Pantheon

Chapter Thirty

He sprinted back to the school office, asking the secretary to order him a taxi as soon as she could. His head was pounding.

He was not paranoid, he was not deluded: something dark and dangerous and awful was going on here and, God knows why or how, Florence and Harry were at the centre of it. An image of his son, cowering and terrified, entered, unbidden, into his mind. Little, beautiful Harry. Oh God, what on earth had they done to his boy? And what did they want with the woman he loved?

There was no writing this off as a coincidence. At first, maybe, it could have been just that. A missing document in the files, a mislaid sheet of paper: it could happen to anybody. But this: concrete proof that his letters to Florence had been intercepted. Who would want to do such a thing? And why?

As he paced by the school entrance, round and round that sign — ‘The Breeding up of Hopeful Youths’ — he could feel again the clamminess of Lund’s hand as the man, sweating frantically, had clutched his own. You have no idea what you’ve walked into here, do you? You’ve stumbled into something much bigger than you realize. Bigger and more dangerous.

The poor bastard wasn’t deluded. He was damn right. This was something dangerous enough to have cost Lund’s own life — and perhaps, who knows, it posed an equally grave threat to James’s wife and child. Unless it was already too late…

He shook his head, as if the action would shake away such an insupportable thought. He had been such a fool and the worst kind, a clever fool; foolish, indeed, because clever. The signs had been there from the beginning: that rattle of the letterbox the morning after Florence had disappeared. They had been tampering with his post even then, getting to the card from his wife before he could, deliberately depriving him of the few hours in which he might have got to her in time. He should have suspected a plot then — a careful, meticulous plot. But did he? No. He was too bloody rational for that, too reasonable. There had to be another explanation, that was what he had kept telling himself. Another, more sensible, rational explanation for why his wife was missing from those files, why Lund had latched onto him, why Lund had ended up dead. James had been a prisoner of his own damned rationality. But he had been wrong. If only he had been stupider, thought with his gut rather than his head, he would have got to the truth so much faster.

At last the cab was here and they were bumping back down Forest Road towards and into New Haven. He would go to see McAndrew right now. He would storm in there if necessary and demand to know the truth. If the Dean could provide no answers, then James would refuse to leave his office until McAndrew had ordered an internal investigation, preferably calling the head of the Yale University postal service into the room, right there and then.

James stared out of the cab’s passenger window, breaking his stare only once, to glance in the rear-view mirror — and he did not notice it at first. His mind was too full to register it.

But then some other zone of his cerebral cortex processed the information for him. He checked the tyres of the vehicle behind, to see if they had the telltale white rims on the wheels. They did. There was no mistaking it: the same car that he had seen on the way up to Hopkins Grammar was now behind him. It had tailed him then and it was tailing him now. He would not try to make rational excuses for it, not this time. He was being followed.

‘Driver, can you take the next left turning, please.’

‘But we don’t want to go-’

‘Just turn left!’

The driver did as he was told and, sure enough, the car behind — stately and solid — followed suit. Right, thought James: he would add that to the list of questions he would hurl at McAndrew the second he saw him. Why the hell am I being followed?

Through side streets and residential avenues, the cab eventually arrived outside the administrative building that housed the Dean. The black car parked up just a few yards away, brazen in its refusal to conceal its purpose. James marched towards the entrance, past the commissionaire and barged straight into the office where he had been less than twenty-four hours earlier. He only realized what a determined, even crazed, expression must have been etched on his face when he saw the way Barbara the secretary looked up at him as he strode in. She was aghast — and petrified.

Without speaking to her, James made straight for the inner office occupied by the Dean. He grabbed the doorknob as if these rooms were his own, making no concession to good manners. As the door flung open to reveal an empty room he heard Barbara’s plaintive cry behind him: ‘The Dean’s not here! He’s on leave.’

‘On leave?’ James bellowed, wheeling around to face the secretary, on her feet and quite pale. ‘On LEAVE? Where the hell has he gone?’

‘I can’t tell you that, Dr-’

James took a step forward, prompting the woman to leap backward in a panicked, animal gesture of retreat, clearly afraid that he was about to hit her. The sight of that terror halted him. He could now hear his own breath; he was, he realized, panting.

A moment longer and he would, he knew, be escorted out of the building and into the arms once again of the Yale Police Department. He gathered his strength and, walking backwards — so that he was able to see the lines of anxiety on Barbara’s face gradually smooth out as the threat receded — he left.

James rushed out through the lobby and into the street. He looked to his right: the black car, which he now identified as a Buick, was still there. Right. That was it. He stormed across the street, plunging into the middle of it with barely a glance at the traffic that now dodged around him, and marched right up to the car, slapping his hand on the bonnet.

‘Get out!’ he said in a loud, clear voice. ‘Come on, out with you.’ He rapped on the window, hard. ‘Don’t be a coward. Show your face, come on.’

He banged on the glass again. ‘I want to see you, you bloody coward!’ He was shouting now; people were staring at him. Dropping into a squat so that he could see inside the car, he realized that he had been banging on the wrong side; he was looking at the passenger seat. But there was no one in the car anyway. It was locked and dark.

He let out a long sigh of exasperation. He was chasing shadows. Chilling though it was to know he was being followed, and infuriating though it was to let his pursuers go unpunished, he knew this was a diversion. It was not them he had to find, it was Florence and Harry.

The immediate task was to make a call. He looked around and spotted a telephone booth on this side of the street, no more than thirty yards away. He sprinted over to it.

Maddeningly, he didn’t know what to do, having to read the laborious instructions on the printed card above the telephone. Eventually he heard the voice of an operator.

‘ Yale Daily News, please.’

He knew he was playing with fire, making this telephone call. The sensible thing would be never to see or speak to her again. And yet who else could he turn to for the information he needed this very instant?

There was a click and then a voice on the end of the line, announcing the name of the newspaper.

‘May I speak with a Miss Dorothy Lake, please?’

‘Is she a typist?’

‘She’s a reporter, I believe.’

‘Hold the line.’

He heard a hand placed incompletely over the receiver and then a muffled voice calling out for Dorothy. There was a rustle and then her breath and then her voice.

‘Miss Lake, it’s James. James Zennor.’

‘Well, how are you, my disappearing Englishman? I was beginning to get worried about you.’ He could tell that she was smiling. He could picture her lips, full and slightly parted in that same knowing, playful expression he had seen over dinner last night.

‘I’m well, Miss Lake,’ he replied, his voice overly stern and businesslike. ‘I’m afraid I need your help. I need to go and see the Dean right away.’ He checked his watch. It was quarter to eleven. ‘I need his home address.’

‘Well, that’s easy.’

‘Really?’

‘The Dean has an official residence. It’s on St Ronan Street. Number two hundred and forty-one.’