Chapter 15
Twenty-Two Cards
It rained in Cardiff the way it had rained in London when Idris Kamara was nine, on long wet walks to school with a plastic bag over his satchel.
He spent the morning in the central library, in a pool of green lamplight, winding through microfilm. He loved it. In the Western Mail of 17 March 2000, on page seven, he found a small paragraph under a photograph of a man in a rumpled suit.
SEAFARERS' PENSION TRUSTEE DIES IN CUSTODY. Gareth Hale, 41, of Cathays, Cardiff, former chief accountant to the Mersey and Tidewater Pension Fund, was found dead in his cell on Tuesday. An inquest is expected to record suicide. Mr. Hale, who denied all charges, leaves a wife, Ceri, and two children, Daniel, 14, and Rhiannon, 8.
After that, nothing. The Fund was wound up and paid thirty-one pence in the pound. The name Hale went down like a stone in a well.
Daniel, 14. He did a small sum. Twenty-five years. Thirty-nine.
Rhiannon Lewis came off her shift at eight in the sleet and found a tall grey man in a raincoat at the staff entrance of the University Hospital of Wales, holding a paper bag.
"I'm so sorry to ambush you. Idris Kamara, Interpol. I've brought you a bacon roll. I thought you might not have eaten."
She was thirty-three, small and sturdy, with a freckled tired face and red-brown hair in a clip, and dark eyes that were suddenly, unmistakably familiar. She held her head a little on one side, as though listening for a note in another room.
"I'll give you thirty minutes. Is it about Danny?"
He hadn't said the name. "Yes," said Idris gently. "I think it is."
Her small terraced house in Roath smelled of toast and damp. A cat slept on the sofa. On the shelf above the television stood a round tartan biscuit tin with a Scottish castle on the lid.
"My Aunt Bethan brought me up," she said. "I haven't seen my brother in twenty-two years. You've been reading about my father. Then you know he didn't do it. The coroner said he hanged himself in a cell with no bars on the window and no ceiling light. My father carried wasps out of the kitchen on a postcard. He was a bookkeeper. The week before they arrested him he told my mother somebody had been cooking the books, and he'd been told it wasn't his business." She drank. "Danny knew. He was on the stairs. When I was eleven, after Mam died, he sat on my bed and said that when he grew up he'd find out who it was. I said who? He said, the man with the watch."
"What happened to him?"
"He went away. The week after the funeral. Seventeen. He'd been with an old man at a theatre who taught him conjuring. On my twelfth birthday, the second of March, a card came."
She took down the biscuit tin and lifted the lid.
It was full of white playing cards in clear sleeves, each with a label in blue biro. 2 March. London. 2 March. Vienna. 2 March. Lyon.
"Twenty-two. One for every year. They come in plain envelopes with no return address. There's never a note. It's how I know he's alive."
He felt a grave, almost physical respect, as when you are shown in a stranger's house the one thing the stranger loves. "May I?"
He cupped a card in his palms and breathed. Nothing. He tried another, and another. At the fifth, labelled Prague, a faint brown line rose out of the white in a small tight hand.
Happy birthday, Rhi. I'm well.
"I held them up to the light," she said shakily. "I tried the oven. It was your breath."
"It's thermochromic ink. He uses it in his work."
"I knew." She dropped her hands from her face. "A man in a hat, who gives back what's been stolen. I knew in the first week, the way you know your own handwriting. Are you going to catch him?"
"I don't know. I'm not at all sure I'm a policeman today."
She smiled. "The night Mam died, they said I couldn't stay. He said, then I'll stay, and took me into the corridor and sat on the floor and did a coin trick all night. He kept making it come out of my ear. That's what he is. He's the one who stays up."
At the door she said, "There was a man last week. Very polite, from a pensions charity. He asked a lot about Daniel. I told him nothing. He had such an ugly old watch."
Something cold went through Idris.
"A steel army one on a canvas strap. A crack in the glass at the bottom. A nick on the side. Aunt Bethan used to say you can tell a man by what he doesn't replace."
Down the wet street, a grey Peugeot waited with a man behind the wheel.
"Is there somewhere else you can stay for a week or two?"
"I'm on nights. If I don't go in, an old man on my ward gets his tea at six instead of four." She lifted her chin. "I've lived in this house twenty-two years, Mr. Kamara, and nothing's happened to me yet."
He wrote his number on the back of her hand in blue ink. "Day or night."
"It rang once," she said. "Weeks ago, in the middle of the night. I could hear him breathing. I said, Danny. I think he was crying." She brought him a scrap of paper with a long string of digits and a foreign prefix. "I don't know why I'm giving you this. If you find him, tell him it's all right. Tell him I'm still the one who sits up."
He folded the paper into his notebook.
From Platform Three he rang Lindqvist.
A wet wind blew down the track. He told the story in order: the clippings, the two children, the nurse, the tin of cards. He did not say he had held the first card and been unable to put it down. "A man is following her. I know the description. It's Strake's. I'd like South Wales Police to put someone on her house tonight."
"Dear God. Of course. I'll make the call myself. Give me the address."
He gave it twice, in the roar of an incoming train, and heard the comfortable scratch of a pen. "Is there anything else? Nothing that would help me arrange it?"
Idris hesitated. There was a scrap of paper in his notebook with a foreign number. There was an old man's pencil in the margin of a crossword.
"No," he said. "That's all."
"Then go home and sleep. You've done splendidly."
On the train, with his forehead against the cold window and the grey fields of Gwent going by, he thought he had left something out. Then he understood. It was the sound on the telephone a moment before the call ended: a second pen being picked up, and a number being dialled, in a room with a window over the Rhône.