Oddly, Fairchild seemed for a while most interested in Captain Zhang, wanting to know every detail of the encounter between him and Jerry and Luther, asking if they’d been in Zhang’s hotel room for even a second. “I would have,” Jerry told him, “I’d have gone right on in and insisted he tell us the truth, but Luther wouldn’t let me.”
“Hard to know if that would have made a difference,” Fairchild said, and at last left that issue to say to Kim, “The lawyer Manville was going to see. His office was in the Mansions in George Street?”
“I think so,” Kim said. “I think that’s what he said.”
“And he told you the name, but you don’t remember it.”
“I’m sorry,” Kim said. “I didn’t know I was going to have to.”
“Of course not,” Fairchild agreed. He was managing to be both remote and sympathetic at the same time. “There aren’t that many lawyers in the Mansions,” he said. “Was it a European name or an Asian name, do you remember?”
“It sounded European, I think,” she said, “but it wasn’t anything ordinary.”
Fairchild brooded, gazing at the far wall over his granny glasses, then he frowned at Kim and said, “Just a minute. You say Manville got to this lawyer through a friend in America.”
“An architect in Houston, he said. I’m sorry, I don’t know his name either.”
“Building trades,” Fairchild said. “Manville is in that line, his Houston friend is, he would have sent him on to someone in the same sort of line here, so it’s a lawyer who represents architects or developers or— Would the name be Andre Brevizin?”
“Yes!” Kim said, delighted. “That’s what he said. I remember it sounded like too nice a name for a lawyer.”
Fairchild laughed. “I expect we have areas of agreement, Miss Baldur,” he said. “Although I doubted it at first, when I heard the story you wished to tell.”
“Richard Curtis, you mean,” she said.
Fairchild nodded. “Among other things. But let us look at what I began with. Two days ago, in this city, your Mr. Curtis brought a complaint to the police — not to me, I’m sorry to say, I wish I’d met the man, considering subsequent events — a complaint charging a former employee, one George Manville, with industrial espionage and theft. I’ve had a looksee at the complaint itself, and he did seem to have sufficient evidence for the charge.”
Jerry wanted to break in here with a ringing denunciation of Richard Curtis as a polluter and a well-known liar, but he restrained himself.
“Now this morning,” Fairchild went on, “an unknown young American lady, yourself, with no identification but claiming a friendly relationship with the same George Manville, presents herself to the police with a wild story of kidnapping, piracy, attempted murder and the suspicious disappearance of the man Manville himself, all pointing to Richard Curtis as the villain. I must admit. Miss Baldur, at first blush you did not bring us anything we could be expected to take seriously.”
“But you do take it seriously,” Kim said. “I can see you take it seriously.”
“For one reason only,” Fairchild told her. “It is why you were brought to this office, and not dealt with rather summarily at a lower level.”
Kim, looking uncertain, possibly a little afraid, so that Jerry had the urge to grasp her hand but again restrained himself, said, “Why is that?”
Fairchild lowered his head enough to look at them all, one at a time, over his granny glasses. Jerry had to force himself to meet that steady look. “I take it,” Fairchild said, “none of you has had any dealings with Captain Zhang Yung-tsien since your unsatisfactory interview with him yesterday.”
Jerry felt heat rising in his cheeks. Had Zhang dared to put in his own complaint? He said, more hotly than he’d intended, “Inspector, if Captain Zhang suggests we—”
Fairchild stopped him with an upraised hand. “Not at all,” he said. “Captain Zhang went out his hotel room window yesterday afternoon, very near to the time you and Mr. Rickendorf spoke with him.”
Jerry could only stare, open-mouthed. His first reaction was: I did it! I pressed him too hard, I forced him, I should have found a better way, a quieter way... “Oh God. What have I done?” He covered his face with his hands.
He wasn’t really aware of the charged silence in the room until Fairchild broke it by saying, “Mr. Diedrich? What have you done?”
Then Jerry realized what he’d said, what he’d implied, and he lowered his hands, showing his flushed face, and said, “No no no! I mean — we shouldn’t have pressed him so hard, I had no idea he...” Turning, he said, “Luther, you know what I mean!”
Luther said to Fairchild, “Did he leave a note?”
“Hard to say,” Fairchild said.
Luther gave a small smile of disbelief and said, “Inspector, how can it be hard to say if he left a note?”
“On the memo pad beside his bed,” Fairchild explained, “in Chinese, was his wife’s name, and ‘I love you,’ nothing more. If it’s a suicide note, it’s certainly an ambiguous one. The other possibility is that he was just starting a letter to his wife when he was interrupted by his murderer.”
Jerry said, “Oh, my God! You don’t think we—”
Luther, gently but firmly, said, “Stop, Jerry. The inspector doesn’t think we have anything to do with it at all.”
“Well, if it was suicide, you did,” Fairchild said. “In a way. You made it clear to Captain Zhang that the questions would only continue, and only get worse.” He tapped one of the pieces of paper that had been delivered to his desk. “Miss Baldur’s parents have confirmed to the Sydney police your account of their meeting with Captain Zhang. It is clear he did speak English, and it is clear he pretended not to be able to, because he was afraid to be questioned on the subject of Miss Baldur. Now that Miss Baldur is alive, rather than dead, we can understand why he was afraid.”
“He felt guilty,” Jerry said, feeling mixed emotions himself. “He was guilty.”
Fairchild tapped a fingernail on his desk, then said, “You may all consider yourselves lucky that Captain Zhang became as desperate as he did, or that someone else became that desperate, because the captain’s death is, so far, absolutely the only confirmation we have of your story. Whether it’s suicide or murder, it effectively eliminates the weakest link.”
Luther said, “Inspector, you still think it might be murder?”
“We can’t rule that out, not yet. There was no sign of struggle. There was that note, however ambiguous. There was the timing, immediately after you two questioned him about Miss Baldur. We would, however, prefer not to be too hasty in our conclusions. There’s no need to close that issue at once.”
A policeman had brought in another slip of paper while Fairchild was talking, and placed it on his desk. Fairchild looked at it, raised an eyebrow, and looked back up at Kim. “Well, we seem to have another potential corroboration of your story. Looked at a certain way.”
Kim said, “What? What’s happened?”
“This morning,” Fairchild told her, “less than an hour ago, from an undisclosed location, Richard Curtis announced he’d been misinformed about George Manville, that Manville was innocent of the charges brought against him two days ago. All charges have been dropped and Manville is once again employed by Curtis Construction. This was a sort of press conference, a teleconferencing hookup with a number of prominent business newspapers and television outlets, including CNN, which is where we got it. George Manville is no longer charged with any crime.” Fairchild tapped the piece of paper. “It would seem, Miss Baldur,” he said, not without sympathy, “that your friend is Richard Curtis’s friend now.”