opening windows, hurrying him back to the car for what they hadn’t been able to bring in the first time. No, he thought suddenly, moving through the living room into the kitchen. Rebecca hadn’t been neat and tidy. Organized, certainly, written-out shopping lists for stores and markets listed in convenient order, but not like this, not as if the house had been made ready, prepared, for a prospective buyer. In quick recollection he looked into the double sink, then the empty dishwasher and finally to the coffee pot, opening it to confirm the filter chamber was clean.
‘What?’ asked Benton.
‘On the Sunday morning, when Rebecca came to pick me up,’ remembered Parnell. ‘I asked her if she wanted coffee, because I was just making some. She said she’d already had some. And juice. There’s no cups or glasses…’
‘And the coffee pot’s empty and clean,’ Dingley accepted.
Parnell led the way into the den, dominated by the television and music system and saw the regimented books and the orderly magazine arrangement and then up to the bedrooms – the bedroom he and Rebecca had occupied and loved in and partially discovered each other in first – and made himself look around it and open and close drawers, although he didn’t know now what for, and then he looked around the other two bedrooms, knowing even less what he was supposed to find out of place – or, rather, wrongly in place, before he retreated downstairs.
‘Well?’ demanded Dingley.
‘It’s an impression,’ said Parnell. ‘That’s all it can be.’
‘That’s all we’re asking for.’
‘No,’ said Parnell. ‘It’s not right. Doesn’t feel right. That’s all I can say. This doesn’t look, feel, like the house that Rebecca left that Sunday morning to pick me up…’ He stopped, at another recollection. ‘That’s why the coffee pot’s wrong… no cup in the washer. She was late, said we had a drive to get where we were going – she wouldn’t tell me where we were going – in time. It was in time to get a table, for lunch, although she wouldn’t tell me that, either. If she was late, in a hurry, she wouldn’t have cleared away, would she?’
‘Not unless she was particularly fastidious,’ said Benton.
‘Rebecca wasn’t particularly fastidious,’ said Parnell.
‘Then no, she wouldn’t.’ agreed Dingley.
‘Where’s this all got us?’ demanded Jackson.
‘We don’t know, not yet,’ said Pullinger. ‘We’re looking forward to something we can understand that does get us somewhere.’
Once more it was pointlessly too late for Parnell to drive out to McLean. He telephoned from the apartment that he would be in the following morning before going out again to shop uninterestedly for essentials, bread and milk and packaged meals he could heat in seconds in the microwave. He also, just as uninterestedly, bought three litre-sized bottles of screw-topped red wine, which he thought was as much as he could carry. On his way back to the apartment he saw one man whom he thought might be watching him, but there wasn’t any longer a stomach lurch. Before he reached him the downtown bus arrived and the man got on it.
Back in the apartment Parnell unpacked and opened one of the bottles of wine, slumping with the glass between his cupped hands, reviewing the day. He hadn’t done well – he had, in fact, been stupid, losing his temper. Too late now, for self-recrimination. He’d got it wrong, again, and deserved Jackson’s rebuke, and next time he’d try to remember and behave better. He had little doubt there would be a next time: maybe even a time after that. Bethesda had disorientated him, although not in the way Jackson suggested the FBI agents had expected him to be disorientated. He hadn’t suddenly collapsed, said anything or done anything, on being somewhere where he’d been with Rebecca, to indicate any guilt or awareness of something he hadn’t told the investigators. The disorientation had actually been far deeper than any of them had imagined. On the near-wordless return to Washington, Parnell had confronted a truth he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself, let alone to anyone else. He didn’t think he’d loved Rebecca. He had feelings, of course – maybe, in time, he would even have come to love her, although that was the most scourging of uncertainties. But not that Sunday when he’d unthinkingly talked of their living together. And not now, not ever. So, he had a lie to live, pitied by the few who knew him here, as someone who’d lost a woman whom he’d planned to marry. How difficult, he wondered, would that be to live with? Something else he didn’t know, like so much else.
He jumped, startled, at the telephone, recognizing his mother’s voice as soon as he’d answered. ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded at once.
‘You know. I told you. It’s all right.’
‘It’s not all right! I’ve been questioned. So have people at Cambridge.’
‘What!’ Some of Parnell’s wine spilled, with the urgency with which he came up out of his chair.
‘Two Americans. FBI, from the London embassy. They wanted to know if you were political. If you belonged to any organizations. That’s what they asked the people at Cambridge. I’ve had two calls, one from Alex Bell, your old tutor. Everyone here is worried about you.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about. It’s an unusual investigation.’
‘I want to come out.’
‘No,’ refused Parnell. ‘It’s not necessary and I don’t want you to.’ If he were a target, so would she be, he supposed.
‘Who’s looking after you?’
‘I’m looking after myself, very well.’
‘Why not come back? Quit and come back?’
‘That isn’t a question I thought I’d hear you ask. At this stage of the enquiry I doubt I’d be allowed to leave the country anyway. And I don’t want – or intend – to leave the country.’
‘There was an attempt to frame you once. How do you know it won’t happen again? Succeed this time?’
‘Because it won’t. I’ve got a good lawyer and I’m not going to be framed.’
‘I didn’t like being questioned as I was, as if you were still a suspect or in some way involved in terrorism.’
‘Is that what they talked about, terrorism?’
‘Of course it was! Asked about foreign countries you’d visited, how long you’d stayed there. That’s what they asked everyone else here, the same questions.’
‘I’m sorry. Call me back, with the names of everyone who was bothered. I’ll call them and apologize. And I’m sorry to you, too. I didn’t imagine it would come to that.’
‘They’re hysterical, about terrorism.’
‘Everybody is.’
‘Not everybody,’ she contradicted. ‘You want anything? Money?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You’ll tell me if you do.’
‘Yes,’ lied Parnell.
‘Call me. I want you to call me every day.’
‘Not every day, Mother. Often.’
‘I want your lawyer’s name and contact numbers. Just in case.’
‘Just in case of what?’
‘Just in case.’
Nineteen
It was a welcome change for Dwight Newton to enter the Dubette corporate building on Wall Street at the same time as everyone else and take a public elevator to the executive floor. He’d been able to catch a later shuttle, too, but he’d still allowed himself time for waffles and maple syrup, unsure if the emergency meeting of the parent board and its subsidiaries would run over lunch time. He entered Edward C. Grant’s office through the secretarial cordon, to smiles and insistences it was good to see him again. The moment Newton was inside, without any greeting from behind his enormous desk, Grant demanded: ‘Bring me up to date. I need to know everything!’
