“After he came in with the tape—at least we understood what we were looking at. What we had on our hands.”
“This was before you knew about the temporary passports. Before you had any connection to Castelli,” Cain said.
“Well before,” the man said. “Making the connection was old-fashioned police work. Interviewing the girls’ friends, their closest confidantes. None of them had ever talked about who had hired them, how they’d found their new job. But one of girls rang her friend from Heathrow. She had a temporary U.S. passport, is what she said. She was getting on a flight to San Francisco. Then she hung up and no one heard a word from her again—except the men who bought the video, if hers was the sort where they made her talk.”
Now the man was opening his envelope again. He brought out a folded sheet of paper and laid it on the table. When he unfolded it, Cain could see that this was old paper. Tattered at the corners, slightly yellowed by the decades in a hanging file somewhere. The man turned it around and slid it across. It was a photocopy of Carolyn Stone’s U.K. passport.
“We made a decision, inside Special Branch. We were already doing the undercover work in other groups—we had an officer who took it so far that he married an animal rights activist, had a baby with her. All so he could report on her, on her friends. Around Special Branch, we all thought that was a good piece of work. We weren’t thinking. So this, the missing girls and the videos, was an easy decision. Until we started seeing links to Castelli.
“Because he was the ambassador,” Cain said. “That made it more complicated.”
“Until we thought what it could mean. What if we had something on him? Something so terrible that if we came to him and asked a favor, he couldn’t say no?”
“You meant to blackmail him.”
The man looked at Cain, considering that. Then he nodded.
“We sent Carolyn to San Francisco, on a student visa. She enrolled in the University of California.”
“You picked her because she looked young. And because she fit the type.”
“Also because she was very good. Top of her class at Hendon,” he said. “She went over in the autumn of 1984, so that she enrolled in the son’s year. She managed to sit next to him in a French class.”
“Her job was to get close to the son?”
“And the fraternity, too. You know about Pi Kappa Kappa?”
“I know.”
“That was an insular brotherhood. And secretive. We knew Castelli Sr. had been a member, and that he’d put his son in touch before packing him off to university. Carolyn had to be patient before she could get anything out of him.”
“Was she reporting to you?” Cain asked.
“Daily, when it was safe.”
“When’s the last time you heard from her?”
“July seventeen, 1985.”
“That’s when they killed her,” Cain said. “They buried Christopher Hanley that day, and she was in the casket.”
It was almost a comforting thought. She couldn’t have suffered more than twenty-four hours.
“What did she report that day?”
“Nothing much. It was a phone call, and she talked to me. The son was back in town that day. Classes ended in June, and he’d spent most of the summer in London. We kept her in Berkeley to watch the fraternity, because we could put people on the son. But many of those kids were on holiday—it was a slow summer for her.”
“And she spent her downtime sewing, didn’t she?” Cain asked.
The man arched one gray eyebrow above the frame of his tortoiseshell glasses.
“She did like to sew. That wasn’t in her reports. It was in her file—she had to list her pastimes on a form when she applied. After she disappeared, I went over everything a thousand times. How did you know?”
“The photograph of her,” Cain said. “She’d made the dress she was wearing. And she was very good.”
The man thought about that, taking the new information and comparing it with what he already knew.
“There’d have been times she would have needed to be striking. To stand out, more than she already did,” the man said. “Some of the older Pi Kappa Kappa men moved in high circles. But there was no budget for that sort of thing. She had to make it work with what she had.”
There was a rush of noise from the hallway, and then it was quiet again. The man was staring at the backs of his hands on the table and never looked up.
“Was it any use sending her? Did she get anything, before she disappeared?” Cain asked.
“Not much. She was there just under a year. Two girls disappeared while she was there. She never saw them on the other side, never saw any of the Pi Kappa Kappa brothers with them. But she logged the activity, and when we went back and compared it against the last day the girls had been seen, there were anomalies—five of the core group dropped out of sight, and she didn’t see them again for two weeks.”
“They’d taken the girls somewhere to make the film.”
“The films, yes.”
“Did she connect Castelli to it?” Cain asked. “Was he one of the five who disappeared?”
“No.”