.

  She went upstairs.

  Robert fought with the damned thing for half an hour longer, trying not to think. At one point the top rim slid a sixteenth of an inch counter-clockwise with a smooth click, as though he’d triggered a precision mechanism, then could not be coaxed further. He tried to reproduce the hand-and-finger positions that had made it happen, but failed. He gave up and went to join Katherine.

  ‘When I was a girl, I had a special secret box that was very hard to open, a bit like that one,’ she said, turning from the computer screen to look at him. ‘A friend gave it to me on one of our summer holidays in France. It was made of wood, very tightly fitted, so you had to know an exact sequence of moves to open it. I wrote down all the hurtful, malicious things people said or did to me and kept the pieces of paper in it. It trapped the hurt inside.’

  ‘I could use one of those at work.’

  ‘I called it my Malice Box.’

  Robert frowned. ‘If I remember, boîte à malice means something more like “box of tricks”, if that’s what you were thinking of,’ he said, walking to the bookcase and reaching for a French dictionary. ‘Yes, look here, it’s a mistranslation.’

  She didn’t look.

  ‘I know. I was mixing up Englishand French. I was only thirteen, Robert.’

  ‘It’s wrong, but I do like the phrase. Malice Box. Very serendipitous. Very doomy. Adam would be thrilled, no doubt. Anyway, I’m going to smashit with a poker.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Don’t smashit?’

  ‘Everything you’re doing right now. Just don’t. Just stop.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trying to diminishme. Being a pedant. Resenting Adam.’

  He grunted.

  ‘Let me have another look at it, anyway. It looks Moroccan, maybe? Egyptian? Whatever it is, don’t smash it. It could be quite valuable. And it’s beautiful.’

  He handed the box over and left her to it.

  The Malice Box, when Katherine eventually got it open, contained a snugly fitted leather pouch. Inside were two keys and a folded slip of paper, with an address on one side and a single word on the other: vitriol.

  How appropriate, Robert thought.

  The address was for an apartment in the West Village.

  Katherine had become animated. ‘How exciting. I’m glad he’s doing his riddles again.’

  ‘Show me how you opened it?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can. I was trying different finger positions, and twisting and squeezing it in different places, and all the while I was staring at the top, and there’s something about it. Look, you see? How it looks concave one second and convex the next? It’s weird. Like looking into a staring eye. If I didn’t know better I’d swear I hypnotized myself for a moment staring at it.’

  ‘That’s crap. You just lucked out, and now you can’t do it again.’

  He took it from her and retired to his study to work out what Adam might be playing at.

  What information did he have?

  Adam, who lived in Miami and had barely been in touch for several years, had mailed him a package from New York, or had had someone do it for him. He’d not put anything on the outside of the package, or indeed inside, to identify him as the sender, except to Robert and Katherine.

  Adam was directly asking for help, in a way that was not typical of his previous puzzle challenges, which had involved mostly enjoyable requests for favours, introductions to women, solicitations of cashand an array of other dubious-to-actionable wheezes.

  And he was running out of time.

  Robert picked up the Malice Box and stared at it. He felt chilled to the core. Something wasn’t at all right.

  Cambridge, March 1981

  The mist was thicker than ever, the air crisp. Katherine took Robert’s arm as they walked north along King’s Parade, past the Senate House and into Trinity Street. Almost no one was out in the streets. They looked like dream creatures in the shop window of Heffers bookshop, lost between worlds. Katherine had brought a torch, which she played to and fro in front of them, to little effect.

  They passed the Great Gate of Trinity, Adam’s college, and the lawn outside it where Newton’s Tree grew, then the front gate of St John’s with its mythical creatures, called yales, supporting the founder’s coat of arms: elephant tails, antelope bodies, goat heads, horns pointing backwards and forwards at once.

  Just before they got to the Round Church, Robert caught another reflection out of the corner of his eye in a shop window, and for an instant he thought there was someone with them. He blinked and it was gone.

  A low wall surrounded the Round Church, which Robert had walked by many times but never visited. A guttering light seemed to be on inside. Katherine squeezed closer to him as they entered the grounds.

  ‘It’s spooky like this. Are you a churchgoing man?’

  He shook his head. The round-arched entrance was closed. He walked round to the left, on to the grass of the former graveyard, inspecting the stained-glass windows, which glowed faintly from within.

  ‘There are only four others like this in the country, according to the book,’ she said. ‘Founded as a wayfarers’ chapel in the twelfth century by a Fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre of which nothing else is known. Returning Crusaders, perhaps? Let’s see what the next clue says.’

  Katherine took out the sealed note and cracked the wax, then walked over to him and handed him the torch. He read over her shoulder: ‘You seek a magical bird. Name it and the reasons for its magic. Bring back the words it nests upon.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he expects us to break in, does he?’

  Robert shrugged and pointed to the carved pillars of the entrance porch. They inspected them. No bird. They left the graveyard and walked all the way around the church to the back, where later extensions had added boxier, more regular church architecture. The red-brick Victorian edifice housing the Cambridge Union debating society loomed behind them.

  They stared up at a stained-glass window depicting the Crucifixion. In the light of Katherine’s torch they scanned it for details. Robert made out a date, written backwards since they were viewing it from outside: 1942.

  A man’s voice spoke out of the mist. ‘It was blown out in the war.’

  Katherine screamed and grabbed his arm. Robert, forgetting his oath of silence, let rip in the direction of the voice. ‘You silly fucker! You nearly gave us a heart attack!’

  ‘Sorry to frighten you,’ the voice said. A man in a tubular duffle coat and Wellington boots stepped forward, his face hidden in a deep hood.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m just a watchman. I like to keep things tidy. People always littering in the grounds. You look pretty frightening yourselves in those get-ups. Are you going to a party?’

  ‘Later,’ Katherine said.

  ‘It sounds like you need help? Solving a puzzle?’

  He had the voice of a man in his fifties. Not local. A gentle voice.

  ‘Well,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Know of any magic birds hereabouts?’

  ‘Ah. Pelican-in-her-Piety.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You’ll be wanting the Pelican-in-her-Piety.’

  ‘What is that, exactly?’

  ‘Stained-glass window. West-facing, so you’d see it on the way out. It’s at the front. Bring your torch.’

  The watchman strode off into the mist. Katherine hung back, raising her lips to Robert’s ear.

  ‘I had a secret wish about this place, but he’s rather spoiled the mood,’ she said with a smile.

  Robert grunted at her.

  ‘Don’t say another word. At least
I’m not sending you away. Come on, let’s find him.’

  They walked back round to the front of the church. The watchman was standing stock-still, one arm raised, a furled umbrella in his hand giving him the impression of a deformed creature. He was pointing at a window above the porch.

  ‘Follow my arm with your torch,’ he said. ‘Can you see it?’

  An abstract, rounded form in white on a blood-red background shone into view. As he looked more closely, Robert made out the curve of a neck, and a wing. It looked as muchlike a dragon as a pelican.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Katherine. ‘It’s eating its own heart.’

  It was true. The creature’s beak was slicing into its chest.

  ‘To feed its young,’ said the watchman. ‘Pelican-in-her-Piety. Like Christ’s sacrifice, among other things. See the nest and the chicks?’

  Katherine played the light from her torch lower. There was a nest, and below it a chalice and a scroll of some kind. Below them was some lettering.

  ‘Those are the magic words,’ she said. ‘Write them down. They’re backwards, wait…’

  ‘I can save you the bother,’ the watchman said. ‘Hic est enim sangus meus novi testamenti in something or other peccatos. There’s a missing word, illegible. How’s your Latin?’

  Katherine pulled a face. ‘Quite rusty, actually.’

  ‘Well, it should strictly be sanguis, not sangus, and the last phrase is garbled, but what it means is: Here is my blood of the new testament in something or other of sins. The missing word is “forgiveness”, or “redemption”. Got it?’

  Robert took furious notes. He nodded.

  ‘You don’t say muchwhen you’re not swearing, do you? Take a look at the top of the window.’

  Katherine shone the torch up. Robert made out a dome in red and white.

  ‘Jerusalem,’ said the watchman. ‘The original Holy Sepulchre, built over Christ’s tomb. Round.’

  ‘You’ve been very kind,’ said Katherine, in a tone that suggested he leave now. ‘Thank you very much.’