‘No!’ His voice was an agonised whine now. ‘I know nothing about any murders. I bought exclusive rights to the Promised Land manuscript from Shari Mitra in good faith.’
‘But you and I both know that Shari Mitra was not who she said she was. She was a fraud.’
‘No, she wasn’t. It was the name she used to stop her abusive husband finding her, that’s all. But she—Uzma Jamali—was the great-granddaughter of Amar Dasgupta, who was George Orwell’s close friend and the rightful owner of his last novel. I have proof of that.’
‘You’ll have to convince me.’
‘Okay, okay … Hey, this isn’t the way to the airport!’
‘You’re going to make a formal statement under caution, Steve. I don’t care about the manuscript. I’m running a police investigation into the murder of Uzma Jamali, and you’re a material witness.’
‘Oh shit.’ Weiner snatched out his phone and started frantically typing.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Finding out when the next flights to Frankfurt are. I’ll tell you everything, but you’ve got to get me to Frankfurt today, otherwise I’m getting my lawyer and I won’t say a word. There’s a flight from Gatwick in three hours. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ Kathy said.
When she had him seated in an interview room in Gatwick security, Kathy cautioned him and he began his story.
‘When Uzma ran from her pig of a husband, she had nowhere to go. She had no money and slept rough for a few nights until she met a Romanian girl, Elena Vasile, who was sorry for her and took her back to her place in Walworth. She got her a job in a kebab place, where she washed dishes. What she wanted was to go home to Pakistan, and eventually, with what she earned at her job and with a loan from Elena, she bought a cheap airline ticket back. But when she got home her family were furious. They disowned her and told her to go back to her husband. The only one who sided with her was her grandmother, who was the favourite daughter of Amar Dasgupta, who had left her an heirloom, the unpublished manuscript of the great English writer, George Orwell. She gave Uzma the manuscript and told her to go back to London and sell it to a publisher for lots of money. Uzma agreed and came to me—and also, although I didn’t know it at the time, to Golden Press.’
‘Why you?’
‘When she returned, she told the story to Elena, who said she’d be better to get an agent. Elena looked on Google and reckoned I had the best website.’
‘Can you prove any of this?’
‘Uzma’s story? Of course I can—people like Welthammer wouldn’t give me the time of day if I couldn’t. I’ve got copies of birth, marriage and death certificates of Amar and the others. I’ve got Orwell’s letter to Amar at the Savoy Hotel and a photograph of them together at Cranham, and a copy of Amar’s will leaving the manuscript to his daughter. I’ve also had a team of experts authenticate the manuscript—a forensic linguist, an Indian historian and the world’s top authority on Orwell. They all agree that it’s genuine.’
‘What about a document scientist, to check the age of the paper and ink?’
‘We confirmed that the typeface was that of a 1930s Smith Premier Home Portable typewriter, but we couldn’t do the other tests because Uzma wouldn’t release the original, only a photocopy. She was scared if she did people would steal it. She agreed to release it only when a contract had been signed, but then she was murdered and the original has never been found. That’s why we’re in a hurry. I have a binding agreement with Uzma to sell the book on her behalf, but I don’t want whoever has the original to beat me to it.’
‘All this must have cost you quite a bit.’
‘Believe me, I’ve got everything riding on this.’
‘Yes, I can see that. And when you heard that Uzma had also approached Charles Pettigrew you must have been very worried.’
‘I didn’t know anything about that, not until I read that she’d been murdered in Pettigrew’s house. That scared the shit out of me—he might have killed me.’
‘So you say, but to me it sounds like you have a big motive to get rid of competitors. I want to know where you were on the evening of Monday the twenty-sixth of October, the night Uzma died.’
Weiner checked his phone and came up with an evening with friends in a pub.
‘Also the morning of Friday, January the eighth.’
‘Why then?’
‘Just check.’
He did. ‘Oh yeah, I was in Oxford, with our Orwell expert, Sir Mortimer Hartley. But … I don’t want you telling him I’m suspected of being involved in a murder case. He’d have a heart attack.’
‘How did you travel to Oxford?’
‘I caught an early train … yeah, here we are, the 7.23, and I came back in the afternoon, the 3.15, got into Paddington at 4.18.’
Kathy took him through it again, pressing for details and the names of people who could confirm aspects of his story. Finally she released him, just in time to catch the Frankfurt flight.
Kathy was able to arrange a telephone conference with Commander Torrens and Alun Hughes. She told them the new information she’d uncovered, and when she finished Torrens, as before, asked Hughes for his reaction.
‘It’s still pretty thin,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Kathy’s provided a possible way in which an outsider could have tracked Brock’s movements that morning, but she hasn’t established that it did in fact happen. She’s also got a blurry photograph of someone who might resemble Dean Causley near the scene of the first murder, and the opinion of “Old Bert”—’ he said it with a derisive snort ‘—that he may have seen two men resembling the Causleys at some unspecified time and place, no doubt between bottles of cheap vodka.’ Perhaps he realised that was probably overdoing it a bit, for he added, ‘But full marks anyway, Kathy, for effort.’
‘We have to follow it up,’ Torrens said. ‘For insurance, if nothing else. After our last meeting, I mentioned your Causley boys theory to the assistant commissioner, Kathy, and she was interested. If true, it would put an end to the Jarvis–Walcott debacle and to the embarrassment of having a former senior homicide detective up on a murder charge. All the more reason therefore why we—you—have to make it absolutely watertight, one way or the other, before the press get wind of it and accuse us of a whitewash. For that reason, we will keep it covert for the time being—electronic and physical surveillance only. See where that gets us. Any word on the other one—Dean?’
‘No. He doesn’t appear to be using his Ethan Hawke identity.’
‘Could one of the brothers have done this on his own?’
‘It’s possible, sir, but I think unlikely.’
Kathy immediately organised a team of officers for the surveillance of Jarrod Causley, and the telecommunications intercept branch for the monitoring of his calls. ‘At this stage,’ she said, ‘it’s important that he doesn’t know we’re watching him. We want information on his movements on these dates in particular, and on any contacts with his younger brother Dean, whom we believe is living under an assumed name unknown to us.’
By the end of the afternoon everything was in place, and they began the long, patient process of sifting through information as it came in, looking for the anomalies or openings that might yield leads to a hidden life.
19
Another Monday without visitors to the prison. He was spending more time in the library these days, helping the librarian, Bryan, with an ongoing project to transfer all their records onto the new computer system. Bookish and gentle, the librarian seemed an unlikely employee of a prison, and they got on well. Today Brock mentioned that he’d once known a former Belmarsh inmate by the name of Jarrod Causley, and was surprised when Bryan nodded and said, ‘Yes, I know.’
‘How come?’
‘I’ve kept in touch with him, off and on. When you got arrested, he told me you’d been the one who arrested him. He thought it was kind of funny you being in the same position now.’
‘I’ll bet he did.’
‘He wasn�
��t like gloating or anything. Just said it was poetic justice, him having been innocent.’ Bryan sounded a little defensive, Brock thought.
‘Is that what he told you?’
‘Yeah.’ Bryan busied himself with his papers. ‘I’d better get these filed away.’
‘So how’s Jarrod doing these days?’
‘Great, really well. He’s got a job in a public library and enjoying it. Amazing, really, how he’s been able to readjust after fourteen years inside.’
‘That’s good to hear. You must have helped him lay the groundwork for that.’
‘Yes, he did an external degree while he was here. He was very focused, very determined to put the past behind him.’
‘That was an arts degree, was it?’
‘Yes, majoring in English literature.’
‘Twentieth century?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking that I should get down to some serious reading. I thought I might have a go at Orwell, maybe. Did Jarrod read Orwell?’
Bryan frowned. ‘Probably. Animal Farm …’
‘How about Burmese Days? Did he read that one?’
Bryan looked puzzled. ‘It’s not one of his popular books. I don’t know if we’ve got it. Look it up.’ He picked up his papers and moved away.
Brock knew that it was there because he’d borrowed it himself. He tried to find out from the library computer who else had borrowed it in the past, but wasn’t able to access the information.
At six thirty that evening Kathy arrived back in her flat and set about preparing a vegetarian curry—cooking therapy—while she listened to the team reporting in on Jarrod. He had worked until five at the library, filled two shopping bags with groceries at the nearby Sainsbury’s and then caught a Piccadilly line train to the Manor House stop at Woodberry Down, a couple of miles east of Hampstead Heath. From there it was a short walk to his two-bedroom flat on the sixth floor of a new block. Kathy knew that Jarrod had paid just under a million pounds for it, no mortgage, ten months before, and that it had absorbed the major part of his share of the brothers’ inheritance from their parents’ estate.
As she kneaded the dough for the coriander and onion flatbreads she’d decided to try making, Kathy listened to Jarrod chatting on his phone to a woman he’d met on the web. They seemed to be in the early days of a relationship, and Jarrod sounded very relaxed and confident, talking about the view from his living room window out over the landscaped water basins of the East and West reservoirs. Kathy knew that view because it was on the screen of the laptop sitting on her kitchen table, copied from the estate agent’s website.
Her phone rang, a call from John to say goodbye. He was all packed, ready to leave early the next morning. Things were going well at Suzanne’s, he said, where the weekend’s events seemed to have had a galvanising effect on Stewart, who was now actually taking part in mealtime conversations, and offering to wash up.
Kathy laughed. ‘That is a miracle.’
‘Yeah. Maybe it’s the realisation that he may have to appear as a witness in a court of law and it might be good to have a few friends around. Poor guy’s still a bit broken up over Inga from Riga though. Any developments your end?’
‘Yes, too early to say, but I’m hopeful.’
‘Good. About the manuscript, I’ve had an email from one of my PhD students back in Montreal who’s been working on it for me. His area is stylometrics, analysing texts through the frequency and pattern of words. He looked at Orwell for me, to compare with The Promised Land. With such a small sample of just two pages he can’t say anything definite, but he tells me the indications aren’t promising. I’ll go over it with him when I get back, but he thinks it’s probably a fake.’
‘Is that right? But what about Weiner’s experts?’
‘Yes. We don’t know what methods they used, do we? Though I know Mortimer Hartley isn’t a great believer in computational models such as we use. But as I say, our sample is too small to give a definite answer. We really need a much bigger chunk, preferably the whole novel.’
‘Little chance of that I’m afraid.’
They discussed their plans for the evening. John was taking the household out for a last meal at a local Indian, and Kathy told him she was also having a curry.
‘Great minds,’ he said, a little wistfully. ‘I wish …’
He hesitated and Kathy said, ‘Yes? What do you wish?’
‘I wish I could be there with you. I miss you, Kathy.’ Then he added, ‘Am I out of line?’
For a moment she didn’t know how to reply, but then she said, ‘No, not at all. I wish you were here too. We’ve had so little time to get acquainted again.’
They were silent for a moment, then he said, ‘I’ll come back to London as soon as I can.’
After she’d hung up Kathy turned back to her cooking, so deep in thought that she almost missed the start of another conversation on Jarrod’s phone, this time with a man.
‘Hi, Jarrod.’
‘Hello, mate. How are you?’ Kathy registered how intimate, almost seductive, Jarrod’s voice had become.
‘Good, good. Saw your old friend again today.’
‘Oh yes? And what was the great detective up to then?’
‘You’ll never guess.’
‘Go on, surprise me.’
‘He came into the library and just happened to mention that he knew an old inmate called Jarrod Causley.’
‘Did he now?’
‘Yes. So I told him I knew you, and he started asking me all these questions.’
‘Like what?’
‘He asked how you were doing now. I told him you were doing well, working in a public library. That was all right, wasn’t it?’
‘Sure. What else did he ask about?’
‘What you’d studied while you were inside. That’s all.’
‘That’s all? You sure?’
‘He asked me about books you read. He was interested in George Orwell.’
‘Orwell? Nineteen Eighty-Four?’
‘No, another one. Burmese Days.’
‘You sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
There was silence on the line until finally the caller said, ‘Jarrod? You okay?’
‘Yeah. I’ve gotta go.’ Jarrod’s voice had changed, become brisk, forceful. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
The line went dead, and immediately Kathy got on her phone and called the car that was waiting outside Jarrod’s apartment block. ‘I think he’s on the move.’
She shrugged on her coat, grabbed her bag and phone, all the time listening on an earphone to the reports from the watchers. Jarrod had emerged from his block wearing a dark jacket and cap and was running in a westerly direction through the rain.
‘He’s reached the main road, Green Lanes, the bus stop on the northbound side. He’s checking the cars going by. I’m driving past him now, Foxtrot Two. Over to you.’
The second car reported a few minutes later. ‘He’s boarded an N29 double-decker northbound. I’m following.’
Kathy crossed the river and headed north but soon got caught up in heavy traffic made worse by the rain, now a deluge. She sat, tapping her hands in frustration on the steering wheel in time to the steady sweep of the windscreen wipers, as she listened to the equally slow progress of Jarrod’s bus up the A105, through Haringey and Turnpike Lane. Finally there was an urgent, ‘He’s got off. Wood Green Mall. Repeat, Wood Green Mall.’
The lead car had passed the bus stop and turned into a side street beyond, while the second car was stuck in the traffic a hundred yards behind. The result was a delay of a couple of minutes before their passengers reached the mall entrance in pursuit. They reported no sign of Jarrod in the ground-floor mall and one of the police took the escalators to the upper level while the other went into the big Primark store. When she couldn’t find him there, she went next door to the market and food hall, where she finally caught sight of him, buying cheese at one of the stalls. He s
eemed in no hurry now, she reported, strolling from counter to counter, and he was still there half an hour later when Kathy turned into the car park.
She joined the officer who pointed him out, discussing something with a fishmonger. Watching him now, and remembering his previous urgency, Kathy asked when the markets closed.
The officer checked her watch. ‘Still another hour,’ she said.
Kathy felt she was missing something. It occurred to her that Jarrod hadn’t used his phone since he abruptly cut off the call with Bryan, and she asked one of the stallholders if there was a public phone nearby. He pointed it out, at the entrance to the markets. Kathy took a note of its number and requested a search for calls made in the previous hour. She didn’t have long to wait for the answer: only one call had been made, in the minutes immediately after Jarrod arrived in the mall, to a mobile number. Kathy requested a location and was told it was currently at an address in Islington, in inner north-east London. She returned to her car and told one of the surveillance crews to follow her there.
On the way, they were informed that there was no longer a signal from the mobile. As she approached the Islington address Kathy heard the sirens and saw the glow in the night sky, and as she turned into the narrow street of terrace houses she saw a fire brigade ladder silhouetted in the rain against a burning roof.
What with the jam of emergency vehicles and the milling crowd of residents and bystanders, it took a while to establish that the fire had occurred in the attic flat at the end of a terrace row, and thanks to the swift arrival of the fire brigade had been confined to the top floor, which was completely gutted, though lower floors were badly damaged by water from the hoses. The flat was being rented by a young man known to neighbours as Robert Leonard, who had been living there for over a year. Two people identified him as the man in the police picture of Dean Causley. There was no sign of him at the scene. It was Alfarsi who later pointed out that Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke had played roommates in the movie Dead Poets Society.
The Promised Land Page 21