Pantheon

Chapter Twenty-one

‘Everything points at you, Dr Zennor. The bust-up in the restaurant, you storming out after him, smashing the place up — all witnessed by at least a dozen people. Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

‘I’ve already told you this.’

‘Well, tell me again.’

James sighed. He was sitting in a grey holding room in the Yale Police Department headquarters which was, to his dismay, a real police station. The name had misled him: he had assumed the Yale Police Department would be an outfit equivalent to the ‘Bulldogs’ who policed Oxford, an arm of the academic authorities rather than a genuine force. But these men were dressed like the policemen he had seen in gangster films back home and they sounded and acted that way, too. Once out of the squad car, he had had to pose for a man with a camera — face on and sideways, like the men in Lund’s photographs — then press each one of his fingertips into a small pad of black ink. This was, he realized, serious.

The bureaucratic processing was long and drawn-out: his mind wandered back to Oxford and the autumn of 1937.

He remembered being surrounded by the paraphernalia of new life, a cot in the nursery, a pram in the hall — signposts pointing to the future. Florence had tiny Harry at her breast, her body fuller and, to James, more beautiful than ever. They were newly married in a new house, a new family brimming with hope and possibility.

That was what the visitors saw, at any rate — the likes of Virginia Grey, pitching up with chicken livers wrapped in greaseproof paper from Harris’s because, ‘My dear, as a nursing mother you will be suffering from depleted stocks of iron which you will need to replenish immediately.’

But neither she nor anyone else saw Florence repeatedly pleading with her husband to pick up their baby and to hold him, urging James to overcome his fears that his shattered shoulder would let him down. No one else was there to witness his insistence that he held no such fears, that it was just that he had to be in college in fifteen minutes or that he had an urgent journal article to complete, or that the baby clearly wanted his mother. Go on Florence, take him, he’s obviously crying out for you.

Just as no one had seen the late November afternoon when, while Florence napped, James had gingerly approached the crib after Harry had woken. He had stared at his child for a long minute, like a wrestler sizing up an opponent, before reaching down with his good arm and trying to scoop the baby up one-handed, curling his right hand under and then around Harry’s back. It had worked at first, the child effortlessly light in his father’s grip, James almost managing a smile as he carefully hoisted Harry upward. But then the baby, not yet two months old, had wriggled. James’s left hand tried to come to the rescue, but it was too slow, its movements still too jagged and awkward. Little Harry escaped from his grasp, tumbling out of his hand and into the empty, dangerous air, while James watched uselessly, frozen in place.

Only luck ensured that the child bounced back into the soft blankets of the crib. A few inches to the left or right and Harry would have crashed onto the hard, wooden floor. At that realization, James had let out a sound he had never made before: part scream, part roar. And either that or the impact of the fall had set Harry off, crying silently at first, his baby jaw trembling, his tongue oscillating until James was terrified he was taking in no oxygen, before giving voice to loud, hoarse bawling. Florence had rushed in, her features stretched wide with anxiety, as if a jolt of electricity had just shocked her from sleep.

She had picked Harry up in a single smooth movement, placing him on her shoulder, letting him feel her warmth, his face nuzzling into her neck. He was still crying, but soon the register altered, the sobs becoming calmer and more regular. Keeping her eyes on her husband, who had retreated into the corner, on the other side of the cot, Florence had moved towards him, stretching out her free hand in a gesture that said she knew what had happened. James had recoiled, then pushed her arm away. He refused to be comforted. He refused to be pitied. She had soothed Harry, but she would not soothe him. He fled from the room.

Now, nearly three years later and thousands of miles away, he let out a deep sigh. Fear had prevented him from trying to pick his boy up again. Until this moment he had thought that the mistake he had made that day had been dropping the baby. Now he understood better — but he had left it too late.

‘Do you speak English in England? Or are you deaf?’

Startled, James looked up to see a detective glaring at him. ‘I’m sorry?’ Like a gramophone record spinning at half speed, it dawned on him only slowly that this man had replaced the officer who had arrested him. He took in the man’s face: pale, fleshy with thinning hair. What was his name? Riley? It struck James that the name went along with his accent, an accent that he had heard several times this morning from other officers. All older, grey- or white-haired, with the air of men who had worn uniforms all their lives. He forced himself to listen to what the man was saying.

‘I’m afraid it’s not your lucky day. You’re staring at an Irishman and we ain’t too fond of the English. No offence, but that’s how it is.’

‘You’re from Ireland?’

‘No. But my Pa was. Once you lot had starved him out, he went to Boston, didn’t he?’

James looked through the door, which had been left open, spotting two more of Riley’s colleagues. So that was it. They were retired officers from the big city, men used to dealing with thugs and thieves rather than plagiarist scholars and exam cheats, or whatever kept them busy at Yale. Which meant they were probably relishing the prospect of a proper crime, like a murder. Well, they could damn well find somebody else to liven up their day.

‘Like I said, everything points at you, Dr Zennor. The only thing I can’t for the life of me figure out is motive. Why d’you do it?’

‘This is outrageous!’ James said, slamming his fist onto the table. ‘I insist that you contact the Dean’s office immediately. They’ll explain who I am and what I’m doing here. Jesus Christ!’

‘Don’t you dare swear at me, you limey bastard, or I’ll shove you in those cells so fast you won’t know what’s hit you.’

Riley was staring at him, his pointed finger hovering in the air in front of James’s face. James stayed exactly where he was, his gaze meeting the detective’s without wavering. ‘I did not kill that man. I am here to find my wife and child. That’s why I’m here, in America. She is one of the Oxford mothers who arrived here a week or so ago.’

‘So you say.’

‘And Lund confirmed it! For heaven’s sake-’

‘I warned you once, Zennor. Now calm down. One thing I’ve learned in this job is you university men are very good at talking fast and spinning a story. You Brits probably the best of the lot. I may not be as smart as you, but I know my job. So you take it nice and slow unless you want to be telling this story all over again to a jury.’

So for the third time, James explained how he had gone to the Dean’s office — twice — how he had adopted a different tack the second time, inventing a story about research simply because he was desperate to find out where his family had gone. Without planning to, he repeated to Riley the question he had asked the harbourmaster in Liverpool: if your family had gone missing, wouldn’t you resort to any means to get them back?

‘That’s what worries me, Dr Zennor. That you were ready to resort to anything. Even murder.’

James leaned forward again, baring his teeth. ‘This is insane. The man threw me out of his office, but whispered that I should see him later that evening. I went to meet him, I asked what he knew but he wouldn’t tell me. He was speaking in riddles.’

‘This was at Frank Pepe’s?’

‘Yes. He was very agitated, and he became more so the longer we spoke. Then, when he went to the lavatory, I saw the-’

‘I know. The photographs. You see how this looks, though, don’t you? You’re angry. You threaten a secretary. You somehow track down the man who-’

‘I didn’t track him down! He told me to meet him there.’

‘We only have your word for that. You track down the man who holds the information — which you’ve just admitted you will do anything to get — to the place where he’s eating dinner. You argue. People in the restaurant hear that. Then he goes to the bathroom, you break into his briefcase and snoop through his personal property-’

‘It wasn’t like that! I thought he might have Florence’s file in there. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I want: to know where the hell she is.’ James dipped his head, exhausted.

But the detective was not to be diverted. ‘You rush out of the restaurant, shouting and screaming. People hear that too. You chase after him, following him home. You watch the house and then later — while his wife is sleeping upstairs — you kill the guy, trying to make it look like he killed himself.’

‘His wife?’

‘That’s right. His wife and his new baby.’

‘But I thought-’

‘I know what you thought. That he was a pervert with obscene pictures in his bag. You told me already.’

‘But I saw them!’

‘Well, they weren’t in his bag when his wife found him dangling this morning. A wife, incidentally, who swears her husband was making plans for the future and would never, ever contemplate suicide.’

‘He hanged himself? Bloody hell.’

‘Or you hanged him and made it look like a suicide. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.’

James rubbed his temples. None of this made sense. A wife and a baby? Now that he thought about it, such things were not unknown: there was a legendary Classics professor at Oxford who used to joke about buggering the more promising undergraduates. His wife was utterly devoted to him.

Riley closed the door, then returned to his seat. ‘You still want to stick to this crap about the homo pictures? Are you sure about that? Much better to change your story now than when you’re in the dock at a murder trial, believe me. You plead guilty, tell the judge you were going crazy looking for your wife, maybe he’ll be lenient with you. But you mess us around, he’s going to be measuring you up for the electric chair. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yep, that’s how we do it these days in Connecticut. Three years now. Not a nice way to go, I can tell you. They strap you in, so you can’t move. Then they pass electric currents through you — two thousand volts, I think it is. The first current’s meant to knock you out and burn up your brain, and the second’s meant to blast all your vital organs, your lungs and heart and what have you. But it doesn’t always go right, see? Maybe the charge is not enough: the brain might stop, but the man’s still breathing. These new machines, something always goes wrong, you know how it is. We had a man whose blood vessels, under the skin, they starting popping and bleeding; then his head was on fire. His head! Oh, that was awful. Took him eight minutes to die. Imagine that. You’d just cry out to be hanged, wouldn’t you? I would. Get it over with.’

James knew what the detective was doing, that he was trying to break his spirit, to force him into some spurious, panicked confession. He knew it, but he would not succumb to it. He knew the evidence the police had was circumstantial at best. But he also knew that juries were unpredictable. Who knew what might be his fate before a dozen Rileys, pumped up by some fast-talking lawyer to fear this strange Englishman, abandoned by his wife and deemed too mentally unstable to wear his nation’s uniform? They would hear that this foreigner was the last person to see Lund alive and that he had been seen chasing after him in anger only hours earlier.

Riley was sitting back now, staring at James silently. James recognized this trick too. He had deployed it himself during some of his clinical interviews: say nothing and let the subject squirm until they eventually revealed themselves, if only to break the silence.

James would not fall for that. Instead he would use the pause for his own purposes, to think. He tried to put aside the question of how things looked and to focus on reality. What had actually happened here? It was conceivable that Lund had taken his own life, perhaps in shame at his deviant urgings. His wife could have come down in the morning, seen his body, discovered the photographs and then destroyed them, for fear they would disgrace the reputation of her late husband and taint her family name.

But the same was true if Lund had been murdered, the killer merely disguising it as a suicide. In that situation, Lund’s widow would still have destroyed the photographs to save her shame. Or perhaps the killer had taken them for some reason.

James pinched the bridge of his nose, as he did whenever he was struggling to untie a knotty problem. The best method, he had found, was discussion with his wife. She had a fine logical mind, ordered and rigorous, but she also had a creative intellect: she could generate new ideas, wholly new possibilities that he had not considered. So often a conversation with her would unlock a puzzle that had seemed insoluble. The irony of it did not elude him: to find Florence, he needed Florence.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to tell me something?’ Riley said. ‘’Cause I’m watching you, closing your eyes, frowning, holding your nose and all that and I’m thinking you look like a man with a lot on his mind. Lot on your conscience.’

‘I’m thinking, Detective, that’s all. Just thinking.’

‘Looks painful.’ Riley leaned back, assessing. His lips adjusted a fractional amount, a gesture that somehow, like a silent clearing of the throat, signalled the imminent introduction of a change in topic.

Riley let his fist open to reveal a glint of metal inside, like a magician producing a coin from an empty hand. ‘Is this yours, Dr Zennor?’

James leaned forward.

‘Go ahead, pick it up.’

At first James thought it was a tie-pin but it was too small and the pin at the back was the wrong shape, long and thin, like a needle. This was to be worn in the lapel. It took the form of an Egyptian cross, a crucifix with a loop rather than a vertical line at the top. In this case, the loop was filled with the image of an animal head. As he peered at it, he could make out the face of a wolf.

‘Well,’ said Riley. ‘Is that yours?’

‘I’ve never seen this before in my life. What is it?’

Riley was staring at him, trying to read his face for signs of mendacity. ‘Never seen it?’

‘Yes, I’ve never bloody seen it. What is it?’

‘You really are going to have to learn to control yourself, Dr Zennor,’ the detective said, though this time, James noticed, the edge in his voice had softened. ‘This was found in the deceased’s mouth.’

‘In his mouth? I don’t-’

‘The coroner says that’s where you’d hide something if you wanted it to be found after your death. Least, that’s what a medical man would do. He’d know there’s no point holding it in your hand. Muscles relax when you die and the thing drops out. Seems Lund was pretty determined: the pin was stuck right into the inside of his cheek.’

‘Did it belong to him?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘The pin. Was it his?’

Riley let a hint of a frown pass across his forehead, before chasing it away. ‘I asked the widow exactly that. Turns out Lund did have one just like it, but that’s still upstairs in the bedroom. In its case, just like always. She showed it to me. So this belongs to someone else.’

‘His killer.’

‘Are you asking or telling?’

James bit down hard, a technique that always used to help him suppress his anger, though it had fallen into disuse in recent years: too feeble a weapon. ‘You think Lund might have ripped this off his killer’s jacket during a struggle. Then put it in his mouth so that you would find it, to identify the man who murdered him.’

‘You’re getting carried away, Dr Zennor. We leave the theories to you gentlemen in the university. Facts is all I want. Facts.’

‘Well, do you know what this is, this badge? Or why Lund had one?’

‘Leave the questions to me, OK? Let’s go back to Pepe’s restaurant. You say-’ He was interrupted by an urgent knock on the door. Riley called out and another police officer came in, bending down to whisper in the detective’s ear. Riley nodded, whispered another question to his colleague, then nodded again. The officer left.

Riley leaned across the desk to retrieve the pin, placing it on top of a pile of papers he now squared up. ‘I guess this is your lucky day after all. The guy behind the bar recognized your mug shot. Says he remembers serving you six double whiskys and telling you to get lost, just after eleven. And the butler at the Elizabethan Club says he put you to bed last night: you were so drunk, he had to take your pants off. Which is embarrassing but also an alibi. The old boy says he slept downstairs on a camp bed and would have heard if you’d left during the night. Which means you’re no longer an official suspect in the death of George Lund.’

James let out a long sigh, a sensation of relief he had not felt since completing that last, agonising row on the Isis. He was free. But then a thought intruded. The butler? He had no memory of that at all. Had he really got that drunk? Or was this the amnesia Rosemary Hyde had taunted him about?

He stood up and faced the detective. ‘If I’m not a suspect, does that mean you won’t be treating this case as murder?’

‘You’re not an official suspect, is what I said.’

James looked down at the table that separated them. To his shame, he realized that it was only now he was not defending himself that he was fully taking in what had happened. A man was dead; a man who had taken what he clearly felt was a great risk to meet him; a man who had told him I can help you; a man who had become feverish with anxiety in the restaurant, in the last hours of his life.

‘And, Detective, you’re sure those photographs I saw were not in his briefcase when you found Lund this morning?’

‘When his wife found Lund this morning,’ Riley corrected him. ‘No, there were no photos. Our men have searched the place thoroughly: no sign of any homo pictures, no magazines, nothing. You may be off the hook for murder, but that doesn’t make your story about last night the truth. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you, Dr Zennor.’

James eyed him steadily. ‘I’d like you to keep an eye out for my wife. No one will tell me where she is.’

‘That’s between you and the university. I’ve got work to do.’ With that, Riley offered a brief handshake and ushered him out of the room, leaving James Zennor relieved, puzzled — and absolutely clear where he had to go.