The Drowned Man Page 16

  Peter tried to be nonchalant. “Joe, this is Peter Cammon. We’ve arrived.”

  “We have arrived?” Joe picked up on the creepiness of the phrase. “My dead brother is home to be put in the ground, then?”

  Peter fumbled through the arrangements for transfer until Joe interrupted. “Did you find the bitch?”

  “Not yet. I could use some help. Any detail. Was there anything really distinctive about her, other than her good looks?”

  There was a short pause this time. Joe stated flatly, “She has a bad twitch.”

  Joe hung up. Peter’s mobile rang a few seconds later. It was Maddy. “Peter! Welcome home. We’re just across the way.”

  Jasper yelped and danced at her leash at the sight of Peter, and he could tell with one look that Maddy was eager to brief him on her research into Alice Nahri’s personal history. The news of Alice’s suicide would disappoint her.

  They took care of preliminaries as they pulled away from the nest of roads around Heathrow. Joan was at the cottage, trying to catch up on sleep. Her sister and brother continued to decline, with her sister not expected to last more than a month. Maddy herself was taking three days off, “because I need the time.”

  “How was Montreal?” she asked.

  Peter could only offer the blunt truth. He summarized the police investigation and warrants put out for Leander and the girl. “Headquarters called me on the plane over. The FBI have discovered a body they think is the girl. Drowned in the Potomac River.”

  “Are they sure it’s Alice?”

  “Not confirmed. But they found the hire car on the riverbank.”

  Maddy contemplated this news for two minutes and then made a statement that was almost elegiac. “Johnny Carpenter drowned in a canal. Now Alice has drowned in a river. Both far from home.”

  “Bartleben wants me to fly to Washington.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Probably,” Peter said.

  “Well, if you need a lift to the airport, give me a shout.”

  The cottage was silent when they arrived. Maddy helped Peter unload his bag from the Saab and he carried it to the front steps. Jasper raced around to her familiar spots but knew not to bark when Joan was upstairs sleeping.

  Maddy retreated to the car and shooed Jasper, who was ready for another ride, towards the house. “Glad you’re safe, Peter,” she said, almost as if she guessed that he had placed himself in danger. He had said nothing about Caparza’s.

  Were all the women in his life clairvoyant? “Wait a moment, dear, would you?”

  Peter left his Gladstone on the veranda and went inside, intending to consult Joan. He wanted to invite Maddy to dinner so that they could review her material. There was only silence on the ground floor. Peter took two steps towards the staircase but stopped. A plastic cloth covered the mahogany dining room table. Joan rarely used anything but a linen cover. A neatly squared stack of paper, four inches thick, sat at one end of the table, a red marker and two ballpoint pens lined up beside the pile.

  Peter didn’t bother going upstairs to get Joan’s permission. He turned and went to the Saab. Maddy and Jasper waited exactly where he’d left them.

  “Come ’round for dinner. I want your opinion on a few things.”

  Maddy cocked an eyebrow. “Okay, good.”

  He blurted out the thought that had been percolating in his jet-lagged brain. “I suspect that the girl from the river isn’t Alice Nahri.”

  Joan awoke as Peter entered the bedroom. He had the skewed feeling that he hadn’t seen her in a very long time.

  “Is Maddy coming back?” she said, slightly anxious.

  “Yeah.” Joan looked played out. His own weariness must have been obvious to her, too. Their common ground of exhaustion made them fall into making love. It promised to be a perfunctory performance but they soon found an almost desperate, mutual passion.

  “You know I have to go back to Leicester tomorrow,” she said afterwards, her head on his chest.

  “I can go with you.”

  She shook her head. “Did you see Maddy’s research on the table?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Welcome Maddy in. It’s so important to her. Finish it, dear. It’s what you do.”

  An hour later, Sir Stephen Bartleben called.

  “What’s the latest, Stephen?” Peter said.

  “The medical examiner at Quantico is having trouble determining the cause of death.” Bartleben’s frustration showed.

  The boss had never seen an autopsy table in his life. Peter suspected that the ME was having a hard time with the floater’s identity, not with the cause of death.

  “Echoes of John Carpenter,” he said.

  “Peter, the whole damn thing is turning into a melodrama. The murkier it gets, the greater the likelihood of Homeland interfering.”

  Sir Stephen was right, even if tiresome on the issue of Homeland Security. The oddball suicide of a suspect in downtown Washington could soon draw the spooks in. The diplomatic wrangle would spread in multiple directions when triggered. Alice, Indian born, had crossed the U.S.–Canadian border in a parody of terrorist infiltration patterns, and Homeland, particularly the INS, but also the FBI itself, was already paranoid about terrorists sneaking in from Canada.

  “Shall I have my aide book your flight?” Sir Stephen said.

  “Yes. Give Owen Rizeman a call at the FBI HQ and let him know I’m coming. I prefer to deal with the Bureau, even if it’s now a subsidiary of the Big One.”

  “I’ll tell him we have a common interest in keeping it simple,” the boss stated.

  “It was hard to get a fix on Alice’s mother,” Maddy said to Peter at the dining room table later that evening. Joan had cleared the dishes and retreated upstairs, and now the two of them were sorting through Maddy’s research. Bartleben’s call had encouraged them.

  “Lead me through it,” Peter said.

  “Alice was proving impossible to trace, almost as if she had brushed away her tracks. So I focused on the family name. I finally came across a Nahri Auto Dealer in Motihari. That was the hook.”

  “How did you confirm the link?”

  “I did the obvious. I emailed the owner of Nahri Auto. The Indians are so polite. He emailed me back, said the founder of the business died ten years ago. The name of the shop was retained for business goodwill. But the founder, a Vikram Nahri, is dead. He was Alice’s uncle and brother of Aamon, Alice’s father. The current owner had lost track of the family.”

  “Did he confirm the mother’s maiden name?” Peter said.

  “Parsons. Christened Mabel Ida after Orwell’s mother.”

  Peter smiled at the validation of Maddy’s Orwell theory. At least three generations of Alice’s family were connected to India. The missing girl’s grandmother named her child Mabel Ida, who kept up the tradition with her child, Alice Ida. Peter guessed that Alice’s mother had returned at some point in her youth to Motihari, perhaps for a visit or as governess or nurse, and married a local man named Aamon Nahri.

  “I wonder how far the parallels go,” Maddy said. “Did Alice’s mother come back to England like George Orwell’s mum did? Does Alice have a sister named after one of Orwell’s? I’ll start looking in phone directories.”

  “And is the mother still alive?” Peter said.

  They agreed that Maddy would keep searching. Only two questions continued to bother Peter. Did Alice go home after Montreal, and where exactly was “home”?

  If I owned an elephant, said the blind man, I’d name him Everyman, since the elephant is a different fellow each time I touch him.

  Peter had rendered himself blind to John Carpenter’s death by telling himself at the outset that he did not care. It was murder, he had confirmed, but he still had no stake in it. No hot vengeance, no cold satisfaction, no goal at all. There was no require
ment to touch the elephant again.

  But in the dream that night his finger stretched out of its own wilfulness, and he brushed against the elephant. The touching drew him in, electrically, like a jolt of painful fire. He might have touched the beast anywhere but all it took was one connection. Murder is the story, the beast told him, and in the face of it, the other human stories are fairy tales. Start with the murder story, the one written in John’s blood.

  Contradictorily, his fevered brain cooled as he surfaced from sleep. He was a detective. Every story had a logical ending. He had to find the key.

  The young woman.

  He owed John Carpenter.

  He realized that he had the need again.

  CHAPTER 16

  The horror had begun well before dawn two days back by the canal’s edge, and Alice hadn’t rested since. She didn’t need much sleep but she was worn through now, and all that was keeping her awake was the twitch. She opened the window and let the breeze revive her.

  It took so long to get anywhere in America, even with the atlas and the GPS to help guide her along her route. But she wouldn’t get far at all if she couldn’t manage a border crossing somewhere. The map offered the choices of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, yet there appeared to be nothing to distinguish one from the other. A smaller crossing point was probably best but even there she was unsure. She faced a decision. She had traversed the Champlain Bridge across the St. Lawrence River to the south shore, just below Montreal, and the nearest American border station loomed straight ahead.

  She turned into an all-night truck stop and positioned the Ford in a shadowy area far away from the gas pumps. With the overhead light on, she opened the Rand McNally atlas to the full display of North America. The map symbols confused her at first. She flipped to the list of markings and abbreviations on the first page of the atlas, and there it was: “Map Legend.” Legend. Alice was used to tortuous travel. She recalled her many struggles up the Patna–Kathmandu Highway, carrying gems, gold, and drugs. On the Nepal Road, as it was known, she had feared, every minute, robbery, extortion by the Maoist gangs, and arrest by the Nepalese customs guards. Entering the United States of America had to be easier than that. Feeling better, she slept for the next thirty minutes.

  She was lucky. The American Customs woman at the tiny border crossing into Vermont let her through, barely raising an eyebrow at the Indian birthplace on her British passport. Alice settled in for the long drive to the Maryland coast.

  The atlas was a trove of useful measuring sticks: mileage counters between cities, spacing between interstate off-ramps, and alternate secondary roads. The interstates offered the obvious route to her destination of Annapolis, Maryland. They led her on a snaking path from Montpelier, Vermont, to points south. She knew she had to pull over somewhere soon to call ahead and she hoped to stop in a major city in case she had to wait for call-backs. The last thing she needed was a small-town policeman bothering her at a street-side phone booth.

  At a discount store off a nondescript cloverleaf north of Springfield, Massachusetts, Alice caught sight of a sign that promised to accept Canadian dollars at par. She stopped and asked the frizzy-haired cashier lady, the only person in the store, if she could pay in hundreds.

  “Hundreds are fine, darlin’. Social Security checks. Food stamps. Just about anything ’cept personal checks.”

  Alice filled a small shopping cart with plastic-wrapped snacks, shampoo and cheap cosmetics, five pairs of underwear, and three T-shirts. On impulse, she picked up a child’s rucksack — a “knapsack,” she reminded herself — with a picture of Jack and Rose on it; the thing was bright pink, but she risked it anyway. The cashier smiled (was everybody in America friendly?) and didn’t blink as Alice handed over a Canadian hundred, although she did hold it up to some kind of ultraviolet light to confirm that it wasn’t counterfeit. Alice, emboldened, had the woman change another hundred for full value.

  “Some of the big banking chains will change big cash bills, but they wouldn’t give you a one-for-one deal like this,” the woman said. Such was Alice’s introduction to the convoluted world of American finance.

  In the car, Alice wolfed down a pair of Twinkies — she had heard about them, but had never eaten one — and felt a little sick. Down the road she stopped at a McDonald’s and ordered two Egg McMuffins and a black coffee from the counter. Giving herself five minutes to eat, she watched the drive-through lane until she thought she had mastered the procedure; from now on, she would only use take-away.

  Springfield was bigger than she had expected and the interstate through the city confused her with its constantly shifting lanes. She would require a telephone soon. One exit was as bad as the next, and so she arbitrarily took a ramp into what happened to be the centre of the urban zone. The Ford eased down into a grid of darkened streets.

  No one bothered to walk the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, at this hour. At one empty intersection she turned right and drove for two blocks parallel to a giant brick building. A sign at the end of the structure read “Springfield Armory National Historic Site.” She knew what an armoury was; Maoist guerrillas in Bihar had once famously raided an armoury housed in an old colonial cantonment and made off with four hundred guns. Alice drove on. She hoped for a pay phone in a quiet area but not entirely isolated from pedestrian traffic. She worked through the deserted avenues until she found a street of one-storey shops and diners; a moment later she spied a phone kiosk on a side street. Although the only human presence was a man running a street sweeper, she stopped and scouted the avenues for potential threats. She parked the Ford where she could see it from the kiosk.

  Alice dropped a quarter into the slot, pressed ten numbers, and in response to the recorded prompt prepared to add a stream of coins to cover ten minutes of talk. She stood by the phone kiosk while the rings accumulated.

  The professor sounded relaxed when he answered, on the sixth ring. He hadn’t been sleeping, Alice could tell, for she heard the clink of a coffee cup and a faint radio voice in the background.

  “Lembridge.”

  The voice was an even baritone, confident and maybe slightly confrontational. All this she could tell from that first word. The fact that he answered the phone with his name also interested her. Johnny had reported that Hilfgott described him as an “arrogant sod.” Coming from that bitch, Alice thought, that was rich irony. But according to Johnny, Professor Andrew Lembridge was the “go-to guy” for authentication of rare documents. Alice had easily obtained his phone number, though not his address, from the university website.

  A formal approach seemed best. “Good morning, Professor. My name is Rebecca Cameron and I am calling from the British Embassy in Washington. I believe you have had a conversation with Madam Nicola Hilfgott . . .”

  “No call display.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “No number shows up on my screen. Last time, your office displayed your number.”

  It had already been a long drive, with hours more ahead, and she had to restrain herself.

  “We at the embassy haven’t called you previously. Mrs. Hilfgott is in Montreal. In Washington these days everything is security, including an innocent call like mine.”

  She waited to see if he was growing impatient with this sparring. She knew she was.

  But he moved on. “All right, Miss Cameron, I’m guessing this has something to do with Booth and some documents.”

  “Exactly, Professor Lembridge. I have two of the letters with me. May I ask, what did Mrs. Hilfgott request from you when she first inquired?”

  She was taking a chance on not alerting him to her larger game.

  “It was a tease,” Lembridge answered. “She said she had three letters from the 1864 period, one of them signed by John Wilkes Booth himself. She claimed to have had an evaluation done by somebody local but wanted confirmation of provenance and signature au
thentication. Haven’t heard from her since.”

  “And would you still be in a position to provide that service?”

  Lembridge’s curiosity seemed to win out over his annoyance. “As I told the consul general, yes, I can do it quickly. For a fee. I don’t have a spectrometer at the house but I can do a good job with what I have. If need be, we can take it to the Archives labs over in Harpers Ferry. Why only two?”

  “Two letters?” Alice said. “That’s all she sent us. But the package includes the one signed by Booth. I can leave both of them with you for a few days, if needed.”

  This sweetened the pot and she felt him lower his guard. She counted on him inferring that Nicola Hilfgott was no longer in the picture. She was sure that she could read him: he was about to ask whether she trusted him with letters that could be very valuable on the autograph market. It was the beginning of the alpha-male flirtation dance, she could tell.

  She certainly wanted to know the market value of the letters — more than anything else — but she held back. Instead, she suggested that she drive down to his house that evening. He dictated an address and invited her to dinner.

  To clinch his commitment, she said, “I can stay for a couple of hours if you want to examine the papers on the spot and give me your recommendation. By the way, there is an honorarium paid by the embassy, as well as your invoicing for your authentication fee.”

  His voice shifted to full seduction mode. “Sure. I’ll take the honorarium but forget my fee, I’m glad to do it. International comity, and all that. My wife is away but I’ll rustle up some appetizers and a bottle of the local white.”

  Well, at least now she knew what to expect. She wasn’t in the mood to be seduced but she would do whatever she had to do. Lord knew, she had done it all before.

  She took down the street address, said goodbye and entered the coordinates into the GPS. The trip took her all day and even with the course set electronically, she got lost a few times. Bypassing Baltimore, she spun directly south onto the highways leading to D.C. and Chesapeake Bay.