The Drowned Man (35 page)

“Wake me at six,” he instructed.

Peter, with no desire for alcohol, went back to downloading and sorting. He was closing in, he felt, but he remained tentative, guarded about next steps. It was not like him to delay in this manner: he could simply have Malloway, Hilfgott, and Brayden airlifted out of Montreal in the morning. Bartleben would respond, if he pressed hard enough. They would be sweating in an interrogation room within twenty-four hours. One or perhaps all three knew who had killed Carpenter. Forget the documents, the letters had become a mirage, slipping out of view the closer he got.

The townhouse was silent; with the weather having turned, even the air conditioner refused to fill the emptiness. He needed a stimulus, but not booze; he could use a spur to break through the last mental obstacle.
Actus reus
and
mens rea
, both remained out of focus.

He began to understand his own irresolution. He would have to wait for the girl. She was his spark. She had travelled half the world, fumbling towards some dream that Peter had little hope of understanding. She had killed wantonly along the path to . . . where? Where would Alice Nahri, born Indian and British, tied into corruption in Pakistan and Nepal, on the run in Canada and the U.S., find any peace? The world of blue people, Pandora, was a fiction. He knew she would keep moving, perhaps in a circle back to Montreal, the City of Saints. She had a restless twitch.

He yearned to call Maddy but it was the middle of the night in Leeds. She and Michael had found the
Avatar
connection and Maddy had an instinct for the young woman's movements and motives. He wanted their advice. And he needed Joan, too. She had ordered him to finish the case — he owed it to the Carpenter family. But he owed her, too. Her brother wouldn't last much longer and he ought to be home when it happened.

Peter stood by the window for at least fifteen minutes as the sky above the street outside lapsed into blackness. He was alone again. Renaud had woken up to say that he lusted for a drink, and he knew a tavern up on Greene Avenue. From an angle by the window, Peter could almost see where young Carpenter had been struck by the Ford sedan. The sodium bulbs on the light standards buzzed and flickered into life, creating round stamps on the streets and the medians, like flashlights pointed from heaven on arbitrary spots. If Seep had the original of one of the three letters, then he had either killed Carpenter to get it or was implicated through Greenwell and the woman. It was a sign of Peter's frustration with the Carpenter case that he considered phoning Deroche and having Professor Seep arrested. Deroche would do it if Peter insisted; he despised the separatist.

Peter put aside thoughts of Alida. The young woman was driven by devils he could never understand. He retreated to the kitchen and opened a beer, resolving that it would be his only drink of the evening. Olivier Seep remained a wild card. Peter couldn't see him firebombing the club, nor physically attacking Georges Keratis. If he latched onto an original of one of the letters it was most likely through direct collusion with Greenwell himself.

Blithely insulting the entire province in a few keystrokes, he revived the
PC
and Googled “corruption” and “history of Quebec.” The Google algorithm spewed out page after page of references to government commissions of inquiry into graft, as well as sites featuring scabrous incidents of corruption over the years. He read for an hour, trying to understand how the nationalist movement regarded the mafia presence in the province.

Of course, the history of corruption in Quebec, and Canada more broadly, was hardly unique and it reflected the growing pains of an expanding society. Perhaps it was inevitable that the country's first great public works project, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, spawned contracting scandals during the rule of the first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, or that in the twenties rattling cases of harsh whisky were smuggled across the border to the Prohibition-constricted American market.

At about ten thirty Peter shut down the computer. He circled the main floor, cranking shut two casement windows and checking the front door; he smelled frost in the night air. His ritual mimicked the cottage, where he performed the same circuit each evening. As he made his rounds, it occurred to him that perhaps he had settled too far into Renaud's domain.

His mood turned him obsessive-compulsive. He squared the ream of blank paper next to the monitor and did the same again with the stack of printouts on the other side. Leaving his research exposed was a vote of faith in Renaud. He trusted his new friend. Pascal might come home slightly debauched from the Atwater bars and if he woke Peter up, that was fine. He turned off every inside light but the kitchen overhead and the night light in the upstairs bathroom.

He went upstairs to the guest bedroom, which felt close and airless. He kept on only a singlet and shorts, lay on the bed, and tried to doze. Several rows of town homes separated Renaud's place from the Atwater Market; babble from the outdoor cafés bounced intermittently off thermal layers into the room. The sound reminded him of an old tube radio unevenly tuned in.

He failed to sleep. He had had fewer dreams since his brother died. All those waking hours spent thinking about Lionel had supplanted his dream life. If only he could work out the meaning of his passing. He had had no opportunity to say goodbye. About a month after Lionel's death, Peter had a very bad night. Waking up in the glow of the spring sunrise he felt guilt wash over him. He had climbed out of bed and come down the stairs to the kitchen, where he stood for a while staring at the floor. He hated the taxonomy of the Stages of Grief but there was no doubt that he had entered the Bargaining phase. He would have traded his own life to have Lionel survive. He sat on the front steps and wept for ten minutes or more; he let forth uncontrollably. If Joan heard him she chose to leave him alone. He went for a long, solitary walk up the nearby country lanes. The next day he went out and brought Jasper home.

In his will, Lionel had asked Peter to retain his personal papers. Peter had stored them in the air-raid shelter at the cottage. He now recalled an odd phrase in the will that contrasted with the dreary legalese: “There may be material therein, brother, that will help you fill in the lacunae regarding Father.” Staring at the ceiling in Pascal's condo, Peter smiled to himself. He had a new mystery to solve, a family one. He would open up the air-raid cache when he got home and find what his brother wanted him to find.

Peter fell into a dreamless sleep.

She's sleek in the zipped black pantsuit that makes her look the elegant party girl but not cheap. Montreal girls know how to dress, she thinks. The only problem is no pockets, and she has brought a clutch bag for the gun. She walks along the canal but then shies back from the water. She slows her pace as she gets to the section where John crawled into the death pool. She has given up hope of proving anything and now she keeps on, without contemplation or a look back. She heads towards the railroad tracks and the edge of the spill of light from the annoying flood lamp by the factory fence. She marks the plastic bits and wrappers and cigarette papers strewn about at random, and recalls the scene in
Terminator 2
where the shattered drops of silver alloy flow back together and reconstitute the unstoppable robot villain. Keeping to shadowed zones, she reluctantly makes her way to the road, where there is no choice but to enter the unforgiving light.

The townhouse stands a street back from the water. She takes one glance behind her and sees how truly opaque the verge beyond the lit-up asphalt is. The whore stood in a pool of light like that, on the edge of blackness. There is no one about. She walks up the steps and takes a key from under the flowerpot, and hesitates only to verify the silence.

An unfamiliar motor and a change of air pressure raised Peter from his slumber. At first he assigned the whirring sound to the air-conditioning unit but he quickly perceived that the gas furnace had kicked in. He rolled over to the edge of the mattress. If he had failed to dream, was the after-image of a dream possible? For that's what had imprinted itself on his mind, an old-fashioned photogravure. Alice Nahri and John Carpenter in a cheesy wedding-cake portrait, into-the-sunset figurines holding hands. But those joined hands were transmogrified into an electrified fibre, and the after-dream symbolism became clear to him. He understood then that the strongest link on his chart of suspects and victims was the fibre that carried Alida's sins and her remorse towards Carpenter, in a quest for forgiveness.

Peter had slept solidly for four hours, and now he was alert to any threat the darkness might bring. He did not jump out of bed; what was the point if you didn't have a gun? Rather, he lay back on the coverlet, half-cool, half-warm; he heard nothing but the rush of tepid air from the ducts into the chilly room. Silently, he slipped out of bed and stood on the carpet, backlit by the window in the bathroom. He felt ridiculous. He wouldn't impress anybody in his creased undershirt and plaid shorts. He prepared himself for the presence in the hallway.

The girl slid into the bedroom — it seemed just the right spot to strike a pose — with her hands displayed to show that she lacked a weapon. Peter wondered if she owned one; the
FBI
found no gun in the Focus or on the body of the hooker pulled from the Anacostia, and Alida had left nothing in the Gorman Hotel. He noted that her pantsuit left no place for a concealed gun, or even a blade. She was beautiful.

He wasn't afraid of her, armed or not.

They stood six feet apart. He tried to think like a constable facing down a suspect. He could rush her or try to intimidate her. His mind raced. Maybe she did have a pistol in reach; it would be in the hallway, if anywhere. Chief Inspector Peter Cammon had no illusions left about any human being's capacity for violence, and he was brave, but he was content to see what Alida wanted from him.

“I didn't kill him,” she said. He understood that she had waited a long time to make her case to him. Her voice was smooth liquid. Her words were genuine, unaffected, meant only for him.

With that one statement, Peter's perspective on the investigation shifted again. He at once understood what he cared about in this case and what
he
wanted from it. Facing him was the one person who knew what had happened. Peter Cammon, retired chief inspector, had parked himself in that stuffy London office in the Mother House while Bartleben patronized him, and he had flared back at the boss's attitude. But Bartleben might have been accurate in his flattery; Montreal had been what Peter needed and it was a shame that he'd slipped away from the Grand Game. Peter was good at crime. He had also been right: from the beginning he'd seen that the woman was key. There was evil in her betrayal of Carpenter, but he believed her when she said she hadn't killed him.

“Are you here to tell me what happened?” he said.

“Olivier Seep killed him.”

Peter needed more from her. “Why did you come to Montreal with John Carpenter?”

“I had to leave. There is a man. The Sword. He's a heavy player in organized crime in Pakistan.”

“The cricket bribes? The photos in
News of the World
?” Peter said.

“You know about that?”

“I still don't know why you came to Montreal.”

She adopted a confessional tone. “The Sword forced me to get close to Johnny. I had no choice. He ordered me to infiltrate the task force.”

Peter's surprise was evident. “You know about the task force?”

“Yes, the cartels know all about Scotland Yard.”

Peter's thoughts jumped to that day in Sir Stephen's office. Had the boss suspected the infiltration of Counter's unit? Had he brought in Peter because he was an outsider, and Bartleben's man?

Peter had to ask his toughest question now; there would be no other opportunity. “Was John on the take?”

“No, never. He was honest. And Johnny never had a chance to work on the cricket investigation. So ironic. He focused on the telephone-hacking. The Sword knew that the people who worked on the hacking crimes worked closely with the ones assigned to the cricket bribery. He thought he was being subtle by getting me to hook up to the cricket investigators through Johnny. But Johnny's work on the match-fixing was minimal. As soon as we got together, I saw that he would never be a good source. I tried to tell the Sword but he did not believe me. He kept pressing me for information. Said I wouldn't be paid unless I delivered.”

It occurred to Peter that much of this had happened before the incident in the Mayfair hotel and the splash in the tabloids. “Tell me about the Sword.”

“The bribery of the Pakistani stars was the Sword's chance to make his own mark in the world of match-fixing. The party in the hotel came about suddenly. The Sword actually called me at Johnny's flat and told me to go. He instructed me to watch the cricket players. And do other stuff. If only I'd known that the
News
was paying the Fake Sheikh for pictures. I eventually saw that the Sheikh was setting us up in the hotel And I knew it was time to bail. I waited for the whole thing to blow up. And it did.”

Peter wasn't about to let her off without a deeper admission. (He wondered how he would ever write his report to Bartleben.) “It was your idea to come to Montreal, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” The air in the bedroom was smothering. Alida took a step in from the doorway. She was beautiful, seductive, with the poise of a practised model. “Johnny and I met at a club in Soho. I liked him well enough and we might have made a go of it anyway. But I knew from the day the Sword gave me my orders to attend the party with the cricketers that I'd never be off his leash. There was a lull in the phone-hacking work and so I urged Johnny to take this silly job in Montreal.”

“Tell me how you decided to steal the letters,” said Peter.

The young woman took a step to her right and then back; it was her version of pacing while she considered his query. He could still make out her expression in the dim light. It wasn't a case of deciding whether to confess, Peter knew, but how much detail to provide. He further realized that this visitation was meant to be her last stop before vanishing.

“Johnny was as bad as me in some ways. In Montreal we both felt we had escaped from jail. It was sex and fun. He thought the whole Hilfgott thing was crap.”

“You went to Leander Greenwell on your own?”

She hesitated. “Yes, I did.”

“What did Leander say?”

She glowered at him and held up her hand. “Forget about Leander. Don't you understand? Hilfgott is crazy. The real amount of the payment was thirty grand of her husband's money. Greenwell was as greedy as anyone. He made the deal only because Hilfgott was willing to pay more than the other bidder.”

“Seep.”

“Yes. Seep was crazy as a bed tick, too. My mother would say that.”

“But you went to Seep and made a deal.”

Alida shifted her weight to her other foot; she took a step backwards into the hall and regrouped, ending up mostly in the dark. She came forward again. The look on her face showed that he had missed something. Peter discerned that she was deciding how much more to reveal; but he knew there was a key point she wanted to get across.

“Seep wanted a particular letter, he told me. If necessary, I was willing to leave one with Greenwell, a three-way split. I didn't care which one I got but Johnny had already mentioned Lembridge and I figured I could get some quick money for it with the American's help. Greenwell told me there were private collectors in the States. I started thinking I could follow up with that kind of deal. I needed money.”