He thought of Linus’s feathered coat, wondered how it felt to keep the birds so close, and if they minded. The gull’s head swivelled. Its beak dipped, pecking at its own feathers. It was still a bird, and it had to eat. A wave moved it within a metre of the corpse. The beak snapped up. Vikram turned away, unwilling to see the moment where it conquered its fear.
7 ¦ ADELAIDE
Adelaide chose a secluded spot off the main pathway. She sat on the end of a stone bench, careful not to disturb a dozing Admiral. As she settled in, the butterflies swarmed about her, their minute feet brushing against her arm. Light poured from the glass dome of the roof and filtered through the tropical foliage.
Her contact was due on the hour. She waited, moisture collecting on her skin from the hot, damp air. The farm was quiet today, but there were always a few wandering visitors. A man in lightly tinted glasses was walking down the path towards her. Adelaide checked her watch. A minute before eleven and no one else was nearby.
The man was Patagonian, his hair substantially flecked with grey. Dressed in a casual shirt and well-tailored trousers, he looked like a family man, respectable, with a professional occupation — perhaps a doctor or an engineer, out for a stroll on his day off. It was possible, Adelaide mused, that he really did have a wife and children — then she put the idea aside. The line of work must be too obscure.
The investigator sat at the other end of the bench without exchanging a glance. He took out a Surfboard. For a minute or so, she heard only the sounds of his fingertips manipulating the screen. Palm leaves rustled; a little way away, a stream trickled over veined pebbles.
“Ms Mystik, I presume.” His gaze was fixed on the Surfboard. His lips barely moved.
“Yes.”
“You can refer to me as Lao.” He took off his glasses and polished them on a square silk cloth. “A favourite place of yours, this?”
“My grandmother used to bring us here as children.”
“Did Axel come here often also?”
“Not lately.”
Lao focused on his screen.
“Your brother is not in the hospitals.”
She followed Lao’s lead, pretending to examine the butterfly that had alighted on her wrist. Its underside was tricoloured, a striking pattern of red, white and black. Red Pierrot. Adelaide loved them because Second Grandmother had loved them, and for their own ethereal beauty. Perhaps, too, it was their immaculate symmetry that she loved, two sides of the same, like Adelaide and Axel.
“Did you speak to the staff?”
“I have checked admissions records and spoken to all of the receptionist staff in the accident and emergency units. None of them recognises the image that you sent.”
“I suppose that’s good news.”
“I also checked the morgues. I should ask you, at this stage, Ms Rechnov—”
“Mystik.”
“As you wish. Ms Mystik. I should ask you exactly what your suspicions are regarding your brother’s disappearance?”
“At this stage, I should say that I’m not sure.”
A small girl in a polka dot frock ran past, followed by the mother at a more sedate pace. Lao waited for them to disappear down the pathway. He gave a little cough.
“Let me be blunt, Ms Mystik. A full-scale search operation has already been mounted. I understand that it cost a substantial proportion of the Council’s security budget. The sea has been searched. There have been raids on suspected gang members in the west. The public operation, in short, has been intensive. This leaves us with three possibilities. One, your brother is hiding. Two, he is hidden. Or three, he is dead and it has been engineered that his body will never be found. Do you suspect murder?”
“Murder is a dangerous accusation, Mr Lao.” Her voice, surprising her, came out as calm as his.
“A large part of my job is to find lies. My experience of working with high profile cases is that the perpetrators do not like to dirty their hands. If certain acts have been committed, someone — somewhere — will have seen something. They will have been paid, or intimidated, to keep quiet. You need to find out if your family are lying.”
“They are lying. At least, my father is lying. I asked him for the keys to Axel’s penthouse. He told me they have all been handed over to Hanif.”
“And you have proof that this is untrue?”
“I know my family, Mr Lao. We have more sets of keys than we own greenhouse shares. My father would never have relinquished access so easily, which means he is lying.”
Lao nodded. “Tell me about your brother. His state of mind.”
Adelaide stared at a flower with large, velvety petals, twined about the trunk of a lemon tree.
“I’m sure you’ve read more than you need to know.”
“I prefer to hear from the client directly. Please try to be as objective as possible.”
“Very well. My brother — Axel — he’s not himself. That is — he’s ill, but the doctors can’t agree on a diagnosis. Some days he’s perfectly lucid, they say. Other days…” She watched an insect crawl inside the flower head. “He can be paranoid. Delusional.”
“He is unpredictable?”
“Yes.”
“Is he violent?”
She hesitated. “No.”
Lao had finished polishing his glasses. He put them back on. “You don’t have to be defensive, Ms Mystik. I am not here to judge character. I just need the facts. If your brother is the type to become embroiled in an argument, for example, that might have a bearing on the case.”
Adelaide let out a shaky breath.
“He’s never intentionally violent,” she said. “Not to people. But he sees things. He thinks he sees horses. And — hears them.”
“He hears them talking?”
“I don’t know.” She didn’t want to discuss the horses. She wished she hadn’t mentioned them.
Lao tapped his Surfboard. He was waiting.
“Sometimes his behaviour is compulsive,” she allowed.
“Such as?”
“He does things — like — I don’t know. Once he told me to come to his boat and he had this basket full of white cloths. He said we had to fix them to the towers. We went all through the quarter, tacking up these stupid white cloths. It started raining but he wouldn’t let us stop. He said it had to be done that day. He was adamant.”
She remembered the glitter in Axel’s eyes, the puzzled expressions of those they passed.
“He’s not well,” she repeated.
“What about habits? Routines?”
She shook her head.
“Superstitions? Does he visit Tellers?”
“Not any more. He’s always been dismissive of them.”
“What about his regular contacts?”
“Very few. In the last few months he’s hardly left the penthouse. There’s myself, the cleaner, and a girl that does his shopping. But he has been known to wander, you see. Sometimes he appears in my flat — he has my key. But he might have visited anyone.”
“And the last time you saw him?”
She thought of that quiet figure waiting in her apartment.
“Nothing remarkable.”
Behind their glasses Lao’s eyes flicked about, scanning the leafy pathways where the butterflies spun in the artificial light.
“Are there any other conflicts within the family? Tensions? Grudges?”
“There are conflicts in every family,” she said, although she did not know that this was true, having had little enough exposure to other families. Her own set, the Haze, was mostly composed of those who had spurned their families, like herself. Lao gave her a sharp glance, as though he knew this, though he couldn’t, of course. She collected her thoughts.