Jane held back until they got outside. Then she whirled on Carver and said: ‘Thanks a whole lot!’
‘Don’t blame me for what happened back there! You fouled it up, not me!’
‘You didn’t help!’
‘You heard what she said – why don’t we really talk this through? Which we didn’t. And haven’t. This is irrational, Jane. I know your grief and I know your loss. But this isn’t the way to compensate.’ He was aware of curiosity from people having to manoeuvre around them on the sidewalk. Aware, too, that this wasn’t the time to ask her about any safe-deposit facilities in her father’s private bank, Carver’s last hope of a more complete dossier.
Jane began, at last, to cry. But silently and, unlike the first day, with no racking sobs. She let the tears run, unchecked. Her nose, too, and Carver gently wiped her face, angry at the now greater curiosity of passing people. She said: ‘I’m trying to hang on, John, I’m looking for something to hang on to.’
‘How about me?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How about hanging on to you?’
Carver had the cab detour to East 62nd Street, glad Jane changed her mind about returning with him to the office. Having tried three times to call Alice he didn’t understand why the message on her answering machine had changed. Or why, even more worryingly, she hadn’t replied. He tried a fourth time from the back of the taxi and got the same strange-voiced reply – strange-voiced but to him easily identifiable as her – and couldn’t comprehend why she didn’t confirm her name or number in her message: she was a working journalist to whom the telephone was a major source of commissions.
He was even more unsettled by Jane’s kerb-side collapse and her unarguing acceptance of the nurses’ help when they’d got to the apartment. How close was Jane to a much more severe breakdown? By finally acknowledging the need for nurses, Jane was acknowledging a problem. Would she also acknowledge the need for a psychiatrist? He could talk to Dr Newton, from the office. Have Newton make a visit to the apartment and, if he considered it necessary, the doctor could broach the idea, to put the thought into Jane’s mind ahead of his suggesting it.
If there was some mental condition, could he risk talking to Jane about safe-deposit boxes? Not that there was a risk in talking about such boxes. The danger, in Jane’s fragile state, was what those boxes, if they existed, might hold. And Carver wasn’t thinking at that precise moment of incriminating evidence of long-term and massive money laundering. He was thinking about photographs of a beautiful, laughing girl named Anna. If Northcote had left the photographs so easily discovered at Litchfield and at West 66th Street – needing nostalgically to remind himself, Carver presumed – or in the firm’s vault, what was there likely to be where Northcote would have believed only he would ever have access? But he had to get to it, if it existed. And for precisely that reason. The more he thought about it the more logical it was that a personal safe deposit was the only place Northcote would have believed secure and secret from everyone except himself. And there had to be one, Carver decided, letting his speculation run on. He knew from the Chase Manhattan ledger that Northcote had been to the firm’s vault on the day of his Harvard Club encounter. And if he’d handed over then what he’d retrieved he – and Janice Snow – might well still be alive. So where else but to his own bank would he have gone, in between the Chase Manhattan at 11.30 a.m. and the Harvard Club, at 1 p.m.?
So engrossed was he that Carver physically jumped at the sound of his own cellphone, almost dropping it as he fumbled it from his pocket.
‘Mrs Carver told me you would both be coming back,’ said Hilda.
‘She’s not, after all,’ said Carver. ‘I’m on my way, though. Five blocks maybe but the traffic’s like it always is.’
‘I took it upon myself to arrange something, knowing you’d be here around this time.’
‘What?’ demanded Carver, apprehensively.
‘There was a call from a lawyer, representing those companies Mr Northcote kept on,’ replied Hilda.
‘What’s the name?’ demanded Carver, hearing the crack in his own voice.
‘He didn’t give one, although I asked, obviously. He said it was extremely important that he talk to you as soon as possible but that he was leaving New York tomorrow. So I gave him an appointment at five this afternoon. You’ll be here well in time for that.’
Run, instinctively thought Carver. Then, delay: delay at least until he could prepare himself. Get to Northcote’s personal box. ‘He leave a number: a way to contact him?’
‘I asked him for one, of course. Just in case. He said he was moving around the city and couldn’t be reached.’
Carver looked at his watch. He had just twenty-five minutes, he saw. Abruptly, ahead, the traffic cleared.
Fourteen
By the time Carver reached the office he had fifteen minutes left and the only precaution upon which he had decided took just five of them, because everything was already set up. All that was left for him to do was wait and try to anticipate, which he initially did but quickly gave up because he wasn’t anticipating he was imagining and the image upon which his mind settled was the near-faceless body of George Northcote. Carver forced the panic back, consciously breathing deeply as if pulling the courage into himself. He could do it, if he didn’t panic: if he didn’t conjure up mental horror pictures. His stomach churned, physically, and a few times audibly. There was no visible shake when he looked down at his hands, lying before him on the desk. He lifted them, holding them out straight in front of him. Still no shake. He felt his face. He wasn’t sweating, either, although he felt hot. He wiped a handkerchief across his face all the same, knowing he wouldn’t be able to do so later. He didn’t know – which was the root of his fear – what he was going to be able to do later.
The lawyer who hadn’t left a name arrived precisely on time and as Hilda ushered him into Carver’s room Carver thought at once of his memorial service reflection about professionally invisible people. In a crowd this man would have been practically see-through. He was medium height and slightly built and everything about him was muted: muted grey, single-breasted suit, grey-on-grey patterned tie, a white shirt. It was impossible to gauge the man’s age from the expressionless, unlined face. There was a strange, oddly unmoving smoothness in the manner in which he walked, a progress rather than an actual walk, the glide of an invisible, ghostlike – or was it ghost- making? – man. Carver had intended to remain seated, as Northcote had shown his superiority at their confrontation, but had hurriedly to scramble to his feet totally losing the planned impression – when the inconspicuous man stopped the offered handshake halfway over the desk, making Carver rise to it. He at once turned to examine available chairs, to take the one that put himself directly – confrontationally – across the desk from Carver, and said: ‘It’s good of you to see me at such short notice.’ The polite, ingratiating voice was soft, worryingly close to being inaudible, with no discernible accent.
‘Particularly as you weren’t able to leave a name.’ Carver was pleased at his own hopefully forceful tone, evenly pitched but demanding, someone unaccustomed to being treated inconsiderately.
A reasonable attempt at playing the affronted man, Burcher decided. But only just. He rose, taking a prepared card from his top pocket, but offered it across the desk in such a way that Carver had once again to stand to accept it.
He was going up and down like the other man’s marionette, accepted Carver. The two-line inscription on the plain pasteboard read Stanley Burcher, Attorney at Law. There was no address or contact details. Carver at once remembered the regular entries in Northcote’s diary, S-B. Could he have misread the intervening squiggle as an ampersand to mean Northcote was meeting two people when it had only been this man, Stanley Burcher?
The lawyer said: ‘The name wouldn’t have meant anything. I knew the company names would.’ He was unsure how long to permit the accountant to imagine his superiority. It was important not to begin wrongly. They were going to have to deal with each other for a long time, years, so there had at least to be an amicable working relationship, if not friendship. Until the very end Burcher had imagined something approaching friendship between Northcote and himself. Mutual respect, certainly.
What, Carver wondered, was the other man’s real name? And how many other people had ever posed themselves the same query? Impossible, probably, to guess: as so much else – everything else – in which he was
