Chapter 26
A Helpful Man
Inspector Kovac turned the envelope over twice, weighed it on her palm, and set it down in the exact center of her blotter without opening it.
"Fingerprints," she said.
"I held it for an hour."
"Yes, I can see you did." The tired black eyes lifted. "So did the old man. And whoever filled it. And the lad at the post office, if it came through a post office, which I doubt." She sighed. "I'll have it done anyway. A crest on the flap. H.M. It could be Her Majesty, for all a defense lawyer would care."
"It's Helen Marlow's."
"It's her stationery. That's what it is." She drew a clean white handkerchief from her sleeve, folded it over the envelope, and put the whole thing in an evidence bag, which she sealed with a long strip of red tape. "Mr. Wray. I want to be honest with you. I'm sitting here with a keeper's log, a shopkeeper's notebook, a receipt and a thread, and I've got a Chief Constable who plays golf on Sundays with the man whose conduct I'm questioning. I have a lady of sixty-nine who chairs four charities and has never so much as parked on a double yellow. And I have you." A short dry breath. "A man with a note on file from Carrow. A video on Facebook. And a car on the camera at 8:52."
"I know how it looks."
"I doubt it." She leaned back. "Because I do. It looks like a man who killed his wife, lost his nerve, and has been spinning a very careful story ever since, with a double, and a conspiracy, and a sergeant who didn't write something down. I could take that to the CPS in an afternoon." She smiled thinly. "I won't. Because of the box."
"The box?"
"I said I'd tell you." She took a pencil from a mug and rolled it between her fingers. "Last Tuesday I asked the clerk in Highways who put the ANPR printout on top of the file. I wanted to know whose neat hand it was. A girl in her twenties, a bit of a mouse. She'd been told to deliver it to me personally. She remembers because the gentleman who brought it was so polite. He said it had come to light during the family's inquiries and he felt it his duty to forward it." The pencil tapped the desk. "She didn't know his name. But she remembers the gloves."
He sat quite still.
"Quist," he said.
"I couldn't possibly say. I'm not allowed to guess." She didn't smile. "But if I were you, I'd ask myself a question. A man gives the police a document that puts a husband on the bridge. It's a perfectly true document. It will help them find the truth. Why would a man do that who wants the matter closed?"
"Because it closes it."
"Does it?"
He looked at her.
"Think," said Kovac. "You're on the bridge. You've lied about it. You have no memory. You're drinking, you've a history, you've a woman in Carrow you've been stalking in a railway station, and a video of you grabbing a stranger by the arm. If I were a barrister I'd say, here is a man who can't be believed about anything." She leaned forward. "And if I were a person who wanted to make sure that nothing this man said, about a scarf, about a keeper, about a double, would ever be taken seriously by a court, I would very much like that document to be found."
The room was quiet.
"He's not trying to hang me," said Callum slowly. "He's trying to make me worthless."
"I'd say that was likelier."
"As a witness."
"As a man." Her voice was dry and gentle. "It's what they do, in the end. It's cheaper than murder. They don't kill the person. They take away the reason anyone would listen."
Quist came that afternoon.
He didn't announce himself. Callum looked up from the Mackenzie at a quarter to four, a swab in his hand and the north light white on the glass, and saw him standing at the far end of the studio by the lift, in a long gray overcoat, quite still, hands clasped in front of him, like a man at a graveside.
Priya wasn't there. She'd gone for the post. The studio was empty from end to end: ranks of easels, tall windows, a line of paintings leaning against the wall with their faces turned in, a bowl of cold coffee. In the high glass roof the clouds slid steadily from west to east. Callum put down the swab.
"Mr. Wray," said Quist.
"Mr. Quist."
"I trust I'm not intruding." The voice was dry and quiet and exact. He took a few steps forward and stopped at a polite distance, his gray head a little on one side. "The young lady at the desk said I might come up. I told her I'd come from Mrs. Marlow."
"Have you?"
"I have a message." He didn't smile. "And an offer."
He wore, Callum saw, the gloves. They were thin and black and fitted like a second skin, and he moved his hands in them with the unthinking precision of a surgeon, never quite still, folding, unfolding. His eyes were small and pale and very steady. They rested on Callum's face with a calm, thorough, impersonal attention, the way a man might look at a tool.
"Mrs. Marlow is anxious," said Quist. "She has been for some time. She feels she has not been able to help you as she wished. She has asked me to take on a task. I was a police officer, Mr. Wray, for twenty-four years. I know how to find things out." A pause. "I wish to find out about Miss Albright."
"I'm not asking for—"
"No. But you are looking for her, and you will go on looking, and I think it better for everyone that you do so with the right information." He slipped a hand inside his coat. "I've prepared a short account. I hope you will find it useful. I hope, in fact, that you'll find it a relief."
The envelope he laid on the nearest trestle was brown, thin and entirely plain.
Callum didn't touch it.
"What is it?"
"A summary. Of her finances." The gray eyes didn't shift. "Miss Albright, as you may know, was in debt. Considerable debt. She had borrowed against a bookshop that was not worth what she owed. Her brother, who is unwell, was in a private clinic whose fees she couldn't pay. By the autumn of last year she was, as I'm told it's put, underwater." The voice was quite level. "In December, those debts disappeared."
"I know."
"Do you?" For the first time a flicker crossed the long face. "Then you will know who paid."
He waited.
"It was a transfer," said Quist, "of forty-two thousand pounds. From the Marlow Trust. It was made on the nineteenth of December, in five installments, to an account in Miss Albright's name. A gift, the paperwork says. In respect of services." He let the word hang. "I don't suggest anything. But I think you will agree that it is a very curious thing for a woman to receive such a sum from the family of a man whose wife she resembles, six weeks after the wife's death."
The studio was extremely silent.
"Services," said Callum.
"Quite."
"You think she was paid to stay away?"
"I think," said Tobias Quist, "that a woman with a talent for mimicry, and a knowledge of a family's private sorrow, and a great need of money, has been in a position to make a discreet approach to a rich old lady." He said it without emphasis. "I think Mrs. Marlow, who is a generous woman, paid. I think the woman, having found it profitable, was not unwilling to find it profitable again." A pause. "And I think that at a hotel in Carrow, in front of a hundred witnesses, she sat in a green dress, with a particular laugh, in a place she knew you would be."
"She didn't know I'd be there."
"Didn't she?" The light eyes held his. "She was engaged by an agency. The agency was informed of the guest list in March. You were on it. Your name was in the program."
Callum felt something shift in his chest, softly, like a loose stone moving in a wall.
I only want you to know I'm here, and that I'm sorry. The creak of a board through an inch of wood. A small sharp indrawn breath. Please. Stop looking at me like that.
"She was frightened," he said.
"Of course." Quist inclined his head. "A good actress is always frightened. It's the first thing they teach." He picked up the envelope again and held it out, and the black glove was quite steady. "I don't ask you to believe me. I ask you to read it. If I'm wrong, there is no harm. If I am right, you will have been spared a good deal of pain." The gray head dipped. "Mrs. Marlow is very fond of you. She would not like to see you made a fool of by a woman who has made a profession of being someone else."
He laid the envelope on the trestle again with a small decisive click and stepped back.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Wray."
He went out. His feet made no sound on the boards. The lift doors opened and closed behind him with a small oiled sigh. Callum stood alone in the white north light among the covered canvases, the swab in his fingers, looking at a plain brown envelope that lay on a trestle table like a card laid face down.
He told himself he wouldn't open it.
He opened it at six, in the empty studio, standing, with the evening coming gray through the glass and the radiators ticking, and read every page. It was beautifully put together. It had dates, bank references, signed letters, and a photocopied statement of Albright Voice's accounts. It was all true. That was what unsettled him, finally, with a slow cold prickle at the base of the skull. He tested it as he tested everything, the way he tested a varnish with a drop of solvent, for the point where it would cloud, and it didn't cloud. Not one figure was wrong.
And yet, as he came to the last page and laid it down, he had the odd, clear, certain feeling that he'd been shown the whole of a painting except the one thing it had been painted to hide.
A copy is always more careful than the original.
He folded the account. He stood with it in his hand. And he thought, with a slow confused distress, of a woman crouching in the steam of a station platform, tying a shoe: what if I've been wrong about her too?