Alex sat up in the bed under the thin motel sheet. He reached over to the little MDF unit screwed to the wall by the side of the bed and found his mobile phone in the half-light. It was the small hours of the morning, though he didn’t bother to check the display on the big digital alarm clock. The answer to the crossword game.
‘The set of all sets,’ Alex typed into his mobile phone, and pressed ‘send’.
‘In your face, Mr Rob,’ he said aloud, even though he was alone. He felt immensely comforted. Rob would be on his way to work, he thought. He pictured Rob, on the Noddy Train, as he without fail called the Docklands Light Railway, heading in to the job he boasted about but hated at PricewaterhouseCoopers or DeloitteDeLaZouch or whatever the company was called.
Rob had made such a noise, when they’d been together as students, about not becoming what he called a ‘spamhat’, his blanket term for anyone richer and older than himself whom he suspected of having taken a lucrative job because they had been – deservedly – bullied at school. Rob had been – deservedly – bullied at school.
Alex imagined – no, knew for a certainty – that his text would ping, or zoing, or chirp onto Rob’s BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever he now had as he swayed along on the train, and that Rob would be excited by it, and affect to have had his day ruined.
Alex, even though it was late, waited five minutes before sending his next text. It was as well to affect not having been saving it up – but at the same time taking a few minutes to imply a plausible albeit startling facility of mind.
‘Inexperienced butler? Sounds like an old film. (3, 5, 3, 2, 5).’
He was woken fifteen minutes later by his phone – on silent – burring against the hard surface of the bedside unit. He reached for it, bleary now, and thumbed the unlock sequence. The little square screen was fish-green. New message.
‘Cnut,’ said Rob’s message.
Alex smiled and sighed, replaced the phone on the bedside table and settled back into a happy sleep.
Red Queen’s encryption team worked on the hard drive they’d recovered from MIC – the drive the boy had couriered across the Atlantic for them and dropped off in Atlanta. The drive was exceptionally hard to crack, but – the cryptologists reported – not impossible. Progress was being made by brute-force computing. Red Queen regarded that as somewhat suspicious. So did Porlock. Still, they persevered. Resources were diverted. Compartment by compartment, data started to come off the disk.
It bugged Red Queen, though, that the casino metrics suggested the device itself was still on the move. The data coming off the hard drive didn’t make much sense, as yet – it certainly didn’t resemble, as Red Queen had initially dared to hope, backup blueprints for the machine. So what did it have to do with anything?
Ellis, MIC’s head of security, had been working on the hard drive too, or rather working on its absence. MIC couriered several items of varying sensitivity between its offices in London, Washington and Atlanta every day; to say nothing of the material it moved between narco states in South America and AK-infested government buildings in Lagos, Freetown, Mogadishu and Khartoum. If any of those packages went missing, Ellis was informed.
Commercial competitors – as senior management insisted on calling the private interests, most of them governments rather than companies, and most of them clients rather than competitors, that tended to be interested in ripping MIC off – needed to be discouraged from obtaining sensitive data.
Ellis’s anti-theft policy was twofold. The first side of it was straightforward. They used a dozen or more different courier companies in each country, randomising each job and booking them independently and at late notice. All electronic data that they couriered was encrypted and tagged; and all disappearances were investigated.
The second part of the anti-theft policy was slightly more complicated. In the first place, MIC couriered something in the order of five or six times as many packages as it needed to. Only very select personnel knew which contained the important data and which were heavily encrypted dummies. These were what Ellis liked to call ‘Barium Meal Experiments’: they’d tie up a lot of time and expertise, and once broken would yield complex, useless or deliberately misleading information. Their chief purpose was to cause their interceptors to give themselves away by acting on a red herring – a piece of bogus market-sensitive information that might cause a greedy dictator to tilt at a stock, or a hint that the opposition had bought a surface-to-air missile package for which MIC sold the only effective countermeasure. Sometimes it was more important and more profitable to know who was ripping you off than to prevent them doing so.
They were also, most of them, laden with the sort of high-end Trojan viruses that would install a nice back door, for MIC, in their hosts’ computer systems.
They knew, for instance, that the Atlanta package had travelled by air to New York within a few hours of its disappearance from the courier company. But the signal from its tag had abruptly cut out on arrival. It had either been discovered or encased in concrete, or discovered and then encased in concrete.
In New York, the tag had not been discovered, nor had it had been encased in concrete. But it was deep underground, with the DEI’s cryptographers. And it was nearly a day before those cryptographers fully cracked it. And a bit over a day when they realised what had happened.
‘Like something gift-wrapped in a cartoon,’ Porlock said without a trace of mirth when he made his report. ‘Black on face. Hair sticking up.’
‘Swine,’ said Red Queen.
The quarantined network they’d been using to open the drive had quietly suffered the computer-virus equivalent of Ebola and would take more time and energy to cure than it had taken to break the encryption in the first place. Among the effects of the virus was that every computer in the network was quietly trying to get in contact with a remote ISP – almost certainly one of MIC’s secure nodes – four times per second. They were doing so in vain, since the network wasn’t wired to the outside world. But it made Red Queen think of the magic harp in the fairy story, screaming and screaming from under Jack’s coat that it had been stolen.
The data on the drive had been mud. One programmer speculated irritably that the extensive personnel file for a company named ‘Herring Enterprises’ – they checked: it had no personnel; it was a Cayman Islands shell – was a private joke.
The DEI’s programmer was right. It was a private joke. But it was not a private joke that Ellis was much laughing at. Ellis, too, had missed a trick. When he was first told about the missing package, he had given it little thought. Let his subordinates work it.
He was more preoccupied with trying to find this probability machine, and the routine loss of a BME – as, on checking, he saw it was – was neither here nor there. It was only when it occurred to him that it was Atlanta and that it was about the same time this kid had given those idiotic thugs of his the slip there, that he went back and wondered about a connection.
Could the boy have stolen the package? Could the machine have caused the package to be stolen?
Ellis looked at the loss of the package. It had gone through the airport, routinely, with no problems. The representative of the courier company had picked up the briefcase with the hard drive. But the closure of the Atlanta offices after the incident with the frogs – another thing that had installed the flickering jelly bean of an incipient migraine in the corner of Ellis’s field of vision – had meant that he’d returned with the package to his own company’s offices with a view to putting it in the safe. Where he’d been mugged and relieved of the suitcase. Two muggers – he didn’t get much of a look at them. The loss had been reported to the police, but Ellis didn’t hold out much hope of recovering it. Not with someone flying it instantly to New York, which was not what normal muggers did.
Ellis couldn’t see a way that the boy, even if he had had an accomplice, could have known about this package arriving at the same time as him; nor where it would be going; nor why he would be interested in it in any case.
Ellis found out which courier company MIC had used, and telephoned their UK office. He was rude to a series of dispatchers until a senior manager looked it up on the computer.
‘His name was Alex Smart,’ said the manager. ‘Yup. First time we’ve used him, according to our records. The usual thing – student or something, no criminal record, answered one of our ads online. He got a short-notice flight to Atlanta. We got your parcel sent. Why? Is there a -’
Ellis hung up. Well. That explained how the kid got to Atlanta. MIC bought him a ticket.
If Ellis had been more puckish, he would have said ‘Swine’, but Ellis instead swore unimaginatively, hammered the phone cradle with two fingers and then started to dial again.
‘What I have been trying to do,’ says Banacharski later in the week. His sentences, still, are not always coming out entire. ‘To build a machine. To undo – these knots.’
They have spent a long day together. As usual, Isla has been circumspect. She has tried to make herself useful – has cleaned, even, where the opportunity to do so without looking rude has presented itself. She has retreated when it seems right – particularly when he has insisted that it is time for him to meditate. It hasn’t been a problem for her. She has taken herself off on a walk.
She has started to get used to his moods. She doesn’t think that she’s going to learn from him what she’d hoped – still less, get him to come back to civilisation. This was the thing that, though she didn’t admit it fully, she’d fantasised about: she, as Perseus, with the gorgon’s head to show off. When she was little her dad taught her how to fish. She liked the idea, always, of the skill of bringing something in that was stronger than the line by which it was caught. She has an ego, Isla.
So she doesn’t think she’s going to bring him in. But she has started to feel for him. She reproaches herself. She always felt for him – even when she’d only read about him she felt she understood him. But now, she feels like she has a responsibility. She sees his mind, like a boat straining at its moorings in a heavy tide, and she feels sorry for him. She wants to soothe it.
‘In the war. My father died. My mother lived. My little sister died. I lived. Chance. How do we live with that? How, Isla Holderness? How do we live with it? It is impossible. Nobody can. Nobody can do that.’ He seems half to be talking to himself.
Then he changes tack again. ‘There are walls in the air.’ His hand, in a chopping motion, comes down between her face and his. ‘Everything is so close to us. These walls: a membrane’s distance. We think – our physics, already, almost shows it if you know how to look. Every moment spawns infinities – new universes. A sparrow falls, a sparrow doesn’t fall – you know that?’
‘The Bible,’ Isla says.
‘Yes. The Bible. Every sparrow, a new universe. Every feather, a new universe. Every wingbeat. What happens -’
‘This is the parallel universes idea you’re talking about?’
Banacharski waves, impatiently. ‘Not parallel. No such thing as parallel. That’s what the devil, as I told you, made impossible -’
‘You’re talking metaphorically?’
‘Yes! Metaphorically. Yes, I am. Exactly that.’ He looks, riddlingly, pleased with her – but not as if she has said something he agrees with, she thinks, so much as that he knows she didn’t understand. ‘What he does to the measurements, the devil, that’s it. Everything curves. Not parallel. Like soap bubbles, these infinities. Everything touching everything else. You could just step through. If you could only see the walls. If you could hear what all those versions of you are saying, just on the other side. Think of what happens. How do you think of it? You go forward, yes?’
‘Ah. Yes?’
‘Look.’ He wiggles his hand like a fish. ‘Your choice, this or that. Your chance, this or that. You jump out of the trench and the precise angle of the bullet from a machine gun two hundred metres away -’ he dashes the tips of his fingers on his temple ‘finished. You are hiding in a house, and your baby daughter then – just then, as the guard comes by – she hiccups or she starts to cry – finished.’
Isla just looks, keeps looking at him.
‘You think this is a chance in a million. This: what kills you. What lets you live. But go back. How you got there. Every tiny chance builds on another tiny chance before it, and before that, to the beginning of the universe. Why are you there then? Why do your parents meet, and why do their parents meet, and how does that one sperm in each one meet that egg? If you look at it like that, look, it is impossible, no? Impossible. My speaking, like this, to you, how did we get here? Start back then. It is like a maze. Take any wrong turning of an infinite number and look: we are not here.’
He rocks, now, back and forwards a little on his haunches. His right hand turns and turns in his beard. Isla sits on the chair. She catches sight of herself with her hands folded over each other in her lap, primly, like a figure in a medieval painting.
‘The only way that what we have here – something as improbable as you, and me, sitting in this room together – can take place is if everything that could have happened, somewhere else, already has. You follow me? So this is what I am working with. How do you solve a maze?’
Isla feels the length of the pause. He is looking at her.
‘You follow the left-hand wall?’
Banacharski wheezes with laughter.
‘Backwards! You start at the end. Then every fork, it is not a problem – it is not a thing that can go two ways. It is just a node that is leading you back home. I mean this -’ he waves his hands again – ‘metaphorically.’
He stands up, now, and takes a step or two – agitating his hands.
‘I mean that chance is an illusion,’ he says. ‘We think one thing happens and not another. But really everything happens. No time passes and nothing is lost and nobody dies. They are living in an infinity of universes, at every moment, for all time…’
His eyes look at her, as if from far away. Isla feels creepily, sorrowfully, a sense of how broken his mind is. She knows, then, that she can’t stay. She shouldn’t have come.
‘Just here -’ He fishes, again, at his imaginary wall in the air. His lips are moving into a sad smile, and his eyes are wet. ‘So near. Imagine if you could pass through these walls. Imagine something that would make everything exist at once. Imagine if at every little point you weren’t seeing universes splitting off, but universes coming together. You will see the maze entire – it will be not a maze but a pattern, you see? Like on wallpaper. A decoration, not a prison.’
Isla’s cheeks feel stiff. She smiles at him, arranging her face somewhere between quizzical and accepting.
‘Everything that is lost is present,’ he says. ‘See? If you can just reach through, with your mind, through the wall, into the place where something never happens, or doesn’t happen yet… Everything that has gone is here. Anything can happen because everything will happen. Everything true, everything existing, everything here, now, always…’
He looks at her almost imploringly. ‘Nobody dies. Nobody goes away. Nothing is ever lost.’
The following day, Isla tells him that she has to leave. Banacharski looks momentarily stricken. Then he shrugs.
It is a bright morning, chillier than the previous one.
‘Walk with me,’ he says. They set off up the hill behind the house. At first Banacharski says nothing; then, to her surprise, he links arms with her. The slight tang of him on the air makes her not revolted, but a little sad.
‘I have enemies, Isla,’ he says. ‘You know, when you first came here, you wanted to know why I left the Sorbonne? That was one of the reasons I had to go. I had the real fear that they would kill me. No joke. They would kill me before my work was finished.’
‘But, Nicolas – why would anyone have wanted to kill you? Your work was abstract. You were a mathematician, an academic. You’re just being -’ she dared it; after a week, she dared it – ‘paranoid.’
‘No!’ he snaps. ‘That is how they try to discredit me. How they try to make me lower my guard. Paranoid! Tchoh! Even then, I knew my work would have – implications. I let something slip in a lecture, and one of their agents – Oh, believe me, Isla Holderness. They have agents everywhere. Everything is connected to everything else, and in this spiderweb there are good spiders and there are bad spiders.’
He has lost his thread.
‘You said something in a lecture.’
‘Yes, yes. Somebody wrote to me. Frederick Nieman, he called himself. Some kind of joke, I think: Niemand. “Fred Nobody.” That was how I was to know him. He said he was interested in my researches into causality. I was not working on causality, then. Not openly. I was still a geometer. But at the time I had started to think about these things: about geometries that were not strictly mathematical: geometries of desire and intention. Nieman had happened on my work by chance, he said. He understood some of the implications. He foresaw a great future for me, he said. And he would pay.’
Banacharski huffs, a little, as they reach the top of the hill. She feels him leaning more heavily on her arm.
‘They wanted what I was doing, for them and them alone, but they did not understand what I was doing. They thought I could make them a weapon: something that would change outcomes. Make magic bullets. If you sell weapons, you know, everything looks like a weapon.
‘I knew, of course – he did not even need to say it – that if I did not do what they wanted they would kill me. I was afraid. I told him that I would share my work with them. This was a company that had done great wrong. It worked, during the war, with the Nazi government. Many, many people were killed with their weapons. But I was scared.’ He looks ashamed, but at the same time a little defiant. ‘I told them I could build them a probability bomb. For that, I told them, they needed to pay, and I would need isolation.
‘So they paid me, helped me disappear. I disappeared – this was the big joke – after I resigned in protest at the discovery that their money was funding my chair at the Institute. They liked that. Double bluff.’
Something in Banacharski’s face changes, like when a shift in the angle of the light turns a transparent surface opaque. ‘I became my own ghost,’ he says.
‘The statement you gave, though,’ says Isla, ‘about the systematic corruption of science by the military?’
‘Yes,’ says Banacharski. ‘They let me attack them because they thought it would help. I was telling the truth. Triple bluff. There is no bomb. There never was. I am engineering reality – not assembling some toy out of nuts and bolts.’
They walk on a bit. Isla watches a small brown bird prick and preen in the grass, the beak and head moving sharply.
‘But Nieman,’ he says, as if more to himself than Isla, ‘I think Nieman is coming back.’
‘Back? He’s been here?’ Isla asks.
‘No,’ says Banacharski. ‘We haven’t met. Only letters. He writes to me on yellow paper. Always yellow paper. Like the paper I use. I am afraid about meeting him. But I think he is coming for me anyway.’
‘What did you do with their money?’ Banacharski looks at her sharply. She worries, for an instant, she went too far. She sees something of cunning in his expression – a decision to say something almost taken, then a decision not to.
‘You must concentrate, Isla. I stalled them. My work is nearly finished. But they may come for me. They have been losing patience. You know, you need to take care for yourself…’
He is now looking down at his wrecked flip-flops.
‘There is something I would like you to have of mine, Isla. A gift. You have been someone who has shown me kindness.’
Banacharski reaches into the pocket of his filthy trousers and produces something. Isla sees it glint, and then she startles at the pressure as he presses it into her palm. As he does so he looks furtively about him, into the distant trees, the empty ground between.
He withdraws his hand and she looks into her own. It is a ring, right where her lifelines cross – a simple silver thing, with a figure-of-eight design sweeping over the top of it.
‘It was my mother’s,’ says Banacharski. ‘I have nobody. Now I give it to you.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I have nobody. You take it. That ring will be – how should I say it? – a lucky charm for you.’
He gives her a strong, fond look. ‘Borrow it, then. Think of it as a loan. Come back at the end of the summer. Bring it back to me. God keep you safe.’
Isla sets off for home the following day, walking down into the local town, from where she arranges a taxi – it takes her half a day – to get back to Toulouse. That is the last time she sees Banacharski alive.
As Hands described to Red Queen, they continued to exchange letters. But Banacharski’s letters had become wilder. Isla, back in Cambridge, felt uneasy – as if there was someone shadowing her. When she went out every morning to get the newspapers, she found herself casting suspicious glances down the aisles at the Co-op. There’d always be someone holding up a pot of yogurt or a tin of sweetcorn, fondling it abstractly, reading the label with studious distraction.
She thought for a time that she might be going mad – that Nicolas’s paranoia was rubbing off on her. The magazine continued to forward his letters. Sometimes, the way they were folded in the envelope, a certain looseness about the glue, made her feel like they might have been tampered with. She took to hiding them.
At the same time, other letters started to come – more personal ones, addressed directly to her. The handwriting on the envelopes of these was different – more restrained – though the writing inside was the same.
In the last of these, he wrote: ‘Don’t worry. You have my love. I am nearing the centre of the artichoke. Do not trust. Destroy.’
Something, she thought, had started to confuse him. The letters were in the same handwriting, but they seemed to be from two different people. The letters that came through the magazine raved about this ‘machine’, which he said was ‘nearly built’. She puzzled over that.
In these letters, he promised her that ‘when the time was right’, he would share his discoveries with her: she was, he said – and here it was triple underlined – ‘the custodian of his legacy’. But he said the time was not yet right. He said he was ‘storing some parts of the machine’ in a place known only to him.
The other letters, the ones that she told nobody about, were love letters, of a sort. That is, they did not profess love directly. But they were personal. They were trying to make a connection. And they talked at length – great length – about his childhood, and what he remembered about the war. Much was about his mother, Ana, the presumed owner of the ring he had entrusted to her. She had lived through the war but cancer got her while Banacharski was in his teens. He talked about his first memory of her, rocking in a chair with him, sitting in her lap wrapped in a woollen blanket. That was at his grandparents’ house in Allenstein, what is now Olsztyn in northern Poland. He said he remembered how the blanket had tasted: of dust and pine.
Banacharski enclosed, in these letters, pages from a manuscript he said was ‘my mother’s testament’. It seemed to be a memoir of some sort, but it was told in the third person, annotated in pencil by Nicolas, and quoted from in his letters. Between the two narratives – and what of the history of his life remained on the public record – Isla was able to piece together the sequence of events.
One fragment described Ana Banacharski’s courtship with Nicolas’s father, Sergei Mitrov, in Berlin in the late 1920s. Mitrov was a Russian anarchist who had fetched up there after fleeing the Bolsheviks. She had moved to the city as a student, and they met after she attended a meeting in the radical bookshop where he was staying. She had fallen pregnant, and they moved through Europe together living, unmarried, as a family.
Then came the Spanish Civil War. Mitrov joined the International Brigades, and Ana moved back to her parents’ in East Prussia. Nicolas would then have been seven. Three years later, when Germany annexed Poland, and the persecution of Allenstein’s Polish-speaking minority began, Ana fled with Nicolas to France. Ana’s story described the old man, her father, waving from the door of the town house – his moustache, his mild smile and the turn-ups on his trousers. It was the last time she saw him.
Mother and son spent the war years in a series of refugee camps. ‘Her Nicolas, her little Buddha, her watchful child,’ her narrator wrote. ‘Ana knew she would have to leave him.’
Nicolas’s own narrative picked up here. He talked about his memories, the watchful child reporting. At some point they had been reunited with Mitrov. He remembered his mother, terribly distressed, in the camp outside Paris. He had worked out afterwards, only from his mother’s memoir, that he had had a sister who was stillborn at about that time.
But in 1942 Mitrov was separated from Ana and his son by what Banacharski called ‘a malign chance’. His letters stopped coming. He did not survive the war. Nicolas wrote, curiously, that he had no memories of his father at all.
These communications resembled love letters not in anything explicit, so much as in their intimacy of address, their notes of tenderness, the parallels they drew between past and present. There had been a girl he had known in the refugee community at Chambon-sur-Lignon, he said, called Kara. Isla reminded him of her. She had resembled Isla, he said, though he did not say in what way. He sketched out a chaste friendship between the fourteen-year-old Nicolas and sixteen-year-old Kara, complicated by longing. Her father was Danish – a wealthy man in the antiques business. He had not encouraged their friendship. They’d been separated, though he’d had letters from her after the war. She hadn’t died. But she had disappeared. In his early twenties Nicolas had tried to find her without success.
‘Gone,’ he wrote. ‘Another gone. Another lost to time.’
His letters seemed confiding, tender, anxious that what had happened to him would be known, and his connection with her maintained.
‘Chance – or the illusion of chance – is what divides us one from the other. It is chance that carries us apart. Chance that kills us. But what if chance could make us live? What if chance brought us together again? It is just a matter of seeing it right. Of turning it around.’
Isla wrote back, in one letter: ‘Nicolas, you say it is chance that divides us. But is also chance that makes us live. You lost people by accident. But you also found them by accident. You found me by accident. Every human being on the face of the earth is here – you said it yourself – by chance.’
‘You misunderstand. Deliberately?’ he wrote back. ‘For everyone who is born hundreds of millions of people – real people – are never born. Who speaks for them? They are nobody. Who will rescue them? What if you could imagine a world in which those people live and are not alone and do not grow old and die? And what if by imagining you could make it so?’
In early autumn, via EtUdes/RecOltes, came another letter, sharper in tone than any of the previous. It wondered, with crude sarcasm, whether she was in the employ of ‘the other side’. It asked her to come and visit him. It said he had something to give her. But before, it said, she needed to answer him one simple question: ‘Nobody has been reading my letters. I have proof positive. I need to know that you are who you are. So answer me this: what is a metre? Reply quickly.’
Isla called her colleague Mike about this. She was worried, she said. She sat in the kitchen of her house in Cambridge and showed him the last letter from Banacharski. What could he mean? Mike shook his head. ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘Your boyfriend is, let’s not forget, mad as a badger.’
‘A metre,’ she said. ‘It’s a measurement. He’s preoccupied by measurements. And he’s trying to build a machine. He says he’s finished it.’
‘Clear as flaming mud, love. I’d leave it. Write back and tell him it’s something to do with Napoleon. He probably thinks he’s something to do with Napoleon.’ Mike seemed moderately pleased with the witticism. He fetched himself another of Isla’s biscuits and moved on to some faculty gossip.
‘What is a metre?’ he said as he left. ‘A hundred centimetres, eh?’
Isla did not show Mike the letters she had got privately. And she did not tell him about Ana’s ring. She was still turning it over in her mind two days later. She was leaving for her 10 a.m. seminar, running late and with her hair still slightly wet against her neck, when she picked up the post from the tiled hallway. There were two letters, forwarded from Nice. Both were bulging, as if there was more paper in them than their envelopes were strictly designed to bear.
She tucked them under the arm of her duffel coat as she stepped out into the street. She slipped open the first one with a thumbnail, her bag on her lap, as she settled on the top deck of the bus on the way in to the faculty. She felt her cheeks grow cold as she read.
The yellow legal paper was in some places torn with the force of the handwriting. Block capitals alternated with lower case, no one letter joined up with another, and words of German and French mashed into English sentences. The ruled lines on the paper were only ever a loose guide when Banacharski was excitable – but here the lines of his script were flapping off them like an untethered mainsheet in a gale.
It was a wad of incoherent fury, calling her a ‘thief’, a ‘liar’ and a ‘Judas’. It accused her of working with ‘the enemy, the murderers, the Moloch’. The second letter was shorter, and barely in prose at all. On the first page, her name was written in block capitals, dead centre, and a series of numbers scribbled underneath – separated by dashes and subject to a whole succession of transformations that brought them out to new numbers. She leafed through. He was using the letters of her name – it would be Kabbalah, she guessed; he had spoken to her about using Kabbalistic practice for, he said, exploring ‘the relationship between speech and number’.
On the following pages the letters of her name had been anagrammed, and further manipulated into numbers; or, the letters of her name were written out as a matrix, and multiplied by another matrix constructed from the same letters. Her eyes started to swim. He couldn’t have slept. Nobody could physically have achieved the rate and ferocity of work in these letters – would not physically have been able to write them down – in the time between them.
They were both dated the same day, though they bore different postmarks and had clearly been held up a few days between Paris and London. Isla, scouring her memory, couldn’t swear to it that they hadn’t been written on the same day as the original letter posing the riddle. The final page of this second letter ended: ‘Nothing comes of nothing. Nobody’s here. We are divided by nothing. Forgive me.’ His signature at the bottom was also bristling with numbers, all of them cancelled to zero.
She missed her stop. She was twenty-five minutes late for her seminar by the time she got there and she noticed her hands trembling as she wrote on the whiteboard. She felt very afraid. She cancelled drinks with Mike and Jude. She spent the afternoon talking to the faculty and the college about a temporary, emergency leave of absence. The first flight she could get to Toulouse was the following lunchtime. It would cost her. She didn’t think about that.
The following morning, a third letter arrived. On the envelope it said: ‘To the Supposed Isla Holderness.’ She read it on the way to the airport.
‘You are not who you say you are. I am not who I was. Nobody is here,’ it began. Almost every other sentence contained a sarcastic intimacy – ‘my dearest “Isla” ’; ‘my trusted “Miss Holderness” ’ – as if parodying the man who had written her those private letters about his life over the past couple of months. The brusque kindness she remembered from the shack was gone. She found it unbearable.
It ended with a signature: not ‘Nicolas’ or even ‘NB’ this time, but ‘Fred Nieman’.
And so, fast-forward to Isla, walking round the final curve of the approach to Banacharski’s shack, feeling that she knows what she is going to find.
The fire had long gone out, doused in cold rain. But the smell of burning came through, wet burned wood. Droplets stood on melted plastic. The shack was gone – a black stain on the ground, a couple of jutting teeth of carbonised wood. Across the wet grass to either side were wisps and fragments of cinderated paper, the odd rag of sodden yellow in the fingers of the green.
The Calor canister under the wall of the shack had obviously gone. Half of it was there, its skin twisted and blackened. Its shrapnel had half dug turves out of the ground, and the grass was radially scorched on that side. The wooden floor of the shack was gone from the centre, where the fire seemed to have started. There were threads of rug towards the outside – where the stump of a piling emerged from poured concrete foundations. A stick of table leg was there.
The wind had blown the fire away up the hill, drying and burning the grass in patches up behind the shack. The beanstalks, the ones nearest the hut, were scorched but those towards Isla were intact, if more overgrown than when she had been here. The leaves were blowsy, the season long gone. Isla walked closer.
Too late, she thought. She had run out of time. He was gone.
She twisted a pod off one of the beanstalks, and thumbed it open. Inside, a broad bean – the only one full-size – sat in its velvety white cushion like a ring in a jeweller’s box.
She walked round the shack, looking for him. She thought of calling for him, but it felt wrong, somehow, to raise her voice. He was gone. She knew that. Not dead – she didn’t know why she was so sure of that, but she somehow felt confident of it – but gone. Beyond her help. Nobody could help him.
Her good Gore-Tex boots kept the wet out. She remembered him drawing his diagram: ‘And here is the map of Nicolas Banacharski in the world. And here is the map of Miss Isla Holderness in the world.’ She understood now why this was strangely comforting.
In among the bean shoots the chickens picked, pecking morosely at the wet grass, shivering their wings. Had he left them? Their henhouse was intact. She peeked into it. There was straw in there, and the hopper was dry, and full of grain.
Isla walked back down into town, and caused the police to be called. They came up, took a statement – Isla struggling a little with her French – filed a missing persons report, and late that evening told her she was free to go home. She spent the night in an auberge, and set off the following morning, early, resolute, sad: telling herself she had done everything she could and not believing it for a second.
When she arrived back in Cambridge, she came home to find that she had been burgled. Her laptop had gone, as well as her video recorder, the contents of her underwear drawer and medicine cabinet, and the nearly full bottle of vodka she had kept on the dresser. A pane of the front bay window had been smashed. A creditable but, finally, unsuccessful attempt had been made to remove the television.
Also, her jewellery box was gone – and with it, which somehow at that moment felt more important to her than even her own christening presents, Ana’s ring. Isla had sat down on her living-room floor and, before she called the police, cried for a long time.
Three days later, Isla’s house was burgled again. This time, it was Banacharski’s letters to her that went. It happened during the day, while she was at the library preparing a lecture. No glass was broken. Nothing of value was taken. Nobody was spotted at the scene.