‘What about your political views, Mr Parnell?’ asked Benton, abruptly.
Parnell laughed, genuinely amused. ‘I don’t have the right to vote in this country, which I’m sure you know. In England I voted for the Liberal Democrats, the smallest of the three English political parties. I have never been a member of any radical political movement or organization, am not a Muslim nor do I subscribe to any fanatical Islamic movement or jihads or suicide bombings…’ He looked at Jackson. ‘Anything I’ve left out?’
‘I don’t think so,’ frowned the lawyer, uncomfortably.
Benton said: ‘That wasn’t a question to be treated lightly.’
‘I wasn’t treating it lightly. I was treating it with the contempt it deserved.’ Parnell felt his lawyer’s warning pressure against his arm and recognized his returning confidence was tipping over into arrogance.
‘Did you have a key to the Bethesda house?’ asked Dingley, in one of his sudden directional changes.
‘No,’ said Parnell.
‘Did Ms Lang have a key to your apartment?’ asked Benton.
‘No.’
‘You moved back and forth, between the two?’ queried Dingley, rhetorically. ‘You were going to set up home together. Yet you didn’t have keys to each other’s homes?’
‘It never came up, as a problem. We’d have got around to it, when we started to live together – arriving and leaving at different times.’ He was making another bad impression, Parnell accepted. He had to correct it – correct it and try to discover what, if anything, they had learned. Find out why they were so obviously treating him with the suspicion that they were. Before either agent could speak, he said: ‘What about Bethesda?’
‘Sir?’ questioned Benton, in return.
‘Had it been entered, before you got there with Giorgio Falcone’s key?’
There was the familiar exchange of looks between the two men.
‘We think so,’ said Dingley.
‘Was it or wasn’t it?’ insisted Parnell, impatiently.
‘Looks that way,’ admitted Benton.
‘ How does it look that way?’ persisted Parnell.
‘Like I think I told you before, everything was very neat. Too neat,’ said Dingley.
‘Which brings us to our request,’ picked up Benton. ‘We need fingerprints… for elimination. Yours will be about the place, won’t they?’
‘My client’s not required to provide them, unless he agrees,’ intruded Jackson, at last.
‘Of course I agree,’ said Parnell, before the FBI group had a chance to reply. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Addressing the two agents, he said: ‘You think something was taken from Rebecca’s house?’
Benton gave another of his open-palmed gestures. ‘We’ve got no way of telling. We don’t know what was there in the first place.’
‘You’ve got more to be suspicious about than the fact that the house was too tidy,’ challenged Jackson. ‘That’s not even forensic. That’s soap-opera bullshit.’
Dingley smiled, bleakly. ‘Not quite, sir. There wasn’t an item of furniture, an article anywhere, that hadn’t been lifted, looked at, and replaced. But not exactly put back in the right place where it had been before it was shifted: just off-centre marks in the carpeting, that carpeting not properly re-secured where it had been lifted, to look beneath. Off-centre again where kitchen appliances had been replaced. Like I said, too neat – always too neat.’
‘Was Ms Lang particularly neat?’ asked Benton.
‘Not particularly,’ remembered Parnell. ‘She didn’t live in a mess but the house was lived in.’
‘Magazines, newspapers, wouldn’t have been carefully stacked and aligned? Books always in the shelves for the titles to be read, none with dust-cover flaps used as bookmarks?’ said Dingley.
Parnell shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘And?’ persisted Jackson.
This time Dingley looked back at the FBI lawyer, who nodded and said: ‘OK.’
Dingley said: ‘There wasn’t any personal mail. Forensics are thorough. Suggested we check the mail drop, for the Monday Ms Lang was found murdered. Mailman remembers three, one package bigger than the other two, which were ordinary letter size. There wasn’t any mail when we got there. Or any that our forensics guys could find.’
‘And?’ repeated Jackson.
Benton said to Parnell, ‘You ever write to Ms Lang? A note, a proper letter maybe?’
Parnell didn’t respond at once, thinking. ‘No,’ he said, almost surprised. ‘I never did – never had to, because we worked in the same place – not even a note. But why?’
‘There wasn’t a single personal letter in the house,’ said Dingley. ‘Utility bills, credit card receipts, all carefully filed. But not a single personal note, from anyone listed in the address book we found…’ He looked back again to Edwin Pullinger, for another permissive nod. ‘And the telephone answering equipment in Ms Lang’s machine was brand new. Hadn’t been utilized before, on any call.’
‘What’s the significance of that?’ demanded Parnell.
‘Answering-machine loops are used and rewound to be wiped and rewound and wiped again and again and again,’ said Dingley. ‘Our forensics guys can recover things from loops that are supposed to have been wiped, like they can with computer hard disks. Ms Lang’s loop had been taken, a new one put in its place.’
‘It was her call on my machine that saved me,’ remembered Parnell, softly.
‘Which brings us to another request,’ chimed in Benton.
Parnell stared at the man, refusing the ventriloquist’s-dummy role.
Finally Benton said: ‘Would you come to Bethesda, to the house, with us – look for anything you think might be wrong, anything that makes you curious… anything out of place…?’
Jackson said: ‘That’s a hell of an unusual request.’
‘This is a hell of an unusual case,’ said Pullinger, coming into the discussion for the first time. ‘You can refuse, of course.’
‘No!’ said Parnell, hurriedly. ‘Of course I’ll come: try to do whatever you want me to do. But I didn’t – don’t – know the house well – know where Rebecca kept things. What might be missing or what might not. Sure I stayed there, but it wasn’t my place, not with my things in it. I’ve told you, it was all too new. We hadn’t… we hadn’t got that far…’
‘We’d appreciate it,’ said Dingley.
‘Unannounced!’ insisted Jackson. ‘My client will not go to Ms Lang’s house as a media exhibit.’
‘The investigation is out of the hands of the DC Metro police,’ reminded Pullinger pointedly.
‘I’ve got to have your guarantee, Ed,’ insisted Jackson. ‘We pitch up to a media reception and blinding lights, we ain’t stopping the car. I’m not having my client publicly exposed or compromised in any way.’
‘We’ve no intention of publicly exposing or compromising your client in any way,’ retorted the other lawyer, stiffly.
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Jackson, unrepentant. ‘When we pull up, I still want to see the surroundings to Rebecca Lang’s house emptier than a Kansas prairie in December.’
It was going too fast and in the wrong direction, Parnell decided, with things still unresolved in his mind irrespective of everyone else’s uncertainties. ‘I still don’t understand the Air France flight number.’
‘As I told you, that’s our biggest problem, too,’ said Benton.
‘How’d you check that flight didn’t carry anything for Dubette in the last six months?’
‘Air France dispatch, here and in Paris,’ said Dingley. ‘We’re as thorough as our forensics people, in our own way.’
‘I’m sure you are,’ said Parnell, unconcerned at getting under the other man’s skin. ‘You double-check, with Dubette… with their security division, I guess?’
‘That’s who are responsible for the Dulles airport collection, security,’ agreed Benton.
‘That isn’t the answer to my question,’ said Parnell.
‘Dubette security have no record of any Dubette-addressed consignment on AF209 in the last six months,’ recited Dingley.
‘There is another inconsistency, here, Mr Parnell,’ said Benton. ‘One we were coming to. You told us that Ms Lang didn’t understand why she was being bypassed by something from Paris? But that, whatever it was, it hadn’t
