Part 7 (1/2)

'I don't think so. What is it?'

'Not important. When will you be back in London?'

The due diligence period was almost over. 'I'm flying home tomorrow night. I'll be in the office on Monday.'

'This is excellent work, Ellie. Again you have surpa.s.sed yourself. Our client will be impressed. Do you have plans this weekend?'

The street artist had started banging a steel drum. 'I'm sorry?'

'Michel Saint-Lazare our client has invited me to Scotland to hunt. I wondered if you would like to come with me. He would be very interested to meet you.'

For a moment, Ellie was captivated by a vision of lochs and forests, a turreted castle with a roaring log fire, snuggling into an eiderdown in a four-poster bed late at night. She bit her lip. 'I promised Doug I'd go to Oxford this weekend.'

'Then you must go, of course.' At once, Blanchard was brisk and businesslike. Was he offended? Disappointed?

He probably doesn't care one way or the other.

'I'll see you on Monday.'

Oxford Ellie took the train to Oxford, staring out the window as it chugged up the Thames valley. An autumn haze covered the fields; the sun shone from a vivid October sky and made the world golden. Up on the hills, the leaves were turning. There would be a frost that night.

On a Sat.u.r.day morning, the carriage was almost empty. Ellie scanned the faces she could see: a mother with two daughters, a man with a bag advertising antiquarian books; two students talking with self-conscious earnestness about Kant and Heidegger. She was invisible to them, which suited her well.

Doug had rugby training that morning; she'd told him not to meet her. She still felt an irrational stab of disappointment when she scanned the waiting faces at the station hall. Just being in Oxford made her apprehensive. She'd only lived there for nine months before Monsalvat approached: long enough for it to be familiar, but not to feel she'd ever belonged. The sense of unfinished business soured the taste, like an ex-lover.

It took her ten minutes to walk to Doug's place, a small mews house provided by the college near the Ashmolean. She still had her key; she let herself in. A pair of muddy rugby boots lay in the hall. From upstairs, she could hear the sound of running water. Books and papers filled the living room, stacked on shelves and sills. After three weeks in the gla.s.sy alt.i.tudes of high rises and hotels, it felt dim and dingy. Empty screwholes pocked the walls like machine-gun fire. The paint had peeled above the doorframe, and the carpet was threadbare. She'd never noticed it before.

She climbed the stairs and opened the bathroom door without knocking. Doug stood in the shower, his face flushed from the fresh air and hot water, his dark hair slick against his skin. Ellie was struck, as she had been their first night together, by his long, rangy body and muscular arms.

He opened his eyes and started. 'Practice finished late. I was going to come and meet you at the station.'

'I told you not to bother.'

'You know I never listen to you.' He grinned and held out the soap. 'Are you going to scrub my back?'

Afterwards, they walked hand in hand along the towpath towards Abingdon. Oars slapped the water as the new eights crews flashed by; the damp smells of mud and rotting leaves filled the air. For the first time since she'd started at Monsalvat, Ellie felt she could breathe again.

'How's your research coming along?' She'd held off asking until now. In the first six months of their relations.h.i.+p, work had been a shared pa.s.sion. Now it was a faultline.

'It's good.' Doug frowned. 'Really good. I had a letter last week, totally out of the blue. A guy up in Scotland, reclusive millionaire or something. Apparently he'd read one of my papers on early medieval romance and wanted to talk to me.'

Ellie glanced at him. 'In Scotland?'

'We met in London. At his club.' An ironic emphasis. 'Huge place off Pall Mall, lots of Victorian busts and deep leather chairs and not a woman to be seen, except the one taking your coat. Anyway, he was waiting for me. An old man in a wheelchair, strapped in to some sort of respirator. He never said a word. He laid out this leather folder on the table. He had a minder with him, a tall guy in a long black coat. He looked like an undertaker. The first thing he did was make me sign a confidentiality agreement which I'm breaching, telling you this, by the way. The minder said that the old man had found something in his attic recently and thought it might be interesting.'

'What was in the folder?'

'A sheet of A4 paper.' Doug smiled at the anticlimax. 'But there was a poem on it written in Old French. Twelfth or thirteenth century, you'd think from the style. The minder said it was a transcription of this piece of parchment they'd found in the attic. I read through it I'd never seen it before.'

He said it lightly, but Ellie knew what he meant. If Doug didn't recognise the poem, the chances were it had never been published.

'Obviously I wanted to see the original, but he said it had been put in a bank vault for safekeeping. I asked if anyone else had looked at it. He said not since it came out of the attic. He didn't know how long it had been there. They gave me the printout to study and asked me to let them know what I thought.'

They were approaching the weir at Sandford lock. A red sign on pilings in the river warned DANGER AHEAD. Despite the sun and her snug coat, Ellie s.h.i.+vered.

Doug checked his watch. 'We should head home. I've invited Annabel and Mark for supper.'

Ellie tried not to look disappointed. She squeezed his hand. 'I thought we could be on our own tonight.'

'I invited them ages ago. It'll be fine.'

Annabel was a wispy woman who always seemed vaguely surprised to find herself in the twenty-first century. Mark was the sort of man who came to Oxford with certain stereotypes and did everything he could to live up to them. He was the only person Ellie had met who wore a cravat. He had also been her doctoral supervisor.

'Mark'll be a nightmare. He still hasn't forgiven me about the bank.'

'He's looking out for you. He wants the best for you.' Doug stared at a bird's nest couched among the willows. 'We all do.'

'I've got what's best for me.'

'I just thought the way they packed you off to Luxembourg like that, no word of warning. You didn't seem very happy there. I thought maybe ...'

His voice trailed off. He snapped a twig in two and threw the pieces in the water.

'Maybe I would come running back to Oxford?' A cold fury was building inside Ellie. 'I've just helped decide a deal worth seven hundred million euros. I'm earning more in a year than you and Mark and Annabel combined.'

'There're others ways to value what you do,' Doug said quietly. 'You're a great researcher. Don't waste it as a cog in some great money-making machine.'

'So I can waste it gathering dust in a library?' She remembered her first meeting with Blanchard. Academia is an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. 'I'm out in the real world, doing real things and earning real money.'

'Numbers on a computer. It's not real.'

She was trapped in a nightmare, reliving all the arguments they'd had that summer, the ones she thought she'd buried when she went to London.

'You can't change this,' she said flatly. 'It's who I am.'

'It's not '

The nightmare always ended the same way. Hot tears and rushed steps and Doug calling after her, too late. Leaves and twigs squelched underfoot. She didn't look back until she'd rounded a bend. She knew Doug wouldn't follow. He'd wait at the house, and eventually she'd go back. They'd skirt around each other like wary dogs, until eventually they'd pretend they'd forgotten. Until next time.

Except there was someone coming after her. A short man taking long, hurried strides, his face flushed from the effort. He wore green rubber boots and a green jerkin, whose numerous pouches and pockets bulged with all manner of reels and bright flashes of fabric bound onto hooks. He didn't carry a fis.h.i.+ng rod.

The path was narrow and overgrown; Ellie stood aside to let him pa.s.s. But he didn't. He stopped a few feet away and half-lifted a hand, almost as if he recognised her.

Ellie froze. She'd never seen the face before, but his pose was utterly familiar.

'Ellie Stanton?'

She couldn't run: the towpath was too muddy. Branches and brambles blocked the way. There was no one else in sight.

'Who are you?' She sounded faint and terrified, a little girl lost in the woods.