Watching You(99)

39




Friday 30 October, 03.18

They could already smell the bodies from the stairwell. It wasn’t strong, or at least not enough to rouse the neighbours. But the higher they climbed, the more Sam found himself in a different time.

A time that didn’t smell of dead bodies.

He was fifteen years old. The door to the flat was marked Larsson. Behind it waited a magical world of watches and clocks. There waited his good friend with the crooked face, the boy who with a gentle hand guided him into a world of perfectly attuned cogs, pinions, springs, shafts, weights and pendulums. A world where every second was a mystery.

They had talked about how Switzerland became the centre of global clockmaking in the 1700s when the clockmakers of Paris, in their capacity as servants to the aristocracy, had to flee the French Revolution. And they had talked about the Antikythera mechanism, and how the Greeks had managed to create a mysteriously complex timepiece almost one hundred years before Christ.

It was like a door opening in Sam’s brain, revealing an unknown world hidden inside the familiar everyday world, a better world that he may never have had access to without William. And it had happened behind the door which Sam, now more than twice the age he had been then, was standing front of. Molly caught up with him. She had her pistol drawn.

It didn’t say Larsson on the letterbox, it said Pachachi.

The stench of bodies was stronger than before.

Sam pulled out his lock-pick and inserted it as silently as he could. He looked at his hand. It was trembling badly. He glanced over towards Molly. She was pale, and shaking. They were both aware that some version of hell awaited behind the door to William’s childhood home. But there was no going back.

This was it.

They were in another universe, the real universe, where darkness reigned. All light was an illusion, a reassuring veneer of lies that allows us to live, gives us the strength to become adults. They were in a different era now, where barbarism still prevailed, where the chimaera of civilisation hadn’t yet broken through.

They heard the click as the pick caught. Pistols raised, torches at the ready. The door opened.

The air seemed to get sucked into the flat, as if the pressure in there were lower than in the world outside. And it was totally dark. The smell of bodies hit them like a wall. Sam looked quickly at the material around the door. He recognised it. Odour-isolating sealant. So that as little death as possible would seep out into the stairwell.

They stood in the cramped hallway, trying to breathe the right way, the way they had been trained. As if training could fend off such extreme darkness.

From beyond the stench, Sam’s childhood came back to him. He remembered every corner, every nook of the flat. The corridor to the left led to the kitchen and one of the bedrooms, the longer corridor to the right to the other bedroom and the living room. That was where William’s bedroom was, the unusually large but windowless room where two teenagers had sat fiddling with their clocks and watches. Their tiny cog wheels.

William’s dying words: ‘Don’t forget the cogs.’

They read the question in each other’s eyes.

Who was dead?

Which of the seven teenage girls would never have a chance to grow up?

William’s dying words: ‘It’s full of death.’

Sam suddenly noticed something pinned to one wall of the hall. When he shone his torch at it he realised that it was a watch. He recognised a tiny scratch in the glass.

It was his Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava.

Ignoring it, he nodded to the left, towards the corridor that led to the kitchen and one bedroom. They took a room each.

Sam quickly ascertained that the little bedroom was empty. He noted odour-isolating material around the bedroom door again. The electronic equipment on the desk indicated that this had been William’s most recent headquarters. There were bound to be a fair few answers in those computers.

He turned and met Molly’s gaze. It was glassy as she nodded towards the kitchen. He left the bedroom and joined her.

At the kitchen table sat two people. They might have been engaged in a conversation, just taking a short break. They were both young men, and they had been dead a long time. The flesh had begun to fall off them, and the parts that hadn’t completely dried out were crawling with maggots.

Sam heard himself groan.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said.

Molly was holding a handkerchief so tightly to her nose that Sam almost didn’t hear what she said. ‘Two young men with beards and loose-fitting clothes.’

‘Brother and friend back from IS?’

She shrugged. They walked out, through the hall and past the front door. The corridor was much longer than he remembered. It was as if they were navigating a body. From somewhere far ahead shimmered an almost guttering source of light. It was as if the gloomy corridor’s walls were closing in on them, contracting and getting ready to propel them into a time that had long since been lost.

As if time was ever lost.

When they reached the living room they realised where the light was coming from. There was another door, one that was simultaneously familiar and unknown to Sam. He recognised all too well the mark in the veneered surface of the door, four impressions, from the knuckles of a fist. The door to William’s childhood room had always looked like that.

But it definitely hadn’t given off its own light.