The Consultant

I called Varley at nine-forty, from the clinic, and told him in eight or nine sentences what I had been told, and he interrupted me only once, to ask what kind of shoe the dead man had lost. I said I had no idea. He said, "Find out," and hung up, and at seven the next morning, which was a Saturday, he was sitting in the window of a bakery on Clement with a notebook in front of him and the morning paper folded to a quarter of its size, waiting for me and looking pleased with himself.

"You've eaten," he said.

"I've eaten."

"Then look at this and don't say anything." He slid the quarter-folded newspaper across to me. It was a page of the classifieds, of all things, the "Lost and Found" column, and a single line had been circled in pencil: a boot, size eleven, brown, found in a hotel doorway in the Tenderloin and held at the desk.

I looked up at him. "That is not a coincidence."

"It is not a coincidence, it is a piece of public information, which is the cheapest kind. No. Sit down. It is a coincidence." He took the paper back and folded it again, precisely, along the line he had already creased. "The boot is a coincidence, which is why I am showing it to you. It is a boot nobody is looking for, found by a hotel man who thought it worth forty cents to advertise, and it has nothing to do with us. What I want you to notice is that I read it, and you didn't, and you are the one who was told about a missing shoe nine hours ago. That is the whole of my method, Simon. It is not cleverness. It is that I read the small print while other people are having their feelings."

"You want to say that the shoe matters."

"I want to say that the shoe matters, yes. A man is frightened to death in his garden. He has lost one shoe, and he was found forty yards from his own back door, having dressed for the evening and gone out by himself onto a raked path with a lantern or a phone in his hand. When a person goes out into the dark alone, in a good coat, unarmed, and does not put on both shoes, he is not going out to check the fence. He is going out to meet somebody he does not want to be seen meeting, and he is doing it in a hurry." He drank his coffee and made a face at it. "Which is to say: either the man was summoned by somebody he knew, or he was frightened out of his house by something he had already heard. Both are interesting. It is too early to be sure which. That is why I want the house."

"Then you'll come north."

"I'll come north on one condition, which is that you come with me, and that you understand the arrangement." He laid down the cup. "I have a case here that I cannot leave on Monday, and it will take me four days at least; a man in the Sunset who has been robbed twice by the same person and, I am fairly sure, by his own partner. So I cannot go up until Friday of next week. Which means that you go up now, on Monday, with the heir, and stand next to him, and write down everything."

"Write down everything."

"By hand," said Ronan Varley, "as it happens, because a letter with a pen in it is worth ten times a typed message to me, and because the act of writing in the presence of a thing makes you notice the thing. Chapters, if you like. Reports to me. Don't try to be interesting; try to be accurate. I want the people in that house, and what their faces do when they say a thing. I want the weather, and the dogs that bark at you and the ones that don't, and who comes up that drive and who goes down it and at what hour, and whether the fog moves."

"You have a theory."

"I have a set of things that must be true and a set of things that might be," said Varley. "A dog of that size cannot be kept in secret by an amateur. It must be fed in quantity, and a great dog is a great expense, and it must be exercised, and it must be worked, or it loses its nerve. So somewhere within a few miles of that house there is a person with money, land, patience and a reason. Find me that person and I have the case. I have not the faintest idea yet who it is. That is what the week is for."

Dr. Cray met us in the bakery half an hour later, having driven down overnight from the coast, and Varley questioned her for an hour and a half without once taking a note, and I wrote thirty pages, two of which had anything in them. He was interested, first, in the house: its plan, its approaches, its road, the position of the two gates and the position of the groundskeeper's cottage; and second, in the people, whom he made her describe twice, once as facts and once as she felt about them.

By the time she had finished, Harrow Reach was as real to me as a place I had once been ill in. The house stood on a shelf of land a hundred and eighty feet above the water, facing west, with a long grey roofline and a garden of flagstones and wind-bent pines, and behind it, to the east, the land climbed through forty acres of old apple orchard to the ridge. Beyond the ridge it went down into the Drumble: three miles of peat and rush and standing water, flat and badly drained, cut for turf for a hundred years. In 1906 that bog swallowed a timber railway, so that a man walking out there today could be walking over a train.

"Who is out on the Drumble?" Varley asked.

"Nobody," said Dr. Cray. "Which is to say: the wildlife people at Ashfrith Station have a permit for part of it, and the last hired man at Harrow Reach left in the summer, and the rest is what it is. Peat, fog, and a hundred and forty years of the family's bad luck. Children don't go out there. Neither do I."

The third thing Varley wanted was the step-nephew, and on this he made Dr. Cray go through the file twice. Cole Vandermeer, born in Illinois, a civil engineer who put water where people wanted it, unmarried, no record of any kind, a man who had never met his great-uncle and had spoken to him perhaps six times on the telephone in his life. He had inherited, subject to a trust and a set of easements, four thousand acres, a house with twenty-two rooms and no heating, and a drowning harbour.

"Does he know about the dog?"

"He has been told by the trust's lawyer in the last two weeks," said Dr. Cray. "In writing. As a matter of prudent disclosure, since the will says the beneficiary must be informed of the family's circumstances. I did not write the letter. I do not know what he thinks of it."

"I should like you to be at the pier when he arrives," said Varley to me. "Watch him listen, and note whether he laughs. If he laughs, he is either a fool or braver than I would be, and I would like to know which before I go up there myself."