“That’s right, I still have what it takes,” she smiled through her gasps as she unlocked the front door. A frigid breath of air escaped the old stately home she’d purchased a few years before, overlooking Oban and its mostly serene blue waters.
It was dark inside, even in the pinnacle of the day’s brightness. Light was never a strong presence in her house, mostly due to the windows facing south and southwest. Their position evaded most of the sun’s course during the day, whereas those windows facing east and west had their light obscured by the large birches and rowans.
Nina liked the shadows. She worked much better in the dark, where her thoughts were contained in the musty confines of dimness, making her feel more distant from the true era she was living in. As a historian, she preferred to surround herself with old things: antiques, codices, and bureaus to store her academic notes, folders, and papers in. In fact, Nina only had a laptop because modern communication and the need for fast research merited the machine. She much preferred scribblings in her own hand and the typewriter to generate fact sheets.
As she stepped into the lobby, her inadvertent contemplation turned to the metaphors of her existence. Much as she hated that, she couldn’t stop it. The cold air in the house, along with the barren wooden floors, sporadically clothed with old Persian carpets, turned into a simile before she could direct her mind to other things. Loneliness, cold, and darkness permeated through the place she called home and Nina found herself wondering if solitude was really something she desired for the rest of her life.
Consciously, she did. There was no need or want for a partner or a pet. Freedom was pivotal, especially for someone as impulsive as she. But if she was alright with it, why did the thought even occur just because the quiet house that welcomed her felt more like Siberia than Shangri-La?
To facilitate the banishment of these morose notions, Nina happily switched on her iPod for some good and dirty hard rock while she woke up the kettle in the kitchen.
“No alcohol today. No alcohol today,” she repeated aloud as she fixed her coffee. Alcohol always made her emotional, and with the past day or two having been emotional pens of rejection and absence, it was unwise to drink at all. For the last two months, she had not done any concrete work; she’d written no dissertations nor lectured anywhere. In truth, Nina was tired. Not forever tired, but momentarily fed up with her vocation. She was worked to death on that which she hardly had to try to do well anymore, much as she loved what she did.
Black coffee and too much sugar substituted a good bourbon this time, as she dialed a number on her landline. Today, she thought, was not a good day to drink until she was useless, until she just called it a day after failing to try too many times over. It was rather demoralizing to know that one did not achieve anything the day before, especially because of one’s own timid resistance to the things that disabled productivity.
“Hello Benny? It’s Nina Gould,” she announced to the man on the phone. “Listen, not to be a pain or anything, but can I borrow your lawnmower again?”
As she bartered with the old fisherman about his lawnmower, a call waiting alert beeped in her ear.
“Benny…,” she she said, trying to ask if she could call him back. But the old man, who adored her, would not stop chatting. Nina could not afford to piss off the old Glasgow football hooligan of the 1960s or she would never get the grass cut.
Beep-beep
Beep-beep
“Listen Benny, let me call you back in a tick, okay?” she said quickly and ended the call promptly.
“Aye?” she said loudly as she took the waiting call.
“Hello? I am looking for Dr. Gould?” a man’s voice inquired.
“This is she,” Nina replied. “And you are?”
“My name is Dr. Barry Hooper and I hope you don’t mind me calling you at home, Dr. Gould, but I could not reach you on your cell phone,” the caller said.
“Oh shit!” Nina exclaimed, remembering that she had not yet switched on her phone after arriving home. Her purse was just out of reach from where her phone cord could manage.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“No, Dr. Hooper, don’t fret. I just remembered something I forgot to do is all,” she explained cordially. “How can I help you?” she asked, stretching out her leg. With her toes, she tried to hook the sling of the purse and draw it closer as the man stated his business.
“My wife works for the London Archives and she referred me to you. My colleague and I have a bit of a conundrum on our hands and we need the expertise of a historian, I think,” Barry clarified.
Nina switched on her phone and set it down on the table, where, one by one the missed calls the doctor spoke of, came through. “And what is the nature of your predicament, doctor?”
“I would prefer if we spoke in person, Dr. Gould,” he insisted cautiously. “You see, I work for the city morgue in the Barking area in London and we may have… we think we may have stumbled on something… odd…”
Nina listened attentively, but when the missed calls on her phone yielded Sam’s number, she lost her focus.
11
Wake Up Call
Sam could not sleep for the third night in a row. The thing with Nina bothered him immensely, and to exacerbate his misery, he had no way to make up with her, since she was not answering her calls. He’d used the first sleepless night to complete the editing for his riot coverage for Channel 15, and submitted it the next morning.
Since then, however, only personal toils populated the night. Lying in the full moon that occasionally peered through the slow progression of dark clouds, he could not help but think how it controlled the brightening and darkening of the room. Just like his life of late, Sam realized that the light and dark repercussions of events, regardless of what they were, were out of his control. All he could do was to draw the curtains, but he couldn’t control what happened in the sky, naturally.
He had to sleep, but such thoughts permeated through his subconscious constantly, penetrating whatever veil Morpheus had managed to weave. It ripped the soft fabric of slumber into a clear wakening once more with every new notion, making it impossible for him to settle down. Hoping that Nina was not furious enough with him to maintain the aggressive stalemate for good, he refrained from calling her again. She would be awake at this hour, because she was a night animal, but if she still had not returned any of his calls by now he took it as a clear signal that she did not want to talk.
Sam sat up. The clock announced that it was just past 3 a.m., so he avoided the whiskey and went for a cup of chamomile tea like a good boy. He winced at the weakness of the beverage on first sip, but he had to be alert and the tea would hopefully calm him enough to make some clear decisions.
The LED screen on his desk glared ominously, still wearing the image of the Islamic persecutor on freeze frame.
“No fucking wonder I can’t sleep,” he hissed, sweeping the mouse across the pad and closing the player. Momentary reconsideration prompted him to set the tea down and open the player again. “Can’t believe I am doing this.”
Again and again, he watched the clip that had been secretly recorded over his footage. Much as he hated the nauseating feeling it brought him, Sam felt that he had to familiarize himself with the man’s face, mannerisms, and voice. In places, there was something sincerely amicable about the dark-eyed villain, but Sam also intuitively picked up on an unmistakable hostility just beneath the surface, waiting to be provoked.
Obsessively, the journalist reran the piece, forgetting about the rest of his tea. One thing was certain. The deadline had passed without incident, because, unlike the general consensus among the men who demanded delivery of the woman, Sam did not have to deliver in the first place. He could not give her up, obviously, and he was not about to return to London to try and save her once more after her less than grateful response the last time.