Chapter 23
Which Hand
It took him nine minutes to find the ring. He wanted it slow.
He made them watch the loaf and the napkin. He asked Dame Honor to hold his wrist. He told a long, pleasant story about a pier in Barry Island and three walnut shells and a dried pea, with his eyes on Conrad Aldermoor's face.
"It's in there. Break it, Conrad."
The old man took up the loaf with the shy joy of a boy at a birthday and tore it. The inside was white and steaming, and pressed into the crumb, bright as a drop of water, lay a heavy gold ring.
Dame Honor slapped the table. "Good God." Moretti-Hart laughed, head thrown back. Ortuño applauded with his fingertips. Aldermoor, with the ring in his palm, looked at David with such pure delight that for one instant David nearly couldn't bear it.
"Twenty-five years," said the old man. "The same face. He taught you."
"He did. I have one more." David stood. "At your place you'll find a card with your name, gilt-edged, on cream. Would you pick it up? Hold it between your palms, as though you were keeping a bird warm."
"Is this where it becomes a dove?" said Moretti-Hart.
"Not quite."
They held the little cards, six rich people in evening dress, stiff at a long white table, in the ticking of seventy-one clocks. David watched the clock over the door. It said 12:26.
"Dame Honor. What do you see?"
She opened her fingers. The clever horsey face went still. Her reading glasses came down slowly onto her nose. "It's writing. It's my name. AF-0443. H. Wickes. Four million, two hundred and nine thousand pounds. Mersey and Tidewater Seafarers' Pension Fund. Received in full, March 2000."
"A very simple ink," said David. "It's only visible when warm."
"Mine says AF-0444," said Ortuño sharply. "Six million."
"And mine." "And mine."
"A cheap trick!" Baron Haller stood, moustache bristling. "Conrad, I insist—"
"Sit down, Dietrich," said Aldermoor quietly. He looked at the little card with its brown figures risen out of the cream. When he raised his head his face was calm and sad and a little tired. "I owe you an apology, Daniel. I said you were a performer. I didn't think you were an accuser. You have turned a dinner into an audit. I'm impressed. I wish you'd let me finish my cheese. Gideon?"
Strake was not in the room. He had slipped out some minutes earlier by the little door behind the long-case clock. Now he came back with a phone in his hand and stopped across the table, the light on his cropped grey hair and the cracked steel watch.
"Odile didn't answer. I rang at twelve twenty-five. The line at the house has been out since ten past twelve. It was a very good line, with a cable down the cliff. I put it in myself. Where is she?"
"On her way to a hospital," said David, "in a boat."
A draught moved the candles. A gilded clock chimed the half hour, and seventy others answered in a long tinkling cascade, like birds going up.
"I thought it might be something like that," said Strake softly. "I've been thinking an hour that I'd missed something. It's an odd feeling. It was the telephone, wasn't it? She sounded a little tired. You've looked at that clock eleven times. How long?"
"Three minutes."
"Ah."
All the lights went out.
They went with a single snap, as if a hand had closed on the world. Chairs scraped. A glass crashed. A woman screamed over the ticking. Candles went over with a hiss.
David did not run. He had known the room nine minutes, and moved through it as through his own house. He heard quick leather soles on parquet and something heavy lifted from the table. The Book.
"Gideon!" cried Aldermoor, high and thin. "The Book!"
"I have it. Sit down. I'll send for you." A glass door crashed open on the terrace, and cold lake air came in. And from the front of the house, from every side, with a roar like surf, came the sound of doors going in.
"Police fédérale! Que personne ne bouge! Bundespolizei!"
White beams swung through the doors and windows. The room filled with helmets and shields. In the middle of the glare, beside an overturned chair, a man in a clean white shirt was smiling.
"Good evening, Inspector. You're twenty seconds early."
"You said twelve forty."
"It's twelve thirty-nine."
"I was told you had a flair for the dramatic," said Idris Kamara hoarsely, and in front of eight Swiss officers, a federal prosecutor and six of the richest people in Europe, he took off his helmet and put both arms round him.
"Where's Strake?"
"The terrace. Two of ours went after him."
"Is she safe?"
"A boat came to the Évian landing twenty minutes ago. A French doctor says she's cold and furious and has asked for tea. Nell says you're to go after him. You're the only one he'll talk to." His eyes were wet. "I'll give you five minutes. I'm going to be very upset about it in the morning."
The lawn ran down to the lake in a long silver slope, with a stone boat-house and a wooden jetty at the bottom. David ran down it in his shirtsleeves, easily, as he hadn't run since he was seventeen. The house blazed behind him like a ship on fire.
The jetty boards boomed. At the end, under a lamp, beside a long speedboat, stood a man with his back to him, holding a green book against his chest.
"It won't start," said Gideon Strake, not turning. "Somebody's taken out the fuel line."
"Anselm, I think."
"The large man with the soup. I should have liked to meet him." He turned. A small flat pistol hung loosely in his right hand, pointing at the planks. "I'm not going to use it. It's only a comfort. I find I don't know what to do with my hands."
"Gideon. You were twenty-six."
For the first time, the narrow composed face flinched around the eyes.
"You came into our kitchen with a cold and a handkerchief," said David. His voice shook a little. "My mother offered you tea. You said no, thank you. You took the papers. My father said, Is it going to be all right? And you said, I'm sure it will."
"I'd been told to say it. I was twenty-six, Daniel, with a mortgage and a man in Geneva who paid well. It seemed only paper. I'd never once been inside a prison. I thought it was a place where other people went."
"He died in one. My mother died of it. I've never in my life heard a clock tick without seeing that watch."
Strake looked down at his wrist: the grey strap, the cracked glass, the nick in the bezel. He looked at it as though he'd not seen it before. Then he lifted the Book in both hands and held it out over the black water.
"Don't."
"It's the only thing in the world that matters to him. He'll be a great deal less dangerous without it. It's a strange thing to have been a good servant and find you've been a fool."
"It's evidence," said David, walking slowly down the jetty with his hands held out. "Forty thousand families got thirty-one pence in the pound. And there's something in it that's mine."
"Then you'll have to come and get it," said Gideon Strake gently, and opened his hands.