So Mehr’s murder occupied Webster’s mind, partly because it was a mystery, partly because he couldn’t quite believe that Qazai being accused of smuggling and Mehr dying for it were not somehow connected. But a mystery it looked set to remain. He had spoken to the foreign journalists who had covered the story, and they had been unable to add anything to what had already been published. He had found sources at two Iranian opposition groups, one in London, one in Paris, and neither knew any more than he did. He had even tried the Foreign Office, who had brushed him off with a coldly polite referral to their previous statements on the affair.
In short his inquiry found nothing, not so much as a hint, until the only people left to call were the Mehrs themselves. His conscience baulked at the thought, but he found a justification: it was possible, after all, that Mrs. Mehr would welcome some interest in her husband’s death—even possible that she would welcome some assistance. Her interests and Webster’s were aligned, he should remember, because they both wanted to know why he had been killed, and by whom.
So he steeled himself, and feeling more or less ashamed despite all his rationalizing, made the call. At least only mild deception was necessary; the number was in the phone book, and he could be himself. The phone rang five times and he was close to hanging up when a woman answered.
“Hello.”
“Mrs. Mehr?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Ben Webster. I work for a company called Ikertu. Darius Qazai is my client.”
He waited for her to say something in acknowledgment but there was only silence on the line.
“He’s asked me to write a report about him. About his reputation. It’s for his investors. I was wondering if I could ask you one or two questions about your husband’s relationship with him. With Mr. Qazai.”
There was a pause of a second or two before she spoke.
“He hasn’t said anything to me.”
“No. I’ve asked him not to call people. It prejudices the result. If you like I can show you a letter of introduction that he’s signed.”
Another pause. “I don’t really understand, and I can’t think what you’d ask me. Or why you’d think it was appropriate.”
Then she hung up.
Webster took a deep breath, closed his eyes tight and sat for a moment, letting the shame wash through his body.
It was half past two, and the sun was shining. He should be leaving for an appointment at his daughter’s school. He glanced at his watch and dialed one more number.
“Cantor Sassoon. Good afternoon. How may I direct your call?”
“David Brooks, please.”
“Hold the line.”
Sober music played in Webster’s ear.
“David Brooks.”
It was rare for a lawyer to take a call direct, and Webster realized that he hadn’t expected to be put through at all. He began by giving Brooks the same account of himself he had given Mrs. Mehr, and the words sounded empty as they came out of his mouth.
“Your name was in some of the reporting. I wondered if I might ask you some questions.”
“Ikertu, you say?”
“Yes.”
Brooks gave a grunt, its meaning not clear; it could have been approval or contempt. “I’m not going to tell you anything without an instruction from my client.” His voice was flat and all on one note, and he left the “g”s off the end of words. “Have you spoken to my client?”
“I have. She didn’t want to talk.”
“Then neither do I.”
“Of course. Although it’s not really about Mr. Mehr’s affairs. I wondered if you knew anything about the investigation in Iran. Whether anything had been decided.”
Brooks sniffed. “What has that got to do with Darius Qazai?”
I wish I knew, thought Webster. “Mehr was his employee, in a sense. There are rumors that Mehr was in Iran on Qazai’s business.”
For a second or two Brooks said nothing. “You have a very strange job.”
“On occasion.”
“Hm.” Another sniff. “You’re investigating Qazai.”
“Yes and no. I’m . . . Look, this is more than I should say, but Qazai is doing a deal. He’s hit a bump, and thinks someone somewhere is saying things about him that aren’t true. I want to make sure that those things aren’t connected to what happened to your client.”
Brooks thought for a moment, grunted again. Webster could hear him tapping keys in the background.
“I’m not going to tell you anything. Obviously. But I will say—and I don’t think this qualifies as privileged or surprising information—that the investigation in Iran, such as it is, is not being conducted to the standard expected by Her Majesty’s justice system.”
“Was he really robbed?”
Brooks seemed unable to answer without a substantial pause. Webster waited. “Mr. Webster,” he said at last, “it is possible, one might suppose, on the balance of probabilities, that every now and then in Iran a normal antiques smuggling ring, during the normal course of its business, is called upon to murder an English art dealer. My own personal belief is that all this was far from normal. Thank you for your interest. Goodbye.”
And before Webster could squeeze in another question, he too had gone.
• • •
THE BAKERLOO LINE WAS deadly slow and by the time he reached the school, five minutes late, Elsa and Miss Turnbull had already begun their meeting. Elsa gave him a severe look as he took a seat next to her on one of the tiny children’s chairs.
It wasn’t at all unusual, Miss Turnbull told them when they had explained the problem, for children of this age—especially girls—to have quite intense relationships with their friends. She had noticed that Phoebe and Nancy seemed to be spending a lot of time in each other’s company, but hadn’t realized that Nancy was feeling put-upon, still less upset, and if she was worrying about it at home and dreading school as a result then something would have to be done. What had worked in similar situations was to talk to all the boys and girls about the importance of having lots of different friends and playing together as a class, and to make sure that at playtime Phoebe wasn’t allowed to keep Nancy to herself. Elsa, Webster could tell, wasn’t wholly satisfied.
“Happy?” he said as they walked across the empty playground.
“We’ll see.”
“She seems to have the measure of it.”
“I was hoping she might have a word with Phoebe’s parents.”
“If they’re anything like their daughter they probably won’t listen.”
Elsa shrugged.
The school was half a mile from their house, and for a while they walked in silence, Elsa half a pace in front of Webster, her head down and full of thoughts.
“Why were you late?” she said at last.
“I’m sorry. The Tube was buggered. We were stopped at Paddington for five minutes.”
“Then you should have left five minutes earlier.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should have left enough time. I know you. You take it to the last minute and then you rush out and expect the world to fall into place for you.”
There was a park opposite their house: a square of grass, a sandpit, a climbing frame and a seesaw, and this afternoon it was full of small children bouncing around each other like atoms in a jar. Webster saw Nancy first, hanging off the climbing frame by her legs, while Daniel carefully shoveled cupfuls of sand onto a growing pile on the grass.
As they reached the gate he touched Elsa’s arm and she turned to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Really.”
“It’s OK.”
“Do you fancy a couple of nights in Italy? The week after next. After Cornwall. I’ve been invited by my dodgy billionaire.”
“To his house?”
“To his big house. On Lake Como. It has its own Wikipedia page.”
She smiled. “Who would look after the kids?”
“The nanny? Your mom?”
“I’m not sure it’s such a good idea. We’ve never been away in the week. I think I should stay here, for Nancy.”
“I was hoping you could tell me what in heaven’s name drives these people. I’m out of my depth.”
“You’ll be fine. They don’t want a therapist.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Elsa collected the children from the friend who had picked them up after school, and together they walked back home. As they turned in to the short path leading to their house Webster reached up to hoist Daniel down from his shoulders and started feeling in his pockets for his key.
“Have you got yours?” he asked Elsa.
“You’re hopeless. Yes.”
As she reached for the lock, something caught his eye.
“When does the recycling go?”
“Wednesdays. Tomorrow.”
“Did we put any out?”
“There was loads.”
Webster looked at the empty box and wondered who had done the work, and on whose behalf.
• • •
TWO DAYS AFTER HIS calls to Mehr’s widow and David Brooks, Webster received a package. It had come by mail—stamped, not franked—in an A4 manila envelope addressed with a printed label that bore no clue to its sender. Inside was a report, of sorts, printed on a single sheet of plain paper in plain, black type.
There was no title, and no introduction, but the moment Webster saw it he knew what it was. It was a private report into the death of Cyrus Mehr, and a very direct and unexpected document it was. Whoever had written it appeared to have seen the police file, and as he read Webster found himself wondering which of his competitors, if they were responsible, had such excellent sources in Iran.
Mehr, it said, had been invited by the Cultural Heritage Association of Iran to spend three weeks helping to catalog the treasures of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, a place so vast and run so inefficiently (some said corruptly) that the true extent of its largely chaotic collection was unknown. It was not unusual for foreigners to be asked to collaborate in this way, and Mehr, an expert above all else in carpets from the Safavid dynasty, whose kings had built the palace, was an entirely plausible candidate.
He had left London on the 15th of February, a Thursday, arrived in Tehran the next day and spent his first week working, staying at a hotel in the north of the city and calling his family at least once a day (the report didn’t make clear whether the Iranians or the Mehrs had provided this piece of information). On the following Saturday he had flown to Isfahan, telling his colleagues that he was going to meet a dealer he knew who had called to offer him a particularly rare, fine prayer rug from the sixteenth century. At around noon he had checked into his hotel and then taken a taxi immediately to Joubareh in the north of the city, a journey of fifteen minutes.
He and the dealer had arranged to meet in an Internet cafe. It wasn’t clear whether the dealer had ever turned up, but at a little after five o’clock, at some point between getting out of his taxi and reaching the door of the cafe, four men in balaclavas had grabbed Mehr and forced him, struggling, into a white van that had driven up at that moment, clearly after waiting a little distance away. The street was not busy, but there were a few passersby who would have seen the van leaving at great speed in the direction of the airport. Neither it nor the five men—assuming there was a driver as well—had been seen since.
This sparse little document, all of four paragraphs, contained two details that caused Webster to imagine Mehr’s last hours more vividly than he would have wished. The first was that his body had not in fact been found in his hotel room. Shortly after daybreak the following day two women had discovered it by the side of the Zarrin Kamar canal, which ran through the middle of Isfahan. The canal wasn’t lit, so it was entirely likely that the body had been there all night and that no one had passed. Mehr was dressed in the suit he had been wearing the day before, and everything on him had been taken, except for his passport (which, contrary to the version released to the press, had been found in his jacket pocket). When the police searched his room they discovered—or said they had—the receipts and other documents that were later reported extensively in the Iranian press.
And he had not been stabbed; at least not at first. There had been no postmortem, but someone in the Isfahan police department had noted that the three wounds in Mehr’s stomach hadn’t bled onto his clothes as one might expect, and that the marks on his neck, described in the report as livid, indicated that he had in fact been strangled. That was the most inspired moment of the investigation, it seemed: since then only three people had been interviewed, no evidence had been taken from the street where Mehr had been abducted, and the last sentence of the report merely stated that as far as anyone could tell, the policemen in charge showed no signs of wanting to make any progress.
Webster read the report three times, and when he was done he walked across the office and photocopied it, twice, before taking a copy to Hammer, who had been in for an hour but was still in his running clothes. The cap he always wore to run was on his desk by his newspapers.
Webster waited until Hammer had finished reading. “Do you think Qazai knows all this?”
“How’d you get it?”
“An anonymous benefactor. It came in the post.”
“Who was it?”
“I’ve called a bunch of people. Journalists, Foreign Office. No one told me anything. It could have been the lawyer. Mehr’s lawyer.” He didn’t mention his widow.
Hammer read it again, and when he looked up there was a challenge in his face. “I didn’t realize this was a murder investigation.”
“I thought it was worth following up. I’d say I was right.”
Hammer settled himself with a long breath, his forearms on the desk. “You going to sit down?” Webster sat in one of the two chairs facing him. “Have you had breakfast?”
“Yes.”
“Shame. I guess I’ll have to do this on an empty stomach. So what’s your theory? Qazai had him killed? He was mixed up in something big?”
Webster ignored the sarcasm. “I don’t have a theory. But he’s Qazai’s man, and he died in Iran, which is already odd, and for whatever reason the Iranians lied about what happened. Isn’t that enough?”
Hammer pushed out his lower lip and thought for a moment. “I’m finding it hard to imagine what the conspiracy theory is. This is Qazai’s guy. Say he’s doing something terrible in Iran. Say he’s into drugs or arms or some shit. You think the Iranians aren’t going to crow about that?” His eyes were on Webster, waiting for a response. “Look. This is interesting, no question. My money, what it’s worth, is on some fucker in the government or the police milking this situation. The original articles, out of Iran, they said that not all the pieces had been recovered, right? Where do you think they might be? On their way to a collector, I bet. I think we can assume that at some point someone there is taking advantage of this situation. Either the Iranians had him killed or they made the most of it when someone else did.”
Webster started to speak.
“Hold on.” Hammer checked him. “That’s part of it. The other part is, this isn’t our job. It’s too big. If I thought you could ever find out what really happened I might say go ahead. But we can’t do work like this there. It’s too difficult. This is great,” he picked up the piece of paper, “but what are you going to do next? Fly to Tehran? Get a bus to Isfahan? Ask a few questions? Can’t be done. Even if you got a visa they’d arrest you at the airport as a spy. Which you sort of are. And our sources there are feeble. Fletcher’s about as close as we get, through the Americans, and they don’t know shit. So.” He raised his hand. “Wait a second, I’m nearly done. With regret—and you know
I’d always rather know things than not know them—we can’t get into this. You need to concentrate on what we’ve been asked to do.”
Webster hadn’t been expecting this. From the start he had wanted to know what had happened to Mehr, and he had assumed everyone would share his interest—naively, of course, because it was like Ike to decide with cool logic which battles not to fight. A talent he would do well to acquire himself.
“All right,” he said. “So you’re happy if in a year’s time we’ve written our report, Qazai’s been waving it around, and it all comes out that his employee was up to no good on his behalf? You don’t mind that?”
Hammer shook his head deliberately. “Not at all. Look. If you find that out, whatever it is, by doing the work we’ve agreed to do, great. I’ll be delighted. But in a year’s time I’ll be quite happy to explain to whoever’s listening that we don’t do murder investigations. Not in Iran, anyway.”
Webster nodded and suppressed a sigh. Ike, like Elsa, was impossible to argue with because he was usually right.
“You want that?”
Hammer put his palm on the document. “I’ll hang on to it.” He watched Webster get up to leave. “When are you flying out?”
“Sunday.”
“Where you staying?”
“Timur’s sending someone to pick me up from the airport. Fletcher offered but I opted for peace and quiet.”
Hammer laughed. “Send the old bastard my love.”
7.
THE HEAT IN DUBAI came in short, thick blocks: the walk from the arrivals hall to the car, from the car to the hotel. Webster, with his northern blood, felt it like a substance, a dense, invisible haze that offered a sly welcome and then held you in a burning grasp. Like the cold in Russia that could make your clothes as stiff as a board this deadly weather was exciting, somehow, but no one chose to endure it for long, not even the tourists, and the only people who did—the guest workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, suspended against the sky on impossibly rickety scaffolding, so far up that they were almost lost in a cloud of heat, slowly building the shiny miracle of Dubai—had no choice. On the road to the city from the airport, crossing the bridge over the creek, there was a huge screen that gave the official temperature in square red figures. When it reached 50 degrees Celsius, all construction work, by law, had to stop; Webster remembered Constance telling him on his first visit here that during the summer it could spend weeks on an uncanny, unchanging 49, so that progress was never interrupted. Today, halfway through what must even here have counted as spring, it was a mere 41.
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