There was no sign of his book, but the room felt slightly different from usual. What was it? He sniffed – and smelled the faintest hint of cigarettes. Odd – Irma hated smoking and forbade it in the house.
He sniffed again just as she came in behind him. ‘I think you will find your book upstairs,’ she said sharply, and motioned him to leave the room.
He held up a hand. ‘Don’t I smell tobacco?’ he asked.
‘Not unless you have been sneaking a cigarette yourself.’
He sniffed again. The aroma was unmistakable.
She sighed. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was the workmen when they painted the windows. The swine – I expressly told them to do their smoking outside.’
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding, though he thought – the workmen left six weeks ago. But he said nothing.
Later, after supper, as he swept the leftovers from their plates into the pedal bin, he saw something glinting. He reached down and found himself holding the stub of a dark brown cigarette with a gold filter tip. A special cigarette – a Sobranie, in fact, the sort he remembered the man in the Homburg hat smoking so many years before, one after another. For a brief second, he wondered if that man had been in his house, but he realised that was impossible – that man would have died years ago. But who had smoked it then, and what had they been doing here? And why had Irma lied to him?
He was the one used to hiding behind countless untruths: how many glasses of wine he’d had at lunch, who his friends were in Brussels – he made sure to mention Matilda only rarely – even the occasions when he had taken a taxi rather than public transport, and of course the big untruth, the secret he had told nobody, the secret of his real identity.
The nature of his relationship with Irma meant that he was the one who hid things, half out of fear of his wife’s tongue, half from a need for some fragment of independence. The very concept of Irma lying to him was entirely novel. He felt he had lurched on to disturbing new ground and he did not know what it might mean.
15
Matilda Burnside stood at one corner of the Grand Place, ignoring the appraising glances of passing men as she waited for her husband Peter, who as usual was several minutes late. She was a tall woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair and the sort of strong features that are often called handsome but in her case verged on the beautiful.
She had been in Brussels for two years, working in the Migration department of the European Commission, and had been married for one. Her husband Peter was in the Foreign Office – or at least that’s what he told people – and was based in the British Embassy, as Counsellor Economic, a job title that gave away nothing at all about his true responsibilities.
Matilda was a Home Counties girl who had discovered a flair for languages at school, and had studied French and Spanish at university, where despite an active social life and a passion for the cinema she had managed a stunning First Class Honours degree and promptly been snapped up by a multinational bank. The pay had been high, the prospects mouthwateringly attractive, but life in the City of London had proved repetitive and dull, and after eighteen months she had jumped at an offer of a position with the European Commission working on the problem of refugees and migrants arriving in unprecedented numbers from North Africa and the Middle East.
The money wasn’t bad, though it didn’t compare with the bank’s offer when it tried to keep her, and the bureaucracy was stifling, but at least her days were spent trying to help people who needed help, rather than padding the already comfortable coffers of the wealthy. And lest she sounded too pious about the merits of her new posting, it had also provided her with a husband – a tall, intelligent and, yes, slightly dashing kind of husband – though one who was always late, she thought with a flicker of annoyance. It was raining slightly and the lights were just coming on in the square. From where she stood just under the arcade in front of the Palais du Roi she could see their reflection sparkling in the wet cobbles. It was beautiful, which certainly could not be said of much of modern Brussels, particularly not of the buildings in the area where she worked.
Her colleagues liked to joke that the B in Brussels stood for ‘boring’. But if anything, Matilda Burnside thought it should be for bouffe – as in ‘nosh’ or ‘grub’. Never had she eaten so well or so much; her husband, Peter, said the food here was better than in France. There were restaurants everywhere and when they met after work in the Grand Place, as they did at least once a week, without walking more than a few steps they could take their pick from haute cuisine in a restaurant with Michelin rosettes to pizza in a bar.
But tonight she fancied nothing more complicated than moules frites eaten at a long wooden table in the cellar bistro of one of the old buildings in the square.
Her mind these days was flooded by images of the refugee camps in Syria and Libya, and increasingly in Italy as well – though at least on the European mainland the refugees were fed. What haunted her most were the children, shrunk like African famine victims, trapped in the Middle East and North Africa, beyond reach of anything she could do, vulnerable to the worst of humanity – the traffickers, the rapists, the killers. And hungry, hungry all the time. Increasingly, Matilda found herself feeling quite ill at the prospect of another splendid meal.
She’d shared this feeling with Dieter Nimitz, her colleague at work; it was unusual for her to share her feelings with him – it was almost always the other way round, especially when he was battling with their department head, the dour Dutchman Van der Vaart. Sometimes, despite being twenty years younger, she felt like an older sister to him. He often seemed stressed, as he had done this week – so much so that today she finally asked him what was wrong. He had started to say it was nothing, then he’d changed his mind and said, ‘It’s Irma,’ in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
Matilda knew very little about his wife. Dieter might tell her every detail of Van der Vaart’s latest stupidities, and moan at length when Accounts questioned his expenses, but he very rarely talked about his home life. Matilda knew that though married, he was childless, and that he went back home most weekends and seemed very proud of his wife, who was the headmistress of a school in Hamburg. But she knew little else, so what he had then said about her was unprecedented – and also rather strange. His wife’s school had seemingly lost one of its pupils – or at the very least allowed one of them to stay behind after a sponsored visit to America.
That in itself seemed mildly peculiar, but Dieter’s account of his wife’s mysterious visitor last weekend was also odd. At first, Matilda thought silently that his wife was simply having an affair – not too unlikely given that she was on her own all week. But the photos she’d seen on Dieter’s desk of Frau Nimitz did not suggest a woman given to philandering; nor, to be blunt, a woman likely to receive approaches. What was odd was that Dieter didn’t seem at all concerned about his wife’s possible infidelity but rather, for reasons she couldn’t understand, he was worried that the visitor had something to do with the missing student.
She’d decided to tell Peter about it. He would know if she was making a mountain out of a molehill; he was always very good at that. And there he was, she thought, seeing the tall figure walking briskly across the square, holding a large, striped golf umbrella. As he tipped it back slightly and saw her, he grinned broadly and she forgot her irritation at his lateness.
‘Hello hello,’ he said and kissed her on the cheek. ‘What a horrible evening. Let’s go somewhere warm. Do you know, I really fancy a nice plate of moules frites.’
‘You must be a mind-reader! That’s just what I want.’
‘Come on then,’ he said, grabbing her hand.
She laughed, and they set off at a trot, sending a pigeon that was pecking at something beside their feet off with a wild beating of wings.
When they were sitting at a table in the cosy restaurant with bowls of steaming moules and a large plate of frites in front of them, he asked, ‘How’s our German friend?’ Peter had never met Dieter N
imitz, but he liked to hear about his contretemps with Van der Vaart, and also delighted in Dieter’s many sayings, expressed in excellent but idiosyncratic English, which were often unwittingly funny.
‘He has what I believe are called domestic difficulties.’
‘Oh no,’ said Peter in mock-alarm. ‘You’d better not be the shoulder he wants to cry on.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s not like that. He rarely mentions his wife, so this was quite unusual. She’s very successful – the headmistress of a school in Hamburg. But he thinks she’s been behaving strangely.’
‘How so?’
She explained about the letter Dieter had found. Peter said, ‘There could be all sorts of explanations, you know. All of them perfectly innocent.’
‘I know. But that wasn’t all. She had a meeting with someone in the house when Dieter had gone out. But he came back early and she tried to conceal the traces. He’s pretty sure it was a man he saw driving away when he came back to the house.’
‘Ah, so maybe she’s the one leaning on an extra-marital shoulder?’
‘I don’t think so; at any rate, it isn’t what Dieter is worried about. He seemed to think it might have some connection with her work – and with the letter he found.’
‘Why?’
‘He couldn’t say why exactly. He made some reference to the Russians.’ She noticed she had all of Peter’s attention now. ‘But when I pressed him, he just mumbled something about a cigarette.’
‘And that’s all he said?’
‘Yes. I suggested he try and find out more about this missing student from the school. It didn’t sound right to me.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Peter. Though his voice retained its lightness there was a professional crispness to it as well. ‘Now tell me some more about Dieter’s wife.’
16
Autumn was coming to New England, and even on this sunny afternoon there was a slight edge to the air. It was still too early for the annual fireworks display of the region’s maple trees – with their palette of vivid scarlet and gold – that drew visitors from all over the world, but the advantage for Harry Fitzpatrick was that he didn’t have to wait in a queue at Burlington airport’s car-hire desk, and there was virtually no traffic as he drove to the university for a second time.
He was following up a request from the FBI office in the London Embassy that had originated from MI5. They’d learned that a young immigrant living in Germany, who had been on a school educational visit to an American university, had not returned to Germany with the other students. For some reason, they seemed to think there was something sinister in his disappearance. It seemed that some bright spark in MI5 had read Harry’s report of his enquiries at the university following the death of the man called Petersen, the man suspected of having been a Russian Illegal. They had noted what Harry had learned, that Petersen taught on a summer course for visiting foreign schoolchildren. Now they were wondering if the course the missing student had been on might possibly have been the course in Vermont. It all seemed a very long shot to Harry but he was secretly rather flattered that his initial report had aroused such interest and so he was happy to do as he was asked and try to find out more.
He had started by ringing the head of Petersen’s department from his office in FBI HQ in Washington, but had found him impossible to reach – thanks to a Cerberus-like secretary, a dry old stick from the sound of her voice, who on three separate occasions was adamant that the professor was too busy to speak to him. The fourth time he rang, Cerberus announced that the professor had left on a recruiting trip to the West Coast, and had asked Angie Emerson, the woman Harry had met previously, to deal with him. Emerson was also away, at a conference in Cleveland, but due back on Tuesday. Taking no chances on further delays, Fitzpatrick had made an appointment to see Emerson on Tuesday and booked a flight to Burlington.
This time, Angie Emerson was more smartly dressed than on their previous encounter – in neat black trousers and shiny black loafers, though her hair was still precariously secured in a fragile bun with wisps poking out. She got up from her desk to shake Harry’s hand, then motioned him to sit down. She said, ‘I’m sorry the boss isn’t here.’
‘Well, I have to say he didn’t seem very eager to see me.’ He explained about the rebuffed phone calls.
Angie Emerson looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Miss Thurston – that’s his secretary – can be a bit off-putting. And I’m not surprised the prof didn’t want to see you. He’s strongly socialist. I think he was a communist in his younger days. He’s probably allergic to the FBI; he may have thought you wanted to see him about that.’
‘Well, he’d have been wrong. Hoover’s been dead a long time. This is a follow-up to what we were talking about when we met last time. So I’m glad to be talking to you again rather than having to explain it all to him. If you remember, when I called on you, you told me that sometimes high-school students came here to take IT courses during the summer vacation.’
‘That’s right. It’s a good use of the facilities, since otherwise they’d just sit unused for three months of the year. And, frankly, for some of us it’s a much-needed supplement to our salaries. You don’t become an academic to get rich,’ she said with a grin.
‘And some of these students come from abroad?’
‘Absolutely. They’re not the majority, but there’s always a group from overseas. This year they were from a high school in Germany – I’m pretty sure it was Hamburg. Though they weren’t German-born – refugees from the Middle East. Syrian mainly.’
‘So they all went back to Hamburg?’
‘That’s right. They flew from JFK so they could have a couple of days to see the sights in New York.’
‘Did any of them stay on?’
Angie looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’
‘You know, stay on for further studies, enrol as students in the university.’
‘No, they’re too young – only sixteen, maybe seventeen. They’d have had to apply for next year, not this one. Presumably they would have to get visas, leave to remain, something.’
‘So no one connected with the summer course stayed on?’
Angie shook her head. ‘No one stayed as a student here.’
He hadn’t flown up here to leave stones unturned, so he persisted. ‘Or stayed to do anything else?’
She began to shake her head again, then stopped. ‘Well, no one,’ she conceded, ‘unless you mean Aziz. But he’s not a student: he works in IT. He’s the assistant to the division’s tech head. He was a bit older than the others. He’s probably twenty now.’
‘Where can I find him?
It proved easier to learn about Aziz than to locate him. His office was on the top floor of an adjacent building and easy to miss. By the time Harry Fitzpatrick found it and knocked on the door he was almost breathless, having gone up and down the stairs several times in his search.
To his relief, a voice called out from inside, ‘Enter please,’ in accented English. He pushed open the door, which just missed colliding with the chair on which a youth was sitting, his back to the door, in front of an oversized Apple monitor. The room was tiny.
The young man turned to face Harry and smiled shyly. Even sitting, he looked small, quite frail, with short black hair and thick glasses. He wore a sweater over a white shirt with a frayed and crumpled collar. ‘Professor Galloway? I’m sorry you’ve been having problems with your machine. Did you bring it with you?’
Harry shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But that’s because I’m not Professor Galloway.’
Aziz looked surprised. Harry said, ‘I’m from the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the FBI.’ He took his badge from the side pocket of his suit jacket and flipped it open. ‘My name’s Fitzpatrick and you, I take it, are Aziz.’
‘That’s right,’ the youth said, attempting a smile.
‘OK, Aziz. I’d like to ask you some questions. That all right with you?’
For a moment, Fitzpatrick thought Aziz might actually say no. So obvious was his agitation that if the path to the door hadn’t been blocked, Harry thought he might have made a run for it. Aziz put both hands on the desk and clasped them tensely. ‘OK,’ he said, as if sentence had already been passed.
Over the next twenty minutes the story that emerged was harrowing, though it grew vaguer and less dramatic the closer it came to Vermont. Aziz had been among the first refugees from the civil war in Syria; he fled with his parents and siblings after their village had been among the recipients of an Assad-ordered air strike. On the coast, Aziz’s father paid with the last of their savings for the family to join a fishing boat that would take them across the Mediterranean. When the time came, there was only room for one of them in the packed craft; as the eldest boy, Aziz was delegated by his father to take the sole place – the family would follow in another small boat due to arrive the following day.
The journey took two fraught days. It rained throughout and the boat leaked; the soaked passengers were forced continuously to bail the accumulating water. Then a squall blew up in the pitch black and the boat was thrown about like a toy on a spring. For the second time in his life, Aziz had been afraid he would die, and this seemed confirmed when the boat collided in the dark with something hard and immoveable. But it was the beach on Lesbos. Aziz had survived.
He waited the next day for the rest of his family to arrive in the second boat. Waited and waited and waited some more. It took three days for the news to arrive: the boat had set sail as planned, but sank in the tail-end of the squall that Aziz’s own transport had barely survived. There were no survivors.
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