Two Women Page 13

  ‘What?’ he demanded.

  ‘Janice hanged herself,’ said the woman.

  There wasn’t any risk of her being discovered, which meant there was no reason for John to be frightened. She hadn’t liked his admitting being frightened. She’d recognized he’d been overwhelmed by George Northcote but George Northcote had been a physically overwhelming man. And being overwhelmed wasn’t being frightened. It was still only one fifteen: more than enough time to duplicate what she’d surrendered and carry on pricking at the sites and their local tax and company registration offices, to colour in more of the incomplete picture.

  ‘Thought you’d deserted me,’ protested the Space for Space manager.

  ‘Never,’ Alice flirted back.

  ‘Feeling thirsty yet?’

  ‘You never know. Depends how hard I have to work.’

  Her favourite station, the one at the end of the line where there was least chance of her screen being read over her shoulder, was empty. She logged on, dialled the hotel reservation chain, fingers poised to complete her entry with her Trojan Horse password. And was confronted on the screen by the message ‘Remote-Requested Access Refused’. No problem, she told herself: inexplicable glitches happened all the time. But rarely four more times. She tried one more time before quickly disconnecting. Their mainframe could have crashed. Or there could have been a power interruption, although in the past she’d found the English grid system more reliable than American electricity suppliers. The screen glowed at her, invitingly.

  From his counter the manager called out: ‘You gotta problem?’

  ‘No,’ denied Alice.

  She used the Google search engine to find that the local newspaper was the Basingstoke Gazette and accessed its website in seconds. Its front page was dominated by a photograph of a fire-blackened shell. Police were treating as murder the deaths of a caretaker and two early-shift cleaners in the arson attack that had totally destroyed the European headquarters of the hotel chain’s reservations site. There had been four different seats of fire, all caused by explosions of what forensic experts had already established to be incendiary material, most likely phosphorous. The possibility of terrorism had not been ruled out, although there was nothing to explain why the building or the hotel corporation had been targeted.

  Alice turned off the machine and fumbled for her user’s fee.

  The manager said: ‘What’s the problem here?’

  ‘Something unexpected came up,’ said Alice.

  Throughout his journeying up and down town Carver had been unaware of the two men alternating their surveillance, but then they were professionals, both former policemen. It only cost one of them $50 to learn the name of Alice Belling from the janitor at Princes Street. Their instructions were to pursue Carver, which meant neither followed Alice to the cybercafe to get a visual identification.

  Twelve

  Carver waited two hours and was about to follow Geoffrey Davis and James Parker, the personnel director, out to Janice’s Brooklyn apartment when the lawyer called to say they were on their way back into Manhattan. It was another thirty minutes before they arrived. Davis’s normally florid face was pale. Parker’s was ashen.

  As he came into Carver’s office Parker, a thin, bespectacled man, said as if he needed to explain: ‘I’ve never seen a dead body before … not dead like that.’

  Davis said: ‘We stayed on to identify the body, to save Janice’s mother. Although it was she who found Janice.’

  ‘From the beginning …’ insisted Carver.

  Parker looked to the older man and Davis said: ‘Janice didn’t come in this morning, as Hilda told you. Hilda kept calling and getting no reply. Then she got a call from Janice’s mother. She’d gone around to Janice’s apartment when she didn’t get a reply either. She let herself in with her own key and found Janice dead …’

  ‘Dead how?’ broke in Carver.

  ‘Strangled, according to the medical officer. Although it’s obvious she tried to hang herself, from some loft-bed stairs.’

  ‘The rope broke,’ said Parker. ‘That’s how she got injured.’

  Carver shifted irritably. ‘You think we could get some coherence into this! I want to know what happened and I’m finding it difficult.’

  Davis looked surprised. ‘Last night Janice phoned her mother, in tears. She was upset by the funeral: said she didn’t know what was going to happen to her …’

  ‘She knew what was going to happen to her,’ interrupted Carver, again. ‘I told her she was being kept on, working with Hilda … that no one was being let go.’

  ‘Hilda told me,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘And I got your memo, with a confirming copy to her,’ said Parker.

  ‘People get confused in grief,’ said Davis. ‘She’d been with George for a long time: knew his ways.’

  Perhaps she knew more than his ways, thought Carver. Her being upset certainly wasn’t because she was frightened of losing her job. ‘The mother gets into Janice’s apartment with her own key? It wasn’t locked … chained … from the inside?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said the lawyer. ‘Janice hanged herself from a rope knotted to the topmost rung of the loft ladder. It was there that the rope snapped, quite close to the top. The medical examiner doesn’t think it happened immediately: his sequence is that she kicked away the stool she’d stood on and for a while the rope held: that’s how she strangled herself. He thinks she probably struggled, the moment she did it: according to the medical examiner people do that when they begin to strangle. The rope only broke when she literally became a dead weight.’

  ‘What injuries?’ prompted Carver.

  ‘Surprisingly extensive,’ said Davis. ‘She came down awkwardly. Trapped her left arm underneath her, breaking it. And three fingers on that hand. And her left leg. That twisted under her, too.’

  ‘How high’s the stool?’

  Davis looked at Parker, to be reminded. Parker said: ‘Eighteen inches, two feet maybe. I didn’t pay much attention to it.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ admitted Davis.

  ‘From a drop of eighteen inches to two feet she breaks an arm, a leg and three fingers?’ queried Carver.

  Davis frowned. ‘What are you suggesting, John?’

  ‘That the extent of her injuries really is surprising.’

  ‘The doctor says strange things happen sometimes,’ said Parker.

  ‘It certainly did here!’

  ‘Janice left a note,’ disclosed Davis. ‘She must have written it soon after she spoke to her mother. She’d been dead for almost twenty hours before she was found. She wrote that she was sorry for what she was doing but that everything was going to be turned upside down by George’s death. She repeated that she didn’t know what was going to happen to her: that everything was over.’

  They would have been standing over her: had probably already started the torture, breaking the fingers of her left hand but leaving her right, so that she could write what she was being told. ‘What was the apartment like?’

  ‘Like?’ Again the lawyer frowned.

  Carver stopped just short of using the word trashed. ‘Tidy? Or untidy?’

  ‘I didn’t pay much attention to that, either. But it seemed pretty together to me,’ said the personnel director. There was some uncomfortable body language.

  ‘That’s my recollection, too,’ said Davis. Then he said: ‘You implying something different from what the police say it is, the suicide of a mentally upset woman? Which I also believe it to be, having been there and talked with them.’

  ‘A mentally upset woman who didn’t bolt or chain her door?’ Carver once again felt restricted – physically strait-jacketed – by an impotence far worse, far different, from that he’d felt with Alice after discovering Northcote’s criminality.

  There was another expression of surprise from the lawyer. ‘A woman intending to kill herself who knew people would have to get in to find her!’

  All so logically, so easily acceptab
le by police probably working ten – a hundred – more obvious homicide cases. Would Janice, brutalized, bewildered, already grief-stricken, have told them – given them – what they wanted? Had she known it – had it – even? She surely wouldn’t have endured so much torture if she had. It proved, he accepted, that she hadn’t been part of any mob-orchestrated conspiracy. There was a sudden, physical chill. It proved even more positively that they hadn’t found whatever it was – of which the night-stand contents could be a part – when they’d ransacked Northcote’s house in Litchfield. And if Janice hadn’t had it, then they’d go on looking and torturing and killing. The chill became even more physically intense at a sudden new awareness. Would she have told them of the valise he’d brought back from Litchfield, before the burglary? Carver thought he would have done, if his fingers and arms and legs were being broken. Forcing himself on, he said: ‘How old’s the mother?’

  ‘Old,’ judged Parker. ‘Mid eighties, I’d guess.’

  ‘Married or widowed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Parker.

  ‘Find out,’ ordered Carver. ‘Find out if Janice financially supported her, too. Look after the funeral, everything …’ He looked to Davis. ‘If there’s a will, ensure it’s administered. If there isn’t, apply to administer what there is of Janice’s estate. We’ll switch Janice’s pension to the mother.’

  ‘That’s a very generous package,’ said Davis.

  ‘No reason why I can’t do it, is there?’ Carver was aware of the truculent bravado.

  ‘I think you might run it by the other partners,’ suggested the lawyer.

  ‘I will, but start on it right away,’ said Carver. ‘Can we get the medical report on Janice?’

  Davis shook his head as much in a gesture of bewilderment as in refusal. ‘We’re not next of kin. And in these sort of circumstances I’m not sure that even next of kin are allowed access: few of them would want what you’re asking for.’

  ‘Try. I want to see it.’ Why, he asked himself: to what purpose? ‘Something else,’ he added, looking back to the personnel director. ‘I want to see Janice’s file. And that of her predecessor, if we still have it.’

  ‘I don’t think we would have it,’ said Parker.

  ‘Look, just in case,’ ordered Carver.

  ‘You sure there’s nothing you want to talk to me about, John?’ demanded Davis openly. ‘You imagining there’s some link with the Litchfield robbery? Because if you are, I can’t see where you’re getting the slightest connection from.’

  No one was supposed to, thought Carver. ‘Just both see what you can do, OK.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ promised the lawyer, doubtfully.

  ‘So will I,’ undertook the younger man.

  Shouldn’t he have told Geoffrey Davis? Set out all he knew – shown the man Alice’s printouts and the roughly worked inflated calculations from Litchfield – to explore all or any legal salvation there might be? I think you might run it by the other partners echoed in Carver’s mind. That would be the lawyer’s inevitable, responsible reaction. After going through and realizing and agonizing over – all the devastating implications of exactly what he was being told: seeing, and realizing, that there wasn’t any blinding light to mark an end to the tunnel but only that of the approaching train. To insist upon telling the partners would, in fact, be Geoffrey Davis’s personal and professional salvation. Initiating, in turn, the personal and professional salvation of them all. They provably didn’t know and were therefore provably, legally innocent of any misdemeanour or crime. Their recourse would be, could only be, to call in the police – and the FBI, he supposed and the Security Exchange Commission and anyone else they could think of. And then stand up dazzlingly white in the equally dazzling light of the hurtling train, having done the right thing as well as having exonerated themselves from any misconduct, guilt or censure.

  Which he could still do, Carver thought. At that moment wanted to do, to walk away, to escape and start again. Could he – could any of them – start again? Wouldn’t there always be, despite any and every exoneration, the stain of association upon them? Did he, personally, need to start again? He was a millionaire, in his own right. Jane was a millionaire, in her own right. He could, quite literally, walk away from it all. The deafening warning bell sounded once more in his mind. Walk away with whom? Not with Jane. With Alice, certainly, easily, but not with Jane, who, as he’d decided when it had all first begun – seven days ago, seven years ago, seven hundred years ago? – would hate him and abandon him if he exposed the firm and her father. And he didn’t want to be hated or abandoned by Jane, as he didn’t want to be abandoned by Alice. Another circle squared. Why had he allowed himself the reflection, knowing its conclusion before he started? Desperation, he supposed. Not knowing – not properly, safely knowing where to look, where to go, what to do. Not being, not feeling, adequate. But that was how he had to be, adequate. Not with Geoffrey Davis’s involvement, help or advice, or the partners’ involvement, help or advice. Not with anyone’s involvement. Clang went the bell. Alice was involved. If she hadn’t involved herself as deeply, as cleverly, as she had, he wouldn’t have been able to confront an approach he hoped never to meet. But they didn’t know about Alice. Never would. So it came back, as it would always come back, to him. Back to how strong he was capable of being.

  When she responded to his summons Carver let Hilda say what she wanted to say about death and tragedies and not knowing people at all when you believed you did, before dictating the severance letter already so well rehearsed and prepared in his mind to BHYF, NOXT, Mulder Incorporated, Encomp and Innsflow International. He said: ‘And erase them from the clients list.’

  ‘Today, you mean.’

  ‘Today,’ confirmed Carver.

  ‘My mother always said misfortune came in threes. I hope she was wrong.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Carver.

  Alice said she didn’t want to go out to eat and was thinking of omelettes and Carver said there were things to talk about first.

  Until that moment Alice had wavered, undecided. Now, abruptly, she blurted: ‘I’ve got something to tell you, too.’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘No, you,’ she refused, already regretting her decision, wanting to get out of it. But stood unmoving, wine unopened in her hand, as he told her. When he had finished she handed him the bottle and the corkscrew. She said: ‘You think she was murdered, like George?’

  ‘Of course she was,’ he said, almost impatiently. ‘Tortured to begin with.’

  ‘Jesus!’ It was right that she tell him about the bombing in England. She said: ‘They would have known who she was, from George. Seen her if they ever came to the office. They could have thought she knew more than she did.’

  ‘Perhaps she did know more than she admitted to me.’ He drank deeply. ‘There were some things I brought back from Litchfield, in a valise. Janice put it in her office safe one night …’

  ‘If she was tortured she would have told them,’ said Alice, at once understanding.

  ‘Yes.’ As well as telling them about his specifically asking about the five companies, he thought.

  Alice momentarily couldn’t speak, her already existing terror doubled. She said: ‘Oh shit!’ and then she said, ‘What a stupid, ridiculous, thing to say!’

  Carver said: ‘You had something to tell me?’

  She did, as calmly as possible, but hearing the words reverberate in her ears and thinking, you caused it to happen, you caused it to happen.

  He said: ‘Three people died?’

  ‘I killed them: caused them to be murdered.’

  ‘You said it couldn’t happen, for fuck’s sake! That no one would ever find you!’

  ‘Ordinarily they’re not supposed to be able to.’

  ‘What about extraordinarily?’

  ‘You need to be brilliant to recover an Internet protocol.’

  ‘These people are brilliant! Absolutely fucking brilliant …’ There was a he
sitation, of awareness. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I wanted to find out more: to get through their firewalls.’

  Carver looked at Alice, letting the silence widen between them, and when she finally looked away he said: ‘You gave me your word!’

  With my fingers crossed, she thought, which now seemed – was – so fatuous. ‘There wasn’t enough.’

  ‘I have enough.’

  ‘So you lied to me, too!’ she seized.

  ‘I was trying to protect you: to keep you safe.’

  ‘I was trying to protect you: to keep you safe,’ she echoed.

  ‘We don’t know what we’re trying to do, do we?’ asked Carver, rhetorically. ‘They’re better – bigger – than we are. And I always thought there wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.’

  ‘You know what I think?’ demanded Alice. ‘I think we’ve still got time to go clean. Get out. Get help and protection. You’re right. We’re in way above our heads, so that’s what we need. Help and protection.’

  ‘You’d go to jail.’

  ‘I’d get a deal.’

  ‘I don’t know if what you’ve got – what I’ve got to go with it – is sufficient for a fuller investigation.’

  ‘What have you got to go with it?’ she pounced.

  He didn’t immediately reply. ‘Calculations: some of George’s rough calculations.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Safe.’

  ‘Where?’ she repeated.

  ‘Where it needs to be to protect us.’ Was his office vault secure enough? For the time being, until he could think of something else: something better.

  ‘Darling! George, who thought he had something – whatever it was – to protect himself, is dead, his face literally chopped meat! Janice is dead, because she wouldn’t tell you what she knew, if she knew anything at all. Or tell them, if she knew anything at all. In some half-assed English town or village or whatever the hell Basingstoke is, three people are dead, leaving kids and husbands and wives. We can’t do this by ourselves any more. We’re not good enough. Clever enough. We’ve got to go to …’ Alice stopped, still not sure what they had to do to guard themselves. ‘The FBI! They’ll do a deal with us in return for our evidence! We go to the FBI, tell them what we know. I’ll admit everything I’ve done and do the deal.’