The Drowned Man (16 page)

Underwater, she thought clearly, while fighting the conviction that there wasn't enough time. The wrist and ankle straps held her tight. The withdrawal of the chest band allowed her to lever forward, but the motion neither loosened the waist strap nor enabled her to slip out of any of the bindings on her limbs. She hadn't stopped wondering what he'd tied her to. At first she had imagined it to be some form of mechanic's dolly, but now she realized that she was in an old-fashioned wheelchair, something colonial British, with multiple metal joints and levers and a flexible, tilting back, probably made of rattan and mahogany.

She began to roll from side to side. She had no ambition to break the chair back or disjoint the hinges. Instead, she rocked and created waves that, though she could not see, sloshed four or five inches of water out of the tank. It wasn't enough to overturn the heavy steel trough, but a piece of luck rewarded her struggle. She kicked her feet, which were not firmly fixed to the chair frame, down towards the foot props. As the left foot plate folded down, it struck the drain fitting, dislodging the bung and causing a flood onto the cement floor. It was almost not enough. She held her breath for a count of two hundred before the filthy water subsided below her nose. Her blindfold had sagged from her eyes and she was able to look down the length of the tank at her knees.

Kicking some more at the bonds on her left ankle, she broke the pinion on that side of the chair. From there, Alice was able to worm her left arm from its wrist band. She freed the rest of her body as though she were an apprentice Houdini.

Her uncle had panicked and fled. Her clothes lay over by the wall with the three posters. Gandhi and the god Mithra looked down on her bruised form. Pain tightened her ribcage; her hips and sternum ached. The wounds under her breasts were half burn and half scarring but she judged that the healed marks would each be less than an inch long.

She saw no sign of her father and she wasn't about to seek him out for any kind of solace. She would gain her revenge her own way. She dressed and fled the garage. She tried not to think of anything as she came into the light outside and began to limp away.

The water had nearly become her doom. Alice had been minutes away from leaving Motihari for good but now there was no chance of getting the daily bus to the state capital. She turned the corner into the roadway. There on the wall hung the poster of Jack and Rose, figureheads on the bow of the fated ship. Jack drowns; Rose lives. Which character would Alice Nahri be?

For once, Heathrow Arrivals was subdued and the queues moved efficiently. Peter collected his luggage at the carousel, then returned to the Departures level, where Aviation Security kept the office he required. His Scotland Yard
ID
won him cooperation from the Met officer on duty, who suggested that he simply call the morgue facility rather than walking all the way over to the receiving hangar. Peter hesitated, feeling he was betraying the Carpenter family by not staying with the coffin. But he was weary and a call to the hangar confirmed that they had offloaded the body. The hearse would pick up the dead man later that day and he would reach home by evening.

But then the distortion of red-eye flying kicked in and led to an impulsive decision. One thing he could do was offer reassurance to Carole Carpenter (though he would not reveal the report on Alice Nahri's drowning).

He rang up the house in New Bosk on his mobile, and Joe answered.

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 requirement 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.

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 authentication. 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.

As darkness eased through the western sky, displacing the retreating light of day, she imagined Washington big and bright ahead of her, though she failed to see any landmarks. She knew that she had entered Civil War country. It was a mark of her joy at finally being in America that she resolved to read a history or two of the devastating war. She experienced a fleeting thrill: she would like to become an American.

Unknown to Alice, the armoury she had remarked on in Springfield had been the centre of rifle and small-arms production for the Union through much of the conflict. Now, the boyhood home of John Wilkes Booth lay just a few miles off to her left. She was entering territory that a million soldiers had traversed on their way to battle. She remained unaware of these facts but did feel the presence of the battlefields around her. She understood that she was circled by ghosts.

The towns on the Chesapeake peninsula bore names like Prince Frederick and Scotland. The Brits and the Yanks had always been great globetrotters, naming their local towns after exotic foreign locations, even when the label made little sense. Her atlas showed Utica, Rome, Batavia, Syracuse, and Ithaca, and that was just in New York State.

She passed through Dunkirk and Bristol and Lothian, silent, bucolic towns. The final leg of her marathon, made in darkness on mostly empty roads, took her along the main street of Chesapeake Beach. Cheap hotels and seafood restaurants lined the route. Newer hotels had been erected right at the harbour's edge; coming closer, she understood that these were in fact residences, probably condominiums, although she didn't quite grasp the North American condo concept. She hoped to arrive at Lembridge's place well after sundown, in order to lessen the risk of being seen on the roads near his house.

Exhausted, she pulled into a broad, asphalted area by a seaside walkway that itself belonged to a new hotel. She parked and walked to the edge of the sea along a wood-slatted path. She looked out on the Intercoastal Waterway, although the far side wasn't visible from the deck, even with her hyperacute vision. On her right, a narrow dock probed out into the bay. She impulsively decided to walk out to the end, to the last tethered sailboat. As soon as she started, something extraordinary happened. Alice had always feared water; there was little of it in the state of Bihar except during the monsoon floods, but then it was a living, killing force. She had never been on a boat. When Jack saved Rose in
Titanic
, she had cried, as much from fear and nausea as joy. And, of course, there was her uncle's garage. Now, she padded along the slender quay and felt the sea calming around her, somehow granting her dominion over the water, over the slow tide that was arriving to her call. She looked up and imagined she hovered above the water, not like in the Bible story, but as a flying, ruling sea bird, not a petrel nor a heron, but Vishnu in one of her shape-shifting tricks. She reached the end of the dock, touched the last boat for luck, and turned back, ready for the next phase of her life.