Three Moments of an Explosion Read online

  “Thanks,” Will said. “They can’t take her away now.” He looked back at her. “I can tell she’s got some plan …”

  Gilroy saw McCulloch. He blinked at the sight of her fury. Her face looked bleached in the sun, and dust and dirt swirled about her business suit.

  “What’s going on?” Hensher said. He jogged heavily toward the confrontation.

  “She’s a fucking thief is what’s going on!” Paddick shouted.

  “Calm down. What’s she stolen?”

  “Yes,” said Gilroy. “What have I stolen?”

  In the red tent, by the half-man, was a new cast of clear set resin.

  It was an alien limb.

  It was small and intricate. The width of a thin human arm, its three joints extending from each other in contradictory directions. At its end, blurry with the slow motion of years of earth, was a mitt, a claw in scissoring intersection. It glowed like illuminated lucite.

  Within the crystalline limb were facets, flecks of light. There were stones and the husks of insects embedded in it, too, and shards of metal, swept up, not fallen to what had been the bottom of the body’s hole, or fallen once but risen again, suspended alongside those glinting colors.

  Everyone stared at it. Hensher kept them back.

  “She stole it!” Paddick shouted. “Then fucked off in her glad rags to report a find to the ministry.”

  Gilroy made a disgusted noise and walked out. “Hey!” Hensher went after her. The silence within the canvas was strained. Everyone listened to Hensher remonstrating with Gilroy, and that she did not respond.

  “Show them,” Paddick said to his colleague.

  “Fuck you,” Sophia said.

  “Show them!”

  The other man looked pleading. He thumbed through files on his phone and held it up for McCulloch to see a picture.

  “This morning we dug that up,” Paddick said.

  Another cast, another of the extraterrestrial immigrants. It lay on its side smashed against the wall of a ruined plaza. It stared toward the camera, a sad alien death in plaster.

  The thing was missing one of its top two limbs. McCulloch looked at the jewel-like arm at his feet.

  “See?” Paddick said. “You see? She stole it.”

  “You found that this morning,” Sophia said. “She found this two days ago.”

  “Yes,” Paddick said. “After we invited her to our dig. Where we’d already started pouring plaster into the hole. It’s not enough that she snakes Banto away, now this …”

  “Wait,” McCulloch said. “I don’t get it. What are you saying? That she stole a bit of hole? She stole a bit of your hole and replaced it with earth?”

  Paddick looked at him in uneasy fury. “Well I don’t know,” he shouted. “But look at it, look at the joins. This is clearly the arm from our body.”

  “We found this,” Sophia said. “Days ago. By the pottery dump.”

  “Look at all that shit in it,” Paddick said. “What’s she put in it, bits of crystal?” he said. “She’s not a scientist, she’s a fucking jeweler …”

  Will said, “This way we can see what’s inside.”

  “It’s a hole,” Paddick said. “That was once an arm. If there’s anything inside it it’s bugs and bones. It’s not like we don’t do X-rays, you know …”

  “So crack it open,” Gilroy said, walking back in, Hensher behind her. “Crack open your cast. To show there’s nothing inside.”

  If you broke it and ground it up there would be no specimen, only dust. Take a second cast of it before you did, to make another model, and all you’d end up with was an echo of a hole. Anything there ever had been within would be gone.

  Hensher kept Paddick and Gilroy apart. “You’re leaving,” he said to Paddick. “Do I make myself clear? Take me to your dig. It’s that or I’m arresting you.”

  McCulloch sat in his car. Will leaned close to the window to whisper to him.

  “She’s talking to the earth,” he said. “She’s talking to herself when she doesn’t think we’re listening.”

  “What d’you want me to do about it?” McCulloch said.

  “You want to help, don’t you?” Will said. “I don’t know.” His desolation startled McCulloch. “She wants me to do light analysis on those glimmers,” Will whispered. “As if that’s my field. Thing is …” He hesitated. “I think she did steal it.”

  McCulloch stared at him. Will nodded. Before McCulloch could ask him to explain, he backed away and shook his head.

  Hensher got into Paddick’s car and McCulloch started his own and followed them down the uneven path, watching the dig recede, seeing Gilroy jump into the pit in her unsuitable clothes.

  Sophia watched her professor, her arms tightly folded. Will watched McCulloch.

  He followed Paddick and Hensher back toward town but soon let them pull out of sight. After a few minutes he pulled over onto the hard shoulder.

  The land to either side looked as if it had been cultivated once but long left fallow. He could see ditches and the overgrown remains of hedges and he could smell a farm. In the distance a large hoarding stood at an angle to the road. Whatever it had advertised had long been illegible. Sections of its paneling had fallen away and through the holes McCulloch could see the volcano. It was raining some way up the slopes.

  It would be light for a while yet. He turned his car around and drove north, back past the turnoff. Into the foothills. Past isolated businesses: stonemasons; a cafe for truck drivers; an unlikely garden center. It was some years since he had been in these uplands. The abrupt change in altitude meant that even the plants here were different from those in Elam and its surrounds. It was not hot but there was something to the light that put him in mind of a sticky high summer. He watched a cardinal fly.

  When the sun at last grew low, he wound a way back south by a dawdling route. He timed his journey well: it was just dark when he parked by the entrance to the dig. He took a pocket flashlight from the glove compartment.

  McCulloch walked the mile or so of path, his hands in his pockets. There were two new guards but they were young and bored and spent their time chatting and smoking by the roped-off entrance. McCulloch stood against a tree and watched them, barely even hiding.

  The lights were on in the living-quarters tent. McCulloch walked the site’s perimeter.

  He could hear Sophia and Will though he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He heard a can open and realized he was very thirsty.

  As he approached the red tent, McCulloch heard whispering.

  The window was covered, the plastic curtain drawn. The spot of a flashlight beam moved over the canvas, from inside. McCulloch moved as silently as he could, making sure his shadow would not fall over the cloth.

  He heard Gilroy within.

  She spoke quickly, a long low monologue. McCulloch put his ear close. Gilroy’s voice went up and down with a controlled urgency.

  “I try every night,” she said. She paused as if at an answer. “It couldn’t be any different now, it couldn’t be other than it is. You know that. Things are different than they were but still, they’re close enough to the same. So. Come on. Please. Come.”

  The surface of the tent vibrated minutely from her words. Her voice got quieter, and came from lower and lower down. She was crouching, or kneeling. “Come on,” she said. “What’ll it take?” She whispered. She must have been whispering right down by the ground. Into the earth. “What are you waiting for? I’ll do what I can. Come on.”

  Her voice grew fainter and fainter until McCulloch could not hear her words any more, only a beseeching murmur. Her light moved and, abruptly, colored glimmers shone across the canvas like a constellation. She was shining a light into the resin limb or into the half-body, McCulloch thought, to make a starburst.

  He heard her hiss with effort. She’d picked something up, he thought, something heavy. He imagined her cradling something.

  All the lights went out. There were long, silent, dark moments. />
  At last McCulloch heard her stand and brush away dirt. The tent vibrated with the zip and swish of the door as she left.

  Her departure shifted the curtain closest to him, twitched it a fraction aside. McCulloch could peer into the dark interior.

  When he was sure she was not returning, that no one was nearby, he turned on his own tiny flashlight and shone the beam into the gap, right into the crystal remains.

  A burst of light filled the tent. It scattered and amplified, brighter still than when Gilroy had turned her own torch on, so bright that McCulloch gasped and fumbled with his torch and turned it quickly off.

  He waited, in agonies. But no one had noticed the glow. No one came. McCulloch sat on the cold ground and waited for his heart to slow.

  On the island everyone was walking on the emptiness of death, the alien dead. Animals tunneled without intent from one corpse-hole to another, linking the gaps with evidence of life.

  When the resin became the default material by which the casts were made—as it surely must—McCulloch would stock up on new trinkets. His key rings and dolls would not be white but brittle clear plastic. The factories of China would set up new supply chains.

  Specimens would go missing. The plaster dead were whole or nothing: set them in an alcove to guard a room, but break them and all you would have is a stub like a knuckle, nothing into which you could stare. McCulloch told himself there was nothing appealing to a thief in such remains, and that he knew this because he’d been a thief once. The resin remains, though—cut one apart, shape its pieces and polish them, and the collaborators’ parts would be jewels on chains.

  McCulloch did not know who’d taken him to Chislehurst’s tunnels when he was a boy. He remembered standing there, though, a cave. He knew he hadn’t thought it at the time, but when he considered the visit now, he imagined himself standing in the space left where dead giants had rotted into nothing, there beneath what would become London.

  Cheevers called him early the next morning. “Meet me at the cop shop,” he said. “Not the old town one—you know the one in Vanderhoof?”

  “Course I don’t.”

  “Budley Road, by the covered market. Hurry up. Gilroy’s been arrested.”

  When McCulloch arrived, Cheevers was in the vestibule, talking urgently into a pay phone under the poster for a drugs helpline. He nodded a greeting.

  “Just liaising with Hensher,” he said when he hung up.

  “Fuck it,” said McCulloch. “He promised he wouldn’t take her in. And for what? She didn’t even touch Paddick …”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “What then? How d’you know?”

  “I’m representing her is how.”

  McCulloch blinked.

  “What’s your excuse?” Cheevers said. “Why are you helping? That lad Will told me he’d called you yesterday, why Hensher softly-softlied.”

  They met each other’s eyes. There was a ghost of amusement in their urgency, a wry recognition of each other.

  “Why you lawing her?” McCulloch said.

  “Oh, because of what kills cats,” said Cheevers. “As if you don’t know. It was you got me intrigued, and it was the charming Sophia called me and got me over here today. She said the police turned up at dawn. She’s still there, keeping an eye on the officers keeping an eye on the site.”

  “Sensible girl.”

  “Very. She’ll go far. When they arrived they arrested Gilroy. For what, you ask?” Cheevers paused for effect. “For illegal dumping.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “Well, it turns out that concoction of hers hasn’t technically been OK-ed by the Environment Agency. Paddick must’ve made some calls. Lord knows what strings he’s pulled but he’s managed to get her arrested under pollution legislation drafted after Bhopal.”

  “That’s fucking absurd,” McCulloch said. “She ain’t even leaving it in the ground.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Will she get out?”

  “Oh, certainly. The question is when. They can only hold her forty-eight hours, but at this rate they might well.” Cheevers raised his eyebrows. “For a departmental turf war this has turned unco’ nasty. Look, I need to speak to my client, she’s crawling the walls.”

  “They’re not going to let me in …”

  “The chaps here aren’t taking this very seriously,” Cheevers said. “I know several of the officers, and they know they’re being used. They’ve already let one of Mother Hen’s little chicks in there with her, they’re certainly not going to mind you being my assistant. Consider yourself deputized.”

  Gilroy stood staring up at a window too high to look out of, going up and down on her toes. When Cheevers entered she turned and came straight to him.

  “How are we looking?” she said. “What’s the situation?” She showed no surprise at McCulloch’s presence. Will stood in the corner and tried to catch McCulloch’s eye.

  “You’ve put them in touch with your university?” Cheevers said.

  “Of course. With my department and with Chemistry.”

  “Well, excellent. I’m afraid they’ll probably hold you a while. They can, technically, and someone seems to want to.”

  Gilroy closed her eyes. She leaned against the wall and McCulloch looked at the profile of her face, her high forehead, the arch of her nose, as if they were rock forms. She startled him by speaking. “I need Will and Sophia to get on with things. While we’re waiting.”

  “We can’t, Prof,” Will said. “Soph’s there but she’s alone and the cops have taken the mixes away and they won’t let her do anything.”

  Gilroy set her lips and nodded at some decision and opened her eyes.

  “Listen,” she said to Cheevers and McCulloch. “We found some holes yesterday. We’d already filled them before all this happened. It’s hardening right now. I think this might be major. Can you help?” She looked at McCulloch. “Will told me what you did yesterday. If that policeman hadn’t been there I don’t know what the stupid man would have done.

  “Will, I need you to talk to the Ministry of Antiquities. My contact is Simeon Budd.” She said the name carefully. “Sophia has the car?”

  Will nodded.

  “Cheevers, can you please take him?” she said. She did not seem to consider that he would refuse, and he did not. “And you might put in a word to get him inside, if there’s any difficulty? There shouldn’t be, though. Will, tell Budd we cannot leave whatever we’ve found under there. Whatever they decide about all this bloody silliness, they have to let you dig it up.

  “It’ll be hard in a day. If I’m not there by then, Sophia’s to take charge. Will I be there, Cheevers?” He shrugged and shook his head. McCulloch watched Gilroy make another decision. “Don’t wait if I’m not,” she said to Will. “Got that? Take it out of the earth as soon as it’s ready.

  “Do not wait.”

  McCulloch drove a long way back from the police station, via the seawall. He parked as close as he could get. He did not often come here. He stood in the low spray. It was not a vigorous sea. He could hear it slopping fitfully through runoff tunnels under his feet.

  He’d returned to London once, for eight days, in 1993. McCulloch would not quite have said he missed the streets of Elam, but on that visit he knew, certainly, that they were where he wanted to be.

  McCulloch had taken a sour, troubling pleasure in telling no one he was there. None of the few family or erstwhile acquaintances who’d made strained efforts to stay in touch with him. He didn’t like the satisfaction he felt as he walked, provoking something by going to his old places, marking as many changes as he could. I won’t come back, he had thought and he had not.

  He’d felt as though, if he only kicked a piece of rubbish the right way, he might dislodge something great from beneath him. Remembering made him grow self-conscious. He returned to the shop at last, where Cheevers eventually called him.

  “Our boy’s not the most honey-tongued,” he said down t
he line. “But he did his best and with a little help from myself I think we were convincing enough. It’s obvious that Gilroy’s already been very persuasive, and I most certainly want to see what’s down there. I didn’t pretend otherwise.”

  His excitement was grating. McCulloch rang off. He tried to remember what flavor of crisps Sophia had bought. In the end he put one of every pack he had in a canvas tote bag printed with the spread-eagled outline of the collaborator protecting two human youths. Below the image were the words CAN YOU TAKE THE HEAT?? IN ELAM! He put two flapjacks and some nuts and a drink in with the crisps.

  McCulloch drove unusually fast into the falling night, up unkempt roads out of the town. When the weak old Datsun rocked along the runnels toward the dig, by the tents he saw police cars.

  At the end of the lane Sophia was shouting, remonstrating furiously with the police, who blocked her passage to the dig and the red tent. McCulloch pulled up quickly and ran out to where five or six officers gathered before her, making calming gestures that were not placating her.

  “McCulloch!” she shouted when she saw him. “Will you tell them? I have to go. Gilroy’s escaped.”

  “What?” McCulloch said.

  He struggled to reach her, shouted at her to repeat what she’d said. A sergeant took him aside.

  “Do you know her? Can you calm her down? We can’t let her go. To be honest no one knows what the hell’s going on.”

  “What’s happened?” McCulloch said. “What’s she talking about?”

  “Look, I don’t know any more than you. Gilroy’s gone. She’s not in the interview room. We just heard. Don’t look at me like that, I don’t know anything else. No one’s supposed to have said anything: for all we know this girl might be aiding and abetting. She has to stay put. Can you calm her down?”

  Sophia let McCulloch lead her away. She was quiet—abruptly and coldly calm.

  “He’s been asking me if I’ve seen her,” she said. “If I’ve helped her. What’s he on about?” She pushed her hair out of her eyes.

  She led him onto a spit of rock over which they could watch and be watched by the police.