Mariam got to the Lambton Theatre at six-thirty, half an hour after Isaac’s shift was supposed to finish.  She was all prepared to tell Jonathan Lambton that Isaac didn’t know she was there and he shouldn’t blame him if it all turned out to be a waste of time.  Assuming she was even able to get in to see him in the first place, obviously.  Yeah, Alex had told them to go and talk to him, but that could have just been wishful thinking.

The foyer was an enclosed, velvety place that looked as if it had been built to discourage people from hanging around while they waited to be called to their seats.  Hopefully there was also a bar or café somewhere in the building.  “Hi,” said Mariam to the guy on reception, “Would I be able to speak to Jonathan Lambton sometime this evening?  Alex Rudd sent me.”  There.  She’d pinned the blame on Alex.  Either Jonathan Lambton would know who he was and the message on the wall would actually have a point, or he wouldn’t, and Mariam could forget the whole thing and go home.

“Well, I’ll call up, but he might be busy,” said the guy behind the desk.  Mariam didn’t recognise him, but going purely on his age and the fact that he was working here, it was a safe bet that he was a Berrylands student.  “If he is available, you might have to wait.  Is that OK?”

“Sure,” said Mariam.  It wasn’t as if she had anything else on this evening.

The guy turned slightly away from her and picked up a phone handset from the left side of the desk, just hidden behind the edge of the screen.  He went to key in the number, then looked back at her.  “Who should I say is calling?”

“Mariam Gharib.”  She felt a little embarrassed for not saying her name as soon as she’d come in.  How was Jonathan Lambton going to know whether or not he wanted to speak to her if he didn’t even know who she was?  Bloody moron.

The guy keyed in the number, and turned a few degrees away from her.  “Hi, sorry to interrupt- there’s a Mariam Gharib who wants to see you?  She says she’s representing someone called…  Alex Rudd?” he checked, turning back to her for confirmation.  Mariam nodded.  “Yeah, Alex Rudd.  Right…  OK.  Brilliant.  I’ll send her right up.”

Mariam, who’d prepared herself for no end of obstacles, suddenly felt like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.

The guy at the desk put his phone down.  “He’s free.  His office is just through that door and up those stairs.”  He pointed to a little grey door in the adjacent wall.  “Once you’re up there, it’s the first door on the right.”

“Thanks,” said Mariam.  The door was labelled Staff Only, which gave her a weird sense of wrongness as she went through it.  As if she was going to set off an alarm, or get a stern telling-off from the security guards.  The fact that the staircase was so dark and narrow didn’t help- it was very obviously not a place for customers.  And definitely not customers who were about to waste Jonathan Lambton’s time.

There had been sections about the Lambton Theatre in all the university prospectuses.  How it had been founded by a great Shakespearian actor Mariam had never heard of, and then inherited by his eldest son and daughter, who had been very generous to the university over the years, hosted events, put their dad’s name on lecture halls, et cetera.  Since getting here, Mariam had seen Jonathan Lambton’s face on the front of the local paper a couple of times, and she’d always thought that he looked like a film star who’d been to just a few too many parties and had just a bit too much plastic surgery.  He definitely didn’t seem like the sort of guy who’d give up his evening to humour some scruffy nineteen-year-old.

Except, when Mariam opened the door to his office, Isaac was already in there, sitting in the chair opposite the desk.  He gave her a little wave.

Jonathan Lambton stood up to greet her.  “Mariam, is it?  Come in, take a seat.”

Mariam stopped opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish for long enough to walk in and sit down beside Isaac.

“Now, would I be right in thinking that you’re here because of a group called The Oakmen?”

It was a moment before Mariam could get it together enough to reply.  “…Yeah.  Has Isaac told you about the message on our wall?”

“And the meeting last night, yes.”  Jonathan Lambton sat down.  He didn’t look quite as plastic in real life, when you were close enough to see the pores and the stubble, but there was still something about him that was a little off.  His hair alone looked like it had hundreds of pounds spent on it every month.  “He said it was run by a man named Shaun Mandeville?”

Mariam finally remembered what she was doing here.  “Yeah.  He just turned up at my work, actually.  That’s why I decided to come here.”

Isaac twisted round to face her properly.  “Really?  What did he say?”

“Um…  He tried to guilt-trip me for us leaving early, and then he told me that his friend almost had to go to hospital after Natalie elbowed her, and we should stop talking to her because she’s a sociopath.”

Isaac’s eyes widened.  “What?” he said, with a laugh.

“She’s a sociopath.  On account of how she elbows people, I guess.”

Jonathan Lambton, having waited patiently for them to finish, continued.  “Shaun Mandeville was called Shaun Pinder when Denny and Alex knew him.  I believe Mandeville was his mother’s maiden name.”

Mariam frowned.  “Alex knew him?”

Isaac looked as if he was going to burst.  “Alex used to live with him!”  He turned to Jonathan.  “Tell her what you told me.”

Jonathan closed his eyes and breathed in.  “I met Alex two years ago.  He made an appointment to see me in this office, and he told me he’d escaped from a cult located somewhere in Dorset.  He told me that my younger brother Hayden- Denny- was still part of the cult, and asked for my help in rescuing him.  The group was run by Shaun Pinder, and they called themselves The Rhymers.”

“Like in the song, remember?” said Isaac, “Thomas the Rhymer.”

Mariam was still stuck on the word ‘cult.’  “Was your brother OK?”

Jonathan’s lips thinned.  “We managed to get him back.  He hasn’t been quite the same since.”

Mariam felt cold.  She folded her arms and drew herself in.  “Why didn’t Alex tell us any of this himself?”

Jonathan gave a brief shrug.  “He thought it would be safer that way.  He thought if he was gone, Shaun Pinder would lose interest in the rest of you.  But since that doesn’t seem to have happened…”  He looked around the room, trying to find a way to end that sentence.

After he’d been silent for a while, Mariam plucked up the courage to ask another question.  She didn’t quite have the guts to ask about the bomb in the park- not yet- but she could ask about this.  “Um, a few days ago, a woman came to our house and said she was Alex’s mother.”

Jonathan tapped his fingers on the desk.  “I can’t say I’ve ever met Alex’s parents…  What did she say?”

“Quite a lot… but mainly, she said that she didn’t think Alex was in Amsterdam.”

Jonathan looked down at his desk.  Suddenly, he looked a whole lot more human than he had before, and it was all thanks to how morose he looked.  “I don’t know where he is,” he sighed.

*

Tamsin’s living room was cramped.  There were other things you could have said about it, but “cramped” came first.  There were paintings on the wall that you couldn’t see because the plants were in the way.  There were windows that you couldn’t see out of because a big widescreen TV was in the way.  There was a cardboard box with the “Happy Shopper” logo printed on it, wedged under a shiny brown coffee table covered with glossy magazines.  There was a fireplace that jutted out in front of the sofa, trapping your knees.  There were glass ornaments on every surface in sight.

Russel, who Rosalyn had thought was Tamsin’s dad until she’d introduced him as “my one and only”, had given everyone a glass of wine.  So far, Rosalyn had only pretended to sip hers.  She didn’t know whether or not Natalie was doing the same.

“So,” said Russel, sitting down opposite them with his legs spread out, “the plan is, me and your man put our heads together, find out who it is that’s been bothering you, and hit ‘em where it hurts.”

“‘Our man’?” asked Natalie.

“Your mate with the bandages,” said Tamsin.  She’d sat down on the arm of Russel’s chair.  Out of nowhere, Rosalyn thought about pirates with parrots on their shoulders.

“Neither of us are…”

“Only way,” said Russel, “Hit ‘em before they know what’s happening.”

Rosalyn remembered that weird woman from Monday, the one who’d said she was Alex’s mum.  “You know when you said you’d seen people hanging around our house…?”

“A whole group of them!”  Russel waved his arms.  “Black knitted caps, lockpicking gear…”

Oh.  So much for that theory, then.

Tamsin rolled her eyes.  “No way you saw lockpicking gear.  Not from all the way across the street at night.”

“Pipe down, or I’ll make you pipe down.”

Tamsin threw her head back and laughed.  “I’d like to see you try!”

Russel sighed, a low, rumbling sound, and turned back to Rosalyn and Natalie.  “I bet your man with the bandages doesn’t have to deal with this.”  He pointed to Tamsin with his thumb.

“Isaac,” said Natalie.  (Rosalyn could see her glass properly now, and it was still full.)

“What?”

“That’s his name.  Isaac.”

Russel nodded.  “Right.  Isaac.  I spoke to him one day last week.  Told him he had to defend his territory.  Cause if those guys in the knitted caps are any indication…”

There was a sound from upstairs.  Rosalyn had to listen for a few seconds to be sure, but she was pretty certain it was a baby crying.

Russel stared at Tamsin.  After a while, he said, “Well?”

“What?”

“I am in the middle of something,” he said, almost primly, “Go up and sort it out.”

“You always…”

Russel gave the back of her shoulders a soft shove.  “Go.  Go and see to it.”

Tamsin got up and strode out of the room, giving an indignant huff at every turn.  Russel watched the door close behind her, listened to her footsteps on the stairs, and then continued.  “Protecting your territory.  Only thing that matters in life.”  He put a hand on each spread-out leg and drummed his fingers on his knees.  “Once a man’s sure of that, he has everything of value in the world.”

Natalie glanced at Rosalyn, then back at Russel.  “How do you…?”

“Your home, your property, your blood…  People have forgotten.  They used to say an Englishman’s home was his castle.  People have forgotten.”  He sat there for a while, ruminating.  “I didn’t want to say this in front of Tamsin,” he said, in a quieter, rougher voice, “but there’s something else.”  He hunched down, leaning a little further towards them.  “When I saw those people on Friday night, I saw one of them take a branch from a tree and set it on fire with his cigarette lighter.” 

Rosalyn glanced at Natalie, who shrugged.

Russel smacked his lips, as if he was enjoying himself.  “It fizzled out quickly enough, but…  I reckon he was trying to burn you out.”

*

It turned out that it had been an eventful day for everyone.

“So they’re a cult,” Natalie said flatly (sociopathic Natalie of the hospitalising elbow, that was).

“That’s what Isaac’s boss said, yeah,” replied Mariam.  She’d poured herself a glass of orange juice, but she hadn’t drunk any yet.  The four of them were sat around the kitchen table, trying to digest everything they’d all heard today.

Isaac didn’t know about the rest of them, but he was feeling a little better than he had.  Sometimes it was a relief to find out that something wasn’t all in your head.

“What kind of cult?”

“Well, I don’t know!  What kinds are there?”

Isaac looked at the ceiling.  “According to Mr Green Blinds, they’re the house-burning kind.”  You’d have thought that, after having been knocked for six by getting caught in a bomb blast, the idea of having your house burned down with you in it would be equally upsetting, but Isaac felt a perverse delight.  Like butterflies in your stomach, if the butterflies were juggling chainsaws.

“He said his name was Russel,” said Rosalyn quietly.

Isaac shrugged.

“Look,” said Natalie, “I know he said that, but I’m not sure how much we can trust him.  He also said he saw lockpicking gear, and even his wife called him out on that one.”

Mariam’s brow furrowed.  “But there was somebody trying to break in on Friday.  We know that.”

“Yeah, we do know that.  But we’ve only got one guy’s word about the fire and the lockpicking gear.”

“But the break-in combined with the harassment is definitely enough for us to go to the police.  Right?”  Mariam looked about ready to start tapping her fist on the table to emphasise her remarks.

Natalie, sensibly enough, didn’t even try to argue.  “Right.”  She looked around the table.  “Right.  Are we all free tomorrow morning?”

“We can be,” said Isaac, who had a seminar that he wasn’t too bothered about.  Mariam and Rosalyn both nodded their agreement.

There’s a cult trying to burn our house down.  Everyone agrees.  It’s not just me.

Natalie breathed out through her nose, and a smile appeared on her face.  “You know,” she said, “it’s almost flattering that I’m the one he hates the most.”

Mariam replied in a hot burst of frustration.  “I don’t think it’s flattering, Natalie, I think it’s bloody terrifying.  Now if you could please take this seriously…”

“Hey!” said Isaac- partly out of a desire to defend Natalie, but also out of guilt.  If Mariam knew some of the things he’d been thinking just now, she probably wouldn’t be too pleased with him, either.

Natalie held up her hands.  “Whoa.  I’m sorry.  And I am taking it seriously.”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Mariam, shrinking back until her head was in her hands, “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“It’s just… what a fucking creep!”  Natalie’s sentence ended with the suggestion of a laugh, but it was more disbelieving than mocking, so Mariam didn’t look annoyed.  “He felt that threatened when I made fun of his alphabet game?”

“Stamping out dissent,” said Mariam, massaging her temples, “Straight out of the dictators’ playbook.”

“Well, he’s only got about ten people to dictate to.  And he won’t be getting any more once we’re done with him.”

Isaac felt warm inside.  Yeah, they could topple a dictator, alright.  The four of them, they could rip him to smithereens.