Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  A phone call. A change of clothes. Shirt, tie, jeans, Doc Martens. Mr. Patawasti’s house on Empire Lane. That big house from the 1930s. The two wings. The Gothic tower. The servants’ steps. The massive front garden with a lawn and roses. A view down to Belfast Lough. On a clear day you could probably see parts of Scotland.

  Doorbell, living room: Mrs. Patawasti, Colin, Stephen, Mr. Patawasti.

  Stephen, six years older than me; Colin, four. I knew them both vaguely from school. Stephen had been captain of the rugby team. Colin had been head boy and a prefect who had given me lines and detention at least a dozen times. Even now he intimidated me.

  The living room. Pictures of her: playing hockey for Carrickfergus Grammar School, matriculating at Oxford, with the family in front of the Red Fort in Delhi, dressed in a sari and stepping out of an Indian river. The rest of the room was academic, tidy, scrubbed. A bookcase, framed cricket posters, shining surfaces.

  I stared at everyone while we sat. Mr. Patawasti looking a hundred years old. Colin: angry, impatient. Stephen: aloof, sad. Mrs. Patawasti: utterly destroyed.

  “Would you like some tea, Alexander?” Mrs. Patawasti asked, her face deathly pale, her hair gray.

  I shook my head. I was supposed to take charge here, ask the questions, but I wasn’t sure of the protocol, I hesitated, stumbled over words.

  “Um, well, uh…”

  Colin glared at me. His lips white with mounting fury.

  “Look at him. Just look at the state of him. Can we end this farce now, please?” Colin said to his father.

  Clearly, Colin remembered me as the screwed-up wiseass from school. And here I was confirming it all, looking like a wreck. Hadn’t I quit the police under mysterious circumstances? Didn’t I have money troubles, too? Now come like a vulture to exploit his parents’ grief.

  “Colin, please,” Mrs. Patawasti said.

  “Look at him, what can he do that the Denver police can’t?” Colin insisted.

  “Um, Mr. Patawasti, you said in your phone call that there was an anonymous note. Maybe I could take a wee look at it, if you don’t mind,” I finally managed.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Mr. Patawasti said, standing, going upstairs. After he left, silence descended.

  A clock ticking. The gables rattling. Victoria staring at me from the photograph. The unspoken person in the room so badly needed now, so adept at defusing a situation such as this.

  “Sure you wouldn’t like some tea, Alex?” Mrs. Patawasti asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind some tea now, please,” I said to give her something to do. She went to the kitchen.

  Another long pause. Colin, Stephen, and I stared at the floor. Mr. Patawasti came back down. I took the note gratefully and examined it.

  “Hmmm, very interesting,” I said. I knew I would have to bullshit them a bit to get the case. Not exactly ethical. But this was life and death.

  “Why? How so? Constable Pollock said it was a crank,” Colin said.

  I began slowly: “It says a lot. Obviously a great deal of thought went into this.”

  “What are you talking about?” Colin interrupted. “Everyone agrees it’s a nutter.”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’s a very deliberate piece of work. Taking the trouble to avoid fingerprints. And look at the mistake, ‘you’r’ instead of ‘your.’”

  “Constable Pollock tells us it was an uneducated person,” Mrs. Patawasti said, coming back in with no tea.

  “Aye, could be, but I don’t think so. I think that’s what he wants you to think. He wants you to think he’s stupid. He’s disguising himself by making a mistake, but would he (I say ‘he’ but of course it could be ‘she’) really make the mistake ‘you’r’ on a word-processed document? Most word processors have a spell check that would have caught that. The more common mistake is to mix up ‘your’ and ‘you’re,’ which a word processor won’t catch. Also, he doesn’t misuse the apostrophe after ‘daughter.’ I’d say that if he were an ignoramus, he would have blundered over the apostrophe first. You could say he was in a hurry, he didn’t have time to do a spell check. But it only takes a second and in any case this note was written with a great deal of consideration. An anonymous note about a murder. It’s not the sort of thing you dash off.”

  “Ok, where does this get us then, Alex?” Colin asked a little less aggressively.

  “Well, we want to know who wrote it. Someone that knew Victoria personally, someone who knows or suspects he knows who the killer is, someone who doesn’t believe the police have arrested the right man, someone educated enough to be worried about appearing too educated, so he makes a deliberate mistake in the anonymous note. I’d say someone who worked with Victoria or was a neighbor or close friend. He wants us to take an interest in this case and expose whoever did this crime but he’s not sure he wants to be involved. Do you still have the envelope it came in?”

  “I think I threw it out,” Mrs. Patawasti said. “The RUC didn’t want to see it.”

  However, she went into the back room and appeared with it a few minutes later. The envelope was more revealing than the note. A lot of times that’s the case. It was postmarked June 12 in Boulder, also slightly faded, and said:

  Mr. Patawasti

  The Tiny Taj

  78 Empire Lane

  Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim,

  N. Ireland BT38 7JG

  United Kingdom

  “Any help, Alexander?” Mrs. Patawasti asked.

  “Yes. Postmarked June the twelfth in Boulder. Your daughter was killed on June the fifth. The Denver police arrested their suspect two days after that. He thought about this for five days. He was frightened to reveal what he knew. He didn’t want to go to the police, but he wanted you to do something. To stir the pot, to lead the police in the right direction. He couldn’t do it—he’d be implicated because he’s already very close. Like I say, friend, neighbor, coworker. It’s interesting that Victoria lived in Denver, but commuted to her office in Boulder. Possibly a coworker,” I said.

  “He could have just driven there, and posted it there,” Colin said sharply.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Victoria had an address book,” Mrs. Patawasti said.

  “I’d like to see it,” I said.

  “She didn’t know that many people, she didn’t have time to socialize much outside of work,” Colin said defensively.

  “Well, I think we can eliminate some of the names. We know the writer owns or has fairly exclusive access to a computer. This isn’t the sort of thing you print out at the local library. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, but did you notice the way the note and the address were slightly faded?”

  “I did,” Mr. Patawasti said.

  “The cartridge was running out. Could it be that he didn’t know how to change the cartridge, that that was his secretary’s job?”

  “You can’t know that,” Colin said.

  “No,” I agreed. “Anyway, now I’d like to see her passport and her letters, the things that were in her apartment with her home address on them.”

  With a heavy sadness, Mrs. Patawasti brought the meager box of things I wanted. I skimmed through them, saw what I needed. I knew I was on to something. Something significant.

  “And do you still have an unlisted phone number?” I asked, remembering the frantic time eight years ago when I had temporarily lost her number.

  “It’s not listed, so what?” Colin said.

  “Well, it’s the name of the house. Victoria would never have told anyone that this house was called the ‘Tiny Taj.’ It embarrassed her. It’s not on any of her letters or her passport, or other personal items. The post office doesn’t give out addresses. So how could anyone know? It’s not here on any of her documents. When you wrote to her, did you put the name of the house on the sender’s address?” I asked.

  Everyone turned to Mrs. Patawasti.

  “No, I never write Tiny Taj, or mention it,” she said, “it is embarrassing.”

  �
�So how could anyone know that this house is called the Tiny Taj? Victoria would never have told anyone. I’ll bet the only way someone could know was if he had access to her personnel file at work and saw it written there as her full postal address. She would never have spoken about it, but she might have written her full home address on her personnel file. It would fit. And who could know that but someone who worked with her in Boulder and had access to her file? It’s just a guess, but I’d say if you were to go to her office and ask around, you might be close to finding who wrote the note.”

  I put the note and envelope and the effects down on the coffee table. A little silence. Some of it had been flimflam, but some of it real enough. Colin unfolded his arms. Mr. Patawasti’s face broke into a little half smile. I’d impressed them. Like I’d been trying to do.

  “Alexander, do you think you can find the man who killed my daughter?”

  I looked at him, nodded.

  “Find him, find who did it, Alex,” Colin said, his voice breaking.

  “It might well be the man they have in custody,” I said.

  “Find out the truth,” Mr. Patawasti said.

  “I will,” I said.

  Mrs. Patawasti and the boys left so Mr. Patawasti and I could agree on terms. He’d pay me three hundred quid a week plus my airfare and any other expenses I’d need. I tried not to see it as a way out of my difficulties. A case. I was working for a family friend. I was doing them a favor using the skills I’d learned in the peelers. Everything I’d promised myself never to do again. But it wasn’t me. It was altruism. Victoria. The fact that it would be the perfect excuse for getting out of Ireland, getting money, away from Douglas, away from the RUC, was beside the point.

  I went home and read all the documents. Mr. Patawasti had given me Victoria’s personal effects, employment documents, apartment receipts, company personnel profile, a copy of the Denver County Police report. Victoria had been shot during a struggle in her apartment. According to her cleaning lady, a number of things were missing. The police theory was that the assailant, Hector Martinez, had botched the robbery, killed Victoria. During the struggle his Mexican driver’s license had fallen out of his jacket or trouser pocket. It was too soon for forensic evidence, but the circumstantial evidence was pretty good. He had two previous convictions for theft and had fled the jurisdiction once on a grand theft auto rap. He’d been living with his brother and they’d picked him up easily. Martinez’s lawyer, Enrique Monroe, had been denied bail for his client. Martinez was considered a flight risk. Pretty damning, but clearly the note writer believed they had the wrong man. Either that or he wanted to muddy the waters to get Mr. Martinez off or implicate someone else. Worth checking out. I called John and asked him to do some snooping for me, using the police computers.

  John met me in Dolan’s that night. He was happy. I’d given him a lot to do.

  “Ok, Alex. Envelope and letter normal office stuff. No help there. But the font is New Courier 2. An updated version of Courier that is only available on the latest packages of WordPerfect. It’s been out about three months and is only in office suite packages. No, don’t ask, I already checked. Victoria’s employers, the Campaign for the American Wilderness, do indeed run WordPerfect rather than Word. And yes, they have the latest release. However, so do tens of thousands of other businesses. Hundreds in Colorado. Tough getting through to CAW, spoke to a college student, they’re moving the whole office from Boulder to Denver, Denver’s not set up yet and they only have a skeleton staff. But anyway, yeah, it’s not impossible the note writer could be someone who worked with her in Boulder and printed it out there.”

  I grinned at him. He’d done well. Everything I’d asked. If you kept John on message, he could be pretty efficient.

  “Aye, well, that’s plenty, that’s more than enough, it’s up to me now,” I said.

  “Listen, you’ve got to admit that I’ve been a help,” John began.

  “Yeah,” I said suspiciously.

  “Well, I’ve always wanted to go to America and the peelers owe me months of leave, and I work at the station only a day or two per month, for whatever reason,” John said.

  “Maybe because of your stupid haircut, it looks like you should be on the cover of romance novels, not writing traffic tickets or—” I began but John cut me off.

  “Let me finish, Alexander. My point is, I’ve been a big help to you, British Airways are doing two-for-one flights, you need me. I want to come with you,” John blurted out.

  I looked at him. That big goofy face. Grinning. I didn’t see why not. He just might be able to help with the legwork. Watson to my Holmes. He was a peeler, after all, my best friend, and I didn’t want to go alone.

  * * *

  Blue meets blue at the curve of the Atlantic Ocean and the sky. America looming. An hour away. But I’m not here, I’m somewhere on the other side of the world.

  The peaks, high valleys of the western Himalaya. The highest mountains on Earth. Formed fifty million years ago when India crashed into the continent of Asia and pushed them up.

  I close my eyes and I can see them. Glaciers in Kashmir. Tarn lakes in Ladakh. Snow over the opium fields of the Hindu Kush.

  I am crawling in my airplane seat. My body is craving heroin.

  A village. Cooking fires. A weather-beaten old man down among his crop. He lovingly removes his penknife and scores the bud of the opium plant. The flower’s botanical name is Papaver somniferum. The Sumerians and ancient peoples of the Indus valley called it Hul Gil, the “flower of joy.” When the Aryans came to India, they discovered that the flower allowed you to see Brahma, the creator of the Universe.

  Only a few weeks ago, red and yellow petals bloomed at the tips of tubular green stems. The old man is content. The petals have fallen away, but the plants have survived the snow. The egg-shaped seed pod is unharmed. Under the penknife an opaque, milky sap oozes out. This is the opium in its crudest form.

  He calls his sons. The sap is extracted by slitting the pods vertically. On exposure to the high mountain air the sap turns darker and thicker, becoming a brownish-black gum. The family collects the gum, laughing, making a real harvest of it, the older boys molding it into bricks or cakes and wrapping them in plastic bags.

  The big money isn’t in opium, but even so, the villagers are content to sell their crop to experts who will know what to do next. On a bright January day, a mule train shows up and takes the village supply of opium over the Afghan border and into Pakistan. The opium refinery is a rickety factory in a residential neighborhood of Lahore. The opium is mixed with lime in boiling water. The morphine is skimmed off the top, reheated with ammonia, boiled and filtered again. The brown morphine paste is heated with acetic anhydride for six or seven hours at 85 degrees centigrade. Water and chloroform are added to precipitate impurities. The solution is drained and sodium carbonate added to solidify the heroin. The heroin is filtered through charcoal and alcohol. Purification in the fourth stage, involving ether and hydrochloric acid, is notoriously risky and can blow up the lab. But assuming everyone survives, it is filtered again and stamped ready for shipping. The final fluffy white powder is known to everyone as number four. It has taken ten kilos of opium to make one kilo of heroin, but it’s worth it. One kilo of number four costs about a hundred thousand dollars.

  The first person to process heroin was C. R. Wright, an English researcher who synthesized it in 1874 at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. He thought it was too dangerous to use. In 1897 Heinrich Dreser of the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company was presented with two new drugs, acetylsalicylic acid and diacetyl morphine: the first became known as aspirin, the second, heroin. Dreser tested both, deciding there was no future for the former, but the latter he called heroin, for it would be the “heroic” cure-all drug of the twentieth century.

  From that heroin-refining factory in Lahore to a cargo flight carrying expensive cashmere shirts from Karachi to Newark Airport in the United States. It comes in under the noses of customs inspe
ctors (who are too swamped to inspect every shipment of textiles from Pakistan to the United States) and makes its way to a warehouse in Union City, New Jersey. From Union City to a van traveling west.

  The imaginary journey of my ketch. Aye, something like that or more likely a ship rather than a plane. But how to get it? I’m not fool enough to smuggle what’s left of my own supply with me. I have to get it in Denver. As soon as I get in. Fast. Now.

  I mean, I know there is a case to be solved. A lot of questions. Who killed Victoria Patawasti? Who sent the anonymous note? How long can I stay in America before the English peelers or Irish peelers track me down? But the most important of all—how in the name of God am I going to score heroin within a few hours of touching down in Denver?

  Thirty thousand feet. Greenland. John watching the movie, hardly able to contain his excitement. Back to my book. I’m reading a dual-language Bhagavad Gita. I suppose it’s because of Victoria. Lame, I know.

  The coast. Islands. Lakes. Brown fields, irrigated to form huge circles. Rivers. Plains. We both stare as we cross the Mississippi. More fields, the odd sprawling settlement. A highway. The colors faded—like giants’ clothes washed and patched too many times.

  Mountains like the barrier at the world’s edge. How did the settlers get through those? Why didn’t everyone just stop here? A squeal of wheels, a bounce. The plane touches down at the brand-new Denver International Airport. White tepees over the big terminal. Immigration. My skin is starting to burn. My hands are shaking. Shit, here goes. There are five desks. The man at one desk is called O’Reilly. He’ll do, in case I mess up somehow.

  “What’s the purpose of your visit to the United States?”

  “Tourism.”

  “Been here before?”

  “Yes, I was here when I was a student; I came for a few months and traveled around on Amtrak. Just the East Coast,” I say, shivering.

  “Are you cold?” the man asks.

  “I don’t like air-conditioning, it’s always too cold,” I say, keeping the panic out of my voice. I get momentarily worried, but the man’s not interested now that he sees I’m Irish.