Nick sent a message saying he would be half an hour late so he surged through the Turner Gallery, drank a cup of sub-par coffee in the café, and sat on the front re-spreeding
Undeath In Venice
on his tablet, trying to decide what approach if any he should take to it. Would he position himself best by praising or attacking it? He thumbed in a number of ambivalent tweets to gauge the overall temperature, and uploaded a few choice phrases to Qwote.
Nick arrived at the entrance to the Wetherspoon’s at roughly the same time as Alex, dismounting and rapidly unsnapping his cycle helmet, the two of them shaking hands. He had an open, sober manner that Alex liked, and for the first ten minutes or so they chatted about the situation up in London: the outbreaks of rioting, the latest mega-projects from Qatar and China that were transforming the city. Alex expressed a certain mature neutrality in the face of it all, global forces, a historical stage that ultimately it would be foolish not to embrace, even though there were obvious costs to some, with Nick politely observing that he was at the business end of all this displacement. Micro and macro views of the broad historical sweep.
After a few minutes Nick produced a carrier bag with some folded sheets, two notebooks, and a sealed A4 envelope of the kind he had seen at Paula’s flat.
You are happy to give this to me? Alex asked.
Well, it’s been twenty years now. It’s like throwing away old Christmas cards. He made me promise not to read anything or listen to any of the cassettes until he came back to get them. You feel bad, but …
I have heard some of Vernon’s music, soundscape stuff. Astonishing, really, and for the time, well. No chance I can persuade you to let me get access to your collection before Graeme Ferris does.
Nick smiled. Ahh, sorry, he said. But listen we are having a little Retro rave down here next week, Return to Dreamland. And I will certainly be playing a few of Vernon’s old tunes. The Trap 9 stuff. Still have all the white labels, probably worth a fortune now.
Well, Alex said. I’m going to get back to you on all this stuff. Definitely.
So, Nick said, who else have you contacted? Paula, right? Have you spoken to Rob, or Sarah and John, or anyone?
No.
Oh well, I am sure they have tons of stuff. Didn’t Vernon spread his stuff around, give it to different people, I thought. That’s what he told me he was doing.
Ah yes, Alex was about to say, in the video, in the message he left for Paula Adonor, but suddenly Nick was excusing himself to take a call. Alex fiddled with his phone checking the noodl data that had been delivered to his email address. Sarah Peake had returned a relatively high percentage similarity across several key terms, though she wasn’t directly connected to Paula Adonor. He tapped on his
DataQuest
extension, even greyer in its legality than noodl, and set it to finding any and every email, landline, or postal address she had ever had.
Nick returned looking flustered and apologetic, obviously needing to leave.
Sorry, Alex said. You mentioned Sarah and …?
Sarah, yeah Sarah and John, friends of Vernon’s from back home I think. I never knew them well but we hung out together sometimes, they crashed at our place a few times, moved up to Hulme Crescent with Vernon and Rob. Don’t know much more about them. Maybe Paula can help there.
Sarah Peake?
Oh, honestly, I have no idea about surnames. Sorry.
And, was it Rob?
Ahh. Nick chuckled, rolled his eyes. Robert Gillespie. He made a lot of that music with Vernon. Last I heard he was in Castleford. Yorkshire. He had a bookshop there. I can’t remember how that happened.
Do you have contact details?
Sure, Nick said, standing and strapping his helmet back on. Let me dig them out. I’ll email them to you.
They shook hands in the entrance. Nick took off on his bike again, Alex headed back to the car, where, out of curiosity he opened the A4 envelope.
Three hours later he was still sitting there, dumbstruck.
Forget the music, impressive as that was, let Graeme Ferris have it. Here was a novel, fallen into his lap. He had the beginning. It was, my god he had to admit it, very, very good. Remarkable, extraordinary, a Thriller.
V. C. 96 1–5 1. Yes, he had seen the same envelope with V. C. 96 1–5 4 in that shoebox in Paula Adonor’s flat, Crane spreading his things around. Five parts, he had the first part now, Paula had the last, and the others were out there somewhere. He closed his eyes and he could sense them somewhere in the dark, dimly pulsing, calling to him. He felt almost as though he could follow their signal, track them down, get in the car and drive blind to where they had sat waiting for him for over twenty years.
And now things began to pick up speed. Accelerate. At some point over the next day or two he made a decision, though really it felt as though the decision had been made for him, long ago. He would steal it, if he could, if he could get his hands on the rest of the novel, if it all added up, and he could also guarantee no-one else had any idea of the contents. Though he didn’t like the word, steal, perhaps appropriate was better.
It was certainly risky. He should have been cautious, but with the decision made and fired by confidence that nothing was beyond his powers of persuasion and the force of his will, he found that he was immediately online, emailing and tweeting and claiming, semi-cryptically, to have finished a work, a new novel. There would be a sudden blazing re-emergence. If people asked he would make claims for the power of Deveretol to boost efficiency, increase productivity. This covered his absences, the missed deadlines, the undelivered work, the unanswered emails and texts. Creative foment, he had been in a trance, an ecstasy of writing so blindingly and brutally intense that all other obligations had been eclipsed. To deliver the work so quickly after
Gilligan’s Century
and with such a tremendous follow-up, something so different. Yes, he would be redeemed, and saved from the boring labour, the years of sitting and writing, waiting for the acclaim, the praise that he deserved, that might never come.
He sent out a flurry of emails, to agents, editors, friends, and contacts, took to all his social networks with renewed wit and energy, and began his quest in earnest. He emailed Paula Adonor and requested Sarah Peake’s email address, fired one off to Robert Gillespie, received “Go Fuck yourself” as an immediate reply, and decided to go to Castleford to meet up with him face to face, to hire a hands-free and take the dedicated Expressway, avoid the inevitable delays and disruptions getting out of London.
He knew little of the North, and was more familiar with foreign countries, especially cities like Madrid or Berlin, or the parts of southern Italy where they’d spent their family holidays. But that was how it was now. He thought of London and the South as essentially facing away from the rest of the country, oriented toward Europe, connected to the great conurbations there. He was largely pro the London independence movement, especially if it would allow them to stay within Europe. Yes, it was getting very complicated and he didn’t really have time to consider all that as fully as he would have liked, though he certainly needed to have an opinion on it.
Paula Adonor didn’t have any kind of contact details for Sarah Peake, but DataQuest knew everything, and checking his inbox he found he already had an email address sitting there waiting:
[email protected]
.
He stopped at a petrol station down the road and got a couple of cans of Vortex coffee, thick and sugary, used one to wash down a couple of Deveretol and sipped the other as he drove. He had found a CD in the envelope that Nick Skilling had passed onto him, which turned out to be some remixes and manipulations of cheesy pop hits from the 80s and early 90s. Queen was there, Pink Floyd, and some other samples he half recognised and would Shazam later. Half an hour or so after he set out he pulled onto the 02 Expressway.
Off we go, the acceleration combined with the pills and caffeine kicking in, the ghostly glow of the lights along the motorway, the towns and cities lying like fluorescent webbing over the dark hills, the smooth rise and fall, the flow of it all, the sense of space and time at your disposal–sublime.
He took the opportunity to send Paula Adonor a message, understood from her response that she was free to talk and called her on noodlviz. He settled his tablet into the holder beside the steering wheel and set the car to hands-free.
Paula, he said, the more you can tell me about Vernon’s movements the easier it will be for me to find his stuff. Who might he have given it to? Rob I am already heading out to make contact with. Tell me about Sarah and John.
He had asked the question but it was hard for him to concentrate on her reply, his thoughts drifting again to the larger structure of the novel. He had read the opening section already and there were a million tantalising, infuriating possible directions it could go in. He could almost see it, the structure over-laying the road and the shifting hills, a hypercube, endlessly folding in on itself, in which he wandered lost and overwhelmed. I am seeing History itself he thought, and almost gasped at the surge of elation that went through him.
Sorry, he realised he was saying, sorry; something Paula Adonor said had snagged his attention. What was that? Ah, so your understanding of Vernon’s last hours was that these guys, Sarah and John, were the last ones to see him. And they were out here somewhere too.
Right. Paula said. I just mentioned that to you I think.
Sure, he said. The name of the farm was?
I am pretty sure it was Cross Farm.
So, he said, let’s recap, make sure I’ve got my facts straight. Vernon disappeared from your place, middle of the night in February 1996, you try to trace him over the next couple of weeks and the trail runs cold with …
Howard, she said. He drove Vernon out to the farm to see Sarah and John, dropped him off there at the gate and watched him go up into the house. But by the time I tried to get in touch they had already gone, off to New Zealand to start a new life. I mean we were never really close, so. I mean we had to do it all by letters and phone calls back then.
He tapped at his phone, entered Cross Farm in the
getthere
app and found he was chewing a Deveretol.
So you know he saw you, Nick Skilling, Robert Gillespie, Sarah Peake, anyone else he might have distributed things too?
He may have made friends when he was travelling, I don’t know.
Sure. Alex Hargreaves said, and thought, well that would complicate matters. His parents? So I guess I am going to pick everything up from you some time in the next week or two.
Paula Adonor laughed. I’m sorry, she said. I just can’t get used to the idea that you are sitting in the driver’s seat with your hands free.
He laughed too, signed out, returned his vision to the road and tried to anticipate where the story might be leading. Paula had said, as she had done before, that she hoped he might find something conclusive about what had happened to Vernon Crane, but for Alex Hargreaves this was a secondary concern. He felt sure he was dead, or as good as dead.
After an hour or so he suddenly felt surprisingly tired and half contemplated crawling over into the back seat, but then a little jolt of panic brought him round enough to check that the car was locked on the right coordinates. Yes, fine. He had been so busy the past few days that he had only managed a couple of hours a night and now it had crept up on him. The seat reclined smoothly and in a few seconds he was asleep and dreaming.
He awoke dry-mouthed, the faint after-image of something star-shaped and livid green bruising his vision. He had the sense that some important, secret work had been undertaken as he slept, neural networks connecting, new pathways forged. Routes, chan- nels, streams.
The car hadn’t pulled into the last bay of the Express route as he had instructed it to, and he sat up disoriented and looked around, reaching for a bottle of Elite Sports water from the glove compartment. Instead he was pulled up onto the grass verge of a minor road somewhere.
He got out of the car to stretch his legs. There was a gap in the trees, a field and beyond what looked like a quarry, an artificial lake. A nice, spring morning. How had he got here? With the pins and needles shaken out of his legs he got back in the car, scrolled through the instruction log and saw that
getthere
claimed he had turned off automatic drive and returned to manual three hours before. The GPS coordinates had been set for here.
He had another sip of water. Had he woken up, driven out here and fallen asleep again? Apparently so. He stretched. Ah, yes, the cottage, he had been talking to Paula Adonor about it, had got a rough lock on its location, but he couldn’t see anything other than fields and trees. He had thought he might perhaps drive out there from Castleford on the way back if time permitted, but it seemed as though he was already one step ahead of himself, busy sorting and arranging his life without his conscious consent.
Well, he smiled, efficiency is one of those
side-benefits
that Deveretol advocates like to talk of. Sit back, he said to himself, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Bohemian Books was on a side street in what Alex Hargreaves took to be the centre of town, though every street resembled a side street. This was a town that anyone with an ounce of aspiration immediately got out of, that much was immediately and abundantly clear. Thank god it was a sunny day. He couldn’t imagine how depressing this parade of boarded up facades, kebab shops, payday lenders, and charity shops would be in winter. As he was driving into town a series of signs directed him toward the Winter Park that Wikipedia told him had been erected on the site of one of the former mines. It was an artificial ski slope and he snorted at the picture of it, in form as close to a literal White Elephant as it was possible to imagine. Of all the misconceived projects, wastes of taxpayer’s money he could imagine, this was surely at the top of the list. It was highly unlikely that any of Castleford’s denizens would be learning to ski in the near future, he suspected.