the Isis. He was free. But then a thought intruded. The butler? He had no memory of that at all. Had he really got that drunk? Or was this the amnesia Rosemary Hyde had taunted him about?
He stood up and faced the detective. ‘If I’m not a suspect, does that mean you won’t be treating this case as murder?’
‘You’re not an official suspect, is what I said.’
James looked down at the table that separated them. To his shame, he realized that it was only now he was not defending himself that he was fully taking in what had happened. A man was dead; a man who had taken what he clearly felt was a great risk to meet him; a man who had told him I can help you; a man who had become feverish with anxiety in the restaurant, in the last hours of his life.
‘And, Detective, you’re sure those photographs I saw were not in his briefcase when you found Lund this morning?’
‘When his wife found Lund this morning,’ Riley corrected him. ‘No, there were no photos. Our men have searched the place thoroughly: no sign of any homo pictures, no magazines, nothing. You may be off the hook for murder, but that doesn’t make your story about last night the truth. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you, Dr Zennor.’
James eyed him steadily. ‘I’d like you to keep an eye out for my wife. No one will tell me where she is.’
‘That’s between you and the university. I’ve got work to do.’ With that, Riley offered a brief handshake and ushered him out of the room, leaving James Zennor relieved, puzzled — and absolutely clear where he had to go.
Chapter Twenty-two
He had once heard Bernard Grey joke that the best-informed people in England were the tea ladies at the Palace of Westminster: they overheard everything. It wasn’t just hatred born of hindsight that made that quip grate on James. He had found it irritating even before he had discovered that Grey was centrally involved in the plot to spirit his wife and child to North America without his knowledge. Because the joke rested on what was meant to be a shared assumption, that it was surprising, and comical, to imagine tea ladies knowing anything about anything.
Still, grudgingly, James had to admit that there was a grain of truth in the old bastard’s little apercu. If you wanted to know what was happening in college — which undergraduate had been caught cheating in his prelims, which fellow had been found masturbating in chapel — then there was no point idling about high table. The place to go was the porter’s lodge, where the true authorities were to be found.
He couldn’t do that in Yale, a place he had never visited until two days ago. He knew no one here. Except for one man, whom he needed to thank anyway.
James knocked on the door of 459 College Street. In the rush of his arrest this morning, he had barely been given time to get dressed, let alone pick up the key to the Elizabethan Club he had been given. But the butler was in and opened the door to him. As he did so, James realized that he did not know the man’s name.
‘Ah, good morning-’ James met his eye.
‘It’s Walters, sir.’ The dark skin of the butler’s face was creased with age; he was much older than James had first appreciated. ‘Good morning to you too, Dr Zennor.’
‘I’m very grateful to you for what you did for me, umm, last-’
‘There’s no need to say anything, sir. We look after our guests here.’
‘But what you told the police; it’s largely because of you that they released me.’
‘I just told the truth, Dr Zennor. They asked me and I told them.’
‘Well, I’m grateful all the same.’ James paused. ‘Could we…?’ He gestured at the main drawing room, as if to introduce a topic that was best not discussed standing in the doorway.
Once safely out of idle earshot, James said, ‘I wondered whether you might be able to help me track something down. A pin.’
‘A pin, sir?’
‘For a lapel. One was shown to me this morning, and my guess is that it’s something a Yale man would recognize immediately, but it meant nothing to me.’ The butler nodded, as if awaiting guidance. ‘It was an Egyptian cross, you know with the loop at the top?’ James sketched the pattern in the air. ‘Inside the loop was an animal head. A dog or something. Perhaps a wolf.’
Walters looked away, weighing what he had just heard. At last he looked up. ‘I think I know what you were looking at, Dr Zennor. And you’re right. It would be recognizable to most Yale men.’
‘What is it?’
‘What you had there was a wolf’s head pin. And Wolf’s Head is one of the most powerful secret societies in the university.’
Chapter Twenty-three
James wanted to get started right away, but the butler steered him to a mirror. ‘With all due respect, sir…’
The reflection that came back was of a man dishevelled, unshaven and rudely stirred out of a hangover. He had missed one of the buttons of his shirt. Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be persuaded that Walters was right: he needed to pause, wash and eat properly before doing anything else.
The bathtub at the top of the house was tiny for a man his size, but stepping into it still felt like a great luxury. The idea of relaxing in a bath of hot water gave him only fleeting pleasure, the warmth and comfort instantly replaced by guilt. From the moment he had discovered Florence and Harry gone that morning, more than three weeks ago, he had rushed to find them. Even when he was sitting at Crewe Station, waiting for his connection to Liverpool, or when he spent those long days and nights on board ship for Canada, or on those slow, rattling trains into the United States he had not let himself relax: he had paced the railway platform and the ship’s deck or drummed his fingers like a man in a desperate hurry. He had maintained the urgency he had felt that first moment, when he had dashed out of the front door of their house in Norham Gardens, calling out their names. He might have crossed an ocean and half the world, but he still felt the fierce urgency of a man who had just lost his family. And stopping, even for ten minutes in the bath, felt like a kind of betrayal. Worse, it frightened him, suggesting a time when he might get used to being without his wife and his son, a future in which he was fated to be as alone as he was now.
He looked down at his shoulder, the bone collapsed, the skin stretched. As the water in the bath began to cool, James remembered how his son, then a baby, had once used his little hand to touch that damaged patch of him, his infant face curious. Harry had never recoiled from the sight of the scar because he had never known anything else.
James realized that his eyes were stinging. Reflexively, to make it stop, he sank his face into the warm water.
Dressing as fast as he could, he made for the Owl Shop. He would pretend his purpose was merely to offer thanks to the bartender who had vouched for his presence there last night. But he was looking for someone else. And to his relief he was there: the young man he had met on his first visit, now polishing glasses.
After a short greeting and a little small-talk, James came to his question. He began elliptically. ‘So what’s all this about secret societies, then?’
‘You mean like Skull and Bones and all that jazz?’
‘Maybe. Assume I know nothing.’
‘Oh, well I’m not a member or anything. Most of them are for juniors and seniors.’ When he saw James’s puzzled expression, he smiled. ‘Oh, you really do know nothing. OK. Freshman, first year; sophomore, second year; junior, third year; senior, fourth year.’
‘So once you’re in your last two years, you can join.’
