The Book of Air and Shadows

door. Through the door was a small room with a gas fire and a battered round table in it, at which sat a slight, handsome man in his late fifties wearing a tweed jacket, a tattersall shirt, and a black wool tie. He stood when we came in, and Paul made the introductions and we all shook and sat. This was Oliver March, the companion. Another evidence that Paul has taken charge of this expedition. I didn’t mind. I felt like one of those great black bladders of industrial chemicals one sees in barges in the harbor, inert and massive, pushed about by little tugs.
    After some small talk, March said, “Well, secret meetings. It all seems so odd: when did you last see your father and all that…”
    At this I started and looked wildly at Paul, who explained that it was a famous painting of a Cavalier boy being questioned by Roundhead soldiers, a figure of speech. The professor continued. “Yes, quite: and I would not have agreed to meet with you in such an inconvenient place were it not for your suggestion, Father Mishkin, that the police explanation of Andrew’s death was not accurate.”
    This was the first I had heard of Paul’s involvement in the Bulstrode case and I listened with interest as he explained. “No it’s not. They found a doped-up rent boy named Chico Garza using your friend’s credit card and muscled a confession out of him. The boy had nothing to do with Andrew’s death.”
    “On what evidence?”
    “Well, first, I visited the boy in jail. He was sleeping in a squat at the time of the murder and he woke up with Andrew’s wallet in his bag. He never met Andrew Bulstrode, but he was carefully framed for the killing. The police found forensic traces of Garza in Andrew’s apartment, so it was well prepared. The other, and more compelling, reason is that no one outside of my brother and his secretary knew that Andrew had deposited the Bracegirdle papers with the law firm, yet within days of the murder, Russian thugs were shadowing him. How did they know? They must have extracted that information from your friend.”
    The word “extracted” hung in the air, and March briefly shut his eyes. What I was thinking at that moment was this: Shvanov had mentioned “sources” when he told me how he had come to take an interest in me and I hadn’t pressed him on it. Of course, gangsters have “sources.” People tell them things, or they have people followed. Or maybe Shvanov was lying, maybe he was the torturer…
    (Again, in hindsight, at an emotionless remove, things are marvelously clear, but in the instant of occurrence they are covered in layers of fog. And we are so good at denying what is before our eyes, as for example, the vignettes of Mutti and me that Paul had provided on the plane, and which I have, from that moment to this, thought about on a daily basis. So you must not blame me for not coming up with what became so obvious later.)
    A barmaid came in at this point, not the sort of barmaid such an inn should have had, a jolly pink blonde in a peasant blouse and a canvas apron, but a thin, dark, dour girl in an olive pantsuit, a Maltese or Corsican perhaps, who took our drink and food orders and departed without any Falstaffian badinage at all. March now said, “I fail to see how Andrew could have got himself mixed up with Russian gangsters. I mean it just boggles the mind.”
    “He needed money to finance the validation of the manuscript,” I said, “and if found valid, for locating the manuscript play Bracegirdle mentioned.”
    “Excuse me…Bracegirdle?” said March, and the three of us gaped at him in surprise. Crosetti blurted out, “Didn’t Andrew tell you
anything
about why he came to England last summer?”
    “Only that he was doing some research. But he was always on to some research or other. Who is Bracegirdle?”
    I gave him the short version, and while I was doing this the barmaid came in with our food and drink. I had ordered a pint of bitter and finished it in time to flag the girl for another. March listened carefully, asking few questions. When I was done, he shook his head ruefully. “Andrew and I have been together more or less continuously for nearly thirty years,” he said, “and we’ve always been reasonably open about what’s going on in our lives-open for dons, I mean, not actual gushing or anything like that-but I must say that I had not the slightest clue about any of this. Andrew could keep things dark, of course, especially after the bloody