When they were sitting at a table in the cosy restaurant with bowls of steaming moules and a large plate of frites in front of them, he asked, ‘How’s our German friend?’ Peter had never met Dieter Nimitz, but he liked to hear about his contretemps with Van der Vaart, and also delighted in Dieter’s many sayings, expressed in excellent but idiosyncratic English, which were often unwittingly funny.
‘He has what I believe are called domestic difficulties.’
‘Oh no,’ said Peter in mock-alarm. ‘You’d better not be the shoulder he wants to cry on.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s not like that. He rarely mentions his wife, so this was quite unusual. She’s very successful – the headmistress of a school in Hamburg. But he thinks she’s been behaving strangely.’
‘How so?’
She explained about the letter Dieter had found. Peter said, ‘There could be all sorts of explanations, you know. All of them perfectly innocent.’
‘I know. But that wasn’t all. She had a meeting with someone in the house when Dieter had gone out. But he came back early and she tried to conceal the traces. He’s pretty sure it was a man he saw driving away when he came back to the house.’
‘Ah, so maybe she’s the one leaning on an extra-marital shoulder?’
‘I don’t think so; at any rate, it isn’t what Dieter is worried about. He seemed to think it might have some connection with her work – and with the letter he found.’
‘Why?’
‘He couldn’t say why exactly. He made some reference to the Russians.’ She noticed she had all of Peter’s attention now. ‘But when I pressed him, he just mumbled something about a cigarette.’
‘And that’s all he said?’
‘Yes. I suggested he try and find out more about this missing student from the school. It didn’t sound right to me.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Peter. Though his voice retained its lightness there was a professional crispness to it as well. ‘Now tell me some more about Dieter’s wife.’
16
Autumn was coming to New England, and even on this sunny afternoon there was a slight edge to the air. It was still too early for the annual fireworks display of the region’s maple trees – with their palette of vivid scarlet and gold – that drew visitors from all over the world, but the advantage for Harry Fitzpatrick was that he didn’t have to wait in a queue at Burlington airport’s car-hire desk, and there was virtually no traffic as he drove to the university for a second time.
He was following up a request from the FBI office in the London Embassy that had originated from MI5. They’d learned that a young immigrant living in Germany, who had been on a school educational visit to an American university, had not returned to Germany with the other students. For some reason, they seemed to think there was something sinister in his disappearance. It seemed that some bright spark in MI5 had read Harry’s report of his enquiries at the university following the death of the man called Petersen, the man suspected of having been a Russian Illegal. They had noted what Harry had learned, that Petersen taught on a summer course for visiting foreign schoolchildren. Now they were wondering if the course the missing student had been on might possibly have been the course in Vermont. It all seemed a very long shot to Harry but he was secretly rather flattered that his initial report had aroused such interest and so he was happy to do as he was asked and try to find out more.
He had started by ringing the head of Petersen’s department from his office in FBI HQ in Washington, but had found him impossible to reach – thanks to a Cerberus-like secretary, a dry old stick from the sound of her voice, who on three separate occasions was adamant that the professor was too busy to speak to him. The fourth time he rang, Cerberus announced that the professor had left on a recruiting trip to the West Coast, and had asked Angie Emerson, the woman Harry had met previously, to deal with him. Emerson was also away, at a conference in Cleveland, but due back on Tuesday. Taking no chances on further delays, Fitzpatrick had made an appointment to see Emerson on Tuesday and booked a flight to Burlington.
This time, Angie Emerson was more smartly dressed than on their previous encounter – in neat black trousers and shiny black loafers, though her hair was still precariously secured in a fragile bun with wisps poking out. She got up from her desk to shake Harry’s hand, then motioned him to sit down. She said, ‘I’m sorry the boss isn’t here.’
‘Well, I have to say he didn’t seem very eager to see me.’ He explained about the rebuffed phone calls.
Angie Emerson looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Miss Thurston – that’s his secretary – can be a bit off-putting. And I’m not surprised the prof didn’t want to see you. He’s strongly socialist. I think he was a communist in his younger days. He’s probably allergic to the FBI; he may have thought you wanted to see him about that.’
‘Well, he’d have been wrong. Hoover’s been dead a long time. This is a follow-up to what we were talking about when we met last time. So I’m glad to be talking to you again rather than having to explain it all to him. If you remember, when I called on you, you told me that sometimes high-school students came here to take IT courses during the summer vacation.’
‘That’s right. It’s a good use of the facilities, since otherwise they’d just sit unused for three months of the year. And, frankly, for some of us it’s a much-needed supplement to our salaries. You don’t become an academic to get rich,’ she said with a grin.
‘And some of these students come from abroad?’
‘Absolutely. They’re not the majority, but there’s always a group from overseas. This year they were from a high school in Germany – I’m pretty sure it was Hamburg. Though they weren’t German-born – refugees from the Middle East. Syrian mainly.’
‘So they all went back to Hamburg?’
‘That’s right. They flew from JFK so they could have a couple of days to see the sights in New York.’
‘Did any of them stay on?’
Angie looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’
‘You know, stay on for further studies, enrol as students in the university.’
‘No, they’re too young – only sixteen, maybe seventeen. They’d have had to apply for next year, not this one. Presumably they would have to get visas, leave to remain, something.’
‘So no one connected with the summer course stayed on?’
Angie shook her head. ‘No one stayed as a student here.’
He hadn’t flown up here to leave stones unturned, so he persisted. ‘Or stayed to do anything else?’
She began to shake her head again, then stopped. ‘Well, no one,’ she conceded, ‘unless you mean Aziz. But he’s not a student: he works in IT. He’s the assistant to the division’s tech head. He was a bit older than the others. He’s probably twenty now.’
‘Where can I find him?
It proved easier to learn about Aziz than to locate him. His office was on the top floor of an adjacent building and easy to miss. By the time Harry Fitzpatrick found it and knocked on the door he was almost breathless, having gone up and down the stairs several times in his search.
To his relief, a voice called out from inside, ‘Enter please,’ in accented English. He pushed open the door, which just missed colliding with the chair on which a youth was sitting, his back to the door, in front of an oversized Apple monitor. The room was tiny.
The young man turned to face Harry and smiled shyly. Even sitting, he looked small, quite frail, with short black hair and thick glasses. He wore a sweater over a white shirt with a frayed and crumpled collar. ‘Professor Galloway? I’m sorry you’ve been having problems with your machine. Did you bring it with you?’