Pantheon

Chapter Thirty-three

What they call salt-and-pepper. Little bit black, little bit silver.

Distinct, Riley had called it and it certainly was. His hair was one of the first things James had noticed about Preston McAndrew. The man the neighbour had seen was the right height too.

If he had heard it described to him, he would have dismissed it as fantastical, the kind of tale feasted upon by the Sunday newspapers back home: the dean of a university involved in a murder. But in the light of the evidence, surely it was rational to conclude that Preston McAndrew had murdered George Lund, that despite his veneer of charm and scholarly sophistication, the holder of one of the most prestigious posts in the American academy had strangled his immediate subordinate, then strung up the body to make it look like a suicide. For James, one implication stripped ahead of all the others: it meant that McAndrew’s warm reassurances about his endeavours to find Florence and Harry were worthless. This man was not to be trusted, but feared.

James was striding quickly now, right on Wall Street, left on Church Street, navigating entirely from memory, glad for the simplicity of New Haven’s layout and for his own memory. His shoulder was sore, urging him to rest, but adrenalin was beginning to kick in and it was an effective anaesthetic.

James could see it now, the same walk-up, two-step entrance to the modest, pretty Lund house. How idiotic he had been to bring Lake with him, McAndrew’s niece. No wonder the woman had clammed up. And then he and Dorothy had gone from here to eat dinner together. He had talked about Florence and he had dropped his guard, allowing himself to believe that Dorothy liked him. When of course she was nothing more than a woman doing a job.

James was furious with himself. He was nearly thirty, too old to be guilty of such naivete. He should have seen through the sudden appearance of a beautiful, intriguing young woman at the Wolf’s Head, ready to help and be at his side. But he was also — what was it? — not angry, exactly, but disappointed in Dorothy. Despite all their negotiations and gamesmanship, he thought he had detected a connection between them. And then there was the concern, almost maternal, he had seen in her eyes when he spoke about Harry… He could not accept that that was entirely fake.

It was late afternoon but the sun was still bright. As he stood on the doorstep he could not see inside the windows; too much glare.

He knocked on the door. Silence. He knocked again, this time pressing his ear to the door to listen. None of the voices and hubbub he had heard yesterday. He stepped away from the entrance, towards the bay window of the main room. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he peered in. All was dark.

‘You looking for the family?’

The voice came from the porch of the house next door. An elderly man in a blue blazer was sitting on a wicker chair, a newspaper on his lap. He spoke again, as if unsure he had been heard the first time. ‘You a mourner?’

James offered a concerned smile. ‘I’m here to see Mrs Lund, yes. Do you happen to know-’

‘They left this morning.’

‘They left?’

‘That’s right. All of them, her parents, the baby. Early too.’

‘Really?’

‘I can’t sleep later than four, four-thirty these days. It’ll happen to you someday, believe me.’

‘And, what-’

‘I came down and I saw them packing up. In a hurry too. Just shoving those suitcases in the trunk of the automobile and off they went. She waved at me, the younger one.’

‘Margaret?’

‘That’s right. She was holding the baby. And then they were off.’

‘At dawn.’

‘You bet. Break of dawn. Yes, sir.’

‘Did they say where they were going?’

‘No. They didn’t stop to talk.’

James thanked the man and headed back down the street, trying to digest what he had just been told.

There are some very powerful people around here. That was what Margaret Lund had said yesterday. She believed they had killed her husband to keep their secret safe. Those were her words. She must have concluded that they would be ready to kill her too, that she was in sufficient peril to warrant leaving her home in a dawn panic. Perhaps Lund had told his wife what he suspected. No wonder she had not wanted to pass it on, especially with the woman she knew to be the Dean’s niece present. It would expose her — and whomever she told — to great danger. He thought of the intensity of her stare, so incongruous as she held her baby. Not for my sake. For yours.

The idea was both dizzying and dangerous. He had to make sense of this too, even this. He had no alternative, not if he was to find his way back to Florence and Harry.

Very well, he told himself. If he could not learn directly what George Lund had told his wife, he would have to work with what he had: the last communication Lund had made, even in death. He would have to discover the truth about the Wolf’s Head.

For an hour he paced up and down, or sat at the bench across the street, all the time watching the entrance to the Wolf’s Head tomb. He kept an especially vigilant eye out for a black Buick with white-trimmed wheels, but saw nothing. Good man, that Riley: apparently he had done as James had asked and let no one know that the English gentleman arrested for criminal trespass had been released from custody. On the belt-and-braces principle, James had stopped by the J Press shop on York Street to pick up a new jacket. Inspired by the Lunds’ elderly neighbour, he had opted for a blue blazer as well as a Panama hat, which he now wore low, covering his eyes. If someone was tailing him, the least James could do was put him off the scent.

Still nothing. The building deserved its name; it was locked, empty and silent as a tomb.

James glanced at the copy of Time magazine he had picked up from a news-stand on his way over here. He had been drawn by the image on the cover of Lord Beaverbrook, first occupant of the newly-created Ministry of Aircraft Production. The magazine was full of praise for the man Churchill had brought in: ‘Even if Britain goes down this fall, it will not be Lord Beaverbrook’s fault. If she holds out, it will be his triumph. This war is a war of machines. It will be won on the assembly line.’

The magazine was clearly impressed and the overall assessment was upbeat, but the opening line made James’s heart sink. Even if Britain goes down this fall… Florence had not been hysterical to fear a Nazi invasion. It was a possibility, maybe even a probability.

Looking up, he saw a white-haired man approaching. At that moment, James recognized his face: it was Theodore Lowell, the university chaplain and pastor he had seen preach at the Battell Chapel on Sunday. He froze, but Lowell did not even glance at him, just looked left and right to check traffic before crossing the road. Without altering his pace, he slipped in among the lawns and bushes leading to the Wolf’s Head’s building.

That was not in itself a surprise: Lowell’s was the only name James had recognized on the alumni list in Lake’s notebook. As a former member of the society, he had every right to pay a visit; as chaplain, he might even have been there on pastoral duty. (James imagined him counselling a wayward young man to drink a little less and pray a little more.)

But there was something about the way he walked, an urgency, that struck James. No, it was more than urgency — it was furtiveness. Lowell didn’t want to be seen. He looked quickly behind him and disappeared into the side door.

James had just resumed his position on the bench when there was another rustle of movement and someone emerged from the tomb, from the same concealed entrance. This figure was taller and, James guessed, younger; his hair was darker. Just in time, James raised his magazine so that he would not be seen.

This second man now reached the pavement and started walking north towards Elm Street. James waited five, six, seven seconds and then began to follow.

The voice of Jorge, the Spanish republican who had coached both him and Harry Knox in the art of shadowing suspected members of Franco’s Fifth Column in Madrid three years earlier, remained in his head throughout. Remember, you walk at the same speed as the subject. Slower, and you will lose him. Faster, and you reveal yourself at once.

The pursuit was challenging, James having to part a large group that emerged from Davenport College when he had barely got into his stride — muttering apologies and ‘excuse me’s’ — having to shield his eyes from the afternoon sunshine, all the while keeping his gaze fixed on the man twenty yards ahead of him. He was walking with purpose this man, whoever he was, at a pace that suggested his destination was not far off.

The hardest part of any pursuit is the turning of a corner, when the risk of losing the subject is at its greatest. The temptation is to accelerate, but that too carries a risk: the subject, if vigilant, will notice that someone previously distant has come much closer. And once a pursuer has been noticed, he is useless.

James maintained his speed, but as he turned the corner, he looked to where he expected the subject to be — and saw nothing.

Damn. Hurriedly, James scanned the other side of the street. Not there. He examined his own side of the road, and again saw nothing. He stared into the distance, to see if the man he had followed had cottoned on and broken into a sprint, but there was no sign of him.

There. He had been searching for a moving target, and so his eye had passed over the static figure. His prey was just one building ahead, standing by the front door of what looked like a large Georgian house. His demeanour suggested he had no idea he had been followed.

James sucked in his breath, a predator trying to shrink into invisibility and avoid detection. Now, at last, he could get a decent look at the man. He was tall, impressively built, but much younger than James would have guessed, perhaps even an undergraduate. Was this a ‘junior’, and therefore a current member of Wolf’s Head? His right leg was vibrating slightly under his trousers, a sign, James decided, of impatience. The man knocked on the door a second time. A moment later the door opened.

Instinctively James stepped back, trying to recede into the street scene, as he watched the young man hand over a large white envelope. There was a brief exchange and then he appeared to be invited inside. The door clicked shut behind him.

James walked past the building, as naturally as he could manage. He glanced rightward once, noticing that mesh curtains blocked any view inside the windows. A brief flash of sunlight dazzled him: a reflection bouncing off the nameplate by the front door.

The least risky option would be to move fast, right now. Wait, and the young man he had followed might re-emerge. Wait, and he would eventually be noticed. James marched to the front door, his stride purposeful, as if he too were making a delivery. He pretended to ring the doorbell, instead taking a quick look at the brass plate just beside it. Then he looked again to make sure he had read the words properly.

What he saw there surprised and baffled him, but there was no mistaking what it said in clear, engraved letters.