The Drowned Man (3 page)

Peter tried a last ploy to draw Frank out. “Were you convinced the letters were real in the first place?”

Counter smiled. “That's the old Peter. Sly like a badger. Well, Nicola swore they were real. Of course, preserving her credibility in this fiasco requires her to maintain that. I have no idea, to be honest. But I admit, our confidence that Foreign would wear the stains from any blunders led us to minimize the effort we should have brought to bear. Young Carpenter not only said that he knew Montreal, having been there with his mother once, he had also taken courses in American history. The icing on that cake was his expressed hope to take a fortnight of leave. If we would pay the airfare and the first week of hotels, he would cover his other expenses.”

Peter wondered if Frank Counter knew what he was admitting — that he had played bureaucratic games, colluded with Nicola, and taken a flutter without knowing whether another department would “wear the stains” of failure. Now the only escape from his lapse of due diligence was a cover-up, and that's what he was trying out on Peter now. Frank should have known better, Peter thought.

Counter sat back in his chair. “We underestimated the risks. But now we've lost one of ours. I'm glad you're on this, Peter. We want our man back.”

They sat in silence. And then Peter — out of impatience, or perhaps indignation — pulled off his second parlour trick of the day.

“Frank, Bartleben showed me Carpenter's personnel file, the original. It was tea-stained. The stains are recent.”

“You are a Sherlock,” Counter said.

“And you've been poring over the file. No one spends time on a personnel dossier unless there's a secret in there somewhere.”

“Human Resources will be pissed at me.”

“You were trying to figure something out. What was it?”

“Ouch. That's harsh, Peter. The Quebec police have everything from us. It's their baby. The inspector impressed me as being on the march, quite capable.”

Peter was unforgiving. “But you say you've no idea — not only who murdered Carpenter, but why your man would have wanted the assignment in the first place. Deroche may have the inside track on the killer, but you sloughed off the case in only one day, Frank. That smacks of containment, not commitment.”

Peter had gone too far and Counter bristled. “There's
every
reason to think that the book dealer went back and killed Carpenter for the documents. Ran him down with his car and dumped him in the river.”

Peter couldn't stop himself from sneering. “Do you know if he even had a driver's licence?”

That ended the meeting. As Peter walked down past the Houses of Parliament, quiet at this hour, his old detective's brain began to understand what Frank had been looking for in the file. He had been searching for evidence that John Carpenter had been in on the scheme to steal Nicola's ten thousand Canadian dollars.

Peter reached Joan on her mobile. She often didn't answer at once, since she spent so many hours in hospitals, which frowned on cell calls.

“Hello, Peter. Where are you?” Joan's voice was weary.

“I'm in town. I have to go to Lincolnshire tomorrow morning.”

“That's fine,” his wife said. They fell into an awkward silence, Joan's family tragedy hanging in the air, as it did over all their conversations recently. He understood that his wife deserved more than his forbearance now as she lurched between distant points across England giving comfort to her dying siblings, and seldom sleeping at the cottage two nights in a row. Joan had a high sense of the dignity of life and her treks had become a double vigil, a regimen to ensure that her brother and sister passed on in a cloud of warmth and compassion. None of this gave her any opportunity to apply her clinical nursing skills, but her mere presence ennobled her family. Her brother Nigel had late stage lung cancer, and although her sister Winnie's surface memory had been obliterated by Alzheimer's, Joan got through to both of them by her touch and tone. Peter struggled to find ways to contribute more but his own brother's death had lately hamstrung his will.

“Do you want me to come up with you to Birmingham tonight?”

“No, stay in London.”

Peter tried again. “I could get to Birmingham tomorrow afternoon.” It was technically possible to jump from Lincolnshire to Birmingham in a few hours, though it wasn't much of a plan.

“No need,” Joan replied. “I'll go to the cottage tonight, off to see Winnie late tomorrow in Leicester. Do you need the car?”

“Tommy will drive me up, then back home.”

It was like this, logistics substituting for communication, scheduling details for confidences.

“Can I make a suggestion, Peter? Why don't you and Tommy take a jaunt? Not Lincolnshire. Go back to some exotic spot you worked a case together. Check in with some foreign police people you worked with. Paris. Vienna.”

Peter jumped in too fast. “I never worked a case in Vienna.”

That killed the chance of connection. Peter could sense her giving up.

“Okay. I'll be home to feed Jasper and take her for a walk,” Joan said. “I don't leave till eleven o'clock tomorrow and if you're home by late day, she'll be fine. I'll be back by evening.”

Logistics. He would have to find a better way to become part of her grieving.

Tommy Verden picked up his old friend in front of the hotel at 8 a.m. The hotel stood only a few streets from Scotland Yard Headquarters, yet Tommy had to navigate multiple right-hand turns, as mandated by London traffic planners and enforced by cameras that, he always imagined, were set off by the dozen in trip-wire fashion.

As Peter got into the front seat of the Mercedes, Tommy sputtered, “Effing cameras. It's like a hundred paparazzi provoking you with flashbulbs. Gives new meaning to ‘reflex lens.'”

“Good morning to you, too,” Peter said.

Yet the day was sunny and held the irresistible promise of a new adventure. Peter fastened his seat belt and Tommy eased out into the rush-hour stream. Having not seen his friend for six months, Peter looked Tommy over with curiosity, noting without criticism that his age had finally caught up to his features. This was overall a good thing. He had always had a craggy face with the crow's feet of experience radiating out from the corners of his eyes, but now the cragginess had turned distinguished, layering extra gravitas on top of a brawler's grit. Peter thought he resembled the actor Michael Rennie. But Tommy took pains not to appear to step up in social class; he wore his hair shaggy and he retained his tweed jackets and heavy detective-issue wingtips.

“So, Lincolnshire,” Tommy began.

“A town called New Bosk.”

“Never heard of it. All these years, we've never been to Lincolnshire on an assignment.”

“I expect they have the same roster of perverts, picklocks, and gunsels as any other place in the U.K.,” Peter said. But it was a light-hearted comment, and Tommy laughed. They both loved Hammett, Chandler, and early Graham Greene.

“So, John Fitzgerald Carpenter. Full disclosure, Peter. I told Bartleben I was picking you up, but we didn't discuss the case, except his saying be careful around Carpenter's brother.”

Peter understood that Tommy was notionally attached to Special Projects, Frank Counter's group, but frequently took on assignments for Sir Stephen Bartleben. But there were no divided loyalties here. Tommy would never be Bartleben's conduit to Peter's thinking. In return, Peter would never place Tommy in a position where he would have to prevaricate to Bartleben about Peter's actions. Besides, decades of partnered casework by the two field men shifted Tommy's primary allegiance Peter's way, if the test were to come. Tommy was clear-eyed about his duty to the boss, but duty and loyalty could be different things. Soldiers in battle primarily fought for each other.

The first signs for the motorway appeared. “It'll take a while to get there,” Tommy said casually.

Peter reached for the road atlas in the door pocket but Tommy waved him off.

“A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's Sat Nav for?” Tommy said, and accelerated.

The morning light was cheering and they tacitly agreed to approach this trip as a lark. Carpenter's murder might hover on the horizon, but so far neither of them had invested much in the case. They were veterans; after a half century of mayhem, they were entitled to enjoy themselves on a minor assignment. Peter slid the reports out of his briefcase and began to relate the travels of John Carpenter, chronicling his arrival in Montreal, the time of his sign-in at the hotel, the exchange of cash for documents, and ultimately his death at the Lachine Canal.

“A lot of gaps,” was Tommy's reaction. “Why doesn't Frank Counter know more? I mean, he went all the way over there.”

Peter agreed. “Only spent a few hours with the locals. And barely a summary of his meeting on the file — unless there's a case folder they haven't shown us. Counter owes the file a full report.”

Tommy showed his amusement. Here was Peter Cammon insisting that he had no intention of flying to Montreal, yet griping about the shortcomings of an investigation he claimed to be shunning.

Peter paraphrased at length from the coroner's report, translating as he went. “The car hit him hard enough to kill him, but not immediately.” Peter felt an urge to call the intrepid pathologist and discuss these findings. “The report states that he was conscious enough to crawl a hundred feet across the grass to the lip of the Lachine Canal. There's a sidewalk — pavement — running parallel to the waterway. I wonder how long he lay there on the cement.”

“And why wasn't this an accident?” Tommy mused.

They were speculating but at this point it wasn't important to get everything right.

Peter read on. “The doctor says the blow from the car would have been fatal eventually but the pathology leaves no doubt that Carpenter was alive when he fell into the canal.”

“Water in the lungs,” Tommy said.

“Right.”

“So, for the sake of argument, the hit-and-run might not be homicide in the strict sense,” Tommy persisted. He paused, reconsidering. “You have to admire that medical examiner. He could have written ‘cause of death unknown' to play it safe. Let's see. Carpenter was mortally injured and he knew it but he scrabbled across a hundred feet or more of dew-covered grass, and over an asphalt path. He was fleeing his killer as best he could. That's what the forensics told our doctor.”

Peter let this scenario hang in the air while he went on to read selectively from Hilfgott's brief report on the Civil War letters. Finally, Frank Counter's pitiful note confirmed that the Sûreté du Québec had issued warrants for the vanished book dealer, Leander Greenwell. Peter circled back to the victim.

“Tommy, I have to ask: Why did Carpenter book ‘up to two weeks in Canada'? Frank Counter said that he had the vacation credits, and August made sense for a holiday. But Frank also told me it was all last minute, that he ‘jumped at the chance.' Carpenter made a big deal of the trip but there are no signs he had relatives in Canada.”

Tommy turned off the motorway where the Sat Nav instructed, the female voice an intrusion into their male domain. Peter looked over at his friend.

“Tommy?”

“Oh, sorry. Just thinking. I don't know what Carpenter had in mind but I was just reconsidering the cause of death. The violence of a murder can tell you a huge amount about the killer. We've both seen cases where the murderer goes too far. For example, he fires off a full clip when the first shot achieved the kill. Or he sticks around to slice and dice for no good reason. Things like that reveal a nasty perpetrator, or maybe something about motive. Peter, there's real perversity at work here. That's why the pathologist, that Dr. Lowndes, made the double-barrelled judgement. Sorry, don't mean to run on.”

“And what do the facts tell us about Carpenter's death, bottom line?” Peter said.

“Easy. They tell us that he was murdered twice.”

The town of New Bosk lies a few miles south of Lincoln. The detectives were able to avoid the county hub by Tommy's clever programming of the Sat Nav, which took them onto circuitous back roads. The town may have qualified as an adjunct of Lincoln but none of the larger city's smokestacks marred the bucolic horizon here. Instead, New Bosk offered an array of church spires and its own small factory towers, including the chimneys of a large brewery.

“This is a long way from Canada,” Tommy declared.

They passed farmland carpeted with maturing wheat, barley, sugar beets, and other vegetables. Peter knew that immigrant workers from Eastern Europe would soon arrive by the hundreds to harvest the crops, but for now the countryside remained sedate. He recalled from his long-ago studies of Old English — or was it Old Norse? — that “bosk” meant “a grove of trees”; perhaps so, but the forests had been cut back for tillage centuries ago. There was little new or leafy about New Bosk.

They decided that in the interest of keeping interaction with the Carpenters low-key, Tommy would leave Peter to deal with the family alone. Nonetheless, Tommy gave him a pointed look as they entered the town.

“We're all right, then?”

Both policemen knew that the brother, Joe, had threatened Frank Counter and Bartleben's aide over the phone. Tommy Verden was armed. Peter Cammon wasn't, but he had handled a thousand difficult witnesses in the past and he felt no worry.

“I'll need a Batemans ale afterwards,” he said as he climbed out of the Mercedes in front of the Carpenters' address.

Tommy drove off. They had their plan. Tommy would circle back for Peter in exactly one hour. Another hour after that for lunch, and they could make it back to Peter's cottage by nightfall. They would manage their report to Bartleben from the car.

The house was part of an undistinguished row of red-brick units, their front doors only a foot or two from the paved lane. There was no one about, the sun having beaten everyone indoors. N. 628 had no knocker. Standing out on the street, Peter rapped on the door panel before noticing a sign that read: “ENTER BY BACK LANE,” with an arrow pointing to the right. Peter waited, baking in the sun. The lace curtain in the front window parted and a woman held up a palm to hold him there. A few seconds later — as if the woman had rushed to head him off from knocking again — the front door opened on silent hinges.

She was about twenty-eight, maybe a year or two older, and gave off an efficient, if downtrodden, impression; Peter's mother would have called her “one of those buried beauties” (although that had been one of his mother's sly ways of slandering the Irish). The woman wore a black skirt and crisp white blouse, as if she knew a guest was coming; her skin was pallid and she wore her hair in a tight bun. Her smile was tentative. She clearly understood that he represented the police.

“I'm sorry, sir,” she said. There was nothing to be sorry for and Peter hastened to reassure her.

“Pardon me, I'm a colleague of Jack's. Chief Inspector Cammon. I didn't mean to interrupt you, I didn't see the sign in time.”

This was the younger sister. She had manners, in the way that the supportive junior child taking care of a parent usually does; Peter knew that the father had died twenty years ago and that the brother, age thirty-two, lived in the house as well. She opened the front door wide and welcomed Peter inside before locking the door firmly behind her.

“Please come in,” she said, hesitating on the entrance mat. The front room was dark and still, and Peter was forced to move farther into the space. “My name is Carole, with an ‘e.'”

Carole turned and tapped superstitiously on the door. She spoke in a lilt that was as much Irish as Lincolnshire. “Do you know the tradition, Chief Inspector?”

Peter was happy to keep everything friendly. “No, I haven't heard it.”

“Now then, the Lincolnshire tradition is to only use the front door for a new baby, for a new bride, or for a coffin.”

Peter smiled and came farther into the living area. The mention of coffins might have hung heavily in the musty room but old Mrs. Carpenter entered at that point and immediately took the talk in another direction. She was thin and creaky but self-propelled, and she crossed the Persian carpet to place her hand on Peter's arm before Carole could waylay her.

“Montreal!” the old woman burst out, and with that single word answered one of the questions about John Carpenter's travel planning. She took what was evidently her regular seat on the sofa. A cup of tea waited beside her on a souvenir saucer from Cleethorpes and Peter understood that if Carole failed to keep the cup filled, her mother soon would call out for more. He introduced himself but her attention at once drifted away.

“Montreal!”

“My mother is a bit more lucid than she seems, once you get used to her style,” Carole said.

“I trust my colleagues have conveyed their condolences,” Peter said. “Let me add my own. Does she know?”

Carole sighed but remained upbeat. “A lot would label her, without shame, as having the Alzheimer's, but she's more complex than that. Like I say, she tunes in and out. Can be quite funny, actually.”

She meant that Peter should make an effort, and so he did. “Have you been to Montreal, Mrs. Carpenter?”

“Oh, definitely! I had an affair of the heart with a Montreal man. He took me away to the Colonies for a time.”

This was a well-honed fable, but then Mrs. Carpenter surprised him with the punchline. “But then the cad brought me back!”

Peter had to laugh. He checked the snow globe sitting close by her teacup with MONTREAL etched in script on the base; the glass dome encased a cross on a mountaintop. He turned to Carole Carpenter but she gave him a look that held him in place. Without warning, the old woman raised herself from the sofa and declared, “Nap time, I think.”

Peter stood as the daughter guided the woman behind a beaded curtain into a back room that now must serve as a bedroom. Soon she was asleep, allowing Carole to come back and sit where her mother had been.

“Would you like tea, Inspector?” She seemed glad of company.

“No thanks. Just to be clear. How much does she know?”

The question was abrupt but they had already established a rapport, he felt, and Carole did not appear discomfited. It was Peter who was suddenly derailed. A small black wreath hung over the old woman's bedroom doorway. Melancholy swept over him like a wall of fog. The blue devils, his mother might have said. He raised his eyes to Carole's and for a skipped beat drew a complete blank, a white page without jots or hints of what he wanted to say. Fifty years of interviewing witnesses, and nothing kicked in. His brother's death had snatched away his mind, and this house of mourning, curtained and hushed, triggered a rush of fears in him.

Carole pretended not to see his distress. “No, she doesn't know and there'd be no point. She confuses my brother, Joe, with Johnny a lot.”

Peter fought to recover his composure. The woman waited primly, expectantly.

“I thought he was called Jack,” Peter managed to say.

“What he's called in London may not be his nickname at home.”