* * *
She walked back into the room to find the audience waiting for her. She had only been gone, to them, an instant. They wanted to stare at her. They parted for her, their gazes examining her. She could still feel. She’d expected to be utterly numb, had looked forward to it, even, during her sacrifice. Instead she could feel annoyance at them looking at her, fear at what she’d done to herself, even a sort of calculating hope for what this would mean for her plans for her father … and there was Costain, not angry now, just terribly worried for her, and she felt a swell of relief, even, as … there was a reaction in her to his expression.
Perhaps the device had gone wrong.
No. She wasn’t that lucky. Perhaps this just wasn’t so bad as it was meant to be. Perhaps ‘happiness’, for this lot, was very narrowly defined.
No, something inside her said, this is grief protecting you. The full meaning of it hasn’t hit you yet. Relief is not happiness. Hope and lust are not happiness. Perhaps you are already losing sight of the thing you lost.
She went to the book on the lectern. Haversham took a fob watch from a pocket of the spidery gown. Ross found her own notebook, but Haversham raised a finger. ‘You are not to take notes,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t part of the bargain. You have fifteen minutes. From now.’
Ross opened the book and found the pages to be smooth with dust. The lists were written in a precise, looping hand, the scratches of the quill visible. There were, as with the catalogue, no pictures and no descriptions. She noted the dates on the pages and saw that the auction was four times a year, yes, on the solstices and equinoxes, so she had nineteen to search. She flipped back, started with the first of them, and worked forwards in time, running her finger down the lists. She knew what the thing was called in the translations she read, the Bridge of Spikes, and had seen a few variations. The familiar name of a person leaped out at her. There were sometimes celebrities at these auctions, then. At the winter solstice auctions in particular, there were a number of them. Four years ago, a famous singer had bought … something the name of which meant nothing to her. What he had offered? Oh, that was so terrible for him.
She stopped at the winter solstice of three years ago when she saw another familiar name. Oh. Oh, but that meant…!
It meant she had found something useful for the investigation. She had come here for her own ends, but here, in what she was staring at in amazement, she had found something new to go on for her team, some startling new leverage they could apply. What could she do about it?
She called Costain over.
‘You can’t show him-’ began Haversham.
‘I can tell him!’ shouted Ross. She whispered the name and item and given address in his ear.
He stared at her, astonished, started to say something.
She pushed him away and quickly turned back to the book. She had to put that out of her mind now and get back to her original aim. The object she was after wasn’t in the first two years of auctions she looked through, to the point where she started to panic at the thought that she’d missed it, because she wasn’t going to get to the front of the book before the time ran out, but then-
There. Her eye had gone past it then instantly been drawn back. She realized she was breathing more deeply, her fight-or-flight reflex set off just by seeing the words on paper. Anna Lassiter was the name of the purchaser, at 16 Leyton Gardens, with a postcode that put it in Kentish Town. Sixteen flowers, laid on, Leyton, she ran a mnemonic around her head a few times, piling associations on the address and the post code. She should tell Costain this too, have two brains remembering it. She looked over to him. He’d seen that she’d found something.
No. Still no. She still could not trust him.
She slammed the book closed and grabbed her notebook, ripped out a page, pulled out a pen and wrote the information down before he could arrive beside her. She folded the paper up and shoved it into her waistcoat breast pocket.
She had it. She knew the location of the object that could bring her dad back to life.
It made her excited. But it didn’t make her happy.
She headed for the door; Costain followed at a run.
* * *
He caught up with her in the Turbine Hall. ‘So what’s the plan? Are we going straight there?’
She didn’t want him going with her. She didn’t want to tell him that. She felt emotionally exhausted, and she was aware of a terrible numbness that had taken hold of some part of her personality like an anaesthetic. Besides, though she really did want to go straight to the address and at least look at where this precious object might be, it did make more sense to use all the tools at her disposal to learn everything she could about the place beforehand.
She turned to look at Costain and saw that he was prepared for disappointment here, prepared to be disbelieved, as he’d been doubted all his life.
She put her hands on both sides of his face and kissed him.
He kissed her back. Then he stopped. ‘Lisa,’ he said, ‘we have to talk about-’
‘No,’ she said, ‘we don’t.’
* * *
She took him home. He kept on kissing her as she slowly pushed him up against the wall, but he was not going to go any further. His expression said he wouldn’t let himself unless she gave him some sort of signal. She took his hand and put it not on her breast as she’d thought to do, but on second thoughts, between her legs. They stood there awkwardly, him looking at her, still questioning, even at that, him cupping her. She found her body was moving unconsciously against him. She opened her mouth to say — God, did she have to give him permission aloud?
Something suddenly changed in his expression. He took the hand away and went to unbutton her, to start to undress her, quickly, roughly. She raised her arms to let him.
He manhandled her and turned her body and opened her with his hands. He spent so long licking her, expertly, but agonizingly too long, too precisely. He was still fully dressed, even. He needed to keep his control. She grabbed his hair, and looked into those deeply worried eyes. Wasn’t he hard? Hadn’t she made him hard for her? ‘For God’s sake!’
He looked at her as if he was convincing himself this was real. He was so unused to being wanted. Suddenly, he got to his feet.
She watched him, wondering if he was going to leave her there.
Slowly, he started to take off his clothes. When he was naked, he put a hand on his cock, showed her how hard she made him. He was shivering.
She reached into her bedside table and took out an unopened packet of condoms. She opened it; her eyes kept darting between her short-nailed fingers slipping on the cellophane, his face, his cock. She kept expecting to find laughter somewhere in all this, but, no, it was all deadly serious. She supposed this was what it was going to be like for her always now.
She had sold happiness for-
No, she didn’t want to think about that now.
She took out a condom packet, ripped it open and reached out. She held him, pleased at how hot he was, at how steadily hard she’d made him. At the feeling of him pulsing in her hand. She rolled the condom over him, and pulled it to cover him, tight. She looked up at him again and took a deep breath.
‘It’s okay,’ she said.
His lips bruised hers as he slammed her back into the pillow.
* * *
They lay there afterwards, feeling the cool through the open window, the sounds of summer and of distant violence still outside. Costain slowly ran a hand down her back as she lay on his chest. He felt that he should now show how gentle he could be. Here was a woman who’d just suffered a huge emotional loss, and he’d … had he taken advantage of her? He looked at her face. She looked calmly back. He already thought that perhaps she seemed different, not quite displaying all the emotions he might expect. But then she wasn’t like the other women he’d been with, and he didn’t know what was normal.