by Paul Heald
“Did Jacob ever mention a different story, having to do with violence against women in Mexico?”
“Not that I remember.” The editor shrugged.
James thanked his boss and promised rather disingenuously not to waste too much time on the Diana Cavendish retrospective, but Mitford had warmed to the idea and suggested that he recycle some of the material from his old stories. When James got home and found Melanie’s message, he emailed back a quick response, suggesting a meeting on Sunday afternoon, since his youngest son was making a trip home from college on Saturday to pick up some things from his room. He sent a message to Thorsten Carter too. It was about time to get everyone together who was poking around the case.
XXIII.
CLIFFS
Stanley Hopkins piloted his rental car slowly through the narrow streets of Sóller, Mallorca. The little village at the foot of the eastern coastal range was connected by a streetcar to the port that bore its name, but the professor drove his rental on the assumption that he could drive through the village to the dirt road indicated on his map and wind his way up the mountains to Reggie’s spectacularly located house. Once past the far edge of the ancient town, he began to doubt his plan, as the road began to resemble a cow path more than a proper street. About a kilometer past the city limits, he encountered a locked gate crossing the gravel trail, and he was almost relieved that he had no choice but to park the car halfway in a grassy ditch and proceed on foot.
The day was warm and sunny, but a row of Spanish chestnut trees shaded the lane and kept the glare off the laminated map that sketched his route. Across a pasture, an old pilgrim’s trail climbed up the mountainside almost to the crest of the Alfabia Ridge before a spur veered south to the landholding marked finca at the end of the dirt road, which started where he stood. The Hiker’s Guide to Mallorca advised that a fit walker could make the ridge in two and a half hours. Although Stanley’s doughnut consumption had abated since his arrival in Spain, months of sugar addiction had left him somewhat short of the fitness level he had attained the previous year on his frequent treks up into the San Gabriels. Nonetheless, he had remembered his hiking boots and had little doubt that he could follow the pilgrim path up to the finca that he assumed was Reggie’s lair.
He walked across the pasture and was surprised to see that the trail was laid with stone and that for the most part it was in the shade. The route followed a broad desfile along a stream, passing the occasional hardscrabble farm serviceable only by donkey, as it steadily gained in elevation. After ninety minutes of continuous slogging, Stanley found the air was noticeably cooler, and he reviewed his plan for the upcoming encounter. He needed to be prepared if Reggie turned out to be Jacob Granville in hiding. If so, he intended to adopt the guise of a lost hiker looking for directions and leave any confrontation to the authorities. Hopefully, Granville would not be too suspicious of an American magically showing up on his doorstep. If Reggie were a stranger, then Stanley might finally get an answer to the question of who posted the pictures of Diana Cavendish on Mygirlfriendsbikini.com.
He had mixed feelings about being at the end of his search. The trail had been full of frustrating dead ends, but it had nudged him off the center of his grief, gotten him out of Los Angeles, and led him to Vanessa, El Langustino, and the most beautiful hike he had taken in a long time. Two hours of walking brought him far above the elevation of his own villa several miles down the ridge, and unfamiliar contours of the coastline tumbled spectacularly south in an unending serpentine of rock and inlet. He sat for a long time on a rock, looking down on the water and feeling the terrible events of the last year lurch slightly further into the past.
He turned and saw a whitewashed house beckoning far above him, but the main trail wound to the left and proceeded along a series of switchbacks until it disappeared, presumably to snake its way back to the right and toward the villa before making its way into the valley beyond. A fainter footpath aimed directly at the house and offered a substitute route. His meditation had put him in the mood for a further climb, so he trudged up the steep incline, pausing every couple of dozen steps to appreciate the view and catch his breath.
After fifteen minutes, the trail steepened yet further, to the point where the rocks jutting out of the mountainside became necessary handholds. Finally, the path petered out altogether, leaving the choice of a slow retreat or a rough scramble to the top. Shit, he thought as he looked up and then down. The villa was no longer in sight, and the view below him was as terrifying as it was glorious. The route had edged increasingly close to the point where the Alfabia Ridge plunged straight down to the ocean. The pilgrim path, far below on the left, had veered away from the cliff and proceeded to the ridge along more gradually sloping ground. Where he was headed, the landscape tilted toward the ocean. A quick look up, however, showed that the rock was volcanic, with plenty of handholds. Perhaps ten minutes of work until the top of the ridge?
The thought of trying to crabwalk down the steep slope and rejoin the main path was as dispiriting as continuing upward was daunting. Unwilling to backtrack, he ignored the urgent voice in his head counseling caution, retied the loosened laces of his boots, and climbed.
Stanley scrambled, hand, foot, hand, never fully secure and steadily veering slightly farther south, imperceptibly around the shoulder of the ridge that separated steep from vertical. His heart began to pound, and he clenched a stone spur and jammed the toe of one foot into a crevice before looking up: the rock face rose at least another hundred feet to the top. He was out of breath and the pulsing rhythm of blood in his ear told him to get the hell out of there. Time to rethink the plan. The handgrips were getting smaller and a nearly vertical rock climb without rope or helmet or companion awaited him. Proceeding, in other words, was really stupid. This was precisely the sort of climb that he had promised Angela he would never attempt.
Time to retreat. Life was a gift not to be squandered on shortcuts or endorphin rushes.
Then, he looked down and tightened his grip in panic, pushing his left cheek hard against the rock face. It was straight down. Not steep. Straight. He studied the lines on the rock in front of him. He tried to focus on the colorful little veins, some of which were filled with lichen or moss. But the calming effect of the geology lesson quickly ran its course. The shock of his quick look down nearly three thousand feet had rendered his legs jelly-like, and his hands were cramping from his tight grasp on the stone. Angela would really be pissed, but Angela was dead, and there was no choice but to make the top or join her. Trying to move blindly down would be suicidal.
He swallowed hard and reached up to a rocky knob. It crumbled away in his hand and he slipped, foot dislodged, life now suspended by a single handhold. He reached again, found a barely usable indentation for his fingers, and then moved his right foot to the ledge immediately below where his stomach had been. Carefully testing each grip and foot plant before proceeding, he moved finger by finger, toe by toe, ignoring the sparkling blue sea far below him, concentrating on every motion, clutching the rock face in a desperate embrace that sent several buttons plunging to the sea.
The last three feet of stone were nearly smooth, as if the cliff edge had been mortared together, conspiring to defeat his attempts to find a purchase. After a pause, during which he willed himself not to look down at the surf pounding more than a half mile below, he spotted a crack in which to wedge his right hand and with a convulsive effort managed to hook his left arm over the top of the last row of rock. His feet dangled in space for a moment, but a burst of adrenaline powered his shoulders over the top, and he flipped down onto his back, flat on a surface of stone. The sound of the ocean was lost and replaced by a quiet hum and curious slurping sound.
“Ahem.”
Stanley rolled to his side, away from the wall at the top of the cliff, and immediately encountered the figure of a very tanned and very leathery old man sitting completely naked on a plastic lounge chair and sipping a tall drink through a straw.
“Nice climbing, old pip!” He offered a toast with his glass. “Would you like a gin and tonic?”
Stanley could only blink. His heart was still pounding with the effort of the climb, and his overwhelming sense of relief at being alive forestalled a coherent response, if one could be made at such a sight.
“Reggie?” he croaked.
“That’s right!” The man got up, sagging belly obscuring his manhood. “Have a seat and I’ll get you that drink.”
When he returned, Reggie was wearing a pair of faded Bermuda shorts and a Mallorca F.C. T-shirt. He brought a small pitcher of water and a glass along with the promised gin and tonic. “Thought you might be a bit thirsty,” he added, as he placed the drinks on a small table next to the chair where Stanley had seated himself.
He sat back down and took a long sip from his glass. “Now,” he said in a posh accent that would be the envy of a BBC One presenter, “I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in that you know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Stanley,” he replied. “Stanley Hopkins.” He drained the glass of water. “And I’ve come all the way from California to talk to you.”
The revelation elicited no more than a slight raising of the Englishman’s left eyebrow. “Really? Well, in that case, I’ll break out the Tanqueray No. 10.”
The professor dropped the complicated fabrication he had planned for the meeting and decided to cut straight to the heart of the matter. The Englishman surely had not personally taken the photos of Diana Cavendish. He must have bought them from a photographer, and he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would hesitate to reveal a potential murderer. Stanley started at the beginning, with his first encounter with Diana’s picture, and traced his own search through William Simmons, the cryptic expatsoller email address, the dart league, and finally the unplanned ascent of the Alfabia Ridge.
“Anyway,” Stanley concluded, “I really need to know who sold you those pictures, along with any other relevant information you might have about them.”
Reggie shook his head slowly. “You’re on a wild-goose chase, old man, but let’s go inside and you can show me your pictures.”
The villa was spacious and covered in the same ochre tile that kept Stanley’s rental so light and cool. The back patio opened into a living room and eating area next to a true chef’s kitchen complete with a massive butcher block and hanging copper-bottomed pots and pans. The Englishman led him to the back of the house and opened a door that contained a large room filled with computer servers. A small desk with a work station was tucked underneath the only window in the room. An air conditioner hummed, cooling the room to a constant temperature, presumably to prevent the servers from overheating.
“Have a seat and show me what you’re looking for.”
Stanley pulled a photocopied picture of Diana Cavendish out of his pocket and typed in the URL. Up popped the Clarkeston dance major, eternally smiling and twirling her hair. He leaned to the side so his companion could get a better view.
“Pretty, that one. And you say that I sold it to this website?”
“The owner said he paid the expatsoller email address via PayPal.”
“Right. Do you mind if I sit down and show you something?” The Englishman switched places with his guest. “I’m going to run a neat bit of software for you.” Using his mouse, he drew a box around Diana’s face, saved just that image, and then opened up another program. “This is image-searching software that will crawl through the net for pictures that match the one I just snipped. Sort of like what the cops use for CATV facial searches. It’s especially efficient if I can combine the search with a word I expect to find in a web page meta tag, like porn or soft-core.” He hit the Enter key. “It will search for this young woman’s face and return web addresses wherever it’s found.”
Stanley watched the screen and within minutes the program had identified 237 websites. Reggie clicked on several of the URLs at random and they each immediately displayed the same familiar set of photos of Diana Cavendish.
“You see,” Reggie explained, “I’m just a middleman who buys from about a half-dozen different consolidators. I pay the consolidators, who pay the photographers, who often buy from amateurs rather than taking pictures themselves. Everything is done in bulk, terabytes of content for a price, not picture by picture. I couldn’t even tell you which consolidator I initially got the pictures from. There’s utterly no point in my keeping any records beyond how much I pay or receive and how many terabytes I buy or sell.”
Stanley knew suddenly that this was truly the end of his search. Weeks of work and a clever trick to smoke out a website owner had brought him no closer to the identity of Diana Cavendish’s photographer. He had been defeated by a porn industry where pictures of a pretty girl in a swimsuit were divvied up around the world like real estate derivatives in the financial market. One desperate hope remained. “And you’re not the source of all 237 hits?”
“Maybe a couple of them, but there’s many other middlemen like me who would be the source for the others.” He gestured to the computer. “Your girl is all over the web and has been for quite a while. No one will be able to tell you exactly where she came from.” He looked up curiously at Stanley. “You didn’t really think that you had stumbled on the only web presence of a girl you happen to know, did you? Wouldn’t that be a hell of a coincidence!”
Stanley had seldom felt so stupid, but as he contemplated the top of the Englishman’s nut-brown head, despair gave way to a sense of relief. He had done his best and pushed the search as far as any could have taken it. He’d managed to get out of California and have the climb of his life. He’d met a naked Englishman and gotten a peek into the colossal netherworld of Internet porn. Worse things could have happened.
He gave a sigh of submission and offered his wrinkled host a crooked smile. “Thanks, Reggie. How about another G&T?”
* * *
Stanley spent the rest of the afternoon on Reggie’s patio, sipping a drink and marveling at the expanse of blue water over which he had recently been dangling his life. The rush of his climb took hours to fade and mingled merrily with alcohol being administered through a thin plastic straw. Reggie kept him amused with stories of local politics and subtle character assassinations of the other participants in the dart league. As the sun lowered to the point where looking westward became a painful squint, the Englishman offered to give him a ride back down to his Land Rover. He had some shopping to do in the village and was happy for an excuse to drive down the ridge.
Stanley was relieved to find the car where he had left it and drove carefully through Sóller and back to the coast. As he made his way back up to his villa, he saw a lone woman, Vanessa, swaying slowly up the hill, plastic shopping bags clutched in both hands. He stopped and offered her a ride, which she accepted with a grateful smile.
“Are you interested in having dinner tonight?” he asked, after stowing her bags in the back seat.
“How about a cocktail right now on my patio?” She pushed her sunglasses deep into her thick auburn hair, smiled, and gestured to her bags. “I’ve just bought a bottle of top-notch gin.”
Stanley laughed and explained how he had already gotten off to an early start on the cocktail hour. Fascinated by his encounter with her fellow countryman, she kicked off her sandals, mixed a pair of gin and tonics, and led him to a shady corner of her back patio.
“Naked, you say.” She shook her head in approval.
“Not a stitch on.”
“Remarkable.”
She put her feet up on a stool and Stanley was treated to a long length of fit and tanned leg, quite unlike the barnacled undercarriage of his new dart-throwing friend. He shook the image of Reggie out of his head and finally told her the purpose of his visit to Mallorca. She was interested in and impressed by his quest, and her questions assumed he was some sort of daring international crime fighter rather than a conventional academic. It had been a long time since he felt so comfortable with himself
or with other people, and he could not help but smile and tell her that if he were James Bond, then she was lovely enough to be the perfect Bond girl. The gin made him bold, and the look on her face told him that it might have been a while since someone had dared look at her so frankly.
Later, while she made another round of drinks, the professor suggested going to El Langustino, but they never made it to dinner that night and instead shared a delightful breakfast the next morning under the approving eye of the gentle island sun.
XXIV.
CONFLUENCE
Melanie was glad that Carolyn had sent her screenshots of all of Jacob Granville’s Facebook content before getting the bad news from Mallorca about the impossibility of sourcing the Cavendish photos. The tantalizing information on Granville’s page had softened the blow that no killer would magically be revealed by the images that kicked off the investigation. Oddly, Professor Hopkins did not sound too disappointed, despite his wasted efforts. He seemed to have enjoyed the search and was planning on spending a few more weeks on the island.
“I owe you at least a fancy dinner if you ever to come to Atlanta or if I make it to Los Angeles.”
“I may take you up on that sooner than you think,” he said before he rang off. “My in-laws live in Roswell, Georgia, and I’m thinking about visiting them on the way back from Europe.”
She put her cell phone down next to the papers on her dining room table. She had read twice all the Facebook entries made by Granville and was very interested to hear what James Murphy would have to say about her discovery. He had arranged a meeting in the priest’s office of St. James church in Clarkeston after the late Sunday-morning service and claimed that the priest and his girlfriend had also uncovered some valuable information.
She was comfortable including Murphy’s two friends. The content of Granville’s Facebook page, after all, was not top secret. He had over two hundred friends at the time of his disappearance and presumably all of them still had access to his page. The photographer had been online less than a year and most of his posts were routine status updates, but he had uploaded dozens of photos taken in both Clarkeston and Europe. Most everything seemed irrelevant, except for a couple of long rants about the cotton case and a picture of the same two women featured in the WTO photo found in the newspaper basement. This time the two girls were linking arms and smiling in front of Lake Geneva. The portrait was subtitled “Brenda Harvey, WTO Cotton Queen.”