“Could it be possible that the ambassador was part of it, but not the son—not Harry Castelli Jr.?”
“Anything was possible,” the man said. “But we hadn’t proved anything yet.”
“Were you her only point of contact with Special Branch?”
“Yes.”
“So her reports—they weren’t just business. She would have told you other things. How she was holding up. Whether she was scared, lonely. That kind of thing.”
“She talked about quitting,” the man said. He had tented his fingers in front his forehead. He used his thumbs to rub against his white eyebrows. “She said she was tired and didn’t know if she could keep going. I had to plead with her to stay on.”
“She wanted to come home?”
“Quite the opposite, in fact—she talked about staying there but dropping the mission.”
“Did she say why?”
“She lost her taste for it, is what I think—what she was doing, it bothered her somehow.”
Cain thought about the methods Special Branch had condoned. Infiltrations through sexual relationships. Maybe she’d bought into it and that was how she got in trouble. Or maybe it was why she wanted to quit.
“If she had met someone—if she’d become involved romantically, is what I’m talking about—would she have told you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she have anyone back in England?”
“Anyone how?”
“A boyfriend, a fiancé.”
“There was a man she was seeing when she was at the police college. We saw that when we did background on her. But that didn’t go far. It was over before she left for the States.”
“Before she disappeared, did she tell you she was pregnant?”
“What?”
“She was in her first trimester. She’d have been starting to show, but only just.”
The old man’s fingers caught hold of the table’s edge, flexing as he steadied himself.
“She’d been on the assignment for a year by then,” he said.
“So it happened while she was here.”
“She never said anything.”
“Would she have, if she’d known?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you okay?”
The old man shook his head, but Cain had no way to gauge what any of this meant to him—whether it was one mistake among many, a career painted with errors, or something that stood alone. It was clear that Carolyn Stone was important to this man. He’d taken a risk, sending her without protection to infiltrate men who were infinitely more dangerous than he’d imagined. Losing her had carried a price, and he was still paying it.
“It took us a long while to get another officer in place. We were waiting to see if Carolyn might turn up. We made quiet inquiries—there was only so much we could do. And meanwhile, the disappearances went on and on. Four more years of them.”
“And then you sent another officer.”
“In 1989. Another woman, but a little older. We thought she was better trained. We may have been wrong about that.”
Earlier, the man had said that after 1989, Special Branch knew Carolyn Stone had probably been buried alive. Now Cain understood how they’d reached that conclusion.
“I talked to a retired homicide inspector on Friday. In 1989, he picked up a naked woman running down an alley behind Eternity Chapel. She was drugged—she could move, but she couldn’t think straight, and couldn’t speak. He got her to a hospital, and then she disappeared. She was your officer, wasn’t she?”
“She was.”
“So then she knew. She had proof—who they were and what they were doing. What did she do next?”
The old man waited a long time until he answered. He looked at the street outside, watched the office workers with their black umbrellas. He looked at Cain and didn’t blink.
“She dropped out of sight too. We never saw her again, but we think we know what she did.”
“You’re talking about the Grizzly Peak fire. Five bodies, a bullet through each man’s trachea.”
“If that was her, she did it on her own. We didn’t order it.”
“But you didn’t particularly mind, either,” Cain said. “You didn’t pick up the phone.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“And that was the end for you?” Cain asked. “When you heard about the fire, you ended the investigation.”
“After the fire, the girls stopped disappearing.”
“And you never tied Harry Castelli Jr. to anything at all?”
“Just the father,” the man said. “His son was clean.”
The man stood, but left his hat on the table.
“Carolyn had a sister, and she’s still in London. I’ll have someone at the Met contact you through the normal channels with a DNA sample.”
“If the lab says they’re sisters, we’ll release her to the family.”
The man put on his hat now and came around to open the door.
“We’re done here, I think.”
36
OUTSIDE THE CONSULATE, he sat in Fischer’s car and watched the front door. He’d never gotten the man’s name, but that might not matter. He had a photograph of Carolyn Stone and a memory stick with a snuff film on it. He took out his phone and turned it back on. There was a missed call from Nagata, but it was Officer Combs he needed to talk to. He called the patrolman’s cell.
“Combs—where are you?”
“The Palace.”