We Are Death (22 page)

He was tired, needing to lie down. The classic police officer’s line: I’m too old for this shit.

‘Perhaps he will help you. That’s why he’s returned. This is his penance.’

Jericho gritted his teeth, lifted the water, and then lowered it, resting his hand on his hip.

‘The man murdered at least twenty people,’ he said darkly. ‘I don’t want his help.’

‘Ultimately,’ said Badstuber, oblivious to his tone, ‘I think you might need to take whatever help you can get.’

The guide returned and immediately started talking at Badstuber, words flying out at great speed. His speech delivered, he turned and walked back towards the hut, and Jericho waited on Badstuber, assuming the guide had been the herald of some event.

‘He suggests waiting for him,’ said Badstuber.

‘Is that all he just said?’

Badstuber nodded. ‘The guide is unnecessarily dramatic. He says that Geyerson left the hut at just after seven this morning, so he shouldn’t be too much longer getting back down. They presume that he will stop here for lunch, as that’s generally the procedure, and then head back down to overnight in Imlil. They don’t know if he has any longer-term plans in the High Atlas.’

‘And he’s travelling with Emerick?’

‘He has a travelling companion who matches Emerick’s description.’

Jericho let out a long sigh. He’d been determined to be phlegmatic about whatever was next, but was relieved that there was no walking in his immediate future.

He turned and looked around, studying the setup for the first time. There weren’t too many other people around yet, although with the groups of walkers coming up behind them, the place was about to get busier. From what he could see, if they had their chat with Geyerson now, then they’d be as well making their way back to the house where they’d just stayed. Beyond that, he really had no idea.

‘I presume we can get some lunch,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

*

A
sunny morning again in Kent, but much fresher after the storm the night before.

There were three of them at breakfast. Both Haynes and Leighton had noted how Mrs Drummond seemed to be serving her husband, while not being part of his morning, as though she was on his staff. He had work to discuss, which meant that more than likely she would be eating breakfast on her own, reading the Sunday Telegraph.

Haynes had been expecting toast and coffee, or perhaps some variation on the full English. Instead he was greeted with home-assembled muesli: oats, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, grapes and apples, with a great dollop of natural yogurt on top, the bowl of which was placed before him with no alternative, and little opportunity to say no.

Leighton, already used to Haynes’s general distaste for healthy food, smiled to herself, keeping her head down. She didn’t want to be caught by her more eminent colleague, casting romantic glances across the table.

They had their bowls of muesli; there was coffee and tea and orange juice and water.

‘Sorry, no toast,’ said Drummond, after he’d been eating for a short while. The others had joined him, waiting for him to get the conversation going. ‘They won’t let me eat bread anymore, so I’m stuck with all this natural stuff. You get used to it, I dare say. Can’t look at off-the-shelf packet cereal now without having to stab myself in the eyeball with an insulin needle.’

‘That’s a little dramatic, Harry,’ said Leighton, and he humphed. In the same movement, he indicated the folder lying on a sideboard behind Haynes, which Haynes had already noticed when sitting down at the table. He could hardly have lifted it on the spot, however, much though he’d wished to.

‘I’ve done your book,’ he said. ‘Very dry, I must say.’

‘Just the passages we asked for,’ said Leighton, ‘not all of it?’

‘Yes, all of it,’ he said. ‘Didn’t take long. I expect some so-called experts would pick me up on my interpretation of some of the language...’

Haynes looked over his shoulder, then glanced back at Leighton. He wanted to lift it up and get out. It was all they had come for. He knew, however, that there was still a lot of talking to be done and there was still, quite possibly, some negotiation to be had before it would be handed over.

‘Have you heard the story of The Honourable William Featherstone?’ asked Drummond.

The question was really directed at Leighton, the historian. He ignored Haynes. Leighton shook her head.

‘No, not many people have.’

He took a drink of coffee and dabbed the corner of his mouth with the cotton napkin. Here comes the history lesson, thought Haynes, who was having one of those moments when the whole thing seemed absurd, a million miles away from the usual Sunday morning shift in Wells, dealing with any leftovers from Saturday night.

What are we doing here?

He couldn’t very well ask Leighton for help, and then skip back down to the West Country as soon as it seemed to be heading off in a direction he didn’t like. Nevertheless, he would have been much happier taking Drummond into custody and asking him what he knew. And when he knew it.

Perhaps Leighton’s working life was always like this.

‘He served in India with the 51
^st
Foot. Around 1810, height of the East India Company. Not a particularly interesting chap, by all accounts. Good family, of course, to which he owed his commission, the duties of which were quite beyond his abilities, I’m afraid. There are, as we know, many such examples throughout history.

‘He rather disgraced himself, as so many did at that time in India. Women and drink. He might have got away with it, but he’d made the mistake of marrying the daughter of the fifth Earl of Canterbury. When word reached the Earl of Featherstone’s carousing and debauchery, not to mention his mistreatment of his daughter, as it was inevitably going to, that was the end for the young lad. Court martial, due to be sent home from India in complete disgrace.

‘The morning on which he was to travel, his wife having already departed to resume a life of some shame at the country home in Kent, Featherstone escaped from custody and fled into the mountains. He’d had quite an entourage of sycophants around him. It was said that it could have been any one of a number of people who helped release him. They never did find out. And that was him gone, The Honourable Featherstone, aged twenty-six, and not a day older.

‘And there the story goes cold for thirty years. What did anyone think at the time? That he had died? That he had fled to some other part of India, or perhaps somehow over the mountains into China? Most likely the former. That somewhere, up in those unforgiving mountains, his body lay frozen beneath ten feet of snow. Perhaps never to be found, or uncovered fifty years later, when his tale would have been long forgotten.’

Haynes had a sudden image of
Ripping Yarns
and stopped himself from smiling. Now they really were in Leighton’s boys own adventure territory. Dear God!

He looked down at his plate, aware that he seemed to be chewing a lot of seeds. Had he ever, knowingly, eaten seeds before? Why did people eat seeds? What was the point of seeds as part of your diet? Someone somewhere must have told old people that they were good for you. This decade’s thinking. At some future point it would be announced, towards the end of a BBC news bulletin in the way these things are, that seeds were in fact bad for you, and that there were several people dying from having sunflowers growing in their stomach at that very moment.

He glanced at Leighton. She was captivated.

‘And thirty years later?’ she asked, as Drummond paused to take some muesli, one mouthful of which, Haynes thought, was probably enough to meet your five-a-day health requirement.

‘Thirty years later, the former Mrs Featherstone saw a ghost. Now re-married to a naval captain and living in Gloucestershire, one day her manservant knocks on her door and announces they have a visitor. She walks out to see the vision of her former husband, who was, of course, still her husband. It would appear she fainted. Sometime later, and upon making her recovery, she sat down to tea with Featherstone. He told her a remarkable story of adventure and survival...’

Here we go
, thought Haynes.
A narrative within a narrative. Oh. My. God. Save me
.

‘... the exact details of which are not recorded. He had not come to ask for her to join him, or to complicate her life. He had come only to apologise for his previous behaviour, and to tell her that although he would be returning to London, he would be doing so in private circles, that he would henceforth be conducting all his business under a new identity and that she need not worry about there being a scandal regarding her remarriage. He left shortly afterwards, and she neither saw nor heard of him again.’

‘Wow...’ said Leighton, her voice low.

Haynes was more amused and engaged by her interest and wonder at the story than by the story itself.

‘That he turned up at her house was not the remarkable thing,’ said Drummond. ‘What so struck the lady was his appearance. It was said that he looked not a day older than when she’d last seen him, and that, indeed, perhaps he looked a few years younger.’

‘Was it definitely him?’

‘By the lady’s account, and we have nothing else on which to go. Given that within the account is the clear implication that the lady had committed bigamy, one would not suppose she had concocted the story for her own ends.’

‘So what happened then?’ asked Leighton, through a mouthful of food.

Drummond nodded and paused to take on some more health on a spoon.

I’d be surprised if you managed to eat this entire bowl without having to go to the bathroom halfway through,
thought Haynes.

Then he suddenly wondered if his problem was that he was jealous. Was he jealous? That this old man was fascinating his girlfriend in a way that he hadn’t yet seen? Yes, he’d brought her a case that had interested her, but he didn’t have any stories like this.

He hadn’t had any cause to be jealous yet, but it was a natural emotion at the start of a relationship. Someone comes into your life; you’re the newest thing in it. Everything else that interests them and takes up their time has done it for a lot longer than you’ve been there. You have novelty, which is a bonus, but the people and the interests that went before, they have a much longer-term commitment already in place.

He shook his head. It was nice seeing her this engaged, and the old man was hardly a threat.

Come on. Stop being an arse. The guy will get to the point eventually.

He glanced at Leighton again, then looked back at Drummond as the old man started to speak again.

‘That,’ he said, ‘was when things began to take an even more mysterious, and darker, turn.’

––––––––

‘W
hat about Harrow?’

Geyerson’s first words to Jericho, after Jericho had told him of the murders of both Carter and Connolly. No concern, no regret. Jericho assumed he’d already been informed somehow by one of his people. He must have been told that they were looking for him, and why. Still, there was an obvious lack of interest in the others.

They were sitting at a wooden table at the outer edge of the seating next to the midway station hut. The other tables were all full now, and there were a lot of people milling around. Although there was space for six at a table, they had spread out so no one had sat down with them. The one person who had looked like they might have an interest in asking them to make room, had been dispatched by a look and a low mutter from Jericho.

Geyerson was tanned and fit, his hair thinning, long and grey. Long enough, probably that he could tie it at the back, although he never did. He had a short multi-coloured beard, and he was topless, his sixty year-old, suntanned upper body slender and with a matt of grey hair. The T-shirt he’d been wearing and had removed at some point on his walk was still in his hand, which was resting on the table.

He looked like he never smiled. The sort of person for whom enjoying himself was a serious business.

Emerick was sitting next to him, his long sleeved T-shirt still on his back. He had a bandana round his neck, which had been covering his head as they came down the hill, but which he’d lowered upon being greeted by Jericho and Badstuber.

‘You automatically assume that this is related to the expedition the five of you took?’ asked Jericho.

‘Two of them are dead and you’re here, bud,’ said Geyerson. ‘You obviously do. What about Harrow?’

Jericho had never seen anyone in real life with teeth that were so perfect and straight and white. Not even the people with the perfect white teeth of
Britain’s Got Justice
. He was quite possibly looking at the most expensive teeth he’d ever seen.

‘We don’t know where he is,’ said Jericho. ‘Can you help us with that?’

‘Haven’t seen him in over three months.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘No.’

‘We have information that you talked to him three days ago in a hotel in Marrakesh.’

Barely a flicker on Geyerson’s face at being caught in the lie.

‘Sure.’

That was all Jericho was getting. The two men stared across the narrow table. Badstuber’s eyes were also on Geyerson. Emerick, for his part, felt uncomfortable, and was looking down at his hands.

Whatever his last words had been, they had been forgotten.

‘We need to find him to warn him,’ said Jericho.

‘When you do, let me know,’ said Geyerson. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘Could he be in Syria?’

‘I have no idea. Are we finished?’

‘Of course not,’ interjected Badstuber.

‘Jesus,’ muttered Geyerson.

He lifted a nearly empty bottle of water and tipped it into his mouth, the sound of his swallowing loud amongst the chatter of the rest station.

‘Can you tell us what happened on this Kangchenjunga expedition that could have resulted in someone wanting to kill two of the five members?’

‘Nothing exceptional,’ said Geyerson, his tone already suggesting boredom.

‘Is it reasonable to suppose that the two of you and Harrow might also be in danger?’