Only Robert wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about his mentoring role. Andrew was a bit too keen. He leaned forward, ready to do anything Robert asked: make coffee, do the photocopying, fetch the mail. If there’d been dishes to wash, he’d have washed them. He sat at a facing desk like a willing pupil who’d won a scholarship. It was pitiful. He’d made notes on the Littlemore case in a brand new reporter’s pad, nodding as if he’d heard it all before, wanting to be an equal.
‘I want to search where he lived,’ said Robert, reaching for his coat. ‘The police looked in vain. I’m hoping they missed something.’
Littlemore’s last place of residence was in Mitcham, a grey stone building attached to a church, the spire of which rose like a blunt sword between two mock battlements. A cat slinked along a shadowed wall heading towards a pool of sunshine. Sanjay was sitting on the bonnet of his car, fumbling with a roll-up. He hadn’t quite got the technique.
‘There’s no point,’ he said, nodding towards the house.
Robert shrugged. ‘We just want a quick look around. Get a feel for the guy.’
Sanjay licked the wrinkled paper. ‘I know what you mean. But you’ll still find nothing. Never seen anything like it.’
Taking the offered keys, Robert looked quizzical.
‘Most people leave a sort of fingerprint where they live,’ said Sanjay, searching for his matches. ‘They leave something of themselves in the air. This guy left nothing because when he came he brought nothing. And I mean nothing.’
Sanjay was right.
Littlemore had made the premises available for general parish business, reserving one upstairs room for his exclusive use. Even that restriction seemed pointless, however, because it showed no signs of having been lived in. A bare desk faced a couple of faded yellow armchairs arranged on either side of a gas fire with plastic coals. A grey filing cabinet had been shoved into a far corner. All the shelves were empty. A bed, stripped by the police, stood upended by a wall lamp without a shade. There were no pictures, no cards propped on the mantelpiece, no ornaments or mementoes. There was no TV, CD player or radio. The only object, like something left behind inadvertently, was a small wooden cross, lost on a pale expanse of scuffed woodchip wallpaper. Sanjay had said that buildings speak and for the first time in his life he’d heard nothing.
Robert and Andrew checked all the remaining rooms, not quite knowing what they were looking for, each of them sure that Littlemore had left the place clean of anything remotely personal. This was no decision, thought Robert. It’s instinctive. Littlemore was hiding from everyone, including himself.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, frustrated, heading down the stairs. ‘The man we’re looking for was never here.’
‘Every door is unlocked except for one.’
Robert turned on the bottom stair. ‘And?’
Andrew pointed back the way they’d come. ‘Well, the door’s in the middle of an adjoining wall. The church wall. But it’s on the first floor, which means the door must open into thin air. And that’s impossible.’
Robert pushed by his bright-eyed apprentice, taking two steps at a time. Coming to the door, he felt along the top of the frame, hoping to find the key; disappointed, he turned the handle, pushing in vain until Andrew’s voice came from behind.
‘Allow me.’ He’d taken a credit card out of his wallet and was bending it into shape. Moments later, after jiggling the plastic against the lock, the door snapped open. Robert was impressed.
‘Where did you learn to do that?’
‘YouTube. I can do old cars as well. With a coat hanger.’
In fairness, Sanjay had probably worked out that the one locked door led to a tiny balcony visible from the inside of the church. But he hadn’t bothered to call a locksmith. And as a result he’d failed to discover that this was the place where Littlemore had concealed the key to his future intentions.
The balcony was only large enough for a wooden chair and small desk. Finding a switch on the wall, Robert flicked it down, bringing a soft light onto a blue folder.
He was intrigued.
The folder contained faxed newspaper cuttings relating to a ‘recluse who abjured the term detective’, preferring – for the interviewer in question, at least – ‘a bewildered cleaner in the basement of justice’. The recluse in question was Father Anselm, a man with a reputation for ‘solving cases beyond the reach of the law’. His work had attracted the attention of several broadsheets, though no commentator had been able to secure an interview of any substance. Brief replies to unsolicited telephone calls had provoked reflections on the nature of the individual who couldn’t stay on the line. Two of them had been marked with black lines:
For a man who has confronted extreme evil he remains surprisingly buoyant about the human condition. Something good remains within reach, a particle, perhaps, that can be salvaged from any heap of moral wreckage. I venture to call him naive and he agrees, almost happily. I ask why help the perpetrator? Sadly, our conversation ended there.
The second took up the same theme but went one step further:
I wonder if his capacity to trust is almost blinding. It’s a breadth of vision that most of us lose as we grow older, as we confront pretence in those we once admired. We acquire – at some cost – prudence. Has he found a cheaper route? Unfortunately he has to go. It’s only after I’ve put the phone down that I’m left contemplating a paradox, which is surely the secret to this monk’s success: it’s this large outlook which permits him to glimpse what another observer might easily miss: the wickedness at our elbow.
Apart from these two passages, random details – insights into the monk’s character – had also been underlined: a ‘disciple of the fifties trad jazz revival’, a ‘horror of mobile phones’, ‘a monk more familiar with doubt than certainty’. He had another job, too: he was ‘a sort of guestmaster for the homeless’. The last word had been circled twice. Using his mobile phone, Robert photographed the marked passages, along with the fax number and date of transmission printed along the bottom of the page.
‘These were sent two days after Littlemore stonewalled the police,’ he said to Andrew, who’d stood back to watch. ‘Three days later he vanished.’
‘They’re linked to where he went?’
‘I’d have thought so.’
Robert then photographed the only other document in the folder: a sheet of yellow paper containing notes about the history of jazz, from Papa Jack Laine’s Reliance Brass Band onwards. Written on the folder itself, on the back cover, were a couple of phone numbers and addresses of London night shelters: the Viaduct in Paddington and the Archway, Victoria.
‘He went homeless,’ said Robert, more to himself than Andrew.
‘And then he went to Larkwood Priory. They don’t know who they’re sheltering.’
Robert looked again at the fax number on the cuttings. Someone else had done the research. They then faxed what they’d found to Littlemore.
‘They effectively sent him to Larkwood Priory,’ Robert said quietly, realising that Littlemore’s sudden departure hadn’t been that sudden after all, and certainly hadn’t been forced by Robert’s persistence. It had been the first step of a more complex operation.
‘But why run away at all?’ said Andrew, uncertainly.
‘What?’ Robert had forgotten he was there.
‘If the boy was too scared to stand by his story, why would Littlemore run away? All he did was draw attention to himself.’
Andrew was right. Crofty had picked a winner: diffidence aside, this late starter was in his element. He had nous. And he was looking at something on the floor, something that must have fallen off the desk: a postcard. Robert leaned down to pick it up.
It was from Sierra Leone.
Young boys were splashing around on a golden seashore. They were leaping and laughing among the breakers. Further out to sea, men cast their nets from long boats. Robert turned over the picture. There was no stamp and no address, just a phrase in red ink:
YU KOHBA SMOK SOTE, I MOHS KOHMOHT
Robert tried to pronounce the words. He turned to Andrew: ‘You didn’t work in West Africa, by any chance?’
‘No, just with street kids in Lusaka … That’s Zambia, in the south.’
‘Ah.’
Andrew nodded at the file and postcard: ‘You’ll show this lot to Sanjay?’
‘No. For now they’re leads, and we keep leads to ourselves. If they produce anything we go first to Crofty. He’s the one who decides. That’s the chain of command.’
Robert photographed the picture and the text and then left everything as he’d found it, closing the door behind him.
They went back downstairs. On stepping outside, Robert tossed the house keys towards Sanjay, making him juggle for his matches and roll-up. The cat watched from behind some railings, its long tail curling in the sun.
‘Well, did you find anything?’ asked Sanjay.
‘Like you say, you wouldn’t believe he ever lived there.’
‘Told you.’
‘Have you got a photo?’
Sanjay opened the car door and reached in for a file, flicking through the papers until he found a Missing Persons profile.
‘Can I see a transcript of his interview as well?’ added Robert, pushing the boat out. ‘Off the record.’
Robert read the document, making notes, and then they shook hands all round. After Sanjay had pulled away, Robert wasn’t quite sure what to say. He didn’t want to patronise Andrew by complimenting him and he didn’t want to lose face by letting him think the teacher had been taught a lesson by his pupil. But he had to say something and Andrew was keeping half a step back, not wanting to lead the way back to the office.
‘Twisted guy,’ he said, eventually.
‘Yes, very.’ As if granted permission Andrew went further and ventured a thought. ‘That cross.’
‘Yes?’
‘It was exceptionally small.’
Robert waited for more.
‘He must have put it there and then left it behind.’
Robert had noticed the same thing. Pinned to the scuffed wall, it seemed to be floating like wreckage after a storm, detached from any meaning.
‘I think we’ve just seen into Edmund Littlemore’s private world,’ said Andrew.
Robert agreed: even God was adrift. But his stronger thought was about the magician’s apprentice. Where on earth had Crofty found him?