Out of the Sun (29 page)

Besides, Harry told himself, if there was anything of value there, it ought to be removed for safe-keeping. Dr. Tilson would know what to do with it. One day, David might thank him for going to such lengths. That half a hope of earning his son's gratitude was perhaps the clinching factor. And the one he could least have afforded to confess to Donna. She would not have said it was foolish and futile. But she would have thought it.

It would not take long. He could be there and back within the hour. And still make Union Station in time for the ten o'clock Metroliner to New York. That would allow him to spend a couple of hours in Philadelphia tracking down Isaac Rosenbaum before carrying on to see Hackensack. Carl Dobermann remained a loose end in David's recent past. One Harry felt unable to ignore.

Donna would be at some Midwest airport by now, waiting for the first flight of the day to Dallas, with the tape safely stowed in her bag. He wondered if she was thinking of him just as he was thinking of her. But his habit of self-denigration would not allow him to believe it. She was probably already glad to have seen the back of him, grateful he had not tried to prolong the intimacy she should never have encouraged. Old enough to be her father as she had pointed out with wounding accuracy, but emotionally immature. It was not much of a testimonial. But he supposed it was the one he would have to settle for.

Maple Place was a cul-de-sac on the north-eastern fringe of Georgetown, within walking distance of Dupont Circle, a fact which lent a furtive haste to Harry's approach. The taxi dropped him at the end of the road on Q Street, just short of the Rock Creek bridge which he envisaged David crossing each morning on his way to Globescope, formerly perhaps with Donna beside him, more recently for certain alone.

The properties were well-to-do townhouses, with expensive cars parked outside beneath trimmed and well-spaced trees. A man in an elegant overcoat was walking a King Charles spaniel before setting off for his no doubt prestigious place of work. And the pavements were so clean Harry felt obliged to stub out his cigarette meticulously and nudge the remains into the gutter with his toe. He had been told Globescope paid generous salaries. And now he saw the proof of it.

Number 18 Maple Place was a whitewashed brick replica of its neighbours, with sash windows and an imposing bottle-green front door. Harry stepped up to it, took the keys from his pocket and examined them: a Yale and a mortise matching the locks on the door and another smaller type. He wondered idly what it was for as he opened the door and stepped inside. Then an alarm started bleeping ominously. There was a box on the wall with lights flashing on a panel beside a small keyhole. Harry wrenched the key out of the door behind him, dropped the bunch in the process and only managed to switch off the alarm after it had given several ear-splitting wails.

He glanced out into the street and saw, to his relief, no signs of neighbourly concern. He closed the door with exaggerated care and moved down the hall. There were stairs ahead of him, an open door leading into a kitchen at the far end and another closed door to his left. He opened it and went through into a large lounge-dining room looking out onto the street.

A sofa and an armchair were arranged in front of the fireplace. A dining table stood against the right-hand wall, beneath a serving hatch, with four chairs tucked in around it. Another smaller gate-leg table stood by the window, one flap raised. A television, video and hi-fi occupied the space behind the door. Enough books and magazines to fill several bookcases were stacked in orderly piles either side of the fireplace. The room had a moved-in-but-not-yet-finished-unpacking feel to it.

There were no pictures or ornaments, unless the blade-end of an oar propped in a corner counted as one. To judge by the inscription on it, David had rowed with some success at Cambridge, a fact Iris had never mentioned. For one self-indulgent split-second, Harry imagined standing with Iris on some windy stretch of Cambridge riverbank, cheering their son on in a race. Then he fended the thought off, shaking his head like a horse troubled by a fly that will not give up. He reached out absently and touched the radiator next to the doorway.

It was warm. Scarcely hot, but certainly warm. It reminded him that the house did not have the musty chill he might have expected after so long a desertion. Then he noticed the post on the table by the window. Two months' worth of letters and circulars that should have been littering the hall had been neatly stored there, awaiting David's return. But stored there by whom? A friend? A neighbour? Where were they? How often did they call in?

Harry hurried on. He glanced into the kitchen, which revealed only a bachelor sparseness of kettle, cupboards and cooker, then climbed the stairs. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom, the rear bedroom serving as a study. More books and magazines were piled there, with a less orderly appearance than in the lounge. Colour copies of computer-generated imagery vivid seahorse swirls spiralling in dazzling patterns were Blu-Tacked around the walls. A computer, telephone, fax machine and sundry other electronic gadgetry filled a large table at one end of the room. A more modestly proportioned desk stood by the window, which looked out over the small backyard and a patch of straggling woodland beyond the rear wall that dropped away towards the creek.

Harry sat down at the desk. The top was bare save for an angle poise lamp and a Charles-and-Di wedding mug filled with pens and pencils. It looked as if it had been cleared in preparation for a lengthy absence. He slid his fingers across the wood. There was no trace of dust. Then he opened the deep drawer beneath the desk. It was fitted with a filing cradle, occupied by bulging manilla folders, subject headings recorded in felt pen on their facing edges. The first few were innocuous enough. Tax. House. Mortgage. Car. Insurance. The thickest of the lot was Divorce. With a respectful squeamishness, Harry resisted the temptation to delve into it. Globescope he pulled out and examined. It turned out to contain an unremarkable clutch of formal letters about David's conditions of employment, most of them signed by Luke Brownlow. But the last item in the file a curt three-liner dispensing with David's services as of 12 April was signed in Lazenby's sprawling hand. The next file, HYDRA, Harry leafed through eagerly. But it comprised only letters written to multifarious individuals and organizations over a period of five years or more seeking funding for HYDRA's establishment. The replies were uniformly discouraging.

The last few cradles were empty. Unused, presumably, although a split in the cardboard at the base of one was faintly inconsistent with that conclusion. Harry sat where he was for several minutes, wondering why there was so little in the way of working material. Where were the disks for the computer? Where were the voluminous jottings he imagined a mathematical theorist would naturally surround himself with? There had been the notebooks, of course. But were they really all there was?

He rose, walked across to the piles of books and magazines and bent over to examine their titles. Most of them were as impenetrably technical as he assumed the contents to be. Particle physics and quantum theory; super strings and twist or space;

topology and co homology the whole mind-bending tangle of higher mathematics Harry instinctively shrank from. Plus a couple of medical texts about diabetes, some science fiction paperbacks, several of them by Isaac Asimov, and a few fat runs of Scientific American and suchlike journals. It was what he might have expected. But it was not what he was looking for. Maybe there was simply nothing to find. Maybe the notebooks were the beginning and end of it.

He walked into the bedroom. A sheet had been laid right across the bed. The outline of pillows and folded blankets could be seen beneath it: further proof that David had not intended to return for quite a while. There was a wardrobe and bedside cabinet, but no other furniture. A large water colour of what Harry thought could be the Californian coast dominated the wall facing the window. He glanced out into the street, satisfying himself that the alarm really had roused nobody. The man he had seen earlier walking his dog was hanging his jacket in the back of his BMW, prior to departure. The mailman was doing his rounds. Nothing else was stirring.

Harry opened the cabinet drawer. It contained a box of tissues, a pocket-watch that had stopped at 11.42 one day, a slim paperback of a script for a Tom Stoppard play Harry thought he might have heard of ... and a spiral-bound notebook with a stub of pencil beside it. He took it out to leaf through. But every page was blank. If David had kept it there to record nocturnal flashes of mathematical inspiration, he was evidently more of a lark than an owl.

Then Harry noticed a tell-tale scrap of paper caught in the wire spiral all that was left of an earlier page. One that had been torn out, perhaps one of several. According to the specification printed on the cover of the notebook, it contained seventy sheets. Quickly, he counted them. Sixty-four. Six sheets were missing. It meant nothing, of course. David might have removed them himself. And yet.. .

Harry walked over to the wardrobe and opened it. That was all it was: a wardrobe filled with clothes. Suits; jackets; trousers; jeans; shirts; sweaters; ties. But they somehow conveyed more to Harry of the strangeness of his relationship with David than anything else he had seen. The owner of the clothes was only what he had always been to Harry: an absence; a costume without a wearer; an amputated life.

Glancing down at the boots and shoes stowed in the base of the wardrobe, Harry noticed a hatbox propped on its side at the back.

Almost certainly, then, a hat was not what it contained. He lifted it out onto the floor, unfastened the string and removed the lid.

A chaos of paper met his gaze. Old bank statements and pay-slips were interleaved with maps, travel brochures, newspaper cuttings and photograph wallets. The wallets turned out to contain only negatives. The snapshots themselves were long gone. Harry held one strip up to the light and made out the unmistakable figure of Hope Brancaster reclining curvaceously on a beach in a dramatically minimal swimsuit. A print, better still an enlargement, would have been well worth seeing. He discarded it and began sifting through the rest.

Then he saw something he recognized: a tour guide to Lindos. A picture of the medieval castle on its hill above the white-walled dwellings of the town framed by the familiar deep-blue Aegean sea and sky adorned its cover. Study the scene long enough and he would be able to spot the Villa ton Navarkhon, where he had lived for nine lost years. He picked the guide up and looked at it. David had bought it for 750 drachmas from Papaioannou's gift shop. There was the old rogue's name on the label. He should not have asked more than 500 by rights. Harry fanned idly through the pages. As he did so, a photograph fell out of the centre-spread: a snapshot that had served as some kind of page-marker. It landed face upwards on the floor and Harry stared down at it.

It was a picture of David, sitting at a table beneath one of the fig trees outside the Taverna Silenou. He was wearing a yellow open-necked shirt and a casual grin. A glass of beer was visible on the table in front of him, beside what was almost certainly the same Lindos guidebook, held open by a plate containing a half-eaten slice of one of Kostas's dubious pizzas. But Harry's attention did not linger on the foreground. It drifted towards the shadowy interior of the bar and focused on the figure of a man propped against a door-pillar: none other than Harry himself, a few drink-fuddled minutes short of his disastrous encounter with Torben's girlfriend. Harry as he had been six years ago, near the bottom of his mid-life trough. Harry as he had seemed ever since in his son's recollection.

"May I ask what exactly you're doing?"

Harry started with surprise and looked up to find a woman of seventy or more regarding him levelly from the doorway. She was small, spry and sharp-featured, with dove-grey hair, keen blue eyes and a faint Parkinsonian tremor. She was wearing a rag-bag outfit of frayed yachting gear, but her voice and bearing implied she would be equally at ease in a ball gown and pearls.

"How did you get in here?" She spoke with the eardrum-tingling loudness of the hard of hearing. "Well? Explain yourself, young man."

"Sorry." Harry could not help smiling at her description of him as young. He scrambled to his feet, hastily composing a lie, or at any rate recycling one. "I'm ... er ... Harry Yenning. David's uncle."

"His uncleT

"Yes. That's right. And you are?"

"Nona Stapleton. David's next-door neighbour. Hasn't he mentioned me to you?"

"No. I don't think so."

"Really? I should have thought he must have done."

"Well, I haven't seen that much of him these last few years, to be honest. I've tried toer rally round since his illness, of course. Give Iris as much support as I '

"I wrote to David's mother expressing my sympathy and explaining that I'd be happy to continue keeping an eye on the house until he recovered or it was decided what to do with it. You would be her brother-in-law?"

"Sort of. I had to come over on business, so I offered to check that everything was all right. She gave me the keys."

"Without mentioning my letter?"

"She's been under a lot of strain lately, as I'm sure you can imagine."

"Indeed I can. How is David?"

"Oh, the same. Neither better nor worse."

"My heart goes out to her. Such a fine boy. Nevertheless, I do think you might have made a few enquiries before .. . Well, I feared the worst, I must say, when I found the door unlocked and the alarm switched off. Then I heard a noise up here. I had half a mind to go back to my house and call the police. I'm not exactly sure why I didn't. I guess .. ." She shook her head and looked away, revealing a hint of sentiment. "I guess I hoped it might be David."

Harry attempted a consoling smile. "He's been a good neighbour to you?"

"More of a friend, I'd like to think. Since my husband died and Donna left.. . You've heard of her, I take it?"

"Yes. Look, I'm sorry about just barging in," he continued, eager to change the subject. "It was thoughtless of me."