Chapter 24
Followed
Hollis's office had been turned over, and the only thing missing was the file he had come to tell me about.
I got there at half past eight on Monday morning. It was on the second floor of an old brick building on Tanner Street, above a locksmith's, reached by a staircase that smelled of damp plaster and machine oil. His name was on the frosted glass of the door in gold letters that had been flaking for twenty years: H. BRANDT. INVESTIGATIONS. The door stood a hand's breadth open. It was a thing he would never have allowed.
Inside, the room looked like a photograph of itself taken in a high wind. Every drawer of the gray filing cabinet had been pulled out and left hanging. Papers lay across the floor in drifts, and a lamp had been knocked from the desk and lay on its side with the shade crushed. The window onto the street was open. A thin, sour, damp air blew through it. Hollis stood in the middle of the carpet with his hands in his raincoat pockets, quite motionless, surveying the wreck with an expression I had seen him wear at crime scenes, the look of a man reading a sentence for the grammar.
"When?"
"Saturday night, I'd say. I came in this morning at seven." He did not turn his head. "The locksmith downstairs heard nothing. He sleeps with a pillow over his face."
"The police?"
"I haven't called them." He moved his eyes, finally, and looked at me. "I thought you'd want to see it first." He nodded at the desk. "And that."
I looked. In the middle of the blotter, laid out as neatly as a place at a table, lay a sparrow. It was small and brown and perfectly dead, its neck turned at an angle no neck should take, its beak a little open, a bead of blood dried black at the corner. One wing was spread, pinned flat with a thumbtack through the delicate bones, as a child pins a butterfly. Beside it, aligned with the edge of the blotter, lay a single gray feather. The room smelled of damp plaster and, beneath it, faintly, of something sweet and rotting.
"Still warm when I came in," said Hollis. "I'd say an hour."
I did not speak. I felt my stomach turn over slowly, as it had turned at the sight of a photograph in October.
"What's missing?"
"The thing I came to see you about." He walked slowly to the desk and righted the lamp and set it on its base. "I'd a file on Ravi Menon. A good one. I'd been building it for ten days. I kept the paper in the second drawer, in a manila folder with a rubber band round it. It's gone. Everything else is here. They took a computer, a cheap one that I use for the mail. They didn't take the good one, in the safe, which they couldn't have opened." He smiled, thinly. "But they took the folder."
"They knew which one."
"Whoever it was knew exactly which one." He sat down on the corner of the desk, heavily, as though his knees had given out. "I'd say they'd been watching me, on and off, since about the time you rang."
I looked at the open window. The sill was streaked with fresh gray soot.
"Have you got copies?"
"Do I look like a man who'd keep the only copy of a thing?" He took a flat black phone from his pocket and held it up between two fingers. "Everything's in here. I photograph as I go. It's a habit from the force. We called it your insurance policy."
"What's in it?"
"Not as much as I'd like." He thumbed the screen. "Ravi Menon, thirty-four. Born in Chennai, raised in Calder, graduated in computer science from the university. Ten years at Hale Meridian, the last four as head of IT security. Single. Lived alone, in a rented flat in Kestrel Heights. Clean as a plate, no record, no debt." He scrolled. "On Friday the thirty-first of October, at four in the afternoon, he cleared his desk. At six he was at the airport. He bought a one-way ticket to Dubai, paid for in cash. Left on the 11:50 flight."
"He was fired?"
"He resigned. Which is a different thing." He looked up. "A week later, four hundred and eighty thousand dollars arrived in an account in his name at a bank in the Emirates. It came from a holding company in Panama. The holding company shares a registered agent with three other shells, and one of those shells, I'd bet my pension, is a subsidiary of something that does business with Hale Meridian." He put the phone away. "That's a severance package, Adrian. That's a very large, very discreet, very final severance package."
"Where is he now?"
"I don't know. His phone's dead. His email's closed. He was supposed to start at a logistics firm in the Gulf in January, and he never showed up." Hollis rubbed his mustache with the back of his hand. "Nobody's heard from him since the nineteenth of November, when he sent a postcard to his mother. It said, I'm well. Don't worry. It had no return address."
"Do you think he's dead?"
"I think," said Hollis, "he's either very rich or very quiet. And I think it's the same thing."
We stood for a while, the two of us, in the wreck of the little office. A truck went by in the street, rattling the glass. On the wall behind the desk hung a framed photograph of a much younger Hollis in a police uniform, shaking hands with a mayor, both of them squinting into the sun, and it had been knocked crooked, and neither of us had the heart to straighten it.
"I'm going to ask you something," said Hollis. "And I want you to think before you answer."
"All right."
"What are you doing?"
"I'm trying to find out whether my client lied to me."
"That's not what I asked." He had not raised his voice. "I asked what you're doing. Because I've known you six years, and I've never seen you like this. You're gray. You've lost twelve pounds. You called me on a Friday afternoon in June and asked for a man to be found, quietly. You haven't told Priya. You haven't told Gil. You've been going about with a look on your face like a man carrying a bomb through a crowd." He paused. "Whatever it is, you've got something. And I'd like to know whether it's the kind of thing that ends in a courtroom, or in a river."
I did not answer. I looked at the open window. A pigeon had come to the sill and was sitting there, fat and gray and indifferent, with its head cocked.
"It's a video," I said.
He did not move.
"Seventeen seconds. It's from the night. It's from the study." I heard how flat my voice was. "It arrived in my email on Wednesday. From her account."
I told him. I told him all of it, standing in the middle of the ruined carpet, with the damp air blowing through the window and the pigeon watching. I told him about the sleeve and the cufflink and the heron. I told him about the voice that said Ellie. I told him about the study on Saturday and the face of a man who had closed his eyes. I did not tell him what Victor had said, about the clocks, and the Act, and which of us I was protecting. I found I could not.
When I stopped, he was very quiet. His long gray face did not change, but I saw the hand with which he had been smoothing his mustache drop to his knee.
"Have you got it?"
"Here." I touched my pocket.
"Don't take it out." He said it sharply. "Not in here. If they were in this room, they might have left something. A bug. Anything." He looked at the ceiling. "I'll tell you what I think. I think we're in a different sort of case now."
"I know."
"You've got a piece of evidence that you can't use and can't ignore, from a source you can't verify, in a matter that's already been tried. That's a very bad place for a lawyer." He rose from the desk. He walked to the window, with a heavy tread, and shut it. The pigeon flew off with a clap of wings. "I'd see your old judge."
"Walt."
"The one who feeds the ducks." He did not smile. "I'd see him today."
I saw him that afternoon, in his study, not at the pond.
It was in a tall narrow house on Hargreave Street, with a green door and a brass knocker in the shape of a hand, and when his housekeeper let me in, I found him in an armchair by the window with a book open on his knee and a rug over his legs. He had a cold. His nose was red. His eyes were watery and bright. He looked at me over the rims of his glasses, and shut the book, and said, quite without preamble:
"Close the door."
I closed it. I told him.
It took twenty minutes. He did not interrupt. He sat with his hands folded on the rug, his chin lowered, and he listened as he had listened to counsel for forty years, with a rapt, severe, entirely unsentimental attention, as though I were a witness whose testimony he intended to weigh to the ounce. When I had finished he said nothing at all for a long time. The clock on the mantel ticked. A sparrow hopped on the sill.
"Play it," he said.
I played it. I put the phone on the arm of his chair, with the sound low. He watched with his head bent. He did not move at the sound of the woman's voice, nor at the second, softer one. When the screen went black, he reached out, with a very steady old hand, and pressed the button himself, and watched it again.
Then he sat back.
"Well," said Walt Abernathy. "That's a pickle."
"I need to know what I'm obliged to do."
"You do."
"Walt—"
"No. Be quiet. I'm going to give you the law, and then I'm going to give you my opinion, and I'd like you to be able to tell them apart." He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "First. Rule 1.6. Confidentiality. You may not reveal information relating to the representation of a client without his consent. That covers everything you learned from Victor Hale, everything you've seen in the Hale Meridian files, and everything you've inferred from either."
"The video didn't come from him."
"It did not. It came to you, in the post, as it were, from a third party. That's the first thing that helps." He held up a finger. "But you'd never have understood it without the context. The context is privileged. So it isn't, strictly speaking, a document that you can wave about. Do you see?"
"I see."
"Second. Rule 3.3. Candor toward the tribunal. If a lawyer has offered evidence, and later comes to know that it was false, he must take reasonable remedial measures, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal. Know, Adrian. Actual knowledge. Not suspicion, not a hunch, not even a very strong feeling. You must be certain." He looked at me over the glasses, and for a moment the old eyes were piercing. "Are you certain?"
"No."
"Then at this moment, in the strict language of the rule, you have not been given the duty."
"But I could get it."
"If you go out and find out, you could. Yes." His mouth twisted. "That's the cruelty of it. The rule says that you may not offer what you know is false. It does not say that you must go looking. A great many very good lawyers have spent very long careers in the gap between the two." He paused. "You have, I think, been living in it for some time."
I did not answer.
"Third. Section 417. The Tainted Acquittal Act." He had said it at the duck pond, in January, in the cold, with a stick; he said it now, in the warm room, with a handkerchief. "A verdict can be set aside if it was procured by fraud. You've got until the eighth of April next year, one year from the verdict, to bring it, or for the court's own motion to be heard. After that, the door shuts. After that it's final." He tapped his knee. "That's the clock, my boy. Not the one in the garage. The other one. I'd like you to be aware of it."
"And if I go to Whitlock with this?"
"You'd be offering her a seventeen-second video from an unknown source that your own client says might be someone else. She would be professionally obliged to take it seriously. She would probably also be obliged to ask you what else you knew, and what you'd done. And you would have to decide, under oath, in front of a judge, whether you'd been told by your client that he answered the telephone, and whether you'd believed it." He let a silence fall. "That is not a conversation I'd like to be having at your age."
"What would you do?"
"Don't ask me that."
"I'm asking."
"I know you are." He laid the glasses on the book. His face, in the soft window light, was lined and gentle and very tired. "I'd say I was a coward. I'd say I was a judge for twenty-two years, and I know what a man looks like when he's afraid of finding out, and I've seen it in the mirror." He shook his head. "I will tell you what I won't do. I won't tell you that the answer is simple. It isn't. You are being asked to choose between your client and the truth, and the profession has been selling you the comfortable idea for years that they're the same thing. They're not. They never were. It's only that most of the time we're spared the proof."
"Which one do I choose?"
"Neither." He smiled, slowly. "You choose a third thing. You choose what you'll be able to live with, in ten years, at three in the morning." His voice dropped. "I'd start with a question, though."
"What?"
"Who sent it?"
"I don't know."
"Find out." He picked up the book. "Because if it's what it appears, a dead woman's last testimony, then someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to put it in your hands. And I'd like to know why they chose you." A pause. "Rather than the police."
I came out into Hargreave Street at five o'clock. The sun was low and yellow and the shadows lay long on the stone. A woman was walking a child on a leash. A bakery's smell came up from the corner. It was one of those still golden summer evenings that hover in a city for an hour, and I stood on the step with my hand on the brass hand of the knocker and thought: She would have been forty-five in September.
I did not know why I thought it. I had read it in the file.
At the corner of the street, a gray sedan was parked at the curb with its engine running.
I stopped. I had seen it before. I am not a man who notices cars. I had noticed this one on a rainy morning outside a jail, with its windows fogged and a hand coming up to clear a patch of mist. I had seen it once more, I realized, on the Wednesday night, in the parking structure, in the third bay from the stairwell, a gray Honda, before I walked up the ramp with the sound of footsteps behind me. I did not know how long it had been behind me. I thought of the months of rain.
I walked toward it.
I do not know what I meant to do. I walked down the street in the long yellow light with my briefcase in one hand, past the green door and the brass knockers, at an ordinary pace, with my heart going so hard that I could feel it in the base of my skull. The sedan sat motionless. A figure sat behind the wheel, dim in the glare off the windshield. As I came within twenty feet, the engine note changed, rose a little, and the car began to move.
It pulled out from the curb with a smooth, practiced, unhurried glide. It passed me at about ten miles an hour. And as it went by, I saw the driver's face through the glass, quite clearly, for a full two seconds, in the low gold light.
A thin young man, pale, with a narrow, intelligent, expressionless face. He wore a gray raincoat. He did not look at me. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, with the faint careful tension of one who has been told not to look. But I knew him. I had seen him standing in the last row of the gallery, on the evening of the verdict, in the middle of the noise, with his hands in his pockets, nodding once, slowly, as if confirming something.
The car turned the corner and was gone.
I stood on the pavement with the sun in my eyes. I knew nothing about him. He was nobody I could name. But I knew, standing there, with absolute certainty, that I had been watched since the hour I won, and that the person who had been watching was not a man who wished me harm, or a man who wished me well. It was something that I had no category for. It was someone who wished to see what I would do.
My phone buzzed. I took it out.
It was a message from Nora. Coming by on Sunday for my things. Will you be there? And under it, a moment later, as though she had thought better of the first: Adrian, are you OK? You sounded far away on Thursday.
I stood in the street and looked at the screen, and I typed, with my thumb, quickly, the way a man writes who has done it before: I'm fine. Just busy. Yes, I'll be there.
I sent it. I watched it go. And I thought, with a cold, clear, unfamiliar precision, of a woman in a kitchen, drying a pan, who would read it, and know.