Omega

One of them was a slender young man with an avid face who pushed an upturned helmet at Marisa over the heads of others. It was a GRP Alliance army helmet, stripped of its internal webbing.

Fury welled up in Owain. Before Marisa could ladle the last of the stew into it, he stepped forward and knocked the helmet out of the man’s hands. He pushed him back so hard he went sprawling.

The man lay still for a moment before heaving himself up and attempting to recover the helmet. Owain kicked his hand away. He brandished his pistol and the man scrambled away. I had to focus so intensely on keeping his rage in check that I was quite unable to discern what had actually provoked it.

Owain retrieved the helmet. The restaurant owner approached Marisa and began gesticulating wildly and jabbering in broken French. Owain couldn’t understand most of it. He heard Marisa reply that since she had paid a good price for the stew it was hers to dispose of as she pleased.

Owain stepped between them

“This is an unfortunate misunderstanding of no great importance,” he said in French. “Let’s content ourselves with the fact that there has been no injury or damage, and therefore no need for continued unpleasantness. We are finished here. I suggest we all get back to our business without further fuss.”

Still holding the helmet, Owain walked Marisa across the ice towards the snow mobile. She kept glancing at him curiously.

“I’ll drive us back,” he said.

“Why did you hit him?”

His behaviour had clearly disturbed her as much as me. Still Owain gave nothing away. He climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Why, Owain?”

“Because he’d jumped the queue.”

She didn’t move. “No. That wasn’t it.”

He hadn’t wanted to explain. But he owed it her. Turning the helmet in his hands he pointed to two small holes at the front.

“See these? Rivet holes. For a badge, the circlet of stars. Probably levered off and sold.”

Marisa looked blank.

“They don’t make them like this any more. To reduce production costs, they starting leaving the badges off. This has to be at least twenty years old.” He showed her the dark interior, criss-crossed with paler strips where the padding had been. “Glass reinforced plastic with a carbon fibre lining. An officer’s helmet, rank of colonel at least.”

It was obvious the significance of this still eluded her.

“Don’t you see?” Owain said vehemently. “It couldn’t have been his. He had no business having it.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Tanya. A black-and-white photograph on the inside flap of the dust jacket. It was a side-lit shot of her sitting at a desk, staring off-picture at something, looking both glamorous and intellectual, the epitome of the seriously sexy science writer.

The cover of the book carried her name, Tanya Z Peters, and the title, The Paradox Realm, in bilious green and tangerine lettering. It was a popularisation of quantum physics, its cover a lurid swirl of electric pastels.

Tanya hated the cover because it suggested a sherbety confection of easily digestible facts aimed at the casual reader. In fact it was a book about a difficult and non-intuitive subject, aimed at a scientifically literate audience. I’d read it soon after it appeared and still found much of it bewildering.

Her other titles were on display in a glass-fronted bookcase of her study. The first was Elemental Fired, a book on stellar nucleosynthesis that had been published when she was still in her twenties. Others had followed on subjects as diverse as genetic engineering and the greenhouse effect. She was a regular contributor to Radio 4 and the Discovery Channel, and she also taught a course on the social impact of scientific developments for the Open University.

Her study was quite unlike my father’s: a light, airy place, its window overlooking the garden. There were modern prints on the wall, a bronze samovar, a set of Russian dolls arranged along the mantelpiece. Trophies of her travels.

I put the book back on the shelf, saw a copy of Battlegrounds. The book had been ghosted by a freelancer but was based on e wres transcripts that I had written. It seemed a fake in comparison to Tanya’s, not truly a product of my own efforts.

I felt a powerful urge to bolt from the house, go running and never come back until I’d found out where I was supposed to be.

A toilet flushed and a door opened. Geoff came in.

He wore a navy suit and his only concession to informality was that the top button on his shirt was undone and his striped tie loosened. I wondered if he had just popped home for a couple of hours, was taking time out to give me a bit of psychological counselling.

As though rehearsed, we resumed our seats in armchairs opposite one another. “So,” he said, smiling. “Where were we?”

“You were asking me if I was still having problems with my concentration,” I said, surprised that I had remembered it.

He nodded earnestly. “And?”

“And what?”

This threw him.

I grinned and said, “Joke.”