“Tresco Supermax was tricky to begin with, but I said I was working for you and eventually got through to Records.”
“And?”
“Aornis never arrived. They raised the alarm when the prisoner was two hours overdue. The police were called, then SO-5, and that was it.”
“Okay,” I said, pinning a large map of southern England on the kitchen wall and drawing a red circle around Swindon with a felt pen. “She left here at one-fifteen P.M. on the second July, 2002 and was being driven toward Cornwall, but she never made it. Have you called Land’s End International? She would have been flown out of there to Tresco.”
“I’ve got the operations manager calling me back.”
“Anything on Highsmith and Quinn, the guards?” I asked.
The Wingco consulted his notes.
“Quinn died six months ago in a car accident when she ran a red light into the path of a bus. Highsmith quit the prison service after losing Aornis. They were chosen for Aornis duty as they were both completely deaf.”
“They think she used speech to manipulate memories?”
“Apparently.”
“They know nothing about her,” I said with a sigh.
The Wingco handed me a Post-it with Highsmith’s address on it, and I thanked him.
“Someone named John Duffy called,” he added.
“Yes?”
“He’s your personal assistant at the library and wanted to know when you would be starting work. Apparently they have a lot of ‘pressing issues.’”
“So do I.”
We took the car into Swindon and spoke to Highsmith, who was tidying up his allotment now that it was the end of the growing season. Only his speech gave us any clue to his disability—he’d been deaf for so long he had adapted almost perfectly. He was keen to assist us, especially when I told him I could get him Joffy’s autograph, but he was of little help.
“The last thing I remember was leaving Swindon with Aornis in the back of the van.”
“By motorway, to Land’s End?”
“Right. I think I remember turning off the M4 and onto the M5, but I couldn’t swear to it. Next thing I know, I’m sitting on a bench at Carlisle railway station five days later with forty thousand pounds in cash, eight kilos of bootleg Camembert in the car and a wife waiting for me in Wrexham.”
“You explained all this to SO-5?”
“Many times. Quinn was the same, only she ‘came to’ a day sooner then me, upside down in a Mercedes she’d bought for cash two hours previously. There was an iguana on the backseat, and the trunk was full of rabbits.”
I exchanged looks with Landen. One of Aornis’ little memory tricks was to make you think you were someone you weren’t, then send you off to cause mayhem on a five-day nonrecall bender. We thanked Highsmith, who told us that on the plus side he now had a very lovely wife and two-year-old daughter— and when no one claimed the cheese, he was allowed to keep it.
“That was a waste of a morning,” said Landen, once we had dropped into Yo! Toast for a coffee and a bowl of crusty toastettes.
“Perhaps,” I mused, thinking of the tattoo on my hand. I needed to ask Swindon’s lone tattooist at Image Ink if she knew why I’d had it done on me rather than Landen, but I wanted to do it on my own—he didn’t need to have a panic.
“I’m going to walk up to the library,” I said, “to have a look at my new office.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No, no,” I said hurriedly. “I’d like to do this on my own. I won’t be long. New password?”
“How about me saying, ‘Nothing should disturb . . .’ and then you finish it by saying, ‘. . . that condor moment’?”
“Condor moment. Very random. Got it.”