Robert Goddard - Name To a Face

It was mid-morning when Harding arrived in London, late morning by the time he reached the offices of Caddick Pearson: one floor of a steel-and-glass tower near Liverpool Street station. His plan to catch Nathan unawares in his workaday environment was stillborn, however. Nathan had phoned in sick that morning.

Harding reckoned it was no better than fifty-fifty he would find Nathan at his flat. He did not suppose for a moment the man’s illness was genuine; he was up to something. Harding was not discouraged by the thought, however. Quite the contrary. It meant he was on to something.

The first warning he had that all was not well came as he approached the apartment block across Vauxhall Bridge. There were assorted vans and cars drawn up in the courtyard area below the flats-at least one of them a police vehicle.

As he drew nearer, he saw a line of police tape, with a constable standing just beyond it, barring access to the courtyard and the adjoining riverside walkway. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered, although they were in the process of dispersing. The incident, whatever it was, had evidently already lost some of its novelty value.

An Asian man dressed in dark-green uniform overalls was among those drifting away. Harding caught sight of the name of the block displayed on his breast pocket. He intercepted.

“Excuse me. Has something happened?”

“A tragedy. Someone has fallen. From one of the flats. They have just taken the body away.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“Oh yes. I saw him. Before the police came. Nasty. Very nasty. Poor fellow. Suicide, I suppose. But who would have thought it? Such a nice man. There was always a joke or a smile from Mr. Gashry”

“Nathan Gashry?”

“Yes. You are a friend?”

“Sort of. You’re saying… Nathan Gashry’s dead?”

“Fifth floor. Straight down into the courtyard. You could not survive. He did not want to, I suppose. A desperate, terrible thing. But there it is.” The man spread his hands helplessly. “Yes. I am sorry. Mr. Gashry is dead.”

Harding waited till dark before presenting himself at Ann Gashry’s door. This was not only to allow time for the police to contact her with the news of her brother’s death. Harding had needed time himself, to come to terms as best he could with an event that seemed to make no sense in the context of what had gone before-unless, he was coming more and more to suspect, what had gone before was not as he had believed it to be.

Ann’s greeting suggested she had been expecting his visit. She invited him in and he found himself once more in the sombre, fustily decorated drawing room, which was thickly curtained and fire-lit against the chill of the evening. There was no obvious sign of distress on her part. She was dry-eyed and calm, though perhaps paler than ever. A photograph album lay open on the table beside her chair. Harding glimpsed faded snaps of seaside holidays long ago: stiffly smiling parents; a teenage girl in an unglamorous swimsuit; a pouty little boy brandishing a plastic spade like a weapon.

“I haven’t looked at these photographs in years,” said Ann, gently closing the album. “They date from before my parents divorced: the brief period when Nathan and I were brother and sister under one roof.”

“I’m sorry Ann.”

“Thank you. It’s a shock, of course. There can be little true grief. We led such different lives. And yet…”

“He was your flesh and blood.”

“Indeed.” She picked up a glass from the table and sipped some of the contents. Brandy, Harding assumed. Her tipple, especially at times of stress. “Would you like a drink?”

“Thanks.”

“Help yourself.”

He poured himself a whisky and tilted the Courvoisier bottle enquiringly towards Ann. She shook her head and sat down. Harding joined her.

She drew a deep breath. “How did you hear?”

“I went to see him. It had just happened.”

“Was it… very dreadful?”

“They’d screened everything off.”

“Did you speak to the police?”

“No. They’d have… queried my being there.”

“So you want me to tell you what they make of it.” She looked him in the eye, defying him to pretend his principal reason for visiting her was to offer his condolences. “Well, perhaps we could start with why you went to see Nathan today. You didn’t seem to have it in mind yesterday.”

“I hoped Jack Shepherd-Kerry’s old editor-would know what she’d hidden under the floorboards. But he couldn’t help me. So, I decided to try Nathan instead.”

“You seriously expected him to know-or to tell you if he did?”

“I was running out of options.”

“Well, you’ve one fewer left now.”

“Do the police believe it was suicide?”

“They seem inclined to. An accident’s out of the question. And murder? There was no sign of a struggle, apparently. Naturally, they wanted to know how he’d been when we last met. Was he distraught at being implicated, albeit unwittingly, in Barney Tozer’s murder? Was there any suggestion he was keeping back vital evidence? Was he perhaps not so unwitting after all and prey to remorse? I’m sure you can imagine the direction their questions took.”

“How did you answer them?”

“As frankly as I felt I could. A degree of reticence was essential, for my sake as well as yours. I certainly made it clear I regarded the idea that Nathan had committed suicide as absurd. I gather his girlfriend said much the same. He was planning to go to work today as far as she knew. He wasn’t ill. And according to her he wasn’t depressed, just angry at Hayley for using him to lure Barney Tozer to his death. None of which I suspect is likely to deflect the police from their suicide theory. It fits the facts better than any other from their point of view.”

“If it wasn’t suicide…”

“Hayley’s not physically capable of throwing a grown man from a balcony, Mr. Harding. You know that. It’s as absurd as suggesting he threw himself.”

“But something propelled him.”

“Yes. Or someone.”

“Someone other than Hayley.”

“Quite so.”

“Which means…”

“Have you seen Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s tomb in Westminster Abbey?”

Harding blinked in surprise. “Sorry?”

“If not, you ought to take a look at it, in view of your involvement in the Association story. A grandiose marble monument carved by Grinling Gibbons. Bizarrely in accordance with the fashion of the day, Sir Clowdisley is depicted, despite his obviously eighteenth-century wig, in a toga and sandals, more like a Roman emperor than an admiral. Most of the thousands of tourists who file past the tomb every year don’t pause to read the inscription, so probably have no idea he was a man of the sea. Costume sends a message. And sometimes that message can be misleading, whether by design or not.”

“What are you getting at, Ann?”

“How sure are you that it was Hayley who shot Barney Tozer?”

Harding could not suppress a rueful smile. It was the question he had been asking himself since learning of Nathan’s apparent suicide. It was the question that begged all others. He had persuaded himself at one point that the young woman he had pursued through rain and lamplight along the streets of Munich might not be Hayley after all. He had only changed his mind at Nymphenburg, in the seconds after Tozer’s death, when he had watched the same young woman run away through the trees, without looking back. She matched Hayley in height and build and hairstyle. And she was dressed for the part, in the same kind of mac Hayley had been wearing the very first time he had seen her, at Heartsease, a few days before the auction. But was it her? Was it her beyond the shadow of a doubt?