The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

Chapter Nineteen

Hallways always seem longer in the dark, especially when you don’t know where you’re going.

If there was a moon out, it wasn’t doing me the least bit of good. The hallway ran along the interior of the house; the only window was the one at the far end. It was so dark that I couldn’t even make out where the end of the hall was.

I hoped Robert Lansdowne and Tommy Fluellen conducted their reconnaissance mission more suavely than I was conducting mine.

I had a vague notion that Colin’s study — and in it, the computer, the ostensible goal of my quest — was somewhere on the second floor with me. The downstairs was devoted to reception rooms on one side, the kitchen and den on the other, and the long drawing room in the back. With the carpet runner prickling against the soles of my bare feet, I started cautiously down the stretch of hallway Colin had redirected me from earlier.

That sounds nice and gothic, doesn’t it? If I were a gothic heroine that would be the signal to all attentive readers that something dreadful (and key to the plot) was hidden at the end of the West Wing. Of course, if I were a gothic heroine, I would also have had a candle dripping wax on one hand and a demented old-maid servant popping out of the shadows to moan, “Beware! Beware! Beware the curse of the Selwicks!” before laughing maniacally and bolting down to the cellars to croon to the corpses of Colin’s six murdered wives.

Perhaps it was a good thing I wasn’t a gothic heroine.

At any rate, Colin’s injunction about the hallway hadn’t been anything sinister or even suggestive; he had merely meant to indicate that the library was in the opposite direction. But I did vaguely recall that he had gone off that way himself once I’d finally been set on the right path library-wards, hence leading to my logical deduction that therein lay the study.

It would have been easier to wait till morning and just ask him, but easy never seems like the appropriate choice at three in the morning when the pipes are moaning and the floorboards are creaking and the very shadows seem to have eyes. Nothing was going to put me to sleep but finding out where on earth 971 was, and then sending a long email to my friend Alex telling her how silly I was being, at which point it would all be out of my system and then I could go back to being a normal (all right, passably normal) human being.

Tomorrow, I knew, I would feel extremely sheepish about the whole thing and wonder why it had seemed so imperative. But that was tomorrow.

With one hand on the hip-high molding that ran down the length of the wall, I felt my way down the hallway, groping my way by touch through the darkness. I encountered a door frame and kept going. Ahead of me, I could see a faint distinction in the quality of the darkness. Ah, glass. That was a window, one of the windows that looked out over the front of the house (the bedroom had windows on the garden front).

Doubling around, I blundered back to the last door frame. It was only a frame; the door itself had been left open.

Surely, that made any ideas about Colin being double-0-something-or-other even sillier. Any self-respecting agent in any novel would have left his study door both closed and locked. A good thing, too. Unlike the heroines of those sorts of novels, I (a) don’t wear hairpins, and (b) wouldn’t know how to pick a lock with them even if I did.

Oh, well. I had never really thought Colin might be a spy. It was just one of those titillating what-ifs, a harmless little daydream, like fantasizing about suddenly inheriting a castle from a long-lost relative, or being asked out by Sean Bean after accidentally stepping on his foot in the Marks & Spencer food hall (many was the happy hour I had spent with that one). You know they’re make-believe. Even if my heart did always beat a little faster when I entered that Marks & Sparks sandwich aisle. But it was all harmless fun, like imagining that my not-always-mild-mannered boyfriend might secretly be an international man of mystery.

And, hey, as daydreams go, it was at least slightly more likely than winning Sean Bean’s undying devotion over an egg and cress sandwich. Hadn’t at least three of Colin’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents been in the business? (I was still excited over the whole his-being-descended-from-Miles thing.)

There I went again.

Shaking my head at myself, I shimmied my way through the door of the study, patting down the wall in search of a light switch.

Blinking in the avalanche of light, I twisted this way and that, like a comical cat burglar in one of the Pink Panther movies. What if Colin saw? What if it woke him up? Never mind that the bedroom was down the hall with the door closed; I dashed over to the desk, pulled the chain on the small brass desk lamp, and hastily switched off the overhead.

A gentle light diffused over the scarred wood of the desk and the reddish brown carpet. Ah, that was better. As my heart rate slowed to a reasonable pace, I looked around, taking stock of my surroundings.

It was larger than I had imagined it would be, more of a combination study-sitting room-library than my apartment-bred definition of a study. Bookcases had been set against the walls on three sides of the room, breaking only for the two long west-facing windows and another that looked south, towards the front of the house. On the right was Colin’s desk, facing out towards the door, with the promised computer crouching on it like a big, beige gremlin. If the desk faced out, that meant the computer faced in, where someone walking into the study couldn’t see what was on it.

The other side of the room featured a well-worn sofa, a squashy chintz chair, and a table with drink rings all over the top. Perched on top of a file cabinet sat an electric kettle, one of those white plastic ones without which no British kitchen seems complete, a battered French press with squished coffee grounds on the bottom, and a stained mug, off of which the lettering had been mostly washed by repeated use over time. There was also a biscuit tin with the lid half off.

I automatically shifted feet, scraping the sole of one against the ankle of another. No wonder the carpet beneath my feet felt mildly crunchy. I wondered if that brown in the rug was there by design or was really just splotches of spilled coffee.

Not exactly anyone’s image of a den of international espionage.

Crunching my way across the rug, I plopped myself comfortably into Colin’s desk chair. It wasn’t one of the wheelie kinds, but a plain old four-legged chair with reddish leather padding set into the seat and back. Fortunately, the computer was already on. It was a slightly different model from my own, so I could just see myself taking an hour to find the on switch. All it took was a slight jiggle of the mouse and the screen blinked crankily into life. Apparently, it didn’t much feel like being woken up, either.

Like a middle-aged lady donning its housecoat, the computer presented me with a plain blue screen and the option of logging on as Colin, Serena, or Guest. Serena had chosen a lilac as her icon. It suited her, I thought; thin and willowy and graceful. Surprisingly, Colin had also gone with the flower option. His was little and pink. It looked, in fact, remarkably like a pink carnation. Hmm.

Oh, no, I wasn’t starting that again. Not even if it did remind me of that bit in The Scarlet Pimpernel where Marguerite spies the small red flowers on her husband’s crest and it all clicks into place for her. Fiction, I reminded myself. They call it fiction for a reason. And could you really imagine James Bond with biscuit crumbs?

All the same, I couldn’t quite resist casting a casual eye over the contents of the desk as I waited for the Guest setting to boot up. The computer was making the huffing and grunting noises that indicate that it might do what you want but it will have to think about it for a while first. Idly, I flipped through the papers that had been piled to the far side of the mouse, held together at the top with a large binder clip. They were all newspaper clippings. I squinted at the tiny print in the top right-hand corner. And recent ones, at that. The top one was dated last week; the others were all dated within the past month. They came from a wide variety of papers. I saw The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times of London, the Daily Mail, articles in French from Le Monde, in Italian from Corriere della Sera, and in German from something with a very long compound title that I won’t even bother to reproduce.

It was nice to be dating a man who not only spoke his own language properly, but others as well.

The article on top reported that Dubai banks had been used to wire money to Al-Qaeda. So did the article underneath it. Others concerned undersea communications cables located in the Persian Gulf outside Dubai; the Dubai engineering boom; the influx of German engineers to Dubai (this in the German paper with the unpronounceable name); the percentage of the world’s cranes currently in Dubai; and so on. Every single article touched in some way on Dubai. Maybe his former company had investments in Dubai. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of looking for a job out there. I doubted it, though. He seemed too attached to Selwick Hall to ever really leave.

Logging into Hotmail, I quickly checked my email — a “Hi! Where are you?” from a grad school friend; a longer email from Alex that I saved to read later; a three-liner from my mother; and five emails, all in the exact same block letters, offering to help me enlarge my penis — and then went to Google.com to try to find the source of the elusive country code. To be honest, it had become more a matter of boredom than burning interest at that point. It took me a while to find a site that would just give me the country codes without trying to sell me phone cards, but, eventually, there it was. The country code for the United Arab Emirates is 971. In other words, for Dubai.

I looked sideways at the pile of articles. Okay, so that was just a little bit weird.

There weren’t any other articles on the desk, but there were Post-it notes scattered here and there, and others that looked like they had been torn carelessly out of a notepad, scribbled with notes in Colin’s hen-scratch handwriting. Some looked like phone numbers, only they were longer than any phone numbers with which I was acquainted, with the dashes in odd places. More international numbers?

The country code finder was still up on the screen, so I typed one of the numbers in, just because. “Russia,” announced the computer.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say.

But where in Russia? It had been hard enough finding the country code site; I didn’t have the patience to hunt around for city codes — and, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure which bit of the number was the city code. As an American studying English history, I had the New York-to-London calling routine down by rote, but I’d never had to tackle calling internationally anyplace else. Not so with Colin, apparently.

Twisting in his desk chair, my nightgown bunching around me, I squinted at the bookshelves behind the desk. “DUBAI” was splashed in lurid green letters down one binding, next to a Fodor’s guide with “United Arab Emirates” in more discreet lettering down the spine. There were half a dozen guides on Dubai alone, others to the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. Farther down the shelf, Moscow elbowed Saint Petersburg for shelf space, cramming Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan all the way into a corner. Kyrgyzstan? Who had ever heard of Kyrgyzstan?

Colin, apparently. Not only did he own the one and only official guide, but it had evidently been well read. The binding was cracked in three places. Tugging it out of the shelf, the book fell instantly open to the description of a city named Osh. Colin had underlined a section about Osh’s proximity to the Uzbek border and resultant raids by an Uzbek militant Muslim group. Wow, everyone seemed to have their own homegrown terrorists these days.

Frowning, I shoved the book back into its corner on the shelf. By this point, I was up on my knees on Colin’s desk chair, my back to the computer, leaning over the back of the chair to try to see the books in the farther shelves. There was a whole shelf dedicated to nothing but dictionaries, dictionaries in languages I had never seen before. Oh, some were perfectly mundane and extremely well used — French, German, Latin, Greek, all presumably relics from Colin’s school days — but others were shiny and new, with lettering that looked even more like hieroglyphs than Colin’s handwriting.

I had leaned out too far. The chair tipped precipitously forwards, sending me whapping stomach-first into the crossbar as I caught at the edge of the shelf to keep from going over. After a few wobbly moments, the chair steadied and I settled safely back down on my haunches, staring with narrowed eyes at the bookshelves. The row I was facing was all biography and cultural history. A biography called Sultan in Oman about Sultan Qaboos, another on the conflict between tradition and modernization in the Middle East, and so on.

All right, I told myself, feeling for the ground with one foot as I wiggled backwards off the desk chair. Calm down. So Colin was interested in other countries and cultures. So were many other people. He might have been an international relations major in college or, rather, read international relations at university as they put it here. Perfectly normal, perfectly innocent.

Only he hadn’t, had he? Hadn’t he told me that he had read economics at Oxford? Or was I making that up? Between the lateness of the hour and everything else, I was so muddled that I was finding it hard to distinguish between what Colin had actually told me and what I had merely assumed. I had had so many imaginary conversations with him in my head over the past few weeks that it was very hard to sort them out from the real ones. Let’s be honest; we all do that. Aren’t there times when you’re sure you’ve told someone something and then remember you’d only intended to tell them? Or that you assume one thing until they tell you another?

Right, let’s say Colin had been an econ major. Everyone needed a hobby. Maybe he just liked the study of languages and their corresponding cultures. Maybe he just had time on his hands after leaving his City job and needed something to do. Maybe.

Feeling a bit like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey pouncing on the Tilneys’ old laundry lists in the hopes that they were moldering manuscripts, I attacked the drawers of Colin’s desk, yanking them open one by one. If he came in — well, I was just looking for paper and pen to scribble down some dissertation ideas. Ignore the fact that I had paper and pen of my own in my bag in the bedroom.

The top drawer had nothing but the usual office effluvia of stretched-out paper clips, capless pens, boxes of spare staples, eraser-less pencils and pencil-less erasers. The second drawer was more promising. Hands unsteady, I reached for the first of the hanging files. “Business Expenses,” it read. Business expenses for what? What business? The first batch were all estate related, reports of land taxes paid, necessary repairs made, machinery bought. No pigs, I noticed.

Feeling considerably less excited, I eased the file back into the folder and drew out the next one. This really was turning into Catherine Morland with her laundry list, wasn’t it? I was all ready to dismissively tuck away this file as I had the last one, closing the drawer on the files and the whole embarrassing episode, when something made me stay my hand.

Unlike the last file, there were no neatly printed-out spreadsheets of estate accounts. Instead, it was just a bunch of receipts shoved haphazardly into a folder. The one on top had been folded three times and tucked into a blue holder that read “Hilton Dubai Jumeirah.” Jumeirah? On an impulse, I tugged down one of the UAE books from the shelf. And there it was. Jumeirah, one of the outlying areas of rapidly developing Dubai. The guidebook listed the hotel as “moderate” and enthused that it was “a bargain for the beachfront.” Hmm. What was Colin doing going to beachfronts in Dubai? Pre-me, I hoped.

Easing it out of its holder, I unfolded the hotel receipt. It hadn’t been pre-me. In fact, it had been this month. Colin had stayed there for a week, one of the two weeks he had been out of London “on business.” Other receipts in the pile were for various restaurants in Dubai, drinks at Vu’s, lunch at Bastakiah Nights, taxi rides, coffees, bus tickets, the usual petty expenses of travel.

Well, that explained how brown he had gotten over Christmas. He had spent enough of his youth in the sun that he had one of those perma-tans, a permanent overlay of brown over a naturally fair skin that probably signaled melanomas later in life, so it hadn’t been striking enough to warrant questions; if anything, I had ascribed his heightened color to the effects of his ski trip with his mother and her husband when he had visited them in Italy over the New Year.

I wondered where he had spent the other week.

If I delved deeper into the folder, I would no doubt find receipts for that week, too, in some other exotic location. Moscow, perhaps, since that seemed to have occasioned the second largest pile of guidebooks, or Bonn, or maybe even Kyrgyzstan. It was all straight out of an old-fashioned thriller. Our Man in . . . Sussex.

Huh.

Didn’t quite have the right ring to it, did it? Besides, if he really was involved in something top secret, why would he leave all his background materials out where anyone could see them? The dictionaries and guides were right there on the back wall, in plain view from the door — except where they would be obscured by the computer monitor and the back of the chair, but that didn’t really count, since all you had to do was walk around them. Shelves are meant to display, not hide. And then there were the receipts in the drawer. The unlocked drawer. Everything was right out there in the open.

But open to whom? That was the question. We were in West Sussex, isolated at the end of a not-very-well-kept road (my posterior, still bruised from the ride down it earlier, suggested stronger adjectives). The books might be right there on the shelves and the receipts right there in the drawer, but they were all the way up on the second floor in a wing off the main block of the house. All the reception rooms were downstairs. Even if he had people over, they probably wouldn’t go up above the ground floor. And if they did go upstairs, this room was all the way at the end of a wing that contained nothing else but the master bedroom and bath.

When I had stayed last time, as guest, my bedroom had been in the main block, the library all the way over in the other wing. I had had no idea that this wing — or this room — was even here. Why would I have? And if I had ventured this way, I would probably have spotted Colin’s bedroom, realized I was trespassing, and gone no farther.

It was all more than a little perplexing.

Tucking the folder back into the drawer, I nudged it shut with one knee and reached for the bottom drawer. It didn’t budge. I tried again, getting a better grip on the brass handle. It rattled a bit, but wouldn’t move. So this one was locked. I knelt down beside the desk to get a better look, my nightgown spreading out along the carpet around me, the bright green flannel with its splashy pink flowers incongruous against the faded and stained Persian carpet. Closing one eye and putting the other against the keyhole, I thought I could make out something in there — but I couldn’t tell what. Probably just the rest of the keyhole.

Settling back on my heels, disgruntled, I spotted something I had missed. There was a fragment of paper on the carpet beneath the desk, right near the edge of my nightgown. It really was just a fragment, with ragged corners, roughly the quarter of the size of a standard piece of paper, as though a document had been torn in two and then torn again. It read:

“ — llowed them as far as the gold souk where — ”

“ — back alley behind a vendor selling fake hand — ” (I really hoped the next missing word there was “bags.”)

“ — crawled beneath a display of gold chains into — ”

“ — nversation between them in the back room — ”

“ — elves safe, made little effort to keep their voices — ”

“ — Dublin, in four days, and then from there to — ”

“ — this gun, a Jericho 941 F double action semiauto — ”

“ — idn’t stand a chance at point-blank range. After — ”

And there it ended, infuriating, inconclusive, all but unintelligible.

What in the hell?

I held the piece of paper under the bulb of the desk lamp, as though more light would somehow illuminate the contents or make the missing words reappear. Even if they did, how was this to be explained? It was Colin’s handwriting; I knew it by now, every awkward, angular scratch of the pen. But the contents . . .

No, I thought. No. This was supposed to be Northanger Abbey, not The Spy Who Loved Me. I might imagine these things, but I was never supposed to actually find corroboration. I rubbed one cold palm against my nightgown; flannel, warm, safe, and mundane. Spies didn’t exist in worlds with flowered flannel nightgowns and coffee-stained carpets. Those things were normal; they were real. Spies were for television, for movie screens, for the old Ian Fleming paperbacks in the library. All fiction, all imaginary. Except some of them weren’t imaginary.

I looked at the piece of paper trembling in my other hand, in the glare of the bulb of the desk light. It looked pretty real, too. So had all those receipts in the drawer. And then there was that two-week period when Colin was out of London, leaving “Miss you!” messages on my voice mail at odd hours, but never there when I called back. I thought back to Sally’s and Joan’s odd comments in the ladies’ room; Colin’s caginess when asked about his occupation; that pink flower icon guarding the files on his computer.

I let the scrap of paper drop to the floor where I had found it, among the biscuit crumbs and spiky bits on the carpet where coffee had spilled and dried. It lay there looking perfectly innocent, like any other fragment of paper accidentally torn and dropped.

Only I knew better.

Why hadn’t anyone told me that I was dating 007?