Sight Unseen (29 page)

* * *

Nobody went near the flat all day. Umber thought he saw a movement at one of the windows midway through the afternoon and dashed round to investigate, but there was no sign of anyone and he eventually concluded that what he had seen was merely the reflection of a seagull in flight.

When nightfall came -- late, thanks to the clock change for summer time -- Umber relaxed, reasoning that no-one would visit the flat once they had to switch on lights to see what they were looking for, because it would signal their presence to anyone who might be watching.

If
anyone was even planning to, of course.
If
there was anything to find.
If...
But ifs were all Umber had to bet on. He spent a couple of hours in a pub further along the Boulevard, then walked out to the Yacht Club and back by the higher route, cutting down to le Quai Bisson by the steps past the flat.

All was in darkness. All looked to be undisturbed. It seemed he was waiting for something that was never going to happen. He stood for some minutes by the door of the flat, turning over in his mind the possibility that somehow he had deceived himself. How sure was he that Chantelle and the girl in
Hello!
were one and the same? How likely was it that she had left anything there that would enable him to trace her? Just how slender a chance was he chasing?

* * *

Nothing changed next morning. A modest weekday bustle took hold of St Aubin. But it did not spread to Rollers Sail & Surf. At ten o'clock, Umber imagined Marilyn presenting herself in a marbled banking hall with a coolly phrased request to withdraw PS100,000 in cash from an account that presumably held a great deal more. At 10.30, he set off for St Helier.

* * *

He spotted Marilyn's Mercedes in the car park by the play area at the top of Mount Bingham as he crested the rise from Pier Road. As he pulled in beside it, he saw she was speaking to someone on her mobile. She signalled to him to wait until she had finished, so he sat where he was, looking down at the docks and the ferry terminal spread out below him, at Elizabeth Castle and the causeway linking it to the shore, exposed by the retreating tide. His gaze came to rest on a vast, sleek-lined private cruiser heading in slowly from the sea lane away to his left. The pallid sunlight glistened on its polished silver-grey hull.

'Penny for them,' said Marilyn as she pulled open the passenger door and slipped in beside him. 'Well, rather more than a penny, actually.'

She was wearing a short-skirted dark-blue suit and pearl-buttoned blouse. Resting on her knees was a black leather briefcase that looked new enough to have been bought for the occasion. She plucked off her sunglasses and looked at him.

'Are you all right?'

'Fine,' he replied. 'Just fine.'

'This is the money.' She snapped open the case to reveal neatly stacked wads of PS20 notes. 'All Bank of England issue, no Jersey currency, as Wisby specified.' Then she closed it again. 'And here are the keys.' She handed him an assortment of Yales and mortises held on a ring. 'You'll have to sort out which is which, I'm afraid.'

'OK. Thanks.'

'That was our man on the phone.'

'I thought it had to be.'

'You're to meet him at La Rocque. It's a village on the coast about five miles east of here.'

'I've got a map. It came with the car. I'll find the place easily enough.'

'There are parking spaces by the harbour just after you pass the martello tower. He'll be waiting for you there.'

'Does he know
who
he'll be waiting for?'

'I told him I was sending someone.'

'It could be quite a shock for him, then.'

'I imagine the contents of the case will help him get over it.'

'What about afterwards? You'll want to see what you've got for your money.'

'Oliver is taking Jane to see the undertaker at three o'clock. My presence is... not required.' There was something in her tone that implied resentment of the degree to which Jeremy's death had brought his parents together, but Umber had no thoughts to spare for such an issue. 'I'll meet you at the flat then.'

'Suits me.'

Marilyn slid the briefcase across to him; their fingers brushed as he took it from her. 'You'll be careful, won't you, David?'

'Of course.'

'Only... Wisby outwitted you last time you met, didn't he?'

'Is that what he told you?'

'Isn't it true?'

'No. Not really.' That was not how Umber saw it, anyway. Wisby had simply been cold-blooded enough to seize the advantage Jeremy's death-fall had given him. There would surely be no such advantage for him to seize this time.

'Well, in case you need it, good luck.'

'Thanks.'

To his surprise, she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the mouth, then climbed swiftly out of the car.

'I'll see you later, Marilyn,' he said as she held the door briefly open.

'Right,' she said, smiling tightly. Then she slammed the door, hurried round to her own car, climbed in and started up.

Umber was watching her as she reversed out of the bay and drove away. But she never once glanced at him.

* * *

Umber followed the coast road out through St Helier's straggling eastern suburbs. The retreating tide had revealed great stretches of grey-brown reef, so extensive that the sea was a mile or more from the shore. The weather was a mix of winter grimness and spring cheer -- ambiguous, uncertain, on the cusp of the seasons.

He sighted the first of several martello towers marked on the map as he neared Le Hocq. He pulled in there and waited. When only five minutes remained till Marilyn's noon appointment with Wisby, he drove on.

It was barely another mile to La Rocque. He slowed as he passed its martello tower, scanning the arc of parking spaces facing the harbour. He was looking for a hire car similar to his own. And he saw one almost immediately, his eye drawn to the H-prefixed numberplate. There was a single occupant, staring straight ahead at the harbour, in which assorted craft lay beached at their moorings. The profile was Wisby's.

He pulled in to the left of the car and looked round, meeting Wisby's gaze, in which there was not the merest flinch of surprise, though a surprise it must have been -- and a big one.

Umber climbed out, carrying the briefcase with him. He opened the passenger door of the other car and eased himself in beside Wisby, cradling the case in his lap.

'Mr Umber,' Wisby said neutrally, with no hint of fear or hostility. 'We meet again.'

'Not in your game plan, I dare say.'

'No. But I wasn't to know you'd got into bed with Marilyn Hall, was I?'

'She thought you might try to trick her,' Umber replied, refusing to be provoked. 'A chap with your track record must expect that.'

'Well, I should congratulate you, I suppose. You get the Junius after all. And Mrs Hall pays for it. Sorry I left you in the lurch at Eden Holt, by the way. It was nothing personal.'

'Did you really do all this just for a fat pay-off?'

'No. But I've decided to settle for one. You too, I imagine.'

'I'm getting nothing out of this.'

'Really? I can't believe you haven't cut a deal with Mrs Hall. Why else should you be acting as her go-between? What have you gone for? Cash... or kind?'

'Where are the books?'

'Ah. Is that it? A late revival of your historical career. Junius: the truth at last. I might have a minor disappointment for you on that front.'

'I know the fly-leaves are missing, Wisby. I checked with Garrard. Like you should have.'

'I should. You're right. But you said yourself the vellum-bound 1773 edition is unique. Even without the fly-leaves, it proves my case. A case Marilyn Hall can't afford to let me go public with.'

'Exploiting the Hall family's grief is beneath contempt.'

'That's what you think I'm doing, is it?'

'What would
you
call it?'

'How much do you know about Marilyn Hall, I wonder? Less than me, I suspect. A lot less. I've enquired into her background, you see. I've done my research.' Wisby smiled thinly. 'Like you should have.'

'And what have you learned?'

'Enough to make me worry I may have settled for too modest a sum.'

'Are you going to tell me what you're getting at?'

'No.' Wisby squinted out towards the distant ocean. 'I'll let you find out in your own good time.'

'Where are the books?' snapped Umber, losing patience with the game-playing.

'You can have them when I have the money.'

'How about when you
see
the money?' Umber flipped up the lid of the briefcase, giving his companion a clear view of the contents. There was a gleam of satisfaction in Wisby's eyes and a greedy little swipe of his tongue along his lower lip. He reached out for the case. But Umber held on. 'The books. Remember?'

Wisby looked at him and grimaced, as if giving up what he had come to trade genuinely pained him. 'They're in the glove compartment. In front of you.'

Umber stretched one hand forward to open the compartment. Its door flopped down. And there were the books, vellum-bound and gilt-edged, held together by a rubber band as he had seen them before. The spines were facing him. He angled his head to read the gold-lettered titles. Not
Junius's Letters I
and
Junius's Letters II,
like every other edition he had come across, but simply JUNIUS 1 and JUNIUS 2.

'The money, Mr Umber,' said Wisby. 'If you please.'

Umber surrendered the case and took the books out of the glove compartment. It was strange -- surpassingly strange -- to lay his hands at long last on the prize Griffin had promised to deliver to him at Avebury twenty-three years previously. He peeled off the rubber band and opened the first volume.

A few jagged scraps close to the binding were all that remained of the fly-leaf. But the title page was untouched. The name of Junius appeared at the top in bold Gothic capitals. Umber's gaze shifted to the bottom.
Printed for Henry Sampson Woodfall, MDCCLXXIII.
The date was right. And the binding was right. It
was
Junius's personal copy.

He looked round at Wisby, who was checking his way through the money, fanning each wad of notes and counting roughly as he went. Then he looked back at the Junius, shaking his head: PS100,000 was a high price to pay for two mutilated old books. Nor was it by any means the highest price to have been paid for them. They were not worth Jeremy Hall's life. Yet he had lost his life because of them. Volume two fell open in Umber's hands at the last paragraph of Letter LVIII, encouraged to do so, he guessed, by being pressed flat on a photocopier some weeks before. There was the fateful phrase Jeremy had chosen near the end of the letter.
'The subject comes home to us all.'
And so it did.

The snapping shut of the briefcase interrupted Umber's thoughts. 'It seems to be all here,' said Wisby, with a flicker of a smile.

'Did you doubt it would be?'

'I doubt everything.'

'Yes. I suppose you would.'

'Why were the fly-leaves removed, do you think?'

'You tell me.'

'It's obvious, isn't it? To break the evidential link with Griffin. Without them they're just another copy of Junius's letters.'

'Not quite.'

'No. But they'd seem so, other than to an expert. And having removed the fly-leaves, where better to lose the books, so to speak, than an antiquarian bookshop? I doubt Garrard's scatterbrained brother bought them. I suspect they were simply slipped onto the shelf. Not by Jeremy, obviously. Perhaps by someone who was trying to keep them
from
Jeremy. By implication someone Jeremy knew, resident on the island. Someone... close to him.'

'Like you say, Wisby. You doubt everything.' The man's logic was as seductive as it was disturbing. But Umber had no intention of acknowledging as much. 'Are we done?'

Wisby nodded. 'I believe we are.'

* * *

A few minutes later, Umber sat in his hire car, watching Wisby drive away. Wisby was heading west, probably making for the Airport. He had every right to be well pleased with his day's work. But Umber's work was far from done. He skip-read his way through Junius's grandiloquent
Dedication to the English Nation
at the beginning of volume one of the Letters till he had given Wisby the ten-minute start he had agreed to. Then he started the car and headed in the same direction.

Umber reached St Aubin with more than an hour to spare before his appointment with Marilyn. He parked the car at his hotel, headed round to le Quai Bisson and let himself into the flat.

Everything was as it had been the previous day. The keys Marilyn had given him would permit access to the office and boat store on the ground floor as well, but the flat was the obvious place to begin his search. Once he
had
begun, however, he realized how frail a prospect he had pinned his hopes on. A systematic search of the lounge-diner-bedroom was likely to prove time-consuming as well as futile. Umber did not really know what he was looking for and could devise no subtler method of setting about the task than moving everything to see what might or might not be concealed by pillows, cushions, magazines, books, CDs and the like. Nothing was the answer.