Three Broken Threads

The first of the three threads broke before breakfast.

Cole's bag had come up from the city in the back of the car with mine, and when he opened it in the room that Hollis Nord had prepared for him — a big square room over the west porch, with a bed and a chest of drawers and no other furniture, and a window with the sea in it — he stood looking down into it for a moment before he said anything.

"There's one boot."

"One boot?"

"One boot." He held it up: a brown leather work boot, size eleven, resoled, the sort of thing a man buys once and wears for fifteen years. "I packed two pairs. Two pairs of boots and one pair of shoes. The other boot of this pair is not here, and nothing else in that bag has been touched — both shoes are in it, and the socks, and the spare jacket, and the razor." He put the boot on the bed and looked at it. "Now, Dr. Ashby, I want you to tell me the honest thing that a doctor tells people when they've got something that has to be taken seriously. Is there such a thing as an airline that loses one boot?"

"No."

"Then somebody went into my bag." He said it quite calmly. "In Chicago or on the plane or in the baggage hall or in that car, and they took one boot out of a pair and left everything else, which means they wanted to do exactly what they have done, which is to tell me that they can reach into my belongings whenever they like."

I should put down what Varley said about it when I telephoned him from the town that afternoon, because it is the first of his long speeches and it explains what he did for a living. He listened to the whole account without interrupting and then he said:

"Put the boot in a paper bag and do not wear the other one. It is not a threat. It is a sample."

"A sample of what?"

"Of scent. You cannot train a dog on a face, Simon, and a photograph is no use to an animal at all. What a dog knows is what a man smells like after he has been wearing leather for six hundred days. Somebody wanted a piece of the heir, and they have taken a piece of him away, and I do not know of any innocent reason why a person should want one boot belonging to a man, and I know of exactly one uninnocent one." A pause. "Tell the young man he has been marked. Tell him I am sorry to tell him so, and tell him that from this hour he does not walk anywhere out of doors by himself, at any hour, for any reason, not even twenty yards to look at the sea, and that the reason is not that he will be shot. It is that a heart with that gene in it can be stopped by a surprise."

The second thread broke on the Tuesday, in the person of a stranger, and it broke in a way I did not understand until much later.

We had driven into Quillon for stores, and were loading them into the car outside the co-op, when Cole stopped with a bag of flour in his hands and said, quietly, "Don't turn round. There is a man across the street looking at us, and I think he has been looking at us since we came out of the hardware store."

I looked in the wing mirror of the car, which is a shameful trick and an effective one. Across the street, in the recess of a shuttered chandlery, stood a man of middle height in a dark hooded jacket, with a beard, and with his hands in his pockets, watching us the way a man watches a house he intends to sell.

"Stay here," I said.

I walked across the street diagonally, so that I would come at him from the side, and I had covered perhaps half the distance when he turned and went away up the alley beside the chandlery at a fast walk, and by the time I reached the corner he was out of sight among the parked trucks of the harbour lot, and the harbour lot opens onto three streets and a set of rotting wharves. I went around it twice. There was nobody in it but a man mending a net who had seen nothing and did not care.

The deputy marshal arrived twenty minutes later, when we telephoned from the co-op, and she was thorough and calm and about thirty-five and had the trick, which I have noticed in good police officers, of asking a question and then letting the silence sit there until you fill it. Her name was Nadia Ozer and she had grown up in the county, and when she heard the description she wrote it down and then said, without much hope:

"Beard, dark jacket, hood, medium height, no distinguishing marks. That's a third of the men on this coast in October, doctor. Did he speak? Did he have a dog?"

"No, and no."

"Then I'll write it up, and I'll drive the harbour road, and Mr. Vandermeer, I'll say to you what I say to everybody who comes up here in the winter. There isn't a soul in this county who doesn't have some business of their own at the back of a shop, and most of them will turn and walk if a stranger comes at them across the street, because that is what people are like. And even so." She put her notebook away. "Even so. I don't like the boot. That's a fact and not a feeling. You keep your doors locked and you call me if the man shows again, and if he shows on the property, you call me and you do not go out after him."

The third thread broke that evening, and it was a piece of paper.

Hollis Nord brought it in at half past eight, on a tray, the way he brought everything, and it had come up the drive in the hands of a boy on a bicycle from the post office in Quillon, which is where all the mail for the coast is sorted. It was a plain envelope of the kind sold in a hundred-sheet pad, and it was addressed in block capitals, cut out of a newspaper or a magazine and pasted down, letter by letter: C O L E V A N D E R M E E R, H A R R O W R E A C H.

Inside, on a half sheet of the same cheap paper, was a single sentence, also in pasted letters, the glue showing through at the corners:

KEEP OUT OF THE DRUMBLE AFTER DARK.

Cole turned the paper over twice, held it up to the lamp, and laid it on the table, and I watched his face carefully, because that was the thing Varley had asked me to watch for, and what was on it was not fear. It was a kind of cold, professional interest, the look of a man who has found a fault in a foundation and is beginning to enjoy himself.

"Cut out letters," he said. "Not printed. Not typed. Somebody sat down with a pair of scissors and a bottle of glue and put this together one letter at a time, which takes about forty minutes, and did it to make sure nobody could match their handwriting." He shook his head slowly. "Nobody does that for a joke, doctor. You can't get a laugh out of a piece of paper like this. Whoever did it is either so frightened of being identified that he would rather spend an hour with scissors than write a sentence, or he has done this before and knows exactly what a handwriting analyst can do."

"Which do you think?"

"I think it's the second." He folded the paper along its crease and put it back in its envelope, and then, without any particular drama, he put the envelope in his breast pocket. "And I think that's the last useful thing I'm going to learn tonight. Let's have breakfast with the old man's lawyer in the morning and find out what the family actually signed."

I wrote to Varley that night, by hand, at the table in the front room with the fire going, and I put down the three threads in the order they had broken, and I added a fourth thing, which was not a thread and which I have never been able to explain in the terms I had at the time, and I set it down as plainly as I could.

On the way home from Quillon we had passed the western gate of Harrow Reach at dusk, and the gate was shut, and the cattle grid was clear, and on the far side of the bars, in the soft earth of the drive where the tarmac ends, there was a print. It was not a shoe and it was not a boot. It was a dog's print, twenty-nine centimetres front to back including the claws, and it was fresh, and the wet that had gathered in it was still standing in it. It was another week before I understood that print. There was no dog loose on that coast that could leave a mark like it, and the gate had been shut when we came past; the print was there because the gate had stood open on some night when the animal was working, and whoever was working it had brought it in through his neighbour's gate and taken it out again.