Chapter 24
The Last Card
The lake in April was eight degrees.
He had read the number on a weather chart in a rented van and never thought about it. Now it closed over his head like a fist.
He had gone off the end of the jetty in a long flat dive after a green book turning slowly in the lamplight. The cold hit him like a bar. Every bit of air went out of him in silver bubbles. Below him in the grey-green dark, turning over and over like a leaf, a great oblong was sinking.
He kicked. Ten feet. Twelve. His shirt dragged at his shoulders like chain-mail. His fingers closed on a corner of brass, slipped, closed again.
He had it. He wrapped both arms round it like a child and climbed.
He broke the surface under the jetty, in a dark weed-hung place between slimy piles. He hung there coughing, unable to feel his hands. Overhead was a confusion of feet and shouting. Someone cried his name.
"Daniel!"
Through a gap between two planks, upside down, a large bearded face stared down, streaming and wild, with spectacles hanging from one ear.
"I saw you go under. I stood on the jetty forty seconds. I counted. I was going to jump."
"You can't swim."
"No."
"That's very brave of you." Teeth chattering, David pushed the Book up through the gap. "Take it. It's iron-gall ink. It'll survive. It's the whole case. Every name, every number."
The hands closed over it and drew it up. There was a long wet silence.
"I told you I'd arrest you," said Idris hoarsely. "I've a pair of handcuffs. I could climb down. I've said the words eleven hundred times. And you'd come."
"I'd come. That's the trouble." David floated, the cold going into his bones. "Is Rhia all right?"
"She's in a boat. Behind you."
A small grey flat-bottomed boat had slid in under the jetty, engine cut, a lantern in its bows. In the stern, in a boiler suit, sat a huge dark shape with a boathook. On the middle seat, in a pale blanket and a hospital sweater, red-brown hair soaked to her head, sat a woman gripping the gunwale.
"You daft sod," said Rhiannon Lewis.
He had nothing to say it with. He let go of the pile, and a great dark hand closed on his collar and lifted him streaming out of the lake like a fish, into the bottom of the boat among blankets that smelled of ginger and tar.
"You see, Mr. Morgan?" said Anselm, wrapping him like a large egg. "It was only a bath."
Two small cold hands took his face. A voice that had said Danny for twenty-two years whispered, fiercely, "I've got you. I've got you. It's all right."
Dr. Roth came down the lawn at a stride in large rubber boots, with a dozen officers behind her. A searchlight swept the water. At the end of the jetty, a tall untidy man in a torn raincoat knelt with his helmet in his hands, looking at the lake.
"He went in after the Book," said Idris, low. "He didn't surface. Forty seconds. It's eight degrees. I think he's drowned."
"Nonsense. Where's the Book?"
He held it out across his palms, a green sodden slab with a gilt anchor and a trail of weed on one brass corner. Roth took it as one takes a baby, and her weathered face did something she'd have been furious to hear described.
"It's very wet."
"It's iron-gall. It'll survive. I'd like it on the record that David Morgan recovered the principal evidence of a twenty-five-year conspiracy at the cost of his life."
Roth looked at the black water. "Divers," she said over her shoulder, hard. "Every man we've got."
Gideon Strake hadn't run. He sat on a mooring post with the small black pistol on the planks beside him, where he'd set it down the moment the first torch struck him. A young Swiss officer read him his rights in a nervous voice. He listened with his head on one side, like a man hearing music he knew.
"I did wonder what it would be like to be on the other side of a door. It's very much as I thought." He looked at the cracked watch. "You'll tell me, Inspector, if he does it again? I should like to hear how."
They found the hat at four in the morning, floating a hundred yards off the jetty: a new black fedora with a narrow ribbon, turning slowly on the grey water. A boatman fished it out with a pole and held it up, dripping, to a silent crowd of policemen. Every one of them knew it at once, as one knows a flag.
Marcus Lindqvist was arrested at half past two in the morning, in his dressing gown, at the door of his flat above the Rhône. He stood on the step in striped pyjamas, large and pink and bewildered, and looked at Tess Marchand as if she were someone from a funeral.
"My dear. I'm so sorry. Is the girl all right? The nurse? I was told nobody would be hurt. That was the one thing." His pale blue eyes were wet. "I had a son, Karl. Twenty-two. He took a car one night in Malmö, with friends, and a girl was killed. There was a great deal of money and lawyers. And a gentleman in Geneva came to me with a file. It was only ever a favour."
"It's never only a favour."
"No," said Marcus Lindqvist. "I found that out."
He held out his wrists, with an old-fashioned courteous air, as for a coat. Tess had been told in her first week that the hardest thing in the profession was to look at a man you liked and say the words. She said them clearly, in French, with no mistake. When the van's door shut and its tail-lights dwindled down the wet quay, she sat on the kerb in the rain and cried.
In the morning, in a bright cold hospital room in Évian, Idris sat by a bed and watched Rhiannon Lewis eat a boiled egg with great concentration, in borrowed socks and a towel round her hair.
"You're not eating. You look as if your dog's died."
"I think I may have lost a friend. I saw him go in. I saw him not come up. I wrote a sentence in my statement. It was the best sentence I've ever written. I don't know if it's true."
"Mr. Kamara." She put down the spoon and looked at him with the calm eyes of a woman who has sat up all night with frightened people. "How many times has he gone into a locked room and come out? Has anyone ever seen him leave?"
He opened his mouth. He shut it.
"A man left a building in Lisbon by the front door in a car. A man danced out of Turkey on a ferry. A man went into a cellar in Prague and came out with fourteen Danes. I'd say you were thinking too long about the hand that wasn't moving."
"I saw him go under."
"You also saw," said Rhiannon over her tea, "a coin come out of an empty hand."
He stared. Then, with grief and understanding and a wild, helpless, improper laughter all working in his face, Idris put his hand into the pocket of the raincoat hanging on the chair and felt in the lining.
There was something there that hadn't been there the night before. It was small and round and still faintly damp. A one-euro piece.
Under it, folded in a plastic sleeve cut to size with sharp scissors, lay a white card. He cupped it between his palms like a bird and breathed.
On Sunday. As promised. — D.
"That's what I thought," said Rhiannon Lewis comfortably, and went back to her egg.