The Art of Detection (16 page)

Or, she decided ten minutes later, they had split up. Philip Gilbert passed through the room to set a tray with glasses on one of the fireside tables—which, Kate only now noticed, had been cleared off for the purpose. He left, and seconds later, from the hallway, came the woman, whom Kate assumed was Cartfield. Her feet were now brushed by a long skirt, which appeared in full as she came through the doorway: long skirt, trim white blouse (did they call those shirtwaists?), a black and silver broach pinned at the hollow of her throat. She was Philip’s age, if they had gone to university together, but she looked years younger. Her hair was gathered in a large Edwardian pouf on top of her head, a style that surely must have taken her longer to achieve than the quarter of an hour she’d been gone. A wig, or had she arrived with it like that? The woman stood in the doorway, surveying the room, then whisked offstage left, her skirts snapping around her ankles.

Only twice over the next two hours were the two together in the room in front of the camera, and both times were brief and businesslike, involving a flower arrangement and a discussion about a tray of canapés. No indication of any relationship beyond that of friendship; indeed, the woman might have been playing a young Mrs. Hudson, the housekeeper.

The two Indian cousins were the first to arrive, at thirty seconds past seven o’clock, dressed in Indian garb: Venkatarama even had a turban on, a decorative spray of feathers at the front. Gilbert let them in, although twice in the next quarter hour the woman went to answer the door in his place. By half past seven, all ten members of the Sherlock Holmes dinner club were in front of the camera, glasses in their hands. Gilbert must have said something, because they began to turn toward him, listening. His back was to the camera, and he talked for a few minutes. They responded with smiles at one point, raised eyebrows and nods of appreciation at another. At the end, his arm with the glass in it came up, and the other nine mimicked the gesture: a toast, accompanied by an exclamation of approval and then a lifting of glasses to mouths. Kate went back in time to freeze the image, and hit the print button. The printer spat out an ink version of the picture on the monitor.

Eight men, two women, meeting to celebrate the life of a man who had never lived. Ten grown and responsible individuals, comfortable in their heavy and constricting costumes, none of them in the least self-conscious about the arcane setting. The nine individuals facing the camera looked relaxed and at home. They looked like a group of native Victorians, in fact.

Kate printed two more copies of the frozen shot, and went on.

The dinner itself took place out of sight, but after an hour and a bit, the guests began reappearing before the fire. Chairs were pulled up, Jeannine Cartfield settled onto the leather hassock, Gilbert handed around cups of coffee and small glasses of liqueurs, and the party wound on. With sound, or to a lip-reader, it might have been mildly interesting, but limited as she was to peering through a window at the festivities, it was not the most enthralling party Kate had ever attended. When Gilbert brought out his violin and began sawing away, it bordered on the farce of a silent film. Fortunately, he limited himself to a single six-minute performance, after which he struck up a couple of songs, in which all joined in with gusto, their mouths opening and shutting like a tank full of goldfish.

Still, the ten people on the screen seemed to be having a fine old time. After their coffee, they played some kind of game that involved one member reading something short from a piece of paper and one of the others shooting up a hand, to answer a question or maybe identify a passage. Most of the answers seemed to be correct, but when one of them got it wrong—the chubby fellow who was either Alex Climpson, winery employee; Ian Nicholson, job unknown; or Wendell Bauer, grad student, had the worst track record—the others would rise up in good-natured ragging until one of them had provided the correct response. There seemed to be no punishment for being wrong, merely the teasing, although judging by the sheepish glances at the master of ceremonies, the withholding of approval from Gilbert seemed punishment enough.

Kate printed half a dozen other stills showing various group members, then speeded through the rest of the party. The clock read 22:08 when all of a sudden everyone stood up and left the room. Not, however, in the direction of the front door, but turning left, either upstairs or to the kitchen. Kate itched to tilt the camera off the wall in their wake, and found herself wishing Gilbert had installed a series of these damn webcams, for her sake if no other.

Twenty minutes went by before the party reappeared, at which time they did start to leave. A few of them paused for a last chat in front of the fireplace, Rutland and the Indian cousins, the two women, and the redheaded man; then they too began to put on their coats and go. To her surprise, Jeannine Cartfield departed with the others, giving Gilbert a brief kiss on the cheek, exactly as Geraldine O’Malley had done thirty seconds earlier. The last to leave was the lawyer Rutland, who shook hands, tipped his silk hat onto his head, and left.

Gilbert came back from the door, gathered a few glasses onto the tray and carried them out. Kate’s finger prepared to hit the fast-forward button, but he came back in, dropping wearily into the frayed chair. He took a cigarette from a fancy little box on the hearth, lit it with a match, shook the match out and dropped it into the ashtray, and then he sat back in the chair, head resting on its high back, all his muscles going limp. The cigarette between his fingers trailed a dancing line of smoke into the air, and Gilbert sat, eyes shut, before his artificial fire. He looked tired beyond the results of a dinner party, as if only the press of people had kept at bay a deeper exhaustion. Or depression.

The untended ash grew, but before it became too long to resist gravity, Gilbert lifted it to the ashtray, flicked it off, took a puff, and then crushed the remains out. He scrubbed his hands over his face, stood up, and went around the room, winding down the gas lamps. When he left, the monitor was dark, but for the low-burning fire in the center of the screen.

Did Gilbert occasionally forget the camera was there? Or had that momentary demonstration of deep tiredness been part of the act, too?

The dinner party was over, and Kate glanced at the actual clock on her wall, then looked again. After eleven; she’d been watching the HolmesCam for over three hours. Lee was sure to be in bed.

Might as well check out one other day.

The computer cousins had seen Gilbert with a woman on the weekend before Christmas, probably Sunday, the twenty-first. She found the day and started the recording, expecting hours of nothing. But instead, the monitor went right into Gilbert settling into the chair. This time he had a tea service with him, and he poured a cup out of the flowered pot, added milk and sugar, and picked up his book. According to the clock, it was four in the afternoon, and instead of a suit jacket, he was wearing the velvety smoking jacket she’d noticed in the second-floor cupboards.

He sipped his tea, read his book, and Kate told herself to shut the thing off, but then the figure in the chair looked up, his attention caught by the doorbell, it would seem. He put down his volume and walked out, turning right. His feet disappeared, and Kate waited to see if one set of feet or two came back down the hallway. Suddenly the scene jumped. The sunlight that had been coming through the window was gone, the lights were on, and Gilbert was walking through the doorway wearing his suit jacket instead of the velvet one. The clock said it was the next morning.

Kate backtracked and examined the archives for the missing hours, but they were gone, with no sign of the women’s shoes that Pandi claimed to have seen. And when she went on with the recording, she found almost none of the staring-at-the-empty-room times. Instead, the scene jumped ahead, hours at a time, and nearly always had something happening onstage.

Gilbert edited the recordings. It made sense, she figured; few viewers would be interested in accessing huge files of nothingness, and storing them would burden a server’s mainframe, so perhaps every so often he would go through and dump the long hours of live-action scenery, leaving only the times when people were moving about. Going forward, she found a chess game with Thomas Rutland made up most of the recording for December twenty-second, and nothing at all on the twenty-third. She was going ahead to the following day, but suddenly dreaded seeing what the man had resorted to for the Christmas festivities, and shut the link down.

The house was silent, the street outside empty, the only sound a faint click of the hard drive going cool. She stood up, stretched hard, then paused to look at the printouts she had made.

During the toast, there were ten faces, Gilbert with his side to the camera and the others with expressions ranging from serious to distracted. On the far left, Thomas Rutland, attentive to the toast and with his glass already half raised. Beside him a Chinese man, no doubt Soong Li, frowning with concentration: Kate wondered if he had some problems following English conversation. Geraldine O’Malley came next, looking not at Gilbert but at Jeannine Cartfield, at the far right. She was wrapped up, not in Gilbert’s toast, but in her own thoughts; her glass tilted, half forgotten in her hand.

Looking over O’Malley’s shoulder was a man with gray-blue eyes and reddish hair, slicked down like most of the other men wore theirs. Only part of his face was visible, as he was not much taller than the woman in front of him, but his eyes seemed to be fixed on Gilbert, his mouth half-open in preparation for the “Hear, hear!” Next to him stood the two Indians, seriously attentive, and to their right two young men, one of them the pudgy boy who was not very good at the quizzes, the other a quiet, even younger man who had spent the entire evening in the background, looking a little lost. Finally, Jeannine Cartfield brought up the right.

Now, there was an interesting woman. Dressed like a schoolmarm, her face and posture might have suited a crown. She looked strong yet moved with an easy grace, at home in her body as in her clothes. The outlandish hairdo (it had to be a wig) disturbed her not in the least, and when she stood, she did not fidget as the others did, merely took up a position and held it.

Cartfield listened to Gilbert calmly, neither fixed on his words nor distracted. Was that the attitude of possession? Or simply knowingness? Kate was not sure. But she wanted to know more about this woman, who she was, what she did.

If she had the muscles to carry a dead man up a hill.

She leafed through the other prints she had made, seeing a handsome group of well-off individuals having a good time.

Except, she saw, for Philip Gilbert himself. Three of the six shots she had made included the host, and in each one, he was standing slightly apart, looking on. In one, Jeannine Cartfield, Geraldine O’Malley, and the redheaded man were laughing together over something one of them held—a picture of some kind. Behind Cartfield’s back, Gilbert watched them, one corner of his thin mouth turned up in a wistful smile.

Kate laid the pictures down on the desk and turned out the lights, feeling oddly self-conscious, as if she had Gilbert’s audience looking over her shoulder. She climbed the stairs, unable to shake the sensation, and went about the rituals of tooth brushing and face washing with more vigor than usual. She tossed her clothes into the hamper, pulled on the T-shirt and shorts she wore to bed, and climbed in between the cold cotton sheets.

Lee’s side of the bed radiated warmth; gently, Kate eased herself in that direction, but despite her care, Lee abruptly raised her head to glare at the clock and murmured something unintelligible but disapproving.

“Sorry,” Kate said.

Lee dropped her head back onto the pillow, but then reached around and pulled Kate’s free hand around her. Needing no further invitation, Kate scooted into the warmth and wrapped her arm around her lover, feeling Lee slide again into sleep.

Kate couldn’t, quite.

As a homicide detective, Kate rarely had any real contact with the victim before his or her death. Her perception of the living person was secondary to that of the dead one, and her interest in the victim’s life confined to how that life might have led to that death. The victim was largely two-dimensional, a thing pieced together out of static images and pieces of information: letters, photographs, the memories of family and friends, memories that became increasingly detached from reality with each passing day. Occasionally, the victim’s family would have a video they wanted to play for the investigators; almost always, Kate avoided looking too closely at it. Far better to work with a dead victim, who did not intrude into the emotional world of those charged with solving the murder. Far better to remain aloof—committed, determined, passionate, but aloof.

With this victim, too, the protective distance had held, until that evening. She’d been quite content to know that her victim was comfortably well-off, that he was a nut about the Sherlock Holmes stuff, and that he was friendly enough on the surface, although it rarely went any further. She would work no less determinedly just because his friendship had been tepid, his life verging on, well, silly.

The wink had changed that. With one infinitesimal droop of the eyelid, Philip Gilbert had transformed himself from a nut to an actor. From someone with a decidedly peculiar fixation, to a man inviting his audience to play along with him. A man who sat in his chair after his only friends had left him, and looked desperately tired.

She liked him, damn it.

And she didn’t want him to have died.

FIRST thing Tuesday morning, sitting at her desk while Hawkin battled the morning traffic, Kate made two phone calls. The first confirmed that the San Francisco Medical Examiner had finally received the body of Philip Gilbert, and their victim was now in the system. The second was to Lawrence Freeman at the crime lab.

“Hey Lo,” she said. “I found out what that connection was on the Gilbert computer—it’s a webcam.”