Robert Goddard - Found Wanting

Now was definitely not the time to mention that the clinching document Clem’s archive supposedly held – along with the archive as a whole – was conclusively out of reach of all of them and that no amount of intrigue and double-dealing could retrieve it. Eusden doubted if he would still be in Copenhagen when Straub returned. But he could not explain why to Regina Celeste. He regretted having to deceive her on the point, but there were other things he regretted far more. He gave her a reassuring smile. ‘I’ll certainly do my best, Regina.’

Eusden finally made it to his room at the Phoenix half an hour later. He patched himself up and ordered breakfast, then lay down on the bed to await its arrival. He was too tired to ponder the full depth and meaning of Marty’s latest abuse of their friendship. All he knew was that it marked a new low – and an end of his involvement in Marty’s tangled affairs. It was time to cut himself loose.

He checked his mobile to confirm there was no apologetic or exculpatory message on it from Marty. Since, as far as he was aware, Marty did not even have the number, it was even more unlikely than would otherwise have been the case. But Eusden felt obliged to give him the benefit of the negligible doubt.

Sure enough, there was no message from Marty. But Gemma had phoned again. To Phone me asap had been added Very urgent. Eusden relented and rang her, despite his reluctance to face questions about what he and Marty had been doing for the past few days. He was at least relieved when Gemma, not Monica, answered.

‘It’s me.’

‘Christ, Richard, why haven’t you called before now? I’ve been going out of my mind.’ She certainly sounded distraught, though Eusden could not begin to imagine why.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘What do you mean, “what’s the matter”? You’re in Copenhagen, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Even as he replied, Eusden wondered how she knew that.

‘So, why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to hear it from a Danish policewoman?’

‘Hear what?’

‘About Marty, of course.’

‘What about Marty?’

‘Are you playing games with me, Richard?’

‘No. Marty isn’t with me. I’m not sure where he is at the moment, to be honest.’

‘Of course he isn’t with you. He’s…’ She broke off.

There was a heavy silence. Dread formed a cloud in Eusden’s mind. ‘

Gemma?’

‘You really don’t know?’

‘Know what, for God’s sake?’

‘Oh Christ.’

‘Know what?’

‘I’m sorry, Richard.’

‘Sorry? What the hell-’

‘Marty’s dead.’

‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone.’ Looking back, Eusden was surprised Marty had not said this at some point during their few days together in Hamburg and Århus. Perhaps he had not needed to. Perhaps he had thought it self-evidently true. And so it was, though there had been several occasions when Eusden would vehemently have denied it. But all the grudges and resentments and irritations, even the numerous breaches of faith, fell away in the face of death. And it was the face of death that Eusden looked into when he gazed down at Marty on the mortuary slab at Roskilde Amtssygehuset later that morning: a cold, pale, vacant face – no longer really Marty’s at all.

A hovering administrator was anxious to establish whether Eusden would be arranging Marty’s removal – to a local undertaker or back home to Amsterdam or England. Eusden prevaricated. He could not afford to commit himself to remaining in Copenhagen for the week or more he suspected such arrangements would take. He was going to have to offload the responsibility on to Gemma. And he was goingto have to find a way to explain that to her.

But he could not summon the effort to concentrate on such stark practicalities as he left the hospital and wandered towards the centre of Roskilde, past the railway station where he had arrived from Copenhagen a couple of hours earlier. The death of his childhood friend was like the amputation of a limb he had not realized until then he possessed. He kept remembering Marty’s most characteristic expression, by which all his mischief and humour and daring – his ineluctable spirit – were magically conveyed. Eusden could see it now, clear and golden in his mind’s eye. Richard would jump off the bus from Newport at the Fountain Arcade in Cowes on a Saturday morning and Marty would be waiting for him, chewing gum and smiling and assuring him, just by the look on his face, that life for the next few hours was going to be fun. Some trace of that had still been there when Eusden pulled the tape off Marty’s mouth at Frau Straub’s flat in Hamburg. ‘ Good to see you, Coningsby .’ And the feeling, despite everything – the forfeited surety, the rivalry for Gemma, the disputes and deceptions – had been mutual. It always had been. But it never would be again.

There was an old cemetery next to the station that had been turned into a park. Eusden had the benches to himself, thanks to the dank chill of the day. He sat and gazed towards the red-brick gables and copper-tiled spires of Roskilde Cathedral, its shape blurred by the tears that were in his eyes. According to the information Gemma had been supplied with, Marty had collapsed in the cathedral at about 3.30 the previous afternoon and been pronounced dead on arrival at the local hospital. Cause of death was a massive stroke. He had not been carrying a passport and had been identified from a prescription in his pocket issued by the pharmacy at Århus Kommunehospital. He had recorded Gemma as his next of kin on admission there. The oncologist had evidently strongly advised him not to discharge himself specifically because of the likelihood of a second stroke, but Marty had insisted. And Eusden knew just how insistent he could be.

The 11.54 train Marty had said he was catching from Århus would have got him to Roskilde just before three o’clock, the time of his supposed telephone call to Straub. Half an hour later, he walked into the cathedral – but did not walk out. The unanswerable question was why he had got off at Roskilde at all. He must have changed his mind about travelling through to Copenhagen for some reason. Regina Celeste would say it was to fix a rendezvous for his covert meeting with Straub. But that rendezvous was clearly not Roskilde. Straub’s note had implied somewhere farther flung. Eusden preferred to believe Marty had sent Straub off on a wild-goose chase so he would not be in Copenhagen when Marty arrived there after a strategic stop-over in Roskilde – only for sudden death to prevent him carrying through his plan. If Eusden was right, Marty had died while trying to protect both of them.

Eusden had been to Roskilde once before with Gemma and Holly, to visit the Viking Ship Museum. The cathedral had played only a bit-part in the day’s entertainment, though Holly had enjoyed hunting for the tomb of Harold Bluetooth. Dagmar’s tomb must have been somewhere in the crypt then, but Eusden had not gone looking for it. It was no longer there, of course, so exactly what had drawn Marty to the cathedral was hard to say. He was an avowed atheist and no fan of ecclesiastical architecture. A mausoleum catering for umpteen centuries of Danish royalty would ordinarily have elicited little more from him than a shrug of indifference.

But gone there he had. And Eusden followed. He stepped into the entrance porch and was greeted by a volunteer guide. When he explained he was a friend of the man who had died there the day before, he was directed to the woman behind the sales desk. She, he was told in hushed tones, ‘knew all about it’.

This, it transpired, was because it was in the porch, rather than the main body of the cathedral, that Marty had collapsed. The sales lady, a kindly middle-aged woman with a ready smile, identified by her badge as Jette, had seen it happen.