Anonymous Sources (6 page)

I absorbed this. “And the autopsy report? Any news?”

“Nope. I told you, it takes a while. They have to do toxicology, tissue testing, all that stuff.”

“Right. When you get it, will you please let me know?”

“Absolutely not,” he replied, but it sounded like he was smiling. “Somehow I have a feeling you'll find out about it just the same.”

I sighed and hung up. I had the itchy feeling I get when I'm onto something but I don't know yet what it is. I had to admit I was intrigued. It didn't hurt that Thom Carlyle turned out to have a famous dad. That guaranteed the story would enjoy front-page prominence for at least a couple more news cycles. The latest rumor from the Washington bureau was that the president himself was clearing his schedule to attend the funeral.

It didn't hurt either that one possibility was murder. Terrible for Carlyle, of course, but at this point he was dead either way. And murder
would be a much more interesting story to chase than an accident or suicide. Still, the pieces of the puzzle didn't fit together yet. An apparently talented and popular young man had been alive and chatting with his mother thirty-six hours ago. Now he wasn't. So far I couldn't find a good explanation for why.

IT WAS AN HOUR LATER,
after a walk around the block to buy the espresso now cooling on my desk, that it finally came to me what to do next. Or rather, where to go next: England. Carlyle had stepped off a plane from London just three hours before his death. The people he'd spent the last year with would be there. Perhaps some answers were there. I could try to find the English girlfriend, take a look around his room, track down his professors. Maybe Thom had said something to someone. At the very least I ought to be able to pull together some sort of a profile, a bit of color about what his last days had been like.

I rifled through the papers on my desk. Where was that statement Harvard had issued the night he died? Finally I found it:

Mr. Carlyle was a magna cum laude graduate of the College and had recently completed a postgraduate year as the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, in England.

I smiled. I'd been so preoccupied with trying to make deadline that I hadn't really absorbed the details. Cambridge University. Emmanuel College. This was a place I knew.

Cambridge had represented a compromise between my father and my mother. My dad is American. More precisely, he's a New Yorker, born and bred. Take him beyond the five boroughs and it's like watching a crack addict deprived of his fix: he just doesn't function. It remains a mystery
to me that he fell for my very Scottish mother. They have lived happily together in Brooklyn for three decades now, but she clings to her Scottishness with the zeal of an expat. I am told I spoke with a broad Glaswegian accent when I started nursery school, despite having never lived outside New York. I do remember being teased for calling pants
trousers
, and cookies
biscuits
, and so on, and for expressing astonishment at the notion that potatoes could be eaten in nonfried forms.

My mother taught me to roll my
R
's. Also to cry during
Braveheart
, to describe raw, rainy days as
dreich
, and to never buy my underwear anywhere other than Marks & Spencer. But she gave up on convincing me to consider Scotland for university. I was too like my father on that front. We both had our hopes pinned on Columbia. I got in early, didn't even apply anywhere else. Then, midway through college, the English department nominated me for a fellowship. Junior year abroad at Cambridge University, all expenses paid. My mother leapt. It wasn't Scotland, but at least it was Britain. Maybe I would meet a nice boy from Edinburgh.

So I went. I didn't meet a boy, at least not one that lasted. But I loved it. And now, eight years later, I could picture the streets that Thomas Carlyle had walked, in the weeks before he died.

THE EDITORS LOOKED SKEPTICAL. THREE
of them were gathered in Hyde Rawlins's office: the foreign editor, the national editor, and Hyde. The Washington bureau chief, Jill Hernandez, was supposedly listening in by speakerphone, but so far she hadn't said a word.

“I mean, obviously I'm all in favor of staying out front on this story,” the national editor was saying. “But isn't whatever happens next going to happen here? The investigation is here. The family is here. The funeral will be here. Shouldn't you be here?”

I shook my head. I had anticipated this argument. “The family isn't talking. We've tried. And my police sources”—no need to mention there
was only one—“my police sources I can work by phone. I don't need to see them. The point is, the people Carlyle knew—the people he was hanging out with this past year—they're all in England. They would know how things were going, what he was thinking. We should be talking to them. And they'll tell us more in person than if I cold-call them on the phone.”

“We do have a reporter in London already, you know,” the foreign editor cut in. “Why don't we have Charlie scoot up to Cambridge and sniff around?”

The room fell silent at that. Charlie Swift, the
Chronicle
's London correspondent, had filed maybe half a dozen stories in the past year. I wasn't even sure he still worked full-time. Charlie was ancient. He'd secured the London gig decades ago, and subsequent generations of management had failed to dislodge him. I suspected Hyde would have fired him and closed the bureau years ago except that it gave Hyde an excuse to visit London every so often to check up on things. The idea of Charlie Swift's hoofing it to King's Cross station, jumping on a train to Cambridge, and producing a front-page scoop within the next forty-eight hours was ludicrous. But the foreign editor persisted. “Also, as I think we all know, the overseas travel budget is not what it used to be. I've already had to cut back the Africa famine series. I don't think we can just be assigning random jaunts without a formal story proposal and paperwork.”

I saw Hyde stiffen. He was well aware of the budget constraints his newsroom operated under; he'd just never seen them as applying to him personally. Or to his favorite reporters. I would wager quite a lot of money that he had never bothered with formal proposals and paperwork before jetting off overseas.

Now he leaned back in his overstuffed, leather desk chair. He plumped a silk pillow behind his back and kicked his loafers up onto the matching ottoman. The
Chronicle
newsroom was a warren of bland cubicles and scuffed taupe carpets. Hyde's office, on the other hand, looked like a cross between an English gentlemen's club and a Turkish harem.
He was old-school. He dated from the days when the
Chronicle
maintained foreign correspondents all over the world. Not just in Moscow and London, but in Caracas, Nairobi, Phnom Penh, Beirut. Hyde had filed from all of them. Eventually he'd found himself back at headquarters, overseeing the foreign coverage. But it was a dwindling empire. One by one, he'd been forced to shut down the bureaus he'd once run.

Hyde got promoted when the old managing editor quit a few years back. He ran a good paper: The
Chronicle
won a Pulitzer last year for stories on corruption in the mayor's office. But anyone could see Hyde's heart wasn't in local news. The relics in his office were testament to more exotic datelines. A silk rug from Tehran that smothered the taupe wall-to-wall, framed flags from countries that no longer existed, a handwritten thank-you note from Boris Yeltsin. Twenty years ago, he would have been the one clamoring to fly to England to chase a story.

He cleared his throat. “If I'm not mistaken, a trifling pot of money does still exist for investigative projects. And Ms. James is already acquainted with Cambridge University, no?”

Hyde's habit of addressing reporters by their last names was both endearing and a bit affected. It was also useful for gauging where you stood. He was the opposite of a parent: you knew you were in trouble when he used your first name.

“I did my junior year there,” I agreed. “I still know people. I've still got my university ID.” This sounded feeble even to me. Hyde raised his eyebrows. I tried again. Rattled off a list of all the people I was planning to talk to. Half the names were made up, but it sounded impressive and I would substitute real names once I got there and started reporting.

“And you could file something for, say, the Sunday paper, I presume?”

I nodded. Surely I'd figure out something to file by then.

“Well then. We're agreed.” He began shuffling through a pile of papers on his desk.

I saw the foreign and national editors exchange sour looks. I thought I heard a snort down the line from Washington.

Hyde ignored them. “You'd best hurry then, my dear. Get yourself on a flight over tonight.”

FOR ONCE, THE
CHRONICLE'
S IN-HOUSE
travel agent was helpful. A last-minute, Boston-to-London, round-trip ticket didn't run cheap, but there were plenty of seats. She booked me on a flight leaving Logan in five hours. Just enough time to race home, pack a case, and taxi to the airport. I swept my notebook and a camera from my desk into my bag. What else? Batteries. A phone charger. Both my passports—British and American—from the top drawer. I looked around for Elias to tell him I'd have to take a rain check on coffee, but he was nowhere to be found.

On my way out, I stuck my head around Hyde's door. He was barking down the phone at someone. I waited a minute until he turned, then held my hand up and gave a little wave.
Thank you
, I mouthed.

“Hold on.” Hyde put his unlucky caller on hold. “Bon voyage. Don't make me regret this,” he ordered.

“Do my best.”

“Find his bedder. They always know the gossip.”

I smiled. Typical of him to have already thought of the bedders. They were an institution at Cambridge—the housekeepers who knocked on students' doors each morning to make their beds, wipe their basins, empty their trash. Bedders did indeed know all the gossip, and some were less discreet than others.

“Also, let's do be careful. Carlyle's father—his connections—make this a bigger story than it might have been. No mistakes on this one. Double-source everything. And try to keep people on the record.”

I nodded.

“Oh, and Ms. James?” He was already turning back to his call. “What airline are you flying?”

“Um . . . let's see . . . British Airways.”

He brightened. “Delightful. I couldn't trouble you to bring me back a Burberry then?”

I must have looked bewildered.

“The spring version, preferably, without the belt. Size forty-two long.”

“Sorry . . . a Burberry coat?”

“Yes, yes, it's British Airways for God's sake. They've got hundreds of them in the lost and found. Sitting there going to waste, you know. Marvelous resource. Just ask the first-class attendant before you get off.”

I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. It was sometimes hard to tell whether Hyde was kidding. He didn't look it. Still, he'd backed me going on this trip. If I managed to pull it off, bringing him back a Burberry seemed like the least I could do.

    

    

FRIDAY, JUNE 25

I RUBBED MY BLEARY EYES
and stared out the bus window. Twenty more minutes to Cambridge.

The flight over had been uneventful. At Heathrow I'd grabbed my bag and steered for the bus terminal. It's the cheapest way to get up to Cambridge. Probably the fastest too. I toyed briefly with renting a car, given the
Chronicle
was paying. But the thought of fighting London traffic on my own was discouraging. Not to mention that I hadn't driven on the left side of the road in years.

So here I was on the National Express coach. It was just past eight in the morning. Just past three in the morning back in Boston. No point
dwelling on that, or I'd be tempted to head for a nap. And today was going to be busy.