The Malice Box Read online

  ‘Millions. Imagine a nuclear bomb of the soul.’

  ‘What? What does that mean?’

  ‘Go to that apartment in the West Village. All the answers are there. That is the way in.’

  Robert lowered his face into his hands again, trying to make sense of everything. Was it an Adam game? Was the old man in on it? He raised his head and looked at Horace. ‘Do you think Adam killed Lawrence?’

  ‘One way or another, yes, I do.’

  ‘This is not a game?’

  ‘Most certainly not. Just promise me this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You will go to the address in the West Village. And, once there, you will suspend your disbelief.’

  Robert sat in wonderment. He closed his eyes and cast his mind back to the day of the Blackout. The lights going off across the entire north-eastern USA as he lay in bed with Katherine. Times Square unlit in the late afternoon. The joy of her pregnancy, and then the unspeakable loss, just as they’d been expecting her to feel the first kicks. The quickening that never came.

  He looked into Horace’s eyes again. He reminded Robert of his late father, who had spent his entire life persuading Robert of the futility of superstition and the merits of the rational mind. Now Horace was telling him the exact opposite. The old man’s gaze pierced his soul. Should he walk away right now? Send Horace and Adam and all their works to hell? He broke away from Horace’s gaze and stared into the blues and reds of the rose window. Walk away? Or at least find out what on earthwas going on?

  He made up his mind.

  ‘I’ll go. I won’t promise beyond that, but I’ll go.’

  Horace slumped slightly in his pew, closing his eyes. ‘Good. Thank you. I have to leave now, Robert. One other thing: don’t tell anyone about this, not even Katherine. I’ll contact you as soon as I can, but please, in any case, we must meet after the funeral.’

  Robert spoke as if in a trance. ‘What are the arrangements?’

  ‘It’ll be a private family affair, I’m sure you understand. Monday morning. I’d be very glad to see you again afterwards, though I suspect we’ll be in touch before that.’

  Then he was gone.

  Robert sat for a few moments in the church, staring into his past. Then he walked out on to the street and tried to call Katherine. No answer. He remembered she had an appointment with the shrink. In irritation, he didn’t leave a message.

  Then, instead of going home, he went to the West Village.

  Cambridge, March 1981

  The School of Pythagoras was in the north-western reaches of the vast metropolis of St John’s. Entering the college through the gatehouse almost diagonally opposite the Round Church, they walked through the sixteenth-century First Court, the mist and the chill penetrating their costumes now, the college chapel to their right almost eaten up by the low white sky.

  ‘I’m glad we survived that,’ Katherine said. ‘Actually I’m glad he survived it. I thought you were going to deck him.’

  She took his arm again, and, as they passed through the passage by the Dining Hall to the next court, she stopped and put her arms round him, shivering and pressing her face into his chest.

  ‘Warm me up,’ she said. He felt his body respond with a flush of blood. She warmed herself against him for a few moments, then pulled away.

  ‘OK, let’s go. You’re doing very well with your vow. Calling the watchman a silly fucker doesn’t count.’

  In the deserted Second Court they stood in the centre and turned about, taking it all in. ‘Any time in the last 400 years it would have looked just like this,’ she said. ‘Spin me. Spin me round. It’ll be fun. I don’t weighanything.’

  Gripping her wrists tightly, he wheeled on his heels and began to spin her. She lifted her feet from the ground and let herself fly. It was like spinning a small child. He dipped and raised her, slowing and speeding up, as she shrieked with delight. Only when he almost lost hold of one of her wrists did he slowly bring her back to earth. Her toes touched the ground, and she skipped and twisted and slammed to a halt in his arms. She reached up to kiss him.

  ‘Take that bloody mask off.’

  He grappled with the drawstrings holding it in place. He had been too conscientious in making sure it wouldn’t come off at an inopportune time. His efforts at laughter came out like a roar of frustration.

  She hugged him and walked on.

  ‘OK, tiger, later, it was just a thought. Moment’s gone. Let’s keep moving.’

  In Third Court, smaller and a century younger, she sprinted on ahead towards the cloisters that lined the river bank, shouting ‘Catch me!’ and scattering a gaggle of scarved and greatcoated undergraduates. On the far side of the court, at the passageway leading to the interior of the Bridge of Sighs, she stopped and waited for him, clouds of white breath emanating from her mouth.

  ‘This looks so romantic from the outside, but I think it’s just freezing and draughty on the inside.’

  They crossed halfway and looked out from within the bridge at the River Cam, spectral and empty. The few trees they could see traced gaunt filigrees against the boundless white.

  ‘Let me feel your heart.’

  She put her hand against his chest, then her ear directly over his heart. He felt it respond to her. Deep, slow, strong, steady. She looked up into his eyes through her half-visage mask. She placed his hand over her heart, just below the warm swell of her breast. He felt it hammer. They held each other’s gaze. Time passed without their reckoning.

  ‘You have a good heart, mystery man. I see why Adam chose you.’

  A group of harried-looking students interrupted them, screeching about being late for the Arts Cinema. Robert was struggling still to understand the strange nasalized vowel distortions people affected when they came to study at Cambridge. ‘Oh, no,’ one of them had said, though ‘Aynay’ had come out of his mouth.

  He reached into his pocket for the envelope and waved it at Katherine, pointing with it in the vague direction of north-west.

  They emerged from the bridge into New Court, a riot of nineteenth-century Gothic with an extravagant cupola in the centre known as the Wedding Cake. Robert closed his eyes as they walked, feeling Katherine again nuzzled against him, and imagined the outcome he wanted of this evening. He held in his mind the image of her smiling up at him, naked, her black hair flowing freely on her white skin. He surprised himself to find he could not imagine her without her mask.

  They walked in silence under the Wedding Cake and emerged into the twentieth century – the 1960s, to be exact – in a widely despised array of award-winning concrete and glass.

  ‘Quick, run, don’t look at the architecture,’ Katherine shouted and took off again, running across the court and under the raised Cripps Building. ‘I can’t see it, I can’t see it!’

  Robert chased her.

  ‘Oh!’ she shouted as she ran. ‘I understand why Adam is doing this. I get it!’

  He caught up with her by the porters’ lodge.

  ‘He’s bending our minds. He and I have been writing this play. Newton’s Papers. It’s about Sir Isaac Newton, obviously. Read his papers? Heard of them? They’re at King’s, Keynes bought a lot of them at auction before the war.’

  Of course he knew Newton. Robert had been tempted to study physics when younger, before opting for modern languages, which he saw as just another kind of system. Calibration and predictability appealed deeply to him.

  She gave a high-strung laugh. ‘So these papers show Newton spent more of his time on alchemy and theology than on the things we know him for now, gravity, and optics, and calculus, and so on, and he didn’t really distinguish: it was all about knowing God’s creation, and clues were everywhere, in the proportions of Solomon’s Temple, and in the path of comets and planets, and in curves and numbers, and the properties of metals, and the hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone. Keynes said he wasn’t the first of the Age of Reason, he was the last of the magicians.’

  Robert looked at
her quizzically and shrugged. Newton had created the modern world. It sounded like artsy crap to him.

  ‘So that’s what the game is,’ she said, smiling. ‘I think he’s trying to create an experience like that. The world as the Ancients up till Newton saw it, everything mixed together in a big riddle. With drinking and fancy dress thrown in. Isn’t he entirely mad?’

  He nodded, unsure how else to react. It all sounded rather dubious.

  They headed further along under the raised modern concrete buildings and emerged into the final court. At the far end of the ghostly lawn squatted the School of Pythagoras, two storeys of old stone town house with a dormer roof, completely refitted on the inside with modern amenities, where the bop – a fancy-dress birthday party thrown by friends of Adam – was clearly under way. David Bowie thrummed from the ground floor. They made their way in and quickly found Adam. Hewas standing ona chair waving to them, dressed as a cross between a sultan and a fakir, all in white except for an emerald-green turban and a blood-red waistcoat. A long fake beard hung from his chin. Two of their fellow conspirators, the tart and the vicar, had already joined him, and now he boomed across at them to join the small coterie, off to one side of the party away from the dance floor, which was jammed.

  ‘Well done, well done! Did you find it? Did you bring the magic words?’

  He was beside himself with glee, the twinkle of a lovable madman in his eyes. ‘We await only the knight and damsel, who had to go a little further afield. Drink? Drink!’

  Robert did not recognize the other two players, both of whom also wore masks. The vicar looked especially odd, with a hook-nosed black carnival mask above his dog collar. His partner had gone for the French maid look, topping it with a stunning black feathered half-mask.

  Adam returned from the bar with a pint of IPA for Robert and a glass of white wine for Katherine.

  ‘Great to see you, O magus! How was it? Fun?’

  Robert nodded.

  ‘You can talk to me, you clot, just not to her. Just make sure she can’t hear you.’

  ‘Katherine’s great. Thank you so much for inviting me.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re key to the whole enterprise.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘All in good time, my friend. I have been watching you from afar. Yes, she is great, isn’t she? I thought you’d hit it off. May have a proposition for you later. Proposal, I should say. Did she talk to you at all about the play we’ve been writing?’

  ‘A little, yes. About Newton, right?’

  ‘Yes. Let’s talk about it later. Come back to my rooms with Kat after this.’

  At that moment two more people joined them. One was a tall, somewhat buck-toothed man in the long white mantle of a knight of the crusades, a red cross on the front, worn over silvery pyjamas intended to represent armour. Robert noted a thick layer of woollen long johns under the silver. The other was a red-headed woman of generous build in a flowing skirt, laced bodice and veiled headdress. The crusader’s face was white, tingeing to blue.

  ‘Adam,’ he shouted. ‘You bastard!’

  ‘That’s a little harsh,’ Adam countered. ‘Have a drink. Warm up. Recount.’

  ‘Who did you pay? How much did it cost you?’

  The knight was quivering, whether with anger or cold Robert couldn’t tell. His partner wasn’t laughing either.

  ‘All will be revealed in the fullness of the evening.’

  Katherine put her hands up to the knight’s face. ‘You’re freezing. Where did you go?’

  Before he could reply, Adam again stood on his chair.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention. Lady tart and good reverend, please recount your evening. What tales of cracked riddles have you brought us? The rest of you, drink, warm up and enjoy.’

  The lady spoke first. ‘Well. This shifty-looking reprobate in a dog collar and a muppet mask showed up at my door at Newnham at eight o’clock and gave me a lovely rose. I’ve always had a thing for men of the cloth, though quite how you knew that, Adam, I would love to find out. Catholic schoolgirl and all that, so I let him in and made him a cup of coffee and he whipped out this clue. I am the ends of the earth, it said. We thought about that for a while. As instructed, I had my envelope here’ – she showed a garter, to applause – ‘which he couldn’t keep his eyes off, but we tried to work it out with just the first clue. Land’s End? John o’Groats? John’s? Finisterre? The reverend here thought we should raid the communion wine to limber up our minds a bit, so…’

  The vicar took up the story. ‘After some suitably chaste sippage the good lady was prevailed upon to open her envelope and therein was the phrase just a short walk for Wojtyla. Now, being a trained theologian and geographer, I was able to deduce the following: Wojtyla is a pope, hence lives in the Vatican, from where a short walk in any direction leads to Rome… but Rome and ends of the earth do not sit well together – ’

  ‘But,’ his partner interrupted, ‘Wojtyla is also a Pole, and then it gets more interesting. The North and South Pole are at the ends of the earth, and just a short walk – ’

  ‘Captain Oates,’ the crusader knight piped up, somewhat happier now that he’d sunk a pint. ‘I’m just going for a short walk, and I may be some time. Walked out of the tent to die on one of the polar expeditions so that he’d not be a burden to his colleagues.’

  ‘Precisely,’ the vicar said. ‘Which led us within seconds to conclude we should be heading for the Scott Polar Institute on Lensfield Road.’

  ‘Bravo,’ Adam said.

  The ladyresumed. ‘Wewalked. I wasn’t cyclinganywhere in this get-up. Once we got there, we looked at the second riddle. QAPVD, it said. Decode it and bring back the words.’

  ‘We looked everywhere except in front of our noses,’ the vicar said. ‘It’s carved right on the front of the building. Eventually we spotted it. Quaesivit arcana poli videt dei.’

  Katherine asked: ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘It’s a tribute to Scott of the Antarctic,’ the vicar said. ‘He sought the secrets of the pole but found the hidden face of God. Those are the magic words we were to bring back, I presume?’

  Adam applauded, sparking the rest to join in.

  ‘And what secret wish was fulfilled?’

  The vicar and the lady looked at each other for a second. ‘Neither of us dared,’ he said. ‘Honest.’

  ‘I don’t believe you for a moment,’ Adam boomed. ‘Moving right along, you will have found in one of your envelopes earlier this evening a card showing a design against a background of dots, looking perhaps like a key, or a constellation.’

  The vicar fumbled in his pocket and produced theirs, holding it up to show to the group.

  ‘Please jot down on the card the Latin phrase you discovered, one letter per dot, starting at the top. When you have done so, please call out which letters are touched by the design.’

  The vicar did so. ‘Let’s see. I, A, R, A, N, O, I.’

  Adam strode among them, thrilled at their diligence as they all made a note of the letters.

  ‘In each of your adventures there is an absence,’ he said. ‘What is it in this case?’

  The knight spoke up again. ‘Scott never made it back. Oates sacrificed himself. There are lots.’

  Katherine raised her hand. ‘I don’t know if it was his expedition or one of Shackleton’s, but they said they had the feeling, when they were at the limits of their strength, that there was always one more person with them than could be counted. T. S. Eliot refers to it in The Waste Land.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Adam said, raising his glass. ‘Yes. To absent heroes, and the spiritual succour they may bring. Now, witch, please recount. Ladies and gentlemen, the warlock is under oath of silence until 10 p.m., still a few minutes hence.’

  Katherine told their story in minute detail, including even her secret wish to snog with a boy in a church graveyard. The watchman’s cameo appearance was a big hit.

  ‘Hic est enim sangus meus novi testam
enti in something or other peccatos,’ Adam repeated. ‘Let’s cut it off after testamenti, since the last phrase is mutilated. Speaking of which, what is the absence here?’

  ‘The word “redemption”, or “forgiveness”,’ Katherine said immediately.

  ‘Thank you. Please write your phrase on your card and call out the letters touched by your key.

  Katherine did so. ‘That would be M, N, I and V,’ she said. They all scribbled notes.

  ‘Thank you. Now, knight and damsel, please recite.’

  ‘First, you are truly a bastard,’ the damsel said. ‘My poor knight nearly died of fright. You shouldn’t play tricks like that.’

  ‘I am intrigued,’ Adam said. ‘Please recount.’ ‘So this man in silver pyjamas and a Ned Kelly hat comes to my door. Lovely rose, and so on. The first clue was a biblical reference. Ezekiel 38:2. Son of Man, set your face towards Gog, of the land of Magog. Pretty clear directions. The Gog Magog hills just outside Cambridge, to the southeast. But they’re big, easy to get lost up there.

  ‘So we went pretty quickly for the second clue, which was as follows:

  ‘I am the creature of this place

  I am its spirit, no magic wand

  Will bury me.

  A warrior might steal me away

  Wrote Gervase of Tilbury

  If he unseat my master

  On a moonlit night.

  I dwell within a ring.

  I am Arabian, and I am chalk.

  I am buried, yet I walk.

  Find me.

  ‘My History of World Literature got us as far as Gervase of Tilbury writing a book in the thirteenth century to amuse his emperor, part encyclopedia, part stories of marvels and local legends from around the world, but we couldn’t get a copy of it, given the hour. We presumed there was some reference to the Gog Magog hills in there. We were looking at a local map and saying the clue out loud when we got it. Wandlebury. No magic wand will bury… very cunning, Adam. Up in the Gog Magog hills there’s an old Iron Age hill fort called Wandlebury. So off to the taxi rank we went and off we rode.’