Ice Claw (17 page)

Curved, cast-iron supports bore the weight of the gallery that went round the whole room halfway up the wall. The ceiling must have been about six meters high and not a space was to be seen between the soldier-rigid volumes. Dulled gold on black lettering spread across the top of the far wall. It was in Basque; Max had no idea what it meant.

Max knew his dad could spend years in this room, examining every paper written by d’Abbadie. He ran his fingers along book spines. A gentle hum drew his eyes to a humidifier in the corner. Yes, that made sense. They were barely a kilometer from the page-rotting dampness of the Basque coast. These books could be either packed away and held in some philistine of a building in a city, or allowed to remain here where they belonged. A tribute to the achievements of one man and his desire to explore the world and its people, the stars and planets, and his dream of living in a pretend castle.

From what Max could see, the lower shelves were mostly astronomical publications. The folders were protected by strong, thick brown paper. He touched his finger along their edges, pulled one from the shelf and placed it on the table.

“Sayid, grab another one of these. From about twenty years ago, just before Zabala left here.”

The folder was heavy, the big pages cumbersome. Max’s
hand hovered over the intricate data. A star chart. Lines bisected each other, stars had numbers, some had letters. Magnifications, magnitudes, it was a meaningless panorama of the galaxy as far as Max could tell. He flipped the pages quickly. There was nothing that could even resemble the name Zabala.

“They’re missing,” Sayid said.

“What?” Max moved to where his friend shuffled along the wide shelves, the only places big enough to hold the star charts.

“The folders go way back. Look”—he pointed one out—“1904, all the way up, 1927, and so on. How long would Zabala have worked here?”

“I don’t know,” Max said.

“Well, if he was here for, say, ten or fifteen years, up to twenty years ago there’s a whole batch missing.”

It made sense. If Zabala had tried to prove something and failed, gone public and brought embarrassment and derision on his scientific colleagues, they would have taken anything he had researched and archived it somewhere, or at worst destroyed it.

“See if there’s a book or something that would list any of the scientists that worked here,” Max told Sayid. “I’ve got to check on something.”

Max automatically looked at his wrist, but of course his father’s watch was missing. A twinge of regret, which he pushed aside. “Time, Sayid?”

“Nearly half-four. They close at five.”

Max nodded and walked quickly to the stair landing.

Looking out of the window, he saw that the Germans’ car had gone. He ran to another window, which looked out onto the fields towards the coast. The Frenchman was locking a small garden-type gate that closed off a footpath towards the cliffs.

Max pounded downstairs to the entrance hall and glanced at the office. The man’s scruffy black anorak was on a hook, so that meant he was probably doing his rounds. He’d be back.

Max trundled Sayid’s wheelchair down the corridor into the chapel, then folded the chair and hid it behind the door. Odds were the ticket seller would check inside the château before locking up for the night. Even if he went into the chapel he wouldn’t spot the wheelchair.

And if Max was lucky the man would see that the Germans’ car and Sayid’s chair were no longer there and believe that the whole “German family” had left.

Max sprinted upstairs, two at a time, got back to Sayid and moved closer to him so his voice wouldn’t echo.

“Tell me when it’s quarter to five. Anything?”

Sayid had an embossed leather book on the table next to a rolled-up plan. “I found Zabala.” He grinned. “I couldn’t find any kind of register, but I reckoned those scientists wouldn’t want to miss out on their bit of glory, so they wouldn’t chuck anything away with their own pictures in.” Sayid opened the ledger-sized book. “Different photos of the scientists who worked here until the 1970s, then it looks as though the place was closed down.”

Sayid was pointing at a group photograph. The caption was in a small typeface, but Max could read Zabala’s name.

Two rows of men: the front row seated, the others standing. Zabala stood with his arms folded and a briar pipe clamped between his teeth as he smiled for the camera.

“But I saw newspaper cuttings from the 1980s,” Max said.

“Then my guess is he carried on doing his own research here afterwards.”

“There must have been a reason. What’s here in the château? Stuff from Africa, different languages, astronomy …” Max remembered the newspaper piece on Zabala. “And astrology. He mixed the two. So there’s a link somewhere, Sayid. The Arabs were major players in astronomy….”

Sayid closed the book.

“Astronomy was OK because that could be used to tell farmers when to rotate crops and what have you, but astrology was unlawful.”

“OK, so perhaps it’s just an astronomy clue. Europeans mixed the two. There’s a load of stuff here about old d’Abbadie’s journey across Africa. Keep looking. And do it quietly. What’s this?”

He unfurled the rolled plans.

“Architect’s drawings of the château,” Sayid said.

They held the uncooperative edges of the plan flat. Max scooted his finger around the drawing, tracing the internal layout of the château in case there was a hidden room they had missed, or, more likely, that was kept purposefully from the public.

“Here’s where we are now, here’s the observatory …”

“We should look in there,” Sayid said.

“Yeah, I know. I just hoped there would be something in this room that would help us. This is where all the records are
kept. The observatory hasn’t been in use for a quarter of a century.”

A footfall scuffed the floor below. The Frenchman was on his rounds. He wheezed and coughed. Lights were going off all the way through the château, but were replaced by the softer glow of all-night security lights, small spotlights strategically positioned to throw a cone of illumination across a corner or edge of stairway.

Shadows changed the shapes of the walls, defacing the huge paintings, making an eerie no-man’s-land of the pockets of darkness.

Max needed to get into the office. He’d spotted the control box for the château’s alarm system when they had first entered the building, and it needed to be switched off if he and Sayid were going to spend the next few hours hunting for clues.

Max paused and crouched, watching through the banisters. The old man was pulling on his jacket. He moved towards the front door—going through his nightly routine.

A warning creak, like a snapping stick, seemed to thunder down the stairs. Sayid!

Had the old man heard? He turned but didn’t look up, then stepped back into the office, took his cigarettes from the desk, closed the office door and moved towards the main entrance.

Max turned, stepping lightly but rapidly upstairs.

Sayid had frozen, as if his foot had trodden on an antipersonnel mine that would spring up and explode if he moved. He winced when he saw his friend emerge from the staircase void.

The door downstairs clunked closed.

Max gave a thumbs-up to Sayid, who nodded, eased his foot forward and swung himself towards the library. Max peeped out of the window and saw the man hobbling towards the gate pillars at the end of the drive. The office door was unlocked. Max could smell the lingering residue of tobacco in the air as he slipped inside.

He opened the alarm box’s cover. A simple series of switches with the master switch clearly marked.

It was off. The Frenchman must have forgotten to switch the circuit on. Maybe the château was so secure no one could get in anyway. Security systems were a nuisance and a curse when one was forever being dragged out of a warm bed for a false alarm. Whatever the reason, the main switch was off, and that was all Max was interested in. Now they could get to work.

Once again he ran quickly back up the stairs, stepping across a darkened corner. Yellow, crinkle-cut moonlight filtered through the stained-glass window. At the top of the staircase the life-sized statue of a young Ethiopian warrior stood silently, a glass lamp held high, guarding the darkness of the stairwell, showing the way. Max murmured, “Thanks, mate.”

The château, full of half-light, relics and mysteries, whispered silence. Max could hear the gentle turn of paper rustling in the library. As he left the upper landing, turning into the passageway for the library and Sayid, he had no idea they were not alone.

Something moved in the shadows below.

Bobby Morrell didn’t have a chance when they came for him.

As darkness fell and the swollen moon escaped the confines of the horizon, he sat with a mug of coffee, a small fire burning on the beach. It was a cold night. He and Peaches had caught a few waves on the break near the rocks, but the wind had freshened, pushing clouds silently through the valleys and peaks of the mountains behind him. Another few weeks and he’d be back in school. Then college. Then what? He didn’t know. What he really wanted was to be on his own with the elements. He’d get a degree—business studies—and set up a sporting empire on the Web. Five years from now someone else could run it. He’d go and find the perfect wave and the highest mountain.

Countless waves around the world waited for him and his board, and there were high valleys choked with snow just begging for him to slice them open with a sweeping curve.

Life should be that simple. Bobby was part of the great outdoors. Connected was how he felt. Integral. Symbiosis. Mountains and sea needed him and he needed them.

That was why he liked Max Gordon. That kid was “connected” as well. Max was cool. He’d take on a challenge. He’d give it a go, as the Brits say. Yeah. He’d take Max to Hawaii one day and let him see real waves on Oahu. That’d chill his blood. Winter storms in Alaska created huge rollers that traveled thousands of miles until they hit Oahu’s north shore. Monsters. Wow. Those waves came at you like an express train, twenty yards high. Higher.

Max’d like that.

He looked out across the bay. Peaches must have caught a wave farther down and decided to call it a night. She was probably trudging through the sand right now. He’d keep the fire going. She’d be cold.

As the moonlight shimmered across the flat-water bay, he heard distant growls—off-roaders. Three or four of them were scratching around the night. He checked his cell phone, nervous he’d missed Max’s call. Nothing. Then something pushed through the bushes.

Bobby got to his feet, grabbed a piece of driftwood to protect himself and faced the figure who’d stepped into the firelight. The malformed head raised its face to the moonlight, as if sniffing the wind. The gashed mouth revealed pointed teeth. Its tongue licked saliva before it dribbled down its almost nonexistent chin.

“You must be Bobby,” Sharkface said.

Max pulled books and files from the library shelves, searching for any clues. Sayid did the same. But all they found for their efforts were a few charts, a plan of the château and what amounted to a series of yearbooks of scientists. Max was on the upper level, moving along the gantry below the emblazoned Basque letters on the roof beams. He looked at them and dismissed them. The words were a legacy of the generous spirit of Antoine d’Abbadie, encouraging the readers in his library to work and seek wisdom. It didn’t matter. Max didn’t understand a word.

His eyes were glazing over. He’d been in the half-light too long, and trying to read the foreign words on the spines of the folders and books was giving him a crick in his neck. He was looking without seeing, concentration flagging.

And then something caught his eye. He took two steps back. Words had been scratched along the edge of a shelf. Faint, barely visible, and they were small. It was doubtful if anyone would notice them unless by chance. Or unless they were looking.

What he needed was a piece of chalk to highlight the letters. But there was no chalk. What else? Max looked down to where Sayid sat at the trestle table, poring over a volume. He saw what he needed. He ran to the end of the gantry and down to Sayid, praying what he wanted would still be in place.