Page 40 of The Librarians
“You’ll love the alcove,” Ryan says immediately. “And oh, Jonathan, I think the second half of our game probably already started.”
The alcove turns out to be right off the room where Ryan and Jonathan have been watching basketball, a glass-enclosed balcony accessed through a pair of French doors. With its lights turned on, the ribs between the glass panes of the alcove make Jonathan think of a large, beautiful birdcage.
From his spot before the TV, the alcove is visible, but at an oblique angle that doesn’t let him see much of anything.
The second half of the game has indeed started.
Jonathan can’t concentrate on the playmaking at all.
He can’t even pretend to pay attention: His gaze strays to the alcove every few seconds.
Ryan glances at him occasionally. After a while it dawns on Jonathan that even if Ryan has no idea what’s going on, he must wonder whether Jonathan is there for Hazel rather than him.
He must wonder how much of what Jonathan said is true.
It’s all true, but it hasn’t really mattered, any of it. So maybe in the end, whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter either.
There is no traffic on the dark expanse of the river-turned-lake. A sprinkle of illuminated houses dots the hills of the far shore. Hazel wonders whether anyone can see the two of them, suspended in this glass aerie, lit like a sky lantern drifting aloft.
And if anyone does, would they marvel at the Instagram-worthiness of the scene, the woman seated on the thickly cushioned bench, the man standing opposite her?
They are looking at the wineglasses in their hands and not at each other.
Still, the unspoken awareness pulsates, a physical sensation upon Hazel’s skin.
He sets down his stemware on a wall shelf by the doors, alongside a line of small potted succulents. Next he pulls the semiautomatic from the back of his waistband, drops out the clip, and racks a bullet from the chamber.
She does the same, except the magazine she drops out is empty, and the chamber too—unloaded, as he told her.
“Can people own guns in Singapore?” he asks abruptly.
“You can’t keep firearms at home, but you can belong to a shooting club.”
Hand-to-hand combat was not the only type of self-defense in which Hazel received training.
Conrad pushes his Glock and magazine onto the shelf, picks up his wineglass again, and sits down. “I’m sure you have an excellent reason for breaking into my house tonight. I’m all ears.”
Human memory is unreliable. Write everything down , her mother used to tell her, if you want a more accurate record . But under her pen, he became a stick figure with none of the ineffable allure of a winsome adolescent on the cusp of manhood.
She gave up the endeavor around the time she gave up any realistic hope of finding him again.
But always she was sure of one thing. As the finer details of his words and even his features faded, as she drifted further in a life propelled more by inertia than anything else, she remained convinced that he was adorable.
Or maybe “adorable” was simply a synonym for “safe.” His youth, his frankness, his bright-eyed admiration of her—everything her memory embroidered and embellished—had made him ever safer and ever more adorable.
“Adorable” is not the first, second, or tenth descriptor that comes to mind now. As she watches him play with the cartridge he extracted from the chamber, “safe” is so far down the list that she’d have to scroll a whole minute to reach its vicinity.
He waits, patiently, lightly whirling the rosé in his other hand. And then he glances at her and sensation rampages through her like a violent weather system.
She swallows half of the contents of her glass, trying to tamp down that inconvenient shock of awareness. “I assume you know about the recent deaths connected to the library where Jonathan and I work?”
He frowns at his wineglass, but nods.
“Another librarian is currently implicated in Perry Bathurst’s death.
We found out that you and he were in business together.
I also found out, last time I was in this house, that you took Ryan’s car out the night of Perry’s death.
” She takes a deep breath. “I was interested in who drove it because I saw it at the library at a time that would be of interest to the police.”
For two seconds his expression remains unchanged. Then he again looks up. “You think I might have killed Perry?”
This time his gaze is sustained. It is not hostile, not even adversarial, only sharp and demanding. She has said something outlandish at a meeting, and he, the CEO, is waiting to see how she will justify that position.
His reaction is exactly right for someone who hadn’t the least inkling that he could be a suspect. Or he might be a fantastic actor.
She never thought of the boy from Madeira as a good actor.
But Valerian de Villiers comes from a wealthy family on his mother’s side.
Succession is not a bad introduction to the internal dynamics of enormous family fortunes, which are cutthroat and dispiriting at the same time.
The constant jockeying for position, for the patriarch’s or matriarch’s favor, turns family gatherings into theater, and siblings and cousins into trained thespians.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I suspect you personally,” she answers. But she does, doesn’t she? That was exactly the conclusion she leaped to when she first learned his full name. “But right now you’re the only lead we have.”
“You could have asked me about it.”
“True,” she says slowly. “But what if it was you who did it? As far as we can tell, you didn’t speak about Perry to your roommate, the best possible source under the circumstances, until Perry had been dead for days.”
He remains perfectly calm. “Still, your course of action seems extreme.”
“I apologize for invading your privacy. It’s no excuse, of course, but I wanted to have a definitive answer.”
“To what question?”
Are you somehow responsible for Perry Bathurst’s death?
“Lots of questions. The nature of your association with him. The reason you were near the library—and therefore near the site of his death. What you’ve been doing recently that might have led you there that night.”
She’s found nearly two dozen entities registered in his name in various parts of the world: UK, France, Taiwan, the United States.
That by itself is not necessarily incriminating.
Her mother has some eight or nine companies just to manage the great dowry she belatedly received when she was re-embraced by her parents.
Even Hazel, upon her mother’s advice, created a company. And it is the company that enters into contracts with her publisher.
Conrad’s companies have vague descriptions, little more than category selections to satisfy registration requirements. Again, not something incriminating in and of itself. Hazel’s company is listed as an investment vehicle, even though its only assets are her intellectual properties.
But it bothers her that she has trouble finding specifics on him.
Maybe, if Sophie weren’t running out of time, Hazel would have achieved better results in French- or Chinese-language media.
But Sophie is running out of time and it feels as if Conrad has deliberately obscured his digital footprint. Why? What is he trying to hide?
“I went to school in the UK. Perry and I met when we were kids, playing rugby for our respective schools,” he says. “But we didn’t become mates until my second contract on the Pelagios .”
It takes her a moment to realize that he is answering her questions; another to catch the significance of his words. Assuming Pelagios is the name of the sailing catamaran— second contract? She thought he was desperate to resume land-based life.
“It was Perry’s gap year,” he continues. “His parents booked a trip from Southampton to Hong Kong. He came aboard in Malta and used to join me for watches, because he had nothing to do. We got to know each other then and kept up in the years since.
“Perry was always interested in filmmaking. When he learned that my mum was going to marry a filmmaker and that I was planning to put some money into my future stepfather’s next documentary, he wanted in too. That’s why we have an entity together.”
He’s been turning over the cartridge between his fingers; now he places it on the bench’s cushion, under his palm. For a moment he appears extremely peaceable, as if he hasn’t been playing with a round of ammunition. Then he again looks at her.
And makes her think of a man about to tell his wife that he knows all about her affair—and has known it for months.
“What do you know about Perry?” he asks.
That for sure she’s never slept with the man. Ever.
Only then does it strike her, the oddity of the question. “Nothing,” she answers, feeling strangely defensive.
He raises a brow. Is he waiting for further clarification? What is there to clarify?
But she does anyway. “I saw him for the first time this past Monday, when he came to the library.
He asked me a few things. Then he walked up and down the stacks for a while.
He came to the library again the next day and got in an altercation with another patron.
He was roughed up a bit; Jonathan offered him some bandages.
“That was the last time I saw him. And then the police came to interview our colleague, who knew him biblically, so to speak.”
Something flickers in Conrad’s eyes. Consternation? Or maybe frustration?
“Other than that, all I know is what my colleague has dug up, because she wants to figure out what happened.”
“So you’ve never heard of Perry before?”
She can no longer ignore his scarcely subtle subtext. “Should I have? You clearly think so.”
“What are you doing at the library?”
Why is he asking all the questions? Sure, she owes him some answers, because he did catch her hacking into his laptop, but what does her entry-level work at the library have to do with anything?