Two Women Page 6

  Neatly arranged in a multi-sectioned tray in the bottom right-hand drawer was a selection of keys, some – the country-club locker and spare sets for the cars, for instance – clearly labelled, others not. The age and model – and insecurity – of the safe surprised Carver when he found it. It was floor-mounted inside one of the cupboards beneath the bookcase and was key, not combination, locked. It took Carver less than fifteen minutes to find the key that fitted from among those unmarked in the bottom drawer.

  The safe was only about a quarter full, all of it easily carried in a single trip back to the desk. Carver began to go through the contents in the order in which they had been stored, which was with the money on top of the pile. He didn’t bother to count but guessed there were several thousand dollars in newly issued, uncreased one-hundred-dollar bills. There were three personal insurance policies, in total with a face sum of $3,000,000 but in the one he glanced through there was an endorsement increasing the value in the event of accidental death. There was a stock portfolio of perhaps twenty certificates, which Carver scanned through not even registering their valuations, interested only in any possible mention of the three companies. Once more there was none. George Northcote’s will was unexpectedly brief. Apart from bequests to the staff – $50,000 for Jack Jennings – the bulk of Northcote’s entire estate went to Jane, passing to Carver if she predeceased him in Northcote’s lifetime. The only exception was a single legacy of $100,000 to Carver if she did inherit. In the event of their both predeceasing Northcote, the estate was to be divided equally between any surviving children. The will had been made soon after their marriage, Carver saw from its date, long before the difficulty of Jane conceiving had been realized. There was a codicil, attested just one week after the partners’ meeting at which Carver had been proposed by Northcote and unanimously approved by the partners as Northcote’s successor, appointing Carver the sole and absolute executor of the will.

  The only things remaining in front of Carver when he put the portfolio aside were a small selection of photographs, the first easily identifiable as Northcote with Jane, when she was a child, and with his wife – one showing Muriel actually on their wedding day, in her wedding dress – which had to have been taken at least thirty if not more years ago.

  Carver didn’t recognize the woman in the last four photographs, although it was very clearly not Muriel Northcote. Each was inscribed on the back with a date – a two-week period in 1983 when Carver knew Northcote to have been married and Muriel to be still alive – and locations, Capri and Madrid. There was also a name, Anna. One showed she and Northcote openly embracing, two more with their arms entwined, the fourth holding hands.

  Each was a picture of two very happy people, very much in love.

  George Northcote’s bedroom was once again heavily furnished, the bed and dressing-room wardrobes thick, dark wood, although Carver didn’t think it was mahogany. He imagined he could detect the smell of the man, a musky cologne mixed vaguely with cigars, but decided in the pristine surroundings that was what it had to be, imagination. He supposed the neatness was not Northcote’s but one of the staff, maybe even Jennings. There was what was clearly pocket contents in a segregated tray on the nightstand, house keys, a cigar cutter and lighter, a wad of money, hundred-dollar notes on the outside, in a silver clip and a snakeskin wallet. One half of the wallet was a personalized, week-by-week diary. The entries for that week were identical to those in the larger version downstairs, even to the entry for this day simply reading ‘2.30’. There was a selection of credit and business cards in their separate pockets at the top of the opposing side, with a slim jotting pad at its bottom. It was blank.

  Carver felt a quick flare of hope when he opened the nightstand door and saw the bundle of fine-lined accountancy sheets, lifting them all out and laying them on the bed to hurry through. His first awareness was that they were old files, all dated five years earlier. His second was that none contained any references to Mulder, Encomp or Innsflow. They were the accounts of two companies – BHYF and NOXT – neither of which Carver could remember discussing personally with Northcote, nor more generally at partners’ meetings. And he was sure they hadn’t shown on the computer search he’d attempted downstairs of Northcote’s personally handled accounts. More mob companies? His unavoidable question. Which prompted another. Why left like this, not in the downstairs safe? Because, incredibly, unbelievably, Northcote had believed he was safe: that there was no need for security. Could they be, even, part – maybe even all – of what Northcote had planned to give him, the insurance against the firm’s destruction? Carver wanted to believe it: wanted to believe it more than anything he’d wanted to believe in his life. Whatever, they were potentially the most important discovery he’d made that night. There was a bedside table on the opposite side from the nightstand, free of anything except a biography of Maynard Keynes, and Carver carefully stacked the sheets there to go downstairs with everything else he’d already set aside to take back to Manhattan.

  Carver went painstakingly through all the drawers in Northcote’s dressing room, discovering nothing more in any of them but the expected underwear, linen and shirts. He actually explored every pocket of every one of the twelve suits that hung from the dressing-room rails, as well as the two topcoats. Carver had half hoped for another, better-hidden safe but he didn’t find one, despite looking behind every picture for something wall-mounted, checking every cupboard and recess for an upright model to match that downstairs, and finally scuffing his feet across the carpet, as he had in the study, searching for a security vault sunk into the floor. There was no tell-tale unevenness wherever he looked or felt.

  Enough, Carver decided. He ached with tiredness: ached so much he couldn’t think straight, could hardly see straight. It had to be BHYF and NOXT. He didn’t know how or where to take it forward from here, but there had to be some significance. Would Janice Snow know? Or rather, would Janice Snow show him a way forward? At that moment he thought of one himself, feeling another spurt of self-criticism that it hadn’t occurred to him before. Northcote’s bank. That had to be a source, whatever the importance of BHYF and NOXT. It was unimaginable – like so much else was unimaginable – that Northcote didn’t have a safe-deposit facility: several safe-deposit facilities, in Manhattan banks. What better place – what more obvious place – to hide secrets but in a bank safe-deposit box?

  Carver was so tired he had literally to force himself to move, simply to walk back into the dressing room, where he found by feel more than sight the valise, in which he packed the five-year-old files from the nightstand and stumbled back downstairs into the study to add the will, diary and the four photographs of the laughing, dark-haired girl named Anna.

  Jane still lay on her back but there weren’t any more sobs. He let his clothes lie where they fell and eased as carefully as he could into bed beside her, anxious to avoid movement or contact that might awaken her. There was no instinctive, automatic shift at his presence.

  Who, wondered Carver, was Anna?

  ‘So what the hell happened!’ demanded Burcher, the soft voice unaccustomedly loud.

  ‘He wasn’t up to it. He croaked,’ said a crinkle-haired, heavily built man.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Burcher.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘I want to know because the Families want to know. Because they’re not happy.’ Burcher thought again how wise he’d been letting the people he represented know that he was strictly adhering to the pyramid procedure. There were far more people in the restaurant back room than when he’d last been there. The attitudes and atmosphere were bravado.

  ‘He’s my caporegime, Paulo Brescia,’ wheezed Emilio Delioci.

  ‘Were you there?’ Burcher asked the man and knew at once from the discomfited shift that he hadn’t been.

  ‘I sent people.’

  Burcher let the silence build and when he spoke he was quiet-voiced again but sounded every word, as if he were tasting it as he wanted them to
taste it. ‘Aren’t you aware of how important George Northcote was to the Families?’

  ‘He was ours,’ said Emilio Delioci.

  Burcher shook his head. ‘You were allowed to believe that as a mark of respect. Northcote created a system that benefited not just New York but every other Family in this country and so every other Family in this country is going to be as sore as they are in New York and that’s as sore as hell. You’re close to being put out of business.’

  ‘You can’t threaten us like that, asshole!’ said Brescia.

  ‘You want to put that to the test, asshole?’ challenged Burcher. ‘Let’s all of us get something very straight and very clearly understood. What I say is what New York say: you insult me like some bit player in The Godfather, you insult New York and if they feel like it – if they feel you are not doing what you’ve been asked to do, then …’ Burcher extended his hand towards Brescia and snapped his fingers dismissively, ‘… you’re gone. History that no one remembers. Have I made that very straight and very clear to everyone here?’

  ‘I don’t want any misunderstandings,’ said Delioci.

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Burcher. ‘So I’ll ask again. What happened?’

  ‘My people told Northcote they wanted what he’d held back,’ said Brescia, all the truculence gone. ‘He said he’d given you the message: that that was how it was going to be. They tried to persuade him. He suddenly went stiff and died on them. They made it look like an accident: that’s how the local radio and newspapers are reporting it.’

  ‘So somewhere there’s a load of stuff that could cause us a lot of harm?’

  The capo smirked and Burcher realized the man was playing to the rest of the audience in the room. Brescia said: ‘He was being persuaded. There’s a guy taking over the firm, married to Northcote’s daughter. Carver. He knows all about it. And a woman, Janice Snow, did the computer entries.’

  It could all be turned into a coup, Burcher decided. And if it could be, it would be his coup, not that of these half-assed small-timers. ‘What about the material Northcote was holding back?’

  ‘I told you, he passed out before they could get that out of him.’

  ‘What about in the house?’

  ‘There’s staff. We couldn’t get near it.’

  ‘Here’s what you’re going to do,’ said Burcher. ‘You’re going to send people back to Litchfield, to find some way in. You’re going to find out everything I need to know about this Carver guy. Use a legitimate private detective agency in the city. And you’re going to find out how much the woman, Janice Snow, knows. All that very straight and very clear?’

  ‘I don’t enjoy disrespect, Mr Burcher,’ said Delioci.

  ‘I mean no disrespect to you,’ said the lawyer. ‘I was told very specifically to pass on the feelings of those to whom we are all answerable and most specifically of all to ensure that everybody understood there are to be no more mistakes.’

  ‘I think you have done that,’ said the old man.

  ‘Then it’s been a good meeting,’ said Burcher. How much more, to his personal benefit, could he manipulate it? He wondered.

  Six

  John Carver thought he’d prepared himself for what he had to do but he hadn’t. He gasped, aloud, and felt his legs begin to go at the sight of George Northcote’s body on the gurney. He instinctively snatched out for the table upon which the body actually lay, pulling further aside even more of the covering sheet and seeing more awfulness and when he tried to speak he couldn’t. What he tried to say came out as an unintelligible hiss. He finally managed: ‘Oh dear God,’ his voice still a dry whisper.

  He felt Al Hibbert’s supportive hand at his elbow. The sheriff said: ‘Easy, John. Take it easy.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ croaked Carver, his voice better but only just. Stronger still he said: ‘What the hell happened to him? It’s like … it’s like he’s been flayed …’

  Northcote’s face was practically non-existent and there was virtually no skin and most of the lion’s mane had been torn off, scalping the man. There seemed to be no skin either on much of Northcote’s chest, from which Carver had tugged the sheet. It was flat, not a body shape at all, and there was a lot of bone and grey, slimed viscera.

  ‘The mower got him first, then the tractor,’ said Hibbert.

  ‘No,’ refused Carver. ‘It isn’t possible. I saw the rig. The mower blades were covered, shielded against just such an accident. If he fell backwards he wouldn’t have been cut … skinned like that. He’d have maybe broken an arm or a leg on the protective covering but that’s all. And going backwards would have taken him away from the tractor, when it tipped over, not underneath it …’

  ‘That’s what Pete and I thought at first,’ said Hibbert, nodding to Simpson on the other side of the slab. ‘We stayed up there past midnight last night: got engineers in. Here’s how we worked it out. George goes too close to the dip, throwing the tractor sideways. The force of it going tips the mowing rig, which runs on its own motor. When George hits it, it’s upside down, the blades going full belt. Does that to him. The mower is wider than the tractor that’s pulling it. For a moment or two – God knows how long – it prevents the tractor going right over but swings it back towards where George has been tossed …’

  ‘He would have most likely been dead by then … unconscious, certainly,’ broke in Simpson. Belatedly the medical examiner put the sheet back over the corpse. ‘This is an odd one, sure. But I get a dozen accidents like this every year, guys driving operating – machinery they’re not used to … something goes wrong … bang, they’re dead …’

  ‘The tractor is heavier than the rig, finally makes it give way … we’ve got photographs of how it bent, when it finally wasn’t able to stop it going right over,’ picked up Hibbert. ‘And when it goes, there’s George right under the whole fucking thing.’

  The perfect murder, thought Carver: the absolute, totally unprovable, perfect murder. Once you’re in, there’s only one way out. Out like George, in front of him although covered again by an inadequate sheet. Skinned alive. Not actually alive. Skinned by being thrust in and out of the mower blades to an agonizingly slow death. Would he have told them: given them what they wanted? He would have screamed. Been demented. Carver went to Simpson. ‘Charlie Jamieson examined him, day before yesterday. Says his blood pressure was so high he could have had a heart attack.’

  ‘Charlie called me, at breakfast,’ said Simpson. ‘George’s readings were at record-book levels.’

  Carver was sure he was snatching at straws but would have been glad of one no matter how slender. ‘Could he have had a stroke, because of it? Could that have been the reason he went too close to the dip and turned over?’

  Both men – the sheriff and the examiner – looked emptily back at Carver. Hibbert said: ‘I’m sorry, John. I just can’t quite get your point …’

  It was a point he couldn’t make, Carver realized. He felt physically encased, as if his ribcage was being crushed by his impotence like that of the man lying, flat-chested, on the metal table in front of him. ‘George knew his land: knew where he couldn’t take his rig. Knew how to handle it, too. There must have been a reason for his going too close this time.’ Why was he saying this? In front of a law officer! What self-justification was he trying to make, to absolve himself from the self-recrimination of not having tried to have George Northcote’s death properly investigated? Which he well knew couldn’t be properly investigated.

  ‘It happened because he knew his land so well,’ said Hibbert. ‘He wasn’t thinking, wasn’t taking enough care because he’d done it a hundred times before. All it needed was inches to make the mistake he made. The engineers we had up there last night are professionals. I’ll show you the photographs: the way they’re sure it happened.’

  The way it had been intended to be worked out, thought Carver. ‘There going to be an inquest?’

  ‘Into what, John?’ demanded Hibbert. ‘There’s nothing officially to inquire into.�
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  Carver felt the impotent straight-jacketed constriction again. ‘I can go ahead with the funeral arrangements then?’

  ‘As and when you wish,’ assured Hibbert, as if he were giving away a raffle prize. ‘It’s gotta be a shock, John. Hang in there.’

  Carver’s feeling now was of burning irritation at the filedaway clichés. ‘That’s what I’ll do, Al: hang in there.’ Hang in where, with whom?

  Hibbert said: ‘I’m sorry but I officially need to hear the words. Is the body you’ve just seen that of George Northcote?’

  Of course it was! But then again it wasn’t: wasn’t the bull-shouldered – most certainly not the bull-chested – lion’s-maned founder of the best known, most prestigious accountancy firm on Wall Street. ‘That’s the body of George Northcote.’

  Hibbert said: ‘I hate this. Of all the things I have officially to do, I hate this the most.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Simpson.

  ‘I’m sorry to have put you through it,’ apologized Hibbert. ‘I tried to indicate last night …’

  ‘I know,’ stopped Carver. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘We lost a good man here,’ said Simpson. ‘The best.’

  ‘That’s what he was,’ Hibbert hurried on. ‘The best. We’re sure as hell glad you and Jane are still here in the community, to carry on.’

  Carry on what? wondered Carver. Near to cliché himself, he said: ‘We’re still here.’

  ‘How is Jane?’ asked Simpson. ‘Charlie told me there was pretty heavy shock.’

  ‘She was still sedated when I left,’ said Carver. ‘Charlie’s with her but I need to get back. Is there anything else?’

  ‘We’re through,’ declared Hibbert.

  Simpson said: ‘I’ll tell my guys to expect a call from your funeral directors.’

  ‘It’ll come sometime today,’ promised Carver. An even-voiced, calm, conversational exchange, he thought. We’re talking about a murder, you fucking idiots! A murder committed by people professional enough to be able to skin a man alive but make it appear to these boondock boneheads a typical country mishap. I get a dozen accidents like this every year. Just another one of those accident stories, to go into the Litchfield folklore.