The Dark Room(99)

“We sent Carolyn to San Francisco, on a student visa. She enrolled in the University of California.”

“You picked her because she looked young. And because she fit the type.”

“Also because she was very good. Top of her class at Hendon,” he said. “She went over in the autumn of 1984, so that she enrolled in the son’s year. She managed to sit next to him in a French class.”

“Her job was to get close to the son?”

“And the fraternity, too. You know about Pi Kappa Kappa?”

“I know.”

“That was an insular brotherhood. And secretive. We knew Castelli Sr. had been a member, and that he’d put his son in touch before packing him off to university. Carolyn had to be patient before she could get anything out of him.”

“Was she reporting to you?” Cain asked.

“Daily, when it was safe.”

“When’s the last time you heard from her?”

“July seventeen, 1985.”

“That’s when they killed her,” Cain said. “They buried Christopher Hanley that day, and she was in the casket.”

It was almost a comforting thought. She couldn’t have suffered more than twenty-four hours.

“What did she report that day?”

“Nothing much. It was a phone call, and she talked to me. The son was back in town that day. Classes ended in June, and he’d spent most of the summer in London. We kept her in Berkeley to watch the fraternity, because we could put people on the son. But many of those kids were on holiday—it was a slow summer for her.”

“And she spent her downtime sewing, didn’t she?” Cain asked.

The man arched one gray eyebrow above the frame of his tortoiseshell glasses.

“She did like to sew. That wasn’t in her reports. It was in her file—she had to list her pastimes on a form when she applied. After she disappeared, I went over everything a thousand times. How did you know?”

“The photograph of her,” Cain said. “She’d made the dress she was wearing. And she was very good.”

The man thought about that, taking the new information and comparing it with what he already knew.

“There’d have been times she would have needed to be striking. To stand out, more than she already did,” the man said. “Some of the older Pi Kappa Kappa men moved in high circles. But there was no budget for that sort of thing. She had to make it work with what she had.”

There was a rush of noise from the hallway, and then it was quiet again. The man was staring at the backs of his hands on the table and never looked up.

“Was it any use sending her? Did she get anything, before she disappeared?” Cain asked.

“Not much. She was there just under a year. Two girls disappeared while she was there. She never saw them on the other side, never saw any of the Pi Kappa Kappa brothers with them. But she logged the activity, and when we went back and compared it against the last day the girls had been seen, there were anomalies—five of the core group dropped out of sight, and she didn’t see them again for two weeks.”

“They’d taken the girls somewhere to make the film.”

“The films, yes.”

“Did she connect Castelli to it?” Cain asked. “Was he one of the five who disappeared?”

“No.”

“Could it be possible that the ambassador was part of it, but not the son—not Harry Castelli Jr.?”

“Anything was possible,” the man said. “But we hadn’t proved anything yet.”

“Were you her only point of contact with Special Branch?”

“Yes.”

“So her reports—they weren’t just business. She would have told you other things. How she was holding up. Whether she was scared, lonely. That kind of thing.”

“She talked about quitting,” the man said. He had tented his fingers in front his forehead. He used his thumbs to rub against his white eyebrows. “She said she was tired and didn’t know if she could keep going. I had to plead with her to stay on.”

“She wanted to come home?”

“Quite the opposite, in fact—she talked about staying there but dropping the mission.”

“Did she say why?”

“She lost her taste for it, is what I think—what she was doing, it bothered her somehow.”

Cain thought about the methods Special Branch had condoned. Infiltrations through sexual relationships. Maybe she’d bought into it and that was how she got in trouble. Or maybe it was why she wanted to quit.

“If she had met someone—if she’d become involved romantically, is what I’m talking about—would she have told you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she have anyone back in England?”

“Anyone how?”

“A boyfriend, a fiancé.”

“There was a man she was seeing when she was at the police college. We saw that when we did background on her. But that didn’t go far. It was over before she left for the States.”

“Before she disappeared, did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“What?”

“She was in her first trimester. She’d have been starting to show, but only just.”