Dover Beach (34 page)

"Yes."

"Good. Meet me under the message board as soon as possible. What's Winfield doing?"

"I'm afraid he found my bottle of whiskey. He's passed out."

"Good. Listen, it might not be a bad idea if you brought his gun. I hid it in the top drawer of your bureau."

"Oh, Walter."

"Just in case, Kathy. Would you rather we just called the police?"

"No. I'll be there. And Walter?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"Okay, Kathy."

I hung up and hurried out of the office. Arthur was lingering in the corridor. I smiled at him. "Thanks. Gotta run."

He smiled back. "Don't mention it. I'll escort you out." He brought me downstairs and left me at the doorway, expressing warmest regards that I absently returned.

I opened the door and walked outside. The day had turned overcast and raw; the late-afternoon sky looked heavy with snow. I took a deep breath. Theory 1 was on its way to being proved correct; I didn't feel particularly good about that, but at least it showed my thinking wasn't completely crazy.

And that left Theory 2. Was the man in the gray overcoat still waiting for me? Had to be. And now was the time to meet him.

Chapter 29

I sauntered away from the Ministry. I turned a corner and sauntered down a busy street. There was too much traffic to hear any footsteps behind me. I sauntered for about a hundred yards, and then turned abruptly. Was that his gray overcoat disappearing into a doorway? I walked back and stopped in front of the doorway. He was standing there. A newspaper hid his face. The hands holding the newspaper were trembling slightly.

I took a deep breath. "Don't you think it's time we had a talk, Professor Hemphill?" I said.

The newspaper slowly descended.

I studied the thin, nervous features that I had last seen in the corridor at Northeastern. The man looked old and tired and very frightened.

The door behind him opened, and I caught the aroma of french fries as a couple of teenagers pushed past us. We were standing in front of a McDonald's, and I was suddenly very hungry. "Let's go inside," I said.

He obeyed.

We sat in a booth. "Want coffee or something?" I asked.

He nodded. I got him his coffee, and a Big Mac and french fries for myself. I set the cup down in front of him. He put both hands around it and lifted it slowly to his lips, trying not to slosh the coffee onto the table. I took a bite of my Big Mac. There was time before the train for Bath. Time to straighten out a lot of things.

"I should have figured out days ago that you had lied to me back in Cambridge," I began. "First of all, you were so certain that Cornwall was dead—and he is so obviously alive. Second, you said he couldn't have created a clone of himself—and he obviously did. But I didn't really think about you—I had more important things to worry about—until I received a letter yesterday from a friend of mine named Bobby Gallagher."

I paused. Hemphill looked at me silently over the coffee cup.

"Bobby mentioned that he'd sold a painting by Sargent to one of his customers," I went on. "Ain't that many Sargents kicking around nowadays, I figure. I remember the one you had hanging over your mantel, though. And I remember telling you how valuable it was. I probably even mentioned Bobby's name. But you weren't eager to sell it—and with that dog of yours, no one was likely to steal it. So I thought: if it was your painting that Bobby sold, what made you sell it to Bobby? And the answer I came up with was: to get airfare to England."

Hemphill didn't respond. I realized that he hadn't said anything so far. And I realized what I had let myself in for: the big scene where the private eye explains it all to the culprit and forces him to break down and confess. Trouble was, I wasn't at all sure I had everything straight. And what if the culprit didn't cooperate—just sat there drinking his coffee and listening? Couldn't be helped. I plunged ahead.

"Here's how I figure it, Professor. You hate Cornwall—I don't know why, and I don't know what sort of hatred can last for twenty-two years after a nuclear war, but there it is. When you saw his clone at Northeastern, you tried to kill him—maybe as a kind of posthumous revenge, maybe because you went a little crazy and thought Winfield really was Cornwall. But the situation changed when you found out Cornwall was still alive—or maybe you knew all along. I don't know. Doesn't matter. Anyway, your hatred made you sell your most prized possession and come to England in search of Cornwall. You found Winfield and me and followed us to Oxford. You waited for him to be alone. You went in, the two of you quarreled, but he escaped. So you set fire to his house, and then kept after him. You broke into his daughter's flat, hoping to find out where he might be hiding. Then you staked out her flat, hoping one of us would lead you to him. And here you are."

I paused again. It wasn't going particularly well so far. Theory 2 was obviously correct in outline—here was Hemphill to prove it—but its specifics sounded a little thin when recited like that. And the culprit wasn't breaking down.

"Do you know where Cornwall is?" he asked, finally speaking. His voice was a thin rasp.

"If I know where he is, why should I tell you?"

"If you tell me, then I'll tell you the real story," Hemphill whispered.

I ate some more of my Big Mac and considered. I held the upper hand here. "Tell me the story," I said, "then I'll tell you where Cornwall is—if I think you ought to know."

Hemphill nodded. "All right." He stared at his coffee, as if trying to find inspiration there, or a key to the past. His eyes glazed over a little, as they had in Cambridge when the memories came. "You've got it all wrong," he began, and my heart sank. "Well, most of it, anyway. Yes, I lied to you when we spoke in America. Cornwall and I had in fact figured out a method for cloning adult human cells. Tensions were high back then, of course, and we wanted to try it out as soon as possible. We found a volunteer to be the surrogate mother, and then we had to decide who to clone. The choice was obvious. Me.

"You see, even before the war made it a popular condition, I was sterile. So cloning was my only chance for reproducing my genes. Cornwall was unmarried, but as far as we knew he wasn't sterile. We agreed, then, that I would be the one.
We agreed."

Hemphill said those last words as if they were carved into his soul. He had started to twitch. "I take it Cornwall had other ideas, though," I said.

Hemphill took a deep breath before continuing, as if he were steeling himself to finish the most horrible story he knew. "Cornwall handled the actual procedure, you see. He must have used one of his own cells. And he never told me. Tensions kept getting worse, and the mother-to-be went home to Florida, carrying what I assumed was my clone. We couldn't find any more volunteers; people had other things on their minds. And then the world exploded."

Hemphill paused. People tend to pause when their stories reach this point. After a few moments I decided to prompt him. I didn't have all day. "So for twenty-two years you thought that maybe, down in Florida—"

"Until I saw the clone in a corridor at Northeastern," Hemphill continued, "and I knew instantly what Cornwall had done to me. I should have suspected all along, of course. He never cared about anyone but himself. But I wanted so much to believe. I wanted that clone to exist. There was nothing else left for me: my wife had died, my friends were gone, there was nothing left but hunger and disease and fear. I dreamed of him coming to Boston one day and finding me, and I could teach him what I knew, and despite all the world's problems, his life would be better than mine. It was a dream, Mr. Sands, that helped me make it through many hard days and nights."

"So the clone showed up, and you went crazy."

"My dream turned to dust when I saw—what did you call him? Winfield? Can you understand what that feels like, Mr. Sands?"

"Maybe not. I've never tried to kill an unarmed stranger who meant me no harm."

Hemphill looked appropriately chastened. "I admit it was wrong. I realized that right away. My quarrel wasn't with Winfield."

"Did you really think Cornwall was dead?"

He shrugged. "I didn't want the clone to find him. I didn't want the wonderful reunion I dreamed of to come true for Cornwall. But it didn't matter, I guess. You found him on your own."

I thought of Winfield and
his
dream. Everyone was having trouble with his dreams, it seemed. That's life. Isn't it? Hemphill's dream hardly seemed to justify all he had gone through lately, but what did I know?
Everyone's pain is real,
I had told Kathy. And I supposed I believed it. "So you decided to follow us to England," I said, "and make sure Cornwall's dream didn't come true."

"Yes. But I didn't follow you to Oxford. I found Cornwall on my own."

"How did you do that?"

"Well, I thought he might be associated with a university, so I simply called up information in Oxford and asked. It took me five minutes."

Five minutes.
It was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the table. "Go on," I managed to say.

"When I got to Oxford, I went to a pub to gather up my courage. And while I was there the clone came in, obviously in a terrible mood. Seeing him made all my anger come back, but I still couldn't bring myself to face Cornwall. So finally I simply called him up."

"Oh," I said. "It was your phone call that got him so upset."

"Yes, well, the call didn't last very long, and it wasn't very satisfactory. It's easy for someone to hang up on you."

"So you went there—and maybe he had gone by that time, afraid to face you—and you set fire to his house, out of anger and frustration."

Hemphill shook his head. "No. That's the part you've got wrong. I didn't do anything. I swear it. I left the pub after I made the call and I went back to my hotel. I didn't find out about the fire until I read the newspaper the next day."

"Oh, come on. You sell your painting to get to England so you can find Cornwall, then you talk to him on the phone for a minute and that's it?"

"I agree with you. It was stupid. I realized it was stupid when I read about the fire—when I found out that Cornwall was missing, and I had lost my chance. I am not a brave man, Mr. Sands. I learned that long ago. I had my chance, and I was too afraid to take advantage of it."

I tried to figure it out. If Winfield didn't do it and Hemphill didn't do it, then who did? Cornwall himself? But why? There was a lot I still didn't understand about Cornwall, and maybe Hemphill could help me there. But another question took precedence. "Did I at least get it right about you breaking into Kathy's flat?" I asked.

"Yes. Her name was in the article about the fire. I couldn't think what else to do if I was going to find Cornwall. But of course he wasn't there, and there was nothing in the apartment to help me. I found her mother's address, and I went and hung around there the day after Christmas, but that was a waste of time. So I came back to the daughter's place, and then I saw Winfield and you, and I thought maybe you were all up to something—maybe you knew where Cornwall was. Was I right?"

He looked at me hopefully. I shrugged. I wasn't ready to give him what he wanted just yet. "The reason the clone was in such a terrible mood at the pub was that Cornwall denied knowing him," I said. "Can you think of any reason why Cornwall would do that?"

Hemphill shook his head. "It doesn't make any sense to me. Why would Cornwall have gone to the trouble of double-crossing me and using one of his own cells back before the war unless the clone—unless the
idea
of a clone—meant a great deal to him?"

"Maybe he's changed his mind. Any reason why he might want to kill clones?"

Hemphill look puzzled and a little frightened. "Kill clones? I don't understand. What's going on?"

What was going on? Good question. Cornwall was killing clones, but I didn't know why. Hemphill was in England, but he denied burning down Cornwall's house. The case was there for the solving, but I couldn't solve it. And I had a train to catch. The solution would be there, perhaps, at the end of the train ride. "What would you do if you were to meet Cornwall now?" I asked Hemphill.

"I just want him to talk to me," he replied eagerly. "I don't want to kill him or even to harm him. Killing solves nothing—I understand that now. I'm an old man, Mr. Sands. Cornwall has caused me enormous suffering, and I should at least have the chance to confront him before I die, to make him explain. Is that asking too much out of life?"