Chapter 13
Walnut Cake
The Czech health ministry received a plain brown parcel on Friday morning, and by Friday night nobody in Prague was talking about anything else.
Inside were a hundred and forty-four photographed pages and a red binder, with a typed note: Batch records and laboratory analyses from the Kostka archive. These explain eight hundred and forty-one deaths. By noon the minister had read them. By six, Kostka's shares were suspended, the Golden Snake pharmacies were closed in forty-three towns, and a grey-faced man in a camel coat was being led from his own front door into a storm of flashbulbs.
"He'll never be out," said Inspector Kamara, watching a café television.
"You say that as if it's kind," said Tess.
"It's just accurate. Look at what he did, Tess. He took eleven million from a safe, from a firm that can't admit it kept it there. And at the same hour, he delivered a perfect, court-ready file to the one person who must act. He didn't just take. He prosecuted."
"We found the card in the vault. AF-0442. PRG."
"Yes." He sipped bad coffee. "Tell me what you found."
She laid a grey photocopy on the table. It was a Swiss court exhibit from 2011, a squabble over an inheritance, with a list of client files. "They all start with the same letters. AF-2207. AF-2208. Same small firm, in Geneva, founded in 1987. So discreet I couldn't find one article about it. Aldermoor Fiduciary SA. I think every man he's robbed was a client of the same little firm."
"How many clients?"
"A few hundred at most. The owner is Conrad Aldermoor, seventy-two. Gives to hospitals. On the board of an opera. Not a breath of scandal. Nobody has ever looked."
"Yes," said Idris. "That's the part I like. Book me a flight to Geneva."
Aldermoor Fiduciary occupied the first floor of a tall pale house on the rue de la Corraterie, behind a door with no brass plate. The secretary sounded as though she'd been expecting him all her life.
Conrad Aldermoor came forward with both hands out, a spare, stooping old man with white hair and a mild, thoughtful face. His grip was like paper. He smiled with his whole face, as though no one in the world was more welcome.
"Inspector Kamara. I read about the Kovač matter. You noticed the signature was younger than the man! Will you take coffee? There is a walnut cake. It's my cook's. A great weakness."
By the fire, he said it plainly. "Yes. They are clients. Lenoir, Salgueiro, poor Doruk, Maes, Kostka. A fiduciary is a sort of confessor. We hold what we are given, and don't ask where it has been. I had no idea what some of them had done. I wept over Dr. Kostka. I'll give you access to everything, through the proper channels, of course."
It was so perfect that for one sentence Idris believed it. Then, as with music played too beautifully, he found himself listening for the join.
"Who were your first clients?"
The old man's hands didn't move. There was the tiniest pause, like the stop between two bars.
"Ah. A sad story. Our largest early client was a pension fund in Liverpool, the Mersey and Tidewater Seafarers' Fund. Forty thousand families. It was robbed in the spring of two thousand by a trustee named Hale. Two hundred million pounds. When they came for him, he killed himself in prison. It was the worst disaster in the history of our house." He shook his head. "I wondered if you'd ask. I thought: better he hears it from me. Do you know what I collect, Inspector?"
"Automata, I'm told."
"Come and see."
In a round room hung with grey silk, in a glass case, sat the figure of a boy, three feet high, in a velvet jacket and lace collar, at a little desk with a quill. His face was pale porcelain, with glass eyes and a faint, absent smile.
Aldermoor wound a brass key nine times. The boy dipped his pen. The small hand moved, the head turned, the glass eyes followed the nib, and in flowing copperplate it wrote one line of French. Then it looked up at the two men and blew gently on the page.
"Je pense, donc je suis. By Jaquet-Droz, the year I lost my wife. An automaton is a machine that persuades you it is alive. I think it's the only honest sort of magic. It makes no claim. It only asks that you watch, and decide for yourself what you are looking at." He took Idris's arm like a favourite nephew's. "You have a very still face. You'd have made a splendid player. Gideon Strake tells me you are a person of rare ability. A dear friend. I hope he hasn't been in your way."
"Not at all."
At the head of the stairs, Aldermoor smiled with unclouded kindness. "And Inspector? I should be careful about the hat. A hat is such a noticeable thing. I'd hate to see a man like you make a fool of himself over a piece of felt."
He walked an hour by the lake in the cold wind, past swans like wedges of ice.
The Mersey and Tidewater Seafarers' Fund. Nobody volunteers that. A man asked about his first clients waits and lets the scandal be found. Aldermoor had said the whole sorry tale in one breath, to a stranger, with fluent, practised grief. He had wanted it said.
Why?
His phone rang. It was Lindqvist. "Idris! The Swiss say you saw old Aldermoor. Tell me you were courteous."
"I had cake."
"Good. He's quite a pillar. It wouldn't do to offend him on a theory. Write it up for me tonight, all of it, in detail. Is there anything I should know?"
Idris looked at the grey water. There was a great deal he could have said. A cold small instinct, like a draught from a door left ajar, told him not to. It was only Marcus, who had given him ginger biscuits.
"He mentioned an old pension fund in Liverpool. The Mersey and Tidewater. A trustee named Hale."
"Ah. A sad old affair. We should look at it, of course. Write it up. Well done."
He put the phone away. On the paving, a gull spread its wings and rose into the wind with a harsh cry.