To my horror I realize that I can’t answer no to that question without reservations.
Especially if I consider the fact that the person he is after is his lawful wedded wife who tried to take his life by shutting him into a bunker full of hungry rats — and I really do have to take that circumstance into account, no matter what.
I start walking again. I feel sick. I can feel the first drops of what promises to be a heavy rain shower, and speed up in order to get back indoors as soon as possible.
But would it be possible to do that? I ask myself. Even theoretically possible? All he had with him when I left him there was the clothes he stood up in. How could he possibly have managed it?
An accomplice.
That thought strikes me just as we are clambering over the wall that separates Darne Lodge from the moor, and I realize immediately that it is a legitimate conclusion. Ergo: if Martin somehow managed to extricate himself from that confounded bunker and is still alive, he must have acquired an accomplice more or less immediately. There is no other possibility.
Somebody who assisted him with his plans, and helped him in every way necessary. Silence, money, support.
But how? I wonder. How could he possibly have found somebody like that?
Who?
When we had come indoors I tried to look at the situation from the other direction, from my point of view. What indications do I have? What exactly is there to suggest that these might be the facts of the situation? That the professor of literature Martin Emmanuel Holinek is in fact alive, and has a plan.
A silver-grey hire car with two daily newspapers in it?
Dead birds outside my front door? But it’s several weeks now since the pheasant appeared there: would Martin really have been on Exmoor for as long as that?
No, I think. It doesn’t add up. It’s too implausible for it to be true. He would already have killed me if he had been here.
I don’t know how convinced I really am about the correctness of this conclusion, but I curse myself for my stupidity. Curse myself for not having had the sense to make a note of the registration number of that car on either of the two occasions I’ve seen it. Armed with the number, it shouldn’t be impossible for me to find out who hired the car from the Sixt rental company.
If I have a third opportunity I certainly won’t waste it.
When we’ve been back at home for a while another thing occurs to me. If Martin Holinek is alive, he has exactly the same opportunity as I have for going into an internet cafe and checking his e-mails. For example. . For example, reading the messages he himself is alleged to have sent to various recipients.
And surely he must ask himself who is looking after his e-mail correspondence so efficiently in his absence. Is there more than one candidate?
Using computers with their own unique IP addresses — for I haven’t used our own computers, not in Minehead, and not in Winsford. If you have that number, that address, surely you must also be able to find out exactly where in the world that computer is located?
Could that be how it happened? Is that what he has done?
But I reject the idea. Martin has always been just as ignorant about and uninterested in computers as I am.
Perhaps it was that accomplice, then?
I reject him (her?) as well. Put two pieces of firewood on the fire and pour out a glass of port. Take two large swigs and feel my unease receding.
I take out the playing cards — I feel too unfocused to be able to read. Not even about John Ridd and Lorna Doone, ‘a simple tale told simply’.
I reject the hazy hypotheses of fear.
Martin Holinek is dead. We met one day in June thirty-four years ago, at a garden party in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. We lived our lives together, and now he has gone. Naturally. Eaten up by rats and impossible to identify when some curious walker wandering along the beach on the Baltic coast of Poland feels moved to take a look inside a filthy old bunker.
That’s the way it is. It’s just that I have chosen not to spell it out previously with such brutal clarity. I’ve done exactly the same as the author E, and let it hide itself away between the lines: please forgive me for that detail, Gudrun Ewerts, when you read this up in your heaven.
I check that I have locked the door. Empty my glass of port and pour myself another, and set out the game of Spider Harp.
30
When Martin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, his present from me was a long weekend in New York. It was in September 2003: we arrived on a Thursday afternoon and left four days later. We stayed at a hotel in Lexington Avenue quite close to Grand Central Station, and I never set foot outside our room from start to finish.
The cause was a major stomach upset which had begun to make itself felt as our flight was approaching Newark, and which forced our taxi driver to stop twice on the drive into Manhattan.
I needed to be within easy reach of a lavatory, it was as simple as that. I suppose I thought it would pass after a few hours — or a day at most — but it didn’t. I couldn’t keep down a crumb of food until the Sunday evening, and as we boarded the plane the next morning for the flight home I was extremely grateful for the fact that I’d treated ourselves to business class in view of the journey’s significance. If I’d been in economy I’m quite sure I would have been sick again.
Martin was loyal that first evening, just went down to the hotel bar for an hour and spent the rest of the time with me in room number 1828. The room was on the eighteenth floor, and so we had a splendid view. To the south and the east, downtown and over the East River towards Brooklyn on the other side. From the very beginning, that first evening, I made it clear to Martin that this was to be his trip and it wasn’t the intention that he should sit twiddling his thumbs in a hotel room on my account. Neither of us was especially familiar with the city (Synn hadn’t yet moved there, that happened about three years later and in any case didn’t increase the frequency of our visits), so he ought to get out and about.
It wasn’t too difficult to persuade him of that. On Friday he went out after breakfast, came back at six o’clock, had a shower and a whisky, then went out again. If I remember rightly he eventually tumbled into bed at about half past two.
On Saturday Martin woke up at about eleven and asked if I still had the stomach problem. I admitted that unfortunately that was still the case, he went back to sleep, got up an hour later and after another shower wondered if, given the circumstances, I didn’t fancy going out for lunch.
I confirmed that unfortunately that was also the case, and he left me soon after two.
He returned thirteen hours later in a new but somewhat soiled suit. I asked him where it had come from, and he explained that it had come from Fifth Avenue and was his fiftieth birthday present to himself. I wondered what had happened to his old clothes, the ones he had been wearing when he went out, and he said he had given them away to a down-and-out in Union Square.
He fell asleep still wearing half his suit, without asking me about the state of my stomach infection.
I woke up early on Sunday morning, went to the bathroom and was sick. I realized it was due to the banana I had eaten during the night, and wondered if it was going to be possible for me to board a plane the next day. I also felt rather annoyed about Martin, and wished we had had separate rooms. But at the same time I felt a bit guilty: here he was, for once, in the city of cities, and of course it was only right that he should go out and enjoy himself.
But you can’t deal with annoyance using reasonable thoughts of that kind, and when he had left me alone again, a few hours into the afternoon, I was merely glad to be rid of him. I didn’t ask him to tell me what he had been up to the last couple of evenings, nor what he had in mind for the third and last one. And he didn’t seem all that interested in informing me either, so in that respect I suppose you could say that we were on a par. I was also so exhausted after all my visits to the toilet that I reckoned as far as I was concerned he was welcome to go and drown himself in the Hudson River.