'I came here expecting to find you'd sent me this letter because you blamed me for Sally's death.'
'Sorry to disappoint you.'
'You disappoint yourself. You know you do. You live in a dingy apartment scraping by on odds and sods of casual tour-guiding. Is that how you plan to go on for the
next
twenty-three years?'
'Something will turn up.'
'It just has. Your big chance -- and mine -- to set things right.'
'You're kidding yourself, George. It's a fool's errand. Besides, you're the detective. What do you need me for?'
'Younger pair of legs. Keener pair of eyes. And the last word on Junius.
That's
what I need you for.' Sharp drained his glass. 'I'll cover your travelling expenses if that's what you're worried about.'
'Police pensions must be more generous than I thought.'
'I just don't want you to have any excuse for turning me down.'
'I don't need an excuse.'
'That a fact? Then, tell me, why are you trying so hard to find one?'
'I'm not going back with you, George.'
'I'll give you twenty-four hours to think it over.'
'It won't make any difference.'
'No. It won't.' Sharp slid the letter back into its envelope. 'Because you already know what you're going to do.' He smiled at Umber. 'You just can't bring yourself to admit it.'
Half an hour later, Umber was on the number 24 tram, trundling north through the darkened streets of Prague -- streets Sally had never trodden. Their wanderings had taken them to most of the capital cities of Europe, but never this one. That, he knew, was one of the reasons he had come to Prague -- and had stayed. He opened his wallet and took out the snapshot of her he always carried with him. It was the only picture he had of her. The flood had claimed the others. All that was left to him was this spare passport photograph from nearly twenty years ago.
Her dark, shoulder-length hair cast part of her face in shadow, accentuating her high cheekbones and making her look gaunt and troubled, whereas in his mind's eye she appeared neither. He remembered her smile so very clearly. But she had seldom smiled for the camera. Somehow, she had never quite trusted herself to.
He put the picture away again and looked at his own, ghostly reflection in the window. 'What do you want me to do, Sal?' he asked her under his breath, watching his lips shape the words. 'Just tell me. That's all you need to do. That's all you ever needed to do.'
There was no answer. There could never be. It was too late for that.
He dreamt of Sally that night, for the first time in a year or more. They were in the tiny flat in Barcelona that had been their first home together. But he could not understand why she was there. 'They told me you were dead,' he said, over and over again. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the neck. 'Me, dead?' she whispered into his ear. 'That's such a silly idea.'
* * *
He was woken by the telephone. Opening his eyes, he saw that it was light outside. According to his bedside clock, it was nearly ten. He had lain awake for what felt like hours before falling asleep, but sleeping this late in the morning was nonetheless a surprise.
He grabbed the telephone, wondering if it would be Sharp badgering for an answer, then realized it could not be because he had not given him this number.
'Halo?
'Dobre rano.'
'What can I do for you, Marek?'
'Not for me, brother. For Ivana. She needs you to cover Tuesday.'
'Ah... Tuesday?'
'Jo.
Day after Monday. Day before Wednesday. I can put you down for it?'
'I'm not, er... too sure I...'
'I need a decision, like, right now.'
'Then it's no.' Sharp was right, of course, damn him. There never had been any doubt about what Umber was going to do. 'Not Tuesday. Not any other day. For the foreseeable future.'
Travelling light and at short notice was one luxury David Umber could well afford to indulge. When Sharp proposed a Sunday morning departure, he did not demur. Nor did he try to hold Sharp to his whisky-fuelled offer of paying for the journey. But the retired policeman seemed oddly determined to put his pension money where his mouth had been.
'I'll make all the arrangements.'
'There's no need. I can --'
'Leave it to me.'
'All right. I will.'
'I'll pick you up at eleven.'
'What time's the flight?'
'Just be ready at eleven.'
'I can make my own way to the airport. If you're worried I'll change my mind, I can --'
'Be ready at eleven.'
* * *
And so the telephone conversation had ended. It was a long way from being the last telephone conversation Umber had that day, however. When Ivana heard he was quitting Jolly Brolly, she rang to congratulate him on landing a full-time job, the only possible explanation for his conduct that had occurred to her. From her the news spread to his other friends that he was in fact going away for a while, prompting various farewell calls and good-luck messages. He assured one and all that he would be back before long. But nobody seemed quite to believe him.
'You think because things have gone bad for you here they will go good for you in England?' Ivana asked in her second call of the day. She had persuaded herself that the parting from Milena was what was driving him away and assurances from Umber to the contrary were futile.
'I don't think that.'
'You remember.
Dostat se z blata do louze.'
It was an old Czech saying.
Out of the mud into the puddle.
'I'll remember,' said Umber.
And so he would.
* * *
Several loud blasts on a horn announced Sharp's arrival at dead on eleven o'clock the following morning. Umber looked out of the window of his flat expecting to see a taxi waiting for him below and hoping for Sharp's sake that he had agreed the fare beforehand.
But the vehicle that had pulled up just past the tram stop was not a taxi.
* * *
Sharp was waiting outside the entrance to the block when Umber emerged a couple of minutes later, bags in hand, and caught at once his wary glance towards the blue and white camper van.
'Something wrong?'
'Is this our transport?'
Sharp nodded. 'A 1977 Volkswagen T2 in tip-top running order. I bought her second-hand when I retired and did her up proud. Lovely, isn't she?'
'You
drove
to Prague?'
'I did. And we're driving back. I've booked us on the midnight ferry from Dunkirk to Dover.'
'I thought we'd be flying.'
'Wait till we hit the autobahn.' Sharp winked. 'It'll feel as if we are.'
* * *
'Tell me, George,' said Umber, once they were clear of the city and heading west on the main road towards the German border, 'what exactly are we going to do when we get to England?' The van, which Sharp quite unselfconsciously addressed as Molly, had yet to show her alleged turn of speed, but Umber's thoughts were already directed to journey's end. It was one thing to talk about going after the truth, quite another to devise a way of doing so.
'You mean do I have a plan?' growled Sharp.
'Well, do you?'
'Oh yes. But that can wait. First I'd like a little background on you and the last twenty-three years.'
'I'm not going to talk to you about me and Sally, if that's what you're getting at.'
'Force yourself. We need to know as much as each other in case there are gaps to fill in. I'm an open book. Policing in Wiltshire. Then retirement to Derbyshire. No family. No friends to speak of. What you see is what you get.'
'Same here.'
'Oh, I doubt that. I'll hazard a guess about you and Sally and you can tell me whether I'm wide of the mark. The relationship began straight after the inquest.'
Umber was glad Sharp had to concentrate on driving. Otherwise he would have been sure to notice Umber's wince of dismay. The inquest
was
where it had begun for them. Devizes Magistrates' Court, October 1981. The coroner's summing-up had loaded an unfair amount of blame on Sally's shoulders. She had looked so young and alone, so helpless in the face of criticism. The Hall family had made no move towards her. The press had been lying in wait outside. On impulse, Umber had said to her, 'Come out the back way with me. We'll drive somewhere.' She had looked at him, her eyes full of gratitude. And she had simply nodded her acceptance. It was all she had been able to do.
'The coroner was out of line,' said Sharp. 'I was going to tell Sally that, you know. But you whisked her away before I had the chance. Where did you go?'
'The Kennet and Avon Canal. We walked along the towpath.'
'Nice choice. And what about the decision to go abroad? Christmas, maybe? New Year?'
'You're not going to give up, are you?'
'Not for the next few hundred miles or so.'
'All right. I'll tell you.' Umber knew then that he would have to give Sharp some sort of account of his life with Sally. Better, he decided, an edited one of his own shaping than whatever result Sharp's guessing game produced. 'Sally needed to get away. So did I. She rapidly became more important to me than a Ph.D of questionable relevance to anything. She'd abandoned a teaching degree before working as a nanny, so teaching English abroad seemed the obvious answer for both of us. We took the qualifying course in Barcelona in the spring and summer of 'eighty-two. We worked in Lisbon after that, then Athens, then... all over. The further from home the better.'
'Good idea, I imagine.'
'It seemed to be. We had a few happy years.'
'Only a few?'
'We were in Turkey -- Izmir -- when we heard about Radd. Sally was pregnant at the time. Miscarried shortly afterwards. I blamed her Turkish doctor. She blamed...' Umber chuckled bitterly. 'Herself.'
'Come again?'
'She got it into her head that she wasn't allowed to have a child of her own... because she'd lost Tamsin.'
'That's --'
'Crazy? Yes, George, you're so right. Crazy is what it was. And it went on that way. I tried to keep her on an even keel. Maybe I didn't try hard enough. Or maybe I tried too hard. Maybe we both did. We got married. But that didn't help. In fact, it only made it worse. In the end, we felt tied to each other. Trapped. We were in Italy at the time. I accepted a job back in Turkey, knowing she wouldn't go with me because of what had happened there. She stayed on in Bologna. She hadn't actually been working in quite a while. Then she went back to England.'
'When was that?'
'Autumn of 'ninety-eight.'
'You were together a long time.'
'Nearly seventeen years. She lasted less than a year on her own.'
They must have covered a mile or more in silence before Sharp said, 'Maybe the coroner was right and it was just an accident.'
'Maybe.'
'But who trails a fan heater on an extension lead into a bathroom on a summer's evening?'
'Exactly. Who does?'
'Blame yourself, do you?'
'What do you think?'
'I think it's handy in this case' -- Sharp cast Umber a sidelong smile -- 'that you've got someone to share the blame with.'
* * *
Blame had hung heavy in the air at Sally's funeral. Umber could remember the almost physical weight of it, pressing down on his shoulders. He had been tempted to plead pressure of work and stay away, but that would have been one desertion too many. So he had gone. And seen the accusations hovering in the eyes of the other mourners. And known that he could not rebut them. He should have saved her. He should have been capable of it. But in the end all he had managed to do was to save himself.
'When love fails, self-preservation takes over,' Alice Myers, Sally's oldest friend, had said to him afterwards. She had not troubled to explain her remark. She had not needed to.
Umber had returned to Turkey the following morning. In simple terms, he had fled. He had been home since, of course. But only now, on this long drive across half of Europe, did he feel that his flight might at last be over.
* * *
It was after dark, in a service area near Aachen, over coffee and baguettes, that Sharp unveiled his plan.
'There's nothing very sophisticated about it. Checking facts and asking questions is what it amounts to. I want to know two things. One, who sent me the letter? Two, what
really
happened at Avebury on the twenty-seventh of July, 1981? Maybe that's basically the same question. We'll see. The great thing is to look on the passage of time as a blessing, not a curse.'
'How can it be?'
'Because it means we can forget all that forensic crap. I never really trusted the white-coated brigade anyway. Fingerprints. Bloodstains. Fibre samples. They don't come into it. But
time?
That's a different matter. It reveals a pattern. What the people touched by the abduction of Tamsin Hall and the murder of Miranda Hall have done in the years since is the evidence we're going to sift.'