Shadow Play (23 page)

What I was most interested in was the imminent discovery of Sharon's notes, and the draft manuscript of
The Leap
,
and whether such a finding would be announced, since the implications would be obvious as soon as its subjects were named. The tabloids in particular would leap all over it, unless some of their mogul-proprietors were among those investigated. Statistically the killer could have been a stranger with little or no personal connection to Sharon, but I had long since fixed upon her book as the objective of the crime. In fact, isolated as I was from any means of sharing this secret, at least until events had clarified themselves, my fears distilled themselves into one peculiar sentence that increasingly became a mantra I couldn't help repeating: ‘The bastards issued a fatwa. The bastards issued a fatwa.'

Perhaps I feared implication, perhaps retaliation. I reiterated each day that the next morning I would make myself presentable and head straight for Scotland Yard. Of course they would appreciate the reason for my delay: I was evidently in shock. Tomorrow, tomorrow – over and over. I also knew that coming clean was the best way of securing protection against whatever it was I apprehended.

On Saturday morning I told the police everything. In fact, I spent Friday preparing a much more concise version of this statement, and took it with me. (It included no chapters of fiction, nor was it a résumé of my lifelong regrets). It is due to investigation following on from that statement that I've since been acquitted, although the official position remains that they would prefer me to resurface. I asked them to respect my cover until I should choose to return to public life. They consented, on condition that I would keep myself readily available to them, especially if someone was brought to trial.

You, who've read so patiently thus far, endured so much circumlocution and delay, deserve some more of the facts. I
assure you, as I have repeated countless times to the detectives, I don't know where
The Leap
is. I cannot even be sure how much of it existed, beyond the research. I know from the police that the lawyer in question, who is protected from being named, claimed to have been contacted for a meeting the following weekend, since he'd been unavailable on Saturday afternoon. Crucially, the CCTV footage from his office backs him on this score. There were no images of Sharon passing through reception. So it follows that he wasn't yet aware of her plans: one dead end so far.

The other is the location of the notes. The police conceded an outside likelihood to my story since all the books lying around Sharon's house seemed relevant to such an undertaking, although then again, she was by trade a financial reporter. What deflated my assertion was the lack of meaningful content on her computer. There was nothing on the desktop hard drive, no diary, no drafts, no obviously relevant downloaded material. Of course, they have to buy my suggestion that she worked on a laptop, and the trail of her eighteen-month-long itinerary is simple enough to pick up. But where is the laptop? In the same numbered vault as the rest of her notes? People do travel for all sorts of reasons, they argue, though it is evident they're not convinced by their own counter-premise. They remind me that every gap-year student is not a corporate whistle-blower.

Sharon's voice-recorder was located soon enough, with the full evidence of our first interview, but without any of its earlier mini-discs. It was as though she hadn't used it before. The detectives reasonably concede that authors, especially of inflammatory material, might choose to hide their work somewhere at a distance from themselves, and they would scour
every last possibility, from the houses of Sharon's friends, to all the bank safes they could unearth. Since she spoke of meeting a lawyer and a publisher in the same week, there was a good chance everything was near at hand in London. But where, Mr Chakraborti, where?

Most of all I sensed from their visits that I had provided them with something that jammed rather prominently in their throats. Neither acceptance nor outright rejection came easy. My suggestion wasn't outlandish by any means, even though despite overt pressure, I stuck to insisting that I didn't know any specific names. She'd only met me twice, for Christ's sake. Perhaps she needed more time to trust me, although from her sketch, I could start them off with an estimate as to the initial Indian big-shot. Besides, didn't my information about Sharon calling her lawyer check out? Although they never found a ticket to New York, where I claimed she was headed soon after, I argued she was probably going to pick one up at the last minute. Her friend over there, whose name I mercifully remembered, confirmed she had texted to announce she was flying over on the Wednesday, but couldn't substantiate the more crucial part of my story. He said Sharon had used exclamation points and xxx-es, and had asked him to keep Thursday morning open.

But their retorts weren't unfair either. ‘There are hundreds of sensational authors, Mr Chakraborti, from Mr Rushdie to Bob Woodward to Michael Moore,' the rather well-informed detective objected, ‘who are all thriving openly. There are conspiracy theorists all over the bestseller lists and the Internet, writing about Bin Laden, the US President, the CIA, Mary Magdalene, yet no one is putting a hit on them.'

All I could do was to persevere with my contention: ‘Send people out with her photo to some of the countries she visited.
Speak to those she interviewed, compare your testimonies. You can probably retrieve much of what she uncovered. Perhaps you'll be able to guess some of the names she was pursuing. Then you have already reached another stage of inquiry. You have some specific people to examine.'

I threw my own objection in their faces. ‘Don't you see you've got a book-shaped hole in this case? Have you unearthed a sounder premise? What, a burglar, a stalker, a crazed hater of her columns, an ex-lover? How come you've got nothing and yet refuse the ten per cent of something I'm offering? Even if you cannot trace anything all the way up to the big dudes themselves, you can be certain of one thing. If it was the book that killed her, then the leak would be from one or more of those small fry from her travels. Whether in the Cayman, or Dubai or Cyprus, isn't it amply plausible that one of them found her questions disconcerting and called someone else by way of caution? Who's this girl that's been snooping around? More and more reports start to come in from all over the place, the trickle turns into a flood, one big boss phones another, and they put a watch on her. Soon it becomes clear she's not law-enforcement; what can she be up to? They don't buy her cover-story for a minute. Then they begin to connect things, one by one, from the pattern of her questions and journeys, and realize just who is being fingered and why.

‘You know the official story, right? You check her flights and her bank statements, and tell me what any of that has to do with writing an admiring, authorized biography of a business giant who has rarely left India in the past decade? Her advance was ample, she was encouraged to write the book ensconced in her flat in London; yet she emphatically told me she had
nothing left even after devouring her previous savings. Because she couldn't seek an advance from just any publisher for this other project. It would have been too risky.

‘Look,' I added, ‘it's only a theory, but it covers one more crucial point – the window of time after the assassination. Only someone who'd been watching her for a while, probably with sophisticated bugs planted inside the house, would know exactly what to seize right after the shooting. Which room to head for, where the laptop and the voice recorder were kept. Perhaps printouts of her notes are still out there somewhere, but in that case, Sharon would have done herself a disservice, especially if they're in a vault under a false name. There is no way for the bank to link their client to this murder. That's the other thing for your financial crimes people to track down, I suppose.'

The detectives didn't appreciate my offering suggestions, and even if they seriously considered my story, I don't believe I ever persuaded them that I wasn't withholding some crucial details that would shed more light on Sharon's (ostensible) targets. In fact, I can tell they don't respect me because they think I'm out to save my ass. But they leave me alone because they haven't come up with anything more. After a few weeks, I was permitted to leave the country, as long as I could always be reached. I thought about that for a day, then told them I'd head for New York, to see if I could get anything out of Sharon's publisher-friend myself, even though the police had already interviewed him fruitlessly at my insistence.

 

You must be amazed at how I appeared to have accepted everything about my life in Brazil at face value, having apparently forgotten within a few months the circumstances in which I was brought there. What happened to him, I hear you asking. Is he some sort of idiot who manages to misunderstand or underestimate things precisely when it is most urgent that he doesn't? Or was he so terrified by the sheer scale of his imprisonment and the number of appearances he would have to unravel – faces, allegiances, motives – that he chose to put up his hands instead and meekly embrace his destiny? ‘And finally, you psychopathic undeserving sonofabitch, what about Patty?' I imagine the more romantic among you screaming, ‘Didn't you feel you owed her anything?'

Well, all of you are probably right, though I still find your questions impossible to answer. The same objections occurred to me frequently during those early months, and I realized that yes, I do tune out of the most pressing situations; perhaps the voices and urgencies that sound inside other heads fail to speak out in my own. I also noticed upon thinking back that I often forget things: the examples came to me unbidden. Remember how I went for a picnic in the heath while I was being followed,
or fell asleep in the garden the moment I thought I was safe. I concluded that this arose from an ability to ignore the bigger picture. Perhaps it is founded upon a lack of imagination, or else an unwillingness to imagine. I remember how rapidly I would skim the newspapers in the weeks after one of my murders. I was looking for reports on the progress of the police inquiries, in the course of which I might glance at the photograph of the victim or go over a few paragraphs of his story. No more. I would then finish my coffee, fold the day's paper and plan out a walk to some area I hadn't visited in a few months.

What would it have availed me to discover that Auguste, Noel, Gustavo, or Nelson were fakes? Or that Sr. da Lima was the one entrusted with my maintenance? How would I have found out without giving myself away? What if they turned hostile and finished me off? Or, they could simply have sent me down to some dungeon without a window to be released only as per requirements. In any case, my life between the bar and the restaurant would have been ruined.

There was nowhere I could go. I would have probably been stopped if I tried to flee in a car. I couldn't call anyone since they would trace it back to me, and there was no one I could write to: how could I have even e-mailed Patty without taking a step towards telling her the truth?

I wish I could claim I encountered electrified fencing at the perimeter of a gigantic estate, or some other evidence of all-enclosing surveillance that would at least have proved I was desperately unfree, perhaps along with numerous others! That would have been something indeed, to try and spot some of them, hear their stories, and collaborate to plot the great escape. It would have catalyzed some sort of action: I couldn't easily
have ignored its implications. Or, if I could have believed that my condition resembled a movie I once saw, in which a man's entire life was a television show from the second of his birth, and everyone – his parents, wife and best friend, and every single person in his town – was an actor playing a part; the town itself was a giant set he was never allowed to leave.

But it always seemed as though I was ‘free' under an open sky, with real people in a genuine city that was in turn surrounded by wide-open spaces and even visited by tourists. The only detail I had to overlook was that I wasn't allowed to leave. And hypothetically speaking, where would I have gone? Where would I have begun a new life without money or papers or acquaintances? Where in the world would they not have found me?

I reassured my sceptical half by arguing that nobody in the grip of this organization seemed to know more than the required minimum, which was what always made their warmth both incongruous and genuine. Why should I have assumed they were all perverse and sinister when it could be that each of them – Gustavo, Bernardo, even Auguste – made up their own stories about me in the absence of the truth: that I was a visitor, a refugee, maybe even a fugitive who had been working for Sr. da Lima in another country and had his own reasons for keeping mum? That could be why I chose to accept the appearances of camaraderie, and a life that felt more real and full than anything I had known in London, barring the few short weeks with Patty.