Pantheon

by Sam Bourne

  James knew what the detective was doing, that he was trying to break his spirit, to force him into some spurious, panicked confession. He knew it, but he would not succumb to it. He knew the evidence the police had was circumstantial at best. But he also knew that juries were unpredictable. Who knew what might be his fate before a dozen Rileys, pumped up by some fast-talking lawyer to fear this strange Englishman, abandoned by his wife and deemed too mentally unstable to wear his nation’s uniform? They would hear that this foreigner was the last person to see Lund alive and that he had been seen chasing after him in anger only hours earlier.

  Riley was sitting back now, staring at James silently. James recognized this trick too. He had deployed it himself during some of his clinical interviews: say nothing and let the subject squirm until they eventually revealed themselves, if only to break the silence.

  James would not fall for that. Instead he would use the pause for his own purposes, to think. He tried to put aside the question of how things looked and to focus on reality. What had actually happened here? It was conceivable that Lund had taken his own life, perhaps in shame at his deviant urgings. His wife could have come down in the morning, seen his body, discovered the photographs and then destroyed them, for fear they would disgrace the reputation of her late husband and taint her family name.

  But the same was true if Lund had been murdered, the killer merely disguising it as a suicide. In that situation, Lund’s widow would still have destroyed the photographs to save her shame. Or perhaps the killer had taken them for some reason.

  James pinched the bridge of his nose, as he did whenever he was struggling to untie a knotty problem. The best method, he had found, was discussion with his wife. She had a fine logical mind, ordered and rigorous, but she also had a creative intellect: she could generate new ideas, wholly new possibilities that he had not considered. So often a conversation with her would unlock a puzzle that had seemed insoluble. The irony of it did not elude him: to find Florence, he needed Florence.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to tell me something?’ Riley said. ‘’Cause I’m watching you, closing your eyes, frowning, holding your nose and all that and I’m thinking you look like a man with a lot on his mind. Lot on your conscience.’

  ‘I’m thinking, Detective, that’s all. Just thinking.’

  ‘Looks painful.’ Riley leaned back, assessing. His lips adjusted a fractional amount, a gesture that somehow, like a silent clearing of the throat, signalled the imminent introduction of a change in topic.

  Riley let his fist open to reveal a glint of metal inside, like a magician producing a coin from an empty hand. ‘Is this yours, Dr Zennor?’

  James leaned forward.

  ‘Go ahead, pick it up.’

  At first James thought it was a tie-pin but it was too small and the pin at the back was the wrong shape, long and thin, like a needle. This was to be worn in the lapel. It took the form of an Egyptian cross, a crucifix with a loop rather than a vertical line at the top. In this case, the loop was filled with the image of an animal head. As he peered at it, he could make out the face of a wolf.

  ‘Well,’ said Riley. ‘Is that yours?’

  ‘I’ve never seen this before in my life. What is it?’

  Riley was staring at him, trying to read his face for signs of mendacity. ‘Never seen it?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve never bloody seen it. What is it?’

  ‘You really are going to have to learn to control yourself, Dr Zennor,’ the detective said, though this time, James noticed, the edge in his voice had softened. ‘This was found in the deceased’s mouth.’

  ‘In his mouth? I don’t-’

  ‘The coroner says that’s where you’d hide something if you wanted it to be found after your death. Least, that’s what a medical man would do. He’d know there’s no point holding it in your hand. Muscles relax when you die and the thing drops out. Seems Lund was pretty determined: the pin was stuck right into the inside of his cheek.’

  ‘Did it belong to him?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The pin. Was it his?’

  Riley let a hint of a frown pass across his forehead, before chasing it away. ‘I asked the widow exactly that. Turns out Lund did have one just like it, but that’s still upstairs in the bedroom. In its case, just like always. She showed it to me. So this belongs to someone else.’

  ‘His killer.’

  ‘Are you asking or telling?’

  James bit down hard, a technique that always used to help him suppress his anger, though it had fallen into disuse in recent years: too feeble a weapon. ‘You think Lund might have ripped this off his killer’s jacket during a struggle. Then put it in his mouth so that you would find it, to identify the man who murdered him.’

  ‘You’re getting carried away, Dr Zennor. We leave the theories to you gentlemen in the university. Facts is all I want. Facts.’

  ‘Well, do you know what this is, this badge? Or why Lund had one?’

  ‘Leave the questions to me, OK? Let’s go back to Pepe’s restaurant. You say-’ He was interrupted by an urgent knock on the door. Riley called out and another police officer came in, bending down to whisper in the detective’s ear. Riley nodded, whispered another question to his colleague, then nodded again. The officer left.

  Riley leaned across the desk to retrieve the pin, placing it on top of a pile of papers he now squared up. ‘I guess this is your lucky day after all. The guy behind the bar recognized your mug shot. Says he remembers serving you six double whiskys and telling you to get lost, just after eleven. And the butler at the Elizabethan Club says he put you to bed last night: you were so drunk, he had to take your pants off. Which is embarrassing but also an alibi. The old boy says he slept downstairs on a camp bed and would have heard if you’d left during the night. Which means you’re no longer an official suspect in the death of George Lund.’

  James let out a long sigh, a sensation of relief he had not felt since completing that last, agonising row on the Isis. He was free. But then a thought intruded. The butler? He had no memory of that at all. Had he really got that drunk? Or was this the amnesia Rosemary Hyde had taunted him about?

  He stood up and faced the detective. ‘If I’m not a suspect, does that mean you won’t be treating this case as murder?’

  ‘You’re not an official suspect, is what I said.’

  James looked down at the table that separated them. To his shame, he realized that it was only now he was not defending himself that he was fully taking in what had happened. A man was dead; a man who had taken what he clearly felt was a great risk to meet him; a man who had told him I can help you; a man who had become feverish with anxiety in the restaurant, in the last hours of his life.

  ‘And, Detective, you’re sure those photographs I saw were not in his briefcase when you found Lund this morning?’

  ‘When his wife found Lund this morning,’ Riley corrected him. ‘No, there were no photos. Our men have searched the place thoroughly: no sign of any homo pictures, no magazines, nothing. You may be off the hook for murder, but that doesn’t make your story about last night the truth. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you, Dr Zennor.’

  James eyed him steadily. ‘I’d like you to keep an eye out for my wife. No one will tell me where she is.’

  ‘That’s between you and the university. I’ve got work to do.’ With that, Riley offered a brief handshake and ushered him out of the room, leaving James Zennor relieved, puzzled — and absolutely clear where he had to go.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  He had once heard Bernard Grey joke that the best-informed people in England were the tea ladies at the Palace of Westminster: they overheard everything. It wasn’t just hatred born of hindsight that made that quip grate on James. He had found it irritating even before he had discovered that Grey was centrally involved in the plot to spirit his wife and child to North America without his knowledge. Because the joke rested on what was meant to be a shared assumption, tha
t it was surprising, and comical, to imagine tea ladies knowing anything about anything.

  Still, grudgingly, James had to admit that there was a grain of truth in the old bastard’s little apercu. If you wanted to know what was happening in college — which undergraduate had been caught cheating in his prelims, which fellow had been found masturbating in chapel — then there was no point idling about high table. The place to go was the porter’s lodge, where the true authorities were to be found.

  He couldn’t do that in Yale, a place he had never visited until two days ago. He knew no one here. Except for one man, whom he needed to thank anyway.

  James knocked on the door of 459 College Street. In the rush of his arrest this morning, he had barely been given time to get dressed, let alone pick up the key to the Elizabethan Club he had been given. But the butler was in and opened the door to him. As he did so, James realized that he did not know the man’s name.

  ‘Ah, good morning-’ James met his eye.

  ‘It’s Walters, sir.’ The dark skin of the butler’s face was creased with age; he was much older than James had first appreciated. ‘Good morning to you too, Dr Zennor.’

  ‘I’m very grateful to you for what you did for me, umm, last-’

  ‘There’s no need to say anything, sir. We look after our guests here.’

  ‘But what you told the police; it’s largely because of you that they released me.’

  ‘I just told the truth, Dr Zennor. They asked me and I told them.’

  ‘Well, I’m grateful all the same.’ James paused. ‘Could we…?’ He gestured at the main drawing room, as if to introduce a topic that was best not discussed standing in the doorway.

  Once safely out of idle earshot, James said, ‘I wondered whether you might be able to help me track something down. A pin.’

  ‘A pin, sir?’

  ‘For a lapel. One was shown to me this morning, and my guess is that it’s something a Yale man would recognize immediately, but it meant nothing to me.’ The butler nodded, as if awaiting guidance. ‘It was an Egyptian cross, you know with the loop at the top?’ James sketched the pattern in the air. ‘Inside the loop was an animal head. A dog or something. Perhaps a wolf.’

  Walters looked away, weighing what he had just heard. At last he looked up. ‘I think I know what you were looking at, Dr Zennor. And you’re right. It would be recognizable to most Yale men.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What you had there was a wolf’s head pin. And Wolf’s Head is one of the most powerful secret societies in the university.’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  James wanted to get started right away, but the butler steered him to a mirror. ‘With all due respect, sir…’

  The reflection that came back was of a man dishevelled, unshaven and rudely stirred out of a hangover. He had missed one of the buttons of his shirt. Reluctantly, he allowed himself to be persuaded that Walters was right: he needed to pause, wash and eat properly before doing anything else.

  The bathtub at the top of the house was tiny for a man his size, but stepping into it still felt like a great luxury. The idea of relaxing in a bath of hot water gave him only fleeting pleasure, the warmth and comfort instantly replaced by guilt. From the moment he had discovered Florence and Harry gone that morning, more than three weeks ago, he had rushed to find them. Even when he was sitting at Crewe Station, waiting for his connection to Liverpool, or when he spent those long days and nights on board ship for Canada, or on those slow, rattling trains into the United States he had not let himself relax: he had paced the railway platform and the ship’s deck or drummed his fingers like a man in a desperate hurry. He had maintained the urgency he had felt that first moment, when he had dashed out of the front door of their house in Norham Gardens, calling out their names. He might have crossed an ocean and half the world, but he still felt the fierce urgency of a man who had just lost his family. And stopping, even for ten minutes in the bath, felt like a kind of betrayal. Worse, it frightened him, suggesting a time when he might get used to being without his wife and his son, a future in which he was fated to be as alone as he was now.

  He looked down at his shoulder, the bone collapsed, the skin stretched. As the water in the bath began to cool, James remembered how his son, then a baby, had once used his little hand to touch that damaged patch of him, his infant face curious. Harry had never recoiled from the sight of the scar because he had never known anything else.

  James realized that his eyes were stinging. Reflexively, to make it stop, he sank his face into the warm water.

  Dressing as fast as he could, he made for the Owl Shop. He would pretend his purpose was merely to offer thanks to the bartender who had vouched for his presence there last night. But he was looking for someone else. And to his relief he was there: the young man he had met on his first visit, now polishing glasses.

  After a short greeting and a little small-talk, James came to his question. He began elliptically. ‘So what’s all this about secret societies, then?’

  ‘You mean like Skull and Bones and all that jazz?’

  ‘Maybe. Assume I know nothing.’

  ‘Oh, well I’m not a member or anything. Most of them are for juniors and seniors.’ When he saw James’s puzzled expression, he smiled. ‘Oh, you really do know nothing. OK. Freshman, first year; sophomore, second year; junior, third year; senior, fourth year.’

  ‘So once you’re in your last two years, you can join.’

  ‘No! It’s not like that at all. Not just anyone can join. You have to be asked.’

  This all made sense so far. Oxford was no different: it too had its drinking societies, like the Assassins or Piers Gaveston or the Bullingdon Club. They were secretive, too, in that they didn’t exactly publish the minutes of their meetings, but most undergraduates had a pretty good idea of who belonged to which. The Bullingdon even had its own costume, with navy blue tails and a garish, mustard-coloured waistcoat. Membership tended to be wealthy and aristocratic, young men rich enough to reduce the private room in a restaurant to rubble and pay the repair bill on the spot and in cash.

  But the Yale societies — Wolf’s Head, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key — sounded different. For one thing, they had their own buildings in the heart of Yale. ‘Oh, they’re extraordinary, you gotta see them,’ the bar boy said. ‘They look like ancient Greek temples. Doric columns and all that. They call them “tombs”.’

  ‘So they’re not secret at all, then.’

  ‘Oh, they are. Completely secret. No one knows what goes on inside. And only a handful of people are allowed to join. I think Wolf’s Head only has fifteen or sixteen members at any one time. Mainly juniors.’

  ‘But however exclusive they are, whatever it is they do can’t be that important if these groups are — with all due respect — made up only of undergraduates.’ James smiled.

  ‘But they’re not, not really. That’s the whole point. After your year as a member, you become a past member. And you keep that for life. They say President Taft was a Skull and Bones man.’

  ‘And, what, they meet afterwards?’

  ‘They help each other out. Like a secret network.’ That too was familiar. Oxford academics pretended to be above such things, but James knew of the Freemasons and their cat’s cradle of connections, one man giving another a leg-up, the beneficiary then lending a hand to a third, who in turn would help the first — a perpetual motion machine of favours and patronage.

  James had just pressed the bartender for a few specifics when the door opened and two men came in, instantly demanding martinis. James left a coin on the counter and hurried out.

  Once outside, he reached for the notebook he had kept in the inside breast pocket of his jacket: he hadn’t wanted to scribble notes while the bartender had been talking, fearing it would look odd or at least break the young man’s flow. Instead he had relied on a mnemonic technique he had used a couple of times during his brief, abruptly-terminated career in intelligence in Spain. If disc
retion barred him from using a pen and paper, he would take in information — nodding along, absorbing what he heard — and then, in his mind’s eye, visualize it in written form, the words appearing one by one on an imaginary page. Once the page was full, he would snap a mental photograph of it in his head and commit that to memory.

  He now jotted down what he had just heard, rather than risk losing it: the locations of those three secret societies. As he walked he checked his notes against the Yale street map he had picked up from Walters earlier. Wolf’s Head was not far at all; he would pass Skull and Bones en route.

  The boy from the bar had not been wrong. If most of Yale looked like a transatlantic transplant from Oxford, the ‘tomb’ of this secret society appeared to have been grafted on twentieth century America from ancient Greece or Rome. It consisted of identical twin buildings, each in reddish stone, smooth and windowless, save for two strips of dark, leaded glass framed by a flat, pillared portico: fake entrances. Buckling the two buildings together was a real entrance, similar in design to the other two — with pillars that were flat, rather than round — but with a genuine, solid door. There were no markings and no sign. It could have been a house of worship for an anonymous religion. And while James was tempted to mock the vanity of such a structure, as he probably would have done had this housed a student society back in Oxford, he could not deny the effect here. The closed austerity of this place exuded secrecy — and power.

  He continued west on Chapel Street, then turned right almost immediately on York. At first, he couldn’t see what he was meant to be looking at. There was none of the immediate grandeur of Skull and Bones, no imposing, temple-like entrance. Instead, there were just glimpses of amber stone behind the lush green foliage of a garden full of trees. He would have guessed this was the home of a wealthy recluse, newly-built, like the Sterling Library, from stones given an artificial patina of age.