The CRES code

Chapter Thirty Four - A Test of Memory

     There were way more maps in the land registry office's back room than Jane had expected.

     The room was larger than her entire apartment had been, back in her old life, and every wall was filled with shelves stuffed full of dusty rolled up sheets of parchment. The dust made her sneeze, even with the window open to try to let some fresh air in. The trouble was that the only window overlooked a narrow alley that was so crowded with buildings on both sides that there was no room for the air to move. It did let in a cat, though, which curled around her legs mewling for attention and tried to sit on the map she was reading. She had put it back out, trying to ignore its harrowing look of perplexed betrayal as she did so. She closed the window most of the way shut, but this only resulted in the cat sitting on the window ledge staring at her as if trying to bring her under its hypnotic control.

     She had only managed to photograph the contents of one shelf so far and it had taken her the whole evening to do it. Her head phone told her that it was close to midnight but she would have known that anyway from the ache behind her eyes and the fugginess in her brain. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands but it did no good. The ache remained. She sighed. In her original naive optimism she'd thought she'd be able to photograph all the maps in one day but the magnitude of the task she'd set herself was only now begining to dawn on her. Well, she'd done as much as she could for now. She was tired. Time to call it a night.

     She stared down at the map she had just photographed, held down by black lead paperweights at the corners, the mold speckled edges curling upwards. She'd had almost no chance to actually look at any of them yet, she had just wanted to get as many of them as possible in her phone's memory while she could in case something happened to deny her access.

     The crabby, handwritten text along the bottom of the map declared it to be a depiction of a farm owned by the Delby family. It was very detailed, she had to give it that, but the size and location of the boundary lines between it and neighbouring farms and areas of common land seemed to be little more than guesswork, as if the surveyor had paid it one visit and taken an hour or so to walk around scribbling down what he'd seen. The location of the farm was also rather vague. There was a road running past it whose name had been erased twice and replaced with a different name as if the man who'd drawn the map had realised he'd made a mistake. God only knew if the most recent version of the road's name was accurate. If it wasn't, and if Randall's secret facility turned out to be under it, the only way to find it might be to go out into the countryside asking everyone if they knew of a farming family called Delby. That was assuming the farm hadn't been sold to a different family since the map had been drawn.

     There was writing all over it done with an old style quill but the ink had faded to yellow almost everywhere and, where the paper had darkened to brown, it could not be seen at all. Even where it could be seen, the writing was almost illegible. Little more than a wriggly line in some places. That didn't matter. All she needed from these maps were places where the ground was too shallow to grow crops in. There were indeed gaps between fields. Long narrow strips and triangular areas, some with the tiny drawings of trees, others just blank. Any one of them might be the one she was looking for and there were a dozen on this one map alone. Was the whole idea just hopeless after all?

     She was too tired to think clearly. Maybe something would become clear to her after a good night's sleep. She thought about going back to the Interesting Weasel but she didn't fancy walking the streets of a medieval city at night. Her successful encounter with her attempted rapist had given her some confidence but she wasn't the type to take unnecessary risks. It was also too late to search for other, closer lodgings here, in what she assumed would be the comparatively safer inner circle of the city. She sighed. Looked as though she would be sleeping in the office, then, for one night at least.