Читать книгу The Zima Confession - Iain M Rodgers - Страница 6

(London – 2013)

Andy Mitchell was dead. The email said so.

“How can they be telling me this by email? It must be a hoax – a spoof email perhaps?”

Having just awoken from the nightmare about the snake, everything still felt unreal to Richard, so he found it hard to take in. A fake email from HR would mean there was a breach in the firewall. But a serious breach in security for an email like this wasn’t at all likely. The message was real. Andy Mitchell was dead. Richard reread it a dozen times wondering what could’ve happened to his boss. A heart attack? Car accident? The email didn’t say.

He remembered the last time he saw him. It was while he had been staying in the Grand Sokos Hotel for a project. Mitchell had suddenly turned up in Helsinki and rang his room at quarter to midnight. It was summer, so it was still broad daylight. He had got dressed again, gone down to the lounge bar to meet Mitchell and they had drunk until three a.m. By then they must’ve been as pissed as newts. His recollection of what had happened was very hazy. To start with, the conversation had been normal enough. Mitchell had talked enthusiastically about music and playing bass for some band in his youth. But then he turned a bit odd. He became more and more morose. Suddenly it all came out as anger. He ranted for a while about what a bitch his wife was. He mentioned he was in serious debt.

He talked about being psychic, quite seriously. Then, bizarrely, he produced a pack of cards. He wanted to absolutely prove that he was psychic for some reason. Were they Tarot cards? Richard seemed to remember they were cards with letters on them… and didn’t Mitchell start talking about politics or something at the same time? It was as though he was trying to prove Richard wrong every time he asked a question. Questions that had something to do with…? Richard couldn’t remember. They were probably drinking that goddamned Salmiakki Koskenkorva – liquorice vodka. That would account for it. It had got quite weird and rather irritating, and the whole political thing had got really annoying in the end. Mitchell kept telling him to remember the facts, and repeatedly saying, “You need to wake up,” just repeatedly saying “You need to wake up now,” to whatever point he made. Well, they were both completely drunk. The standard of debate couldn’t have been very high. It was probably a slur of barely intelligible babble.

Suddenly Richard had an uneasy feeling. A feeling Mitchell had said something important to him he’d completely forgotten.

And then he remembered the email Mitchell had sent him two days ago. He had dismissed it as a jokey way of saying they had to go for a drink sometime. He read the words again with a feeling of déjà vu, or a feeling of having read them in a different life:

“Remember Helsinki? Have you made a decision yet? It’s getting urgent. Let’s arrange to meet soon.”

It was only at that moment, now that Mitchell was dead, in fact because Mitchell was dead, that the strangest idea began to insinuate itself. Back in Helsinki, Mitchell had said something to him that was not only very important but very secret. But no matter how he struggled, he couldn’t remember anything definite. Why can’t I remember the thing that I’m trying to remember?

Richard shook his head, trying to shake away the presence of the dream serpent, the shadows of grotesque unreality that still swarmed around him; trying to imagine what Mitchell could possibly have said to him that was so important. Something to do with Oldhams Bank, perhaps – or another project?

There was a more ominous possibility. The possibility that it was something to do with Zima. But that would be preposterous. Anything to do with Zima would have lit up in his consciousness like a neon sign. Where there should have been a memory there were just shadows.

So whatever this shadowy memory was, it couldn’t be Zima. He tried to think what else it could have been. There was one more possibility. The possibility that Mitchell had never said anything important to him in Helsinki. That, like the snake, it was imaginary. So, finally, unable to bring to mind any substantial notion of what Mitchell had said, he dismissed it as the memory of a dream. Richard switched off the laptop. He was annoyed though, that he’d read his emails just because a stupid snake dream had woken him. It was still only two a.m but now he wouldn’t get back to sleep.