And a bleakness in his eyes.
The PC came to life under her fingers. Hello, please tell me your name, it ingratiated itself. She hesitated. The request disappeared, then reappeared. That would happen only once more.
Shadow, she typed.
Hi, David, the machine replied. Marian wrinkled her nose. Her own computer was severely English, restrained in its responses to her.
"Hi, David," she murmured, as if she was reading a headstone, and sighed.
The memory remained clear to her, ten years later. After Robbie's death, David had presented her with a battered cardboard box. His brother would have wanted you to have some of his books, he had offered with savage, tearless restraint. The gesture had, nevertheless, touched her and was meant to indicate emotion. In a moment of recollection a few days later, she had opened the box and examined the books from Robbie's childhood, adolescence, student days. Most of them unread, some of them even given to Robbie by herself.
And there was the well-thumbed copy of an anthology of Chinese poems of the eighth and ninth centuries in translation that she had given to David, not Robbie.
In his late teens, David had been reacting with unexpected, oversensitive ferocity to the prejudice of his fellow pupils, and she had bought him the book partly as a salve to wounded pride. A leaf of paper bearing Robbie's scrawl had fallen from between the pages. The poem it had marked was annotated in David's neater hand.
A poem by Tu Fu, To a Younger Brother. From the handwriting of the two brothers, she had worked out that David had evolved the passwords into his first computer by using lines from the poem and that Robbie had discovered the trick and had betrayed the tenderness implicit in David's choice by breaking into the computer.
She had never forgotten that small betrayal, nor the affection that had made David, years after she had bought the book, use that poem for his passwords.
Eight-twenty-eight. Time stunned. The way into the PC's menu was Rumours, the first English word of the poem. The Shadow might have been David himself, or Robbie. Now it was herself.
She felt very heated, her hands quivered. What did she want to know, what did she need? Wind in the dust prolongs our day of parting, the poem said, a metaphor for war. This was a different war, the one between her and David.
The menu unrolled on the screen. The vacuum cleaner, she realised, had ceased unnoticed in the next room. Towels changed, duster wiped over surfaces. She strained to hear, but there was only a murmur. Come on She summoned Millennium because it was obvious. The fraud was upon the Millennium Urban Regeneration Project. a list of charities? She had fumbled the camera from her handbag, but the screen seemed to mock her as she held it. She scrolled the information forward with a jabbing, angry forefinger. Contributions, schemes, the names of dignitaries…
Eight-thirty… The clearing of breakfast plates, the sense of coffee being served as sharply as if she had caught its aroma. The damp line across her forehead, at the roots of her hair… The Millennium file she had opened rolled to its engagingly innocent conclusion.
Ceremonies, fundraising, invitations, monetary gestures.
She returned the menu to the screen. Jabbed at Skyliner. She could hear the ticking of her blood's clock, accelerating. Investments, involvements, negotiations, the narrative of failure, the hurrah of recent success… innocent, all of it. Winterborne Holdings, she summoned. There was silence from the next-door room now.
Briefly, registered only subconsciously, there had been the noise of a radio or television. The maid would be entering David's suite any minute now. All the companies, the investments, the share holdings the details of boards, chief executives, salaries, pensions. Her finger jabbed the key endlessly, furiously, scrolling the useless, useless information up the grey-tinted screen and back into oblivion. It was as if she was reading some gangster's accounts, the ones prepared for the tax man. The other accounts were hidden somewhere in the computer but she had no idea, no inkling, where they might be. Filed under what?
She returned from the brief history and assessment of David's empire to the menu, hurrying through it more and more violently, carelessly.
Blood's clock eight thirty-five… "Oh, bugger!" she breathed aloud.
David's fat black pen seemed to mock her like a complacent expression.
The name almost vanished before it registered his name. Curious. Her forefinger hovered above the key, to be joined by other fingers, her other hand. Her breathing was very loud. Her temples throbbed, as if all thought was an effort. It was like finding an old love letter, written by a parent one had always thought incapable of love, when clearing out drawers after their death. David and Robbie. Perhaps there was some surviving sentimental element in David's nature, within the deep, suspicious tomb in which David had always buried feeling.
Robbie had been dead for a decade, killed when he crashed his latest red Porsche. He had been a stranger to David for a long time before that R-o-b-b-i-e, she typed slowly, hesitantly. Then at once gasping with relief and success. Fraser, she read. Thenother names…
Roussillon who? the chief executive of Balzac-Stendhal, Laxton, others… dates of meetings, sums of money, as if David had been intent on item ising some Dutch treat at an Indian restaurant.
The camera clicked twice. She scrolled on… The Urban Regeneration Project, the EU funding… the beginnings of the careful, precise balance sheet of theft, of Aero UK's failure. The dates measured, like a financial ECG chart, the crucial cardiac arrests the company had suffered… and the injections of diverted EU funds into the company to keep it afloat. She was shivering with excitement, the camera's eyepiece was becoming fogged with her delighted tension.
She was terribly hot. Steady the camera'I am sorry—" Marian straightened in the chair as if she had been electrocuted. Whirled around.
The maid was standing in the doorway, apologetically surprised. Seeming not to recognise her. Marian clutched the camera against her stomach like a weapon designed to disembowel her.
"I yes! Come in, yes I've finished. Come in-!"
She exited the computer and shut the lid of the PC as if a snake was inside. She experienced almost a sense of bereavement as the keyboard slid out of sight and the screen disappeared. She closed the catches and stood up, hiding the camera at first then thrusting it into her handbag. She walked stiffly into the bedroom and replaced the leather case in the wardrobe. The arms of the empty suit attempted to arrest her. She brushed wildly at her hair. The maid watched her passage to the door with a dull, respectful stare, her eyes blinking once like camera shutters.
Marian slammed the doors of the suite behind her, leant back against them. Eightforty-two… She was perspiring freely. Her whole body seemed to tremble with weakness… and for nothing, she castigated herself in a fury of frustrated failure. All for bugger-all!
"Damn," she breathed aloud.
"Damn, damn, damn?
She had been panicked by the maid's appearance. Just like a silly girl at her first sight of an erect penis a stupid uirginl "Damn, damn, damn bugger!" she breathed.
Her hands were slippery on the doorknobs. It had all been there, begging to be photographed. She could have simply told the maid to wait, that she mustn't be interrupted. She had had it all in her hands and had just thrown it away! She had nothing but some names, the first few snippets of the gigantic fraud… fish scales from David's leviathan crookedness, nothing more. She would have to try again… The idea appalled her.