Finding Arcadia Read online

  “And unofficially?”

  She lets the door shut almost completely but peers out the crack at the drone, which is now hovering above a fountain. “Unofficially, I’m going to see who is piloting that drone.”

  The light is failing, but she uses the optical zoom on her phone’s main camera to take a closer look at the drone. White and just less than a foot across, she can now see the camera mounted on the base between its rudimentary landing gear. It is facing directly at the door. She checks that her phone’s camera flash is off and then takes a few more pictures.

  Abruptly, the drone turns and climbs, rising above the tree line. She steps outside once more, aware that Henry is still beside her.

  “You should go back to class, Henry,” she says, knowing he will not.

  “Maybe I’m looking for a bathroom too,” he replies as they begin following the sound of the drone, which has flown further into the zoo.

  Some drones can travel 50 miles per hour or faster; fortunately, this one adopts a more leisurely pace. Even so, they must break into a jog. Above the trees, the drone is not limited to pathways but is following a straight line—presumably to where its operator waits. She has not studied the map of the zoo closely, but it appears to be flying over the hippopotamus enclosure while they must skirt around it on one path and then turn down a second that intersects it at a right angle. Hippopotamus, hypotenuse. A bad joke, but the kind Henry enjoys; she decides to save her breath.

  The second path runs alongside the tigers, separated from them by a moat. One of them looks up at the drone and then at the two running humans. How far can a tiger jump? If it wanted to, could it escape its cage without bars? She once read about how best to survive a tiger attack. Don’t bother to run, was the advice. All that will accomplish is to ensure that you die tired.

  They keep running. Another turn down a straight path while the drone flies over the meerkats. This sends the small animals into a frenzy—meerkats especially fear aerial predators—and as she and Henry pass them, all appear to have taken refuge inside a hollow tree trunk.

  If the drone goes much further it will leave the park, but now the whine of its engines changes in pitch and it starts to descend. At the next corner they slow down, breathing heavily. Marwell Zoo is not designed for night visitors and has limited lighting, but the drone is heading towards a deserted picnic area.

  Not deserted. A figure in dark clothing, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, stands up from a picnic table as the drone touches down on the ground. Five feet, four inches tall, but weight and appearance are not discernible at this distance. She motions for Henry to stay where he is and moves forward silently along the path.

  The figure is occupied removing the propellers of the drone and storing it in a backpack with quick, precise movements. She is about fifty yards from the picnic area, edging towards it, when the figure freezes. Her only cover is the foliage that borders the path. She leans further into it as the hood turns to look in her direction. She has been seen.

  Even as she breaks into a sprint towards the picnic area, the figure swings the backpack onto both shoulders and dashes off down another path. “Arcadia!” she hears Henry call as she pursues the figure, followed by a sigh and the sound of his own footsteps.

  The figure races past a field in which several undersized horses stand—Mongolian, by the look of it, but was that really the breed on which the Golden Horde almost conquered Europe?—and towards the edge of the zoo. She chases him (her? the clothing is too loose to tell), managing to keep the distance between them from increasing, though not succeeding in narrowing it. The figure reaches a junction and ignores a sign saying “authorized personnel only”. Somewhat moot since the entire zoo is off limits at this time. She follows, Henry not far behind.

  The new path leads to sheds and machinery, barrels of feed and tools. Henry has now almost caught up with her and may have a chance of overtaking their prey. What would happen then she has not planned, but knowing her quarry’s identity would be a start.

  Past the sheds, the path continues into a grove of trees and must be nearing the edge of the grounds. They turn a corner and see—a ten-foot-high brick wall.

  “What the—” Henry comes to a halt beside her. She puts a finger to her lips.

  The opportunity for surprise has long passed, so she switches on the torch on her phone to look around. It is possible that the figure is hiding, but more likely that the wall was somehow scaled. A rustling of leaves on the other side confirms this. There are no trees close enough to the wall to have climbed in order to jump over; the wall itself is nearly smooth. No sign of a rope. More promising to look for signs on the ground.

  Then the whistling starts. It takes her a moment to recognise the tune, so out of context. Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words has never been performed with such insouciance.

  “I like your drone,” she calls out. The whistling continues but its volume drops slightly. “Maybe you’ll let me fly it next time?”

  There is the briefest of pauses—considering whether to respond?—followed by more rustling, the sound of something being removed from the bushes on the other side of the wall. The rattle of a chain. A bicycle. Mockingly—is it possible to ring a bell sarcastically?—two dings are sounded and the cyclist pedals off into the dark.

  “How on earth did he climb the wall?” Henry exclaims at last. “Is this some kind of super athlete?”

  “Unlikely,” she replies. “We wouldn’t have been able to catch her if she was.”

  “Her?”

  “From the hips, almost certainly. And about our age.” Before the attack on her parents, their neighbour Mrs. Pike had seen a teenage boy—or so she said—break into their house. That was when the hidden cameras were installed. At first Mrs. Pike thought it was a girl. The same person? Then it was also the person who took—and then returned—Mother’s diaries. And strapped the fake bomb to Henry.

  She uses the torch to scour the ground, soon locating two rectangular depressions about a foot apart. “As for the super-human climb, I think it was more likely a ladder that she climbed and then pulled up after her.” She sweeps across the base of the wall with the torch and her eyes, looking for anything. Something. She kneels down in the mud. Pressed into the dirt in one of the holes left by the ladder is a slip of paper. A train ticket, an open return from Oxford to Winchester stamped that day. So whoever she was had taken the train from Oxford that afternoon and was planning to return. Or planted the ticket here to make it appear so.

  The sound of the bicycle is long gone and there seems little more information to gather here. The break was only meant to be fifteen minutes and they have been gone for nearly forty-five.

  “So who was it?” Henry asks.

  “I have no idea,” she replies, truthfully. “But for some reason she seems to have an unhealthy interest in watching me—but trying not to be seen herself.”

  “What are you going to tell Starr? I’m guessing that the truth is out of the question.”

  “We’ll tell him we got lost,” she replies standing up and putting the muddy ticket into her pocket. Side by side, they walk back into the zoo.

  “It’s getting dark. Are you sure you do know the way?” He corrects himself before she can reply. “Who am I talking to—of course you know the way.”

  She says nothing. In the distance, a gibbon’s hoot breaks the silence, echoed soon afterwards by a second, then a third, the chorus accompanying them as they start back towards Marwell Hall.

  5

  MISTLETOE

  “Why are you so disinterested—I’m sorry, uninterested in the planets and the stars?”

  They are almost halfway back to Marwell Hall and above them the clear night sky is beginning to reveal points of light. Is Henry nervous in the zoo alone at night? Perhaps he is just making small talk.

  “I’m just being practical,” she replies. “The brain really does have a finite capacity to store knowledge and I don’t find such details of things humans will ne
ver reach particularly illuminating.”

  “But look above you,” Henry persists. “Thousands upon thousands of stars. Whatever you think about humanity’s chances of reaching them, how about the prospect that other planets out there might have produced life as ours did, or differently from ours. Wouldn’t that change the way we think of ourselves, of our place in the cosmos? If we somehow knew that we weren’t alone?”

  “Actually I find the whole subject fairly depressing.” She casts a brief look up at the night sky. For thousands of years humans have tried to find patterns in the stars, two-dimensional impressions with no regard to the actual location of those balls of fire in three-dimensional space—four-dimensions if you took account of time. “Because you’re right. It’s hard to imagine that ours is the only planet that could produce life. Of billions of planets, many of which must be far older than ours, surely some would have the right conditions for the emergence of life. And, like on earth, increasing complexity in life forms through a kind of natural selection should produce ever more sophisticated creatures, some of which would match or exceed our own intelligence.”

  They pass the tigers, which appear to be sleeping.

  “You ask whether it would change how we think about ourselves if there were evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But that’s the wrong question. Given the high likelihood that there is intelligent life elsewhere, why can’t we see any evidence of it? No spaceships, no transmissions, nothing. Unless we really are unique—and there’s no reason to think we are—then other civilisations would have had millions and millions of years to colonise the galaxy. So where is everybody?”

  “Maybe,” says Henry, “they are already among us?”

  Henry watches too much science-fiction. “I’m serious, Henry. Assuming that there is life elsewhere, there are only three possible explanations for why we don’t see any evidence of it. One is that the universe is just too big and it’s not practical to communicate. Given the number of planets and the passage of time, that isn’t a very good answer as it requires that we exist at a specific time when radio waves and probes have not yet spread through the galaxy. So a second possible answer is that this is not accidental: we aren’t being contacted because these alien creatures choose not to reach out to us. Humanity is too backward or too dangerous.”

  They have reached the hippopotamus enclosure, a simulacrum of a riverbank with mud in which the animals can wallow at will. “Maybe aliens regard us the way we regard these hippopotamuses,” she continues. “Creatures to be left in an environment that they take to be natural, but not disturbed unduly. Out of a kind of humanitarian impulse, the earth is left alone—like a nature preserve, the better to leave humanity to develop at its own pace.”

  “You mean like a zoo,” Henry observes, looking at the hippopotamuses.

  “Yes. But that’s also unlikely because all it would take is one alien species to break ranks and the wall of silence would collapse.”

  “So what’s your third theory?”

  They are nearing Marwell Hall. There is movement near the fountain. She slows down, Henry following suit.

  “The third explanation,” her voice drops, “is that any civilisation advanced enough to send messages or people across the cosmos doesn’t last very long. That it eventually uses that technology to wipe itself out. Think how close we came to blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons, and how effectively we’re poisoning the environment today. We’re centuries from interstellar travel, but only decades from an earth that is almost uninhabitable.”

  The person near the fountain is smoking a cigarette. Dr. Starr. She stops. “And so,” she concludes in a whisper, “I choose not to fill my head with data about the cosmos and to focus on what’s happening right now here on earth.” Raising a finger to her lips, she edges forward in the darkness towards Dr. Starr.

  He appears to be talking to himself, until she sees a light near his ear. A Bluetooth headset connected to his phone. She can only catch part of the conversation.

  “… off into the zoo with the Stamford boy.”

  Pause, then: “What was the name your little friend used while she was teaching here. Alderman? She asked me about her, trying to trip me up, I think.”

  Another pause. “No, no. Everything else is under control. Just make sure that Sophia or whatever she’s calling herself now stays out of my way. Any update on the other—hang on.” He stubs out the cigarette and peers into the darkness towards her and Henry.

  He cannot see them, but knows that there is someone there. Probably deducing that it is them. Best to play it up.

  “You see?” she says loudly. “I told you it was this way. Typical of a man not to trust a woman’s sense of direction.” She strides towards Dr. Starr, footsteps somewhat louder than gravity and friction dictate. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Starr,” she calls out. “We were looking at the tigers and then took a wrong turn. There really should be more lighting in this zoo if they’re going to open it in the evening.”

  Henry has caught up with her but, sensibly, decides not to join the act. He just looks sheepishly at Dr. Starr, who is trying to determine how much they have heard, and what he should do.

  “I’ll call you back,” he says into the phone and hangs up. “Miss Greentree, Master Stamford,” he says evenly, turning to them. “What a relief that you are both unharmed. We were beginning to worry that something might have happened to you.” He does not sound particularly worried. Their breathing has now returned to normal, but her mussed up hair may reveal that they have been running. Better that than spying on him. “One of the students asked,” he continues, opening the door for them, “whether the Mistletoe Bride might have taken you.”

  They step inside Marwell Hall. He closes the door behind them. “You know the story, I assume?”

  She does, but allowing him to recount it may avoid a conversation about his telephone call. “Vaguely,” she says.

  “According to legend,” Dr. Starr says, leading them through the foyer, “there was a young woman who had just got married at Marwell Hall. At the reception afterwards, she tired of dancing and suggested to her new husband that they play a game of hide-and-seek instead. ‘You won’t find me,’ she challenged him, then looked for the perfect hiding place. She found it in a remote room, where she climbed into a wooden chest. When she closed the lid, however, the clasp snapped shut and she was locked inside. The husband searched for hours, for days, but in vain. Trapped in the chest, she died—suffocation, dehydration, starvation, the precise details vary in the telling. The distraught husband assumed she had left him. Months pass; years pass. Then at last someone discovered the chest and opened it to find the Mistletoe Bride, a skeleton in a wedding dress.”

  They proceed down the corridor, past the drawing room to the dining room in which the other students are being served a basic dinner of pasta. “It is said,” he finishes, “that she still wanders the hallways, looking for her hiding place and for her husband.”

  The haunting story is not original—and Marwell Hall is only one of the locations in which it features—but as far as she knows there are no cases of the bride actually spiriting anyone else away. In any case, he has missed the significance of the mistletoe—a decoration under which a woman was traditionally expected to kiss any man who trapped her. For the bride might not have been playing a simple game of hide-and-seek, but fleeing unwanted advances—or running from evidence of her new husband’s infidelity. And how hard could it be to find a grown woman in a house? Unless the chest was soundproofed, which seems unlikely. Or if someone did not want to find her.

  The true meaning of the story, then, might not simply be death through misadventure, but suicide. Or murder.

  The pasta is overcooked. The Italian term for properly cooked pasta is al dente, meaning “to the tooth”. This spaghetti appears to have been prepared for people without teeth. A dour-faced man, whom she is confident is not Italian, stands behind a huge pot of it, as if daring anyone to ask for secon
ds.

  The students are then given an hour to complete any outstanding work or read. She is about to open a textbook when another text message arrives from Lestrange:

  Miss G, suicide excluded from policy for two years. Foster-daughter in custody. Lestrange

  She sends back a quick reply:

  Policy less than two years old and money goes to wife?

  A one-word reply in the affirmative confirms her suspicions. And so it starts to come together, though is there a piece missing? She should be doing her biology homework, but there will be time enough for that.

  The coroner, now an official who investigates causes of death, was originally a kind of tax collector for the King—the word itself comes from corona or “crown”. Where suicide was suspected, the entire estate could be claimed.

  Murder, suicide… murder? She closes her eyes and slowly the room she has not seen in the house she has not visited comes into focus:

  The bath is filled; a glass of whisky is poured. The large frame lowers itself into the water, raising the water-level even as displacement offers a brief respite from gravity.

  A sip of whisky. Another sip.

  Relaxation. Steam on the mirror clouds the reflection.

  It is like a dream, but not a dream.

  Haze. A mist due not to steam long dissipated but to uncertainty. The water is warm. Residual bubbles cling to the skin. Now empty, the glass on the stool retains the faintly sweet smell of whisky. And something else?

  Bitterness.

  I am by the water; I am in the water. By the water or in the water? No struggle. Sacrificial limb or sacrificial lamb?

  Tendrils escape at first, wending their way as spirals, then clouds.

  Until the water of the bath runs red.

  The foster-daughter wishes her abusive father dead; the wife wants her husband’s insurance money. I am only giving them what they long for. I look in the mirror one last time, but all I see is haze.