Текст книги "Broken Verses"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

XIX

The intersecting ropes of the charpai tickled my ankle as I pulled myself into a cross-legged position, feet tucked under thighs to escape the attention of the mosquitoes. Across the splintering table Ed was bent over his plate, his fingers hovering over the mounds of haandi chicken, chapli kabab, daal and raita as he contemplated which combination to pick up with his na’an. Above us, there were more stars than you could ever see in any of the hearts of Karachi. From the other side of the restaurant’s low boundary wall came the sound of trucks traversing the highway. A group of men and women walked in through the gate and were directed towards the ‘family section’ where Ed and I were, thus far, the only patrons.

It was two days after Eid. It was a few minutes after I had decided I did believe in miracles.

I looked back down at the encrypted pages in my lap and then at the decrypted version I had just finished writing out on the back of five menu-cards. This set of pages had arrived earlier in the day, in an envelope with no stamp. Hand-delivered, Ed supposed, though no one on his street had seen it pushed through the letter slot in the gate. He had asked, yes, repeatedly. There was a tyre mark on the envelope, proof of nothing. He’d driven over it without noticing it when he came home from the gym. Then he’d got out of the car, seen tyre marks on a white rectangle, gone closer, recognized the handwriting on the envelope. He got back in the car and drove straight to my flat, the letter in his glove compartment. We made the long drive out to the restaurant without him telling me it was there.

We didn’t speak of mothers or codes or Boond during that ride. Instead we talked of the ordinary things of our lives. We talked of music and movies, school days, university years, the different jobs we’d held, the people we discovered we knew in common. He told me why he’d rather watch basketball than cricket. I told him he was a fool. He described waking up in New York one Thanksgiving and opening his window to see the air full of feathers – an event that remained unexplained. I told him about finding a dying dolphin on Karachi’s beach, its dark skin like rubber, its large eyes more gentle than any human eyes. Only when we pulled up outside the restaurant had he opened the glove compartment and handed me the envelope.

‘I wanted to be with you while you read it. Do you mind?’

I found I didn’t mind at all. ‘You’ll have to shut up while I decrypt it; can you do that?’

He’d done it with an astonishing degree of patience, not even asking questions when I said, ‘It can’t be. It can’t be,’ as the series of letters became words and the words became sense which I was so afraid of misinterpreting that I had to read it over and over, once I’d written out the decrypted version, until I was finally able to accept it.

I placed the menu cards on the table between us. ‘He saw the first episode of Boond.’

‘Wh—?’ His mouth was full as he spoke, but the question mark at the end of that garbled sound was unmistakable.

I pointed to the menu cards. ‘Read it. Read it, Ed.’

While he was reading it, I rocked back on the charpai, pulling my shawl close around me. Ed pushed the plate of kababs closer to me as he read, but I couldn’t think of eating.

There was so much else to think of. That he had watched the episode and would be watching more, yes, that seemed important. That was more important than I fully realized, I guessed. But my mind kept moving on from that to other things. How reading my name had almost made my stomach flip over, much as it did when I rode the Hurdy-Gurdy with him. He always stepped off that ride slightly nauseous. And that part about Charlie’s Angels. Love and laughter and desire sparkling in the air between Mama and Omi, restoring to me my memories of them which had been more shaken than I had admitted to myself by the previous set of pages with its accusations of perversion.

I closed my eyes and my mind skimmed over those moments. But where it settled was nearer the end of the pages, the moment which had made my breath catch.

It’s lonelier when you flit in and then leave, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination or a ghost.

I knew that loneliness, the exact and exacting desolation of it. Made lonelier by my aloneness in it; everyone else had given up on her years ago. I had never realized how much I wanted a companion for my grief until, coming to the end of the Poet’s missive, I had heard, for the first time, a voice which understood my dreams. The dream of a mermaid, particularly. The dream of a burial without a body, and the anticipated release of a ritual of farewell.

I opened my eyes. The sky was almost too beautiful to bear. And it was only then that I finally asked myself the question I had failed to ask all this while: whose corpse had been found in the empty plot of land, nearly seventeen years ago? Who was the man disfigured beyond recognition for the simple crime of having the same build as the Poet? Someone inconsequential, that’s who his captor, or captors, would have chosen. Someone whose disappearance wouldn’t make newspaper headlines, whose relatives couldn’t afford to push for an extensive investigation. In all the years since, had some woman been waiting for her husband to come home, had some child grown up wondering if he’d been abandoned by his father? And if I could discover the identity of the corpse, would it be an act of benevolence or brutality to seek out his relatives and say, he’s not coming back, and this is how he died?

‘This is unbelievable.’ Ed put down the menus. ‘And weird.’

‘Weird?’

‘Why would someone go to the trouble of bringing in a VCR and television to show him Boond?’

‘To torment him with that glimpse of my mother. Ed, it was uncanny the way your mother did it. I mean, I don’t know if you ever saw Mama do that, but Shehnaz got it so right…’

‘So whoever’s keeping the Poet captive knew your mother. Knew her well enough to recognize my mother’s impersonation of her.’

‘Yes.’ It felt like a triumph. The first clue of any kind we had to the identity of the Poet’s captor.

‘It’s all happening very fast,’ he said. ‘It’s been hardly more than forty-eight hours since the show aired.’

‘There’s another question here. Whoever the captor is, why did he tape Boond in the first place? Was that just coincidence? He taped it, saw the impersonation and decided to give the Poet a viewing. Or…?’

‘Or?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I can’t think of an “or”. I guess that’s how it happened.’ I was lying. I could think of another way for it to happen. If Shehnaz Saeed was connected to the conspiracy, that’s how it could have happened. If she played the scene that way precisely in order to send it to the Poet and make him weep with longing for my mother. I ladled daal on to my plate and started spooning it into my mouth, just to have something to do.

‘What is it?’

I smiled at him. ‘Nothing. I’m just overwhelmed.’ If Shehnaz Saeed was involved, Ed knew nothing about it. I was sure of that now. Sure of him.

‘I’m having an idea,’ he said. ‘It could be crazy. But I’m distinctly having an idea.’

He called out to the waiter, gestured for the bill. ‘I have to get to STD. There’s something I need to do there. You can take the rest of the food home.’ I waved away the suggestion. ‘I’m sorry. I know I’m acting strangely. But there’s a reason. Promise. Tomorrow you’ll see. Or not. Once I think it through it may just be nothing. But I think it’s something. I think it may well be something.’ He was standing up now, almost hopping in his excitement.

I was more than happy to leave the restaurant and forestall any conversations that might lead to me airing my suspicions. Ridiculous, I was being ridiculous. Beema said I could trust her, and Beema’s instincts were always better than mine.

Although, really, my instincts were to trust her, too. When I was in her company I couldn’t imagine her involved in any form of deception. It was only away from her, when I looked at the evidence, and remembered the moments in which Ed had spoken of his mother as a creature of overwhelming narcissism that I wondered, was all that sweetness just an act?

If so, it was such a good act that even now I was far more convinced by it than not. It was easier to believe Shehnaz Saeed was being manipulated than to see her spinning webs of deceit in which she and her son and I were bound.

Ed paid the waiter, batting away my attempts to reach for my purse, and we left the restaurant. Both of us were quiet as we drove away, a distracted but comfortable quiet. My hand rested on his shoulder, and when his left hand wasn’t changing gears it reached up to caress my fingers. Soft music drifted out of the open windows – the artist was a singer I’d never heard before who threatened in every track to cross the line which separates mellow from soporific, but never actually did.

When he pulled up outside my flat, I said, ‘Will you come up?’

‘Of course. But not tonight.’ He pulled me into a swift kiss – there were neighbours walking down the driveway towards us and even that brief liplock felt risqué—and drew away, grinning like a boy who’s run through a stranger’s kitchen and stolen a hash brownie. ‘Ask me tomorrow. By then I may be your hero.’

‘All I really want is a toyboy,’ I said, stepping out of the car and blowing him a kiss.

He drove away with a screech that was entirely for the benefit of the neighbours.

I was smiling on my way up the stairs when I bumped into Rabia, Shakeel and Dad, headed down.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Rabia complained. ‘Dad’s plane leaves in an hour. We have to get to the airport.’

I looked guiltily at my father. Yesterday, after I’d locked myself in my bedroom, I hadn’t come out for hours, and when I did I refused to talk to Dad about anything to do with my mother. And so our interaction in the last twenty-four hours had returned to centring around cricket and home repairs. He’d spent much of the day correcting the imbalance of my bookshelf, oiling rusty hinges and doing something elaborate with the pipes under my sink which hadn’t yet given me cause to complain. In the evening he’d gone with Rabia and Shakeel to have a look at the renovations being done on the house, and I’d said I would cook dinner for the three of them when they returned. But then Ed arrived to whisk me away and I’d left a note saying, ‘Sorry. Forgot prior commitment. Rain-check?’

‘I didn’t realize you were leaving tonight.’

‘I can stay until tomorrow if you’d like,’ he said.

‘No. No. I’d just be keeping you from Beema. She needs you right now.’

‘Well, you’re coming to the airport, aren’t you?’ Rabia said to me, her tone belligerent.

I was still looking at my father. The boy who played ‘chicken’ on the streets of Karachi with Mama. One drunken evening, I had been talking to some friends at university and said, ‘Not that I’ve ever imagined my conception, of course, but I’m sure it occurred entirely by accident. My mother must have bumped into my father in the dark as their paths crossed somewhere in the vicinity of the linen closet.’

They never stood a chance as a couple, that had always been clear. But since talking to Dad the evening before I had been able to believe that for a moment they – not just he – might not have known that. And, in that moment, perhaps, I happened.

‘Airport goodbyes are horrible,’ Dad said. He came down the stairs until he was standing just beneath me and we were the same height. He put his arms around me. ‘We’re not done talking. I’m just giving you a pause.’ He kissed my cheek and released me. When he got to the bottom of the steps he turned around again. ‘If she were alive, she’d let you know. She loved you.’

After they’d driven away, I went upstairs and sat on the low cement wall that surrounded my balcony, my back pressed against the building’s edifice. The temperature had dipped sharply and there was nothing except a shawl between my short-sleeved cotton shalwar-kameez and the glass-and-tinsel air.

Yes, she loved me. All the years in which she went off with Omi, she loved me. But then he died and she broke that habit. I could never explain that to Dad or Beema or Rabia. I could never say – you want to know what I think happened to her? All right. All right. Here it is: she saw the falseness in everything she had believed. She saw the futility – in activism, in protest, in peaceful resistance, in all those things she had built her identity around. So she decided to un-become the woman she had been for so long. That’s what happened to my mother. She cast off her own skin, and became someone else, someone opposite. It took time, but she was patient, and determined. My God, was she determined. She would let go of everything that held her to her past self. Everything, including me. And when she saw that she couldn’t do that here, because this place and all of us had too many memories of the woman she used to be, she left. She and Omi, they knew so many people who had to vanish from the country, leaving no trace of where they’d gone. She knew it could be done. She knew how to do it.

I could never explain that to my family because there was, within all of them, nothing that would allow them to believe such a monstrous act was possible.

She never deceived herself about the brutality of what she was doing. That’s why she wept as she did when Rabia confronted her with her selfishness. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she kept on. That’s why she had never come back. Because she knew what she had done was unforgivable. She realized it even before she left. Those days she was reduced to an almost coma-like state, lying in bed, her eyes fixed on nothing. Those were the days she was paralysed by the horror of her own decision. She knew exactly what she was doing, and the price she was exacting from all of us who loved her. And she knew, also, that the price she was exacting from herself was this: that she couldn’t change her mind. She couldn’t come back and say, sorry for what I put you through, but here I am and everything’s OK.

But here’s the thing, Mama: you can. I’ll forgive you.

I pulled the shawl closer and for the first time in my life I wondered if I could really do that. Could I forgive her who I had become since her departure?

Would I forgive her if she came back for Omi after all those years in which she didn’t come back for me?

This habit of blame, had it become an addiction, the defining feature of my character? If she came back, would I find it impossible to rein in the momentum of my incessant accusations? Would I find it necessary to interpret her every act as a sign of betrayal or desertion?

Questions without answers. My life seemed filled with them these days.

But Omi would give me all the answers. He’d come back and teach me how to be the girl I could have been. He’d teach me how to step forward instead of circling old wounds. He’d teach me that – and I’d teach Ed the same.

The door-bell rang, and I smiled. Dad was notorious for discovering, halfway to the airport, some crucial item he’d left behind.

But when I opened the door there was an unfamiliar man standing there. His hands were much too small for his body. I noticed this right away and I can’t say why but it struck me as threatening.

‘You live alone,’ he said.

With a quickness I didn’t know myself capable of I slammed the door shut and locked it.

There was no sound from the other side of the doorway, but when I stepped back I could see, in that slice of space beneath the door, his feet, unmoving. Then, there came a gentle rapping on my door, of knuckles that knew they didn’t have to exert any strength to achieve their effect.

‘Madam,’ said the soft voice. ‘I only want you to see this.’

A paper slid beneath the door and stopped at my feet.

I picked it up. Amidst columns of words, a colour picture of a man lying on the ground, his head cradled in blood.

I knew, right away, that they’d intercepted Omi’s letters. Intercepted them, and killed him. And now they were here just to tell me what they had done. That was all they needed to do to me.

The caption beneath the picture said: DON’T LET THIS BE YOU.

The voice behind the door warned, ‘Madam, it won’t take long.’

‘You bastards.’ No fear, only rage.

‘Madam?’

And then I looked down at the paper in my hand again. SECURE-CITY SECURITY said the words at the top of the page.

It was a newsletter from a private security company, one recently hired to manage the block of flats. A circular sent around the building had said representatives of the company would be stopping by to speak to all tenants, on an individual basis.

There was suddenly no strength in my legs and I had to lean all my weight against the wall.

‘Madam?’ And now the voice was concerned.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. My lips felt numb. ‘Please come back later.’

‘Sorry to bother.’ Footsteps moved away from the door. Then they stopped and the man’s voice said, ‘Be assured, we will be watching at all times.’

The footsteps started again – towards, and down, the stairs.

Just the security man, I told myself. But why hadn’t he stopped next to knock on Rabia and Shakeel’s door? I leaned over the balcony and looked down. Ten, eleven seconds went by. He was talking to the downstairs neighbours, no doubt. But then he stepped out of the stairway, into the driveway, his small hands lighting up a cigarette, and walked towards the gate, without stopping at any other flat along the way.

I ran inside and called one of the neighbours.

‘The security man?’ she said. ‘Oh, there’ve been many of them through the day. I got my visit this afternoon while I was asleep, 9D was woken up at seven a.m. to get her briefing. What nonsense is this? Why not just have the whole block get together and tell us in one shot?’

This is not sinister, I told myself, putting down the phone. None of this is sinister.

I lay awake at night repeating that thought over and over, and when I finally slept I dreamed of pushing my way through tangled weeds in murky water, ahead of me a bend in the river which would lead to sun-dappled waters and herons in flight if I could only swim clear of the little hands which wrapped themselves around my limbs.

XX

The following morning, when I walked into STD, there was a palpable air of victory about the place. Telephones, e-mails, websites, internet chat rooms, newspapers – praise for Shehnaz Saeed’s comeback had choked all mediums of communication. So today, the first day most of us were back after the Eid holidays, the ground floor had the air of a school hallway in the intense flicker of time between lessons. All the previous night’s fears seemed absurd.

‘Did you see, yaar, that moment? Oh my God, that moment.’

‘The one when Shehnaz…?

‘Yeah, yeah. Man, wow.’

‘Who taped it? I need to see the whole thing again. That look when she sees the daughter.’

‘Taped it? Taped it? Oh, ehmuk, we work for STD. We’re in the building with the original tapes.’

And then the knot of people dissolved into near-hysterical laughter.

How had Shehnaz played the moment when she sees the daughter?

A door opened and Kiran Hilal held her fingers up in victory. ‘Pulled it off, didn’t we?’ She danced, unexpectedly sinuously, across the floor. Then she stopped, mid-gyration, and turned to me. ‘Any idea why Ed’s taken a rough cut of the second episode? He’s not going to start interfering, is he? They say he’s a little strange when it comes to his mother.’

I shook my head, shrugged and then ran to find Ed. At some point in the middle of the night I had woken to realize, for the first time, the full impact of what it meant for Omi to be watching Boond. It had taken every atom of self-restraint within me not to call Ed and demand to know his plan but instead to do what he had asked and give him until the morning.

As I rounded into the hallway, I saw Ed standing outside his office watching Boond’s director stalking away from him. Halfway down the hall, the director turned around – as though she’d just thought up a punchline – and said, ‘It’s prostitution.’

‘No, it’s a box of tissues,’ Ed replied with elaborate patience, and the director stormed her way past me.

Ed came down the hall towards me, caught me around the waist and waltzed me down to his office.

‘What?’ I said, laughing. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Product placement, baby,’ he said, closing the office door behind him and picking up a box of A-TISHOO tissues from his desk. He twirled the box on the tip of his fingers. ‘The day after Boond aired I got a call from an old classmate of mine who works in marketing at the company that produces these luxurious, two-ply wisps of heaven.’ He pulled one tissue after another out of the box and threw them in the air. ‘And my friend said, “Ed, yaar, remember how you asked me if we wanted to buy spots to advertise our wares during Boond and I said no? Well, mea mucho culpa. Is it too late? Can we still get in there? We’ll pay double the rates.” And I said, “Ali, yaar, I don’t think so.”’

‘Punchline, please.’

‘Punchline is this. Last night, after reading the decrypted pages, I thought – product placement. Why not? Instead of giving A-TISHOO a spot during the ad breaks, why not have their product placed in every home and every office and every back seat of every car in the Boond universe? And make the folks at A-TISHOO pay through their running noses for it.’

‘You read Omi’s pages and it made you think of how to generate revenue for STD?’

He threw the last of the tissues at me. ‘Don’t be silly. Look, watch this. It’s the last scene of episode two, to be aired in four days. Obviously, we can’t reshoot the whole episode to include tissue boxes in every scene. But we can make a start.’ As he was speaking he ushered me into his desk chair and pressed some combination of keys on his computer keyboard.

An interior shot appeared on the computer screen. Some generic living room, so tastefully decorated it was entirely without personality. The only sign that it wasn’t just a show-room in a furniture store was a newspaper carelessly tossed on the coffee table. There was the sound of a door opening. Then someone – the camera didn’t show us who – walked into the room and placed something on the coffee table. The figure turned and walked out. The camera panned back to the table. There, lying on top of the newspaper, was a faded picture of Shehnaz Saeed, her on-screen ex-husband and their infant daughter – Shehnaz’s eyes had been poked out.

Ed pressed another key and the picture stilled.

‘The black magic storyline?’ I said.

‘Forget the storyline. This is the last shot of the episode. This is the shot on which the episode “freezes” as the credits roll. Don’t you see? It would take very little effort to reshoot the scene. They’re still using those interiors for the new episodes. They can reshoot the scene, with a tissue box placed on the coffee table, and have it ready in time for the second episode to be aired.’

‘Thrilling. A tissue box in episode two!’

‘The thrill isn’t in the tissue box. It’s in the fact that we reshoot the scene. We reshoot the final shot which has a newspaper in it.’

I took a closer look at the newspaper. It was open on the LOCAL NEWS page, which was largely dominated by a photograph of a burst sewer.

Aasmaani, you’re being uncharacteristically slow here. They won’t still have that old newspaper lying around. And even if they do, I’m going to go over while they’re reshooting – under the excuse that I want to make sure the tissue box is properly placed with its logo and brand name clearly showing – and pay whoever is in charge of set design or props or whatever the hell it is to place today’s newspaper in the scene instead.’ He picked up the morning paper from his desk and folded it to isolate the crossword. ‘Like that.’ I made a gesture of appeal, and he sighed and spoke very slowly. ‘Episode two will end with a shot that has the crossword clearly showing. The crossword grid will not be empty. Some clues will be filled in with bright red pen that draws your eye to it. Do. You. Understand?’

I looked from him to the crossword to the red pen he was holding out to me. I understood.

I took the pen from him.

‘Something simple,’ he said.

I tapped the pen on the back of my hand, its nib emerging and retracting. Something simple. In two of the across clues I wrote: JAZZ and FUGUES. Then I used the first letter of FUGUES to write FRASS vertically.

‘What are jazz fugues?’ Ed asked, watching over my shoulder.

‘He’ll know. Omi will know,’ I said, going over the letters one more time with the pen to ensure they’d stand out. I closed my eyes and leaned back. All I could hear was the twittering of a sparrow outside and my own heart. Omi would know, Omi would understand. And when he realized his words weren’t merely echoing into silence, he would start to write differently. He’d write clues to where he was. Sixteen years of being in a place, you must pick up some clues. A man as smart, as observant, as Omi, he couldn’t fail to pick up clues. He’d tell me how to find him, and then I’d bring him home.

I’d bring him home. He’d be home. Aged, yes. Frail, perhaps. Unaccustomed to the din of city life, no doubt. But his first day back, I would take him to the sea. Just Omi and me, walking through the sand towards the surf, taking turns to lead, taking turns to plant our feet into the other one’s footprints as we had been doing since the days when he had to stand on the tips of his toes in order not to stamp out my prints. He’d wade into the water, trailing his fingers – now swollen and misshapen from all the times the Minions had broken them – just below the surface, and he’d beckon me to come alongside him. As the first wave loomed ahead of us, we’d shout out together, leap up into its maw, bodies colliding with water, and in that sting, that slap, that wheeling over and floundering, we’d know ourselves to be alive again.

I stood up and put my arms around Ed’s neck. He lifted me off the ground and swung me around.

‘I’m going to speak to him, Ed. I’m going to speak to Omi. My Omi.’

‘Can we not talk about him all the time, please?’

I unlooped one arm from his neck and tweaked his ear. ‘Why, Mr Ed, are you jealous of a seventy-year-old man?’

Ed let go of me and I slipped to the ground, yanking his ear as I did so. We both cried out and glared at each other.

‘What?’ I said.

He picked up the crossword. ‘I’m going to go and find the director and get this taken care of.’

I caught hold of his sleeve as he started to walk away. ‘What? What is it?’

He looked at me and shrugged. ‘It’s just a little thing. A tiny little thing, Aasmaani. You’ll never love me as long as you’re obsessed with the two of them.’

I loved him a little, right then.

‘Sometimes I want to burn them,’ he said. ‘When I have the envelopes in my hand, before I give them to you, sometimes I want to burn them.’

‘You can’t, you know you can’t. Ed, promise me.’

‘You don’t need a promise. You know I won’t. I can’t.’ He said that as though pronouncing a sentence on himself. Then he looking accusingly at me. ‘Even though you won’t tell me what “jazz fugues” means, I won’t burn them.’

I let go of his sleeve. ‘It’s the key to the code. It’s two words from the key. You want me to explain the whole thing to you?’

In response, he kissed me, holding my face between his hands, and everything else in the world ceased. When he finally pulled away his smile had nothing boyish about it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I just needed you to make the offer.’

Then he left with the crossword to find the director again.

When he was gone, I drew a long breath. Everything was falling into place, everything was falling. I made my way to my office, placing one foot carefully in front of the other as I walked. Suddenly it all seemed so precarious, no room for any mistakes. Is this how they felt – explorers in search of lost treasures when they saw the spot indicated by ‘X’ on the map and knew, finally, there was no stepping back? Were they surprised to find the exhilaration they expected replaced by dread?

I reached my office, sat down, and ran my hands along the cracks in the leather of the desk chair. Today it was cool enough to dispense with the fan, for the first time since I had joined STD, and without that whirring of the blades this room, with its tiny dimensions, felt even more sealed up than usual. Six weeks. Six weeks only since I first stepped into this office with Ed.

Could it really just be chance, everything that had happened since then? The questions worrying at the back of my mind were no longer irritants to be pushed aside. The Poet’s messages and I had moved into the world of reactions and consequences. Was it really possible that there was no ordering principle behind anything that had happened – the messages to Shehnaz, her guess that they were written in code, the intersection of her life with mine? Stranger things had happened by chance, it’s true. And yet, there was that possibility that I was being played. What game is being played with my life, Omi had asked. Whatever it was, was I now part of it? Had I been placed on the board myself? To what end? What was the purpose behind his captivity, what was the plan?

But even if I were part of the game, how could I act differently, how could I pass this opportunity by? If the explorers knew the treasure map was written by a malevolent hand, would that stop them from digging deep into the earth in search of what was buried? If the box they pulled out said ‘Property of Pandora’ would they, even then, find it in themselves to place it back in the earth, tear up the map and turn away?

To understand the game, you must understand the mind that created it. For all my amateur detective work I was no closer to doing that than I had been the day all this started. All I had done in these last weeks was make myself visible, my investigation into Omi’s death anything but a secret.

Now comes the gathering.

I switched on my computer and checked my e-mail. There were messages aplenty with the heading Boond. I read only a few before deleting them all. Did every person at STD feel the need to send an office-wide message about what their friends and relatives said about the show?