“But I’d have a good think about who it might have been. We should talk about it. When you have some idea.”
Timur chewed his bottom lip and watched the eddying waters of the pool, his eyes full of quiet fear.
9.
WEBSTER’S PARENTS LIVED IN CORNWALL, on the Helford estuary, and at the end of the steep slope of their garden was a small cove, overhung by oaks, where at high tide a rowing boat could negotiate a course over the rocks to a mossy stone quay. In the early morning, whenever he was staying, Webster would walk through the garden down to the water’s edge, the grass cold and alive under his bare feet, drape his towel over the same dead branch and swim. Today the water was high with a spring tide and he was able to dive, carefully leaping off the slippery stone, his body a straight line piercing the surface. The water here wasn’t like other water; it was salty and fresh at once, of a green so dark it looked black, quickly deep and always, even in autumn after a good summer, icy. There was no place he liked to swim more.
In the drizzle and the early half-light the oaks’ new leaves seemed lit up against the darkness on the banks. He swam to a buoy about thirty yards out and from there turned down sharply through new layers of cold and dark, tried with powerful strokes to reach the bottom, failed, and rising burst finally into the air again, taking as much breath into his lungs as he could, the fine rain soft on his face. The boats moored beside him hardly bobbed, it was so calm.
It was still enough to swim across the estuary but he wanted to be by the woods today, so turning back from the buoy he headed upriver past his parents’ house toward Frenchman’s Creek, keeping about five yards from the bank, his stroke a steady crawl. Here the oaks stood so close to the water that they seemed to grow out of it, their branches reaching down and brushing the surface, the roots exposed in the red earth where the land had fallen away, so that all the elements of the place—the river, the sea, the damp earth and the misty sky—seemed joined in an ancient, watery union. Webster was always revived here. Like a penitent to the confessional he would bring his doubts and his sins to the water and, addressing each in turn, find them washed away.
He had plenty today. Dubai had left him feeling dried out and restive. Three days switching between the solid heat and the air-conditioned cold, drinking too much with Fletcher: that would have been enough, even without the grim flight back that had left at three in the morning and dumped him in a gray, tired-looking London at six. But none of this was the cause. He had caught the train with Elsa and the children at noon, and though delighted to be with them had been tetchy throughout the journey, having to field e-mails and calls about the case, and beyond that preoccupied with something he couldn’t clearly grasp. Part of it was having to deal with Dean Oliver, a private detective—for want of a better word—of Webster’s faint acquaintance. There was nothing wrong with Dean. He was resourceful, slick, even charming in his own way, but his trade was grubby, and Webster would rather have kept his distance. As it was, he had called him with Shokhor’s numbers that morning, and Oliver had said, in his most reassuring tones, that he would see what he could do, and suggested they meet in a week. Webster knew all too well what he could do, and what sort of trouble it might lead to—though on this case, he told himself, there was little risk.
No, there was something else. Elsa had given him a short period of grace and then let him know that he was going to have to rally, and for the rest of the trip he had done his best to give a convincing impression of cheer and disguise the fact that something continued to scratch at his nerves.
They were in Cornwall for his father’s birthday, his sixty-fifth. Patrick Webster was not a man for grand celebrations, but the family would be there, and one or two close friends. Webster’s sister, a family lawyer, was flying down from her practice in Edinburgh. Tomorrow night they would all have dinner and Webster was to give a speech, something he hadn’t given a moment’s thought in the crush of everyday obligations, and now as he moved through the water, twisting his head up to the air every fourth stroke, he felt shame at the thought that he was devoting more time to a man like Darius Qazai than he was to his own father.
What different men they were. Patrick Webster was a clinical psychiatrist who had devoted his career to the care of profoundly ill people: to the schizophrenic, the irretrievably depressed, the bipolar, to those poor souls whose minds had betrayed them.
As a boy he had found his father’s job mysterious and, if he was frank, a little frightening—not because he felt at risk but because the idea of a mind failing seemed nightmarish, both terrifying and curiously real. His father, though, he had found anything but. He was a quiet man, well-read, a student of history, engaged in the world, a socialist by instinct but never a member of any party, indefatigably kind. He was always trying to help people: when Webster was eight one of the fathers in the street had left his wife and small daughter, disappearing entirely with all the family’s money, and the Websters had put them up for four months while they reconstructed their lives. A couple of years after that, a homeless man whom Patrick had befriended came one summer to dig over and replant the garden, turning up every day in time for breakfast and after three weeks leaving with the job, which was of course unnecessary, undone. If he had been born in the eighteenth century, people would have called him a philanthropist, and there was something classical too about his more caustic, satirical side, which railed against entitlement and injustice. He was funny about these things, but deeply angered by them, too, and if he dwelled on them for too long could sink into a forceful gloom.
After ten minutes Webster had reached Frenchman’s Creek, where the trees swelling out over the water were in such health that he couldn’t see the bank on either side. He rested for a moment by a buoy at the entrance and saw bass sliding past a foot below the surface of the water. Before Lock’s death, he wouldn’t have taken this case so seriously. Now everything seemed trivial, and corrosive: Qazai’s vanity, Senechal’s steely mania, his own determination to find his client guilty of something at all costs.
He set off again, up the creek now, swimming through the clustered leaves and twigs that the night’s rain and wind had dislodged from the trees. At eye level water boatmen skittered around by the bank and bass broke the surface to snap at them.
Too much was wrong. The state of Shiraz Holdings, in particular, was beginning to intrigue him. A broker friend of his had asked around and found that it was widely assumed that Qazai’s private fund was in trouble. Word was that in 2009, when Dubai looked as if would be cut loose with all its debts by Abu Dhabi, Qazai had decided that there was no way that the richer, more sober of the Emirates would let its brash younger brother default, and had bet heavily that the market was wrong. No one was sure how much he had lost, but it was known that he had placed not only a large amount of Shiraz’s money but a larger sum he had borrowed from various banks, all of which he had of course had to pay back. There were some who were surprised to see Shiraz still functioning at all.
Then there was Mehr, whose death made little sense. It was no robbery, that was certain, and none of the other motives fitted unless Qazai was somehow involved. Webster had two theories, neither of which he particularly liked: that Mehr really had been smuggling treasures out of the country, perhaps on Qazai’s instructions, and had been caught; or that he had been involved in a far deeper, darker game, perhaps for an intelligence agency somewhere—a game that for now he could only guess at.
No: even without Parviz’s brief disappearance it was too much.
• • •
THAT AFTERNOON THE WEBSTERS rented a bass boat and took it out to the mouth of the estuary to fish for mackerel. The drizzle had cleared, scraps of blue showed through the white clouds and a breeze blew into their faces as they made for the headland, the faded pinks and oranges of their lifejackets vivid in the middle of the lead gray sea. The two-stroke outboard, flat out and managing three or four knots, strained away at a cons
tant pitch behind them.
Half a mile short of open water Webster killed the engine and letting the boat dip up and down on the gentle swell unwound a mackerel line over the side, taking care not to let the shining sharp hooks catch his fingers. He passed the end to Nancy and started playing out another line while Daniel waited patiently. They both loved to fish. On land they weren’t still for a minute, but out here they would happily sit for an hour jigging the lines and waiting for that moment when something unexpectedly powerful tried to tug them out of their hands.
“Move it up and down,” Webster said to Daniel, taking his son’s hands in his own. “Like this. You want the fish to think the bait’s alive.” Daniel gave the line a great jerk. “That’s it. Gently. Do it again and again. That’s it.”
Elsa smiled at him, her dark hair falling in her face in the wind.
“You’re such a countryman.” She pointed at a grand stone house sitting in isolation on the headland to the north. “How about that one?”
“Too severe. And you’d get bored.”
“I’d do something. Paint. Sculpt. Learn the violin.”
“You’d still get bored. Although I’m sure you’d find plenty of patients down here.”
“What would you do?”
“Fish.”
She laughed. “These two have a better record.”
“That’s true.”
Nancy turned to him. “Daddy, is this one?”
“Did you feel a tug? Let’s see.” He moved over to her side of the boat, which tipped a little with his weight, and pulled her line out of the water, looping the wet nylon in his left hand. There was nothing there. “False alarm. Do you want me to have a go?” Nancy shook her head and made to take the line back from him. He let it out again, passed it to her and moved back to sit by Elsa.
“What are you going to say then?” she said. “Tomorrow night.”
“I don’t know. I’m getting there. He’s an easy man to say nice things about.”
Elsa looked up at him and leaned against his shoulder. He put his arm around her. The breeze was beginning to gust a little and there was a trace of chill in it.
“You’ll be fine,” she said.
“I know. They’re not a tough crowd. I’ve just never had the opportunity before. I want to make the most of it.”
They all sat for a minute in silence, Nancy diligently tweaking her line, Daniel simply staring at his.
“You seem better for your swim,” said Elsa.
“Much. This place never fails.” He looked around him at the murmuring gray of the water, lighter and white-capped beyond the line between the two headlands; at the ragged tawny rocks on the shore and the secret sandy beaches that lay among them; at the hundreds of boats moored at Helford a mile or two behind. It was a complete world, the estuary. Maybe they could live here.
Nancy gave a little shriek and lifted the line above her head in her hands. “Daddy! Daddy! I think this is one!”
Webster moved forward and sat between her and Daniel, helping her reel it in. This time he could feel weight on the other end, and as he pulled he looked carefully into the water for the first silvery sign of a fish. There were a dozen or more hooks, and on the last were three plump mackerel, each about a foot long, whose shining backs squirmed in the light and dripped water as they struggled into the boat.
Webster let them drop and hugged Nancy while they thrashed at his feet.
“Well done, poppet. Three! We’ll have these for tea.”
The breeze was now a wind, and the swell beneath them choppy. They would have to go in soon. He took the first mackerel off its hook, held it firmly by the tail and raising his arm high beat its head sharply against the bench seat. The fish gave a final quiver and went still. As he bent to free the second his phone rang, an absurdly urban noise, and Elsa gave him a steady look. Distracted for a moment he let it ring out and set about his work again, killing the last two fish while Nancy and Daniel looked on with a childish lack of squeamishness.
The three mackerel lay beside him now, neatly in parallel and waiting to be gutted. As he reached into his jacket pocket for his penknife his phone rang again, its old-fashioned trill insistent.
“Just turn it off,” said Elsa.
“It’s a Friday,” he said.
It was a U.S. cell phone number that he didn’t recognize.
“Hello.”
“Ben?”
“Yes.”
“Lester. What’s up?”
“Lester? Jesus. How are you?”
“I’m good, buddy, I’m good. We miss you. How’s life with Ike?”
“It’s all right. It’s good, thanks. Listen, Lester, I’m on a boat, sitting next to three dead mackerel. Can I call you back in an hour?”
He turned to keep the phone out of the wind.
“Sure. Listen, all it was, I got a call from some guy, said he was a headhunter, his client’s thinking about giving you a job.”
“Is he real?”
“He left his name and a number, his cell. No company. Jonathan Whitehouse. A Brit. I couldn’t find any headhunter of that name. Not on this planet anyway.”
Webster knew what that meant. “You’d think they’d bother to do it properly.”
“I know. Don’t they know who we are?” Lester chuckled.
“What did he want to know?”
“What kind of a guy you are. And why you left. He tried to squeeze that in. I told him I wasn’t in the habit of talking to people I didn’t know. So who’s checking you out, Ben? You fighting someone you shouldn’t be?”
“God, I don’t know. Some Russian. Lester, I should go. But thanks. I appreciate it.”
“No problem, man. Any time.”
Webster switched his phone to silent and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”
Elsa nodded, clearly annoyed. There had been enough Ikertu on this trip already.
“Right,” he said with false cheerfulness. “Daniel. Let’s see what you’ve got, shall we?”
Daniel had nothing, and when Webster told him that was fine, that he never caught anything either, he protested. He didn’t want to go home now. That wasn’t fair. He wanted to stay until he’d caught as many fish as Nancy. Webster tried to exchange a glance with Elsa but she was looking out to sea, more irritated by the call than he had realized, or by something unsaid. Her mood had changed.
In the last fifteen minutes the wind, squalling now and forceful, had blown them halfway across the estuary so that they were only two hundred yards from the northern shore, and over the headland to the south rainclouds the color of wet rock were massing. The little boat danced erratically on the chop.
“Did you check the forecast?” said Elsa.
“There was nothing about this,” said Webster, sitting in the stern and dropping the engine back into the water. Daniel started to cry and Elsa comforted him as Webster started it up, turning the boat back toward the village, suddenly feeling exposed and more vulnerable than he had thought possible here. Substantial waves crossed the estuary now and Webster took them on the perpendicular, the bow rising up and crashing down, sending thick arcs of spray over the boat. Everyone was quiet, the only sounds the blustering wind and the slap of the bow on the water, and Webster, adjusting their direction and concentrating hard, watched his family huddled together and found himself praying for their safe return.
• • •
“HE MAY NOT LOOK IT, but he’s a daunting figure, my father.” Webster had stood to speak, but there was no need. They were twelve in all, squeezed around a makeshift dining table that was really two tables artfully dressed, and in the candlelight each face was bright with expectation. He could have simply raised his glass and bid them all do the same, and they would have been happy—his father, perhaps, would have preferred it—but there were things he had never said before that ne
eded to be said.
“When we were little, Friday night was discussion night. I think it started when I was ten or eleven.” He glanced at his sister. “You must have been all of nine. After we’d eaten, Dad would ask us if there was anything we wanted to talk about that week. There never was. So he’d suggest something. Something from the papers, or something that was on his mind, or something he knew was on ours. The first one I can remember, there was a huge CND march in London, and you wanted to know,” he turned to his father, “whether we thought it was right that these weapons existed. Or what we made of the miners’ strike. Or hostages in Beirut. Or heart transplants. Or Chernobyl.” He took a breath.
“Some of this scared me, to be honest. These were things I half heard on the radio or caught scraps of on the news when we were ushered off to bed, and I wanted to block them out. But you didn’t let us do that. We had to know what the world was like, so that we wouldn’t be scared.
“And it worked, more or less. I used to have the odd nightmare about nuclear winters, but that had more to do with my friend Peter Lennon gleefully showing me films about the likely aftermath. But generally the world was a less frightening place. It was still scary, but we didn’t have to be scared by it.”
Webster paused. “He did this for us. But more importantly he did it for countless others who were much more vulnerable than we ever were. We knew what he did at work, a little, because he’d explain it to us, like everything else. Not the details, of course, and in a sense I still don’t know. But I can see the thousands of people he treated and begin to imagine how they were helped and changed and sometimes cured by his work. In thirty years of practicing, that’s thousands and thousands of lives made better, sometimes in small ways, sometimes beyond all expectation. Thousands of people who because of him were less fearful. Became less scared.”
He looked at his sister again. “It’s quite an inheritance, not being scared of the dark. And Rachel, at least, uses her powers for good.” He smiled. “But I don’t think either of us can look at a thing we don’t understand and not want to understand it. Dad showed us how to explore the world.”
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