was no pressing need to dash straight back to France, as Jeff and Tuesday could manage fine without him for just a little longer. He’d pay a visit to the college admin office in the morning to check that he was clear to hold onto the room another day.
His mind made up, Ben ambled back through the cloister and up the groaning bare wooden staircase to his room. The remainder of the wine he’d bought earlier was there waiting for him, seductively calling, ‘Drink me’. He was about to flop in the armchair when he changed his mind, and for old times’ sake grabbed the bottle and went back down to the cloister. He sat on the same cold stone ledge he used to sit on, and in the peace of the night he smoked his last three Gauloises, listened to the bats flapping about the cathedral tower and savoured the rest of the wine.
He thought about lost friends and wished they were there, but he wasn’t lonely. He’d been alone for most of his life, and he relished solitude as much as he liked the darkness.
Sometime in the early hours, he carried the empty bottle upstairs and went to bed.
Nick Hawthorne treated himself to a taxi home after the concert. He was happy with the evening, and thought he hadn’t performed too badly. The organ had sounded great as it ever had, in all the years he’d known it. The truth was, the only remaining original part of it was the case, dating back to about 1680. The actual guts of the instrument were a modern replacement from the late seventies. He often wondered what the old one would have been like to play.
All in all, a successful night. The only downside was that his hands hurt after the performance. He couldn’t flex his fingers without wincing. Of all the rotten luck, for someone in his line of work to get arthritis of the hands at such an early age. Nick had two consolations. One was that the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson had suffered from the same condition for much of his life. If it didn’t stop Oscar, it wouldn’t stop him.
The second consolation was waiting for Nick back home. On arrival he hurried straight to the spare bedroom, unlocked the door, slipped inside and turned on an infrared side lamp that filled the room with a crimson glow. Out of habit, he locked the door behind him.
The reason Nick Hawthorne kept the spare bedroom locked at all times was because it contained his large collection of plants. When it came to horticulture, he was highly specialised: cannabis sativa was the only species he’d ever attempted to grow. He was pretty adept at it, too – so much so that it had become something of a hobby with him. Only the females produced smokable marijuana; the males were there for pollination purposes only. He’d learned how to nurture his crop with all the right light conditions and nutrients, maintaining the soil pH in perfect balance for optimum growth. The resulting overproduction was far more than he could actually use himself, even if he’d planned on spending all day every day stoned out of his wits, which was far from the case. So many plants filled the room that it looked like a set from a jungle movie. He’d taken out the bed long ago to make room for them all. Aside from the sideboard and tables all covered in pots, the only remaining furniture was the large recliner chair in which he often spent his evenings, bathed in the submarine glow of the infrared lamp and drifting through an extremely pleasant haze as he partook of the evil weed.
Nick’s cannabis use was the only illegality he had ever committed in his life. He felt absolutely no guilt about it whatsoever, as he justified it on purely medical grounds after having tried every noxious pill and potion the doctors could offer him, and all they’d done was cause a whole raft of side-effects without relieving the symptoms of his condition. Deciding the medical profession were essentially no more than quack salesmen for pharmaceutical corporate giants set on poisoning everyone, he’d gone natural and never regretted it. The stuff worked. It was the only medicine that eased the pain in his hands after playing. Plus, it relaxed him, and that was just what he needed after a gig.
The room was kept much warmer than the rest of the apartment. Nick bolted the door shut behind him, then slipped off his coat and dumped it carelessly on the floor in his haste to attend to his needs. He opened the sideboard cupboard where he kept his stash of the crumbled dried leaves, along with his extra-large-size Rizla papers. He spent a few moments carefully rolling up a joint, which made little lances of pain jolt through his fingers, but the discomfort would soon be relieved. Then he went over to the recliner, settled deep into it, relished lighting up the joint with his Dupont Mozart lighter, and began to puff away contentedly.
It wasn’t long before he felt the herb working its magic. The delicious familiar sensations began to wash over him, his muscles drooping, heart rate slackening until he could have sworn it was beating once a minute. A smile curled his lips and he closed his eyes, letting the recliner support him like a big, soft hand gently cupping him in its palm. The echoing remnants of the evening’s performance played in his head. Then they, too, relaxed and softened, gradually slowly faded away to transcendent silence … and Nick Hawthorne was one with the Cosmos.
Some eons later, Nick’s eyes snapped open. At first, disorientated, he thought it was the vividness of his dream that had startled him awake. But the bubble of the dream was popped, and the thumping sound that had woken him was still there.
Thud.
Crash.
Nick stopped breathing and he went rigid with sudden tension. He peered at his watch by the dim light of the infrared lamp and saw that it was ten to four in the morning. He’d been asleep for five hours.
He sat bolt upright in the chair as he heard another muffled thump from somewhere beyond the bolted bedroom door, not far away.
There could be no question. Someone was inside the apartment! But who? His mind was still clouded from sleep and the lingering after-effects of the cannabis, and for a couple of moments he thought maybe some of his music pals had turned up in search of a late-night party. Or maybe one of the lunchtime guests had left something behind and come back to get it. But no, that couldn’t be. Nick was certain he’d locked the front door on his way in.
That was when he clearly heard the heavy, aggressive footsteps thumping about the apartment, and the strange voices of at least two men, and his guts twisted up with the realisation that whoever was inside his place, it wasn’t his friends. They were intruders.
Nick struggled to contain his panic and think straight. From some part of his brain bubbled up the memory of something he’d read: that what the Americans called home invasions, or what the British police called ‘creeper burglaries’, were reportedly on the rise in the UK. Creeper burglars were the kind who were content to enter their victims’ properties even when someone was at home, because in the case of a confrontation they had no qualms about beating your brains out with a hammer or stabbing you to death.
All sliced and diced with a knife hanging out of your guts.
Except these guys weren’t doing a lot of creeping. It sounded like a herd of elephants in there.
Nick slowly rose from his chair and advanced through the red-lit jungle towards the bedroom door. He placed the palms of his shaking hands flat against it and pressed his ear to the wood, listening, barely daring to breathe in case they detected his presence in here. The thought suddenly hit him that they might see the streak of infrared light under the door, and he reached out and turned off the lamp, plunging the jungle into pitch black. He froze in the darkness, listening to the intruders crashing about. As terrified as he was of what they might do to him if they found him, the thought of the mindless damage they could be causing to his precious possessions, just for the hell of it, frightened
