of the proceeds with the Osborne Trust Company for his use. Her brother had suggested she join him in California. He was wealthy, quite capable of supporting her, and she intended to take up teaching again. She urged him to reconsider a college education on his return, to which end she would be leaving him her library of books.
He could tell from the deterioration of her normally neat italic hand that she was devastated and fighting hard to hold herself together.
When his companions joined him in the cloister, Conrad made some excuse and went in search of a pub. He drank several pints of strong Norfolk ale then picked a fight with a loud American bombardier on twenty-four-hour stand-down from one of the local airbases.
It was a few weeks before he realized that the greatest fear of his childhood had finally come to pass, that as he waited in line at Ellis Island, fresh off the boat from France, the doctor had indeed marked him with that stick of blue chalk, leading him away, never to see his father and Antton again.
It came to him then that he was alone in the world.
Conrad woke with a start, orienting himself. He brushed the straw from his clothes and climbed down the ladder from the hayloft. He had planned on slipping away a little before daybreak, but the morning sun was already casting long shadows in the garden as he crept from the barn.
He could make out the sounds of the doctor and his family stirring in the house, obliging him to duck below the level of the window sills as he left.
He felt sharp, alert, which was good. The sleep had helped, sweet and unexpected.
He asked Earl Griffin to drop him off at the head of the track, and he settled the fare.
He saw the tire marks in the sand immediately. Closer examination revealed that there were two sets—the same vehicle coming and going, suggesting that the visitor had left. But his hand still closed around the gun in his hip pocket as he set off through the pitch pines towards his house.
The vehicle had pulled to a halt just before the trees gave way to the dunes. The track was too narrow at this point to turn a motor car around, and the visitor had been obliged to reverse it back to the highway, but not before abandoning it first and continuing on foot.
The footprints stood out clearly in the sand, the area around them smoothed unnaturally flat by Conrad the evening before. It hadn’t taken him long to perform the task: simply a matter of dragging some heavy, tarred pound-trap netting behind the Model A.
The footprints veered off to the right, into the dunes, but Conrad made no attempt to follow them. Neither did he glance in their direction in case he was being observed. It wasn’t important; he knew where they were headed.
He picked them up again in the broad sweeps of leveled sand in and around the buildings. The visitor had entered the compound from the west, skirting the shack, making for the whaleboat house. He had then crossed to the barn, entering it. From here he’d returned to the shack, circling, keeping his distance, approaching only twice— once to examine the small lean-to at the back which housed the generator, the second time to inspect the corner of the roof where the telephone cable entered the building.
Conrad knew then that, if they had to, they were willing to go all the way in order to silence him.
He should have felt fear, some modicum of anxiety at the very least, but he didn’t. It was with a pleasing sense of anticipation that he reached for the phone and asked the operator to put him through to a number in Sag Harbor.
Thirty
‘Tom? Are you there?’
The voice entering his head through the earpiece of the receiver had grown distant, hollow, strangely remote.
‘Tom?’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Hollis.
‘I checked each sample twice against the master. None of them match.’
‘One of them has to.’
‘They’re not even close. Believe me.’
‘Okay,’ conceded Hollis.
‘Are you on to something?’
‘I was. Thanks anyway, Ed.’
‘Any time, you know that.’
‘Sure.’
He hung up, pleased to silence the unmistakable note of pity creeping into Ed’s voice.
How much more saddened would his old colleague from the crime lab have been if he’d seen the whole pathetic picture behind the favor he’d just performed: Hollis creeping through the grounds of the Wallaces’ house in the dead of night, heart pounding, ears straining for the sounds of detection as he scraped away with the chisel, dropping the flakes of paint into the envelopes. Four motor cars, four envelopes dispatched express to the Broome Street crime lab for comparison with the sample taken at the time of the hit-and-run.
Ed had fired up his spectroscope, the two electrodes blazing white over the sample dish, the prisms seizing the light, breaking it up and firing it down the ten-foot tunnel on to the photographic negative.
The machine had spoken. It had all been a waste of time.
A match would have offered the breakthrough piece of evidence—the
He should have seen it coming. Only a fool wouldn’t have got rid of the incriminating vehicle by now. Odds were
