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“They wouldn’t leave it disturbed,” Lucas answered. “If they did, the police might take it for a burglary, and that would mean a lot of further investigation…and a likely assumption of murder. Although Stoney was untidy—or looked it to others—he always knew where everything was.” He gazed around with an overwhelming sense of loss. Without Stoney’s presence, it looked chaotic.
“What will it be—this evidence of a secret fund? Papers? Figures? Names?” Josephine asked.
“Almost certainly figures.” He stared at the shelves, seeking a pattern, but they looked in order exactly as he would have expected them to be. “We could search through this lot for the rest of our lives.”
“He would expect you to look for it,” Josephine said quietly. “So he would have put it somewhere you would look, but other people would not. How well did you know him, Lucas, really? Memory and sentiment aside.”
“Lately, not so well,” he answered. “But ages ago we were close. He was an odd duck, eccentric, good at conversation—sometimes he was very funny—and he was always kind.” He heard again the sound of laughter from so many evenings long ago on the river, cricket games won or lost, but played hard, all with an innocence that they would never see again, that the next generation could not even imagine. It tore away part of your own life when those who remembered the same shattering events, the victories and defeats, were no longer there, no longer survivors but part of the vast bank of memories…Now there was an aching space where Stoney had been.
“Where would he expect you to look?” Josephine asked again. “What was important to him that only you knew?”
“Not in the pages of a book,” Lucas said with certainty, thinking as he spoke. “It’s such an obvious place, and easy to search, if tedious. All Stoney’s books would have been read. It’s not as if you could look for uncut edges.”
“His papers?” she suggested. “Not behind a photograph or a painting, that’s obvious, too.”
“We’ll start with his papers,” he agreed. “I might recognize something.”
“What would you like me to do?” she asked.
“Make sure there isn’t anything in the places we’ve ruled out, just to be sure.”
Reluctantly, he turned to Stoney’s desk: the drawers, the piles of papers, letters, old diaries, and photographs. He sat in Stoney’s chair and started methodically, looking through one after another. He felt uncomfortable about it, but it must be done. He had not intended to read the letters, only to see if there was anything added or concealed in them. Mostly they were from old friends. He ended by reading them all. He realized that Stoney had observed far more than Lucas had imagined, and that he was funnier. In the diaries, Lucas recognized himself in Stoney’s view of him, standing on a punt in a summer evening, feeling awkward and afraid of falling in, and believing he looked dashing. Stoney had made fun of him gently. “Standish is so terribly clever,” he had written, “and yet unintentionally so funny, I sometimes wonder if he knows it.”
Lucas knew it now, looking back, but he had not known it at the time.
He skipped down the rest of the memories, tears coming unbidden to his eyes. Stoney had thought better of him than he deserved. It was clear in his choice of words, his gentleness. Lucas wished he had lived up to it. He was tempted to linger over each page; it was like having Stoney back again yet just out of reach.
He read pieces about Peter Howard that he had not known. Vulnerabilities he had hidden from others that, strangely, Stoney had seen. They had not been intellectual so much as emotional. Lucas had never appreciated how much Peter had grieved for his elder brother. He had tried to live up to their father’s hope for both of them, and his father had not allowed him to. Reading it in Stoney’s words, Lucas could see it for himself now. How had he missed it before?
“I think he’s given up at last,” Stoney had written in a diary a year ago:
The gap in friendship has been partially filled by Standish. And he’ll be gentle, even if he has no idea why. Howard’s father will have lost both his sons, the fool. One to war, one to indifference. Pet
er is a good man. He might even become a great one. But like everybody else, he needs to be loved by someone, or at the very least to have been loved, and to know it. To walk entirely alone is to endanger your balance, to lean too far one way, in circles, without realizing it, until it is too late. I think Standish knows that instinctively, if not intellectually. We’ll see.
Was that true? At least, in part? It felt right. It brought brief memories to mind, sharp and cutting with truth. He had no idea Stoney had seen and understood so much.
Stoney also mentioned Jerome Bradley, who was now head of MI6, and Peter Howard’s immediate superior, whom he disliked intensely. Of course, he did not say so to Lucas, but it was in his omissions, the tightening of his mouth when Bradley was mentioned, as if he did not intend to betray it. Emotion in such relationships could be dangerous: they should be soundly based on loyalty, respect, trust, but also judgment, the ability to stand apart and see both sides of any decision, or however many sides there were, even an unthought-of third or fourth alternative.
* * *
—
It was beginning to grow cooler as the sun’s warmth faded when Lucas at last found the information he needed. It was quite easily seen, but not so easily recognized. He had discarded most of the papers as unimportant calculations that Stoney had forgotten to dispose of. Stoney had been something of a squirrel. Then Lucas looked at them again and realized they were not as casual as they had at first seemed. The more he followed the figures, disregarding the signs of addition and subtraction, the more he saw a pattern in them. They were not calculations, as he had first thought; they were lists.
Josephine came into the room without his noticing. He looked up to find her sitting in the chair opposite him, waiting.
“What is it?” he asked, noticing that the light was deepening on the floor and shadows were encroaching further. “Have you found something?”
“I think so, but so have you,” she answered. “What is it?”
“Lists, but disguised as calculations,” he said. “Carefully hidden. They look crazy, full of error, until you try altering the pluses and minuses, and then suddenly it makes sense. I’m not a mathematician, but I can see the patterns. I think it’s money transferred secretly, well covered, but big amounts and over quite a few years.”
“Embezzlement?” she said incredulously.
“It’s a hell of a lot, if it is. I think there would have been a fearful stink if it had been known. There certainly would have been a crisis somewhere.”
“Then what, if it’s not stolen? Why did Stoney care? And even more than that,” Josephine added, “why was he killed? It’s got to be something more than a hidden embezzlement, to murder for it. Are you certain he was killed?”
