Стелла Римингтон: The Moscow Sleepers

‘I can see the car keys. But where are the house keys?’

Sarah walked across the room to look. ‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘They were always there – with the car keys. Where have they gone?’ She paused, frowned. ‘I wonder if Mr Ohlson took them.’

‘That’s possible,’ agreed Fitzpatrick. ‘Could you ask the nurse who was here when Mr Ohlson left whether he mentioned the keys? And did Mr Ohlson say how he learned Mr Petersen was dying?’

‘No. I assumed he’d heard from someone else – I didn’t have the impression he’d heard from Petersen himself.’

‘But this “someone else” didn’t visit Petersen?’

‘No. He didn’t have any other visitors. When he first came in someone from the university was with him but they never came back. No one else came. I’m sure of that because we insist anyone visiting signs the book.’

‘How long was Ohlson with the patient?’

‘I think it was no more than half an hour. He was still here when I went off duty but Emily – that’s the night nurse – said he’d left shortly after she came on. I thought it seemed a long way to come for such a short visit, especially as he knew he’d probably never see Mr Petersen alive again.’

‘Are you sure he knew how ill Petersen was?’

‘Yes. I pretty much told him that he was dying.’

Fitzpatrick nodded. ‘Did anything else seem unusual about this visitor?’

The nurse thought it over for a moment. ‘Not really. He was Swedish, but then so was Petersen.’ She paused, and Fitzpatrick could see that she wanted to be careful in what she said next. ‘I guess if anything did strike me, it was the sense that they were talking confidentially.’

‘Why did you think that?’

Nurse Burns looked a little embarrassed. She said reluctantly, ‘I stood outside the door to the room for a minute after I left Ohlson in there. I was trying to hear what they were talking about,’ adding defensively, ‘I thought the Bureau might want to know.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Fitzpatrick reassuringly. ‘And what did you hear?’

She laughed awkwardly. ‘Nothing really. I suppose I was silly to think I would as they must have been speaking in Swedish. There was just what sounded like a lot of questions from Ohlson and murmured replies from Mr Petersen. It was all very calm and quiet.’

After the visit to the hospice, Boyd drove Fitzpatrick to the brick ranch house on the outskirts of the city Petersen had rented for the last five years. The landlord lived in Florida and the letting was managed by a local agent. From what Boyd had gathered, little was known about Petersen. There was no one still working at the agency who’d been there when Petersen had first taken on the tenancy, but from the file it seemed he had done it without seeing the house. They did a lot of lettings for the university and that was not unusual. No one currently working in the office had ever met him and they had never had cause to go into the house since he took up residence. He paid the rent punctually from an account at his bank in Burlington.

Boyd parked in the drive. The front lawn had not been mown or the front borders weeded, but once inside, the house was tidy, almost clinically so.

‘He lived alone, right?’ asked Fitzpatrick, pulling on thin cotton gloves. ‘So why’s there no dust?’

Boyd nodded. ‘Looks as though it’s been professionally cleaned – and very recently. They didn’t mention a cleaner at the agency.’

In the study there was a wall of books, mainly sets of contemporary fiction. ‘I guess they’re part of the fittings,’ said Boyd.

A filing cabinet contained folders of academic papers – student recommendations, student grades, applications for grants. ‘I can’t see much of interest here,’ said Fitzpatrick, ‘but we’ll have to get it taken back to HQ to check. No sign of any private papers – no will, not even any bills.’

‘Maybe we’ll find them at the university.’

Fitzpatrick scratched his head thoughtfully. ‘What do you make of this Petersen, Tom?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What sort of guy do you think he was?’

Boyd looked bemused by the question, but eventually he said, ‘I guess if I had to use one word to describe this man it would be boring . There’s nothing unusual about him at all.’ He saw Fitzpatrick’s expression and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t think it’s so much boring as unreal. I think someone has been in here very recently and removed any sign of a real person. This place is like a stage set after the play is over. Tidied up and dusted and all the props put safely away. I bet Mr Ohlson has been in to make sure no trace of Petersen was left. I guarantee that when we get the labs boys in here there won’t be a single fingerprint they can lift. Not one.’ He exhaled in frustration. ‘You know, when I flew up today I had real doubts about whether we’d got the right man. Now I’m sure we have. But what the hell was he doing here?’

At the University of Vermont, Boyd parked in a half-empty lot. They walked slowly through the afternoon heat towards a gothic sandstone building that loomed over the university green below it.

‘The students are all away and a lot of the academic staff as well,’ said Boyd. ‘We’re seeing the deputy head of Computer Sciences – that’s the department Petersen worked in. Her name’s Emerson.’

Angie Emerson looked about seventeen. She was small and slim and wore a faded red T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops and large horn-rimmed spectacles pushed on to the top of her head. Her hair was dyed a dayglo blonde and pinned up in a loose bun from which strands were escaping. As they came into her office she leaped up from her chair and held out a thin brown hand, smiling broadly and talking quickly.

‘Do come in,’ she said, pushing some journals on to the floor to clear a couple of chairs. ‘It’s not every day I get to meet the FBI. I understand you want to talk about Lars Petersen. I was so sorry to hear that he’d died; not that I knew him very well. I knew he was ill but I didn’t know it was terminal.’

She paused briefly while Fitzpatrick and Boyd sat down, then continued: ‘I’m sorry the chairman of the department isn’t here. He’s on vacation with his family – giving his kids a cultural tour of Europe.’ She smiled. ‘My partner and I haven’t got kids, so I look after things here during the summer. We go away in winter – skiing, not culture, for us.’

‘It’s good of you to see us,’ Fitzpatrick said, thinking he’d better try and get to the point or they’d be there all day. ‘I’m eager to hear anything you can tell us about Petersen. We think he may not have been quite who he said he was.’

‘Oh,’ said Angie Emerson in surprise. She scratched her head with the end of her glasses. ‘Who do you think he was then?’

For a moment Fitzpatrick wondered whether she was being sarcastic. He said mildly, ‘We think he may have been working for a foreign intelligence service.’

Angie Emerson seemed genuinely taken aback. Fitzpatrick went on, ‘I’d like you to tell me whatever you can about his work here. What was his academic specialty, for example? Did he have a social life? Who was close to him? And we’d like access to his office. My colleague Tom Boyd here will send someone to take away any papers he’s left behind.’

‘I’m not going to be an awful lot of help,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell you what I know. His own work was on statistical pattern recognition, algorithms and image analysis. It’s not my area at all, but he was well regarded – I do know that. As for his private life, I don’t know much about it. I can’t think of anyone who would. You see, he kept himself to himself. He wasn’t one to frequent the bars – not that I am either – and we don’t do a lot of socialising in this department; we’re quite geeky. If he had a partner I never met her – or him.’