“Could you check your diary, please?” I say.
He nods, whipping his diary out from a bag. I wait as he performs the necessary keyboard acrobatics.
“Let me see…we’ve only discussed Mr. Evans once, when I asked her why she doesn’t want to tell her husband that she writes. She was afraid that he would laugh at her, she said. Or he might tell her that her aspirations are pointless and that she will always be hopeless at it. That somehow resonated with me, because my wife has a tendency to laugh at me whenever I—”
“Did a woman named Mariska Van Dijk ever come in here? Claiming she heard about you through Mrs. Evans?”
“Ah, yes.” He nods, frowning. “I learned from my diary that Mariska was mad. She also got me into trouble. But let me check.”
He taps his diary again.
“Okay…she came in one morning and stormed out from the basement minutes later. I went down to ask what had happened. They said that she was a crazy Duo masquerading as a Mono. That I was an idiot to let her in without checking her background carefully. That I deserved to be sacked.”
“The perils of frontline fire,” I say. “Did you mention this Mariska episode to Claire later?”
He inspects his diary again.
“I did. Claire claimed never to have heard of the crazy woman before.”
“I’m not surprised,” I say, handing the questionnaire back. “Not at all. Thank you for your time.”
I turn to leave.
“Wait a minute,” he calls after me. “What is this all about? Why did you come here to ask me these questions?”
To figure out a murderer’s identity, of course. Though I still haven’t worked out the murderer’s motives. But there’s no way I can say these things to a man who looks like a leprechaun.
“Because I’m still looking for my pot of gold,” I say. “And I have only found some blooming pebbles so far.”
Toby is waiting in my office with a large grin, armed with two promising-looking sheets of paper.
“Didn’t take us too long to get these,” he says, striding over and handing them to me.
I peer down at the uppermost sheet. It says:
Registration district: Cambridgeshire
Time, date, and place of birth: 15:41, 5 March 1996, Rosie Maternity Hospital, Cambridge
Name: Catherine Louise Evans
Sex: Female
Class: Unconfirmed
Father’s name, date of birth, class, occupation: Mark Henry Evans, 14 June 1969, Duo, unemployed
Mother’s name, date of birth, class, occupation: Claire Evans (née Bushey), 28 February 1976, Mono, waitress
Address: 23 Milton Road, Cambridge CB4
My throat constricts. So Mark and Claire Evans did indeed have a child. I turn to the second piece of paper:
Registration district: Cambridgeshire
Date and place of death: 18 June 1996, 23 Milton Road, Cambridge CB4
Name: Catherine Louise Evans
Sex: Female
Class: Unconfirmed
Date and place of birth: 5 March 1996, Rosie Maternity Hospital, Cambridge
Name and surname of informant: Alan Bisseker
Qualification: Coroner
Cause of death: Sudden infant death syndrome
I whistle under my breath.
“Quite the revelation,” I say. “Well done for getting these so quickly. Pull up the coroner’s report, too, will you?”
“I had a feeling you’d want it,” Toby says. “I called Bisseker’s office a while ago. They’re going through their files at the moment. With luck, the report will be winging its way to us soon.”
“Excellent work, my boy.”
Toby looks pleased as he hurries out of the room. I grab a black knight and use it to scoop a white pawn off the board.
I turn on my computer. Its search screen eventually flashes up; I navigate my way to the Action for SIDS website. A “Donors” link emerges into view. I click on it to discover the following:
We are delighted to have the bestselling author Mark Henry Evans and his wife, Claire, as two of our most ardent supporters. They have funded our work with great generosity over the past nineteen years. In 2007 they set up an endowment for a professorial fellowship on research into sudden infant death syndrome based at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. The fellowship was named the Walter Bushey Fellowship in memory of Mrs. Evans’s father, who died the previous year.
I tap my way to Evans’s campaign website and type the name Catherine Louise Evans into its search box.
Nothing shows up.
I try again, just to be sure. I do a blanket Web trawl for her name. But the Internet is silent on “Catherine Louise Evans.” There is absolutely no mention of the girl’s name online.
This is odd. Really odd. Doesn’t Catherine’s existence, though brief, work in favor of Mark’s political strategy? Won’t the tragic tale of her premature death buy him a few more sympathy votes from the mothers of South Cambridgeshire? Yet he never mentioned Catherine during our interview this morning. Neither did he mention her to Sophia, the woman he’d been shagging for months.
Silence might result from scars. Deep scars. Terrible scars.
Or it might be caused by fears. Dark fears. Terrifying fears.
Mark and Claire Evans appear to have done their best to forget the daughter they once had. Poor Catherine Louise has been erased. Wiped clean from the factual slate of Mark’s existence. From his own campaign website, even.
But why keep her a secret? Was Catherine’s death so terrible that it scarred her parents for years?
I’m on the verge of reopening Sophia’s diary when Toby barges in, waving another sheet of paper.
“Gotcha,” he says, handing it to me. “Coroners are efficient sorts.”
“That’s because their clients are dead and can’t argue with them. Anything yet on the bank transfers?”
He gives me an apologetic shake of his head.
“We’re still working on it,” he says. “Bankers are damned annoying.”
“That’s why so many people wish them a quick death. And that’s why coroners are still in business. Keep trying, will you?”
Toby nods before disappearing out of the room. I turn my eyes to the report in my hands.
CORONER’S REPORT INTO THE DEATH OF EVANS,
LOUISE CATHERINE
A detailed autopsy revealed no anatomical cause of death. Toxicology and expert consultations with neuropathology and developmental pediatricians did not identify a cause of death, either.
Anthony Paget, MD, a Duo consultant on complex behavioral conditions at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, was asked to comment on the case. His report, dated 24 June 1996, states: “The findings of the postmortem examination indicate that Catherine’s death is consistent with a diagnosis of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). At this point, it remains unclear how a two-week period of prenatal exposure to the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant Prozac during the first month of conception might have contributed to her death, if at all.”
Cause of death is therefore listed as: No anatomical or toxicological cause of death. The significance of a two-week period of exposure to Prozac in utero has yet to be established.