The nameless dead

Epilogue

I lost a kidney and a fair amount of self-respect. After all, Arthur Bimsdale was a lanky kid without special forces training. I should have taken him out with my hands rather than a primary school writing implement. I expressed that feeling to Karen and she dispatched me to the Ice Age with her eyes. After a week in hospital, I was allowed out to make it up to her. I did, somehow managing not to split my stitches.

We spent a week in an FBI apartment looking over the East River. I even managed to tag along on short walks with Karen and Magnus. I could have taken a taxi to the lawyer’s office in Queens that Sara had told me about, but I decided against it. Given her record, whatever she’d stashed there would be a contemporary version of Pandora’s Box. I was still puzzled by her physical condition-the sweats and the pain she seemed to be affected by-but didn’t ask to see the postmortem. Sara’s life was over and so, I decided, was her influence on mine. I could also have checked out the address that Roger had found for the email account of my former lover’s broker, or passed it to the FBI. As it happened, neither was necessary. On our penultimate day in New York, there was a report in the papers of a murder. An economist by the name of Xavier Marias was found near that address, his throat cut. Nothing seemed to have been stolen from his person and there was no indication of who the killer might have been. Sara had somehow got at her broker from beyond the grave. That was another reason to avoid her stash-what else might be waiting for me there?

We were flown to Washington by Bureau jet. Ethan Simonsen was seriously embarrassed over the Bimsdale affair, but I told him to lighten up. As it was, he stuck to us tighter than superglue. We were put up in a smart hotel near the Hoover Building while I was questioned at length. I told them more or less everything I knew. You should always keep something to yourself-in this case, I kept back much of what Sara had told me about her activities. They weren’t germane to the case and, since they had never caught her, they had no claim to title. We visited Quincy several times. I had the feeling he might have known that Karen and Magnus hadn’t died, but I didn’t encourage him to come clean. It was irrelevant now.

I never knew Sir Andrew Frogget, but I had come across his sleazy sidekick Gavin Burrows. The postmortem on the Routh Limited chairman was inconclusive. There were small traces in his bloodstream of a chemical compound that had never been seen before, but it was deemed to be irrelevant. I immediately thought of spies and dirty tricks. Obviously the CIA or their foreign equivalents would be interested in Heinz Rothmann. I let that go-I didn’t need any more hassles. That was also why I’d left Hercules Solutions to the Bureau. As for Arthur Bimsdale, it was assumed he had been conditioned by Rothmann, though the chances of Peter Sebastian having had a second assistant who had been turned struck me as being even more minimal than those of Great Britain becoming the best rugby league team in the world. Besides, I had other things on my mind: baby shit, breast-feeding and its psychological effects on fathers, baby shit…

We were eventually cut loose by the FBI and given tickets for a flight to London. I didn’t have many plans. That was because Karen did. She was going back to work, taking the baby with her until she stopped feeding him, which would be a tester for the Metropolitan Police. I was vaguely thinking about writing a book, but not about our experiences. Perhaps a kids’ story, one with no monsters-and no nameless dead. Rothmann and his sister had stolen the identities of all the people they had conditioned, and their father had been responsible for hundreds of anonymous deaths at Auschwitz. It was beyond me to bring any of those victims back.

There was still the small matter of our wedding. We had some time before the thirty days after Magnus’s birth that Karen stipulated. Maybe we’d slip off to Nevada before we went home. Julie Simms managed to find the engagement ring Peter Sebastian had bought. I considered sending it to his grieving family, but decided against that. He owed us big time.

In the evening, after Magnus dropped off, Karen and I listened to Monteverdi’s Orfeo again. The mythical singer had gone to the underworld to find his dead wife, but had lost her on the way back to the sunlight.

I wasn’t ever going to let go of Karen and our son.