Light

16 The Venture Capital

The day he got back to London, Michael Kearney closed the Chiswick house and moved into Anna’s flat.

There wasn’t much to move, which was lucky because Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts. The place was a warren to start with: linear in plan, but each room sized differently or acting as a passage between two others. You never knew where you were. There wasn’t much natural light. She had reduced it further by doing the walls a kind of Tuscan yellow then rag-rolling on top of that in pale terracotta. The kitchen and lavatory were tiny, and the latter had been painted with blue-gold fishes. There were masks everywhere, streamers, Chinese lampshades, bits of dusty curtain, chipped glass candelabra, and large dried fruits from countries to which she had never been. Her books spilled off their bowed softwood shelves to drift across the molasses-coloured floor.

Kearney had planned to use the futon in the back room, but as soon as he lay on it his heart raced and he was racked with inexplicable anxieties. After a night or two he began sleeping in Anna’s bed. This was perhaps a mistake.

“It’s as if we’re married again,” Anna said, waking up one morning and giving him a painfully bright smile.

When Kearney got out of the bathroom, she had made poached eggs and stale toast, also stale croissants. It was 9 a.m. and the table was carefully set with place mats and lighted candles. Generally, though, she seemed better. She signed up for yoga classes at Waterman’s Arts Centre. She stopped writing notes to herself, though she left the old ones pinned up on the back of the bedroom door where they confronted Kearney with forgotten emotional responsibilities. Someone loves you. He spent much of each night staring at the wash of streetlight on the ceiling of the room, listening to the traffic murmur to and fro across Chiswick Bridge. As soon as he felt settled, he went to Fitzrovia to see Tate.

It was a raw Monday afternoon. Rain had emptied the streets east of Tottenham Court Road.

The research suite—an annexe of Imperial College orphaned recently into the care of free market economics—was entered through a bleak, clean basement area with a satin-finish nameplate and newly blacked iron railings. A few streets further east it would have housed a literary agency. The ventilators were open and noisy, and through the frosted glass windows Kearney could see someone moving about. The faint sound of a radio filtered out. Kearney went down the steps and punched his access code into the keypad by the door. When it didn’t work, he pressed the intercom button and waited for Tate to buzz him in. The intercom crackled, but no one spoke at the other end, and no one buzzed.

After a moment he called, “Brian?”

He pressed the buzzer again, then held it down with his thumb. No answer. He went back to street level and peered through the railings. This time he couldn’t see anyone moving, and all he could hear was the sound of the ventilators.

“Brian?”

After a moment, he assumed he had been mistaken. The lab was empty. Kearney turned up the collar of his leather jacket and walked off in the direction of Centre Point. He hadn’t got to the end of the street when he thought of phoning Tate at home. Tate’s wife picked up. “Absolutely not here,” she said. “I’m glad to say. He was out before we woke up.” She thought for a moment, then added dryly: “If he came home at all last night. When you see him tell him I’m taking the kids back to Baltimore. I mean that.” Kearney stared at the phone, trying to remember what she was called or what she looked like. “Well,” she said, “in fact I don’t mean it. But I will soon.” When he didn’t answer she said sharply, “Michael?”

Kearney thought her name was Elizabeth, but people called her Beth. “Sorry,” he said. “Beth.”

“You see?” said Tate’s wife. “You’re all the same. Why don’t you just bang on the fucking door until he wakes up?” Then she said: “Do you think he’s got a woman in there? I’d be relieved. It would be such human behaviour.”

Kearney said, “Look, hang on, I—”

He had turned round just in time to see Tate come up the steps from the suite, pause for a moment to look both ways, then cross the street and walk off at a rapid pace towards Gower Street. “Brian!” called Kearney. The phone picked up the tone of his voice and began squawking urgently at him. He broke the connection and ran after Tate, shouting, “Brian! It’s me!” and, “Brian, what the fuck’s going on?”

Tate showed no sign of hearing. He stuck his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. By now it was raining heavily. “Tate!” shouted Kearney. Tate looked over his shoulder, startled, then began to run. By the time they reached Bloomsbury Square, which was where Kearney caught up with him, they were both breathing heavily. Kearney grasped Tate by the shoulders of his grey snowboarder jacket and swung him round. Tate made a kind of sobbing gasp.

“Leave me alone,” he said, and stood there suddenly defeated with water pouring down his face.

Kearney let him go.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

Tate panted for a bit, then managed to say: “I’m sick of you.”

“What?”

“I’m sick of you. We were supposed to be in this together. But you’re never here, you never answer your phone, and now bloody Gordon wants to sell forty-nine percent of us to a merchant bank. I can’t deal with the financial side. I’m not supposed to have to. Where have you been for the last two weeks?”

Kearney gripped him by the forearms.

“Look at me,” he said. “It’s all right.” He made himself laugh. “Jesus, Brian,” he said. “You can be hard work.” Tate watched him angrily for a moment, then he laughed too.

“Look,” said Kearney, “let’s go to the Lymph Club and have a drink.”

But Tate wouldn’t let himself be won over that easily. He hated the Lymph Club, he said. Anyway he had work to do. “I suppose you could come back with me,” he suggested.

Kearney, permitting himself a smile, agreed that this would be the best thing.

The suite smelled of cats, stale food, Giraffe beer. “Most nights I’m sleeping on the floor,” Tate apologised. “I don’t get time to go home.” The cats were burrowing about in a litter of burger cartons at the base of his desk. Their heads went up when Kearney walked in. The male hurried up to him and fawned about at his feet, but the female only sat where she was, the light making a transparent corona out of her white fur, and waited for him to come to her. Kearney passed his hand over her sharp little head and laughed.

“What a house of prima donnas,” he told her.

Tate looked puzzled. “They’ve missed you,” he said. “But look here.”

He had prolonged the typical useful life of a q-bit by factors of eight and ten. They cleared the rubbish from around the credenza at the back of the room and sat down in front of one of the big flatscreen displays. The female cat prowled about with her tail in the air, or sat on Kearney’s shoulder purring into his ear. Test results evolved one after the other like puffs of synaptic activity in decoherence-free space. “It’s not a quantum computer,” Tate said, after Kearney had congratulated him, “but I think we’re ahead of Kielpinski’s team, as of now. Do you see why I need you here? I don’t want Gordon selling us down the river just when we can ask anybody for anything.” He reached out to tap the keyboard. Kearney stopped him.

“What about the other thing?”

“What other thing?”

“The glitch in the model, whatever it was.”

“Ah,” said Tate, “that. Well, I did what I could with it.” He tapped a couple of keys. A new programme launched. There was a flash of arctic-blue light; the female oriental stiffened on Kearney’s shoulder; then the earlier test result bloomed in front of them as the Beowulf system began faking space. This time the illusion was much slower and clearer. Something gathered itself up behind the code somewhere and shot out across the screen. A million coloured lights, boiling and sweeping about like a shoal of startled fish. The white cat was off Kearney’s shoulder in a second, hurling herself at the display so hard it rocked. For fully half a minute the fractals poured and jerked across the screen. Then everything stopped. The cat, her coat reflecting ice-blue in the wash of the display, danced about for half a minute more, then lost interest and began to wash herself affectedly.

“What do you make of it?” said Tate. “Kearney?”

Kearney sat full of a kind of remote horror, stroking the cat. Just before the burst of fractals, just as the model collapsed, he had seen something else. How was he going to save himself? How was he going to put all this together? Eventually he managed to say:

“It’s probably an artefact, then.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Tate. “There’s no point going any further with it.” He laughed. “Except maybe to amuse the cat.” When Kearney didn’t rise to this, he went off and started setting up another test. After about five minutes he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation:

“Oh, and some maniac was here to see you. He came more than once. His name was Strake.”

“Sprake,” said Kearney.

“That’s what I said.”

Kearney felt as if he had woken in the night, out of luck. He put the white cat down carefully and stared around the suite, wondering how Sprake had found his way here.

“Did he take anything?” He indicated the monitor. “He didn’t see this?”

Tate laughed.

“You’re joking. I wouldn’t let him in. He walked up and down in the area, swinging his arms and haranguing me in a language I didn’t recognise.”

“His bark’s worse than his bite,” Kearney said.

“After the second time, I changed the door code.”

“So I noticed.”

“It was just in case,” said Tate defensively.

Kearney had met Sprake perhaps five years after he stole the dice. The meeting occurred on a crowded commuter train passing through Kilburn on its way to Euston. The walls of the Kilburn cutting were covered with graffiti, explosions of red and purple and green done with deliberation and exuberance, shapes like fireworks going off, shapes bulging like damp tropical fruit, effects of glistening surfaces. Eddie, Daggo, Mince—less names than pictures of names. After you had seen them everything else became oppressive and dull.

The platform at Kilburn was empty but the train stopped there for a long time, as if it was waiting for someone, and eventually a man pushed his way on. He had red hair, pale hard eyes, and an old yellow bruise across the whole of his left cheek. He wore a belted military surplus coat with no jacket or shirt underneath it. Though the doors closed, the train remained still. As soon as he got in, he rolled a cigarette and began smoking it with relish, smiling and nodding around at the other passengers. The men stared at their polished shoes. The women studied the mass of sandy hairs between his pectoral muscles; they exchanged angry glances. Though the doors had closed, the train remained where it was. After a minute or two, he pulled back his cuff to consult his watch, a gesture which revealed the word FUGA tattooed inside his grimy wrist. He grinned, and indicated the graffiti outside.

“They call it ‘ bombing,’ ” he said to one of the women. “We ought to live our lives like that.” Instantly she became involved with her Daily Telegraph.

Sprake nodded, as if she had said something. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and examined the flattened, porous, spittle-stained end of it. “You lot, now,” he said. “Well, you look like a lot of self-satisfied bullies.” They were corporate IT workers and estate agents in their mid twenties, passing themselves off with a designer tie or a padded shoulder as dangerous accountants from the City. “Is that what you want?” He laughed. “We should bomb our names onto the prison walls,” he shouted. They edged away from him, until only Kearney was left.

“As for you,” he said, staring interestedly up at Kearney with his head at an odd, bird-like angle on his neck, and dropping his voice to a barely audible murmur:

“You just have to keep killing, don’t you? Because that’s the way to keep it at arm’s length. Am I right?”

The encounter already had the same edge of unease—the aura, the heightened epileptic foreboding—many events had taken on in the wake of the Shrander, as if that entity cast some special kind of illumination of its own. But at the time Kearney still considered himself as a kind of apprentice or seeker. He still hoped to gain something positive. He was still trying to see his retreat from the Shrander as accompanied by a counter-trajectory—a movement towards it—from which something like a transformational encounter might yet proceed. But the truth was that, by the time he met Sprake, he had been throwing the dice, and making random journeys, and getting nowhere, for what seemed like a lifetime. He felt a flicker of vertigo (or perhaps it was only the train starting up again, to drift, slowly at first then faster and faster, towards Hampstead South) and, thinking he was going to fall, reached a hand out to Sprake’s shoulder to steady himself.

“How do you know?” he said. His own voice sounded hoarse and threatening to him. It sounded disused.

Sprake eyed him for a second, then chuckled round at the occupants of the carriage.

“A nudge,” he said, “is as good as a wink. To a blind horse.”

He had slyly removed himself as Kearney reached for him. Kearney half fell into the woman hiding behind the Daily Telegraph, righted himself with an apology, and in that instant saw how good the body is at making metaphors. Vertigo. He was in flight. Nothing good would ever come of this now. He had been falling from the moment the dice came into his hands. He got off the train with Sprake, and they walked off across the noisy, polished concourse and out into Euston Road together.

In the years that followed they developed their theory of the Shrander, though it contained no elements of explanation, and was rarely articulated except by their actions. One Saturday afternoon on a train to Leeds, they murdered an old woman in the draughty space between the carriages, and, before stuffing her into the toilet cubicle, wrote in her armpit with a red gel pen the lines, “Send me an eon heart/Seek it inside.” It was their first joint effort. Later, in an ironic reversal of the usual trajectory, they flirted with arson and the killing of animals. At first Kearney gained some relief, if only through the comradeship—the complicity—of this. His face, which had taken on a look so hollow he might have been dead, relaxed. He gave more time to his work.

But in the end, complicity was all it turned out to be. Despite these acts of propitiation, his circumstances remained unchanged, and the Shrander pursued him everywhere he went. Meanwhile, Sprake took up more and more of his time. His career languished. His marriage to Anna ended. By the time he was thirty, he was sclerotic with anxiety.

If he relaxed, Sprake kept him up to the mark.

“You still don’t think it’s real,” he would say suddenly, in his soft, insinuating way: “Do you?”

Then: “Go on, Mick. Mickey. Michael. You can admit it to me.”

Valentine Sprake was already in his forties and still lived at home. His family ran a secondhand clothes shop in North London. There was an old woman with a vaguely middle-European accent, who spent her time staring up in a kind of exhausted trance at the curiously wrenched space of the religious art on the walls. Sprake’s brother, a boy of about fourteen, sat day in and day out behind the counter of the shop, chewing something which smelled of aniseed. Alice Sprake, the sister, with her heavy limbs, vacant heavy smile, her olive skin and faint moustache, regarded Kearney speculatively from large brown eyes. If they were ever left alone together, she sat next to him and put her damp hand softly on his cock. He became erect immediately, and she smiled at him in a possessive way, revealing that her teeth weren’t good. No one ever saw this, but whatever their other limitations that whole family had a withering emotional intelligence.

“You’d like to give her one, wouldn’t you?” said Sprake. “Give her a bit of a slippery hot one, Mikey old chap. Well I don’t care, mind—” here he gave a shout of laughter “—but the other two wouldn’t let you.”

It was Sprake who took them into Europe.

They killed Turkish prostitutes in Frankfurt, a Milanese dress-designer in Antwerp. Towards the end of what became a six-month spree, they found themselves in The Hague one evening, eating at a good-quality Italian restaurant opposite the Kurrhaus Hotel. The evening wind came up off the sea, blew sand into the square outside before it died away. The lamp swung above the table and the shadows of the wineglasses shifted uncomfortably on the tablecloth, like the complex umbrae and penumbrae of planets. Sprake’s hand moved between them, then lay flat as if exhausted.

“We’re like bears in a pit here,” he said.

“Do you wish we hadn’t come?”

“ ‘Crespelle and ricotta,’ ” said Sprake. He threw the menu onto the table. “What the fuck’s that about?”

After an hour or two, a boy sauntered past outside in the twilight. He was perhaps five feet ten inches tall and twenty-six years old. His hair had been dragged back and plaited tightly, and he was wearing yellow high-waisted shorts with their own yellow crossover braces. He carried a matching yellow soft toy. Though he was slightly built, his shoulders, hips and thighs had a rounded, fleshy look, and on his face was the self-satisfied and yet somehow wincing expression of someone acting out a fantasy in public.

Sprake grinned at Kearney.

“Look at that,” he whispered. “He wants you to put him in a death camp for his sexuality. You want to choke him because he’s a prat.” He wiped his mouth and stood up. “Maybe the two of you can get together.” Later, in their hotel room, they looked down at what they had done to the boy. “See that?” Sprake said. “If that doesn’t tell you something, nothing will.” When Kearney only stared at him, he quoted with the intense disgust of the master to the apprentice:

“ ‘It was a mystery to them that they were in the Father all along without knowing it.’ ”

“Excuse me?” the boy said. “Please?”

In the end these promises of understanding amounted to little. While their association never quite came to seem like anything as positive as a mistake, Sprake revealed himself over the years to be an undependable accomplice, his motives as hidden—even from himself—as the metaphysics by which he claimed to understand what was happening. That afternoon on the Euston train he had been looking for a cause to attach himself to, the folie à deux which would advance his own emotional ambitions. For all his talk, he knew nothing.

It was late. Candlelight flickered on the walls of Anna Kearney’s apartment, where she turned in her sleep, throwing out her arms and murmuring to herself. Sparse traffic came out of Hammersmith on the A316, crossed the bridge and hummed away west and south. Kearney threw the dice. They rattled and scattered. For twenty years they had been his secret conundrum, part of the centralising puzzle of his life. He picked them up, weighed them for a moment in the palm of his hand, threw them again, just to watch them tumble and bounce across the carpet like insects in a heatwave.

This is how they looked:

Despite their colour they were neither ivory nor bone. But each face had an even craquelure of faint fine lines, and in the past this had led Kearney to think they might be made of porcelain. They might have been porcelain. They might have been ancient. In the end they seemed neither. Their weight, their solidity in the hand, had reminded him from time to time of poker dice, and of the counters used in the Chinese game of mah-jong. Each face featured a deeply incised symbol. These symbols were coloured. (Some of the colours, particularly the blues and reds, always seemed too bright given the ambient illumination. Others seemed too dim.) They were unreadable. He thought they came from a pictographic alphabet. He thought they were the symbols of a numerical system. He thought that from time to time they had changed between one cast and another, as if the results of a throw affected the system itself. In the end, he did not know what to think. Instead he had given them names: the Voortman Move; the High Dragon; the Stag’s Great Horns. What part of his unconscious these names emerged from, he had no clue. All of them made him feel uneasy, but the words “the Stag’s Great Horns” made his skin crawl. There was a thing that looked like a food processor. There was another thing that looked like a ship, an old ship. You looked at it one way and it was an old ship. You looked at it another way and it was nothing at all. Looking was no solution: how could you know which way was up? Over the years Kearney had seen pi in the symbols. He had seen Planck’s constants. He had seen a model of the Fibonacci sequence. He had seen what he thought was a code for the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the primitive protein molecules of the autocatalytic set.

Every time he picked them up, he knew as little as he had the first time. Every day he started new.

He sat in Anna Kearney’s bedroom and threw the dice again.

How could you know which way to look at them?

With a shiver he saw that he had thrown the Stag’s Horns. He turned it over quickly, shovelled the dice back into their leather bag. Without them, without the rules he had made up to govern their combinations, without something, he could no longer make decisions. He lay down next to Anna, supporting himself on one elbow, watched her sleep. She looked hollowed-out and yet at peace, like someone very old. He whispered her name. She didn’t wake, but murmured, and moved her legs slightly apart. A palpable heat came up from her.

Two nights previously, he had found her diary, and in it read this passage:

I look at the images Michael made of me in America, and I hate this woman already. Here she stares out across the bay from Monster Beach with one hand shading her eyes. Here she undresses, drunk; or picks up driftwood, her mouth full of smiles. She dances on the sand. Now she is seen lying back on her elbows in front of an empty fireplace, wearing light-coloured trousers and a soft wool jumper. The camera moves across her. She is laughing out at the lover behind the handicam. Her legs are raised at the knees and slightly parted. Her body looks relaxed but not in the least sensual. Her lover will be disappointed because of this: but even more because she looks so well. Is it something about the room? That fireplace betrays her instantly, it makes too bare a frame, it throws her into high relief. Her energy is projected beyond the picture space. She is making eye contact. It is a disaster. He is used to a thinner face, gaunt cheekbones, body language pivoting between the grammars of pain and sex. Neither folded in on herself nor quivering with need, she is no longer the woman he knows. He is used to more urgency.

He will not be so attracted to someone this happy.

Kearney turned away from the sleeping woman and pondered the justice of this. He thought about what he had seen on Tate’s flatscreen monitor that afternoon. He would have to talk to Sprake again soon; he fell asleep thinking about that.

When he woke up, Anna was kneeling over him.

“Do you remember my Russian hat?” she said.

“What?”

Kearney stared up at her, feeling stupid with sleep. He looked at his watch: 10 a.m. and the curtains were open wide. She had opened the window too. The room was lively with light, the sound of people, traffic. Anna had one arm behind her back, and was leaning forward with her weight on the other one. The neck of her white cotton nightgown had fallen forward so that he could see her breasts, which for some complicated reason of her own she had never encouraged him to touch. She smelled of soap and toothpaste.

“We went to the pictures in Fulham, to see a Tarkovsky film, I think it was Mirror. But I went to the wrong cinema, and it was bitterly cold, and I was sitting on the steps outside waiting for you for an hour. When you got there, all you could look at was my Russian hat.”

“I remember that hat,” Kearney told her. “You said it made your face look fat.”

“Broad,” said Anna. “I said it made my face too broad. And you said, without a moment’s hesitation, ’It makes your face your face. That’s all, Anna: your face.’ Do you know what else you said?”

Kearney shook his head. All he really remembered was angrily searching the cinemas of Fulham for her.

“You said: ‘ Why spend any more of your life apologising?’ ”

She looked down at him, and after a pause said, “I can’t tell you how much I loved you for that.”

“I’m glad.”

“Michael?”

“What?”

“I want you to fuck me in my Russian hat.”

She brought her arm from behind her back and there it was in her hand, a silky grey fur thing the size of a cat. Kearney began to laugh. Anna laughed too. She put the hat on her head and instantly looked ten years younger. Her smile was wide and pretty, as vulnerable as her wrists. “I never could understand someone who wore a Russian hat to watch Tarkovsky,” he said. He gathered her nightgown up into the small of her back and reached down. She groaned. He was still able to think, as he often thought, Perhaps this will be enough, release me at last, push me through the wall between me and me.

He thought: Perhaps this will save her from me.

Later he made a phone call, and that afternoon, as a result, found Valentine Sprake wandering up and down the taxi rank at Victoria station with two or three blackened pigeons running in and out between his feet. They were all lame. Sprake looked irritated.

“Never phone me on that number again,” he said.

“Why?” asked Kearney.

“Because I fucking don’t want you to.”

He showed no signs of remembering what had happened when they last met. His engagement with the Shrander—his flight, if it could be described like that—was as private as Kearney’s, as private as madness: a dialogue so internalised it could only be inferred, partially and undependably, from the sum of his actions. Kearney got him in a cab and they went through the coagulated traffic of Central London then out to the Lea Valley, where the shopping parks and industrial estates were still embedded with a vestigial tissue of residential streets, neither clean nor dirty, new or old, inhabited by midday joggers and half-dead feral cats. Sprake stared sullenly out the windows at the alloy siding and empty buildings. He seemed to be whispering to himself.

“Have you seen this Kefahuchi thing?” Kearney asked him tentatively. “On the news?”

“What news?” said Sprake.

Suddenly he pointed out a display of flowers on the pavement in front of a florist’s. “I thought those were wreaths,” he said, with a bleak laugh. “Sombre though colourful,” he added. After that, his mood improved, but he kept saying, “News!” under his breath in a contemptuous fashion until they reached the offices of MVC-Kaplan, which were hushed, warm and empty at the end of the working day.

Gordon Meadows had begun his career in gene-patenting then, after a series of high-profile drug launches for a Swiss-based pharmaceuticals house, moved laterally and with ease into money. He specialised in ideas, kickstarts, original research. His style was to blow a pure, weightless bubble: boost capitalisation, float, talk the stock up, and profit-take a stage or two before the product was due onstream. If you didn’t get that far, he dumped you for what he could get. As a result, Meadows Venture Capital had the whole of a curious bolted-glass structure which glittered uneasily between the tailored alloy façades of a Walthamstow “excellence” park; and no one remembered Kaplan, a puzzled highbrow who, unable to meet the challenge of free market thinking, had returned only briefly to molecular biology before becoming a teacher in a Lancashire comprehensive.

Meadows was tall and thin, with a kind of willowy fitness. When Kearney first knew him, fresh from his pharmaceutical triumphs, he had favoured the merciless saffron haircut and goatee of the internet entrepreneur. Now he wore suits from Piombo, and his workspace—which had a grim view of trees along the towpath of the old Lea Valley Navigation—seemed to have been furnished from an issue of Wallpaper. B&B Italia seating faced a desk made from a single slab of re-melted glass, on which stood, as if they had something to do with one another, a Mac Cube and Sottsass coffee pot. This he sat behind, eyeing Valentine Sprake with a cautious amusement.

“You must introduce us,” he told Kearney.

Sprake, who had worked himself up into a fever in the lift, now stood with his face pressed up against the glass wall of the building, staring down at two or three lumps of packing material the size of refrigerators, floating along the canal in the gathering twilight.

“Let’s talk about him later,” recommended Kearney. “He’s got a great idea for a new drug.” He sat on the end of Meadows’s desk. “Brian Tate is worried about you, Gordon.”

“Is he?” said Gordon. “I’m sorry if that’s so.”

“He says you’re progress-chasing. He’s worried that you’re going to sell us to Sony. We don’t want that.”

“I think Brian is—”

“Shall I tell you why we don’t want that, Gordon? We don’t want that because Brian’s a prima donna. You’ve got to show confidence in a prima donna. Try this thought-experiment.” Kearney held up his hands, palms uppermost. He looked at the left one. “No confidence,” he said, and then, looking at the right one, “no quantum computer.” He repeated this pantomime. “No confidence, no quantum computer. Are you intelligent enough to see the connection here, Gordon?”

Meadows laughed.

“I think you’re less naÏve than you suggest,” he said. “And Brian is certainly less nervous than he pretends. Now let’s see . . .” He tapped a couple of keys. Spreadsheets blossomed on his monitor like ripening fruit. “Your burn-rate’s quite high,” he concluded after a moment. He raised his hands, palms upward, and mimicked the way Kearney had looked from one to the other. “No money,” he said, “no research. We need fresh capital. And a move like this—as long as we thought it was good for the science—would expand our opportunities, not limit them.”

“Who’s ‘ we’?” said Kearney.

“You aren’t listening. Brian would have his own department. That would be part of the package. He wonders if you work hard enough, Michael. He’s worried about his idea.”

“I think you’re getting ready to dump us. Here’s some advice. Don’t try it.”

Meadows examined his hands.

“You’re being paranoid, Michael.”

“Imagine that,” Kearney said.

Valentine Sprake turned away from the darkening view and walked in a jerky, hurried fashion across the room, as if he had seen, out there in the marshes, something which surprised him. He leaned over Meadows’s desk, picked up the coffee pot and drank its contents directly from the spout. “Last week,” he said to Meadows, “I learned that Urizen was back among us, and His name is Old England. We are all adrift on the sea of time and space here. Think about that too.” He stalked out of the office with his hands folded on his chest.

Meadows looked amused.

“Who is that, Kearney?”

“Don’t ask,” said Kearney absently. On the way out he said: “And keep off Brian’s back.”

“I can’t protect the two of you forever,” Meadows called after him. That was when Kearney knew Meadows had already sold them to Sony.

Lightweight separators in pastel colours were used to create privacy inside MVC-Kaplan’s otherwise featureless tent of bolted glass. The first thing Kearney saw outside Meadows’s workspace was the shadow of the Shrander, projected somehow from inside the building onto one of these. It was life-size, a little blurred and diffuse at first, then hardening and sharpening and turning slowly on its own axis like a chrysalis hanging in a hedge. As it turned, there was a kind of rustling noise he hadn’t heard for twenty years; a smell he still recognised. He felt his whole body go cold and rigid with fear. He backed away from it a few steps, then ran back into the office, where he hauled Meadows over the glass desk by the front of his suit and hit him hard, three or four times in succession, on the right cheekbone.

“Christ,” said Meadows in a thick voice. “Ah.”

Kearney pulled him all the way over the desk, across the floor and out of the door. At the same time the lift arrived and Sprake got out.

“I saw it, I saw it,” Kearney said.

Sprake showed his teeth. “It’s not here now.”

“Get a fucking move on. It’s closer than ever. It wants me to do something.”

Together they bundled Meadows into the lift and down three floors. He seemed to wake up as they dragged him across the lobby and out to the canal bank. “Kearney?” he said repeatedly. “Is that you? Is there something wrong with me?” Kearney let go of him and began kicking his head. Sprake pushed his way between them and held Kearney off until he had calmed down. They got Meadows to the edge of the water, into which they dropped him, facedown, while they held his legs. He tried to keep his head above the surface by arching his back, then gave up with a groan. Bubbles came up. His bowels let go.

“Christ,” said Kearney reeling away. “Is he dead?”

Sprake grinned. “I’d say he was.” He tilted his head back until he was looking straight up at the faint stars above Walthamstow, raised his arms level with his shoulders, and danced slowly away north along the towpath towards Edmonton.

“Urizen!” he called.

“Fuck this,” said Kearney. He ran in the opposite direction, all the way to Lea Bridge, then got a minicab to Grove Park.

Every murder reminded him of the Shrander’s house, which in a sense he had never left. His fall had begun there, his deeply fallen knowledge imprisoned him there. In another sense, the Shrander’s pursuit of him in succeeding years was that knowledge: it was the constant fall into the awareness of falling. When he killed, especially when he killed women, he felt released from what he knew. He felt for an instant as if he had escaped again.

Bare grey dusty floorboards, net curtains, cold grey light. A dull house on a dull street. The Shrander, intact, irrefragable, enduring, stood in its upper room gazing magisterially out of the window like the captain of a ship. Kearney ran away from it because, as much as anything, he was frightened of the coat it wore. He was frightened of the smell of wet wool. That smell would be his last unfallen sensation.

The beak opened. Words were spoken. Panic—it was his own—filled the room like a clear liquid, an albumen or isinglass so thick he was forced to turn and swim his way through the open door. His arms worked in a sort of breaststroke while his legs ran beneath him in useless slow motion. He stumbled across the landing outside and straight down the stairs—full of terror and ecstasy, the dice in his hand—into the rainy streets, looking for someone to kill. He knew he wouldn’t be saved unless he did. A kind of lateral gravity was in his favour: he fell all the way from the Shrander’s house towards the railway station. To travel, he hoped, would be to fall away from falling, at some more acceptable, some more merciful angle.

It was late on a wet winter afternoon. The trains were reluctant, overheated, empty. Everything was slow, slow, slow. He caught a local, grinding its way out of London into Buckinghamshire. Every time he looked down at the dice in his hand, the world lurched and he had to look away. He sat there sweating until, two or three stops beyond Harrow-on-the-Hill, a tanned but tired-looking woman joined him in the carriage. She was dressed in a black business suit. In one hand she carried a briefcase, in the other a plastic Marks & Spencer carrier bag. She fussed with her mobile phone, leafed through a self-help book which seemed to be called Why Shouldn’t I Have the Things I Want? Two stations further north, the train slowed and stopped. She got to her feet and waited for the door to open, staring at the darkening platform, the lighted ticket office beyond. She tapped her foot. She looked at her watch. Her husband would be waiting in the car park with the Saab, and they would go straight on to the gym. Up and down the train, other doors opened and closed, people hurried away. She looked nervously right and left. She looked at Kearney. In the overheated emptiness, her journey pulled out like chewing gum, then snapped.

“Excuse me,” she said. “They don’t seem to be letting me out.”

She laughed.

Kearney laughed too.

“Let’s see what we can do,” he said.

Five or six thin gold chains, each bearing either her initial or her Christian name as a pendant, clung to the prominent tendons of her neck. “Let’s see what we can do, Sophie.” As he reached down to touch with his fingertip the makeup caked in the faint blonde down at the corner of her mouth, the train pulled slowly away. Her shopping had spilled when she fell. Something—he thought it was a shrink-wrapped lettuce—rolled out of the carrier bag and along the empty carriage. The platform slid backwards and was replaced by black night. The doors had never opened.

Kearney, expecting discovery at any moment, lived from newscast to newscast: but there was no mention of Meadows. The upper half of a body recovered from the Thames near Hungerford Bridge proved to be decomposed, and a woman’s. A second Nigerian boy was found dead in Peckham. Apart from these incidents, nothing. Kearney regarded the screen with growing disbelief. He couldn’t understand how he had got away with it. No one likes a venture capitalist, he found himself thinking one night, but this is ridiculous.

“And now,” said the anchorwoman brightly, “sport.”

He was less afraid of discovery, he found, than of the Shrander itself. Would Meadows be enough to keep it at bay? One minute he was confident; the next he had no hope. A noise in the street outside was enough to send his heart rate up. He ignored the phone, which was often ringing two or three times in a morning. Messages were backing up at his answer service, but he didn’t dare call in and get them. Instead, he cast the dice obsessively, watching them bounce across the floor away from him like bits of human bone. He couldn’t eat, and the slightest rise in temperature made him sweat. He couldn’t sleep, and when he did, dreamed it was himself he had killed. When he woke from this dream—filled with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief—it was to find Anna lying on top of him, weeping and whispering fiercely:

“It’s all right. Oh please. It’s all right.”

Awkward and unpractised, she had wrapped her arms and legs tightly round him, as if to stifle his cries. It was so unlike Anna to attempt to comfort someone else that Kearney pushed her off in a sort of terror and willingly fell back over the edge into the dream.

“I don’t understand you,” she complained the next morning. “You were so nice until a few days ago.”

Kearney peered cautiously at himself in the bathroom mirror, in case he saw some other thing. His face, he noted, looked pouchy and lined. Behind him through the steam he could see Anna lying in a bath which smelled of rose oil and honey, her colour heightened by heat, her expression made petulant by a genuine puzzlement. He put down his razor, bent over the bath, and kissed her on the mouth. He put his hand between her legs. Anna writhed about, trying to turn over and present herself, panting and slopping water over the side of the bath. Kearney’s cellphone rang.

“Ignore it,” Anna said. “Don’t answer it. Oh.”

Later, Kearney made himself listen to his messages.

Most of them were from Brian Tate. Tate had been calling two or three times a day, sometimes leaving only the number of the research suite, as if he thought Kearney might have forgotten it, sometimes talking until the answer service cut him off. To begin with his tone was hurt, patient, accusatory; soon it became more urgent. “Michael, for God’s sake,” he said: “Where have you been? I’m going mad here.” The call was timed at eight in the evening, and bursts of laughter in the background suggested he was phoning from a pub. He put the phone down suddenly, but the next message came in less than five minutes later, from a mobile:

“This is such a shitty signal,” it began, followed by something indistinguishable, then: “The data’s useless. And the cats—”

After two or three days things seemed to come to a head for him. “If you won’t come over,” he threatened, “I’m giving up. I’m sick of dealing with it all.” There was a pause, then: “Michael? I’m sorry. I know you wanted this to be—”

There were no further calls after that, until the most recent one. And all that said was:

“Kearney?”

There was a background noise like rain falling. Kearney tried to return the call, but Tate’s phone seemed to be switched off. When he replayed the original message, he heard behind the rain another noise, like a signal feeding back then swallowing itself abruptly.

“Kearney?” Tate said. Rain and feedback. “Kearney?” It was hard to describe how tentative he sounded.

Kearney shook his head and put on his coat.

“I knew you’d go out again,” said Anna.

As soon as Kearney let himself in, the black cat, the male, ran up to him, fawning and mewling for attention. But he extended his hand too suddenly, and, lowering its haunches as if he had hit it, it ran off.

“Shh,” said Kearney absently. “Shh.”

He listened. The temperature and humidity of the suite were supposed to be tightly controlled, but he couldn’t hear the fans or the dehumidifiers. He touched a switch and the fluorescents came on, buzzing in the silence. He blinked. Everything but the furniture had been crated up carefully and moved somewhere else. There was plastic packing material scattered over the carpet, along with discarded strips of heat-seal tape. Two damaged cardboard boxes, bearing the logo of a firm called Blaney Research Logistics, lay discarded in a corner. The benches and desks were empty but for the dust which had built up over the months of their occupation, to make circuit-like patterns between the installations.

“Puss?” said Kearney. He drew with his finger in the dust.

On Tate’s credenza he found a single yellow Post-it note. There was a phone number, an email address.

“Sorry, Michael,” Tate had scribbled underneath.

Kearney stared around. Everything Gordon Meadows had said about Tate came back to him. It made him shake his head. “Brian,” he murmured, “you conniving bastard.” He was almost amused.

Tate had taken his ideas to Sony, with or without the help of MVC-Kaplan. He had clearly been planning it for weeks. But something else had happened here, something less easy to understand. Why had he left the cats? Why had he disconnected the flatscreen displays, then swept them onto the floor and kicked them apart in a rage? You didn’t associate Tate with rage. Kearney stirred the pieces with his foot. They had fetched up among the usual litter of junk food wrappers and other refuse, some of which was more than a week old. The cats had been using it as a lavatory. The male was cowering in the wreckage now, staring up at him like a little live gargoyle.

“Shh,” he said.

He reached down more carefully, and this time it rubbed against his hand. Its sides were trembling and emaciated, its head as sharp as an axe, its eyes bulging with opposites—distrust and relief, fear and gratitude. Kearney picked it up and held it close to his chest.

He fondled its ears, called the female cat’s name, looked around hopefully. There was no response.

“I know you’re here,” he said.

Kearney turned the lights out and sat down on Tate’s credenza. He thought that if the female got used to him being there she would eventually come out from wherever she was hiding. Meanwhile, her brother ceased to tremble and began instead to purr, a clattering rumble, disjointed, hoarse as machinery. “That’s a bizarre noise,” Kearney told him, “for an animal your size.” Then he said: “I’d imagine he called you Schrödinger in the end. Is that what he called you? Is he that dull?” The cat purred a moment more then stopped and stiffened suddenly. It peered down into the pile of wrecked equipment and burger cartons.

Kearney looked down too.

“Hello?” he whispered.

He was expecting to see the female, and indeed, there was a whitish flicker down near his feet; but it wasn’t a cat. It was a quiet spill of light, emerging like fluid from one of the ruptured displays and licking out across the floor towards Kearney’s feet. “Jesus!” he shouted. He jumped up. The male cat made a panicky hissing noise and squirmed out of his arms. He heard it hit the floor and run off into the dark. Light continued to pour out of the broken screen, a million points of light which shoaled round his feet in a cold fractal dance, scaling into the shape he most feared. Each point, he knew—and every point which comprised it, and every point which comprised the point before that—would also make the same shape. “There is always more,” Kearney whispered. “There is always more after that.” He threw up suddenly: staggered away, bumping into things in the dark, until he found the outside door.

It hadn’t been rage that made Tate destroy the equipment; it had been fear. Kearney ran into the street without looking back.