The Ghost

someone else,” she said.
    “Good,” I said and hung up.
    After that there didn’t seem much else to do except go down to the bar and get drunk.
    It was decorated to look like the kind of place Captain Ahab might fancy dropping into after a hard day at the harpoon. The seats and tables were made out of old barrels. There were antique seine nets and lobster traps hanging on the roughly planked walls, along with schooners in bottles and sepia photographs of deep-sea anglers standing proudly beside the suspended corpses of their prey: the fishermen would now all be as dead as their fish, I thought, and such was my mood that the notion pleased me. A big television above the bar was showing an ice hockey game. I ordered a beer and a bowl of clam chowder and sat where I could see the screen. I know nothing about ice hockey, but sport is a great place to lose yourself for a while, and I’ll watch anything available.
    “You’re English?” said a man at a table in the corner. He must have heard me ordering. He was the only other customer in the bar.
    “And so are you,” I said.
    “Indeed I am. Are you here on holiday?”
    He had a clipped, hello-old-chap-fancy-a-round-of-golf sort of a voice. That, and the striped shirt with the frayed collar, the double-breasted blazer, the tarnished brass buttons, and the blue silk handkerchief in the top pocket, all flashed bore, bore, bore as clearly as the Edgartown Lighthouse.
    “No. Working.” I resumed watching the game.
    “So what’s your line?” He had a glass of something clear with ice and a slice of lemon in it. Vodka and tonic? Gin and tonic? I was desperate not to be trapped into conversation with him.
    “Just this and that. Excuse me.”
    I got up and went to the lavatory and washed my hands. The face in the mirror was that of a man who’d slept six hours out of the past forty. When I returned to the table, my chowder had arrived. I ordered another drink but pointedly didn’t offer to buy one for my compatriot. I could feel him watching me.
    “I hear Adam Lang’s on the island,” he said.
    I looked at him properly then. He was in his middle fifties, slim but broad shouldered. Strong. His iron-gray hair was slicked straight back off his forehead. There was something vaguely military about him but also unkempt and faded, as if he relied on food parcels from a veterans’ charity. I answered in a neutral tone, “Is he?”
    “So I hear. You don’t happen to know his whereabouts, do you?”
    “No. I’m afraid not. Excuse me again.”
    I started to eat my chowder. I heard him sigh noisily and then the clink of ice as his glass was set down.
    “Cunt,” he said as he passed my table.

SIX
    I have often been told by subjects that by the end of the research process, they feel as if they have been in therapy.
    Ghostwriting
    THERE WAS NO SIGN of him when I came down to breakfast the next morning. The receptionist told me there was no other guest apart from me in residence. She was equally firm that she hadn’t seen a British man in a blazer. I’d already been awake since four—an improvement on two, but not much—and was groggy enough and hungover enough to wonder if I hadn’t hallucinated the whole encounter. I felt better after some coffee. I crossed the road and walked around the lighthouse a couple of times to clear my head, and by the time I returned to the hotel the minivan had arrived to take me to work.
    I’d anticipated that my biggest problem on the first day would be physically getting Adam Lang into a room and keeping him there for long enough to start interviewing him. But the strange thing was that when we reached the house, he was already waiting for me . Amelia had decided we should use Rhinehart’s office, and we found the former prime minister, wearing a dark green tracksuit, sprawled in the big chair opposite the desk, one leg draped over the arm. He was flicking through a history of World War Two that he’d obviously just taken down from the shelf. A mug of tea stood on the floor beside him. His trainers had sand on their soles: I guessed he must have gone for a run on the beach.
    “Hi, man,” he said, looking up at me. “Ready to start?”
    “Good morning,” I said. “I just need to sort out a few things first.”
    “Sure. Go ahead. Ignore me.”
    He went back to his book while I opened my shoulder bag and carefully unpacked the tools of the ghosting trade: a Sony Walkman digital tape recorder with a stack of MD-R 74