Chapter seventeen was missing. Each page had been carefully sliced out of Jack's copy of Helen of Camden, leaving only a thin sliver by the spine to indicate that they'd ever been there at all.
This was so unexpected that, for a few minutes, he wandered around his bedroom, feeling lost—too lost to even invent games to occupy his attention.
Nowhere, in all the hundreds of scenarios his brain was constantly playing with to keep boredom at bay, had he considered the possibility that anyone at the Faculty—indeed, anyone in Oxford—would be so desperate to keep something from him that they'd resort to mutilating books.
He stopped pacing after a few bewildered minutes and made himself sit still on the bed. Alice could hear the floorboards creaking whenever he paced around and would always watch him with extra vigilance if she thought he was feeling restless.
He knew Ellini. He was sure of that now. He didn't know how they'd met, or what they'd been to each other, or why she was happy to let him treat her like a perfect stranger, but he knew he knew her.
And he supposed he could plausibly have forgotten her. After all, he'd been drinking, smoking, and injecting every narcotic substance he could get his hands on in the past five years.
But the missing pages were... well, they were something physical. He would have remembered doing that. And not only did he not remember doing that, he was forbidden—on pain of Alice's displeasure—to handle sharp objects like scissors.
He tried to keep himself from tapping his toes on the carpet, but it was no good. He had to be doing something. And, in some obscure way, he felt as though remembering Ellini was the key to remembering everything else he'd forgotten—to realizing why he could never keep his mind on one thing at a time, and what he was supposed to do with himself now that the wars were over.
Which was stupid, because how could one girl hold the answer to all those questions? A girl he wasn't even attracted to? A girl who probably wasn't even pretty? True, she was strangely compulsive company, but that was probably just because his only alternatives these days were Alice, Sergei, and—
Jack sat bolt upright on the bed, his eyes shining with unaccustomed concentration. Sam had a copy of Helen of Camden. He'd been carrying it around for weeks now, waving it at people in an admonishing sort of way, as though it was doing service as a truncheon.
And he wouldn't be in bed yet. Policemen kept late hours, especially the ones who were incandescent with rage.
In fact, when Jack got to the modest, respectable boarding house on Speedwell Street where Sam rented his rooms, he found that the Inspector was busy being incandescent with rage somewhere else.
But the landlady—who'd always been very fond of Jack, even though her husband had died fighting his army at Lucknow—led him up to Sam's rooms, pressing a Chelsea bun into his unresisting hands, and asking whether they fed him enough at that demonic Faculty.
Sam's rooms were crowded with bachelor clutter—shirts hanging to dry on chairbacks, books lying sprawled-open, or wedged inside other books to act as bookmarks.
Jack tried not to get crumbs on the carpet, and tiptoed through the debris to the bookshelf, where Helen of Camden stood between two solid, respectable legal tomes, as though Sam had been trying to civilize it by association.
He opened the book and leafed through it eagerly, getting a thin film of sugar and cinnamon on the pages.
There was a lot of noise coming from the neighbouring rooms. It wasn't just snores, and babies crying, and the low drone of domestic conversations. There were creaks and clanks and judders that it genuinely took a lot of imagination to account for.
He was just amusing himself with the image of a ghoul lurching about in chains in the attic, when he heard Sam's distinctive, heavy tread in the hall—followed by a pause which probably meant he had realized he wasn't alone in the apartment.
Jack smiled as he heard the slight scrape which meant he'd lifted the gun off the hall table, and continued to read, even though he'd found what he was looking for a long time ago. He flicked back to the first page, where there was a brief biography of the author. Fabienne Desault was such an exciting name...
The door to the living room banged open, but Jack didn't look up. He knew exactly what he'd see.
There was a short, fuming silence, and then Sam said, "Why didn't you turn the lamp on?"
Jack shrugged and looked up, pretending not to notice the gun. "I don't need it. I've got excellent night vision. It comes of being descended from the damned."
There was another clanking thud from the room above. It seemed that none of the other neighbours could hear it, though, because they continued their snoring, screaming, and arguing unabated.
"You know, this is incredible," said Jack, shutting the book with a snap. "Do they go on like this all night? Is that why you're always in such a bad mood—because your neighbours keep you awake with inexplicable noises? Do you think we should notify the authorities about that baby?"
Sam tapped the gun absent-mindedly against his leg, as though he was fighting the temptation to raise it again. "I nearly shot you," he said, a little wistfully. "Even after I realized who you were."
Jack tried hard to suppress a smile. He wanted to say, 'No you didn't. That gun is never loaded. You keep the bullets in a locked drawer at your office, because that Lily woman's death hurt you so much, you never want to be responsible for another one, ever. You rely on the sight of the gun to keep miscreants in line. It would never have worked on me. I know a killer when I see one.'
But he didn't say this, because he never wanted Sam—or Sergei, or Alice, or any of them—to find out how much he knew about them. He only noted their weaknesses out of habit. He was retired now, and he liked them. But revealing how much he knew still felt like playing his hand too soon. His hand was completely useless, but he still wanted to keep it close to his chest, because it helped him stay sane—in this world of bright lights and mind-numbing civilities—to know he had an advantage.
So, instead, he said, "I'm flattered. When you've been a terrifying General, and you're now a shut-in who takes pills for a living, you learn to appreciate it if anybody considers you a threat."
"I don't consider you a threat, I consider you an annoyance," Sam snapped. "Did you break into my rooms?"
"Mrs Pirbright let me in," said Jack in an injured tone, waving the remains of the Chelsea bun as substantiating evidence. "But even if I had—because the latch on the door is feeble beyond description—it would still be a friendly act. You need to be kept on your toes. All those people doing what you say, agreeing with you, running to carry out your orders—it's not good for you. It breeds complacency. Trust me."
"What," said Sam, emphasizing each word very carefully, "do you want?"
Having reached the limit of what Sam would tolerate without attempting to throw him out of the window, Jack relented. "Did you know that a whole chapter has been cut out of your copy of Helen of Camden?"
Sam heaved his massive shoulders into a shrug. "So?"
"You didn't think that was odd? You're a policeman!"
"I'm the one who gave the ex-convicts jobs in the public libraries," Sam protested. "I can hardly complain when they start damaging books, can I?"
"Would you be interested to know that exactly the same chapter has been cut out of my copy? And that one comes from a library that Alice Darwin guards like a rabid she-wolf."
There was another fuming silence. Then Sam threw the gun onto the desktop in front of him. "All right," he said, rubbing his temples. "Do you have any idea what the chapter contained?"
"Paris," said Jack triumphantly, waving the book to underline his point. "At the end of Chapter Sixteen, Ellini Syal is in Paris. I was there in the same year. I think. And she hinted that Chapter Seventeen would sort of... tell me something."
"But you've never met her before?"
Jack gave an irritable shrug, annoyed that his friend was slowing the momentum of his deductions. "No, but I've... I've been forgetting things recently. And, when I told Ellini about it, she said I should read this chapter, as though it would explain everything."
"And it never crossed your mind that she might be playing games with you? She's been staying at the Faculty. She would have had every opportunity to cut that chapter out of your book herself."
"And when would she have had time to cut the chapter out of your book? When did you first notice it wasn't there?"
Sam tilted his head, as though grudgingly conceding the validity of this objection. "Before she got here," he admitted. "But that doesn't mean anything. I don't think she was properly locked up in Cambridge. Hawthorne said the Warder who was looking after her took ten minutes to remember his own name. I'm going there myself tomorrow, to try and get more information out of him."
He chewed his bottom lip for a moment, then added, "Mrs Darwin said you knew Miss Syal. Through Robin Crake. She said that you'd consented to having some of your memories and your... instincts... removed, but that you wouldn't remember consenting."
"She what?"
Jack could feel the colour draining from his cheeks. In a way that was totally unfamiliar to him, he felt violated. It was as though he'd suddenly discovered that somebody had been studying his habits and mannerisms—examining the latch on his front door.
"It's worse than it sounds," said Sam. "The instincts she took away were... well, they were whatever makes you attracted to women. Or maybe just this particular woman. I think it was supposed to keep you safe from Ellini Syal."
"Safe?" said Jack, in a hollow voice.
"Anyway, I don't understand how any of it could work. I don't see how she could take some of your memories, but not all."
"She can do anything," said Jack grimly.
His first—thoughtless—response was to say that he didn't believe it. But then he wondered why he shouldn't believe it. When had Alice ever given him the impression that her aims were negotiable? When had she ever acted as though there was something more important than getting her own way?
Still, this was beyond her usual, run-of-the-mill depravity. It had been all right when she'd turned him from a General into a useless, domesticated pet—there had been no war to fight, and no better option—but this...
Then it suddenly occurred to him that he might do something about it.
"I'm going to find out what's written in that chapter," he said at last. "And I don't trust Alice or Ellini to give me a straight answer." He looked up at Sam, who seemed to flinch back from the enthusiasm in his eyes. "You know, the writer of this book is a Cambridge Professor..."
Sam groaned. "I'm going there for policework. And Alice would skin me alive if I took you away from the Faculty."
"You? You're the only one she's scared of!"
Sam hesitated uneasily, as though he was remembering something. "It's never seemed that way to me..."
"Oh, come on," said Jack, laughing. "You know you've lost this one! You need to find things out and I can help you do it. No one talks to you the way they talk to me."
"I'm exceedingly glad of it," said Sam, with a petulant shrug. But there were no more protests. That was the other extraordinary thing about humans. They were good at recognizing when they'd lost—which, of course, was why they always did.