Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

Robert said, ‘By the time I sat up and got my finger near the unlock button, she had already tried the door once. I guess she wanted air. I had to make a decision. I decided to leave it locked, because it felt more consistent. I left it locked until Peter went up there to fix the car. I unlocked it then because I figured one of them would want to come out to talk to him.’

‘OK,’ Mark said.

Robert clicked the mouse again and the screens changed to a daylight shot from a different angle. Patty and Shorty were sitting side by side on room ten’s unmade bed.

‘This took place while we were eating breakfast,’ Robert said.

‘I was on duty,’ Steven said. ‘Watch what happens.’

Robert pressed play. There was audio. Shorty was deflecting attention from his own shortcomings by ranting on about mechanics getting call-out charges. He was saying, ‘Which is basically like getting paid for still being alive. It’s not like that when you grow potatoes, let me tell you.’

Robert paused the recording.

Steven asked, ‘Now what happens next?’

Mark said, ‘I sincerely hope Patty points out the two trades are massively dissimilar in the economic sense.’

Peter said, ‘I sincerely hope Patty punches him in the face and tells him to shut up.’

‘Neither one,’ Steven said. ‘She gets exasperated again.’

Robert pressed play again. Patty got up suddenly, bouncing the bed, and she said, ‘I’m going out for some air.’

Steven said, ‘She’s really abrupt and jumpy. Right there she was zero to sixty in one-point-one seconds. I counted the video frames. I couldn’t get to the button in time. Then I saw Shorty was going to give it a go, so I unlocked it late. I thought if he got it open, where she couldn’t, she would somehow blame herself more than the door.’

‘Is there a fix for this?’ Mark asked.

‘Forewarned is forearmed. I guess we need to concentrate harder.’

‘I guess we’ll have to. We don’t want to spook them too soon.’

‘How long before we make the final decision?’

Mark paused a long moment.

Then he said, ‘Make the final decision now, if you like.’

‘Really?’

‘Why wait? I think we’ve seen enough. They’re as good as we could ever hope to get. They’re from nowhere and no one knows they’re gone. I think we’re ready.’

‘I vote yes,’ Steven said.

‘Me too,’ Robert said.

‘Me three,’ Peter said. ‘They’re perfect.’

Robert clicked back to the live feed and they saw Patty and Shorty in their lawn chairs, on the boardwalk under their window, catching the wan rays of the afternoon sun.

‘Unanimous,’ Mark said. ‘All for one and one for all. Send the e-mail.’

The screens changed again, to a webmail page peppered with translations in foreign alphabets. Robert typed four words.

‘OK?’ he asked.

‘Send it.’

He did.

The message said: Room Ten Is Occupied.

REACHER SAID, ‘I still don’t get it. The birdwatcher lady supplied the ID on Stan, and Stan could have been leaned upon to ID his mysterious friend, surely. Just one extra step. One extra visit to his house. Five minutes at most. That’s no kind of a manpower problem. One guy could have done it on the way to the doughnut shop.’

Amos said, ‘Stan Reacher was listed as resident outside the jurisdiction. That’s a whole lot of paperwork right there. All they had was typewriters back then. Plus they must have figured he was likely to clam up anyway, no matter how hard they leaned on him, which couldn’t have been very hard in any case, because they would have been on foreign turf, probably with a local guy sitting in, and maybe lawyers or parents too. Plus they must have figured the mystery friend would be in the wind already and out of the state by then. Plus they weren’t shedding any tears for the victim anyway. No doubt the easy decision was to let it all go.’

‘Stan Reacher was resident outside of what jurisdiction?’

‘Laconia PD.’

‘The story was he was born and grew up here.’

‘Maybe he was born here, in the hospital, but then maybe he grew up out of town, on a farm or something.’

‘I never got that impression.’

‘In a nearby village, then. Close enough to be in the same bird-watching club as a woman living above a downtown grocery store. He would put Laconia as his birthplace, because that’s where the hospital was, and he would probably say he grew up in Laconia, too. Like shorthand for the general area as a whole. Like people say Chicago, even though a lot of the suburbs aren’t technically in Chicago at all. Same thing with Boston.’

‘The Laconia metro area,’ Reacher said.

‘Things were more dispersed back then. There were little mills and factories all over. Couple dozen workers in four-flats. Maybe a one-room schoolhouse. Maybe a church. All considered Laconia, no matter what the postal service had to say about it.’

‘Try Reacher on its own,’ he said. ‘No first names. Maybe I have cousins in the area. I could get an address.’

Amos pulled her keyboard close again and typed, seven letters, and clicked. Reacher saw the screen change, reflected in her eyes.

‘Just one more hit,’ she said. ‘More than seventy-some years after the first. You must be a relatively law-abiding family.’ She clicked again, and read out loud, ‘About a year and a half ago a patrol car responded to the county offices because a customer was causing a disturbance. Yelling, shouting, behaving in a threatening manner. The uniforms calmed him down and he apologized and it went no further. He gave his name as Mark Reacher. Resident outside the jurisdiction.’

‘Age?’

‘Then twenty-six.’

‘He could be my distant nephew, many times removed. What was he upset about?’

‘He claimed a building permit was slow coming through. He claimed he was renovating a motel somewhere out of town.’

After thirty minutes in the sun Patty went inside to use the bathroom. On her way back she stopped at the vanity opposite the end of the bed. She looked in the mirror and blew her nose. She balled up the tissue and lobbed it towards the trash can. She missed. She bent down to correct her error. She was Canadian.

She saw a used cotton bud in the dent where the carpet met the wall. Not hers. She didn’t use them. It was deep in the shadows, at the back of the knee hole under the vanity, beyond the legs of the stool. Imperfect housekeeping, no question, but understandable. Maybe even inevitable. Maybe it had been pressed deeper into its hiding place by the wheels of the vacuum cleaner itself.

Except.

She called out, ‘Shorty, come take a look at this.’

Shorty got up out of his chair and stepped in the room.

He left the door wide open.

Patty pointed.

Shorty said, ‘It’s for cleaning your ears. Or drying them. Maybe both. They have two ends. I’ve seen them in the drugstore.’

‘Why is it there?’

‘Someone missed the trash can. Maybe it bounced off the rim, and rolled out of sight. Happens all the time. The maids don’t care.’

She said, ‘Go back to your lawn chair, Shorty.’

He did.

A long minute later she joined him.

He said, ‘What did I do?’

She said, ‘It’s what you didn’t do.’

‘What didn’t I do?’

‘You didn’t think,’ she said. ‘Mark told us this is the first room they’ve refurbished so far. He said in fact they only just finished it. He asked us to do them the honour of being its very first guests. So why does it have a used cotton bud in it?’

Shorty nodded. Slow but sure. He said, ‘The story about their car was weird, too. Peter must be some kind of saboteur. When are they going to catch on?’