It was still enough to swim across the estuary but he wanted to be by the woods today, so turning back from the buoy he headed upriver past his parents’ house toward Frenchman’s Creek, keeping about five yards from the bank, his stroke a steady crawl. Here the oaks stood so close to the water that they seemed to grow out of it, their branches reaching down and brushing the surface, the roots exposed in the red earth where the land had fallen away, so that all the elements of the place—the river, the sea, the damp earth and the misty sky—seemed joined in an ancient, watery union. Webster was always revived here. Like a penitent to the confessional he would bring his doubts and his sins to the water and, addressing each in turn, find them washed away.
He had plenty today. Dubai had left him feeling dried out and restive. Three days switching between the solid heat and the air-conditioned cold, drinking too much with Fletcher: that would have been enough, even without the grim flight back that had left at three in the morning and dumped him in a gray, tired-looking London at six. But none of this was the cause. He had caught the train with Elsa and the children at noon, and though delighted to be with them had been tetchy throughout the journey, having to field e-mails and calls about the case, and beyond that preoccupied with something he couldn’t clearly grasp. Part of it was having to deal with Dean Oliver, a private detective—for want of a better word—of Webster’s faint acquaintance. There was nothing wrong with Dean. He was resourceful, slick, even charming in his own way, but his trade was grubby, and Webster would rather have kept his distance. As it was, he had called him with Shokhor’s numbers that morning, and Oliver had said, in his most reassuring tones, that he would see what he could do, and suggested they meet in a week. Webster knew all too well what he could do, and what sort of trouble it might lead to—though on this case, he told himself, there was little risk.
No, there was something else. Elsa had given him a short period of grace and then let him know that he was going to have to rally, and for the rest of the trip he had done his best to give a convincing impression of cheer and disguise the fact that something continued to scratch at his nerves.
They were in Cornwall for his father’s birthday, his sixty-fifth. Patrick Webster was not a man for grand celebrations, but the family would be there, and one or two close friends. Webster’s sister, a family lawyer, was flying down from her practice in Edinburgh. Tomorrow night they would all have dinner and Webster was to give a speech, something he hadn’t given a moment’s thought in the crush of everyday obligations, and now as he moved through the water, twisting his head up to the air every fourth stroke, he felt shame at the thought that he was devoting more time to a man like Darius Qazai than he was to his own father.
What different men they were. Patrick Webster was a clinical psychiatrist who had devoted his career to the care of profoundly ill people: to the schizophrenic, the irretrievably depressed, the bipolar, to those poor souls whose minds had betrayed them.
As a boy he had found his father’s job mysterious and, if he was frank, a little frightening—not because he felt at risk but because the idea of a mind failing seemed nightmarish, both terrifying and curiously real. His father, though, he had found anything but. He was a quiet man, well-read, a student of history, engaged in the world, a socialist by instinct but never a member of any party, indefatigably kind. He was always trying to help people: when Webster was eight one of the fathers in the street had left his wife and small daughter, disappearing entirely with all the family’s money, and the Websters had put them up for four months while they reconstructed their lives. A couple of years after that, a homeless man whom Patrick had befriended came one summer to dig over and replant the garden, turning up every day in time for breakfast and after three weeks leaving with the job, which was of course unnecessary, undone. If he had been born in the eighteenth century, people would have called him a philanthropist, and there was something classical too about his more caustic, satirical side, which railed against entitlement and injustice. He was funny about these things, but deeply angered by them, too, and if he dwelled on them for too long could sink into a forceful gloom.
After ten minutes Webster had reached Frenchman’s Creek, where the trees swelling out over the water were in such health that he couldn’t see the bank on either side. He rested for a moment by a buoy at the entrance and saw bass sliding past a foot below the surface of the water. Before Lock’s death, he wouldn’t have taken this case so seriously. Now everything seemed trivial, and corrosive: Qazai’s vanity, Senechal’s steely mania, his own determination to find his client guilty of something at all costs.
He set off again, up the creek now, swimming through the clustered leaves and twigs that the night’s rain and wind had dislodged from the trees. At eye level water boatmen skittered around by the bank and bass broke the surface to snap at them.
Too much was wrong. The state of Shiraz Holdings, in particular, was beginning to intrigue him. A broker friend of his had asked around and found that it was widely assumed that Qazai’s private fund was in trouble. Word was that in 2009, when Dubai looked as if would be cut loose with all its debts by Abu Dhabi, Qazai had decided that there was no way that the richer, more sober of the Emirates would let its brash younger brother default, and had bet heavily that the market was wrong. No one was sure how much he had lost, but it was known that he had placed not only a large amount of Shiraz’s money but a larger sum he had borrowed from various banks, all of which he had of course had to pay back. There were some who were surprised to see Shiraz still functioning at all.
Then there was Mehr, whose death made little sense. It was no robbery, that was certain, and none of the other motives fitted unless Qazai was somehow involved. Webster had two theories, neither of which he particularly liked: that Mehr really had been smuggling treasures out of the country, perhaps on Qazai’s instructions, and had been caught; or that he had been involved in a far deeper, darker game, perhaps for an intelligence agency somewhere—a game that for now he could only guess at.
No: even without Parviz’s brief disappearance it was too much.
THAT AFTERNOON THE WEBSTERS rented a bass boat and took it out to the mouth of the estuary to fish for mackerel. The drizzle had cleared, scraps of blue showed through the white clouds and a breeze blew into their faces as they made for the headland, the faded pinks and oranges of their lifejackets vivid in the middle of the lead gray sea. The two-stroke outboard, flat out and managing three or four knots, strained away at a constant pitch behind them.
Half a mile short of open water Webster killed the engine and letting the boat dip up and down on the gentle swell unwound a mackerel line over the side, taking care not to let the shining sharp hooks catch his fingers. He passed the end to Nancy and started playing out another line while Daniel waited patiently. They both loved to fish. On land they weren’t still for a minute, but out here they would happily sit for an hour jigging the lines and waiting for that moment when something unexpectedly powerful tried to tug them out of their hands.
“Move it up and down,” Webster said to Daniel, taking his son’s hands in his own. “Like this. You want the fish to think the bait’s alive.” Daniel gave the line a great jerk. “That’s it. Gently. Do it again and again. That’s it.”