‘And can you remember anything that happened there, anything my wife might have said, that could perhaps explain where she is?’
Just for a second, the woman looked at her feet, a fleeting aversion of the eyes that suggested — what? — guilt, embarrassment, James was not sure. ‘Anything at all, Mrs Goodwin.’
‘Well, it’s rather awkward but-’
At that moment she gave a slight jump, shaken by a sudden bellowed roar from the exercise ground as the boys shouted a slogan: ‘Straight backs and good posture are essential to good health!’ The instructor cupped his ear, a pantomime gesture suggesting they had shouted too quietly. They tried it again, this time at the tops of their just-broken voices.
‘They’re very serious about all matters physical here, I’ve noticed,’ Mrs Goodwin said with a smile. ‘If they’re not hiking, they’re wrestling or playing basketball. Thomas always enjoyed playing cricket, but this is-’
‘You were about to tell me something, Mrs Goodwin. About Florence at the Divinity School.’ He paused. ‘You said it was awkward.’
‘Yes, I did.’ She looked towards the boys, about to embark on a run around the perimeter. ‘It’s a question, really. Tell me, Dr Zennor, have you ever written to your wife?’
‘What? Yes, of course. Every day, as soon as I knew she had come to Yale. I sent several letters from Liverpool, then perhaps a dozen from Canada. I’d stored them up on the ship. I’ve sent some from here too, not that I’ve got an address. I’ve just been sending them “care of Yale University”.’
‘Oh I see.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘That confuses me rather.’
‘I don’t understand. Why?’
‘I don’t like to be rude, Dr Zennor. And this really is none of my business.’
‘What? Tell me.’
‘Well, my husband’s been doing the same. Addressing his letters “care of Yale”. And they’ve all arrived, every one of them. There were several items of post waiting for me and the children at the Divinity School. But I’m afraid… ’
‘Yes?’
‘Florence had nothing from you. Not even a card. She was quite distressed about it. We all sympathized as best we could. Now that I see you here, having travelled all this way, I realize we must have got the wrong end of the stick. But I’m afraid at the time we did think it a rather poor show.’
Chapter Thirty
He sprinted back to the school office, asking the secretary to order him a taxi as soon as she could. His head was pounding.
He was not paranoid, he was not deluded: something dark and dangerous and awful was going on here and, God knows why or how, Florence and Harry were at the centre of it. An image of his son, cowering and terrified, entered, unbidden, into his mind. Little, beautiful Harry. Oh God, what on earth had they done to his boy? And what did they want with the woman he loved?
There was no writing this off as a coincidence. At first, maybe, it could have been just that. A missing document in the files, a mislaid sheet of paper: it could happen to anybody. But this: concrete proof that his letters to Florence had been intercepted. Who would want to do such a thing? And why?
As he paced by the school entrance, round and round that sign — ‘The Breeding up of Hopeful Youths’ — he could feel again the clamminess of Lund’s hand as the man, sweating frantically, had clutched his own. You have no idea what you’ve walked into here, do you? You’ve stumbled into something much bigger than you realize. Bigger and more dangerous.
The poor bastard wasn’t deluded. He was damn right. This was something dangerous enough to have cost Lund’s own life — and perhaps, who knows, it posed an equally grave threat to James’s wife and child. Unless it was already too late…
He shook his head, as if the action would shake away such an insupportable thought. He had been such a fool and the worst kind, a clever fool; foolish, indeed, because clever. The signs had been there from the beginning: that rattle of the letterbox the morning after Florence had disappeared. They had been tampering with his post even then, getting to the card from his wife before he could, deliberately depriving him of the few hours in which he might have got to her in time. He should have suspected a plot then — a careful, meticulous plot. But did he? No. He was too bloody rational for that, too reasonable. There had to be another explanation, that was what he had kept telling himself. Another, more sensible, rational explanation for why his wife was missing from those files, why Lund had latched onto him, why Lund had ended up dead. James had been a prisoner of his own damned rationality. But he had been wrong. If only he had been stupider, thought with his gut rather than his head, he would have got to the truth so much faster.
At last the cab was here and they were bumping back down Forest Road towards and into New Haven. He would go to see McAndrew right now. He would storm in there if necessary and demand to know the truth. If the Dean could provide no answers, then James would refuse to leave his office until McAndrew had ordered an internal investigation, preferably calling the head of the Yale University postal service into the room, right there and then.
James stared out of the cab’s passenger window, breaking his stare only once, to glance in the rear-view mirror — and he did not notice it at first. His mind was too full to register it.
But then some other zone of his cerebral cortex processed the information for him. He checked the tyres of the vehicle behind, to see if they had the telltale white rims on the wheels. They did. There was no mistaking it: the same car that he had seen on the way up to Hopkins Grammar was now behind him. It had tailed him then and it was tailing him now. He would not try to make rational excuses for it, not this time. He was being followed.
‘Driver, can you take the next left turning, please.’
‘But we don’t want to go-’
‘Just turn left!’
The driver did as he was told and, sure enough, the car behind — stately and solid — followed suit. Right, thought James: he would add that to the list of questions he would hurl at McAndrew the second he saw him. Why the hell am I being followed?
Through side streets and residential avenues, the cab eventually arrived outside the administrative building that housed the Dean. The black car parked up just a few yards away, brazen in its refusal to conceal its purpose. James marched towards the entrance, past the commissionaire and barged straight into the office where he had been less than twenty-four hours earlier. He only realized what a determined, even crazed, expression must have been etched on his face when he saw the way Barbara the secretary looked up at him as he strode in. She was aghast — and petrified.
Without speaking to her, James made straight for the inner office occupied by the Dean. He grabbed the doorknob as if these rooms were his own, making no concession to good manners. As the door flung open to reveal an empty room he heard Barbara’s plaintive cry behind him: ‘The Dean’s not here! He’s on leave.’
‘On leave?’ James bellowed, wheeling around to face the secretary, on her feet and quite pale. ‘On LEAVE? Where the hell has he gone?’
‘I can’t tell you that, Dr-’
James took a step forward, prompting the woman to leap backward in a panicked, animal gesture of retreat, clearly afraid that he was about to hit her. The sight of that terror halted him. He could now hear his own breath; he was, he realized, panting.
A moment longer and he would, he knew, be escorted out of the building and into the arms once again of the Yale Police Department. He gathered his strength and, walking backwards — so that he was able to see the lines of anxiety on Barbara’s face gradually smooth out as the threat receded — he left.
James rushed out through the lobby and into the street. He looked to his right: the black car, which he now identified as a Buick, was still there. Right. That was it. He stormed across the street, plunging into the middle of it with barely a glance at the traffic that now dodged around him, and marched right up to the car, slapping his hand on the bonnet.
