White Death

‘Could I see his room?’

‘Sure.’

Furman led Patrese down corridors that smelled faintly of disinfectant.

‘Do you know when he was last seen?’ Patrese asked as they walked.

‘In the refectory on Saturday evening, around seven o’clock. He was on roster then, one of the staff due to eat with the boys. After that, no one knows. I guess he’d have gone back to his room if he had no other engagements, and no one would have thought anything strange about not seeing him again that night.’

‘Next morning? Sunday, in a religious establishment; someone must have noticed him missing?’

‘Of course. His absence was noted at first morning prayers, seven a.m., but people just thought he was ill; there’s a virus going round the school, plenty of pupils and staff have got it. His room was checked to see if he was OK, but there was no sign of him.’

‘That didn’t cause alarm?’

‘At that stage, no. This is a big school; he could have been anywhere, doing anything. It didn’t seem sinister. But when he didn’t appear for the main chapel service at ten thirty or for lunch afterwards – that’s when we started to search for him in earnest.’

‘And when you couldn’t find him?’

‘We called the police.’

And Patrese knew what the police would have said: he’s an adult, adults go missing, we’ll take a note of his details and let you know if we find anything. Meanwhile, the search for John Doe would have been working its way slowly outwards from New Haven, and Cambridge was far enough away not to have shown up in the first sweep.

Not that it would have made any difference. Showalter had been dead several hours before anyone had even thought to look for him.

‘How easy is it to get into this place?’ Patrese asked.

Furman shrugged. ‘We have security guards, of course, and gates, but we’re a school of young men. They go on sports and cultural trips, we encourage them to help out in the local community, the abbey itself is open to the public at certain times. We don’t want to shut ourselves away from the world. We wouldn’t be much of a school if we did.’

‘But anyone acting suspiciously would be challenged?’

‘I’d like to think so.’

The problem, as Patrese knew, was that anyone who could kill a woman on New Haven Green and leave another body there was almost certainly pretty good at not acting suspiciously. If killers walked round rubbing their hands and cackling like pantomime villains, they’d be much easier to catch.

‘You have CCTV here?’

‘At the main entrance.’

‘Nowhere else?’

‘No.’

‘How many entrances are there?’

‘Four or five, depending on how you count.’

‘So why not have CCTV on them too?’

‘I wouldn’t have had it at all if it hadn’t been required by the insurance company. I want to bring these young men up properly, and you can’t do that if they think they’re being watched the whole time. I know most of them are good kids; but they’re also kids, and kids sometimes do what kids do. I come down like a ton of bricks on them when they screw up, but I want to let them make their own mistakes too. Within reason, of course.’

Heck, Patrese thought. If he’d had a principal like Furman when he’d been at school, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up hating religion so much.

‘And you have no idea how Darrell could have ended up in New Haven?’

‘None whatsoever. As far as I know, he had no family there, no friends. I’ve been here eight years, and I never heard him mention the place once.’

Patrese looked out of the window, toward the spire of the chapel and a concrete sports hall beyond. Something about the solidity of both buildings made him think of the Gothic gatehouse on one side of New Haven Green.

‘You’re not far from Harvard here, are you?’ he asked.

‘Not at all.’

‘You ever do anything with them? Meetings, programs, any of that?’

Furman shook his head. ‘Not really. We take the boys in twelfth grade to look round the place – not just Harvard but MIT too, of course – in case any of them are thinking of applying there, but that’s about it.’

‘Did Darrell ever go on these trips?’

‘Not that I recall. Why?’

‘You’re near Harvard. His body was found near Yale. I was wondering whether there could be a connection.’

‘Not one that I’m aware of. Darrell certainly didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale as a student. Thought they were a little too elitist, if I remember rightly.’

‘And yet he taught in a private boys’ school.’

‘A third of our boys are on some sort of financial assistance. And religious instruction is a major part of the curriculum here. I think his conscience was satisfied that he was doing the right thing. Here—’ Furman pushed open a door and stood aside to let Patrese through. ‘This is – was – Darrell’s room.’

It reminded Patrese a little of Kwasi’s room in Bleecker Street: a single bed, hundreds of books. None about chess, though, or at least none that Patrese could see at first glance. Shelves of religious texts, unsurprisingly. The obvious giants of the postwar American novel: Mailer, Updike, Roth, squashed close together like rush-hour rail commuters. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in translation, and not only the famous ones about war, peace, crime and punishment either: Patrese saw The Cossacks, The House of the Dead, Hadji Murat, The Idiot, Resurrection, Demons, all with broken spines and fraying corners.

‘Loved Russia,’ Furman said, following Patrese’s gaze. ‘One of the classes he liked to teach was about religious survival in times of persecution. In particular, how the Russian Orthodox Church kept going under the godless Soviet regime. Lessons for us all in how to keep the faith.’

There was a laptop on a desk by the window. Patrese turned it on, waited for it to boot up, and tapped on the Outlook Express icon. Forensics could crawl over the machine later, but if Showalter had made any arrangements for Saturday night by e-mail, they’d probably still be on here.

The program opened. No password demand: most people don’t bother when they have sole access to a machine. Patrese scanned through the inbox. All school-related business, by the look of it: circulars about staff meetings, refurbishment work, and so on. He glanced toward Furman. ‘Do you know whether he used a personal account too? Hotmail; that kind of thing?’

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘Why so?’

Furman stepped forward and clicked on the ‘sent items’ folder. It came up empty.

‘Darrell didn’t use any e-mail unless he had to. He’d read the incoming stuff, because he knew that’s how people communicate nowadays, but if he wanted to reply, he’d ring you up.’

‘Why?’

Furman shrugged. ‘Just the way he was. Not everyone likes to filter their lives through electronics.’