It was still just light in Glisson Road when Mary Hollis arrived home.
The bag in her hand, from the Marks & Spencer at the station, contained a fish pie, a small bag of prepared carrot batons and a half-bottle of red wine with a pink twist-off cap. Summer was on the way out. She felt a faint winter chill through her blouse.
She put the bag down and fished in her handbag for her keys. As she did so, a movement – barely more than a disturbance of the air – registered in her peripheral vision. She glanced briefly up the street towards the road that led to the station. Nothing there.
Silly woman, she said to herself aloud. Silly old bag. Only since she retired last year, though, had she started to notice herself looking over her shoulder when she turned the corner from Hills Road, or feeling nervous if she had to pass a man on the same side of the street. During all the years she worked up at the college, she had regarded the undergraduates as overgrown teenagers – unruly nephews and slatternly nieces, as exasperating and unthreatening as badly trained Labradors.
‘All right, Mrs H?’ bellowed in a cockney accent by a public schoolboy. ‘Where’s your gentleman caller, eh?’
‘Mind your own business.’
Now, already, they had started looking bigger and more strange. If she was out at night and she heard young men walking behind her, she’d dawdle at a bus stop, or pause on the main road under a street light, to let them pass before she turned off. Sometimes, when they looked drunk, she’d make an excuse to drop into a shop.
She was sixty-five, and she realised that she had started thinking of herself as an old woman. She had started thinking about what she looked like to others. Not the little vanities of make-up or hair – but the way her profile was changing. She felt as if she was growing smaller, taking shorter steps – as if she was gradually feeding herself to her fear.
She found her keys in the bottom of her bag, turned the heavy deadlock and rattled the sticky little brass one into the Yale. The hall was dark and smelled of polish. She picked up her supper, and turned on the light.
She tasted copper in her mouth, and felt her face go cold.
The drawer had been pulled out of the hall table and her letters were spilled over the floor. The rug had been pulled up and was rucked up at the other end by the foot of the stairs. Every one of her framed photographs had been knocked from the walls and there were big jagged pieces of broken glass across the floorboards, a different colour where the rug had been.
She felt her skin prickle. She made herself breathe, took a step and reached for the telephone on the hall table. It was an old brown plastic push-button BT model. She’d never owned a mobile phone.
It was when she fumbled the receiver that she realised her hand was shaking. It clattered heavily onto the table. She picked it up and brought it to her ear. There was no dialling tone.
Ahead of her, the darkness leading through to the kitchen seemed to breathe. She wanted to ask whether there was someone still there, but she didn’t want to know the answer and her mouth was too dry to speak.
The door behind her was still open, and the street outside felt suddenly more cold and strange. She took a step away, not wanting to turn her back on the other end of the hall, and pushed her spine against the door jamb. She turned her head to look out. In the dusk just across the street there was an elderly man. He was dishevelled. Above his grey beard there was a kindly, perplexed face. He was standing still, watching her. Then something seemed to startle him. He turned his head sharply, as if looking over his shoulder.
She stepped back out of the house and called to him, or tried to. As she raised her hand, though, he turned and dipped his head, walking back up towards the main road.
‘Sir!’ she yelped. ‘Sir! Excuse me!’
His pace seemed to quicken and then, just as he was coming up to a street light, something she could not account for happened. He seemed, simply, to vanish. There was a shimmer, and where a second ago she had been watching him there was now no more than a heat haze – a smear in the air.
A man’s shadow on the pavement shortened as it approached the street light, then lengthened on the far side, at the pace you might walk on a brisk spring evening, and then disappeared.
By the time the police arrived, it was full dark and Mary was two doors down with Mrs Smart at number 62.
Angela Smart had left an open pan of pasta boiling in the kitchen and opened the door to a tremulous knock. She found the old woman standing there. She wore a shapeless greatcoat and hat, and was clutching a plastic bag from Marks & Spencer up against her chest. She seemed agitated.
‘Mary?’ she had said. She knew Mrs Hollis from the occasional Neighbourhood Watch meeting, and to say hello to in the Co-op, sort of thing. She had long had her pegged as a meddlesome ratbag of the first water. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘I’m terribly sorry to trouble you. I think I’ve – I’ve been burgled. May I use your telephone to call the police?’
There was a moment where it just hung there, and neither woman knew what to say.
‘But come in, of course. Come in. My goodness, were you there? Are you hurt – you poor thing…’
She reached a hand to the other woman’s arm, and saw her shoulder shrink back and her eyes drop. Her hand tightened round the thin green bag.
‘I’m very well, thank you. I’m sorry. I mean, I’m fine. I think they’ve gone – but my telephone isn’t working at the moment.’
Mrs Hollis’s tight politeness was as brittle as porcelain. If she touched her, she felt sure that she’d start to tremble and cry. She didn’t know quite how to cope with that, so she said: ‘Of course. Yes. I’ll put the kettle on.’
She made Mrs Hollis a cup of tea. Mary Hollis, who had not since she was a young woman and been told it was common taken sugar in her tea, had two lumps. Installed on the sofa, she sipped, and scalded her lips, looking around the living room with a bland show of curiosity.
The police showed up a little later. A man and a woman. She, a trim blonde in her early twenties; he, a thyroidal beanpole of a lad who looked barely out of his teens, and whose Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his neck like a fisherman’s float after a motorboat has passed.
The WPC called Mrs Hollis ‘dear’, which would have annoyed her had she been more composed. Her silent companion looked ahead, gulped and bobbed.
They went back into her house a little later. The interior of the house matched the wreckage in the hallway. Her single mattress had been heaved over and there were knife slashes through the fabric of the bed frame.
The little room she used for her study had received the most thorough going-over – books pulled from shelves and scattered open-faced on the floor; slicks of paper spilling from the disembowelled desk. She gasped, little fluttery gasps, as the woman officer asked her, patiently: what’s gone?
She didn’t know. The feeling wasn’t so much loss as violation. And there had not been that much to go, as she would reflect later sitting alone in her ruined room – she declined with a politeness she regretted Mrs Smart’s offer of a bed for the night. No. She couldn’t possibly.
Not that much. They’d left her radio, the old television set. They probably wouldn’t have recognised as valuable the fine old edition of Peter Pan that had been her mother’s, the one with the Rackham illustrations. It, too, had been flung to the ground. She replaced it on the shelf.
The jewellery box on her dressing table had been upturned, its contents scattered onto table and floor below. She fished the big turquoise-and-silver brooch from the carpet when the police left, put it carefully back into the box. She started tidying. Gathering these little precious things back together, amid the destruction of the room, felt like combing the hair on a corpse.
The knife slash through the fabric of the bed frame was especially horrible – a casual, instrumental violence. She imagined herself on the bed, on her back, the knife descending. The man with the knife looking not at her, but through her, towards something else.
‘You must have surprised them,’ the policewoman had said before she left, making a note in her pad.
Mary didn’t think she’d surprised them, still less scared them. Nobody had rushed past her or clattered in the bowels of the house as she opened the door. Nobody had hoofed it over the garden fence. They’d been here, and they’d not wanted her jewellery or her nice books or her television. They’d not cared what they broke.
She fingered the piece of paper the woman had given her – a form, something to do with being a victim of crime – and looked over again at the slash on the bed. Where the knife had hit the frame, the wood had splintered.
Mary had said nothing to the police about the man she thought she saw vanish. She wondered if she’d been hallucinating. She didn’t want them thinking her dotty. Downstairs, she picked up the cushions and replaced them on the sofa. She slept on there that night, still in her clothes.
Mary was right about that much. They had not been interested in her jewellery, the men who had turned over her house, and they would not have been scared of her. They had not, in fact, been interested in her house, her nice books, her jewellery, her television or anything else. They went by the names Davidoff and Sherman, and they had been intending, in fact, to burgle another house altogether.
But the small flat Mike Hollis lived in on the other side of Cambridge from his aunt was a sublet, and the address and phone number appeared in the book under his landlord’s name. So when discreet enquiries were made of Google by the accident-prone employees of MIC Industrial Futures, those enquiries yielded an M. Hollis in Glisson Road. And when those enquiries were cross-checked by the same accident-prone employees with the payroll system of Emmanuel College, Cambridge – a comically easy hack, they had thought – they confirmed ‘M. Hollis’ at that address, and in receipt of the sort of miserly monthly cheque that corresponded to their understanding of what research fellows in mathematics could be expected to earn. They were right about only one thing – research fellows in mathematics do earn about the same as a long-standing college administrator would expect to draw as a pension. But they are paid by the faculty of mathematics, and not by the college.
So, twenty-four hours after ruining Mary Hollis’s home and her peace of mind for no good reason, the two men were standing in a room that smelled of dry-cleaning and swivel chairs and paper plates of stale biscuits covered in cling film.
Davidoff stood with insolent blankness, big hands nested behind his back, chin up. His hair was sandy and his cheeks permanently windburned so he always looked as if he had just shaved with a blunt blade. Sherman was smaller – wire-haired, sallow, all muscle and nerve. He was like a longdog constructed from twisted rubber bands. They were making their report.
Their report was that they had nothing to report. In search of their employer’s fugitive piece of hardware, they had burgled a blameless old woman. On the evidence of her house she, also, knew no more about the device than you’d expect an elderly secretary to know. Then that old man had turned up. They’d no idea if he’d been a husband, a lodger, or what – he’d looked more like a tramp than anything else – but he had appeared as if from nowhere, and Sherman feared – though he did not tell Ellis this – that the guy had got a look at his face.
What had he been doing there? Everything had been quiet. No burglar alarm, no nothing. They’d watched the old woman leave earlier in the day, and lock the front door behind her.
It had given Sherman the fright of his life. The man had just appeared at the top of the stairs and started walking calmly down towards them. Sherman and Davidoff had bolted as soon as they’d seen him.
They had ‘struck out – nil for one’, as Davidoff, wearing his affected Americanism with an irritatingly complacent air, had put it on the way in. Davidoff seemed almost to relish failure; or perhaps he simply liked watching Ellis cross. What was being handed down to MIC’s head of security was, it was reasonable to speculate, about three times as nasty as what he was capable of passing on to those below him.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Ellis, which was his customary overture to a bollocking. He thought it made him sound superior. ‘Gentlemen, I don’t need to remind you that a very great deal of this company’s time and money is invested in the recovery of this device. And I don’t need to remind you, either, that if it falls into the wrong hands – that is, any hands other than our own – my position is going to look very weak indeed.
‘And that means that your position, gentlemen, is going to look even weaker still. This is incredibly fucking important, this thing,’ he said, letting his profanity hang in the air for a bit.
There were people who knew how to swear, Sherman reflected, and people who thought they knew how to swear, and Ellis, with that stupid little vein throbbing self-importantly in his forehead, fell into the latter camp.
Ellis prided himself on his swearing, you could see. It was important for his self-esteem, as an ocean-going civilian sub-craphat, to be able to swear in front of ex-servicemen. Sherman worked really hard to see if he could bring himself to be even the faintest bit intimidated by Ellis. He could not. Davidoff, Sherman could respect. Davidoff was a squarehead, but he was quite a dangerous squarehead. Ellis was… His thoughts drifted off.
‘This is the future of this company. We own this thing. We paid for it. And our proprietors are not going to sit back and give it away for free to any teenage geeks, Islamist loons, Marxist wackjobs, or any fucking fucking blue-hatted save-the-world fucking ponce-fucker.’
Ponce-fucker, eh?
‘Fortunately, we have a lead. Our friend in the States has learned of a young man connected to the Banacharski Ring who has just unexpectedly upped and flown across the Atlantic. No warning. Just went. And there’s no good reason we can see why he might have decided suddenly to go on holiday by himself.’
Ellis knitted his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles.
‘His name is Alex Smart. Postgraduate student, close associate of this Hollis. While we were looking at the supervisor, this lad skipped out and there’s very good reason to believe that he has the device. He was booked on a flight for San Francisco, but he wasn’t flying direct. For no reason we can readily understand, unless he was trying to discourage pursuit, he flew via Atlanta. Two different airlines. Tickets booked at different times – the first through an agent. Only the second was on his own credit card. But the onward flight was grounded by the hurricane. He never got back on a plane, according to our intel.’
Intel? thought Sherman. He noticed that Ellis had a monogram on his shirt. He enjoyed hating him for a bit.
‘We’ve lost track of him,’ Ellis continued. ‘But so have they. So enough messing about. Do not shoot anyone if you can help it, do not get shot yourself, and if and when you find it helpful to do something illegal, do not get caught doing it. I need scarcely remind you that we have no status either in the UK or in the States. You are private citizens. Whatever favours our proprietors are able to call in when from time to time we find ourselves in a legal grey area, you can be sure they will not call in for you. If you get in trouble, MIC will disavow you so fast your heads will spin.’
‘Disavow’ could mean lots of things. Which was, Sherman thought, probably why the two of them were being better paid than they would be if they’d been working for private hire even in Iraq.
Ellis looked at them both, one after the other, and then enunciated, slowly: ‘Go to America, find him, and get our toy.’
‘America’s quite big,’ said Davidoff. ‘How do you suggest we go about that?’
Sherman was surprised when Ellis replied: ‘There is one idea. Look – this device affects the way probability works, as we understand it. Like a magnet in iron filings. We think the effect is more powerful when it’s closer by. But it’s eccentric. For some reason one of the things it seemed to affect strongly, if the literature is to be believed, are these.’
Ellis, who had remained sitting throughout this conversation, reached into the drawer of his desk. He pulled out something attached to a tangle of white wires and put the tangle on the desk.
‘There’s one each,’ he added.
‘The literature,’ said Sherman.
Davidoff’s big hand went down first. He fished up a small square of plastic that brought some of the white wires with it. He looked at it.
‘This is an iPod,’ he said.
‘An iPod Shuffle, yes,’ said Ellis. ‘It’s preloaded.’
Sherman picked the other one up and looked at it.
‘What are we supposed to do with these?’
‘Listen to them,’ said Ellis. ‘Listen for patterns. Songs that seem to keep repeating; runs of the same artist; albums that come out in order.’ He looked a little sheepish. ‘Even things like… songs that begin with the same word, or something.’
‘This is what we’re supposed to use to hunt down this super-weapon, or whatever it is. An iPod. Are you having a laugh?’
‘I hate rock music,’ said Sherman.
Three hours later he and Davidoff were on a plane.