I was soon on the long outer arm of the fishing harbour, the dark sea heaving below me to my left, the calm waters of the harbour on the other side. My hip was sore from walking, and my weak right shoulder was aching. I went on, from one dim pool of light to the next. There was a long gap between lights where the quay wall turned at an angle to contain the harbour.
In the middle of the gap between lights I scooped the four spent bullet cases from my pocket and tossed them into the sea. The soiled gloves followed, and after a moment’s thought so too did my slip-on shoes. The sea would not destroy them, and one day soon they would turn up in the harbour or on one of the beaches as jetsam, but they would be bleached of all signs of Hari’s blood. Also of any traces of my skin or perspiration that might otherwise be forensically traceable to me.
Finally, the gun. I looked around, suddenly concerned that someone might be watching. But I was alone, in darkness. I released the clip of unused bullets and fingered them free of the spring loader and down into the sea. Then I broke the weapon open, slid the firing pin from its mount – that too I dropped into the sea. I returned the gun to my pocket.
Now walking barefoot, I went slowly back along the harbour arm. It was painful to walk, but I felt safer than before. No bloodied shoes to worry about. Just before reaching the harbour road I saw a litter bin. It was crammed with used drink cans and food waste. I dropped into it my cotton gloves, pushing them down beneath the top level of waste.
When at last I came to my hotel I noticed the street vendor I had seen earlier. He was working hard for a group of customers, standing close by his brazier, making up portions of sliced broiled meat with a handful of salad, crammed into a pitta. I passed him, went to my hotel. I wanted to change my clothes, rest my feet – I had not walked barefoot in city streets before.
In my room, under the dim light of the single bulb, I stripped off the trainer pants and T-shirt, bundled them up. Next, I attended to the gun. The ammo clip was inside, but empty. I had brought a replacement firing pin with me, concealed in my luggage. I pushed it into place.
Now, apart from hand and fingerprints, the gun was unidentifiable. The gun itself was already registered by the firing range to ‘W. Alman’ – that thin disguise would not of course resist good police work, but I had the resources to deal with it. When I handled the baseball bat I was wearing gloves. The bullet cases I had scattered around Hari’s body were from another gun, the one the rookie had been using at the range. The bullets they would find in Hari’s apartment, and the one (or two) somewhere inside his body, were not from those cases. The firing pin was not the one that had detonated the charge in the bullets. The barrel, if examined, would reveal that the bullets had passed through, that it was the murder weapon, but there were no other traces to identify it further.
Wearing another pair of cotton gloves I wiped the gun clean. I laid it on the table beside the bed.
I filled the hand basin with cold water. I rinsed my hair, then washed my face, hands, chest, everything.
I lay on my bed for half an hour, listening to the sounds of the night through the open window.
Finally, I dressed in my own clothes and shoes, then went down to the street. I walked across to the vendor and bought some food. The cauldron beneath his cooking plate was glowing bright red in the breeze from the sea. He passed me the filled pitta, with a paper napkin and a wooden fork. He sold me a bottle of iced water too.
I said: ‘When you’re finished for the night, how do you deal with the hot coals?’
‘It’s charcoal,’ he said, looking beyond me, hoping for another customer.
‘So how do you deal with the charcoal?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you just leave it here on the side of the road? Do you have to put out the fire?’
‘Incinerator,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the hotel.
I remembered the untidy yard beyond the building. It was an enclosed area, behind a high chain link fence and an unlocked gate. ‘You dump it over there?’
‘Incinerator. The town truck clears it out at daybreak.’
The pitta sandwich was delicious but I didn’t want to take it to my room. I strolled around, eating and remembering – remembering most of all. Memories filled me. I couldn’t finish the sandwich.
Back in the room I stayed obstinately awake. I kept trying to justify what I had done, make excuses, but then would turn defiantly against myself. Hari was dead! It was done at last! The sounds from the street gradually quietened. It was long past midnight. When the stillness had lasted for more than an hour I left the bed, and picked up the small bundle of clothes.
The main door to the hotel was closed but not locked. No one was on the desk, or in the tiny office behind. I went out into the silent streets.
I doubled back, walking along the narrow street that ran beside the building, to the yard. The gate was wide open. The whole area was a mess, with rotting rubbish spilled on the ground. Several immense hoppers lined one side, waiting to be emptied or carted away. At the back of the yard was a walled area, which the pitta vendor had identified as an incinerator. It was in fact just an area where hot cinders from braziers could be dumped at night. It was obvious that the contents of more than one brazier had been emptied here. There was a wide and multi-peaked mound of cinders and ash, emitting heat while not actually releasing flames or smoke. Patches glowed bright red where the breeze caught them. Sparks briefly flew.
I tossed my incriminating clothes as far towards the back as possible, then watched for as long as it took for smoke to rise.
No sleep followed, that night.
In daylight, when the town was awake, I walked to the police shooting range. I arrived a few minutes after it had opened for business. The woman civilian worker I had previously seen on the desk was not there. A young guy had taken her place. I was wearing the last of my cotton gloves. I flashed my Alman warrant card at him, then handed over the gun in its holster.
He took the weapon from me, opened it expertly, removed the firing pin, examined it, then put it back. He noted down the number engraved on the barrel.
‘Have you brought back unused rounds, Serjeant Alman?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘OK.’ He typed something on his keyboard, then handed me the refund of the deposit. I signed for it as W. Alman.
The next day I flew back to Dearth, using the Alman identity for the last time. I had to wait a while at Tristcontenta for the traffic helicopter to arrive, but I was home before midnight. The day after I put on my usual work clothes, pulled on the ID lanyard, and reported to the station. As usual I was rostered for desk work.
The news of the death of Detective Inspector Harsent broke towards the end of that day. He was a well known and popular figure on the station, at least among the more senior officers. He had been working undercover for so long that recently appointed officers knew of him only by reputation. The station went immediately into mourning, a formal roll was called as a tribute, an investigation was announced to work alongside the homicide squad of the Salay Ewwel police. Many officers volunteered to take part, but I did not. I saw Superintendent Frejah Harsent during that day, but she either did not realize I was attending the roll call, or did not notice me. For all of the next day the mystery of Hari Harsent’s killing was covered by television, press and internet news media.
I continued to work my shifts at the station, but was fearful of being challenged. I fretted endlessly about the effectiveness of how I had concealed the evidence. There were two weak areas I was painfully aware of: the knowledge that Superintendent Harsent would deeply suspect me of the crime, and the fact that I had strong personal links with the victim.
My working belief about Frejah Harsent appeared to be correct. She was herself too deeply involved to reveal her knowledge, or to make accusations against me. I rarely saw her again, except on the most formal of occasions – if she came to the station when I was working there I never had any contact with her. Sh
e knew what I knew, and vice versa. There was a silent pact between us, and it held.
More concerning were my links to Hari Harsent, and this was because effective investigation by the homicide team could discover them. There was a direct causal link between the murders of my two sons, and the death of Hari Harsent. However, both the police cases of Lew and Dever had been closed, Lew’s because his death had been declared a suicide, and Dever’s because no suspect had ever been identified or arrested. As the weeks went by, none of those links to me were discovered. I knew of course who had killed Dever, and so did Frejah Harsent. For different, or in fact similar, reasons we maintained our silence.
The strongest link, in theory one that could be revealed by good police work, was the nature of the financial investment that Hari and I had shared. An opening of that matter would incriminate me beyond any reasonable doubt, because it would establish not only the connection between us, but the motivation for the killing. I was helpless before that.
But the money was in an anonymous fund, it was spread between document banks and unnamed investment houses, it was long-established and had been set up years in the past – even the bank officials who drew up the agreement would not only not remember any details, most of them by now would be retired or even deceased.
The worst moment during the investigation came about seven days after I returned. I was working at my desk when two uniformed officers from another force approached me (I later learned they were from Salay Ewwel), ordered me to stand up, then demanded I hand over my firearm. Of course I did, fearing the finger of suspicion had finally landed upon me. Only later that day did I discover that every semi-automatic weapon issued in our station had been taken away for forensic and ballistic examination. Mine was returned to me ten days later. So was everyone else’s.
24
The Concatenated Man
I went to my office. I took the photocopies of Jeksid’s story with me. I laid them out next to my desktop computer, and spread them so that the right-hand edges of most of the pages were visible. I lifted one page after another, scanning quickly over what I had read, deliberately skimming the description of the brawl that led to Harsent’s death. I never enjoy reading about violence, even in fiction. If Jeksid’s story was true, or even partly true, then it was so much the more unpleasant.
I had other things on my mind. These included enquiring into the state of financial health of my bank, to me an urgent matter. I still had only a few thalers in my pocket until Jo came home. The bank’s website had not been refreshed since I last looked. I turned to the local news: nothing had developed there either, from what I could tell. No new financial corporations had declared imminent bankruptcy overnight, but the general sense of malaise amongst the people who lived in Ocean Domaisne remained high and all-consuming. It depressed me simply to listen to those interviews, even with people whose obsession with wealth was alien to me.
I tried to contact Jo, but she was not online.
I felt the day starting to slip past me, with nothing achieved. I took a break and walked across to the beach, stood by the shallows and stared out to sea. This was not Salay’s central sea lagoon, but the Midway Sea itself. Our view of the open ocean created a constant temptation to travel, to follow the apparently close allure of the horizon, to discover and explore the subtropical islands to the north of us, and east and west. Jo had suggested a holiday at the end of the summer – perhaps it was time I took her up on that. By then my new novel should be finished and delivered, and I would have no more literary commitments for a while.
Back at the house I tried again to contact Jo, but she had left a message for me saying she had to be offline for a few hours. I knew it was her last full day at the theatre. Her plan was to pack up her stuff in the evening and catch the red-eye flight from Muriseay to Ewwel, the first, which took off after midnight. I would drive to Raba airport and meet her from the inter-island shuttle during the morning.
In the afternoon I settled down to a series of detailed searches of the social records of both Dearth and Salay Hames, the fifth. It had not occurred to me that the murdered twins were relatives of the other people. The revelation that Lew and Dever were the sons of Enver Jeksid had come as a significant surprise, something which seemed both to explain and obscure a great deal.
The registry data available about births and deaths, and so on, became more inconsistent and unreliable the further back I looked. The file storage formats and general organization of the records created puzzles I had to keep working at.
I could turn up no birth records for the twin boys, either in the Dearth social archives, or in Salay Hames. Frejah had said they were Dearth citizens: I searched the serf, villein and vassal categories from both islands.
In the Dearth Vassal Court of Marital Union and Dissolution I came across a summary (only) of a suit of dissolution, in other words a divorce, made by the plaintiff, one Enver Woller Jeksid. He was suing for dissolution on the grounds of desertion by his wife, Jessa Jeksid. He lodged an appeal against a previous court decision, which had granted custody to Jessa of their twin sons, then aged two years, but the appeal was turned down. Jessa was granted leave to travel away from Dearth, with the condition that her ex-husband be allowed full access to the boys on request.
I soon found Jessa’s birth record: she had been born into the Dearth vassalage as Jessa Alman. She was approximately the same age as Enver Jeksid. They had married young and the marriage did not last long: between three and four years. I could not discover why custody of the boys had been granted to the mother, although I knew in most divorce cases involving children that was what happened. There was one unsubstantiated allegation of neglect against Enver Jeksid, but he emphatically denied that and it was not raised again.
In the archived gazetteer of the Dearth police I discovered that Jeksid had joined the force two years after his marriage broke up. He was then twenty-five years old. After three years he was moved to the Transgression Investigation Department as a plainclothes detective. He was promoted to detective serjeant two years later, having displayed, according to the gazette, ‘commitment and determination’ in his work.
From this information I worked out that Jeksid, the man Frejah alleged was hunting for me with deadly intent, was now sixty-two years old.
While searching through the gazette archive I looked to see what I could find out about Hari Harsent. Harsent was five years older than Jeksid and at the time Jeksid was recruited Hari was a detective serjeant in the TID. According to the file, Harsent was promoted to detective inspector a year later. In the same year he married another young officer, Detective Serjeant Frejah Garten. There was no further information about Hari Harsent’s career after that, presumably because for several years he was working undercover. The final entry reported his death at the age of fifty-eight, nearly a decade ago.
I frequently remembered Spoder’s querulous demand: ‘Who are all these people?’
I was beginning to find out at last, and even had some idea of what they looked like. I had already seen the photos of Lew and Dever Antterland, for instance, and the police archive carried a blurred photo of Hari Harsent in the years before he was assigned to undercover work. Of course I had met Frejah several times, but Jeksid remained an enigma. He was the one I knew least and, unexpectedly, through his written confession, the most about.
Spoder was on my mind. Then Spoder called me on the landline.
‘Sir, I have some important information for you!’ he said, while I was still lifting the receiver to my ear. ‘I have had good news, and I have made some interesting discoveries about these cops from Dearth.’
‘Tell me the good news,’ I said.
‘Well, it is only good for myself, but as you showed some sympathy, which I greatly appreciate, I must tell you. I was in contact with my bank this morning, and the website claims that their cash machines are all operative again. I went straight down to the nearest one, and it was true. My account will be back up and running again
tomorrow.’
‘Spoder, I’m genuinely pleased for you. I was worried.’
‘And the savings account, where I have set aside something for Terrik and Noella, that is going to be restored before the end of the week.’ There was a slight pause, then: ‘Is your own bank functioning again, sir?’
‘Not yet, not as far as I know. But I’m OK for now – Jo will be home tomorrow, and she is bringing some money to tide us over. It’s not a problem, or not yet. What is the information you said you had found?’
‘It’s about the Dearth cops. Are you still involved with the mystery?’
‘Of course I am,’ I said. I had resigned myself to following the path to its conclusion. ‘I want to see the thing through. What have you discovered?’
As often before, it turned out that Spoder’s research covered much of the same ground as mine. I listened carefully to him without commenting, noting down a few extra details I had missed or skimmed over. Spoder was a thorough researcher.
He told me about Jeksid’s early marriage and divorce, the loss of his small children in a custody dispute.
‘I have to say I felt some sympathy for him there, sir,’ Spoder said. ‘I can’t imagine anything more hurtful than to lose contact with one’s pre-school children. But it seems to have been an angry divorce, and Jeksid deliberately kept away from his wife and children after they left. He made only two contact visits after the divorce. His wife, Jessa, moved to Salay Hames, the fifth, with the man she had met. As you know, travel between Dearth and Salay involves a substantial journey.’
‘When were these visits, do you know?’
‘The first was a year or two after they split up. The second was some years later, when the boys reached the age of sixteen – it was probably a birthday visit.’
The Evidence Page 25