Chapter 12
The Unpleasant Way
"I'm not going to hurt you," said Gideon Strake. "I want that understood. I find it hard to talk to a man who thinks I will."
He hadn't moved from the doorway. His torch pointed at the floor, and in the light that came up from it his face looked narrow and calm and tired. Behind him in the blue corridor stood two other figures, well back. They had been told not to come forward.
"I'd have preferred the lights on," said David.
"I know. I thought you'd rather I came alone to the door." A dry, apologetic smile. "I have a great admiration for your work. You'll have all you came for, I imagine. The batch records. The real ledger. Milan's bonds. It doesn't matter. Milan was always going to be a casualty. He was a very sloppy man."
"He killed eight hundred and forty-one people."
"Yes. Very careless. I told him so at the time." He said it as a plain professional fact, and it was, David thought, the most dreadful thing he'd heard in a year. "But I didn't come to defend him. I came to ask who sends you your envelopes."
"I don't know. I never have."
"I believe that. That's what makes it interesting. She has been right nine years in a row about men who put nothing on paper. And you have no idea who she is. It's not you I'm interested in, David. I find you charming. But you're a beautiful instrument, and I'd like to meet the person playing it. Walk out with me quietly, have coffee in a car for an hour, and you can go, with everything you came for. Because if I wait, I think the person who writes those letters will come to me."
He took a step closer, into the full light of the torch.
He was a slim, fit man of fifty with short grey hair, clear grey eyes and weathered skin. Nothing about him was threatening. And as he reached into his coat, his left cuff slid back an inch, and the wrist showed.
A plain steel field watch on a canvas strap. A crack in the glass at seven o'clock. A deep nick in the bezel, like the bite of a coin.
David looked at it for four seconds. He never lost four seconds to anything. In them there was a stair, a banister under his chin, the smell of toast and damp, and a man in a grey suit saying kindly, Just the papers, Mr. Hale. It was a thing he had spent twenty-five years not looking at, standing in front of him with a torch, offering him coffee.
"You're looking at my watch," said Strake gently.
"It's an ugly watch."
"It was my father's. One buys a great many fine things, and keeps the one that doesn't match." He tilted his head. "You've gone white. I wonder if you've seen it before."
The grey eyes narrowed a little, like the start of a question.
David stepped left, toward the wall. "Mr. Strake. I was told this room has two doors."
"It has one. I've seen the drawings."
"So had I. I think we both looked at the wrong ones."
He put his hand on the red handle. It turned like a tooth. Behind him came footsteps, and Strake's voice, sharp and astonished for the first time: "Stop him—"
The little door swung down with a bang like a gun. Behind it gaped a black square three feet wide, breathing a draught of coal and rust. He threw the bag in. He went in headfirst. As he went, a gloved hand brushed his head, and the old black felt hat came off in it and was gone.
It was forty feet down an iron-lined pipe, steep as a stair and polished by a century of coal. He slid on his back, arms crossed, in a roar of cold air and grit. Twice his elbow struck metal. Once his boots left the pipe entirely. Then he came down hard on a slope of coal that rattled under him.
He couldn't breathe. Breathe, he thought, in the voice of an old man on a wet pier. You're only in trouble if you stop watching the pea. He breathed.
He was in a brick cellar on a mountain of old coal. His torch was cracked, but it showed a gap in the bricks, low down. The tunnel. He had no hat. From high above, thin and fast, came shouting.
He crawled.
At 2:09 in the morning, in the brewery cellar next door, fourteen Danes in paper hats had drunk a hundred and eighty litres of lager and been told a great many lies by a small Frenchwoman with a lantern. Two men in dark coats watched from the shadows by the iron gate.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen," said Camille in a loud theatrical voice, her heart going like a hammer, "the finale. In the great Bohemian breweries, the maltsters come up from the coal cellar at two in the morning after six hours of shovelling in the dark, with no light and no supper and no wives, to bring us the finest beer in the world. I give you the last of the Mohicans."
A barrel moved. A figure in black came out from behind it, coal-black from crown to boots, hair standing up like a crow's, the whites of his eyes startling and red. He swept off an imaginary hat and bowed to the floor.
"SKÅL!" roared a Dane.
Fourteen men in paper hats surged forward. Someone lifted him onto his shoulders. Someone put a mug in his hand. Someone kissed his black cheek and was left with a black lip. By the iron gate, the man in the dark coat, told to find a lean man in a black hat, watched a filthy figure borne away singing, and looked at his colleague, and did not move.
"Miners," said Camille, helplessly. "You see? Miners."
They carried him up the steps into the snow and put him on a tourist coach.
At a quarter to three, Gideon Strake stood on the pavement outside Kostka's building in the blue light before dawn, holding a hat.
It was a black felt fedora, worn thin at the crown by many hands. It smelled faintly of tea. Inside, stamped in gold on faded silk, were four lines.
ELLIS & SON. Hatters. Wyndham Arcade. CARDIFF.
"It doesn't matter," Strake said to the man behind him, who was explaining about a coach full of Danes. He sealed the hat carefully in a plastic bag. "I've been stupid. I looked in Vienna, in Marseille, all of Europe, for a man with no history. It's the one thing a man like that can't have. He's from Cardiff." He looked at the snow beginning to fall. "I stood in an accountant's kitchen twenty-five years ago in a house in Cardiff. It was the first time I'd ever been sent. And a boy was on the stairs."
"Sir?"
"Nothing. Get me everything on the Hale family. Ceri, Gareth, the children. The ones that lived. I want to know where the girl is."
The coach went out of Prague in the dark. In the back seat, wrapped in a blanket, sipping sweet tea from a flask, a small coal-coloured man sat with his knees up and shook.
"I've lost the hat. You told me twice."
"David. Stop." Camille crouched in front of him and scrubbed his face with a wet cloth like a mother. "You are alive. You have the folder and eleven million in bonds, which I think are damp. You have lost a hat. It is the first time in twenty years I have seen you do something not clever, and I find I like it."
"It wasn't clever. It was stupid. I looked at his watch."
"What?"
He shook his head and said only, "He knows I'm from Cardiff. The shop's name is in the hat. It was Emrys's. I wore it twenty-two years because I didn't know how to stop. And I think Strake has been in my house."
Camille went still. "David?"
"I'll tell you. I swore on the elephant." His red-rimmed eyes looked uncertain for the first time in twenty years. "Not tonight. I have to be sure."
"Be sure," said Camille, "and then be quick."
In the front seat, Nell spoke low on the phone. Beside her, with a bandage on his head and his arms round his laptop, Ravi slept with his mouth open. A large, extremely apologetic man had hit him. He wanted a medal.
"We will talk about the Archivist tomorrow," said Camille. "A woman who knew about a coal chute that was on no plan also knew there'd be a man waiting at the other end of it."
He didn't answer. For the first time in nine years, he deliberately did not think of the envelope with the anchor at all.