The burning library, p.19
The Burning Library, page 19
“I hate him!” Izzy blurted out. “All he wants is to get in my pants. Since he found out he’s not going to be able to, he’s decided it’s fun to demean me in front of the team whenever he gets the chance.”
Clio swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What’s his name?”
“Tony Axford.”
It was always good to know.
“Do what you want,” Izzy said. “Just make sure you leave it as we found it.”
“Thank you. If I can ever do you a favor in return.”
“I’ll keep in touch. Good to meet you, Clio.”
“Be safe,” Clio said.
She laid out the embroidery and photographed it carefully, including close-ups, then refolded it and tucked it back into the bra. She had no means to sew it back up, but she tucked the lining back into the underwire as best she could using her fingernail, though with gloves on, it wasn’t easy. She returned it to the evidence bag.
On the street, she wondered if she should call in. Her boss, Tim, might have heard by now that she was off the case.
Her phone rang with an unknown number.
“Clio Spicer,” she said.
“Oh hello, Detective, this is Mark Ward, Lady Arden’s butler from Sherston Hall. I have that name for you. The woman who came to us asking about the embroidery was called Zofia Danek.” Even over the phone he was smooth. She wondered what it cost to employ a man like him.
“And you said she worked for the University of St. Andrews?”
“That’s what she told me.”
Clio thanked him.
She could call in or she could eke out a few more minutes to work on this. She slipped into a café across the street, where she found a quiet booth in the back. She ordered food and a coffee, and hit the phone to make some discreet inquiries as to the whereabouts of Zofia Danek.
Chapter Twelve
Anya
Over breakfast, Sid told me he was going to spend the day at the computer science department. He sounded stilted, and so did I when I replied to say I hoped he had a nice day. It was impossible to remember what I would normally say, or how I normally behaved.
Sarabeth called me early. “I have some very difficult news to tell you. There’s no easy way to say this, but Diana died yesterday. She was mugged in London, and it seems to have gone wrong. She was found in a park in East London with a head injury and died in hospital without regaining consciousness. If it’s any consolation, the doctor said it would have been quick. I’m so sorry, Anya. Please take the day off if you want.”
She sounded terribly upset. I told her how sorry I was, too. The shock was intense. I wasn’t sure how I got the words out. It was hardly credible that Diana had died, especially as I’d been with her only a few days earlier. I felt as if this was something I could hardly process on top of everything else. My mind was stretched to breaking.
The car arrived to pick me up. Nobody had canceled it, and even though my brain was sludge, I decided to work. It felt better to be on autopilot doing what Magnus wanted me to do, doing what I knew, than staying at the cottage, feeling watched or heard, feeling as if another cluster bomb had gone off in my head and not knowing how to reassemble the pieces. Sid stepped outside with me when I was leaving and told me to call him if I needed him, to come home if everything got too much.
I thought about Diana on the journey to the castle. How much I’d liked her at first, how charismatic she was, how the last time I’d made this trip was with her. It seemed impossible that she was gone. I watched the back of the driver’s head, too, and wondered who they really worked for. I was becoming as paranoid as Sid.
Rain fell in shards and the wipers were working overtime. As we drove up the long drive the castle looked gloomy and spectral ahead, here one moment, obliterated by the wipers the next. They scraped the windscreen, and the sound cut right through me.
Tracy’s housekeeper greeted me at the door and showed me in. The castle was busier than before, the atmosphere more alive. Florists were positioning an exuberant display on a table in the middle of the entrance hall, and there were staff working in the formal dining room, laying the table for what looked as if it would be a sumptuous dinner. Polished cutlery and elaborate candelabra gleamed. The room’s tall ceiling was intricately painted with medieval designs. Vast tapestries hung from the walls and chandeliers fashioned from deer antlers were suspended on long chains secured to the dark beams crisscrossing the ceiling. I could hear chatter and the sounds of work coming from the kitchen and the aromas drifting out smelled delicious.
The housekeeper led me away from the bustle and into the more private wing of the castle, where the tower was. She asked me to leave my bag and devices on a table outside the door like I had before. I did it but kept my burner phone on me, hidden in a pocket. Tracy was waiting in the room at the base of the tower, where I’d seen the manuscripts on my first visit.
She must have to hide when they had people in the castle, I thought, and I wondered who the dinner was for. Perhaps there was a select group of people, like my father, who knew where she lived and could be trusted to keep it a secret.
I had no time to dwell, though. Focusing on the collection was what mattered and the sooner I started, the sooner I could deliver on my side of the deal I’d made with Magnus and guarantee the best treatment for Mum.
Tracy looked stressed and I wondered how close she’d been to Diana and whether grief was the reason, but I didn’t know whether to mention it to her. I wasn’t sure if she knew yet.
“Ready to get started?” she asked, and I told her I couldn’t wait. “Let’s go,” she said. I followed her up the spiral stairs; the room above was empty, a circular stone void, harboring echoes, its windows glazed arrow slits, with narrow views over the forest below and the hills beyond.
Tracy opened a wooden door that, curiously, led from the tower back into the main body of the castle, as if the tower had been constructed as an elaborate entranceway. The door was so thick and dark and worn that it had to be ancient. Tracy hit the lights and we entered a small, square chamber paneled from floor to ceiling. The paneling was inlaid with intricate patterns and pictures, trompe l’oeils, made with such skill that images seemed to leap out from the wall in 3D. I turned a full circle to take it all in. It was incredible. There were musical instruments, books, a dagger, a pipe, and more, all attributes of an educated gentleman from medieval Italy, all arranged in trompe l’oeil cabinets or displayed on trompe l’oeil shelves. I’d seen it before.
“Is this a copy of the study in the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, Italy?” I asked.
“Yes. The laird who built this place made a trip to Italy and fell so much in love with what he saw that he had his own version made here.”
This place was full of surprises. Using a key fob, Tracy unlocked yet another door, which I hadn’t noticed because it was hidden within the paneling. “This is where we keep your father’s manuscripts.”
She looked at me as if curious to witness my reaction to her mention of my father. You knew everything all along, I thought, but I wasn’t intimidated by her anymore. I figured she was Magnus’s pawn, just like everyone else.
“You’re good at keeping secrets,” I said.
She pushed the door open, and flicked another switch. “I’m an actress. It’s my job to be whoever other people want me to be. In the case of your father, it’s been my pleasure to act as custodian for these books. They’re really no trouble at all. In fact, it’s been a great deal easier to hide them than it has been to hide myself.”
I barely listened to what she was saying. I had eyes only for the manuscripts, which were arranged on shelves around three walls of a plain, windowless room. She said, “They’re all yours. Do your thing. That laptop is for you to make notes on. It doesn’t leave this room.” They’d provided a brand-new MacBook. I flipped it open. It was already set up for me and, no surprise, it had no internet access.
Tracy gave me a fob of my own, which she said would let me into the tower and the manuscript room, then left me there, shutting the door firmly yet quietly behind her, and I took stock.
The only entrance and exit was the door we’d come through. Artificial lighting had been designed to show off the books and was dimmed to conservation levels. In the middle of the space there was a large desk, where the laptop lay alongside a book stand and a lamp for examining the manuscripts.
The books waited silently on the shelves; they had a quiet, confident presence. I made a conscious effort to empty my brain of distractions, so that when I opened the first book, my memory would be primed to preserve copies of every page I looked at. Confiscating my iPhone might stop me from photographing the manuscripts and sharing them, but it couldn’t stop me from recalling every detail. And I needed to. My burner phone was too basic to have a camera. It was only good for making and receiving calls.
I ran my fingers gently along the spines of the books and thought of all the people who’d handled them before me, the scribes, illustrators, bookbinders, booksellers, and owners. My father and grandfather. My mother, too. I supposed I could count her, since she’d spent one afternoon with them. And now me. It was hard to think of any other objects in my life that had been handled by my mother, father, and me.
I decided to make an inventory first, a list of the books with a description of each. Then I could organize them by type, for serious study.
As I contemplated them—there were so many—a surge of doubt rose like nausea, doubt that I couldn’t deliver the standard of scholarship Magnus wanted. My heart thumped, but I had to start somewhere. I picked out a book at random and laid it on the cushion beneath the light, and I heard Mum’s voice, the same way I always did when I handled a precious manuscript.
Books connect us to the past and teach us how to map our future.
I hoped so. So long as I had what it took, these books could save her life.
I worked on the collection for hours without stopping. Compiling my list was slow going because I kept getting distracted. Every book I took from the shelf was breathtaking in its beauty and rarity. Time flew, until I suddenly realized I needed food, and fresh air. I went downstairs, collecting my phone on the way.
Once I’d left the dead quiet of the manuscript room and the tower, I wasn’t sure where I was allowed to go. Instinctually I kept away from the busier areas of the castle, which wasn’t hard, since the place was so big. I found a side door and slipped outside to find myself in an area of the grounds that was out of sight of the castle’s main rooms. It was a perfect, private place to call Mum from.
I tried her phone and when she didn’t pick up I called the ward again.
The nurse was upbeat: “Rose is doing much better today. I’ll transfer you to her bed.”
“Mum!” I said when she answered. “It’s me!”
“Hello, darling.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“Viv took it downstairs to pay for some drinks. I’m so bored with this place. Tell me what you’re up to. I want to know everything.”
“I already started work on the manuscripts.” One of the books I’d looked at that morning had an especially gorgeous binding. I knew she’d love to hear about it. She missed her work. I weighed telling her about it, and figured it was fine because she’d only seen those books once, many years ago, and like everyone else, she thought they’d burned.
“One of them had a gold repoussé binding with encrusted gems. It was stunning.”
“Oh, wow. This is the drink of water I needed. Tell me more.”
I smiled and then I made a mistake. My brain had a runaway moment. Maybe because it was bliss to escape into the fantasy that life was okay, that St. Andrews was everything it had promised, and that Mum and I could chat about our shared passion. I started to describe another binding to her when she snapped, “Say that again.”
“It was a clasped gold binding with filigree work, showing the Adoration of the Magi.”
She said nothing.
“Mum?” I said. “Hello?”
The silence stretched further and stifled that little bit of pleasure I’d let myself feel, and with a horrible sinking feeling, I knew that I’d said too much.
“Darling, I need you to listen to me very, very carefully. Are you alone?” Mum asked.
“Sort of.” I’d wandered around the back of the castle. There were vans parked, back doors open, caterers and chefs unloading yet more stuff. A team of landscapers was tidying up the garden nearby.
“Go somewhere no one can hear you. Go now. I’m going to call you back, because I don’t want to talk on this line.”
“Okay, but when you do, use this number.” I got out my burner phone and read the number out to her, then hung up and walked across the garden, to a quiet spot at the edge of the woodland where I was hidden from people and out of hearing. I waited, nerves building, for her to call, and caught it on the first ring.
“I’m alone,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“I need you to be completely honest with me. Do you promise? Don’t hold anything back because you think it will hurt me or make me cross.”
Oh, God, I thought. What did she know? Had she found out about Dad’s involvement in the clinical trial? I braced myself to fight with her over it.
“I promise,” I said.
“Okay, listen carefully. I’m going to ask you some questions. Remember, be honest. Lives depend on it.”
“Mum—” I started.
“No!” she interrupted, so forcefully it made her cough. “We haven’t got time for feelings, and I need to give this phone back soon. First question: Were those accurate descriptions of the bookbindings?”
“Yes.”
“Both of them?”
I hesitated. I had a bad feeling.
“Anya,” she coaxed.
“Yes, they were,” I said.
“I know those books and I know where they’re from.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Anya, I heard St. Leo’s clock chiming when we spoke the other day. You were in Cambridge, and those bindings are from books in your father’s collection.”
“You can’t possibly know that. You only saw his collection once.”
“I might not have told you the truth about that.”
“The collection burned!”
“Did it?” she asked. “Now I’m wondering.”
My legs felt as if they might give way. I sank down and crouched against a wall.
You can’t keep secrets from me, Anya. I always know.
She broke the silence. “The clinical trial. There’s a reason I’m suddenly accepted and fully funded to join it, isn’t there? What have you done?”
“Nothing,” I said. Please, God, don’t let her refuse this.
“Let me give you some context. After my diagnosis, when I heard the prognosis for this disease, I contacted your father for the first time in over a quarter of a century. I sent him an email asking if he would help me access the best possible treatment, whatever that might be. I told him if he didn’t want to do it for me, he should do it for you, because you only had one parent. He replied promptly. Do you want to know what he said?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“He said no.”
I shut my eyes tight. The world spun around me.
“I know him better than most people. Whatever he’s up to now, he showed me who he is then. And not for the first time. So, if I’m accepted onto a clinical trial, fully funded, including travel to a posh clinic in the US, I’m pretty sure someone has struck a deal, and I’m pretty sure that person can only be you. What did he promise you, Anya? His collection? Has it survived? You must tell me.”
I needed to think. I wanted to give her an answer that would guarantee she had the best possible chance at living, but I had no idea what that might be. Truth or lies?
“Yes,” I said eventually. “We struck a deal.”
She swore under her breath. “Darling, listen to me. I’m never going to tell you anything more important than this. None of this is what you think. It’s bigger than either of us, or him, and much, much more dangerous. Anya, are you hearing me?”
Clio
Clio quickly discovered two things from police databases: that Zofia Danek had been registered as a missing person in St. Andrews for just under six weeks, and that she’d been found at the end of that period.
She phoned the officer in charge of the case. “Zofia Danek disappeared after a hike on a bitterly cold day in Aberdeenshire,” he told her. “She left her car behind, and we found her passport and what we assume were most of her personal belongings in her cottage. It took a while, but we traced her to London. She’d managed to apply for a new passport from the embassy there and had already made her way back to Poland. We worked with the Polish police to find her and eventually spoke to her. She’d changed her name, and she requested that we keep her exact location a secret. She didn’t want her old employers to know where she was.”
“Her employer being the Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews?”
“Right. She said she felt threatened by them, but she wouldn’t go into detail. We didn’t pursue it because there didn’t seem to be any lawbreaking. She’d had a rough time of it because she’d had personal problems, too. She told us she’d been stalked by a colleague’s husband, so obviously, once we’d established that she was safe, we respected her wishes to remain hidden. We told the Institute we’d located her in Poland and that the case was closed but didn’t give out any more information.”
“Do you think she’d speak to me? I’m hoping she can help with an investigation.”
“She might. There’s no harm in trying. I’ll send details of our contact in Poland.”
Clio hung up. This case was exerting a strong pull on her. She could feel it in her gut. It wasn’t just because of the connection to Lillian, though that was stirring up feelings; it was also a sixth sense that this went deep. She knew she couldn’t let it lie.
