by Robin Duval
The first arrival was a helicopter, which swept overhead and sped away towards the mountain. Two four-wheel drive SUVs shot straight up the track after it. A third vehicle, a white sedan with gold go-faster stripes down its sides, came to a sliding halt by the Superintendent’s truck. Two officers from the Sheriff’s Department emerged.
They were both large individuals, with large square moustaches like Thomson and Thompson; dressed in identical smart brown uniforms with dark brown tie, über-cool aviator shades, aluminium star on the breast, and a black leather belt laden with guns, ammunition pouches, handcuffs and – by the look of them – lunch. They huddled either side of the Jeep, heads through the side windows in close discussion with the Superintendent and the ranger sitting inside. For quite some time.
Eventually they withdrew their heads from the truck and studied him awhile, like a pair of prairie bison interrupted in midgraze.
Finally they began to advance upon him, rather slowly and cautiously.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the one with the shaven head.
‘Hi,’ said the grey-haired one.
‘I’m Sergeant Whitney Crockett,’ said the first.
The other said nothing.
‘And this is Officer Shawn Mouser,’ said the first. ‘I understand you’ve reported a homicide. Is that correct, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Bryn. ‘I’d been hiking on the mountain and I came across a body near the peak. It’s up near the top beyond the snow line.’
‘There’s been folks hiking up the trail since daybreak,’ the shaven-headed one responded. ‘How come no one reported it afore you?’
‘Oh well. I didn’t go up the trail. I went round the side of the mountain.’
‘Why would you want to do that, sir?’
‘I was looking at the Pikas.’
‘Looking at the what?’
‘The fat little rabbits that live at the top.’
‘You a naturist or something?’
‘I’m a historian. A professor. And,’ irresistibly correcting him, ‘I think you mean naturalist.’
‘Is that a fact.’
The grey-haired one was walking round him in a wide circle, his right hand resting on the bulky automatic weapon strapped to his belt. Bryn at first thought it sensible to hold his own hands away from his body. Then it occurred to him that such a posture might suggest too great a familiarity with police routine, so he slipped them more negligently into his jeans pockets; and prayed that his pockets looked small enough to be above suspicion. He had had a few run-ins over the years with traffic policemen. But never with a lawman with fingers wound round the grip of a pistol.
‘OK,’ said the shaven-headed one. ‘See if I understand this. Whilst everyone else is going up the main track, you and this other guy go some completely different route that nobody uses. And it’s the same route for both of you. Why do you think that would be?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
His voice had acquired an almost operatic vibrato.
Pull yourself together.
‘I’m a tourist,’ said Bryn. ‘I’m English, out for a stroll, and I came upon a body. Still warm, by the way. I mean, there was obviously some other person up there as well as me.’
‘What did he look like, this other guy?’
‘I’ve no idea. I never saw him.’
‘You’re both on the same piece of mountain at the same time and you never saw the guy?’
‘Maybe he hid.’
The grey-haired one completed his ambulation and took up a position alongside his colleague. He spoke at last in a nasty, lazy, menacing whisper.
‘Have you ever tried hiding on that mountain? Sir?’
‘Look. I can see where you’re going – ’
‘Is that right?’ said the first.
‘Can I point out… ’
It should be possible to pull some thread of rationality from this rapidly unravelling situation.
‘… point out that I was the one who reported the crime and that I would hardly have done so were I the perpetrator.’
‘As I understand it, sir,’ said the first, ‘you were intercepted by Ranger Rothmuller as you were leaving the park. In something of a hurry? Do I recall correctly?’
‘To report it. In a hurry to report it.’
He struggled to collect his thoughts.
‘You’re very welcome to check me out. You can search my car. I do not have a weapon. You won’t find anything suspicious. I am a responsible citizen reporting a crime.’
‘We’re checking the mountain, sir. Let’s hope there’s nothing there neether.’
Of course there’d be plenty. His own footprints in the snow. He had seen no others. And a rifle lying in the back of the black Dodge Pickup. Had he been foolish enough to pick it up? He no longer felt certain of anything. Nor had he any idea what to expect from two country policemen with guns unhitched and – quite clearly – dreams of crime-busting glory buzzing in their heads.
The shaven-headed one pulled a radio phone from his belt and took a call. A long call. A very serious call. Then he buttoned the phone back into his belt, and pulled a folded sheet of paper from a breast pocket and started to read its contents out, carefully and slowly.
‘I am going now to read you your rights, sir,’ he said. ‘You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Bryn, shrilly.
‘I can read you them again if you wish, sir.’
‘No.’
The grey-haired one snapped open one of his belt pouches and produced a pair of handcuffs. He invited Bryn to offer his wrists in the time-honoured fashion. That accomplished, Bryn was ducked into the back seat of the sedan, a hand easing his head under the door ceiling. The car gunned and spun and wobbled on the gravel road, till the tyres gripped and it shot away.
After an hour’s rapid drive to the west, they arrived at a small town. They drew up outside a stone building embossed with the words County Jail and, in smaller letters below, Sheriff ’s Department. A group of townsfolk had gathered on the pavement. Bryn was led through to a desk where his handcuffs were removed and he was required to empty his pockets, remove his belt and jacket, and sign a form listing all his possessions.
A man he took to be the desk sergeant came out of a rest room with a paper cup of coffee.
‘Whitney, you son of a gun!’ he exclaimed. ‘How you doin’?’
‘Bright-eyed an’ bushy-tailed an’ jus’ ’bout ready to kick ass,’ said Bryn’s escort.
With which he was guided, amiably enough, through a door to a corridor of white painted iron-barred gates. One of the gates slid back and he was ushered into the small room beyond it. A bed, a chair, the usual accoutrements, all perfectly clean and tidy. The hum of air conditioning. Dry and cool. And the ambient smell of pee and ammonia.
He was too enervated to brood on his condition. He lay down, pulled a blanket over his body, closed his eyes, and composed himself for sleep.
It was late evening when he woke up.
Someone was talking in Spanish in a nearby cell. A metal tray with a mug and a covered dinner plate lay on the floor beneath him. On the blank corridor wall opposite was a poster with the strap line: ‘Serving our Community with P.R.I.D.E.’ And under that the words ‘Professional Respect Integrity Dedication Equality’. High standards indeed.
He did not at first register the man watching him through the bars. The newcomer was tall and slimly built and wearing a shiny dark suit; but his features were difficult to make out against the strip light on the ceiling behind him.
‘You’ve had a good sleep,’ said the man.
It was an urban accent, Los Angeles perhaps or San Francisco.
‘I’d like a chat,’ he continued. ‘Not here though. You wanna eat first?
’
He gave the metal gate a gentle push and it rumbled back on its tracking rail.
Bryn studied his tray. Under the plate cover was a taco folded round some congealed mince. But there was also a stack of French fries in a paper cup, which he picked up along with the mug of cold coffee; and followed the man out of the corridor to the sheriff’s office. The man waved Bryn towards a comfortable couch, settled himself in an armchair and pulled a small notebook from an inside pocket.
‘You are Professor Brynmor Jonathan Williams of the Western University of Utah. From England originally, I see. British passport.’
The in-tray on the sheriff’s desk was piled high with Bryn’s belongings.
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, Professor, I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this. I’m Detective Henry Slocumb of the SFPD, San Francisco’s finest. I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
And he did. About what Bryn was doing in north-eastern California. Whether he had been with friends. What he planned to do next. What he had seen on the mountainside. As the man went along, a number of interesting new features began to emerge.
The police had found evidence of a third party on Lassen Peak that morning. Whoever it was had been at some pains to avoid leaving a trace, but a CSI unit officer had discovered a single footprint in a patch of snow near the abandoned truck. It was possible to judge from the speed of melt and the depth of the print that the individual who had left it was present around the same time as the victim was killed. There were curious characteristics to the footprint also which tended to rule out Bryn. That and one or two other specifics relating to the killing itself meant that he was free to go; but Detective Slocumb would like him to keep in regular touch.
Bryn gave him the name of the motel he intended to use in San Francisco. Slocumb handed over a card with the address of the SFPD station where he was based. He explained, almost apologetically, that he would be keeping Bryn’s passport and return e-ticket to Salt Lake City for the time being; but that he expected to be able to release them before Bryn had finished his stay in California.
‘That means I’m still under suspicion.’
‘No, sir. It means we need to be sure we can get in touch with you. If you hi-tailed it out of ’Frisco without telling us, that would be suspicious. So please don’t do that, sir.’
There was one other question.
‘Do you know who the victim was?’ Bryn asked.
‘Sure. A scientist guy. With some business on the mountain. You saw the rock drills and the generator?’
‘But why should anyone kill him?’
‘Now, that’s the sixty four thousand dollar question, isn’t it sir?’
And that was all he was prepared to divulge.
Bryn collected his belongings and left. His hire car was parked outside the main entrance, with the keys on the dashboard. He was not due to make his first San Francisco rendezvous with Detective Slocumb for a few days, so he decided to continue with his holiday plans and drive on up to Medford, Oregon. He would complete his tour of the Cascades with a leisurely visit to Crater Lake. The deepest and bluest in the entire Western Hemisphere.
At Medford, he booked into a chain motel by the motorway and went online. Some of what Slocumb had said had begun to prey on his mind. What did he mean by ‘curious characteristics to the footprint’ and ‘other specifics relating to the killing itself’? Was the footprint perhaps an unusually high and thin Cuban heel? Had those specifics anything to do with an unusual bullet? And had not the motel receptionist in Truckee seen his Yosemite breakfast companion driving off to the north, towards Lassen?
He put the name Jack Wilson into the search engine. A fruitless waste of time. It came up with a string of hits about a famous baseball player, several young men on Facebook, a rising Hollywood actor – one and a half million entries altogether. He tried to narrow it down with added-in references to San Francisco, gun clubs, purple hearts, other social network websites, driving offences, anything. As a final act of desperation, he put in all the details he could remember of the man’s gun and the ammunition he had purchased in Truckee.
And at last something came up. A local newspaper report about a court case in Nevada where a very similar combination of weapon and bullet had been employed. An Israeli tourist had got into an argument in a casino in Reno. Weapons were drawn and the Israeli killed. The accused, a professional security guard, had made a successful argument of self-defence and was acquitted.
His name was not Jack Wilson, though.
It was Richard Wagner.
Chapter 8
Two days had passed.
Crater Lake, disappointingly smaller than expected, and as uncomplicated as a reservoir, was behind him. A straight fast drive down the Sacramento Valley had taken him back to San Francisco, where he’d found a motel in the low-rent barrio area east of Van Ness Avenue, within easy distance of the opera. Late in the afternoon, he strolled up to the box office to return Marion’s tickets for The Ring of the Nibelungs.
Lettering at the edges of the frontage identified the building as the ‘War Memorial Opera House’ and its heavy, Greek colonnaded structure had every appearance of a mausoleum to music. It had been built, in that spirit, to commemorate those who had died in the Great War. The flags of America and the State of California hung limply above in the breathless summer air. Touts stood about on the steps, offering Ring tickets at inflated prices. A bearded beggar squatted in the shade and another was rooting through the rubbish in a street bin.
The box office was in a shallow ante-chamber fronting the street. Bryn turned his spare tickets in successfully, with the promise of a tidy sum of money when they had been resold. He was on his way out when he noticed that one of the doors to the gold-coffered main lobby was open. So he slipped through.
A party of British tourists was being shown around by a woman in her early thirties – one of those English public school alumnae who are obligatory for cultural parties travelling abroad. Her group were twenty or thirty years older and probably more than capable in this internet age of organising a simple trip like this for themselves. The point of course was that they did not need to.
Bryn attached himself to them.
He thought the lady good value. She was enthusiastic about Wagner and his Ring Cycle, and was animatedly describing aspects of the production her party was shortly to see; though he noticed that not all her clients, notwithstanding the financial investment involved, were more than loosely familiar with the operas. One woman standing beside him even appeared to be expecting Gandalf instead of Wotan and a chorus of Hobbits rather than Nibelungs.
The guide was half-way through a persuasive feminist analysis of Wagner’s work (demonstrating that it was always the male characters who got it wrong and the women who had to save the situation) when she stopped speaking and asked Bryn if she knew him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not believe I have had that privilege.’
‘I see you are from England,’ she said, ‘but not, I think, a part of this tour.’
He explained that, while that was true, they were attending the same performances and he’d been unable to resist listening in on her erudite comments. She was better informed – forgive him, but he was bound to say this – than most people he had met at Bayreuth at the festspiel a few weeks past.
After that, unsurprisingly, he became a welcome addition to the group. They would shortly be going to dinner at a nearby restaurant and would he care to come along? He’d be delighted. One member, a clerical-looking gentleman in his fifties, balding with grey-blonde collar-length hair, was impressed by Bryn’s track record and anxious to learn more about Wagner. Bryn was happy to oblige, and they sat together at table.
David Burton – and it took Bryn a while to realise this – was not what his manner suggested. He was one of those quite dangerous men who like to conceal their intelligence beneath a cloak of diffidence. It was easy to overlook the subtle counterindicators – the quiet wat
chfulness, for example – and Bryn, that evening, was not in the mood for analysis. The other man’s interest drew him forward all too willingly on the warm tide of his own self-indulgence. The name of the game was charm. Burton was engaging, uncritical, and attentive; and irresistible. It was only when Bryn got back to his motel that night that a perception of the other’s shrewdness, and of his own absurdity, began to gather in his mind, like bitter lees settling in a bottle of wine.
In particular, he realised that once again he had talked far too much about himself and his life, acquaintances and interests; and learned almost nothing in return. This was chiefly because, while Burton had asked many questions about him, he – somehow – had never got round to any kind of reciprocal interrogation.
For example, he did not know what Burton did for a living or how he spent most of his leisure time. Burton knew what Bryn did. He had told him about Bayreuth – boasted would be more accurate – and been indulged with a string of questions about the people he had met, the restaurants he had been to. And he had not even asked Burton if he’d been to Glyndebourne.
Drink as usual may have had something to do with it. At one point, with glass in hand, Bryn had expatiated to the table at large about modern cinema. One of his new friends sitting opposite challenged his view that film was the great twentieth century art form. How could it possibly compare with opera?