Two Women

Six

John Carver thought he’d prepared himself for what he had to do but he hadn’t. He gasped, aloud, and felt his legs begin to go at the sight of George Northcote’s body on the gurney. He instinctively snatched out for the table upon which the body actually lay, pulling further aside even more of the covering sheet and seeing more awfulness and when he tried to speak he couldn’t. What he tried to say came out as an unintelligible hiss. He finally managed: ‘Oh dear God,’ his voice still a dry whisper.

He felt Al Hibbert’s supportive hand at his elbow. The sheriff said: ‘Easy, John. Take it easy.’

‘I’m OK,’ croaked Carver, his voice better but only just. Stronger still he said: ‘What the hell happened to him? It’s like… it’s like he’s been flayed…’

Northcote’s face was practically non-existent and there was virtually no skin and most of the lion’s mane had been torn off, scalping the man. There seemed to be no skin either on much of Northcote’s chest, from which Carver had tugged the sheet. It was flat, not a body shape at all, and there was a lot of bone and grey, slimed viscera.

‘The mower got him first, then the tractor,’ said Hibbert.

‘No,’ refused Carver. ‘It isn’t possible. I saw the rig. The mower blades were covered, shielded against just such an accident. If he fell backwards he wouldn’t have been cut… skinned like that. He’d have maybe broken an arm or a leg on the protective covering but that’s all. And going backwards would have taken him away from the tractor, when it tipped over, not underneath it…’

‘That’s what Pete and I thought at first,’ said Hibbert, nodding to Simpson on the other side of the slab. ‘We stayed up there past midnight last night: got engineers in. Here’s how we worked it out. George goes too close to the dip, throwing the tractor sideways. The force of it going tips the mowing rig, which runs on its own motor. When George hits it, it’s upside down, the blades going full belt. Does that to him. The mower is wider than the tractor that’s pulling it. For a moment or two – God knows how long – it prevents the tractor going right over but swings it back towards where George has been tossed…’

‘He would have most likely been dead by then… unconscious, certainly,’ broke in Simpson. Belatedly the medical examiner put the sheet back over the corpse. ‘This is an odd one, sure. But I get a dozen accidents like this every year, guys driving operating – machinery they’re not used to… something goes wrong… bang, they’re dead…’

‘The tractor is heavier than the rig, finally makes it give way… we’ve got photographs of how it bent, when it finally wasn’t able to stop it going right over,’ picked up Hibbert. ‘And when it goes, there’s George right under the whole fucking thing.’

The perfect murder, thought Carver: the absolute, totally unprovable, perfect murder. Once you’re in, there’s only one way out. Out like George, in front of him although covered again by an inadequate sheet. Skinned alive. Not actually alive. Skinned by being thrust in and out of the mower blades to an agonizingly slow death. Would he have told them: given them what they wanted? He would have screamed. Been demented. Carver went to Simpson. ‘Charlie Jamieson examined him, day before yesterday. Says his blood pressure was so high he could have had a heart attack.’

‘Charlie called me, at breakfast,’ said Simpson. ‘George’s readings were at record-book levels.’

Carver was sure he was snatching at straws but would have been glad of one no matter how slender. ‘Could he have had a stroke, because of it? Could that have been the reason he went too close to the dip and turned over?’

Both men – the sheriff and the examiner – looked emptily back at Carver. Hibbert said: ‘I’m sorry, John. I just can’t quite get your point…’

It was a point he couldn’t make, Carver realized. He felt physically encased, as if his ribcage was being crushed by his impotence like that of the man lying, flat-chested, on the metal table in front of him. ‘George knew his land: knew where he couldn’t take his rig. Knew how to handle it, too. There must have been a reason for his going too close this time.’ Why was he saying this? In front of a law officer! What self-justification was he trying to make, to absolve himself from the self-recrimination of not having tried to have George Northcote’s death properly investigated? Which he well knew couldn’t be properly investigated.

‘It happened because he knew his land so well,’ said Hibbert. ‘He wasn’t thinking, wasn’t taking enough care because he’d done it a hundred times before. All it needed was inches to make the mistake he made. The engineers we had up there last night are professionals. I’ll show you the photographs: the way they’re sure it happened.’

The way it had been intended to be worked out, thought Carver. ‘There going to be an inquest?’

‘Into what, John?’ demanded Hibbert. ‘There’s nothing officially to inquire into.’

Carver felt the impotent straight-jacketed constriction again. ‘I can go ahead with the funeral arrangements then?’

‘As and when you wish,’ assured Hibbert, as if he were giving away a raffle prize. ‘It’s gotta be a shock, John. Hang in there.’

Carver’s feeling now was of burning irritation at the filedaway cliches. ‘That’s what I’ll do, Al: hang in there.’ Hang in where, with whom?

Hibbert said: ‘I’m sorry but I officially need to hear the words. Is the body you’ve just seen that of George Northcote?’

Of course it was! But then again it wasn’t: wasn’t the bull-shouldered – most certainly not the bull-chested – lion’s-maned founder of the best known, most prestigious accountancy firm on Wall Street. ‘That’s the body of George Northcote.’

Hibbert said: ‘I hate this. Of all the things I have officially to do, I hate this the most.’

‘Me too,’ said Simpson.

‘I’m sorry to have put you through it,’ apologized Hibbert. ‘I tried to indicate last night…’

‘I know,’ stopped Carver. ‘It’s OK.’

‘We lost a good man here,’ said Simpson. ‘The best.’

‘That’s what he was,’ Hibbert hurried on. ‘The best. We’re sure as hell glad you and Jane are still here in the community, to carry on.’

Carry on what? wondered Carver. Near to cliche himself, he said: ‘We’re still here.’

‘How is Jane?’ asked Simpson. ‘Charlie told me there was pretty heavy shock.’

‘She was still sedated when I left,’ said Carver. ‘Charlie’s with her but I need to get back. Is there anything else?’

‘We’re through,’ declared Hibbert.

Simpson said: ‘I’ll tell my guys to expect a call from your funeral directors.’

‘It’ll come sometime today,’ promised Carver. An even-voiced, calm, conversational exchange, he thought. We’re talking about a murder, you fucking idiots! A murder committed by people professional enough to be able to skin a man alive but make it appear to these boondock boneheads a typical country mishap. I get a dozen accidents like this every year. Just another one of those accident stories, to go into the Litchfield folklore.

‘Anything I can do to help, John, you just call. That’s all it needs, a call.’

‘I appreciate that.’

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you do.’

The sheriff and the medical examiner both solicitously escorted Carver from the building and stood together as he drove away. Simpson said: ‘That guy’s suffering shock, just like his wife. Worse, maybe. His is delayed. It’ll properly hit him in a couple of days.’

‘I must admit I’ve never seen anyone quite so badly hurt as George from falling into mower blades,’ said Hibbert.

Simpson shook his head, a patronizing you-don’t-know gesture. ‘Happens all the time.’

Carver drove home by the longer, round-about route that took him by the bottom of the lake, a way they rarely used, intent upon landmarks when he approached Northcote’s estate and grunting with empty satisfaction when he identified what he was looking for. The hollow into which George Northcote had been tipped was invisible from the house but it was very much in view from this rarely used back road. In view and easily reached through the simple pale fencing. And from where he was standing the mow-line was distinctly marked, going from this boundary up the incline but stopping at the hollow into which it had tipped. Carver remembered quite clearly that when he’d been there the previous evening all the talk – all the indications – had been that the rig had come in the opposite direction, down the incline.

From the moment of entering financial journalism through a fluke of shall-I-shan’t-I timing, Alice Belling had recognized that the World Wide Web was the trampoline upon which to bounce anywhere she chose through cyberspace.

And had become a far more expert and adept surfer than any on Wakiki beach. There were few firewalls she could not electronically scale or burrow beneath or systems she couldn’t hack into. She justified the intrusion to her own satisfaction by only ever using what she discovered to expose financial wrongdoings, never valid business manoeuvrings. It was an operating integrity with which she had no difficulty and would have been uninterested in that of others had others known, which none did, not even John Carver, from whom she had no other secrets.

Normally she roamed the world and its Web from the comfort and convenience of her SoHo apartment on Princes Street. Today, persuaded by what Carver told her, she decided against working from home, even though she always avoided the possibility of inadvertently leaving her own electronic fingerprint on any detection equipment or device with which she was unfamiliar by never going direct into a target system but always hacking first into an unsuspecting intermediary business or organization to make her penetration via their site.

Alice set out early and was at the door of the Space for Space cybercafe on Canal and West Broadway when it opened, to ensure she didn’t have to queue for a station. She surfed and at random chose the European headquarters booking system of an international hotel chain based in the southern-English town of Basingstoke to be her cut-out host, isolating their password after just five attempted hits and within minutes established her Trojan Horse, her personal password-accessed site undetectable within the chain’s mainframe into which she could come and go without their having the slightest knowledge of her presence.

The obvious search was for the three names Carver had given her. Alice selected Mulder first, in a global sweep, and was startled by the number of immediate hits, just as quickly recognizing the names to be the parent company registration in Grand Cayman. She began the familiar password hunt and after thirty minutes became irritated, as well as impatient, at the repeated rejections from Grand Cayman. Frustrated, she scrolled through the other listings, which curiously covered a large number of the American states, with the addition of overseas subsidiaries in a matching number of European and Asian countries. Obeying the hackers’ lore when confronted with initial refusal, she closed down on Mulder, moving at once to Encomp, and got what appeared to be a virtually identical number of hits, with the same American state and worldwide spread. Innsflow International matched the preceding two. She spent more than an hour trying to get into Encomp and Innsflow in Grand Cayman and was consistently rejected.

‘Mystery upon mystery,’ she said, at once embarrassed at having spoken aloud, although she often did when upon such expeditions from her Princes Street apartment. She answered the manager’s enquiring look with a half wave and a gesture towards her empty coffee cup, genuinely needing a refill after being so effectively and irritatingly defeated.

Knowing the frequency with which initial registrations were often used as cut-outs in much the same way as she was using the hotel chain’s computer set-up, she surfed all the Caribbean offshore islands for minimal variations on the three parent companies she was trying to penetrate but found nothing she considered a possibility. Alice spread the search further afield, to Switzerland and Israel, but found nothing. She entered the market registrations in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore and on Wall Street – even though any listing should have shown with her first search entry of the names – with the same lack of success. Which was the same when she hacked into the newspaper reference archives of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and The Times in London, the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times, Fortune and Forbes.

Alice recognized that the surfeit of subsidiary but linked names risked overwhelming her, certainly in such public surroundings. She needed the quiet, reflective security of Princes Street. And to try to evolve a way to get past the Grand Cayman hacking shield. As she, with forced patience, printed out the state-by-state and international listings, Alice conceded to herself that it was not the first time she’d drawn such a total blank. But she couldn’t remember it happening more than twice before. And both of those had eventually emerged under police investigation to be criminal enterprises, which objectively she further acknowledged had no real bearing on this attempt but which nevertheless inclined her to regard it in that light. It took her a further thirty minutes to print out.

As Alice paid for her time the manager said: ‘You’ve been working hard.’

‘Not sure what I’ve got,’ complained Alice.

‘There’s good days and bad days.’

‘Today’s a confused day.’

‘Come back again: better luck next time.’

‘I think I’m going to have to come back a lot,’ said Alice. After all, she had a new Trojan Horse password in an unsuspecting host system and John might come up with something that would give her a short cut. How long would it be before she and John could get together again? Not long, she hoped.

Jack Jennings was in the hallway, waiting for him, when Carver got back, and he said at once: ‘Mrs Carver’s just woken up. The doctor’s with her. And Manhattan called. The helicopter will be here by eleven thirty.’

Carver held back from going directly upstairs, instead gesturing the other man towards the study and going immediately to the desk holding the unidentified keys, which he laid out close to the wedding photograph of Muriel Northcote. ‘I need your help with these, Jack. You know what the unidentified ones fit?’

Jennings stared down for several moments, separating some from others with a finger before isolating a second country-club locker, the pool house and several garden-equipment outhouses. One had housed the fatal tractor. Three were left unnamed and Carver thought one, oddly coloured red, could have been a safe deposit or left-luggage locker.

Carver said: ‘You don’t know these three?’

Jennings shook his head. ‘Don’t mean anything at all.’

‘Something else,’ encouraged Carver. ‘Where did Mr Northcote keep things: things that needed to be carefully looked after?’

Jennings indicated the bookcase cupboard. ‘The safe, I guess.’

‘Nowhere else? No special place?’

There was another head shake. ‘No, sir. Nothing like that.’

‘What about yesterday?’ persisted Carver, sure he was right about how Northcote had been tortured. ‘It’s a long way from the house, I know. But I think you might have heard if Mr Northcote yelled out, when he fell?’

‘If he had and I’d heard it – if anyone had heard it – I’d have gone looking. I didn’t hear any cry for help. Nor, obviously, did anyone else in the house.’

‘Anyone visit Mr Northcote yesterday? A stranger, maybe? Someone you didn’t know?’

‘No, sir. No one came all day.’

‘So there was nothing.’

The other man considered the question. ‘There was a phone call.’

‘What phone call?’

‘Just after lunch. It was a man who said he wanted to talk to Mr Northcote. I asked for a name but he said it didn’t matter: that Mr Northcote was expecting the call. Which seemed to be right. Mr Northcote heard the phone and came out into the hall behind me. Would have got it first if I hadn’t already been there.’

‘Did you hear the conversation?’

The butler’s face stiffened. ‘I don’t listen to other people’s telephone conversations, Mr Carver. Anyway, Mr Northcote took it in here, in the study.’

‘Had he told you before then that he was going to take the mower out?’

Jennings frowned, in recollection. ‘No, not before then.’

‘So he wasn’t dressed for it: wasn’t in his usual work overalls?’

‘No.’

‘How’d he seem, after the call?’

Jennings shrugged. ‘Just like always.’

‘Were you with him when he left the house? See him?’

Jennings looked curiously at Carver. ‘I wasn’t with him. I saw him through the kitchen going towards the tractor lock-up.’

‘Was he carrying anything… anything like an envelope?’

The man paused. ‘Has something come up with the sheriff, Mr Carver?’

‘No,’ said Carver. ‘Just one or two things I need to get sorted out in my mind.’ When Jennings didn’t speak Carver said: ‘So, was he carrying anything like an envelope in his hand?’

‘No, sir,’ said the other man. ‘He was just setting out to drive his tractor!’

Jane was still in bed, propped up against the backboard, when Carver got to the room. Jamieson was in a chair alongside.

She smiled up wanly and said: ‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It all go OK?’

‘I guess.’

She nodded towards Jamieson and said: ‘There’s a helicopter coming?’

‘Everyone’s coming in for the conference.’

‘Sure.’

‘I don’t want to leave you here by yourself.’

‘I don’t want to stay here by myself.’

‘Take your time.’ There was at least an hour, Carver knew, without needing to consult his watch.

‘How was it?’

Carver instinctively looked to the doctor for guidance. Jamieson remained turned too far away for any facial hint. ‘I had to say it was George, that’s all. A formality.’

‘Would it have been bad?’ There were no tears and her voice was quite even. It almost sounded like a casual enquiry.

‘Pete Simpson was positive about that…’ Carver nodded to the half-turned figure of the local doctor. ‘Charlie thinks it’s possible your father had a stroke: that that’s how the accident happened. If it wasn’t that way, he would have been knocked out, hitting the cover guard of the mower. Either way he wouldn’t have felt a thing.’

‘It was blood pressure,’ came in Jamieson, supportive at last. ‘It was bad.’

‘I’m glad he wouldn’t have felt any pain.’ Jane straightened, against the headboard. ‘If I’ve got to get dressed I need space.’

Outside in the corridor, where they’d been the previous night, Carver said: ‘She seems OK. Looks OK.’

‘Remember what I said about denial.’

‘This it?’

‘I’d have liked her to be more obviously grieving.’

‘Maybe she’s more resilient than you guessed. Than any of us guessed.’

‘Maybe,’ said the doctor, doubtfully.

‘You examined her?’

‘Physically she’s fine.’

Jane came downstairs with the arrival of the helicopter. As they walked out towards it she said: ‘We’ve got a lot to talk about.’

With the exception of one subject, thought Carver.

Stanley Burcher had a trained lawyer’s objectivity and from every angle from which he examined the idea that had immediately come to him in the Queens restaurant the more he became convinced that it was perfect. He had actually raised with the consiglieri of the New York Families the problem of Northcote’s age and impending retirement. Now there was no longer a problem. Northcote’s informed and therefore complicit successor could simply continue to act as Northcote had acted for so long in the past. The man more than likely knew where Northcote had kept the withheld documentation, too.

It was tempting to tell the consiglieri how perfect his resolution was but Burcher decided to wait until he’d confronted Carver. He wondered if he would enjoy his association with the man as much as he had in the past with Northcote, until that very last meeting. Northcote had been stupid, imagining he could behave as he had.