Alchemist (36 page)

It was twenty to five as he hit the outskirts of Brighton and pulled on to the forecourt of a pub. Squinting against the shadowy weakness of the interior light, he flicked through the pages of the computer magazine on the passenger seat until he reached the listings section with the name of the company he was looking for, and the directions he had written beside it. He re-read them, then drove on through the town centre, heading towards the sea.

After about ten minutes he passed a forest of domed minarets on his right: the Royal Pavilion, the massive extravagant folly George IV had built for his mistress. This was his principal landmark; now he began looking out for the address he wanted on his left. He crossed a traffic light, then saw the number painted on the column of an elegant Regency terrace. ‘24'. A large sign hung from the first-floor window: ‘Minaret Internet Plc'

He drove on past it, followed the directions he had been given to the car park. A biting cold breeze was blowing as he walked back along the seafront, past the brightly illuminated pier, clutching his Apple Mac laptop tightly and wishing he had some gloves on. Rounding the corner, he climbed the steps of number 24 and rang the entryphone buzzer.

There was a sharp click and he pushed the door open, walked along a narrow corridor, then up a flight of steps. As he reached the top he was greeted with a warm smile by an elegantly fashionable young woman in her early twenties.

‘My name's Bob Frost – I phoned earlier this afternoon.'

‘Yes, from Canterbury? Did you find us all right, Mr Frost?'

‘Your directions were grand.'

‘Come on through. Would you like some tea or coffee?'

‘Coffee, please, black, no sugar.' He followed her through a long room that looked like Mission Control at Houston and into a rather chaotic office crammed with desks and computer terminals, at which a bald-headed man, a ponytailed youth and a rather fierce-looking individual with a cigarette gripped in his lips were all working in feverish concentration. Clumps of wiring like mutant spaghetti spewed between the desks into junction boxes on the floor. Keys puttered and lights blinked among the intermittent bleeps, hisses and chimes of modems connecting.

Conor was shown to a chair sandwiched between a desk and a stack of Internet Yellow Pages, and told someone would be with him in a moment. He sat down and stared at a hand-drawn progress chart on the wall opposite him; it was in the shape of a glass tube with an orange line midway between the 7000 and 8000 marks. After a few moments a tall, slim man with long, prematurely greying hair came up to him. Wearing a green jacket over a black t-shirt, and a ‘&' sign earring pinned to his left lobe, he sported rather conventional glasses.

‘Mr Frost? I'm Andy Holyer. What can I do for you?'

The man had ‘tekkie' printed all over him, but his manner was pleasant and businesslike.

‘I need an eMail address.'

‘No problem.' He eyed the computer Conor was holding. ‘For a Mac?'

‘Yup.'

‘Is that a 540?'

‘540 colour, yes.'

‘We charge a joining fee of £17.75, then a monthly sub of £14.75 – no extras and there's no unit charging. We throw in
the manual and the software. The service gives you an eMail account and full Internet access.'

‘And I could join up right now?'

‘We could add you on to the system at the end of today and get your pack off in the post tonight.'

‘I – er – Is it possible I could take the pack with me?'

Andy Holyer looked at his watch. ‘I suppose if you called back between six and six-thirty that'd be OK.'

‘Sure.'

The young woman who had brought him in came over with his coffee. Andy Holyer turned to her. ‘This gentleman wants to open an account, Toni. Could you take the details? He wants to get on tonight, so he'll come back after six.'

‘Of course.' She led Conor over to a quieter corner of the room, sat him beside her desk and gave him a form. He laid his laptop and coffee in a gap on the desk and studied the form. It was simple, with spaces for his name, address and method of payment, and details of the system he used.

He filled in his fictitious name and an equally fictitious address in Canterbury, then hesitated at the payment option of cheque or credit card. ‘I'd like to pay cash – is that OK?'

‘No problem at all.'

He paid for six months in advance, and she wrote out a receipt. ‘Do you have the name you want to register for your mailbox?' she asked.

‘Yes,' he said with a wry, private smile.

She handed him a form on which he wrote down
eumenides
, then he turned it round for her to read. As she glanced at it, then typed it into the terminal, her face remained expressionless, not revealing whether the name meant anything to her or not. ‘So your eMail address will read:
[email protected]
. Yes?'

‘Yup, that's good.'

‘OK,' she said brightly. ‘If you'd like to pop back just after six we should have everything ready for you.'

‘Do you have an instruction manual I can be studying in the meantime?'

She ducked beneath her desk and produced one, saying, ‘You're welcome to wait here, but if you turn right outside the
front door you'll find a couple of cafés where you might be more comfortable.'

Conor glanced at his watch. It was only five fifteen. He thanked her and went off in search of somewhere to kill the next three quarters of an hour.

The sight of the lights on in the cottage meant either that Alice had not been today, or that the strict note Monty had left her cleaning lady had got through, she thought as she drove up the pitch-black cart track. So far it had been a losing battle trying to train her daily into leaving the lights on. Coupled with the fact that on winter nights like these it was cheering to come home to a house not in total darkness, Monty thought also that the cats might be happier with some lights on, although she was not so sure about that.

The headlights of the MG picked out the barn, revealing clearly for an instant its corrugated iron cladding and flapping sheeting, before dropping it back into an ominous silhouette. The other thing Monty did not like about arriving home in the dark was driving past the barn; for no real reason it always spooked her.

She turned on to the hard in front of the garage, climbed out, shivering against the sudden cold of the rising wind, heaved up the garage door and drove the car in. She removed her briefcase, containing some papers she intended working on after supper, pulled the door shut, walked up to the front door and pushed the key into the lock.

She was feeling a little down this evening. Lunch had gone so well with Conor Molloy yesterday, right up until the point when she had mentioned that Seals had cried out something that sounded like
wolf
, and then he had suddenly seemed to lose interest in her and retreat into a world of his own.

She'd known he was going to be preoccupied as he had told her he was in the middle of moving; she had been hoping to get a call or an eMail from him today, though, but had heard nothing. Her father had been down in Berkshire and she had gone up to the canteen at lunch time in the hope of running into the American, but had seen no sign of him. A couple of
times she had been tempted to phone him on a pretext, but had resisted.
Mustn't seem too keen
, she knew.

The two cats came running up as she entered, the way they always did. ‘Crick! Watson! Hello, boys, how are you?' She knelt to stroke them both. As she did so, the phone rang.

Conor Molloy? She hurried through into the kitchen, and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yeshello,' she said, a fraction breathlessly.

‘Oh – er – Miss Bannerman?'

It was a female voice that was vaguely familiar; Monty recognized the Welsh accent, but could not immediately place it. The woman was courteous, but sounded very distressed.

‘Speaking,' she said, a little guardedly, and disappointed that it was not the American; although she remembered she hadn't even given him her home number.

There was a pause. ‘Miss Bannerman – I'm so sorry to disturb you – it's Walter's wife.'

‘Yes – yes, of course, hello. How are you, Mrs Hoggin?'

There was a longer pause. ‘I thought you might want to know – because you asked Walter to do something for you, and you – you might be waiting on it.' Her voice began to falter. ‘I'm afraid he had a heart attack at work this afternoon. They –' Her voice cracked completely and Monty held on in terrible silence, fear swirling in the pit of her stomach.

‘They – they said they tried to resuscitate him, but that he was dead by the time the ambulance got him to hospital.'

As Conor headed north on the motorway, back towards London, the sign loomed up overhead, ‘Gatwick Airport', with an arrow indicating the near side lane exit.

Perfect
, he thought, accelerating past a couple of trucks, then moving sharply over to the left. He drove up the ramp and stopped at the lights at the top. Amid the blaze of illuminations
that marked out the sprawling buildings and perimeter of the airport, he saw several hotel signs high in the night sky.

Any of them would do fine, he thought, selecting the Post House at random and heading down the dual carriageway towards it. He crossed a series of roundabouts, then found himself about to overshoot the main entrance. Braking hard, he swung in without indicating, ignoring the blare of a horn behind him, and followed the signs to the car park at the rear of the building.

Relax
, he thought.
Cool it!
He was as tense as hell, and clammy with perspiration. Slowing right down, he cruised the parking lot, and saw a row of empty bays ahead.

He reversed into one, removed his briefcase and locked the car, then walked through a pair of automatic doors into the rear of the lobby and made his way to the front desk. The hotel seemed quiet; a group of businessmen, with their names on lapel badges, stood closely together as if they had been deposited on alien terrain and were waiting to be rescued. Two men in armchairs were engrossed on their mobile phones, and a glamorous brunette sat on her own reading a magazine.

Conor addressed the young woman receptionist. ‘Do you have any rooms available – a single?'

‘They're all twins, sir, but we have a single occupancy rate of forty-five pounds.' Her voice sounded like one loop of a gramophone needle stuck in a groove.

‘Fine, I'll take one.'

She swivelled a pad of registration forms to face him. ‘If you could just fill that out, please, sir,' then she turned her attention back to her printouts. Conor wrote the name ‘Robert Frost' and his fictitious address in Canterbury, and paid cash in advance for the room.

She handed him a card key inside a tiny folder. ‘If you just settle your extras when you check out. Enjoy your stay,' she added with a vapid smile.

Conor got out of the lift on the fourth floor, checked the arrow directions for the room numbers and made his way along to 4122. It was a blandly functional room, with twin beds and a television. Net curtains blotted out some of the
glow from the airport, and the double-glazed windows muffled most of the noise.

He found the ‘Do Not Disturb' sign and hung it on the door. Then he lifted his laptop, modem cable and the instruction manual from Minaret Internet out of his briefcase, and switched on the computer.

It chimed reassuringly, and as it began booting up he traced the hotel telephone wire behind the bedstead to the socket on the wall. As he'd anticipated, the toggle had been broken off to prevent it being removed, so he levered in a pin, wiggling it until it sprung the catch, and the jackplug slipped out. He pushed in the jack on the modem cable, then connected the other end of the cable to his modem port, opened the desk legs on the base of the computer and set it down beside the television.

He waited a couple more moments for the machine to finish booting up then opened up InterSLIP and typed in a ‘9', followed by a comma, to the front of the Bendix Schere network dial-in number – so that it would pass through the hotel system. Then he clicked on the ‘Connect' button and held his breath. The modem appeared to hesitate for a moment, then made the familiar hisses and beeps.

The words
ENTER USER NAME
appeared on the screen.

Conor typed:
chrowley,
then hit the carriage return.

ENTER PASSWORD.

Conor typed Charley Rowley's password,
1u
1
u/,
then hit carriage return again.