When the time came to leave town, I didn’t know what to say to Carl. He’d returned to London from Brighton a week earlier, a succès fou, in a state of such forceful energy that I could hardly bear to be around him. In ten days he and the other Cellini players were leaving for the second Edinburgh arts festival. His successes, his plans, his vision of chamber music, these were so consuming that he didn’t even notice how ill I was. I finally wrote him a very awkward letter:
Dear Carl, I am taking medical leave from the Royal Free. I wish you great success in Edinburgh.
I tried to think of some sweet way to close, something that would evoke the evenings perched in the top balcony at the opera, our long walks along the Embankment, the pleasure we’d shared in his narrow bed at the hostel, before he started making enough money for a real flat. Those times all seemed dead to me now, as remote as my Oma and my Bobe. In the end I only added my name, putting the letter in the post outside Waterloo before boarding the train to Axmouth.
XXV
Paper Trail
As soon as I got to Morrell’s I returned Nick Vishnikov’s call. He came on the line with his usual abrupt staccato.
“Vic! Was that witchcraft? Or did you have some kind of evidence?”
“So it wasn’t suicide.” I stood at the kitchen counter, letting out a long breath.
“No gunpowder residue on the hand was the first pointer. And then a blow to the cranium, which must have stunned him long enough for the perp to shoot him—the junior who did the first autopsy didn’t bother to check for other injuries. What did you notice?”
“Oh, the blow to the head,” I said airily. “No, actually, I saw the details of his life, not those of his death.”
“Well, whatever, congratulations—although Commander Purling at the Twenty-first District isn’t happy. Since his team didn’t spot the problem on site, he doesn’t want it to be homicide. But as I told him, the SOC photos show the gun just below the vic’s hand. If he’d killed himself, he would have lost the gun up around his head and it would have fallen away from his arm, not right under his hand. So Purling’s assigned the case. Got to run.”
Before he could hang up, I quickly asked if they were sure the SIG Trailside on the scene had killed Fepple.
“More witchcraft, Warshawski? I’ll pass the question on to the lab. Later.”
As I filled a bowl with water for the dogs, I wondered if I should call Commander Purling at the Twenty-first District to report what I knew. But it was so little—the mystery phone call on Friday night, the mystery visitor to Fepple’s office—the cops would get all that from the bank guard and Fepple’s phone logs. And anyway, if I called him, it would mean at best hours of explaining why I was involved. At worst—I could find myself in more trouble than I needed for having explored the scene of the crime on my own.
Besides, this wasn’t my case, it wasn’t my problem. My only problem was to try to get Ajax to pay the Sommers family what they were owed on Aaron Sommers’s life insurance. Aaron Sommers, whose name appeared on an old ledger sheet in Howard Fepple’s briefcase with two crosses next to it.
I called Cheviot Labs and asked for Kathryn Chang.
“Oh, yes: Barry gave me your sheet of paper. I took a preliminary look at it. From the watermark I’m saying it’s of Swiss manufacture, the Baume Works outside Basel. It’s a kind of cotton weave that they didn’t make during the Second World War because of the shortage of raw material, so it dates from somewhere between 1925 and 1940. I can give you more precise dating than that when I’ve studied the ink—that will make it easier for me to date when the words were written. I can’t make that a priority, though: it will be at least a week because of other jobs I have ahead of you.”
“That’s fine; this is enough for me for now,” I said slowly, trying to turn the information over in my mind. “Do you know—would this paper have been used primarily or exclusively in Switzerland?”
“Oh, no, by no means. The Baume Works aren’t so important now, but well into the 1960’s they were one of the biggest makers of fine paper and business paper in the world. This particular stock was widely used for things like address books, personal journals, that kind of thing. It is very unusual to see it treated like this, as accounting paper. The person who used it must have been very—oh, let me say, fond of himself. It would be helpful, of course, if I could see the book this was torn from.”
“That would help me, too. But one thing I’d like to know in particular: can you tell when the different entries were written? Not the exact year—but, well, if some are more recent than others I’d like to know that.”
“Right. We’ll include that in your report, Ms. Warshawski.”