A Book of Bones

by John Connolly

  The Enclave’s battered external walls concealed concrete reinforced with steel, and a state-of-the-art security and fire-prevention system, the latter based around the use of inert gas in place of water to prevent damage to items. More than two hundred cameras monitored the interior and exterior of the building, and only biometric confirmation permitted access to its strongrooms. All this meant that when Visser’s inquiries finally led her to the gates of the Enclave, her months of hard work seemed destined to come to naught.

  But Visser was resilient, and had funds to disperse as she saw fit, her employers being prepared to tolerate certain underhand methods to track thieves—though only, one understood, on a purely theoretical level. If Visser couldn’t gain access to the Enclave’s records or its vaults, she could follow the paper trail left by the shippers. She spoke to customs agents, both active and retired, in five European countries, and spread a little financial goodwill where required. By the time she was finished, she had compiled a shortlist of companies worthy of examination, and the names of local representatives and drivers who might be susceptible to pressure. Among these companies was Carenor, and one of those drivers was Christopher Sellars.

  Sellars first learned of Visser from Dylan Lynskey, Carenor’s CEO, during a routine staff briefing. Lynskey was a former military man who favored blazers and club ties, and liked to reminisce about his time in “the Service,” even though the closest he’d come to combat was chucking-out time in the bars of Larnaca as part of British Forces Cyprus. Standing before an image of Visser projected on a screen, Lynskey reminded his staff of the duty of confidentiality the company owed its clients (which was probably true); stressed that Visser’s inquiries were part of a larger investigation, so were not specifically directed at Carenor (which was only partially true); and assured them that Carenor, with a reputation to protect, was scrupulous in its adherence to the law, as well as all national and international requirements governing tax and customs declarations, especially those pertaining to the transfer and ownership of works of art (which was certainly not true, if only because it would have made Carenor unique in the art world). If they were to be approached by Visser, Lynskey instructed, they should refuse to answer any questions, and immediately contact either him or Karyn Toner, Carenor’s oleaginous legal advisor—although Lynskey omitted “oleaginous,” not least because he was sleeping with Toner behind his wife’s back.

  Sellars hadn’t realized just how clever Visser was, and the extent of her researches, until she confronted him the next day at a Starbucks off the M6. Visser had obviously been following him—unless she just liked hanging around motorway services, which seemed unlikely—and this made Sellars very unhappy. He and Mors had met just hours earlier, and during that encounter he’d transferred into her care two small oils on canvas by the nineteenth-century French landscape artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and a larger oil of Madame Helleu, the wife of the portraitist Paul César Helleu, painted by her husband in 1893. Together, the Corots were worth perhaps £100,000 or more, but the real prize was the Helleu, because earlier that year an inferior version of the same painting, with an upper estimate of €150,000, had fetched nearly €800,000 at Sotheby’s in Paris. It seemed that Quayle was in need of operating funds, and strategic inquiries had unearthed a buyer for all three works, a Qatari businessman who desired some nineteenth-century works of a specific size and style for the bedroom of his mistress’s apartment in Kensington, and was happy to cut a cash deal for a quick sale as long as he wasn’t bothered by unnecessary paperwork. This suited Quayle entirely, as the three paintings had once formed part of the collection of a Jewish art dealer whose final resting place was an oven at Bergen-Belsen. During a trip to Le Freeport for Carenor, Sellars had taken a detour to the Enclave, supervised the removal of the paintings from one of Quayle’s vaults, presented the requisite (and entirely falsified) documentation to the resident customs official, who knew better than to ask too many questions about attribution and valuations, and proceeded on his way, encountering no further difficulties until he reached London, and Mors.

  Now here was Yvette Visser, pretty in a studious way, sliding into the seat across from him while kids played video games nearby, and waste from fast-food outlets piled up on tables.

  “Mr. Sellars?”

  He didn’t reply, didn’t even nod, just folded his newspaper, finished his coffee, and prepared to leave.

  “So you know who I am,” said Visser. “That’s good. It will save time.”

  She had a slow, singsong accent. He might even have found it attractive in another woman.

  Sellars’s jacket had caught on the arm of his chair. He was still trying to free it when Visser said, “What were you doing at the Enclave yesterday?”

  He thought about denying his presence there, but what would have been the point? She knew, otherwise she wouldn’t be asking. She probably had photos, too. He remained standing, and stared down at her. If he was hoping to intimidate her, he was destined to be disappointed, because neither her smile nor her voice faltered in the slightest.

  “I ask,” Visser continued, “because Carenor filed paperwork only for Le Freeport, and your company has an official policy of not dealing with the Enclave, because it attracts the wrong sort of attention from the British authorities. But unofficially, who knows? So your presence at the Enclave means that you were engaging in questionable activities either on Carenor’s behalf, or your own. I’m guessing the latter, and not for the first time.”

  Sellars stopped fighting with his jacket. He now knew that Visser, or someone in her employ, had been monitoring him, and was aware of Carenor’s occasional commerce with the Enclave. Sellars was one of only two company drivers trusted with access to the facility, and with knowledge of the layers of obfuscation that enabled Enclave assets to be transferred through three separate business entities in Italy, Latvia, and Spain, all without leaving their temperature-controlled environments, before Carenor even touched them.

  “It’s understandable that you might want to earn a little extra money,” said Visser, “although I’m not sure your company would approve. Look, why don’t you sit down and hear me out? It won’t take long. I have no desire to get you into any trouble with your employer. Perhaps we can even help each other. For example, I may be able to help you stay out of jail.”

  Sellars resumed his seat.

  “What do you want?” he said at last.

  “An Americano, to begin,” she replied. “After that, information.”

  * * *

  SELLARS PASSED LIVERPOOL, MAHLER playing on the van’s radio. When he was younger, he could never have imagined himself listening to classical music. It was all new wave hits for him, and anything with synthesizers. He still enjoyed the sounds of his youth, but they came tinged with sadness now. Odd how Mahler could leave him less depressed than early Depeche Mode. He had grown middle-aged, and hadn’t even noticed it happening. He couldn’t have imagined that, either, back when he was a teenager.

  We lose ourselves by degrees: our youth, our souls.

  Listening to classical music. Being middle-aged.

  Killing, and facilitating the killing of others.

  But Visser was special. She was the first, the instant when Sellars progressed from making paintings disappear to making people vanish. Sellars had marked Visser, and death had come for her in the shape of Pallida Mors.

  * * *

  SELLARS LISTENED TO VISSER’S pitch, or gave the appearance of doing so, but already she was fading from his world, her voice coming to him as though through dense fog, distorted and distanced by the elements. He could see himself in the mirror over her right shoulder. It enabled him to arrange his features in response to those fragments of her discourse that continued to register with him, permitting him to offer reasonable facsimiles of anger, regret, fear, and finally, reluctant acquiescence.

  Yes, he told her, he could obtain copies of documents pertaining to Carenor’s activities at Le Freeport, and a secon
d, similar zone near Geneva. No, he did not have direct access to client records at the Enclave, but—and here Visser’s eyes lit up as though a bulb had been switched on in her skull—he had made, strictly against company policy, copies of paperwork relating to specific Carenor customers, and particular assignments that had concerned him at the time. To be honest, he informed Visser, he had long feared a day like this might come, and he had a family to support. He wasn’t prepared to go to jail to protect Lynskey and the Carenor board. In fact, he went on, it was almost a relief to learn that these activities would soon be forced into the open. Did Visser know he was one-eighth Jewish, or maybe it was one-sixteenth? Didn’t matter. Someone on his late father’s side. Never knew him. Died before Sellars was born. Lovely man. Everyone said so.

  And Visser nodded along, but he could tell she wasn’t interested in some manufactured family history.

  “When will you have those papers for me?” she asked, when she guessed he had finished justifying to himself his betrayal of his employers.

  “A couple of days,” he said. “I’ll be in the office tomorrow. I’m supposed to log in to the system within twenty-four hours of a delivery or collection to fill in all sorts of nonsense, but I have a bit of a backlog. We’re old-fashioned that way. The big companies, they use handheld devices to speed up record keeping, but Lynskey is too cheap, or too careful, for that. If I have an excuse to be in the system, I can nose around.”

  “What about the material you copied? Is that at your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why can’t we get it now?”

  “Because my wife is there, and I don’t want her involved in any of this.”

  Visser ceased to press him. So she had a heart, Sellars thought, although not much of one, as her next words confirmed.

  “If you don’t come through,” she said, “I’ll hang you out to dry: with your employers, with Revenue and Customs, maybe even with the police, depending on why you were visiting the Enclave, and on whose behalf.”

  She let the last part hang, and Sellars was almost certain that she was referring to Mors. Sellars and Mors had met, as usual, in the basement car park of serviced offices in West London, and they had departed in separate vehicles. The car park used cameras only at the entrance and exit lanes, so the transfer of the three paintings had not been filmed, which was not to say that it had not been witnessed. The basement had appeared empty of other people, but Sellars couldn’t recall if another car had entered behind him, and he had left the car park immediately after Mors. Perhaps he should have waited longer, but he was in a hurry to get out of London before the afternoon traffic grew too heavy, and he hadn’t been checking for surveillance or signs of pursuit. But however she had done it, Visser had connected Sellars to Mors. Visser wouldn’t have been able to identify Mors—and Sellars wished her luck with trying to—but the Volvo V60 that Mors had used to move the paintings might be traceable: if not to her then to a rental company. And Visser was clearly good at what she did, because otherwise Sellars wouldn’t have been contemplating her murder.

  “There’s no need to threaten me,” said Sellars, giving it some sulk. “I told you I was in.”

  “Good,” said Visser. “If it helps your conscience, you’re doing the right thing. This is looted artwork we’re talking about, with Nazi fingerprints all over it. It deserves to be returned to the heirs of its rightful owners, or the institutions from which it was stolen.”

  Sellars nodded along, and pocketed the card she gave him listing all her phone numbers, two of them handwritten. One, Sellars noticed, was a London number: a hotel, possibly, or a short-term apartment.

  “My colleagues and I look forward to hearing from you,” she said—just to let him know that she wasn’t working alone, he figured, in case he should get any ideas about attempting to intimidate her, or worse.

  It won’t matter to Mors, he thought.

  And he was right: it didn’t.

  * * *

  SELLARS HAD WATCHED VISSER drive from the parking lot, taking note of her car registration, and the fact that she was alone. He didn’t use his own phone to call Mors, instead gathering enough coins for a public phone, having first ascertained that there were no cameras in the immediate vicinity. He passed on to Mors the description of Visser’s car, along with its registration, her direction of travel, and the telephone numbers the investigator had provided.

  And Visser had disappeared that evening.

  The following morning, once Sellars had learned, via Mors, that Visser was no longer going to be a problem, he asked to meet with Dylan Lynskey in order to inform him of the attempted solicitation. Lynskey was initially annoyed that Sellars hadn’t contacted the company immediately, but quickly calmed down once he realized that Visser’s first attempt at inveigling her way into Carenor’s records had been successfully repulsed. He congratulated Sellars on his honesty, and added that it wouldn’t be forgotten when it came to his end-of-year bonus.

  The police arrived the following day, accompanied by one of Visser’s associates, a big Dutchman named Hendricksen, with Sellars’s name at the top of their list. Sellars met them with Karyn Toner seated by his side, and under strict instructions not to answer any questions relating to free ports other than to confirm that Carenor’s drivers were occasionally required to visit them, either to make deliveries or collect items for transportation. In the end, it was Hendricksen who brought up the Enclave, and Toner swatted him away with the usual platitudes about client confidentiality. She refused to acknowledge that Carenor did business with the Enclave, which suited Sellars just fine.

  The two detectives with Hendricksen were named Hamill and Mount, and were attached to Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit. Hamill, the woman, was in her fifties, and more like an academic than a detective, with a manner that couldn’t have been more deceptively sweet if it had come wrapped in chocolate. Mount was younger, and had a noticeable underbite. Sellars ignored him from the start. Hamill, he decided, was the one to watch.

  They went through his conversation with Visser, which required him to commit some smaller lies of omission to add to the larger one about the phone call.

  “So Ms. Visser did not make any allegations concerning your visits to the Enclave?” said Hamill.

  “I can’t answer questions about the Enclave.”

  “Let me rephrase that one. Did she imply that you might be engaged in the transport of goods independently of your duties to Carenor?”

  Toner shot Sellars a puzzled look, but he chose not to register it.

  “Is that a fancy way of saying ‘smuggling’?” said Sellars.

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Then, yes, Ms. Visser did make that allegation, but I ignored it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t true.”

  Hendricksen intervened, although Hamill didn’t appear happy about it. “Then why would she make such an allegation?” he asked.

  “I think she was trying to blackmail me.”

  “Blackmail you?”

  Hendricksen gave a little semi-laugh that made Sellars want to punch him in the face. Scoffing: that’s what the Dutchman was doing, and Sellars experienced a surge of righteous indignation. Whatever else he was trying to get away with, Sellars wasn’t dissembling about Visser trying to pressure him into revealing Carenor secrets. Frankly, he was glad that Mors had taken care of her. Yvette Visser, in his view, had been severely lacking in principles.

  “She wanted me to access confidential records in our systems,” he said. “She warned that if I didn’t help her, she’d suggest to Carenor that I was working off the books, which would have been a lie.”

  Hamill regained control, speaking before Hendricksen could open his mouth again. “And you simply ignored this?”

  “I didn’t argue with her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But if the allegations were untrue, why did you agree to provide her with the information she was seeking?”

&nbs
p; “I just needed to get her off my back. I told her what she wanted to hear, then reported our meeting to Mr. Lynskey first thing the next morning.”

  “Why wait? Why not get in touch with him immediately?”

  “Because it might have meant going into the office that evening to discuss it in person, and I wanted to go home. I have a family, and I don’t see enough of them as it is. I was at Mr. Lynskey’s door at eight sharp the following morning, waiting for him before he even arrived at the office.”

  “That was very laudable of you,” said Hamill, even if she didn’t sound like she meant it. Sellars wondered if Mors could also be persuaded to deal with her, and maybe the Dutchman into the bargain.

  “What did you do after Ms. Visser left the motorway services?” Hamill asked.

  “I finished my coffee. It had gone cold by then, but it was still caffeine.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I went to the gents’.”

  “Did you make any telephone calls?”

  “Only to my wife, to tell her I might be delayed.”

  Hamill pounced on this. “Delayed? Why?”

  “Because I’d been sitting listening to Ms. Visser when I should already have been back on the road. I’d be heading into rush-hour traffic.”

  “And you made no other calls?”

  Sellars recalled the corridor outside the toilets. No cameras, or none that had the pay phones in view.

  “No.”

  “Would you be willing to let us examine your phone?”

  Sellars looked to Toner.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “And since you haven’t been arrested, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act doesn’t apply. Your phone can’t be seized.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” said Hamill. “Under statute and common law, we can seize as evidence material that we reasonably suspect relates to the commission of an offense.”