The Tsunami File (15 page)

“That's another matter altogether.”

“I see.”

They regarded each other over plates and cups and cutlery.

“May I ask you something now, Mrs. Smith?” Delaney said. “My turn.” “If you must,” she said.

“This phone message. On your voicemail. Did you recognize the voice by any chance?”

“Don't be silly,” she said.

“It was in English, obviously. Western accent?

Or Asian? Thai?”

“You're playing detective now, Mr. Delaney?”

“Humour me, OK? Asian accent?”

“No.”

“European?”

“Yes.”

“British?”

“Great Britain is not Europe, Mr. Delaney,” she said.

Delaney did not rise to the invitation for morning political debate, with a medium-level hangover and one hour's sleep.

“What part of Europe?” he asked. “What accent? In your view?”

“This is silly,” she said.

“Humour me.”

“Well, German,” she said. “I would say German.”

T
he day Stefan Zalm made what Delaney and Smith would refer to afterward as his “confession” was the day Mrs. Smith headed back to the relative tranquility of England. It was also the day Mrs. Smith confronted her husband about what Delaney knew she would always refer to afterward as the “scandal.” She waited until she had checked in at the airport for her flight, Smith told him. Smith had insisted on driving her there himself in Zalm's car, declining a police driver. This left the Smiths for too long in uncomfortable, unsupervised proximity.

At sundown on the day of Mrs. Smith's departure, Delaney and Smith were drinking beer on the balcony of Delaney's hotel room. Smith had come directly to the hotel from the airport, for there was much to discuss in addition to disintegrating marriages. They had not, for example, decided what to do next about the excised
Deutschland
fingerprints. Smith had not yet told Braithwaite about what they had found in the mortuary compound. He was far less angry and prone to impulsive acts than on the night of the break-in, but he was no less perplexed, no less determined to rectify the situation. “Fiona knows about Conchi,” Smith said to Delaney, squinting into the afternoon sun.

Delaney had not told Smith about the breakfast encounter with his wife a day earlier. He wasn't sure why.

“We knew there was a risk someone would tell her,” Delaney said.

“I really thought they wouldn't bother,” Smith said. “What does it achieve, when you think about it?”

“You have enemies now. They want you to lay off this thing and they're obviously willing to use anything they can to get at you.”

“I know that,” Smith said. “But it's not working.”

“How bad was it, with Fiona?” Delaney disliked Mrs. Smith enough to feel immediately after his question that there was something unpleasantly familiar about his using her given name.

“She was very civilized about it. Very English. We English are so . . . ” Smith groped for words, “. . . English about these things.”

“Meaning?”

“She clearly just wants to avoid a scandal. That's basically what she said, Frank. She didn't say anything about ending the marriage or what we should do next or ask whether I was going to come home, now or after my stint in Lyon is over. She just said she wanted to protect our family name. Her family name, more likely.”

“That's pretty Victorian of her,” Delaney said.

“Precisely,” Smith said. “She has a hyphenated maiden name, after all.”

“Quite,” Delaney said. “My good man . . .”

“At least she didn't go down the path of somehow blaming me for the death of our baby. Not in that conversation at least. It used to come up somehow in just about every other argument we had, about anything. Before we stopped bothering to even argue anymore.”

Delaney said nothing. This was a level of personal detail he could do without. Smith saw this, looked embarrassed at his very un-English display. They sipped beer.

“She ask you to break it off?” Delaney said eventually. “The Conchi thing?”

“Not in so many words. She did say she was confident I would do the right thing.”

“I see.”

“I told her we should both spend some time thinking about things for a little while.”

“How very civilized.”

“Do the right thing, my good man.”

“She knows it's Conchi?”

“She knows it's Spanish.”

“Who would have told her?”

Delaney felt uneasy about not having told Smith about the breakfast meeting with his wife, but things had gone a little too far in their conversation for him to raise it now. There was no strong reason to bother now in any case; there was no new information for Smith, really. In the realm of marital breakdowns, Delaney had been through a particularly nasty one himself, had been watching O'Keefe's marriage disintegrate at a glacial pace for years, had watched far too many media marriages hit the shoals to be overly troubled by the family secrets Smith was sharing with him in the fading tropical light over a beer.

“She said she didn't know who it was,” Smith said. “Someone just left her a phone message. I'm guessing Becker, or someone on his team. That's what I think. And Braithwaite has basically warned her to warn me that I'm on decidedly shaky career ground if I keep on with this. So she said at the airport.”

“We knew about that already as well.”

“Quite,” Smith said.

It took them a number of additional cold Singhas before they decided what it was they should do next. The beer helped, of course. But it was Zalm's rather theatrical arrival and subsequent confession that clinched it.

Before Zalm swept into the hotel room to bare his soul, Delaney told Smith about his telephone conversation that morning with Ackermann in Berlin. Ackermann had been in a rush. A woman was waiting for him in some seedy bar or other. But he had done his reporter's work very well, as always, and Delaney would owe him yet another favour and another expensive meal.

“No way that body over there is Stahlman's,”

Ackermann had said. “Not a chance, Francis Frank Delaney.”

“You really sure, dead sure?” Delaney said. “No body was ever found.”

“Dead sure Stahlman is long dead. I've triplechecked in my obsessional Germanic way and the man was dead, dead, dead long before any tsunami in Thailand became the biggest damn story of 2004. Every police contact who knew the case, every friend of his friends I managed to find, every government contact I used, even the vice-president of the damn company that took over Stahlman's firm after the suicide, everyone, everyone, everyone assures me that the man killed himself. There was never the slightest trace of him being alive after his little outing at the seashore. No money trail, no phone calls, no letters, no sightings, nothing, nothing, nothing. You are on the wrong track Francis Frank. Trust Ackermann on this.”

Delaney himself had all but ruled out the possibility that the
Deutschland
body was disgraced pedophile Karl-Heinz Stahlman. Stahlman's reputation had already been ruined well before his last solitary swim in the Baltic Sea. Delaney could think of no reason for anyone—friend, family or police—to go to such lengths after the tsunami disaster had taken so many other lives to try to cover up a story about a German pedophile having faked his own death in order to start a new life on the beaches of southern Thailand. Even if body PM68-TA0386 had in fact been Stahlman's.

“So who?” Delaney said.

“I can't do all your work for you, Frank. You are the world famous investigative journalist, am I correct. Still? So go out and do some investigative journalism. Or perhaps use your good friends in cloak and dagger realms to help you out on this one.”

Ackermann, like a very small circle of Delaney's closest media colleagues, had developed suspicions over the years that at least some of his investigative work was not actually done for newspapers and magazines. Delaney never bothered to deny this when the suggestion came from a man he trusted as well as Ackermann. Nor, however, did he ever actually confirm it.

“Have I now earned my supper?” Ackermann asked.

“I suppose,” Delaney said. “I would have preferred a full name and a police fingerprint card for this body. Or a DNA match. But if this is the best a German newspaper man can do . . .”

“You are too much, Francis Frank. You are lucky I love you more than life itself. Now will you let me get along to meet the young woman who helps me to forget about you for a time and mend my broken heart?”

Smith had, very unwisely in Delaney's view, already told Conchi and Zalm separately about the break-in at the compound and what he and Delaney had found in the body bag. Or, more importantly, what they had not found. Smith said Conchi had been angry that he and Delaney had taken such chances. Then she was angry about not being invited along to help them. Then she was angry the fingerprints had been removed from the body.

Conchi was wise enough, or, possibly experienced enough in such matters, to have kept a low profile while Mrs. Smith was in town. Delaney didn't see her for several days. He did not ask how, or when, or how often, Smith had managed to meet with her while his wife was doing the right thing in tropical climes.

Zalm, Smith said, had been surprisingly agitated by the news that the
Deutschland
body was now without finger pads or back teeth. The break-in story itself had alarmed the Dutchman, clearly. But the revelation that someone else had broken into the container before them and expertly removed potential evidence seemed to shake him up badly, Smith said.

Zalm wasn't angry like Conchi. Instead, Smith said, he was upset; one might even say frightened.

The reason for that became clear soon after Zalm hurried into Delaney's hotel room and joined them on the balcony. He refused offers of a beer. He refused offers of a chair. His face was flushed. He lit one of the fragrant Indonesian clove cigarettes he now liked to smoke. He was carrying a large, overstuffed brown envelope.

“What's wrong with you this evening, Stefan?” Smith asked. “Are you in love, or something?”

The beers appeared to have relaxed the Scotland Yard fingerprint man somewhat, despite the heavy problems that faced him. Or perhaps it was the departure from Thailand of his wife. Or both.

“What's in the envelope, Stefan?” Delaney asked.

The Dutchman looked as if he were about to burst into tears.

“What is it, Stefan? What's going on?” Smith said.

“I've done something terrible,” Zalm said.

“Come off it,” Smith said.

“I've done something very stupid, Jonah. I'm so sorry.”

“What?” Smith said, looking over at Delaney.

“What?”

“Jonah, please, just listen before you condemn me, please just listen first.”

Zalm sat down at last on a chair facing them both. He placed his mysterious brown envelope on a low table beside him. They waited. Delaney resisted the journalist's urge to reach for a notebook and pen.

“I'm so sorry,” Zalm said, running his left hand through his hair, rubbing his head nervously. “This is my first big international DVI assignment. I wanted to do well. You know? They said I would be representing Holland and with all the Dutch victims out here they were expecting the whole Dutch team to do very good work, to work fast and get lots of positive IDs. They wanted all the Dutch bodies home fast.”

“All the teams want that, Stefan,” Smith said.

“Yes, yes, I know. But I felt I had to do particularly well, because I'm a civilian and I'm younger than a lot of the police and I just wanted to do well and make a lot of IDs. It's not always easy, with teeth. You know that, Jonah. Frank, you know how hard these DVI things can be. You do.”

“It's hard with fingerprints, too, Stefan,”

Smith said.

Delaney could see that Smith was getting annoyed even before he knew what it was Zalm had actually done.

“What did you do, Stefan?” Delaney asked.

“I took things from files,” Zalm said.

“You what!” Smith shouted.

“Not whole files, Jonah. Things from inside problem files. I took copies of some of the things in them. Some of them.”

“You what!” Smith shouted again.

“Jonah, please. I'm sorry. I wanted to do well so I took copies of some of the things in the problem files so I could study them slowly and look at people's notes at night in my room and sort of get a sense of things so I could do better work. Some of you had good notes about possibles, things like where people might be from, which country, maybe which city. You, for example Jonah, left good notes when you were struggling with a hard fingerprint match or looking at palms. You would say whether the body was probably male or female, young or old, manual worker or office type. The other guys might say things about clothes found on the bodies or rings or tattoos and I wanted to study these things alone at night so I could make better guesses about where people might be from or if they were Dutch and where I might get people back in Amsterdam to go to try for good antemortem dental records. You see? So I could do well. I wanted to make a lot of matches. I thought it would help me to know where the matching process was going for some of the harder files. I thought the papers would help me in my own work.”

“That's crazy, Stefan,” Smith said. “You didn't need to do that. Anyone would have told you what they thought. I would have helped you anytime. You could have looked at any files anytime.”

“I know, Jonah, I know. It's crazy. But I wanted to spend more time on the files at night without seeming like I was going around asking people for favours like a police cadet. It's crazy, I know. I just photocopied things instead and brought them to my room to study them alone at night.”

“That's crazy.”

“So what are you saying exactly, Stefan?”