Robert Goddard - Sight Unseen

'That's what you think I'm doing, is it?'

'What would you call it?'

'How much do you know about Marilyn Hall, I wonder? Less than me, I suspect. A lot less. I've enquired into her background, you see. I've done my research.' Wisby smiled thinly. 'Like you should have.'

'And what have you learned?'

'Enough to make me worry I may have settled for too modest a sum.'

'Are you going to tell me what you're getting at?'

'No.' Wisby squinted out towards the distant ocean. 'I'll let you find out in your own good time.'

'Where are the books?' snapped Umber, losing patience with the game-playing.

'You can have them when I have the money.'

'How about when you see the money?' Umber flipped up the lid of the briefcase, giving his companion a clear view of the contents. There was a gleam of satisfaction in Wisby's eyes and a greedy little swipe of his tongue along his lower lip. He reached out for the case. But Umber held on. 'The books. Remember?'

Wisby looked at him and grimaced, as if giving up what he had come to trade genuinely pained him. 'They're in the glove compartment. In front of you.'

Umber stretched one hand forward to open the compartment. Its door flopped down. And there were the books, vellum-bound and gilt-edged, held together by a rubber band as he had seen them before. The spines were facing him. He angled his head to read the gold-lettered titles. Not Junius's Letters I and Junius's Letters II, like every other edition he had come across, but simply JUNIUS 1 and JUNIUS 2.

'The money, Mr Umber,' said Wisby. 'If you please.'

Umber surrendered the case and took the books out of the glove compartment. It was strange – surpassingly strange – to lay his hands at long last on the prize Griffin had promised to deliver to him at Avebury twenty-three years previously. He peeled off the rubber band and opened the first volume.

A few jagged scraps close to the binding were all that remained of the fly-leaf. But the title page was untouched. The name of Junius appeared at the top in bold Gothic capitals. Umber's gaze shifted to the bottom. Printed for Henry Sampson Woodfall, MDCCLXXIII. The date was right. And the binding was right. It was Junius's personal copy.

He looked round at Wisby, who was checking his way through the money, fanning each wad of notes and counting roughly as he went. Then he looked back at the Junius, shaking his head: £100,000 was a high price to pay for two mutilated old books. Nor was it by any means the highest price to have been paid for them. They were not worth Jeremy Hall's life. Yet he had lost his life because of them. Volume two fell open in Umber's hands at the last paragraph of Letter LVIII, encouraged to do so, he guessed, by being pressed flat on a photocopier some weeks before. There was the fateful phrase Jeremy had chosen near the end of the letter. 'The subject comes home to us all.' And so it did.

The snapping shut of the briefcase interrupted Umber's thoughts. 'It seems to be all here,' said Wisby, with a flicker of a smile.

'Did you doubt it would be?'

'I doubt everything.'

'Yes. I suppose you would.'

'Why were the fly-leaves removed, do you think?'

'You tell me.'

'It's obvious, isn't it? To break the evidential link with Griffin. Without them they're just another copy of Junius's letters.'

'Not quite.'

'No. But they'd seem so, other than to an expert. And having removed the fly-leaves, where better to lose the books, so to speak, than an antiquarian bookshop? I doubt Garrard's scatterbrained brother bought them. I suspect they were simply slipped onto the shelf. Not by Jeremy, obviously. Perhaps by someone who was trying to keep them from Jeremy. By implication someone Jeremy knew, resident on the island. Someone… close to him.'

'Like you say, Wisby. You doubt everything.' The man's logic was as seductive as it was disturbing. But Umber had no intention of acknowledging as much. 'Are we done?'

Wisby nodded. 'I believe we are.'

A few minutes later, Umber sat in his hire car, watching Wisby drive away. Wisby was heading west, probably making for the Airport. He had every right to be well pleased with his day's work. But Umber's work was far from done. He skip-read his way through Junius's grandiloquent Dedication to the English Nation at the beginning of volume one of the Letters till he had given Wisby the ten-minute start he had agreed to. Then he started the car and headed in the same direction.

Umber reached St Aubin with more than an hour to spare before his appointment with Marilyn. He parked the car at his hotel, headed round to le Quai Bisson and let himself into the flat.

Everything was as it had been the previous day. The keys Marilyn had given him would permit access to the office and boat store on the ground floor as well, but the flat was the obvious place to begin his search. Once he had begun, however, he realized how frail a prospect he had pinned his hopes on. A systematic search of the lounge-diner-bedroom was likely to prove time-consuming as well as futile. Umber did not really know what he was looking for and could devise no subtler method of setting about the task than moving everything to see what might or might not be concealed by pillows, cushions, magazines, books, CDs and the like. Nothing was the answer.

By the time he had trawled through the bathroom and kitchen with similar results, three o'clock – the hour set for Marilyn's arrival – was no longer comfortably distant. He decided to try his luck in the Rollers Sail & Surf office. Hurrying down to it, he found the right key after a couple of tries and went in.

It was a cramped, single-windowed room furnished with a desk, swivel-chair, filing cabinet and cupboard which looked as if they had been bought as a job lot second- or third-hand. A communicating door leading into the boat store stood half-open, explaining the faintly salt-tinged mustiness that filled the air.

Umber glanced through the doorway into high-roofed gloom, where he could make out little beyond the shrouded shapes of wintered vessels. They did not interest him. The office held infinitely greater promise. He decided to start with the filing cabinet. He walked over to it and pulled the top drawer open.

Whether he heard something first or merely sensed movement behind him he could not afterwards have said. Perhaps his instincts gave him some fractional forewarning. Or perhaps the breath Chantelle took as she lunged across the room at him, knife in hand, was sharp enough to be audible.

He threw himself to one side. The blade of the knife struck the metalwork of the drawer at an angle but with enough force to dent it and throw out a scatter of paint fragments. He heard her cry out 'Shit!' in pain at the jarring of her wrist. The knife fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. Umber glimpsed its blade – long, pointed and gleaming. Then he looked up into Chantelle's eyes. Fear and hatred and desperation burned back at him.

'You bastard,' she screamed. 'You fucking bastard.' She stooped for the knife.

His foot got there first, stamping down hard across the handle. She grabbed his ankle and tried to pull him off, but she was physically no match for him. He grasped her waist and swung her off her feet, whirling her round into the angle of filing cabinet and wall, where he pinned her by his own weight.

'Let go of me,' she shouted, flailing at him with her fists. 'Let fucking go of me.'

He caught her wrists and forced her arms back above her head. Their faces were no more than a couple of inches apart now. He could feel her hot, racing breaths against his chin, could see deep into her staring, wide-pupilled eyes. And they were a different colour, he suddenly realized. Not the dark brown that he recalled, but a pure cornflower blue. 'Listen to me, Chantelle,' he shouted. 'I know who you are. But I've told no-one. No-one.'