What I am trying to say is that lying is a linguistic exercise of extraordinary complexity. It is better at your stage to tell the truth, although this may also have unintended consequences.
There we are, it concluded after its recitation was done. Does that help?
No, he thought.
As Chang sat trying to find something useful in the torrent of information, Maltby returned with the tea, handed it to him and sat down opposite him. They were interrupted by a man who brought in a large envelope. ‘That’s all,’ he said, and left.
He pulled out the contents and Chang saw that they were bits of paper from his room, mainly his efforts at handwriting, which he still found difficult. He had spent many a long hour clutching a pen tightly in his hand, scrawling on the paper, trying to acquire the sort of ease, fluency and legibility that most people around him could manage as second nature. He had tried English, and Cyrillic and Arabic. He found the Cyrillic easiest and had begun to take notes to fix his still erratic memory. That, he thought, might not be good.
‘There are several words of Russian here,’ the man observed. ‘Why is that?’
‘Just notes,’ he replied.
‘You speak Russian?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Really? Now how did the son of an African missionary learn to speak Russian?’
‘I taught myself.’
‘Why were you watching the house of Henry Lytten?’
Chang began to sweat. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘Then would you care to explain this, sir?’
Maltby held up a piece of paper that had been collected from Chang’s little desk. On it were written three names. Henry Lytten. Angela Meerson. Rosalind.
‘Lytten. You have been watching his house. Meerson? Who is she? Then there is Rosalind. A young girl called Rosalind briefly disappeared two days ago. Her parents are convinced she’s been seduced by an older man. She’s only fifteen. A serious crime, that would be.’
Chang’s mind went into panic.
‘Anyway,’ Maltby continued. ‘We’re done with you here.’
‘Really? Thank heavens for that!’
Maltby smiled in a cold sort of way. An hour later, Chang was put back into the car and driven to Henry Lytten’s house.
34
Henry was out when I arrived at his house, but I had a key and let myself in. I put on the kettle and then went downstairs to visit my machine. It was reassuringly quiet, looking gratifyingly like a rusty old pergola covered in bits of tinfoil, and I had a brief burst of hope that, suddenly and miraculously, my little problem had resolved itself. I carefully went through the routines required to activate it and watched as the electricity began to flow through it, crossing my fingers in a perfectly unscientific fashion as I waited.
No luck. Slowly the scene resolved itself; the grim view of the bare grey wall beyond faded and was replaced by the rather more beautiful sight of a coastline from the top of a hill, stretching down to the sea. Birds flew overhead and the waves were breaking on the shore of enticingly clean white sand.
Why wouldn’t the damned thing just go away? I had had an idea during the night; a recommendation had arrived in my mind when the calculations were nearly complete. Why don’t you set it back to before the girl first stepped through? Reset to before she met the boy for the first time and that might unblock it.
Worth a try. So I closed it, recalibrated for about six months before the moment I thought Rosie had first gone in, and went through the start-up procedure once more. Please, I thought to myself. Please don’t work...
Another view took shape and solidified, a river landscape this time. With ducks. For some reason the ducks really annoyed me. They were unnecessary, almost a gratuitous insult.
Then the phone rang. I left the machine running, in the vain hope it would correct itself, and ran upstairs to answer. An earnest voice with a Midlands accent asking for Henry. Detective Sergeant Maltby, he said his name was. I announced myself as his associate and said he could speak freely. ‘I have full authorisation and clearance in all matters,’ I reassured him in my grandest manner.
‘It’s about the man watching his house,’ Maltby said. ‘We’ve arrested him.’
‘Really?’ I replied. ‘That was good work. What do you think?’ Nothing like vague questions to find out what on earth someone is talking about.
‘He’s a queer one, no doubt about it. One of the worst liars I’ve ever come across. Foreign, obviously, and speaks Russian. I think he may be... you know.’
‘Describe him.’
‘Looks early thirties. Brown eyes. Average height. Healthylooking, pale complexion. A bit Chinese-looking, but he says he isn’t. His name is Alexander Chang, so he says.’
‘Is that so?’ I said in what I hoped was a distant, uninterested tone.
‘The thing is, we found papers saying he wanted to get something from Professor Lytten, and needing to find someone called Angela Meerson. There is also a possible reference to a girl who briefly went missing. We don’t know what it means, but it doesn’t sound good. Does the name Angela Meerson mean anything to you?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied.
‘What should I do with him?’
‘I’d just shoot him, if I were you.’
‘Ah... no. Not one for the police, that.’
‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘Could you bring him here at, say, eleven o’clock? We can ask him questions and get to the bottom of it. We’re good at that sort of thing.’
I put down the phone. Alexander Chang? The man who tracked down the cleaner in my experiment? After all this time? Talk about inconvenient. Perhaps a coincidence. I made myself a cup of tea and went back downstairs again until Lytten arrived in a taxi with a man whom I assumed must be his visitor. They were soon followed by a taller one I had not seen for nearly fifteen years. ‘Sam Wind!’ I said, giving him a warm embrace. ‘How simply lovely to see you again!’ I’d never liked him.
‘Angela, a long time,’ said Sam Wind. ‘So kind of you to help out. Odd circumstances. How’s your Russian?’
‘Good as ever. How’s yours?’
‘I’ve no idea. Not met him yet. Henry found him,’ Wind replied. ‘I was only told this morning. I was planning to do some gardening. Ah, well. The things we do for our country, eh? With your assistance, we might find out what Henry has dredged up.’
‘I didn’t know he still did this sort of thing. I thought he’d given up years ago.’
‘He did, but this man wouldn’t trust anyone else. They knew each other during the war, apparently. So the old warhorse came clumping out of retirement to help. He’s in rather a bad mood about it. Not the man I knew once.’
‘We all change.’
‘You don’t. You look disgracefully well-preserved for a woman of your years. You should be ashamed of yourself. Shall we begin? We can chat afterwards, no doubt. Lot of water under the bridge and so on.’
We all went in and sat down, and the interrogation of Dimitri Volkov could begin.
I had done translating on many occasions; it was why initially I had been brought into this world of Henry’s and Wind’s. I had been really good at it; it reached the point where the people I worked for would deliberately look for messages in obscure languages, just to try and find one I didn’t know. Careful experimentation established that I knew few Asian or African languages and my Icelandic was patchy, but apart from that, I could manage nearly all that came my way
Portmore had asked me to stay on after the war but I had refused even to consider the idea. I’d done my bit, I pointed out, and I was desperate for some peace and quiet. Besides, I wanted to get back to a decent climate and I suspected my little garden in the South of France was so overgrown that, unless I gave it some urgent attention, my house might disappear for ever into the forest.