Sacred Scroll by Anton Gill

Author:Anton Gill [Gill, Anton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780241950661
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

58

It was after 11 p.m. The night staff had already checked in. Marlow was the last to go – as always, he reflected. But life at the moment held nothing for him outside his work. He remembered something Boris Cyrulnik had written in Talking of Love: ‘Someone who is wounded cannot come back to life immediately. It is hard to dance when your legs have been broken.’

But he found his thoughts trailing towards Su-Lin.

The blue phone rang. He returned reluctantly from the door to pick it up.

‘I know it’s late, but I thought you’d like my conclusions on that dream as soon as possible,’ said Ben Duff.

Marlow sat back at his desk.

‘I had another talk with Su-Lin before I left. I think the experience was real. But she disagrees. She says she would never have done anything like that.’

Marlow thought about that. ‘Well, why doubt her?’

‘Young children haven’t yet learned not to be selfish. But the rules most of us learn, and become second nature as we mature and live with other people – to take our place in society, in other words –don’t get fully absorbed by some people.’

‘And you’re saying she’s one of them?’

‘All I’m saying is that she may actually have committed this bizarre act in her childhood. It may sound like a small thing, but it’s worth considering. There are people who go through life protected, as it were, by their egocentricity, which goes hand in hand with their emotional immaturity. It never leaves them. And they’ll always write a script in their head which places them as the blameless party in any situation, even situations they’ve created themselves. Bad ones, especially.’

‘Go on.’

‘The thing is, such people are very difficult to spot, unless you’re a victim of one. They can function perfectly normally in every aspect of life until they’re confronted with something they can’t cope with, and then they kick out at it – in one way or another. Their disadvantage is that they’re often not aware of it when a normal person has seen through them – but most of the time they get away with things. It was recognized long, long ago. Lao-Tsu was writing about it 2,500 years ago. He described egoists as people who, “without ropes, bind themselves”. Duff paused. ‘I’m sorry. I’m getting a little obsessive here. Nothing to do with memory loss.’

Marlow’s tone was brisk. ‘What we need to find out, before anything else, is how she ended up in Jerusalem after disappearing in Istanbul, and what the hell happened to her, and the others.’

Duff’s voice sounded more businesslike now. ‘She’s making good progress, even since you saw her last, and certainly she’s up to another session with you.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Early.’

Marlow’s Paris apartment was a small, anonymous duplex owned by INTERSEC, in the Quartier de l’Horloge, just north of the Pompidou Centre.

The minute he’d closed his front door, the exhaustion hit him, as did the familiar loneliness, somehow worse since he’d met Su-Lin.

But the loneliness ran deep, and it was like an ocean he didn’t have the strength to swim across.

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