‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Are you done yet?’
They were sitting in the dappled shade of a grape arbour while Ada Morange talked with Fahad and Rana inside the farmhouse. Henry had shed his down-at-heel private-eye impersonation, was clean-shaven and dressed in black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt. He looked older. He looked his age.
‘You may be disappointed to know that I’m going all the way,’ he said. ‘If young Fahad agrees to our plan, that is.’
‘As if he has a choice.’
‘Of course he has a choice. We aren’t monsters. We’re trying to do our best for those kids.’
At last, Fahad and Rana came out of the French doors, past the wiry alert man who escorted Ada Morange everywhere. Ex-Foreign Legion, according to Henry. Rana ran off down a slope of glass towards the old apple orchard, arms extended airplane style; Fahad smiled at Chloe and said, ‘She wants to talk to you.’
Ada Morange sat straight-backed in her black wheelchair by the room’s stone fireplace. Heavy oak furniture, oriental rugs on the stone-flag floor, lilies pale as ghosts in a big Chinese vase on a side table. A grandfather clock ticking in a corner. The old woman thanked Chloe for her help, asked her opinion of Fahad.
‘He talked to you openly and willingly. Do you believe him? Do you believe this eidolon can lead us to something interesting, or is the boy spinning a story to get me to take him to Mangala?’
Ada Morange wore a black pencil dress with gauzy sleeves. Classic Chanel. Her white hair was brushed straight back from her forehead. A line taped to the back of her bony hand looped up to a pouch of clear liquid hung on a rod at the back of her wheelchair. A choker of red pearls gleamed like drops of blood against the corded tendons of her neck. In the wreckage of her health she was formidably elegant and commanding.
‘Fahad’s paintings and drawings, his obsession with that landscape…All of that is very real to him. And Ugly Chicken is real, too. No question about that. I saw it,’ Chloe said, with a tingling sensation of remembered panic. ‘A small part of it, anyway.’
‘Yes, when you escaped from the Hazard Police. We examined such CCTV footage as we could obtain, of course, but found nothing. The eidolon must operate directly on the optical nerves. Perhaps also the limbic system, where emotions and memory are regulated.’
‘I think it helped Fahad and Rana escape from their guardians in Norfolk, too,’ Chloe said. ‘Fahad said that it wanted to be found. That’s why, he said, it got inside the heads of Mr Archer and the others in that little cult. That’s why he let them use his pictures, even though he knew it might attract the attention of the wrong people.’
‘He told me that the eidolon wanted to attract your attention,’ Ada Morange said.
‘And yours too, perhaps,’ Chloe said.
‘Indeed. It may have a deeper agenda than we can know. We believe that eidolons like Ugly Chicken are fragments of something much larger. That they’re broken, damaged. But suppose they only appear to be damaged because we don’t really understand them? Suppose we don’t see them for what they really are? Suppose we don’t realise they are manipulating us in ways we can’t see or comprehend? But even if it is not some broken thing, even if it has potency, agency, it is quite possible that it is feeding the boy and his sister fantasies of a place that no longer exists except in its memory.’
‘We can’t know until we go there, can we?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly the problem.’
Ada Morange’s dark gaze reminded Chloe of a chimpanzee she’d once seen in London Zoo. Her eleventh birthday, just before things started to go bad, before chimpanzees had been wiped out by Texas flu. A different kind of intelligence, recognisable but unreadable.
She said, ‘Can your special friend help us?’
‘I have already asked him. Unfortunately, while Unlikely Worlds is not as wilfully enigmatic as the Jackaroo, on this matter he offers no opinion. I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away. No, if we want to know more, we must discover it for ourselves.’
‘Fahad told you what those spires are, didn’t he? What he thinks they are.’
‘Yes, he did. He claims that they are the equivalent of a shuttle terminal, used by the spaceships of the Elder Culture that built it. If that is true, if any trace of them still exists, it will be a wonder. We are utterly dependent on the shuttles to reach the worlds the Jackaroo gave us, and have no control over their schedules or flight plans. And apart from a few disputed fragments around what might be the craters of crash sites, we have never found anything resembling a space vehicle, nor any depiction of space travel, anywhere in the fifteen worlds. We assume that either the Elder Cultures lacked the technology, or that it was as primitive as ours and was abandoned after contact with the Jackaroo. Or that if any Elder Culture once possessed the means for independent travel between the fifteen worlds, all traces have been erased by time. Most ruins are very old, after all, and little more than mineralised traces compressed in layers of rock.
‘That is why,’ Ada Morange said, ‘this will be in the nature of a preliminary investigation. I have rebuilt my company, but its resources are not what they once were. I must test the boy’s claims thoroughly before I mount a full-blown expedition. And Rana will stay here, of course, in the care of her aunt. We will talk to her, let her play games, and in general get to know her and her special friend. She is very charming, is she not? She has not been damaged by her guest. She is herself. That she sees it as a separate entity is very good. Very hopeful. But we cannot let her go with her brother. It would not be right to put her life at risk.’
‘I want to go,’ Chloe said. ‘I want to help Fahad and Rana. I want to see this thing through.’
It burst out of her. It was as if, yes, something else had spoken. But it was also what she wanted.
‘That’s good,’ Ada Morange said. ‘Fahad will help us to find where Ugly Chicken came from, but he has certain conditions. Very bold, that boy. I admire it. One of them you already know about: he wants us to help him find the people who killed his father. The other is that you must accompany him to Mangala.’
32. Little Dave
Mangala | 30 July
When Vic drew up outside Danny Drury’s house, Alain Bodin and Maria Espinosa got out of the unmarked Ford Victory that blocked the gate, and told him that there was no sign of Drury. ‘Just the husband and wife who do the cooking and cleaning, look after the garden,’ Alain said. ‘And the guy who answered our knock.’
Little Dave was sitting in the back of the unmarked car, his wrists cuffed behind his back. Looking up when Vic tapped on the window, looking away.
Vic said, ‘I guess he isn’t in the mood to talk.’
‘The piece of shit didn’t even ask us what it was about,’ Alain said, with a spasm of anger and disgust. ‘Because, of course, he already knows.’
Maria said, ‘How are you, Vic?’
‘After I deal with this, I’m heading out to Idunn’s Valley to pick up the body. The stupid fucking kid,’ Vic said. ‘Trying to play that boy-detective shit. Thinking he was in his own personal action film.’
‘You must not blame yourself,’ Maria said. ‘He did what he thought he had to do.’
‘Kid fucked up, is what it is,’ Alain said.
‘He didn’t say one word about what he was planning,’ Vic said. ‘If he’d told me, I could have done something, stopped it…’
The three investigators shared a quiet moment.