‘No luggage, Sir?’ the taxi driver asked casually.
Luggage? The dim remembrance of the impact of his fist upon a blue travelling bag on a luggage rack entered his mind. Well, that might have been coincidence. The man might have put it in left luggage. But then he remembered Ahmed’s anxious glancing at his watch and the sly grin as he handed Gabriel the mobile phone. He saw in his mind the hands of the clock on the cafeteria wall as they left, and calculated backwards through the five minutes to the time just before the young man had left them.
Gabriel felt a sharp burning pain in the tip of his index finger – the finger that had touched the last of the digits. He remembered particularly straining to hear the ring tone that did not come.
He felt his body swaying and clutched wildly at the top of the open taxi door.
The radio in the cab was playing.
‘They’ve really done it his time, the bastards,’ the cabby said. ‘Two trains at once, passing each other apparently.’
MUNTJAC
Christopher’s morning had not been kind. First it was Alice from the almoner’s office, stepping uninvited into the notional space around the table that was barred to all but himself when an autopsy was in progress. Then there was Bertie, his assistant, clattering about on the second table, saw and chisel in hand, as if he were in a calypso band. Fortunately there were no police today. Time, then, for one more body before lunch with Alice.
Though the instruments were already laid out for him, he rearranged them – unnecessarily, as he always did – in accordance with that tiny manifestation of autism known only to his family. He called for Bertie to help him pull out the drawer and together they manoeuvred the ice-cold cadaver onto the stainless steel table. Then he remembered it was the one with the curious history.
It was clear the man had died through asphyxiation caused by vomit blocking the airways. What had caused that was not immediately apparent. It was a while after he started probing the stomach contents that he found it, the object that would transform his day: a tiny glistening ball hardly larger than a pea that dropped from his forceps and tinkled across the steel surface before coming to rest on what he saw was one of its many faceted surfaces. It first crossed his mind that the object was a perfectly cut diamond, so brightly did it refract the light from the lamp above, but on closer inspection there was no doubt it was metallic. He looked up once to see Alice gesticulating at the partition window, then waved her away and put it from his mind that they had agreed to lunch together.
Under his magnifying lens the object was not just a simple sphere. The colour of each of the many facets was distinctly unique and beneath the surface of each he believed he could see – although sense was probably a better word – tiny oscillations in the refracted light. A cloud began to form before his eyes, followed by a throbbing at each temple. But that was just the beginning.
No-one saw – not even Alice – that when they lifted him from the floor the metal sphere rolled as if propelled by its own energy along the gully and into the drain, from which – although of course no-one looked for it – it was never recovered.
Exactly a week later Christopher – or rather his cadaver – suffered the indignity of being autopsied on the very same table. And then Bertie took Alice for lunch.
The Robinsons had moved to Suffolk in anticipation of their joint retirements. For George it was a logical progression from the chic, but rather dismal, town house in Hackney to a listed farmhouse with three acres where he could bed himself in for retirement. Alma accompanied him reluctantly, not realising that the bane of her life, the urban fox – one of which had threatened their grandson Tommy in his pram – had country cousins with a taste for guinea fowl and chickens. That was minor, though, compared with a new arrival some two years into their translatio in paradisum. There had been odd sightings of the hound-like creature – hardly a deer at all – in the village, but it was only when, one morning, George found his rose-heads decimated and the agapanthus leaves truncated – with characteristic teeth marks – that they knew there was a problem. At first seldom seen, the sand-coloured beasts quickly became less timid. In full view of the house they cropped the lower strata of the laurel bushes, so that the animals lurking in the undergrowth became more visible below the browsing line. And so with the vegetables. The one obvious solution – to fence the garden – failed at the first hurdle when George paced out the quarter-mile perimeter and Alma resolutely refused to forego their holiday in Ibiza to meet the cost. So they fell back on simple solutions: devices which emitted frequencies that allegedly only deer could hear; talking boxes that only excited curiosity; and, as a last resort, an imitation fox that jumped out of a box to flashing lights when triggered by movement (usually George’s). By the end of the summer the muntjacs – which had now multiplied alarmingly – showed only disdain, while the bird population, to Alma’s dismay, had upped and left. In a last desperate measure George fenced the flower and vegetable beds with wire netting, but admitted defeat when one of the creatures, having jumped the fence, had caught its leg in the netting when chased by George and had to be cut free, to the sound of loud bellows from both parties.
So ended the first skirmishes in the war of attrition. George and Alma spent the winter thinking laterally and seeking help on-line. Following the advice of the Royal Horticultural Society to plant species that muntjacs don’t like (prefer would be a better term), following radical replanting in the spring the garden took on a more homogenous look with the proliferation of thorn-bearing and dull-leaved shrubs. The result was that the browsing line of the specimens that had survived had become higher. ‘They can stand on their back feet,’ Alma exclaimed, realising that the heavily-blossomed branches of the potentially fruit-laden trees would sooner or later come within reach.
‘It’s your mind-set that needs to change,’ Ferdinand, their neighbour, told them. Think of them as an asset, a decorative addition to your estate, to be cherished.’ George thought he saw Ferdinand try to stifle a guffaw of laughter as he turned to walk away, but Alma had grasped the message. ‘They are rather cute, aren’t they George? And have you seen the little ones – they’re so sweet.’
But George had one last ace up his sleeve. ‘They can’t abide male pheromones,’ a guest at one of their dinner parties had told them. ‘They see you as territorial – perhaps even sexual – competitors.’ So while it was still light, and foregoing their desserts (although imbibing an extra glass of beer each), the males, young and old, tramped into the garden, stationed themselves strategically along the flower and vegetable beds, and freely urinated. The following morning George pulled the bedroom curtains apart to reveal two stags locked in combat on the lawn. It was then that he realised outside help was needed.
It came in the form of a master’s degree student from the department of animal behaviour at Avonbridge Polytechnic. Wayne Parfitt was looking for a project for his second year dissertation. ‘One of our brightest stars,’ his tutor had assured George, adding, ‘Something of an oddball, though.’ Against Alma’s better judgement, George invited him to stay. That first morning, over coffee in the kitchen, Wayne expounded his theory of niche adaptation, for which the muntjac deer afforded an unparalleled example. This was partly because the whole population – now expanding rapidly across southern England – was derived from a single escapee from a herd imported from China, known to Wayne and his companions as Fleance. ‘When you eliminate genetic variability,’ Wayne said, ‘the data is so much more robust.’ George could just about see that. Alma was more impressed by Wayne’s apparent affinity with Shakespeare, which to George was at odds with the dreadlocks, rings in the ears and bangles at the wrist. But in spite of that they gave him the room vacated by the couple’s teenage son Tommy, who was at boarding school. Wayne kept himself to himself, at least at the beginning.