photograph away, before bringing Jane to the telephone.
‘The FBI?’
Federal Plaza. That’s all she had to do, get them to Federal Plaza! ‘That’s what John was doing, at Citibank on the day of the accident. Going to his safe deposit to get what he’d found, to pass it over to the FBI.’ She was too far gone now to worry about – count even – the lies and the deceits. As much for Jane as for herself, Alice thought. Sorry John: I’ve made a mess of it but Jane will be safe. ‘The agent-in-charge is named Gene Hanlan. It’s too early to call him yet. You can speak to him first thing.’ Get her out the room, on whatever pretext, just long enough to get rid of the damned photograph! Not a damned photograph. One of the few physical reminders she had of John. She’d take it with her, to her new life. She’d ignore them, whoever gave her the new identity, if they said she couldn’t keep it: that she had to surrender and abandon all and every trace of her past. She had to have that positive memento of John.
‘Whose cabin is this?’
Alice’s mind was completely skewed by Jane’s unexpected change of direction and without thought – without giving herself time to think, as she hadn’t virtually throughout this disastrous confrontation – she blurted: ‘Mine.’
‘What about your husband?’
‘I don’t have a husband.’ The sickness was there again, the churning low in her stomach, growing at the back of her throat.
Jane jerked her head back along the corridor. ‘I had to borrow one of your things… I didn’t realize I was due: so much happening, I guess. There was stuff in the cabinet, a razor. Cologne.’
The nausea worsened. Alice said: ‘A partner. Didn’t work out. It’s only just happened. I haven’t got around to clearing away the memories yet.’
‘I haven’t even begun to think about clearing away the memories yet.’
‘I’m sorry. About John, I mean,’ Alice forced herself to say. Today was the end. After today it would all be over. No embarrassment, about hypocrisy, about anything. Not the end, Alice corrected herself. This was the very beginning. The beginning of the rest of her life, lying, pretending, being someone she didn’t want to be but had to be, saying things she didn’t want to say, but had to say.
Jane looked down at her crumpled self. ‘I need to clean up.’
Her escape, seized Alice. There was nothing she could do about the razor or the cologne but the photograph was the important thing. The only thing. Why the sudden change in Jane’s attitude? It didn’t matter. Getting Jane out of the room was all that mattered. ‘You know where the bathroom is. And then we’ll get going.’
‘I need to make some calls, first.’
‘I want you to.’
‘I…’ started Jane, but stopped.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
It took Alice only seconds to snatch up John’s proud, joke-of-the-moment photograph and stuff it into a side drawer of the desk, beneath manuscripts and proofs of articles she had written and which she’d worked over, every time she and John had been here, all part of the fake domesticity, his reading by the amber, crackling fire while she did her job.
Alice was glad the main bathroom was en suite. She couldn’t have waited for Jane to emerge from the second one before being sick.
It had been a sleepless but productive night, the only potential problem a personal one for Gene Hanlan. Within an hour of his cut-off telephone conversation with Alice, Hanlan had organized an FBI plane to take him and a willing Rosemary Pritchard to Washington, for the CCTV loop to be photographically enhanced. It was while that was being done in the J. Edgar Hoover buildings that Hanlan endured the self-protective tirade from his regional supervisor, who’d failed to react to Hanlan’s previous visit and who argued now that the Bureau was inescapably locked into a kidnap investigation that Hanlan had decided upon without superior authorization, which was against regulations, and that his career hung upon the safe return of Jane Carver. The confrontation was shortened by Rosemary Pritchard’s positive identification of Alice Belling from just her features being brought up from beneath the veil, without needing to bother with hair colour change. The gynaecologist was, of course, able to provide the Princes Street address from her patient records and it was still early enough that night to obtain a judge’s order to enter the apartment. Hanlan returned to Manhattan with a five-man forensic team and six seconded field agents to join the waiting Ginette Smallwood and Patrick McKinnon and the NYPD squad headed by Barbara Donnelly.
Hanlan had restricted the entry into Princes Street to just himself and Barbara Donnelly, in addition to the scientists, and assigned McKinnon to organize an incident room at Federal Plaza. By the time Hanlan and the woman returned there, ahead of the scientists, computers, desks and banks of pinboards had been installed in the conference room for the still-to-arrive clerks and support staff. McKinnon had already started the pinboards, fixing enlarged photographs of the Catskills range and then reducing the focus to the still extensive region dominated by the town of Paterson, from which they had already traced Alice’s contact call.
There were also cots available for people to sleep in the mess.
It was 4.00 a.m. – by coincidence the time Jane Carver began edging out of bed in the Bearfort Mountains cabin – before the scientists arrived and a further hour before they produced the findings from their mobile laboratory facility. During that hour Hanlan declared the Bearfort Mountains their obvious target area, after seeing the location on the back of the now greatly enlarged photographs of Carver at the cabin.
‘So Alice knew John Carver,’ said McKinnon, examining the display. ‘I’ve got five bucks says it was in a kind of a cosy way, too.’
‘That put Jane at risk?’ queried Barbara, at once.
‘Might have done, from the jealous mistress syndrome, if Carver was still alive,’ agreed Ginette. ‘But he’s not.’
‘It’s not unusual for a wife and mistress to know each other,’ said the New York Police lieutenant.
‘All she keeps saying is that they need protection,’ reminded Hanlan.
‘So why doesn’t she come and get it, instead of running?’ demanded McKinnon.
‘Today could be the day,’ suggested Hanlan, hopefully. To the man leading the scientific team, whom he thought looked young enough to be his son, Hanlan said: ‘You got things to tell us?’
‘Worrying things,’ announced the man, at once. ‘We got there second.’
‘Shit!’ said McKinnon.
‘You sure?’ asked Hanlan and wished he hadn’t from the younger man’s sour look.
‘Very professional entry, one of the best I’ve seen,’ said the scientist. ‘We got picklock markings at the mouths of the mortice and the deadlock. We dismantled both. Very definite forced-entry groovings. The lobby mailbox had stuff dated more than two weeks ago. There’s not one single message remaining on the answering machine. It’s been wiped…’
‘Careless,’ remarked McKinnon.
‘Not if there was a voice that didn’t want to be recognized, trying to reach her,’ said Hanlan.
‘We’re shipping the tape back to Washington. They’ve got higher specification audio equipment than we carry. They may be able to pull something up.’
‘Fingerprints?’ asked Barbara Donnelly.
‘Just two sets,’ said the scientist. ‘Always together. All old.’
‘One Alice’s, one Carver’s,’ predicted Ginette.
‘Inevitably,’ agreed Hanlan. ‘How about untouched valuables: stuff worth stealing?’
The scientist nodded. ‘Some jewellery, a diamond ring, in an old setting, could be a family heirloom. Some gold chains. Television, video, computer… we’re shipping the computer back to Washington, too, to get the hard drive looked at. People don’t realize how much stays behind, even if you think you’ve deleted it…’ The man hesitated. ‘You want my guess, the guys who got in before us were doing what we’re trying to do. Find Alice.’
‘And Jane,’ corrected McKinnon.
‘And there’s something that just might help,’ offered the scientist, turning to the pinboard and the grinning photograph of John Carver. ‘See this…?’ he demanded, pointing to an image in the background, among the trees. ‘Doesn’t show so well, scarcely at all in fact, at the size of the prints in the apartment. Looks like a fallen branch. It isn’t. That’s the tail of a Volkswagen Beetle. Could be white or grey. Definitely light-coloured. Nothing else visible
