The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [173]
“Are you all right, sir?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Did you just shoot somebody?”
“No, sir, just the vehicle. This is a Barrett rifle, sir, nothing like it for stopping a car. Father Paul wanted some privacy for this meeting.”
I stared at him and he took my elbow. “We should get back in our car now, sir.”
We did and drove off down some more little roads until we came to a perfect little English village, whose name I have quite forgotten: Dorking Smedley? Inching Tweedle? Something like that; and pulled up in the yard of what looked like a coaching inn off the cover of a fancy biscuit package: thatched roof, black Tudor beams, heavy, purplish, leaded glass, the kind of place Dick Bracegirdle used to frequent for a pint of malmsey. We all trooped inside except for Brown, who waited with the car, talking into a crackling radio.
Inside it was dim and cozy, with a fire in the grate. A large man with unfashionable red sideburns was behind the bar, and when he saw us he nodded and gestured to one side, where there was a 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