Lee Child - 61 Hours

Reacher pulled on it. He heard a chime deep inside the house, delayed by a second, low and polite and sonorous. Another second later a policewoman opened the door. She was small and dark and young and was in full uniform. Her gun was in its holster. But the holster was unsnapped, and she looked to be fully on the ball. Women officers in the house, Peterson had said, the best we’ve got, minimum of four at all times, two awake, two asleep.

The woman asked, ‘Are you Reacher?’

Reacher nodded.

‘Come on in.’

The hallway was dark and panelled and fairly magnificent. There were oil paintings on the walls. Ahead was a substantial staircase that rose out of sight. All around were closed doors, maybe chestnut, each of them polished to a shine by a century of labour. There was a large Persian carpet. There were antiquated steam radiators connected with fat pipes. The radiators were working. The room was warm. There was a bentwood hat stand, loaded down with four new police-issue winter parkas. Reacher shrugged off his unzipped coat and hung it on a spare peg. It looked like he felt, an old battered item surrounded by current models.

The woman cop said, ‘Mrs Salter is in the library. She’s expecting you.’

Reacher said, ‘Which one is the library?’

‘Follow me.’ The cop stepped ahead like a butler. Reacher followed her to a door on the left. She knocked and entered. The library was a large square room with a high ceiling. It had a fireplace and a pair of glass doors to the garden. Everything else was books on shelves, thousands of them. There was a second woman cop in front of the glass doors. She was standing easy with her hands folded behind her back, looking outward. She didn’t move. Just glanced back, got a nod from her partner, and looked away again.

There was an older woman in an armchair. Mrs Salter, presumably. The retired teacher. The librarian. The witness. She looked at Reacher and smiled politely.

She said, ‘I was just about to take some lunch. Would you care to join me?’

Five to one in the afternoon.

Thirty-nine hours to go.

JANET SALTER PREPARED THE LUNCH HERSELF. REACHER WATCHED her do it. He sat in a spacious kitchen while she moved from refrigerator to counter to stove to sink. The impression he had formed from Peterson’s casual description did not match the reality. She was more than seventy years old, for sure, grey-haired, not tall, not short, not fat, not thin, and she certainly looked kind and not in the least forbidding, but as well as all of that she was ramrod straight and her bearing was vaguely aristocratic. She looked like a person used to respect and obedience, possibly from a large and important staff. And Reacher doubted that she was a real grandmother. She wore no wedding band and the house looked like no children had set foot in it for at least fifty years.

She said, ‘You were one of the unfortunates on the bus.’

Reacher said, ‘I think the others were more unfortunate than me.’

‘I volunteered this house, of course. I have plenty of space here. But Chief Holland wouldn’t hear of it. Not under the circumstances.’

‘I think he was wise.’

‘Because extra bodies in the house would have complicated his officers’ operations?’

‘No, because extra bodies in the house could have become collateral damage in the event of an attack.’

‘Well, that’s an honest answer, at least. But then, they tell me you’re an expert. You were in the army. A commanding officer, I believe.’

‘For a spell.’

‘Of an elite unit.’

‘So we told ourselves.’

‘Do you think I am wise?’ she asked. ‘Or foolish?’

‘Ma’am, in what respect?’

‘In agreeing to testify at the trial.’

‘It depends on what you saw.’

‘In what way?’

‘If you saw enough to nail the guy, then I think you’re doing the right thing. But if what you saw was inconclusive, then I think it’s an unnecessary risk.’

‘I saw what I saw. I am assured by all concerned that it was sufficient to secure a conviction. Or to nail the guy, as you put it. I saw the conversation, I saw the inspection of the goods, I saw the counting and transfer of money.’

‘At what distance?’

‘Perhaps twenty yards.’

‘Through a window?’

‘From inside the restaurant, yes.’

‘Was the glass clean? Steamed up?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Direct line of sight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Weather?’

‘Cool and clear.’

‘Time?’

‘It was the middle of the evening.’

‘Was the lot lit up?’

‘Brightly.’

‘Is your eyesight OK?’

‘I’m a little long-sighted. I sometimes wear spectacles to read. But never otherwise.’

‘What were the goods?’

‘A brick of white powder sealed tight in a wax paper wrap. The paper was slightly yellowed with age. There was a pictorial device stencilled on it, in the form of a crown, a headband with three points, and each point had a ball on it, presumably to represent a jewel.’

‘You saw that from twenty yards?’

‘It’s a benefit of being long-sighted. And the device was large.’

‘No doubts whatsoever? No interpretation, no gaps, no guesswork?’

‘None.’

‘I think you’ll make a great witness.’

She brought lunch to the table. It was a salad in a wooden bowl. The bowl was dark with age and oil, and the salad was made of leaves and vegetables of various kinds, plus tuna from a can, and hard boiled eggs that were still faintly warm. Janet Salter’s hands were small. Pale, papery skin. Trimmed nails, no jewellery at all.

Reacher asked her, ‘How many other people were in the restaurant at the time?’

She said, ‘Five, plus the waitress.’

‘Did anyone else see what was happening?’

‘I think they all did.’

‘But?’

‘Afterwards they pretended not to have. Those who dwell in the community to our west are well known here. They frighten people. Simply by being there, I think, and by being different. They are the other. Which is inherently disturbing, apparently. In practice, they do us no overt harm. We exist together in an uneasy standoff. But I can’t deny an undercurrent of menace.’

Reacher asked, ‘Do you remember the army camp being built out there?’

Janet Salter shook her head. ‘Chief Holland and Mr Peterson have asked me the same question endlessly. But I know no more than they do. I was away in school when it was built.’

‘People say it took months to build. Longer than a semester, probably. Didn’t you hear anything when you were back in town?’

‘I went to school overseas. International travel was expensive. I didn’t return during the vacations. In fact I didn’t return for thirty years.’

‘Where overseas?’

‘Oxford University, in England.’

Reacher said nothing.

Janet Salter asked, ‘Have I surprised you?’

Reacher shrugged. ‘Peterson said you were a teacher and a librarian. I guess I pictured a local school.’

‘Mr Peterson has any South Dakotan’s aversion to grandeur. And he’s quite right, anyway. I was a teacher and a librarian. I was Professor of Library Science at Oxford, and then I helped run the Bodleian Library there, and then I came back to the United States to run the library at Yale, and then I retired and came home to Bolton.’

‘What’s your favourite book?’

‘I don’t have one. What’s yours?’

‘I don’t have one either.’

Janet Salter said, ‘I know all about the crisis plan at the prison.’

‘They tell me it has never been used.’

‘But as with all things, one imagines there will be a first time, and that it will come sooner or later.’