Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

Niemand didn’t reply for a moment. He needed to think. ‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Good. Excellent. There’s no need to look elsewhere, I assure you.’

Niemand sat for a while, not easy in his mind.

…HAMBURG…

Anselm took the firm’s BMW and drove to Winterhude. He found a parking space in Barmbeker Strasse, went to the Konditorei and bought a small black chocolate cake, walked to the apartment in Maria-Louisen-Steig to see Fraulein Einspenner, whose service to the Anselm family began in 1935.

She came to the door in seconds. She was just bone covered with finely lined tissue paper but her eyes were bright. She seated him in the stiff sitting room on a striped chair, took the cake to the kitchen and came back with it, sliced, on a delicate plate, on a tray with cake plates and silver cake forks.

They talked about the affairs of the day. She knew about everything, watched the news and current affairs on television, her eyes not up to reading the paper.

‘How is Lucas?’ she said.

‘Well. He’s well.’

‘When is he coming to live in his house?’

‘I don’t know. He has a house in London.’

‘Then he should give the house to you.’

‘Perhaps his son will live in it one day.’

Fraulein Einspenner thought about that for a while, nodding. Then she said, ‘Your German is very good.’

She always said that to him at some point. She had said it to him for thirty years.

Fraulein Einspenner separated a tiny piece of chocolate cake with her fork, put it to her mouth slowly. There was no perceptible chewing movement. She was ingesting it.

Anselm waited until he thought she had swallowed.

‘Moritz,’ he said. ‘Do you remember much about him?’

She was looking at her plate, making another incision in her thin slice of cake with the side of her fork.

‘Moritz?’

‘My great-uncle.’

‘I was a servant,’ she said.

‘You do remember him?’

She finished the cut, didn’t impale the fragment, didn’t look up, began another separation.

‘I saw him, yes. He came to the house.’

‘What became of him? Do you know?’

More work on the cake.

‘Became of him?’

‘What happened to him?’

She rested the fork on the plate.

‘The war,’ she said, looking up.

‘He was killed in the war?’

‘A lovely cake. When will you come again? I so look forward to seeing you. I see your father and your grandfather when I look at you.’

This meant she was tired. She walked to the front door of the building with Anselm, holding his hand, two fingers of his hand, and there he stooped to kiss her papyrus cheek.

She smelled as she had thirty years before, when she had stooped to hug him, kiss his cheek.

‘Remember when we used to go to Stadtpark together?’ she said.

‘The birds. You loved them so much.’

He walked back to the car, stopped to buy cigarettes, drove down Dorotheen Strasse and into choked Hofweg. Turning down to Schone Aussicht, he saw the last light of day on the silver lake. Three small boats were tacking towards the Poseldorf shore, on their sails a colour the palest rose.

In the building, Baader was gone, returned to his child bride, and the shifts had changed. Inskip was back.

‘There may be life outside this place,’ he said in his languid English voice, not looking at Anselm. ‘Have you considered that?’

‘Movement, yes,’ Anselm said. ‘Life is another matter.’

‘I’ll settle for movement,’ said Inskip. ‘Up and down. You may or may not be pleased by some initiative I’ve shown. A Ms Christina Owens came up on the Continental database. The Campo woman checked in as C. Owens at a hotel in Vancouver six years ago. Someone in Canada found that out for the client.’

‘Yes?’

‘Christina Owens is staying at a hotel in Barcelona. The security man’s given me some pictures.’

‘Let’s see.’

Inskip tapped, they waited, the screen began running a jerky hotel lobby surveillance film, four cameras: entrance, reception desk, seating area, lifts.

A couple came in the door, a woman with shoulder-length hair and a man walking just behind her. They saw him at the desk collecting a key. At the lifts, waiting, she turned her head to him, a younger man, said something, curt, impatient. He shrugged, raised a hand. The lift doors opened and they entered.

‘Again.’

The couple came into view walking through the doors from the street.

Anselm raised a finger.

Inskip froze the film. She was head-on to the camera.

Anselm made the enlarge sign.

It was a taut-skinned face, perky nose, eyebrows pencilled in, full lower lip.

‘Save it.’

The box file was at Inskip’s elbow. Anselm opened it, took out the top photograph: a woman, mid-twenties perhaps, hair pulled back, long nose, glasses. She had the face to play a librarian in a Hollywood film and she bore no resemblance to the woman in the Barcelona hotel surveillance video.

Anselm looked at the name and date pencilled on the back: Lisa Campo, October 1990.

‘What’s the nature of her malfeasance?’ said Inskip.

‘She’s an accountant. Worked for Charlie Campo, a Midwest pizza prince. She became Mrs Campo, stashed around six million dollars offshore for Charlie. Skimmed money. Then she took off. Our client says there’s five million moved, vanished. And all Charlie’s got is this old driver’s licence shot.’

‘Sad, really.’

‘Send the pic and the whole video to the Jocks, marked Rush. They may still be upright, capable of responding today.’

The firm sometimes used people in Glasgow, experts in facial recognition, academics making a buck on the side, putting taxpayer-funded research to good use.

Inskip said, ‘You’re suggesting that these totally different women might be the same person?’

‘I’m just running up the bill.’

He nodded. ‘How uncommercial of me. What do the Jocks do? Apply haggis-fuelled intuition?’

In spite of his considerable hacking skills, Inskip pretended to technological bewilderment, an upper-class English attitude of puzzlement and disdain.

‘This’ll be over your head, old fruit,’ Anselm said, ‘but they use something called PCA, principal component analysis. You establish a person’s eigenface, then you compare any other face’s eigenvectors, beginning with eyes, nose and mouth. It’s well established but the Jocks have come up with a few tricks of their own.’

Inskip rolled his chair back, ran fingers through his hair. ‘Eigenface? Why do the English think a German word is more serious than an English one? I mean, really, what has Doppelganger actually got going for it?’

‘Didn’t register anything except the one word, did you? Send the pics.’

Anselm was reading the logs when Inskip loomed in the doorway.

‘John. The sporran-swingers say 100 per cent positive.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘I cannot believe that.’

Anselm looked at him for a while. ‘Her eigenface. Plastic surgery couldn’t hide it. Nothing they can do about the distance between her pupils. Her eye sockets. Booked in for how long?’

‘Didn’t notice.’

‘Notice, James. Check it.’

Inskip sniffed, disappeared. Anselm signed a logbook, went back to the big room.

‘It’s three nights, two to go,’ said Inskip.

‘The man to ring is called Jonas. Campo’s lawyer. The emergency number’s in the file. If I remember, Charlie Campo offers twenty-five grand if he gets to confront her. Half for us.’

‘My God.’ Inskip was looking for the number. ‘Who gets it?’

‘Our policy,’ said Anselm, ‘is to give half of our cut to the finder.’