Алистер Маклин - Prime Target

‘No,’ Dilys shook her head. ‘I don’t think they had friends, not in the sense of relationships with people they saw regularly, nothing like that. They had each other, you see, and that seemed to be enough. And of course there was Emily’s father, whom Desmond lived with on the campus at Cornell. I know she was deeply fond of her father.’

‘Did she ever mention a woman called Erika?’

‘Erika Stramm?’ Dilys smiled, catching the look of surprise cross Sabrina’s face. ‘She was her cousin.’

‘Cousin?’

‘Well, second cousin, actually.’

Sabrina wondered how the resources of UNACO hadn’t managed to determine that Emily and Erika were blood relations.

‘Emily’s father was born Johannes Stramm,’ Dilys said. ‘But he changed his name in the concentration camp where he spent three years of the war. He did it to lose his identity and save his life. When he came to America he kept the assumed name. He was known here as Johannes Lustig, so Lustig was Emily’s maiden name. Erika is his cousin’s daughter. I knew about Erika, sure. So did some of the White House administration. It wasn’t really a black mark, having a semi-violent lefty for a relative – not if you were someone as universally respected as Emily. It certainly isn’t the kind of fact that gets entered on a person’s record these days. Too tackily McCarthyish, you know?’

Sabrina noted with interest Erika Stramm’s established reputation as an active leftist terrorist. ‘Do you know anything about the people Emily associated with after her husband died?’

Dilys shrugged elegantly with one shoulder. ‘She was very close about that. I had the feeling her circle of acquaintances shrank to near nothing. That happens a lot to widows.’

‘I guess so. Tell me more about her as a person.’

Dilys sucked on the cigarette and peered at the tiny Gucci watch on her wrist. ‘One thing that needs saying about Emily is, she was selfless. We’ve all heard of it. Selflessness. But Emily was the only person I actually met who had it. If two sets of interests were at issue, she would always disregard her own.’

‘I get the impression she was something of a saint.’

‘Jeez, no.’ Dilys made a face. ‘Who said she was a saint, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Nobody did. But what I’ve been told about her adds up to a picture of an unusually good person.’

‘She had some of the characteristics, I suppose, but she didn’t have the sickly bits that would qualify her for sainthood. What she was, I suppose, was a good scout. She was withdrawn but she was never remote, she was always there for you, and she would really put herself out. She was shy, too, but she never tried to play it like she was mysterious. Do you see what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

Sabrina watched the woman behind the counter make a cappuccino with a head on it an inch high. It was fluffy but firm at the same time. She wished she could do that. Whatever she did wrong, the head always came out nice and creamy, but also flat as a pancake.

‘Dilys, do you have any theory about why she was killed?’

‘I was getting around to asking you that.’

‘We only know how. We haven’t a clue why.’

‘Well. Given the way she was – good-hearted, generous, also a woman who kept pretty much to herself…’ Dilys did her one-shoulder shrug. ‘I’d say it was either a bad mistake on the part of the killer, or it had something to do with her cousin.’

‘Erika Stramm.’

‘Right.’

‘Do you know if they saw much of each other?’

‘In recent times they corresponded a lot. And it was serious business.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘I don’t know. But Joe Dexter – you spoke to him, right? – he used to be the mailman.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Joe has a kind of quiet life. He lives alone, doesn’t know enough about human nature to tussle with it, so he gets his fulfilment being a sysop.’

‘I should know what that is?’

‘System operator,’ Dilys said. ‘On a dial-up bulletin board service. He sits by his board most evenings. The board is a computer with a whole clutch of information that people can download or add to, and sections where members can have written discussions with each other. The sysop’s the bulletin board manager.’

‘How does someone communicate with the board?’

‘It’s reached with a phone and a modem. The thing is, Joe can receive e-mail on his bulletin board from anywhere in the world, via the Internet. So he received e-mail for Emily from Erika, and Emily would send stuff through Joe to Erika’s electronic mailbox, wherever it is.’

‘She talked to you about that?’

‘No, and I didn’t ask her,’ Dilys said. ‘But if you want to see the irregularities in a pattern all you have to do is stare long enough, right? About six, seven months ago, I began to think Joe was no longer just researching for Emily. So I watched. There were definitely new and much more frequent transactions between them. That was the change in the pattern.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I cornered Joe and pumped him. He admitted he carried mail back and forward, but he had no idea what it was. The messages were coded, and he never tried to jemmy the code.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘Sure. He had too much respect for Emily to do anything like that. I think he was in love with her.’

‘Do you think he suspected he was doing something wrong?’

‘No, not at all. He believed what he was doing was confidential, just plain private. He didn’t even think he had been secretive the way he handled the e-mail traffic. How he looked at it was, he had just been discreet.’

Dilys drained her cup and stood up. ‘Listen,’ she said, nodding in the direction of two customers who had taken a table nearby, ‘I’ll get us more coffee, but do you mind if we go out on the little veranda there to drink it?’

‘You need a smoke?’

‘Have pity. I’m an addict.’

‘No problem.’

They took their fresh coffee to a small table at the end of the veranda, beside a canvas sheet tied between two uprights to make a windbreak.

Dilys said, ‘When I stop to think about this, it makes me laugh.’ She cupped her hand around the lighter and puffed several times, sending up a big flame on the last drag. She sat back and exhaled slowly. ‘The ironies. As you get older they accumulate like luggage. Every day, at some point, I will do this. I will go out in the fresh air, so I can have an opportunity to fill my lungs with smoke.’

Sabrina tasted her coffee, waiting for Dilys to volunteer whatever she still wanted to say about Emily Selby.

‘Have you ever been married, Sabrina?’

‘Never.’

‘I have. Twice. And divorced twice. Each breakup was a wrench, even though I was at the point of hatred in one case and disgust in the other. I was a long time recovering, both times. I thought of that when I tried to imagine what Emily went through, with her husband actually dead, the man who happened to be what she loved most in the world. God…’

‘Her father, too.’

‘She talked to me about it.’

‘About her father?’

‘About the two men dying.’ Dilys drew on the cigarette and blew smoke out over the veranda. ‘She also asked me not to say anything to anybody.’ Dilys looked straight at Sabrina. ‘Maybe it’s important now that I do.’

Sabrina waited.

‘I think she talked to me because she had to spill it to somebody. It seemed like a straightforward tragedy. Her husband Desmond and her father were out fishing on Lake Cayuga, which is inside the campus at Cornell, and within view of the house Desmond and Emily’s father lived in. Emily was taking a week’s vacation up there at the time. On the afternoon it happened, she came back from the university library with a stack of references for a book she was working on, and from the sitting-room window she could see the empty boat out on the lake. Her first thought, she told me, was that it had drifted. Des and Dad, she assumed, were having a couple of quiet ones at the tavern, like they sometimes did at that time of day.