Chapter 20
The Sunday Calls
On the first Sunday, at four o'clock, the phone rang in a kitchen in Penarth, and a voice said, "Danny?"
He held the receiver in both hands. Under a dry crackle on a long line, thin and astonishingly close, was a woman's voice with the Cardiff valleys in every vowel. It was lower than he remembered, and warmer.
"Rhi."
"Is it really you? You sound just like Dad. I'm all right. I want to say that first. They've been very polite. A woman sits with me, Odile, from Lyon. She hums while she knits. It's Calon Lân. I don't think she knows what it is."
"It's all my fault—"
"Danny." It was the voice of a girl of eleven on the end of a bed, thin and clear and immovable. "I've waited twenty-two years for you to ring. I'm not spending the first four minutes hearing you're sorry. Are you eating?"
"Yes."
"You're lying. There's a man here with a strange wristwatch saying you'll come to dinner. Is it dangerous?"
"Not at all," said David. It was the first time he'd told her a lie knowing she knew it. "A very small party. You'll be home by morning."
"Then I'm not going to worry. You were always rubbish at being late." A door opened behind her. A woman's voice, with Lyon in it, spoke quickly. "I've got to go. They only give us five minutes. Danny? Are you still the one who sits up?"
He couldn't speak for a moment. "Yes. Always."
"It's a lake," said Anselm.
An hour later he sat at the kitchen table in his socks, in huge headphones, having played the recording eleven times.
"At forty-one seconds, behind her voice, a long note and two short. A big old horn. A paddle-steamer, with a brass whistle. Few are left in Europe. At one minute eight, a small church bell with a flat note, striking the quarter forty seconds late, because the clock-weight is slow."
"That's not evidence," said Ravi.
"It is the only evidence I need. I have sat in cars thirty-one years. I have learned what a thing sounds like when you cannot see it. A French bell, a Swiss steamer, and the water very close."
It took Ravi four days, by ringing village clerks in Haute-Savoie in increasingly implausible voices to ask about church clocks. He found a stone chapel above Évian whose clock lost forty seconds an hour. A mile below, on a headland, stood a pink stucco house with a private jetty, owned by a Panamanian shell company incorporated the same week as Halyard Risk.
"It's got a boat-house," said Ravi hoarsely. "She's in a house with a boat-house."
"Sixty miles by road to Cologny," said Camille.
"Twenty-two by water," said Anselm. "I only say it because I like a good road."
Nell took the voice.
She sat on a hard chair in a cold back bedroom with her eyes shut, a tape recorder on the bed, and listened to Odile's five-minute fragment fifty times, lips moving once or twice. At four o'clock she opened her eyes.
"Rhiannon, c'est l'heure. Dépêche-toi, on n'a que cinq minutes."
It wasn't her voice. It was a woman from Lyon in her late thirties, slightly nasal, patient, with a faint breath of tobacco. Camille, who had grown up in Marseille, felt the hair stir on her neck.
"I did a lot of the Belgians," said Nell in her flat Leeds. "A voice is only a person's way of being afraid. Nothing's harder to copy. Once you have it, it's all there is. Strake will ring her at five to midnight. I'll say all's well. At five past, when David's at the door, I'll tell him the child is in the car."
"And if he asks something you can't answer?"
"Then I'll sound as though I've a child in the car, and I hope he'll let me concentrate."
On a grey Thursday in mid-April, Idris rang Marcus Lindqvist from a call box in Bern, forehead against the cold glass.
"Idris! My dear boy, I've been so worried. They said you'd had a collapse. That dreadful business in Cardiff." The big voice shook with feeling.
It was harder than he'd thought. He heard in his mind a pen set down above the Rhône, a tin of ginger biscuits. You taught me to read a balance sheet.
"I think I've found her. A friend in the Swiss prosecutor's office thinks she can get a warrant for a house on Lake Geneva. The night of the twenty-fifth, a Friday. A hundred officers from Bern, at midnight. If it waits for Saturday, there'll be guests and a fortnight of lawyers. I thought you should know before I did anything."
"That's splendid. The best news I've had in a year." A faint delicate noise, like a pen lifted. "It's a pity you didn't trust me at the start. I was very fond of that girl. Give me the time and place, for the file."
"Friday the twenty-fifth. Midnight." He named a village exactly, and heard a ballpoint scratching on a form.
"Look after yourself. And Idris? Do eat something."
The line clicked. He put his head against the glass and shut his eyes. He did not weep. He wasn't going to begin in a telephone box.
At a café on the Marktgasse sat a square-shouldered woman in a charcoal coat with a file: Dr. Anneliese Roth of the Federal Prosecutor's office.
"He took it?"
"Every word."
"Sit. Eat. You look like a man told to shoot his dog." She pushed a roll towards him. "I'd have preferred to arrest the bastard in the ordinary way. But I've waited twenty years for a way into that house. If it takes a thief and a leak and a ridiculous amount of paper, I'll take it and sleep for a week. Don't thank me yet. I haven't decided whether you keep your pension."
On the last Sunday he phoned from a platform at Lausanne, in the cold early dark.
"Are you at a station?" said Rhiannon. "I can hear a man saying 'Genève.' I'm not daft, Danny. I've been listening for weeks. They say it's Saturday. Is it all right?"
"I'm not going to say it's all right. I'm going to say it will be over."
"That's better. I'd planned a speech for when they let me out. Then I thought: he'll say he's sorry, I'll say don't be daft, and we'll cry on a pavement. So I'll say one thing. Come round on Sunday. Mrs. Pugh brings a cake. It's a terrible one. You'd like her."
He pressed his hand over his eyes. "I'll come."
"I love you, you daft sod," said his sister. "Don't be late."
He stood among the commuters like a stone in a stream. Then he took from his coat a new hat. It was black, with a wide brim and a plain ribbon, made in Bern by an old man who asked no questions, and it did not yet fit. It sat a little high. He looked into the crown. There was nothing there, not a name, not a shop. Only smooth blank silk.
He put it on.