Deep Secret

  Here Andrew startled me, the way he often did, by saying musingly, “There is very seldom any true secret.”

  “Right,” I said. “Things get out. Look at King Midas and his ass’s ears.”

  I don’t think either of us said anything else until we reached Bristol and he asked to be dropped by the Nails. I got lost getting him there. It was midday or after when I finally dropped him. “When do you want to be picked up?” I asked him.

  “Oh,” he said, and thought. Then he gave the smile that always made me realise he was not the absent-minded fool he often seemed. It changed his distraught, neurotic face quite radically, so that you saw there was a deep mind behind it. “I’ll find my own way home,” he said. “I don’t know how long I shall need to be here.”

  That was a relief. It meant my time was my own. I found a promising Italian restaurant and treated myself to a good leisurely meal. Later, I was glad I did. The rest of that day was pure frustration. It was typical of the hunt for Mallory. And I still don’t see how she did it, but I am sure now that it was all her doing.

  First, I lost the place where I had parked my car. When I found it, it had acquired a parking ticket. Then I got lost again driving to Mallory’s new address, regardless of the fact that I had been to the street before, and when I did get there, there was nowhere to park, in that street or the next. It was after three when I finally rang the bell of the tall, smartly painted Regency house.

  The woman who answered the door was as smartly painted as the house. She would probably have been good-looking, in a dark, gypsyish way, if she had not worked so hard at it. Under the make-up, her face had the look of someone who dieted fiercely. Her dark hair had been enhanced with bronze streaks and her strenuous slimness enhanced by a tight black skirt and a designer jumper. The jumper fascinated me. It was one of those which have a white satin pattern, sewn with beads, randomly appliquéd to one shoulder. It was the most pointless pattern I had even seen. So fascinated was I that it took me a moment even to realise that she was too old to be Maree Mallory. She was in her mid-thirties at least.

  She tapped the doorframe with a shapely red fingernail and said, “Yes?” impatiently.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “I’m looking for Maree Mallory. About a legacy.”

  As I spoke the name “Maree” her face hardened. It was clear she hated Maree and now disliked me by association. “I’m afraid my niece has just gone out,” she said. I could tell she was pleased to frustrate me.

  I said, “Have you any idea when she might be back?”

  “Not the foggiest,” she said, with evident pleasure. “When my niece takes it into her head to go gallivanting, it’s anyone’s guess how long she’ll be gone.” Then she added, as if it were a major tragedy, “She took my son Nick with her too.” Her manner suggested that Maree had torn the infant from her arms.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, to both things. “Do you know where they’ve gone?”

  “All I know,” she said, with satisfaction, “is that she drove off almost the moment you rang the doorbell.”

  She was right to be satisfied. It is always worse to know you have just missed someone. In the normal way, that is. But for a Magid that is not such bad news. “Thank you,” I said humbly. “Perhaps you could tell your niece that I called.” I gave her a business card. From the way she took it, I could tell that it would be in the wastebin, in pieces, seconds after she shut the front door. I gave a last fascinated look at the design on her jumper – the satin had scalloped edges and two beaded tendrils that impinged hungrily on her right breast – and went away.

  Janine, I thought. That had to have been Janine. Poor sick Mr Mallory had correctly pronounced her to be a bitch.

  Then I dismissed her from my thoughts, jumper and all, and took out the letter Maree Mallory had written me. Everyone leaves traces of themselves in the air as they go. These last for ten minutes strongly and can be detected for another twenty minutes after that – or more, if the person has a powerful character. In letters, traces of personality can linger sometimes for fifty years. And Maree Mallory had left her strong character all over that letter. All I had to do was match it with any nearby traces.

  They were just up the street, those traces, mixed with pungent blue smoke from a car in dire need of an oil-change. I remember at the time misguidedly finding the traces rather agreeable. They had a valiant, pugnacious and even humorous feel – as if Mallory, despite the misfortunes that had evidently befallen her recently, was holding herself together and fighting fate. And Janine had been quite accurate. The girl had been driving out of one end of the street literally as I walked into it the other end. I was – again misguidedly – delighted. I sprinted back to my car and set off in pursuit.

  I followed these traces for half an hour. They led me on a tangled trail, through streets broad and narrow, under other streets, over bridges, downhill, uphill so steeply that once I stalled my engine, and out along small snaking roads across green parkland. I saw Regency terraces, pink Gothic towers, modern office blocks, cobbled alleys, Brunel’s iron ship and the M32. From the map that I had spread out on the seat beside me, I reckoned, with growing exasperation, that I had seen every part of the city north of the harbour – and all without once coming within hailing distance of the car I was following. I hadn’t even identified it – let alone discovered what the girl thought she was doing – but since the narrower streets where she had been were invariably pungent with oil, I guessed I was looking for a fairly old car.

  Guessing is a mistake. You should keep to the traces. About this point, the trail plunged steeply down to the waterside again. Following it, I saw ahead of me a small dingy Morris with a woman driving and a child’s seat in the back. Ahah! I thought. I gave chase, sending Magid messages to the driver to draw in somewhere and talk. There was no response. I pursued the Morris across two branches of river into a place where a one-way system induced mad circularities and the growing amount of traffic reduced both of us to a crawl. The Morris was always three cars ahead of me and its driver refused to respond to my messages in any way. My frustration mounted with every yard. I would have given up, except there she was, so near.

  Then the brown Morris abruptly turned off into a side road and I realised it was not the right car after all. The traces of Mallory had completely vanished. I had probably lost them from the moment I assumed the Morris was hers.

  I cursed. I decided to give up and drive home. Then, with uneasy thoughts of Stan’s comments, I supposed that the obvious thing to do was to drive back to the aunt’s house and lie in wait there. I set out to do that, but by then, of course, I was lost again.

  I fought through the ever-increasing traffic, looking for a bridge, and no bridge appeared. Instead, I found myself to my bewilderment driving steeply uphill on what was almost a country road. The traffic was appalling. We crawled. More cars came crawling up behind me. I had ample leisure to see I was driving along one side of a very considerable ravine and that the whole of Bristol was now spread out or piled up on the other side of it.

  That settles it! I thought. I’m driving home. And resigned myself to having to do it via Wales or something.

  But at that point, the traffic ahead speeded up, the city vista vanished behind trees and a notice by the road stated that I could turn right for Bristol via tollbridge. I turned right thankfully. And the tollbridge, when I reached it, was a perilously high suspension bridge across the gorge – a ribbon of road hung from cliff to cliff between two quasi-Egyptian towers. I put money in a slot and rumbled across it dubiously, sparing glances through its sides at a muddy trickle of river flaring in the sunset some hundreds of feet below.

  Some fool had stopped a car in the middle of the road just beyond the bridge. I nearly ran into it.

  I stamped on my brakes. Squeals behind me told me that a line of other motorists was doing the same. Not only was the car stopped, but its driver’s door was open blocking what was left of the road. There was no
room at all to get by because the road was divided by a steep kerb to stop cars going the wrong way on the bridge. Motorists were stopped on the other side of this kerb, staring. The way they stared told me that my first idea – that this was an accident – was wrong. This car had been stopped deliberately. Then I saw its driver.

  She was dancing. Dancing on the sidewalk beside her car.

  She was a small, unlovely woman in glasses, with a figure like a sack of straw with a string tied round it. And she danced. She bent her knees, she hopped, she cavorted. Her ragbag skirt swirled, her untidy hair flew and her spectacles slid on her barely-existent nose. Beside her, her passenger also cavorted. Both of them waved their arms. Both bounded about. He was a teenage boy, dark and startlingly handsome, and he towered over her in his dancing, rather sheepishly. He had the air of one who was only dancing because she was not going to drive on unless he did. I exonerated him. As for her…

  I put my thumb on my hooter-button and held it there. I was not the only one.

  The woman stopped twirling, but only to bend at the knees and shoot out her fingers – those fingers were adorned with nails long enough to be classed as murder weapons – flick, flick, flick, towards the road. It was a totally contemptuous gesture. The boy did the same, self-consciously. I could see they were both singing, or chanting something, as they flicked. Then, calm as you please, they both went back to dancing.

  I was angry enough to augment the sound of my horn with a blast of magic. It fair bellowed. Behind me, the bridge was jammed solid and half the cars on it were hooting too.

  The boy at least noticed. He looked unhappy. But the woman went on dancing and he obediently imitated her. They did another flick, flick, flick of the fingers, this time in the direction of the rocky bank. And then they danced some more. I lost my temper.

  I took my thumb off the hooter. I turned off my engine, pocketed my keys and got out of my car. They were doing another flick, flick, flick as I reached the woman’s car. Her keys were inside it, dangling from the ignition. I nearly slammed the door on them – except that then she would have had to pick the lock to get in and no other car would be able to move until she had. Instead, I stalked round the bonnet of her car and confronted the capering pair on the pavement.

  “Luck, luck, luck,” they were chanting. Flick, flick, flick.

  “Do you mind holding your Sabbath somewhere else?” I said. I had meant to say much more, but I had got so far when the traces of her personality hit me. She was Mallory. Of course. She had done nothing but lead me a dance all along.

  She stopped dancing. She turned to me as if I had just crawled out of a sewer. Then, with immense disgust, she put one of her outsize fingernails to the bridge of her glasses and looked me up and down all over again.

  Two can play at that game. I took my left lens between my finger and thumb and focused the look right back at her. “Maree Mallory, I presume,” I said contemptuously, before she had quite got round to speaking.

  “Get lost,” she said, as she had been meaning to say all along. She had an unpleasingly loud, gloomy voice, with a sort of sob embedded in it. Then, belatedly, she registered what I had said. “You may know me,” she retorted, “but I don’t know you and I don’t want to.” Beyond her, I saw the boy – who must be Nick Mallory and not the infant Janine had implied – looking as if he wanted to get down and lie under her car.

  I was angrier than ever. It was the sob in her voice, I think. “Rupert Venables,” I said – or rather, snapped. “I wrote to you.” I let go of my lens and brought out my wallet. “I’ve been looking for you all over town to give you your wretched legacy. Here you are.” I held out to her in a fan the ten ten-pound notes I had made ready to support my story.

  She looked dumbfounded. And, as I had hoped, she automatically put out her hand for the money. I counted the ten notes into it with angry ceremony. There began to be yells, whistles and cheers from the motorists watching across the road and from some of those behind, who were now either hanging out of their windows or standing irritably beside their cars. Mallory’s face turned a dull, furious red. Her cousin’s dark face was redder still. Mallory’s chin bunched and her hand flinched, as if she wanted to throw the notes into the road. But the money meant too much to her. She hung on to it.

  “Ten,” I said, “making a hundred. Now will you please get into your bloody car and drive it out of my way!”

  She did not answer, just strutted haughtily to her open door, to further hoots and cheers from the line of motorists. The boy folded himself in through the other door with the speed of an early silent film.

  “Was it worth the money then?” the driver of the car behind mine called out, as I went back to my own car.

  I wanted to say it was indeed worth £100, just to be able to wash my hands finally of Mallory and her family, but I could hardly explain why. I simply shrugged and smiled and got behind my wheel as Mallory started her car with a leap and roared away in a cloud of blue oily smoke. Her car was nothing like as elderly as the brown Morris. She just didn’t look after it, evidently.

  I was glad I did not have Andrew with me on the way back. I was able to swear the whole way home. I arrived still raging.

  “What’s the matter now?” Stan asked from my dark living room, over the remorseless rhythm of a Bach fugue.

  “Mallory,” I said, snapping on the light. “If anyone wants to make that girl a Magid, it will be over my dead body! She’s… unspeakable! And ugly with it. Besides being mad.” And I angrily described my day’s adventures.

  “Hm. Did she show any talent at all?” he asked.

  “I’m sure she has bags of it,” I said. “Enough to keep me away from her all day. Which is where I want to stay! I don’t want any part of someone who uses their talent to hold up rush-hour traffic by dancing widdershins in the street. Not even ashamed of it, either! At least her teenage cousin had the grace to look embarrassed.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Stan said. “Mallory can’t behave like a Magid. So you’ve eliminated one candidate. Now you can start thinking about the other four.”

  “What fun!” I said savagely, and stormed into the kitchen. I said to myself as I tore open the fridge, “And how am I supposed to look at four people when they’re scattered all over the globe? Japan, New Zealand, Bosnia, Ohio – oh, fun!”

  Stan had evidently followed me. His voice said at my shoulder, “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  I slammed the fridge shut. “Don’t do that!”

  “When you’ve had something to eat and cooled off a bit, I’ll tell you,” he said.

  It took me another two hours to simmer down. That only happened when I admitted to myself that not only had I been hoping that Mallory would turn out to be Magid material, but I had also, on the basis of her personality trace, been building up a picture of a brave person in considerable adversity. She had a broken home, she had been jilted by this man Robbie, she had no money and was forced to live with a bitchy aunt, and on top of this her father (adoptive father, I supposed) was dying of cancer. I had been prepared to be wonderfully sorry for her. But all that went when I saw her grotesque baglike figure prancing at the side of the road. Then, after the way she had first ignored and then looked at me, I wanted to go and shake the hand of that ex-boyfriend and tell him he was well out of it. I was well out of it. It was worth a hundred quid – cheap at the price.

  “Ready to talk now?” Stan asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What you want to do,” he said, “is collect all your candidates in one place and interview them for the job. Am I correct?”

  I had been brooding with my chin on my chest. I sat up. “But how?”

  “The extreme way,” he said. “Tweak their fatelines. Bring them to you.”

  “Is it permissible?” I said. I had thought that way was only for emergencies. Anything that involved meddling in someone’s personal life without their permission was to be considered only in extreme need.

&nbs
p; “Yes, you’re allowed to do it if you’re choosing a new Magid. That’s important,” Stan said. “You’d be doing it anyway by appointing someone, if you think about it.”

  “OK, but not tonight,” I said.

  What Stan was suggesting was a fairly arduous process. I have always thought it lucky it is so difficult, or Magids – and other people – might be tempted to do it for trivial reasons. Done often, it could bring chaos to more than one world. It can also bring chaos down on the Magid who does the working, unless it is done carefully, with proper safeguards. If you don’t get it right, you can tangle your own fatelines disastrously with those of the people you are trying to influence. A Magid is supposed to be a free agent. One of the things which is done when you become a Magid is that your personal fatelines are freed from those of the rest of the multiverse. Rather a lonely state, actually.

  Anyway, I knew it was going to take days and I didn’t want to be interrupted. The next day, I finished all my ordinary business (somewhat late, but too bad – Mallory’s fault) and then disconnected my phones from this world and the others. I shut down all the computers, including the one devoted to Magid business, and hung what amounted to a ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on that one.

  I was a little irritated to find a series of faxes from General Dakros had come in overnight. The first said triumphantly that his experts had deciphered the genetic codes on the two lists: they would be able to recognise all the heirs when they found them. The second told me that Knarros was still untraced; the third that Jeffros thought Knarros was hidden by magic. The fourth asked me outright to come and discover Knarros for them.

  I faxed back briskly that I saw no reason why they should maintain the Emperor’s secrecy, and suggested that they advertise for Knarros in the media. Then I unplugged the machine.