‘Yes, exactly!’
‘And a little while ago, after we spoke on the phone, I understood. We’re still trapped in this nightmare, Yoyo. It pretends we’re awake, but we aren’t. We’re watching an illusion. It’s far from over.’ He sighed. ‘I’m actually obsessed by Hydra! I have to go on working on this case. Clearing out the cellar in which I’ve been burying people alive for years. Hydra is turning into the model of my life and the question of how it’s going to go on from here. I have to face up to these ghosts to get rid of them, even if it costs me my courage or my reason. I can’t, won’t, go on like this. I can’t bear living like this, do you understand? I want to wake up at last.’
Otherwise we will be trapped for ever in an imaginary world, he thought. Then we won’t be proper people, we’ll only ever be the echoes of our unresolved past.
‘And – have you kept on working on the case? On our case?’
‘Yes.’ Jericho nodded. ‘Over the past two hours. When you arrived, I was about to phone Madrid.’
‘Madrid?’
‘An oil company called Repsol.’
He saw her face light up, so he told her about his research, familiarised her with Loreena’s last email and introduced her to his theories. With every word Hydra slithered further into that dark loft, stretched her necks, fixed her pale yellow eyes on them. In their effort to shake the monster off, they had conjured it up, but something had changed. The monster didn’t come to ambush and chase them, but because they had lured it, and for the first time Jericho felt stronger than the snake. Finally he dialled the number of the Spanish company.
‘Of course!’ a man’s voice said in English. ‘Loreena Keowa! I tried to get through to her a number of times. Why does she never answer?’
‘She had an accident,’ said Jericho. ‘A fatal accident.’
‘How terrible.’ The man paused. When he went on speaking, there was an under-tone of suspicion. ‘And you are—’
‘A private detective. I’m trying to continue Miss Keowa’s work and shed some light on the circumstances of her death.’
‘I see.’
‘She’d asked you for information, right?’
‘Erm – that’s right.’
‘About a meeting in Beijing that Alejandro Ruiz took part in before he disappeared?’
‘Yes. Yes, exactly.’
‘I’m pursuing that trail. It might be the same people that have Ruiz and Loreena on their conscience. You would be doing me a great favour if you would let me have the information.’
‘Well—’ The other man hesitated. Then he sighed. ‘Sure, why not. Will you keep us up to date? We’d very much like to know what happened to Ruiz.’
‘Of course.’
‘So, we’ve gone through the documents here. In 2022 Ruiz had just been appointed head of the strategy department. He was moving heaven and earth to open up new areas of business. Some of the oil multinationals were increasingly looking into joint ventures, so there were discussions in Beijing, for a whole week—’
‘Why there?’
‘No real reason. They could equally well have met in Texas or Spain. Perhaps because the most important was a project between Repsol, EMCO and the Chinese oil company Sinopec, so they agreed on Beijing. The initiator of the joint venture suggested that it should be turned into a business summit. Almost all the big companies agreed to take part, which meant that discussions went on all week without interruption. Ruiz was happy about that. He thought something might change.’
‘Do you have any idea what he might have meant by that?’
‘Not really, to be quite honest.’
‘And where did the summit meet?’
‘At the Sinopec Congress Centre on the edge of Chaoyang, a district to the northeast of Beijing.’
‘And Ruiz was in good spirits?’
‘Most of the time, yes, although it turned out that the train had already pulled out. On the other hand, it could hardly have got worse. On the last day of the summit he called and said that at least the week hadn’t been wasted, and there was one last session that evening, more of an unofficial meeting. A few of them wanted to get together and discuss a few ideas.’
‘And the meeting was also held in the Congress Centre?’
‘No, further out. In the district of Shunyi, he said, at a private house. The next day he looked depressed and unwell. I asked him how the meeting had gone. He reacted oddly. He said nothing had come out of it, and he’d left early.’
‘Do you know who took part in it?’
‘Not explicitly. Ruiz had hinted that representatives of the big companies had come together – I guess we were the smallest fish in the pond. Russians, Americans, Chinese, British, South Americans, Arabs. A proper summit. Not much seems to have come out of it.’
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, thought Jericho.
‘I’d need a list of official participants at the summit,’ he said, ‘if such a thing still exists.’
‘I’ll send it to you. Give me an email address.’
Jericho passed on his details and thanked the man. He promised to get in touch as soon as anything new came in, signed off and looked at Yoyo.
‘What do you think?’
‘A meeting in which senior oil company representatives take part,’ she mused. ‘An unofficial one. Ruiz doesn’t wait for the end. Why does he leave?’
‘He might have felt unwell. That’s the harmless explanation.’
‘That we don’t believe.’
‘Of course not. He left because he’d come to the conclusion that the whole thing was going nowhere, because there was an argument, or because he didn’t want to go along with whatever they decided.’
‘If he’d just been angry, he’d have told his people or his wife the reasons. Instead he said nothing.’
‘He felt threatened.’
‘He was afraid they might hush him up because he didn’t want to play.’
‘As they did, by the look of it.’
‘And who are they?’
‘Hmm.’ Jericho pursed his lips. ‘We’re thinking along the same lines, aren’t we?’
Yoyo stayed with him that night. Nothing happened except that they emptied another bottle of wine together and he held her in his arms, faintly surprised that he only wanted to console her: a girl overtaxed by adulthood, intelligent, talented and beautiful who, at the age of only twenty-five, had already driven wedges of insecurity into the armour of the Party and at the same time preserved the attitude of a teenager, a punishing, immature stroppiness that was every bit as unerotic as her efforts to defy biology and keep from growing up. It seemed to him that Yoyo wanted to stay in adolescence for ever, or until circumstances calmed down enough to grant her a more peaceful youth than the one she had already had. He, on the other hand, wanted only to wipe out this phase of his life, those said transitional years. Small wonder, then, that neither of them felt what they should have felt, as Yoyo had put it.
He thought about this, and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he felt lighter.
There was someone else with them in the room. He looked up, and that shy boy who had been hurt so often was sitting in the gloom of the loft, watching his fingers glide through Yoyo’s hair. Numbed with red wine and worry, he stared straight ahead, while the boy’s eyes filled with tears of disappointment that girls like Yoyo only ever used boys like him to talk to. His nose, disproportionately swollen by the beginnings of puberty, was still too big for his otherwise childish face. His hair needed washing, and of course he was wearing the stuff he always wore, a human being who loved everyone and everything more than he loved himself. How Jericho had hated the little bastard who couldn’t understand why that adult man with the girl in his arms, the girl he could have had there and then, wasn’t declaring his love – why he suddenly didn’t desire her, when he had desired her, hadn’t he?